– Destination anime and update server issues –

We got feature by LL in one of their videos and blog posts about anime destinations on sl :D

https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/7868-second-life-destinations-anime/

Update server issues

As some of you have noticed, the update server has been all fucky wucky for a while now and the update cards are dead for most of the products, or sometimes they will work but as soon as you get one update, the rest stops working. We were working with casper support to fix the problem and they have identified and fixed it this morning but the fix didnt last long and it looks like the updates are broken again so we are still working on it. So like, hold on tight and i will announce when its fixed for good.

– AMH 2.0 is open! –

Alright, everything is ready and we are now open so come on down to AMH 2.0 at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Meteor%20Star/51/186/1548

The old AMH will remain open for a while to direct people to the new place till all the tenants rents run out on all the stores.

– AMH is restructuring –

As with all the things i announce on this blog, this move is kind of long overdue as well.

So within the following few months, AMH will be restructuring and moving to a new location. The new AMH 2.0 will be smaller and will no longer offer shop spaces to rent and instead will be more focused on providing the player with all the essentials (bodies, heads, skins, hairs and clothing) for putting together an anime avatar.

On average, sim prices have went down by a significant amount over the past year, ours however didnt and this was the final sign that it is time to move on.

The original reason for us to have a full sim is no longer there, due to mainly my laziness and lack of motivation, the sim never really lived out the full potential of what was planned for it, we only managed to finish 2 of the attractions and a lot of our ideas didnt really pan out (like the residential area, what a disaster that was)

It was also supposed to be our home and a personal sandbox where we could chill and work on our projects, but as the sim got too popular an it became kinda hard to have some privacy, especially when you are trying t work on things while everyone and their mom wants to pop in and see what what you are working on.

Running the mall itself was a bit of a pain in the ass as well, none of the moderators were ever online so i always had to manage new tenants and run around after everyone telling them their rent has expired.

What always surprised me was how much traffic AMH managed to pull, despite us doing fuck all to promote the place, moderate it or keep the community engaged, especially when other big anime sims had huge difficulties attracting people despite their best efforts.

But now days the sim has lost its purpose, we had had many disagreements on how we should run the place and most of the original staff have went on to do their own things, some left SL altogether and now its just a waste of money and space, so having a full sim dosnt make sense at this point

All in all, AMH had a really good run and lots of fun nostalgic moments were had, probably some of the best days of my second life, so it really pains us to do this and is the main reason why we didnt do this sooner, but it is time to move on and get with the times, instead of holding on to past memories that can no longer be relived, and besides, the place really needed a face lift anyway.

So thats all, you should see directions to the new location pop up within the next month and i might make another post about the history of AMH and all that stuff. until than, heres some nostalgic videos of the good old days and stuff.

– New update migration process for UTILIZATOR and ABC Apparel products –

Okay so to recap once more for those of you who have been out of the loop, our old update cards do not work anymore because hippo vend (our update service provider) pulled the rug under everyone and left SL.

With a lot of help and persistence to make our life more easy from a friend that doesnt want to be named, We now have a better way for you to migrate your stuff to our new update system. This will save everyone a lot of trouble, no more jumping through hoops.

So all you need to do now is:

A. As before, if you made any purchases on the marketplace that dont fall into these dates (August 2014, January 2015, March 2015, April 2015 and May 2015) you can find your items in any casper redelivery terminal (my items have no preview images yet so look for blank squares in the list). I dont have a Casper redelivery terminal at my own store yet.

B. If you bought stuff in game or you cannot find your items in the casper redelivery terminal, follow these steps:

1. Go to may mainstore at AMH and find the update card terminal thingie.
2. Wear your old non working update card(s)
3. Click the UTILIZATOR or the ABC box to receive new card, For UTILIZATOR products, click the UTILIZATOR box, for ABC Apparel click the ABC box.

Thats all, happy updating and report any problems to me or ABC.

– Ready Player One and how LL could improve SL –

So i just watched Ready Player one and it was a pretty fun movie, Its about this huge virtual reality MMO game like SL mixed with SAO and this generic main protagonist looking dude and his wacky friends trying to solve puzzles and get 3 keys to unlock some shit and win the ownership of the game world itself. While the evil EA corporation is throwing money into focus groups trying to solve the puzzle themselves to gain control of the game and shit it up with their loot boxes and micro transactions.
I dont get why nerds hate this movie so much because this movie is like every nerd’s wet dream, like i understand there were some really cringy geek out moments that felt really forced like that part where they were talking about golden eye on nintendo64. But its still a very enjoyable and surprisingly solid movie.
What kinda disappointed was that there were a bunch of big missed opportunity moments, like they could have made the main chick turn out to be a dude IRL, you know just like girl avatars are in real videogames. I think they kinda sort of wanted to do that but it would have offended all the good god loving christian folks in american and their dumb sensibilities, because in american folklore, the hero has to get the girl and all that cheesy shit and if there is no girl to get or the hero gets the guy, you will have a bunch of pissed off old people going all HURR MUH FAMILY VALUES HAVE BEEN SHATTERED BY THIS MOVIE!!!, so instead *spoilers* they made that big cyborg dude turn out to be an ugly fat chick IRL because that wont offend anyone.*spoilers*
As for the main girl, when she said “you wont like me irl, im ugly” i expected her to be, i dunno, at least chubby or something, but no she looks just as hot irl as her avatar, its really lame how safe they are trying to play even in places where they dont need to, no one would have minded her actually turning out not looking like a supermodel IRL.
Now for avatars themselves, it didnt lack variety in that department, there were all kinds of avatars, robots, elfs, orcs, pizza wizards and even fucking furriers, but not a single anime girl anywhere, have they not heard about VR chat? You can literally be anything you want in that game, but anime is off the table, so fuck you. Which is even more strange considering they had a gundam and the bike from akira and all that anime stuff in it.
Another missed opportunity is by nintendo itself for not licensing their characters to the movie, there was no iconic nintendo characters like mario with his blue and red overalls, red hat and mustache or metroid in his yellow armor with big round shoulders and green arm cannon or zelda with his pointy ears and green hat and sword or a single pokemen reference. Nintendo, if you want to still be relevant in the future, you should jump on opportunities like this nerd wankfest of a movie, you are a huge part of nerd culture and you have probably shaped the history of gaming more than anything else they showed in it, yet other than that cringy goldeneye reference, its like you never even existed, they could at least made the main hero wear the powerglove or something, but well i guess its true what they say, genesis does what nintendont. It was also strange to not see any storm troopers or darth vaders, although they did throw in a shit ton of verbal references to star trek like the millennium falcon and captain spock’s famous phrase “may the force be with you”  so i guess thats ok.

Its kind of ironic how all thsoe copyrighted characters in the movie mirror all the copyright infringment and game model rips on second life.
Oh yeah there were also some inconsistency with the time line by like 20 years, when JD Halliday played atari as a kid, we already had playstations by then.

Anyway, this movie is like second life and sword art online had a baby, It was a very fun and filled with fun pop corn munching action and, pop cullture references and tracer’s ass. I recomend seeing it, just dont watch it in 3D cuz it just makes it as hard to watch and recognize all the characters as a crappy low quality cam rip on the web

– Mesh bakes, reduced sim costs and my idea for SL –

Now speaking of swords art online and second life having a baby, you probably already heard the news but Linden labs are rolling out a bunch of new changes to SL. One of them is a new mesh feature that will allow loading LL avatar textures onto mesh objects, this is a big thing because now you will no longer need deal with tons of confusing applier systems just to load your skins or clothing layers onto your normie mesh bodies, you will be able to wear your LL skins, tattoos, alphas, on your mesh bodies straight from your inventory. How exactly it will work i do not yet know but if you are wondering if im going to implement that into any of my stuff, the answer is very yes!.

Another somewhat great news is that they are lowering the sim costs on mainalnd and moving the grid into a cloud based network, witch i think is a step in to the right direction that they should have taken ages ago. I say somehwat because lets face it, the 10% cost reduction is meaningless when sims still cost hundreads of dollars a month, no ones going to flock to mainland because its still way out of reach financially for most normal people, especially when you compare it to the monthly cost of running a game server witch is 40$. But i do hope that moving to the cloud will help them cut the costs enough for them to be able to lower the sim prices even more.

But if was LL, heres what i would have done in the first place:
Instead of throwing all my money and resources into dead end projects like desura, patterns and sansar, i would instead direct those resources into making SL a streamlined MMO game platform. Redo systems like character movement, vehicle system, combat, IK, pathfinding and AI, make it all work like in a real videogame.
Next step would be redoing the sim software to allow sim scalability so that you wouldnt be confined to 250×250 cube ion the middle of the sea, and price land based on scale.
Lets say a small island sized as 1/4 of our current sim sizes would cost you 15$ or whatever subscription fee premium users pay in MMO games.
Bigger plot of land for commercial purposes like shopping malls or small indie game projects would go from 40$ to 100$
And than we would have huge plots of land for big game companies to create their own MMO titles with a huge open worlds the size of games like skyrim or farcry, building their MMO experiences on top of the infrastructure provided by LL, it would go from 300$ to 1000$ or even more if the game is as massive as WOW.

So yeah that’s all.

– A new update system and how to get your update –

So To recap what happened, our update system died because hippo vend (our update service provider) pulled the rug under everyone and left SL.

For the past 2 weeks i have been working on migrating my products to a new update system, it was a huge pain in the ass, mostly due to LL’s inadequate web services when it came to retrieving marketplace sales data, and some data was lost, but most of it i manage to salvage.

So anyways, all the work is done, new update system with new update cards are in place and heres what you need to do to get your hands on those new update cards:

For marketplace users:

>>>Simply go to any casper vend redelivery termial and find the latest version of your item along with the new update card and request a redelivery.<<< I dont have one at my store yet but other stores around me should have one or two, also my items have no preview images yet.

I could not retrieve sales data for August 2014, January 2015, March 2015, April 2015 and May 2015, If you are one of the unlucky people that bought something during these months, heres what you need to do:

1. Go to the marketplace web page.
2. Click My marketplace.
3. Click My account.
4. Click order history and look for the item you need.

Once you find it, copy its order number (NOT the item ID!) it will be a 10 digit code on the left size under the purchase date, for example Order#1469386064. Make a new notecard, write the name of the item(s) you want redelivered and paste the order number(s) and send it to me. Do not include order numbers for things that are unaffected by these missing sales dates. scroll back up and read the part about the casper redelivery terminal.

Alternatively, if you have too much history to dig through, you can also find it in your mail if you keep your MP purchase confirmation emails, it should be called Invoice# but it will be the same 10 digit order number.

If you are really shit out of luck and cant even find it there or you are not even sure if you even got it through the marketplace, use the method bellow.

For ingame store users:

If you have bought the item in one of my ingame store locations, you are not completely fucked either, heres what you need to do:

1. Wear the item in question.(NOT the update card or the box, i need to see the product itself)
2. Open its folder in your inventory.
3. Right click and edit the item to bring up the build menu.
4. Click on the general tab where it shows you as the owner and me as the creator of the item you are wearing.
5. Make sure your name tag is showing above your head.
6. Take a screenshot of everything, DO NOT save it to your SL inventory as a tiny ass unreadable snapshot, save it to your desktop and DO NOT upload it to SL, upload it to an image hosting website like www.imgur.com (please dont use websites that arent streamlined for image hosting, like drop box, they are a pain in the ass to view) and paste me the link.
IF you have multiple images, upload them all to the same gallery you create.
Dont send me pictures of boxes or update cards.

Due to the volume of update/redelivery request messages i am getting, messages with incomplete information will be ignored. For example, just a messages such as “hello, i need update for kemono” with no order number or other proof of ownership included, with the intention of waiting for me to get back at you and ask you for that information, i have no time for these turn based games, so give me that information up front so that i could get back at you with an update ready. Or messages with tiny blurry screenshots of stuff, or random numbers you copied from fuck knows where that arent order numbers.

Do not include irrelevant items! Old products like the M2 anime heads that have no updates and never will, stuff that never came with a update card such as rikugou hairs and head gear and single color avatar 2.0 clothing items (unless you bought the fat pack that contains all the colors), these items dont have updates for them and are unrelated to this update system change, pretty much everything that does not originally come with an update card, is irrelevant.

OH and another thing, DONTuse my own or other people’s notecards, create one your self by right clicking anywhere in your inventory and choosing new notecard, it needs to have your name as the creator or i will not know who it came from and wont be able to get back at you.

 

– RIP Skills Hak –

So as many of you who arent living under a rock, have already heard that Skills got perma banned again and looks like its for real this time. Here’s her blog post about it.

http://skills.tumblr.com/post/141699124267/byeeee

I find it kind of a pants on head retarded move by LL to ban someone who sinks so much money into their dieing game, someone who runs a place that they use to promote their dieing game, someone helps them fix their dieing game. GG linden lab.

Anyway, Skills was always surrounded by controversy, hated by many little dicked gingers, copybotters, safe hub memester trolls  and wanna be grieffer youtube stars, for basically nothing more than not bending over backwards to these people and taking it up the ass, But none of them took the time to get to know the real Skills Hak and her contribution to the game.
Skills is a great friend and we had some good times together, especially when we moved to cumboy canyon (later named poop cuz lindens dont like cum). Skills gave us a fantasy land of our own where we could all gather to circle jerk and let out creativity flow free, cumming up with hilarious sim build ideas, new creative ways to kill clueless memesters wandering the sim, create whatever we wanted. We had a blast with all those sim builds and none of that would have been possible without Skills. You say you want to be a mommy now, but you always were our mommy <3

This ban means those fun days are now over, we will miss it but life goes on, and maybe theres some more good times to be had ahead, who knows, but i feel too tired to invest any more of my time and effort into playing this game and building something, especially when it all can just be taken away from you like that whenever LL pleases.

– Jelly babies will take over SL soon (AKA how linden lab is planing to break second life) –

So theres a lot of talk about the upcoming patch that will break SL visually, so i think its time for me to rant about it too.

So we all know how laggy and unplayable SL can be, its probably one of the biggest problems with second life today.

LL is going to do what LL does best, implement a half assed fix for a symptom instead of fixing the cause of the problem, optimizing the viewer, fixing how it handles video memory, making the viewer use full capabilities of your videocard’s processing power(it uses CPU to calculate and only uses GPU to draw), And maybe even making a D3D version of the client for windows users.

Anyway, this “solution” that LL came up with will undermine the whole point of mesh avatars and i suspect this will make a lot of people just quit SL in the log run. It will Automatically derender any avatars exceeding whatever arbitrary render weight setting that you or LL chooses for you by default. You wont be able to wear your fancy mesh outfits, bodies and heads without being visually muted for everyone around you, you will have to go back to using the linden body and linden avatar body and its crappy body paint clothing layer. (It will tell you when you are muted though)

Current problem with render weight calculation is that it sums up everything, including the LOD for every object you wear(LODs that the game doesnt even use because of a rigged mesh LOD bug),  instead of what your video card has to actually draw on your screen. This calculation is horribly inaccurate, it doesnt tell you what actually makes you lag, and people just abuse the rigged mesh LOD bug to cheat the render weight count.
To calculate real render weight, the viewer would need to calculate it in real time and only the things your video card has to actually render, anything else added to that just undermines the whole calculation. You can look at a perfectly fine avatar low polygon avatar that for some reason has an absurd render wight and not lag looking at it, and you can look at an avatar that has an excessive amount of polygons but abuses the LOD bug that makes it have a low render weight, and it makes your viewer go 5 frames per second (People cheat render weight by using single triangles for all the LODs)

So here’s what i think should happen first before this feature is implemented.

1. The rigged mesh LOD bug has to be fixed, currently the game doesnt use LODs and displays the same high detail model on all distances, this, apart from texture memory issues, is what they should be focusing on if they really want to fix the lag.
2. The render weight calculation has to be done in real time and only count things that are being rendered, if this is not possible to do without rewriting the whole code, at least make the render weight calculation only count the high detail objects and not the LODs because its absurd, your wearing 1 object at the time, not all 4 different detail versions of it.

Btw one legit benefit of this jelly baby feature is that it would make graphics crashers impossible, instead of implementing this to the UI, they should instead just leave it in the debug settings menu but set it to a certain max amount by default so that it would still show everyone correctly but at the same time would automatically derender any graphics crashers.

 

– Nice troll LL, 10/10 well played –

Okay so, dunno if anyone seen the recent LL announcement, where they talk bout all the improvements they did to mesh and other stuff. It was like, WOW LL is no longer ignoring the important issues and is actually doing something to move this game forward, instead of pretending they are doing something, this is so amazing :O http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Check-Out-the-Latest-Improvements-to-Second-Life/ba-p/2895496

The thing in their announcement that got me excited the most was “We’re upgrading support for mesh import: an upcoming Viewer update will allow uploading models that have more than eight unique faces” This would open up so many new possibilities for mesh, it would let me optimize the shit out of the av2, kemono and M3, and remove all sorts of frustrating, dead end limitations on what can be done, it would make my work so much easier and let me focus on creation instead of figuring out ways around those limitations. I finally had my respect back for LL.

 

But then…..

 

The public beta notes came and “Using these new features, models with more than 8 unique faces can be imported. Gone are the days of importing complicated meshes in pieces with “some assembly required”. At import, these models are automatically split into pieces so that each satisfy the current face limits for a volume.”

This is fucking, pants on head retarded, this wont allow us to upload models with more than 8 faces, this will just automatically break them up into separate models, with you having no control over how its done, just like their lazy ass LOD and physics generation algorithms. And the part about “some assembly required” There was no assembly required! you could upload linksets of separate mesh objects in one go. You had full control on how your mesh in your 3D editor of choice and upload them as linksets, instead of giving it to a crappy algorithm that does it whatever random manner.  This new “feature” is just fucking stupid and meaningless and will only enable people who have no idea what the fuck they are doing, to hit up the game even more with their terrible, unoptimized wastes of polygons.

So yeah, well done LL, once again you did absolutely nothing and made us all think you are doing something to move the fucking game forward.

– Second Life 2.0 (for real this time) –

So i assume you all have probably heard about Second Life 2.0 by now. People often ask me what is my view on this, so imma give my 2 cents on this matter as well (and generate some copypasta for the next time someone asks :D).

Ok so SL 2.0, is it a good thing, is it bad, do we need a new sl? well I personally would wish that instead of spending all that time, money and effort on building a new game, they would concentrate it all on fixing this current one. On the other hand, this game is so fucked up beyond repair, that a fresh start might be the only way to fix it.

Theres some pants on head retarded rumours going around about how LL is going to pull the plug on SL after SL 2.0 is out. I wish people would stop listening to rumours and look for real information from real sources, like the linden labs blog that clearly states that they wont be killing or even phasing out SL any time soon or ever, if no one stops playing it.
Also shutting down the old SL would be a commercial suicide to LL, especially when SL2 is in its infancy. They need to have a safe harbor that they can return to in case shit doesnt go the way they planed it.

So ummm, LL hasn’t disclosed any specific information about how the game will work and what technology will it employ so its kinda early to say how eager i am to move to SL 2.0.

I would however be all for SL 2.0 if it had the following things in it:

Clothing and hair simulation.
IK targets (for stuff like holding guns right, no matter what shape you have, or your legs interacting with the surface you are walking on)
Custom bone structures (like ability to have finger bones or a tail or extra arms and all that stuff)
Morphs and joint morph targets (for adjusting the avatar’s shape and face, face expressions, hand positions, nice joint deformations and so on)(fuck fitted mesh)
A proper material editor maybe.
More useful script commands and no technical limitations like one particle system per script and so on.
A more informative compiler.
Special built in functionality in the client/server itself, for handling things like vehicles, weapons, sword combat, combat interactions with avatars(like punching someone would actually make the hit connect and move their avatar), scoring and other gameplay elements, to make games on SL perform like real games and not some disjointed laggy wtfisgoingon shit. Having this functionality built into the client/server instead of having to write complicated 54651531351 lines of script to do such seemingly simple tasks, that are impossible to do smoothly anyway because of all the fucking sim lag.
Proper key mapping in scripts, so you would be able to bind any keyboard key you want to a script without having to use gestures.
CUSTOMIZABLE CONTROLLS!
Creation tools that let you create meshes ingame.
User owned sims.
Bring back old sl features lost over time like water simulation, mirror surfaces destruction physics and rain.
A proper optimized client with a customizable UI and features.
Disallow third party clients.
A FUCKING LOG OUT BUTTON FOR FUCK SAKE!

But yeah, all of this is just wishful thinking, we would be lucky if even 1 or 2 things from this list would be implemented into the new game. And in general im a bit skeptical about SL 2.0, do you really expect someone as incompetent as LL, who takes 3 years to fix a bug, breaks 10 other things with their lazy fix and cant even do something as simple as adding a button to the UI. On top of that, a company that doesnt even understand its own product or its own userbase, ignores feedback, keeps fixing whats not broken, implementing shit that no one asked for, and keeps on making other pants on head retarded decisions, like shitting all over their front page and user dashboard with malware containing ADs, and keeps trying to take the game to directions that no one wants to go to.

And finally, remember this?how well did that work out?

Now there is a rumor that SL 2.0 is just a codename because secretly LL has been funding Philip linden who is working on his own project called high fidelity. But i do not see high fidelity as a proper replacement for SL because 1. Philip linden is a childish visionary that is still hyped up with early 90s concepts of virtual reality and doesn’t understand that no one really cares about that stupid shit anymore. 2. His project is all about live expressive interactions between players through their their avatars, using expensive motion capture and virtual reality equipment that no one in their right mind would consider buying. His game is all based on recreating that real life face to face communication (I dont think he ever heard about skype video calls) and is not really in tune with what the current SL is about. In fact, Philip left LL because SL wasnt in tune with how he envisioned SL to be when he created it. I just dont see how this would interest all the socially awkward shut ins that are playing SL. Also his game looks like ass in its current state.