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March Mesh Madness


Mikki Miles
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I read you want SL to be changed into something completely different from what it is now because that will generate Linden Lab more money.

That's like telling the butcher on the corner to turn his place into a bakery because that would make more money.

I agree that SL as a concept isn't the best way to generate a whole lot of money, but people are still willing to participate and I'm one of them. Mesh added to my experience, I don't see how that's a bad thing. Linden Lab making more money doesn't make my experience any better. If Linden Lab made more money and that would bring down my tiers (which I doubt it would btw), well I'd be happy, but I rather have a pretty environment to be honest.

I really can't follow your thoughts on supply and demand. I don't see how both supply and demand are too low. If supply is too low, that means demand is too high and vice versa. I also don't see why growth is needed for existance. As long as SL doesn't shrink (too much) it won't go away.

I'd be really interested in your thoughts on what LL should do to improve Second Life.

EDIT..I really don't see any of what you said in your latest post in the previous post I replied to. So if this is what you ment, it's no surprise I "obviously didn't get it ". You said a lot of things about 3rd parties vs native objects. I don't see any of that in your latest post. That kind of confuses me....

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One thing for sure: Without adequate revenue Linden Lab will not survive, and without Linden Lab your experience will be as lost as mine. In so far Linden Lab´s commercial success is OUR success, and Linden Lab commercial failure, unfortunately, is OUR failure. Regardless if we like mesh imports or not.

Third parties: You are right that SL always relied on imports, but that´s not something LL as a software company can brag with and cultivate as a business strategy. Nothing beats native formats as soon as it comes to usability and effectively controlling the environment.

Wanna hear the true story on mesh imports?

Object creation with prims is native, and of all indigrients SL relies on this native format ever caused the LESS trouble of them all. And still does. Huge textures cause problems, massive server bugging scripts do, all the shiny but bugging stuff does, but not prims. Instead of developing their pretty successful (and cheap, highly effective and simple) format and toolset further (SL was mafe BIG with prims and native tools, not with imported cubes and spheres), some unnamed Linden managers and board members in their deepest - disconnected from SL subculture - wisdom (and friendship to some business knownothings who wanted to exploit the 3D models of their office skyscrapers in SL) decided to come up with "sculpt map imports", Well, these looked kinda nice, sure, but they caused trouble. Lots of. And the business friends still complained. And the techies at the Lab, desperately trying to keep this mess running, did as well.

"And hell, this renderosity stuff looks sooooo nice! We want this!! And the Google Warehouse! And, and, and..."

This was confirmed by a legion of users, of course, who refused to understand that Second Life is an online environment with a limited technical horizon and not a million dollar AAA 3D game or desktop presentation software and that renderosity, DAZ and google content is intellectual property.

And so they decided to come up with Polymesh imports, supported and confirmed by some employees who were friends with some great 3D modellers in the valley and elsewhere and loved to play with Maya instead of fixing the bugs in SL. Another two years later they came up with it, while a year of betatesting did not generate much more than a handful of enthuisatic hand selected friended creators and their friends importing some stuff onto the beta grid (stolen Halo and WoW models included - following the Hulk).

While, at the same time, someone refused to add a great little tool for aligning prim objects to the native toolset. Which was all free and opensource. But you know, who cares? Now they finally could let their business friends import their office replications into SL, which was most important.  Or not? Unfortunately their business friends STILL complained, now on the violence, the sex, the content theft and all this. So the Linden masterminds were left alone with the real users and not really working polymesh imports.

While the only format and the only toolset which ever worked relatively perfect within SL and which made SL big and these Linden masterminds weathy and fat and won them all their business friends was neglected, devalued and ignored  without ANY valuable reasoning. Apparently the same happened to the SL user.

 

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Vivienne Schell wrote:

One thing for sure: Without adequate revenue Linden Lab will not survive, and without Linden Lab your experience will be as lost as mine. In so far Linden Lab´s commercial success is OUR success, and Linden Lab commercial failure, unfortunately, is OUR failure. Regardless if we like mesh imports or not.

Ofcourse, I won't deny that at all.


Third parties: You are right that SL always relied on imports, but that´s not something LL as a software company can brag with and cultivate as a business strategy.


Linden Lab has a business strategy that's pretty unique. They provide the platform and the users create the content, or at least most of it. That's what makes SL so appealing to a certain group, I am part of that group, both as a creator and consumer. We've seen other 3D environments fail because they took away all the freedom for the user in exchange for better looks and performance.

One could argue that means we should have the most stable basis possible, with as much freedom with the tools available on such a stable platform. That indeed might mean prim builds only, but I think taking away the ability to create more sculptural or natural items won't do the community (and therefor LL) any good. Most people I've talked to IRL said they quit SL rather quickly (during the 2006/2007 hype), for one particular reason: bad looks. Well this and the "there's nothing to do". Linden Lab responded to this complaint with sculpted prims and although that made SL prettier, sculpts ment a big performance hit and were still pretty limited. Now with mesh, which seems to get more stable and more accepted, we can have both the good looks and better performance.


Nothing beats native formats as soon as it comes to usability and effectively controlling the environment.

I agree, but that means exactly what Second Life is not. Linden Lab gives the user as much freedom as possible, the results being some unique, well built aspects, nowhere to be found in another virtual world and some poorly built, lag creating others. That's the trade off. So Linden Labs job is to make sure making lag creating objects is not something that can happen, or at least not by mistake. Adding mesh to the toolbox is very helpful, since unlike prims and sculpts, the laggier you build, the more prims it will cost. Mesh is a lot friendlier on the systems than prims. There are plenty of things that need attention, but mesh as a tool is not one of them. There's more to be gained with reducing texture load or script load and I hope LL has something planned on those. I can think of some things that would motivate people to use smaller textures and better performing scripts, I'm sure LL can aswell. BTW, script load is very high in SL and isn't LSL something native to SL?

 

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