Rod Humble interview and new Drax Files

[Medhue Simoni]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

 

Once again, solving the problem of usage and retention in SL is not about guild-masters endlessly affirming and even hectoring others and claiming that the skills are easy, and that people are just stupid or lazy if they won't devote their attention to mastering them. The problem is conceding that the guild-mentality is an obstacle for other users, and the gulf is only widening. When the CEO can only fly around warbling how wonderful it is that other masters in his guild craftsmen make stuff, he hasn't figured out that most of his customers are consuming stuff, not making it, and he therefore hasn't structured the user experience accordingly.

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You quite possibly do have a very good point there. Retention is definitely an area where LL has had problems with for it's whole exsistence. You will have no disagreements from me here.

 

My issue is with this divide that you keep bringing into the picture. While I admit, in any economy, you will have specialists. That's all we are. I'm pretty knowledgable about animations. I'm not a 3D modeling expert. Many people can run cycles around my modeling, and it only modestly interests me. Even within my own specialty, there are specialists. Making dance animations is a different animal than AO animations, especially couples dances. There are no 3D creators that are experts in every aspect of 3D creation. At best, a person can only have an overall knowledge and a specialty. Creators that are experts beyond that are like unicorns. The elitists you speak of, are only people who know a few grains more than others, and probably only in their specialty. Yes, if you want to look at each of us an say we make up a tiny percentage, you would be correct. And..... thank god we are all here. If we weren't these things we specialize in would not be here to enjoy. Why are we here tho? We are here because the market supports us, which means the people like and want what we produce. We add value to the whole economy. We are not the evil guidemasters that seek to drang every penny from a dying corpse.

All we, and LL can do is work on the areas that we do understand. My role is to make animations that people will like. I'm trying to do my part, as others are doing their part. LL has many roles, and 1 of them is to give us the tools to help make SL look better and run better for every1. With my support of mesh, I'm trying to help LL in that goal. I mean really, I'm an animator, not a modeler, but I see the importance. Some areas that need work, like retention, these are difficult and complex problems. I too would love to see something, anything, that can put a dent into it. I can only hope that people that know more than I about it are working on it. I don't blame LL for the bad retention, as I feel it really is a difficult thing to address, without drastically changing everything else about SL.

[Jo Yardley]

Just throwing this in here;

my ideas on keeping new users in Sl a little longer;

http://joyardley.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/starting-your-second-life/

[Medhue Simoni]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

What beats me most about mesh based creation is how the (land) cost of mesh is very unfavorable compared to sculpts and for larger builds also prims. It often throws the creative process from being creative on to a track of optimization and re-topo to reach a target LI – it therefore fast becomes very technical and not very fluid or even fun. (In addition the mesh importer often throws the LI in not very intuitive or logical directions, where the final outcome depends on how and if you ungroup meshes.)

I have for my own part a 12 sim OS running standalone where I don't have to worry about LI and where you can experiment,  be creative and see how far you can push the viewer and the sim performance with complex and many meshes in a small area.

I consistently find that the mesh builds are super efficient performance wise compared to sculpts regardless of how complex they are. The setback comes of course when you try to move creations into SecondLife, where you have to optimize the heck out of them to get to down to a LI that is acceptable (own land cost or in competition with sculpted items.) Most of the time I don't find the effort worthwhile.  – So I have 2 years worht of creations more or less sitting there outside of SecondLife. The flip side is I had fun in the process and learned a lot :-)

 

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I agree completely and totally with everything you said. I was in the mesh beta and have been complaining about it since the land impact stuff was introduced. It goes against everything I've ever learned and experienced in 3D. I really can't even begin to understand why LL made the LI work the way that they did. Maybe it has something to do with the LODs, but still, it's convoluted. The whole LI stuff turns mesh into this animal you are forced to work around if you want to use it.

With my own tests, if I completely ignore the LI, and just make all the meshes for a sim efficiently, the overall result is a smoother experience, and ok prim counts. Getting some1 else to realise that extra cost of a large mesh object is worth it, is nearly impossible, especially on the marketplace right next to a 1 prim sculpty version. To me, the logic of it all is backwards. SL's main problem is the amount of data that is streaming. Server cost is a none issue. It solves itself overtime. I don't see how something larger is more streaming data, as I don't see the load time affect in SL, unless that mesh has a ton of polys. To punish a mesh object simply because of the server impact is just wrong, as the server space is not the issue. Of course, I'm not an expert in any of this, so I can only speculate based on my own knowledge and tests. If it were me, most of the cost of an object would be directly connect to it's polygon count, and texture size. Object size would be irrelavent.

Examining the LI, I almost get the sense that LL wanted to allow people to make small object with lots of detail. For whatever reason, they thought this would be a benefit. So they designed the LI to account for size. So, what I'm saying is, they purposely gave a benefit to something being small, so that the polygon count could be higher. Again tho, I'm struggling to understand how they implemented this. If this is the case tho, why weren't they smart enough to make size irrelavent after it reaches a set size. In the real world, yeah, a larger size means more matter, but not in the virtual world. You don't have more data filling the spaces.

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

The unfortunate thing about mesh creation more or less happening in its entirety outside of SL is that it  removes the bulk of the creative process out of SecondLife where newcomers earlier could watch the progress of, learn from and be inspired by the building process, they now more or less see a finished, polished product they have no idea of how was created. It is then easy to think this is not for me or I will never master it.

It can be compared to most younger people don't have the skills to make RL clothes any more because it moved off to China, and they have become passive consumers of garments they only have a vague idea of how was created. 

It also skews the economy because builder tended to need more land for their creative process, off the shelf textures are largely replaced with custom uv-mapped textures and so on. 

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Exactly, Gavin.

If you watch/read Philip Rosedale early explanations of his vision for SL, you'll see that LL is now living on another planet. Philip envisioned SL as a giant tinkertoy set that anyone could use to build things and do so cooperatively. SL still has the tinkertoys, but they're not competitive with things built outside SL. I truly enjoyed working with friends in-world to build things on-the-fly. It was reminiscent of group projects in college or working with my parents to build things in our barn.

Allowing third party viewers made teaching new residents how to work SL more difficult as each could, and often did, move menu items around and alter the functionality of various tools. Sculpties and mesh make it necessary, in most cases, to spend significant time outside SL, and therefore outside the collaborative teaching/learning space. For SL to be friendly to new potential creators, LL must curate the building experience. They've not done a good job of that. That creation now requires more time outside SL than inside it seems to be exactly the problem Rosedale was trying to address with Second Life. It's not often I get to watch a company create the problem it was created to solve ;-)

SL is unique, it's got a loyal following that might keep it alive for some time to come, but I don't yet see a compelling growth story.

[Gavin Hird]

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

SL still has the tinkertoys, but they're not competitive with things built outside SL. 

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...which I think is at the core of the retention issue.

With the introduction of sculpts and later mesh you have to a large degree moved SL from a creative environment to a consumer environment, and the consumer experience is not particularly compelling compared to other virtual goods be it games, entertainment, and to an accelerating degree apps and experiences on mobile devices. Investment in SL content gives less instant gratification than investment in mobile content – which also is much easier to purchase or obtain for free. 

Compound that with the tiny return on investment most SL mesh creators experience – both in monetary and land impact terms, the incentives to create outside the wearable categories are few. 

 

[Suspiria Finucane]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

The unfortunate thing about mesh creation more or less happening in its entirety outside of SL is that it  removes the bulk of the creative process out of SecondLife where newcomers earlier could watch the progress of, learn from and be inspired by the building process, they now more or less see a finished, polished product they have no idea of how was created.

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This is only partially true. Were it not for textures (created entirely outside SL) there would be no SL as we know it. I agree with some of it though as far as the creative process being primarily inside SL. Were it not for building inside SL, I doubt I would be in SL today.

"In Rod we Trust"

PS In the realm of mesh models, the real world pays much higher for gifted 3D modelers than SL ever will. For that reason I doubt we will see the high standard of mesh models there are in other applications.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Examining the LI, I almost get the sense that LL wanted to allow people to make small object with lots of detail. For whatever reason, they thought this would be a benefit. So they designed the LI to account for size. So, what I'm saying is, they purposely gave a benefit to something being small, so that the polygon count could be higher. Again tho, I'm struggling to understand how they implemented this. If this is the case tho, why weren't they smart enough to make size irrelavent after it reaches a set size. In the real world, yeah, a larger size means more matter, but not in the virtual world. You don't have more data filling the spaces.

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LL's main concern is server performance, not viewer performance. This is what the land impact calculations are intended for. Large meshes require more physics calculations from the servers to account for collisions, etc. and a big box will be collided with just as much as a large complex sculpted shape of a similar size. A small complex item only briefly puts a load on the servers when it's being uploaded - since it's small there are fewer chances for things to collide with it. The complaints about land impact ballooning with the new land impact calculations are almost always because of the physics score of an object and there are usually ways of lowering this score dramatically while having the object look absolutely identical in world.

[Perrie Juran]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

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LL's main concern is server performance, not viewer performance.

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Server performance is critical because it is the thing that ties us all together.  That they should need to sevote more resources to it than to the Viewer makes sense.  But they should be just as concerned about the Viewer because that is where their customer is sitting. 

When I was test driving the CHUI beta, I made the comment that sometime they really needed to sit and watch over the shoulder of people who use SL to see "how" we used the Viewer.  They really do not understand the average users "work flow."

After not using the official Viewer for several years I decided to give it a test drive about a year ago.  I clearly remember the first question that came to mind when I logged in.  "How the heck do I communicate."  The chat bar should have been right there in front of my face.  I shouldn't have needed to search for it.

While I know that not everyone logs in to SL to socialize, there is no way that you could persuade me that for the vast majority of users that some form of socializing is not a primary reason for being here.  The default should not be hidden chat.  It should be the other way around.

The point of contact with the customer, in this case the Viewer, really is more important than the Servers.  It may not require as many resources to maintain and improve, but it is still more important.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Examining the LI, I almost get the sense that LL wanted to allow people to make small object with lots of detail. For whatever reason, they thought this would be a benefit. So they designed the LI to account for size. So, what I'm saying is, they purposely gave a benefit to something being small, so that the polygon count could be higher. Again tho, I'm struggling to understand how they implemented this. If this is the case tho, why weren't they smart enough to make size irrelavent after it reaches a set size. In the real world, yeah, a larger size means more matter, but not in the virtual world. You don't have more data filling the spaces.

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LL's main concern is server performance, not viewer performance. This is what the land impact calculations are intended for. Large meshes require more physics calculations from the servers to account for collisions, etc. and a big box will be collided with just as much as a large complex sculpted shape of a similar size. A small complex item only briefly puts a load on the servers when it's being uploaded - since it's small there are fewer chances for things to collide with it. The complaints about land impact ballooning with the new land impact calculations are almost always because of the physics score of an object and there are usually ways of lowering this score dramatically while having the object look absolutely identical in world.

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Believe me Theresa, I completely and totally understand the details of what makes a mesh tic, and why the LI goes up. My point was that LL based the LI on the past, when server resources were a problem. The problem with this, is that LL has total and complete control over the server resources and what they can handle, besides the fact that servers improve every single year, without exception. What LL doesn't have control over is the PC that people are using to run their viewer. Many years ago, people thought, "Oh yeah, SL will get better for every1 because PCs are also improving every year." Nice thought, but that didn't quite happen the way every1 thought. People moved to laptops, and the manufactures of those laptops didn't give a dang about PC games. Then, some thought, well laptops will get better, and out came the iPhone, and now the iPad. The bottleneck was always, and will always be the amount of data that is streamed.

Ultimately, my point is that LL was extremely short sighted when they created the LI system. That shortsightedness has made mesh for large structures, which would benefit from mesh the most, extremely cumbersome, and hardly worth the effort.

[Deltango Vale]

Thank you for your post. It's nice to know Rod is still alive. It is also nice that Rod is broadly supportive of Second Life. Needless to say, we get this snippet of Rod's thoughts courtesy of you posting an interview from your own website into the General Discussion Forum. Forgive me, therefore, if I contrast Rod's almost accidental communication with the SL community with the communication process of another VR company that has not only been around ten years, but is growing steadily.

Oh, and, btw, here's what the management and staff do for fun:

Regarding VR presence technology, see:

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-vr-an-experiment-in-bringing-virtual-reality-to-the-eve-universe/

So, thank you Rod for your brief message via Jo's website. Great that you are doing stuff (whatever it might be). Wonderful that you like Second Life. Nice of you to show up every six or seven months with a tweet or two, but, y'know, it just doesn't cut it. In fact, it sucks. Write 100 times on the blackboard: "Must do better."

[Dillon Levenque]

Deltango, I didn't actually watch any of your clips, but I get the idea. I've seen you and others talk about Eve and it does sound interesting but my time to fall into the web is limiited. I don't have enough  time now to be with my SL friends or explore on my own. Looking at another platform/game/whatever would just reduce that time.

That being said, I completely agree with your take on all this. In spite of Rod's appearance inworld and his yakkity yak, it seems as if he's without a clue regarding Second LIfe. (and I still smile remembering your comment about LL and SL).

I see posts on the Forum all the time about how LL is going to milk the SL 'cash cow' as far as they can. Maybe that's true, although the people who post those comments never add any references to back up their claims. If they're right, LL is making enough money off  the SL residents (or users, if you're one of those nitpickers) to keep the project alive.

There are a great many things wrong with the way Second Life is presented and maintained.. If that doesn't improve, there will eventually be nobody left here except us, and  'Us' is not enough. We will eventually  leave.  We need new people. I can't understand how LL can keep missiing the point of first time visitors versus people who stay. Do they not care? I think the answer to that is "No". They don't care.  I don't think there are stupid people working at Linden Lab.  I just think they have other things to do.

Maybe we are the only resource SL has going for it. Help a newbie.

 

 

edited to delete a surplus word

[Maryanne Solo]

Wow thats awesome thank you Jo

Rod is in touch, he is happy and yes they've been under the hood.

176 staff who actively work to make things more efficient.

Thats all I need to keep me premium.

♥ LL ty