Mr Amore

So far as I know, the SL Combat scene faltered years ago. There were the CCS/DCS sims, SL military sims and SL Gor sims, with hundreds of active players daily. But this was going back about a decade. My experience of raiding in Gor was: 2008 - Around 40 players in combat would bring the sim to a standstill. Your avatar could be frozen in place for upto a minute, then inch forwards. 2012 - 60 player raids were possible, but the arrows would occasionally freeze. During these moments we'd advance in slow motion with swords drawn. 2014 - Large raids were much smoother, with my group at the time, we often hosted raids of 50+ players fighting simultaneously on our sim. I haven't raided in a long while, the scene now is a fraction of its former glory. But in SL combat I would always prefer the mouse and keyboard over a controller. The real difference is, community. In SL there is roleplay among the rival groups, the raids are usually a consequence of hostile acts and the stakes are far higher. Playing an FPS vs SL Combat, is like the difference between playing a single player RPG vs an MMORPG.

Barbarian was surprisingly fun, it's not your standard 'woman trapped in a house' horror. Don't watch any trailers to spoil it, just watch!

It's already been a year since Facebook rebranded itself to Meta, since then the company has lost $700 billion in value. When LL splurged some $60 million on Sansar, that was shocking. Yes Sansar was a far superior product to the billions Meta has poured into Horizon Worlds, and its indie-developer aesthetic. A year ago every tech venture was touting the Metaverse tagline, that hype is officially over with all eyes on Meta's free fall. Meta's loss is SL's gain, the 20th century metaverse that keeps on giving. All we need are larger sims (1km * 1km minimum). And the One-Mesh-Body-To-Rule-Them-All, provided by LL with opensource dev kits. Add in height maps, instanced regions, content delivery networks, improved HUD and gaming features - and I'm prepared to forgive LL. And another video, courtesy of:

I would delete my avatar before resorting to a BoM shirt! Strangely it's simpler to dress for fantasy or sci-fi roleplay, than putting together casual outfits. Largely because there's no standard for waist height on pants, or shirt lengths. Each store has their own definition which challenges a customer to mix their wardrobe. Complete outfits do exist, but those are boring. In a nightmare scenario you enter a sim and someone 40 meters away is wearing the same outfit. If there's an item of male clothing that's well made, it's probably in my inventory. But most of my inventory rarely features in a saved outfit because of glitching issues. Granted, it's not an issue for everyone in SL, but some standardization will simplify the dressing process.

I'm certain it's branching into this direction, eventually AI will be creating the textures, the models, and the entire scene too based upon a few parameters. In Star Citizen, each ship takes months, or even years to reach their gold standard from concept to completion. Some of these are showcased at every stage along the way. https://starcitizen.tools/images/4/4d/Ship_Pipeline_-_Full.png Accounting for the 'human hours' and overheads, each vehicle easily exceeds a million dollars and several months to create. When AI is sufficiently trained, it could breeze through the entire process in a matter of seconds. There may be some lingering discrepancies, balanced against the sheer savings in time and investment. It's not so much a case of artists losing their jobs, but the smaller studios with limited budgets will start employing AI over artists. With procedural generation being an existing case with limited impact on the industry.

Thanks Rolig, it's good to hear the experience has improved since! Relatively few people use the official viewer, so I must've been trapped in a Twlight Zone moment whilst the TPVs were catching up. And significantly cheaper too, creating a pre-mesh avatar was in the region of 5k. Now it's easily 15k to just get started. If SL could transition to a visual clothing interface, where all of your shirts are displayed as icons, and you click on one to wear it, then for the pants and so on. That would make SLife so much easier for newbies and myself too!

@Da5id Weatherwax You're overcomplicating a non-issue for yourself. Over the years I've helped a few RP sims set up their Experience teleporters. In all this time I've heard of only one person who refused to join because they couldn't trust the SL Experience. Meanwhile hundreds of other players enjoyed the convenience of Experience enabled teleportation. Even saying this, I don't accept random Experience popups whilst out shopping, they're as annoying as Group joiners and bots that IM you with welcome messages. And then there are NC and LM givers. Why? All of which is separate from participating in an Experience you're going to interact with.

After a periodic break, when I install SL again there's always a process of reacquainting myself with the avatar and inventory system. It climaxes in a moment of WTF?! when trying to understand it all. Why does dressing avatars need to be so complicated. I have outfits saved, but somewhere along the line these broke. My avatar hasn't changed clothes in a couple of years because I'll have to remarke every outfits and that's a grueling process. Female clothing is fitted tighter, consequently they are easier to dress. Male clothing is looser and generally runs into issues matching shirts with pants, and pants with shoes/boots. Could LL solve these issues? It seriously seems like most Linden avatars are dressed in system clothing from 2005. When you aren't experiencing the same dressing issues as the general population, you won't understand the need for improvement. And if this is a complication for me, it's going to be a struggle for new users. The last time I created an avatar for testing furniture with, there was Help Island HUD that popped up which I couldn't close. Eventually I reached the end where it listed two methods for closing the HUD. One of those was broken, the second method was to open the toolbar menu, add a 'Help book' icon to the toolbar. Click that button to close the HUD, then remove the button from the toolbar. Even if I were to imagine the absolute worst UI design conceivable by a demented mind, I couldn't reach these depths. If I really, really hated my audience and wanted to slap them in the face every time a new account was created, this is how I'd humiliate them. And the user experience beyond Help Island doesn't get any better.

On a side note, the Rezz room leash attachment does animate the avatar, and can be used with any combination of animal. For free roaming dogs, I've found Realistek's were the most functional. Great for RP sims that allow pets, as these dogs can be set to follow your avatar, roam around, sit or follow others. I recall the collar's were moddable, with a little scripting you could create a particle leash. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/39964

In this challenge you can see the tension in the artist, his future is literally on the line. Eventually businesses will be deciding whether to employ a graphics designer with a full salary and overheads, or an annual subscription to an AI artist. Infringement is brushed over in this video, also an interesting guide on influencing the AI. Excuse the youtube spam, but a video's worth a million words and all that ;)

I know, everyone in SL 'hates drama'. But I secretly like it, SL drama is silly and usually entertaining. Once I was directed to VS and it was fun for a minute, but swiftly became repetitive. It may be different if I knew the 'community', but it's clear we do not, and will not occupy the same spaces in SL. Haven't been back since.

There's too much here to summarize, but it's actually relevant to the future of the 'metaverse'.

Something I liked about SL was the landscaping, it could take weeks to complete a scene with a spare hour thrown in at the end of day. Virtual landscaping is an art form as any other, it's relaxing and it's enlightening as you begin to view the world differently. And you find an appreciation for the builds of others. This is all set to change. The future will not be an inventory filled with foliage, rocks and a canvas to build upon. It's going to be a sequence of words, instructing an AI to construct something for you and scarily, the results will be superior to anything you could build yourself - At least that's true in my case. These past months youtube has been spammed with AI generated art and even to an AI skeptic as myself, the results are remarkable. To see more, search for DALL-E 2 or Midjourney. Within the decade this level of AI generation will extend to 3D environments too. Feed the AI your terms and within seconds it will generate a tree, a building, or an entire scene. Whether we'll find it as satisfying remains to be seen.

SL's niche is the maturity of its audience, you won't find another game where the average player is 30+ When Elder Scrolls Online was releasing, they claimed there would be 'mature' servers for older players so I pre-ordered the game, but Zenimax did not deliver. The fact this was even a topic suggests I'm not the only 'ageist' who wants to game online, but with adults. This will become a larger consideration going forwards as the gaming-population continues to age into their 50s and 60s. I'm not quite there yet, but have met many in SL who are from combat and roleplaying sims. LL's issue is, their scope has stagnated. It's still focused on the market economy, where creators upload an item and consumers purchase them to dress their avatars and their homes. The upcoming 'metaverses' will focus on experiences, by providing creators with the tools and assets to create whole environments. Consumers will still socialize and embark upon shopping frenzies, then load an instanced environment and take their friends in for a gaming session. A Roblox for adults with visuals like these, which you can freely create and distribute.

Are we there yet? The only feature I'd upgrade for are the 30 second audio uploads, otherwise I'm not in need of incremental upgrades.

Goldfish are one step closer to world domination.

It certainly suggest they're working on new bodies and not only humans, possibly fantasy/animal forms too. The impression I'm getting is, LL are developing the body and are recruiting creators for free starter content. + Opensource the mesh body and clothing templates to encourage a new generation of creators - Keep it closed with limited content from approved creators only. + Introduce improved UV maps for the new generation, taking an example from the Cinnamon body. - Use the standard SL UV map and all of its inherent issues for compatibility with ancient content. + Optimize the bodies to be used as NPCs too. ++ Bring back Project Muscadine and enable BoM for animesh NPCs too! A free and usable body would be great for many but I don't see it as a body-pocalypse, seasoned SL'ers will still branch out to third-party bodies and heads.

It's not you @Enola2017, it's the game. Everything happens faster in SL and people get an emotional rush from meeting someone new, seducing and carrying them towards the ultimate goal of virtual marriage. Once they cross that line it's no longer a challenge, but a chore to login and be with that person. The challenge for you is not expecting too much from SL. I've known multiple people in this game who were waiting on their absent partner for 4+ years. This isn't loyalty, it's an unhealthy fixation which burned 4 years of their lives.

I briefly explored the default 'P' animations and there wasn't anything memorable. But when the 'P' is paired with the '[Ruckus] Teotwawki Shower', it's a game changer. The shower has animations specifically for the 'P' which shows what's possible with a faux-physics attachment.

This is marvelous. There's a lot of background here so to summarize, Dale runs a self defense channel on youtube. His techniques were recreated and roundly mocked on moistcr1tikal's channel as the 'worst self defense advice'. So Dale did what any gentleman must and drove down to Florida to school these young men in self defense.

Damn, when I get these IMs it's always for something silly like 10L. Is it the way I dress...

It's a shocking reminder of the Victorian era when white women brought their manservants to the market and made him stand around whilst she shopped. In two hundred years we've made no progress.

Candy Crush alone will carry this deal.

When humanity finally wakes up to climate change it's going to be too late, our priorities beyond the 2050's will be drastically different to today. Colonizing space isn't possible with current technology, it may take 4 months to send a human to Mars but that person will be physically diminished upon their arrival. We aren't built for spaceflight, anything short of a warp drive isn't cutting it.