animats

I haven't had much trouble in a while. I have a cafe, motorcycle shop, and builder's yard in Kama City in Zindra. My main neighbor has an area which looks like a part of Baltimore. I have some waist height fences and walls, but no more than that. Big walls are rare in Zindra, although one place on the same sim has one big tan surface for no good reason. Its owner is never home. My favorite unnecessary wall: A wall with a picture of a forest, to hide a forest. Near Caletta. If you want a backdrop, get some isolated parcel from one of the landlords that rents them. Look at the SL map (when it gets fixed) for areas that look like checkerboards. You can rent a little box in an area of little boxes. Don't clutter up mainland.

Luxury convertible! Be the envy of your friends in the 'hood.

It could be done with modern technology. Maybe you don't get to take your inventory, but on arrival in the new system, you get the closest visual match from items in your inventory. Like font substitution, where, if you don't have the exact font, one that looks similar is used. CasperVend supports selling items in a way that supports multiple grids. Few use it, but the system is in place. Kitely has that, too. An important feature is to allow a party to cross as a group, so you and your friends can visit a different metaverse. (SL ought to have this in world. Fortnite has it.) With RLV and some viewer support, that could work. So it's quite possible to implement crossing between mostly disconnected systems.

Oh, those are nice builds. Sad to lose them.

One approach would be to have User and Creator modes. In User mode, you have a clean screen, with very little 2D user interface. Switch to Creator mode, the 3D pane shrinks and toolbars appear around the 3D window.

That's correct. The LL viewer has its own networking system, its own marshaling system (three of them, no less), its own database system, its own rendering system, its own HTTP system, its own cache system, its own 2D user interface system, its own futures system, its own math library... Most of those things are off the shelf parts today. They weren't 20 years ago. UE4 wouldn't help much. UE4 is all about preprocessing content when building a game level. UE5, maybe. It does more at run-time. Their LOD and animation engines are very interesting. We'll know more around mid-2021. I wonder what those were. Inside the viewer code are special cases for "Demon", "Bird", and "Rock". Those, like Linden trees, are built-in objects. I wonder if any still exist in world.

We must have 64-bit integers before 2038, or time will wrap around.

The upper limit of LSL is rather low. After spending a year cramming an entire NPC system into LSL, I have to say it took about 3x as long as in a more reasonable programming language. The language itself isn't that bad. Structs and arrays would be nice. The lack of memory space, and in particular being able to run out of stack unexpectedly, was the biggest headache. You can track your heap usage and avoid allocations when tight, but there's less control over stack usage. A big incoming message or system call return can blow the stack. This is a big problem for scripts doing something highly dynamic. I'd like to have stack space not counted against the 64K limit. When a script is not processing an event, the stack is empty. It's only transient usage, so you're not using much sim resources with the stack. Some reasonable limit to prevent runaway recursion, such as 64KB of stack in addition to code and data, would be fine. Lucia has many useful comments about the SL API, which is a separate issue from the language. How much you should be able to do from LSL, and how fast, is a complex issue. LSL is only semi real time. With script overload the new normal, it's hard to do real time anything from LSL. The trick that makes my NPCs work is assuming script performance will be poor, and computing all moves just before they start. All their motion is keyframe animation, planned a few seconds before it's executed. If you see one of my NPCs with its arms folded, the planner, written in LSL, is computing busily, trying to get enough CPU time to find a path for the next move. On a lightly loaded sim, movement is continuous. Built-in pathfinding works great in an empty sandbox. This is a LL video from 9 years ago. All the right concepts, but not enough CPU power to make it go. Built-in SL pathfinding is making steering corrections in real time, and totally falls apart under overload. It will overshoot and hit things because the steering corrections have fallen behind. SL pathfinding will work at slow speeds in open spaces, but it's hopeless in tight spots or at high speed. This is what LL pathfinding looks like in an overloaded sim. This is why we can't have highly dynamic scripted objects grid-wide no matter what calls LSL has.

Neither were email, or SMS messages, or Twitter, or Facebook. Your users tell you what your product is for by how they use it. That's what success looks like. Vendors must accept that, or go under. It's embarrassing that Second Life, a social system, can't do either text chat or voice chat reliably. (I once went to a talk at Stanford by one of the architects of Facebook. The original concept was that it was for college students, and it was expected that most traffic would be within a single college, with little national or worldwide traffic. The first version of the system assumed that traffic pattern and was based on regional servers. When it turned out they had far more long-distance traffic than expected, they had to do a total redesign. It worked.)

Check the date on it.

How do you block someone in the new forums? Thanks.

Roblox took a long time to get going, but then... Roblox started as Lego-like, but has slowly become closer to Fortnite-level objects. Like SL, it's a social open world system with building. There really are big wins in this space. Linden Lab had a Roblox competitor, called BlocksWorld. Launched in 2016, it was less successful, and was quietly shut down on June 17, 2020. What went wrong?

I've been reading some of the old wiki entries, from the days in 2007-2010 when people were trying to link multiple SL-type grids together. There are chat logs on a regular basis, and then suddenly in 2010 it just stops. The final meeting is busy, has no indication that anything is ending, or that there are any major problems. So what happened?

I can get the world X and Y coordinates of a region from within SL with a dataserver request. I can get them from Tyche Shepard's grid survey server in the outside world. Is there any LL API where I can get them so I don't overload Tyche's very slow server? Doing some mapping stuff. Thanks.

Someone in Russia made a game that's intended to be boring - "It's Winter" It’s nighttime and you find yourself in a small, dark flat in a nondescript suburb in Russia. You look out of the window and see the courtyard covered in snow, illuminated by street lamps and the cold neon glare of store fronts. You turn on the light switch and look around your apartment. You can make eggs on toast, turn on the radio, take a bath, and take out the trash. You leave the flat and go for a walk around the deserted courtyard. The corner shop and beauty salon are both closed and the playground is eerily empty. In fact, there are no people to be seen wherever you go. “Nothing awaits you: there is no chance to get out, no room for adventures, nor a breathtaking plot. All you have to do is experience the precisely detailed, pixelated mundanity of the world around you." Somehow that feels all too familiar.

Turned out to work, but it's kind of a pain. Use the hover height slider in the "Edit Appearance" dialog box to set sit position, then the hover height slider in the pie menu to set stand position. Opening "Edit Appearance" forces your avatar into pose stand position, which is inconvenient for adjusting sit height, of course.

Now that browsers have WebAssembly, they can run compiled programs. It's possible to build a viewer that runs in a browser at reasonable speed. Big job, but possible.

Streaming gaming is a great idea that currently costs too much. There are services such as Shadow, which rents you a rackmount PC in a data center, which you then control from a remote desktop client. Clients are available for desktops and and phones. You can run whatever you want. Costs about $12/month for a basic gamer PC, about $30/month for a really good one. Unclear what happens if you stay logged in 24/7. They used to charge more, but then NVidia and Google got into the business and forced the price point down. But those won't run SL. There are many other streaming game services, but most of them come with a list of games you can run. Shadow just gives you a bare Windows 10 PC, so installs are your problem. Because your machine is in a data center, it has lots of bandwidth to and from SL's servers. Ideally, you'd like to have game streaming from the same data center that hosts the SL servers. Asset loading could be really fast. If the Shadow "Subscribe" button produced more than a blank page and lots of web console errors, it might be interesting to try. A few other companies have offered similar services, but didn't stay in business. This one may be having problems too. Not sure this business model works. $12 a month is a very low rate for a full time computer in a data center; the going rate for a dedicated server is $75-$150. NVidia and Google have similar offerings, but they only work for specific games. SL would have to cut a deal with them to get a viewer onto their platform, and maybe give them a cut of revenue.

SL should have a face generator like that.

I'm pushing the idea that new users should start with a mesh avatar that supports both BOM and bento. They should get a starter wardrobe, maybe a dozen mesh pieces, plus some legacy texture clothing. New Resident Island has new walkthrough tutorials that take this approach, one for women and one for men. You get the open-source Ruth and Roth avatars and some clothing as you complete the tutorial. Most of the new user tutorials assume you have a classic body, and maybe at the end they mention mesh. It's time to turn that around. Teach new users that the modern avatar is mesh, bento, and BOM. It's backwards compatibility that's complicated. Pure BOM is straightforward. You just use "Wear" or "Add" and look at the list of what you're wearing.

There's something throttling asset loading. Run something that shows your computer's network traffic load, then TP to a new sim. Watch the traffic spike up for 10 secs or so, then drop to a very low level for a minute or two even though there are still many assets left to load.

You can sail all the way to Sansara. Unfortunately, though, you can't get around the Sansara coast or into its waterways. There are few water regions around the edges of that continent.

Ah, I will try the second height slider.

I'd like to see an "Perfect Fit" event. Fitmesh clothing that doesn't require an alpha. You just wear it on the designated brand of body and it Just Works. The body never goes through the clothing. Even if you move and or adjust the body sliders.

I've never had much trouble with seat height being way off before. But now I'm using the Roth open-source avatar. That works reasonably well. But it's taller than real life, so I used the height slider to make it shorter. (6'2", my RL height; we're not talking tinies here.) Then I had to adjust hover height, so feet are on the ground. Now, everything I sit on that used to fit has the avatar about a quarter meter above the seat. This has me puzzled. If anything, I'd expect it to be too low or the same. Sit position is relative to the center of the bounding box, right?