Secondlife #2 - 2015 Beta

[Parhelion Palou]

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Syo Emerald wrote:

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Airikk Ellisson wrote:

  Here is My tunderstanding and take on the whole scenerio.  I gave been in SL for almost 6 yrs.and have spent more than my share of RL mobey on lindens.

  First off.thr VR headset situation..not everyone will be able to afford it.  In the long run, you will need a moore powerful machine to handle VR heasdsets.  So,in essence, the general "regular Joe" public wotn bne able to afford to tap into

VR headsey world.  Personally I recall reading someplace that in the bew platform..both VR users and regular users will

be able to interact with each other.  This being said, everyone has said for a long time that SL needs to upgrade their graphics engine...the Sl game engine is way out-dated, and thats all true.. this NEW platform is what is needed tor SL

to take it to the next level.  We all need to keep doing what we arr doing to help SL thrive. when the new platform arrives,

do all we can to enbrace it!!  THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!!!  KEEP LOOKING FORWARD WITH OPTIMISM AND EXCITEMENT

 

“The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.”

― Douglas Adams,Mostly Harmless

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Oh, please...learn to read, before you get exicted about **bleep** that isn't going to happen.

Sansar is NOT a new Second Life. It is NOT an update. It is NOT a new graphic engine. It is NOT connected to Second Life.

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Sansar does have a new graphics engine, at least new to LL. That's what they've been testing for the past year. LL has already said the engine couldn't work with SL, so you're right if you're only referring to SL.

 

[Tegg Bode]

"As others have pointed out, Sansar is really not for us. So that's the thing: for those who enjoy (or enjoyed) Second Life, the most optimistic hope is for Sansar to fail quickly, before it squanders all of LL's resources, so we can get past this distraction and finally get on with fixing Second Life's shortcomings."

Sorry but who elected you the spokesperson for "us"?

I'm damn sure there will be plenty of people from SL who as with other virtual worlds will move on to others they find they prefer. They've reached limitations of the SL engine can do hampered by retaining compatibility for old crap and most of the gurus who know how its code works are gone.

Sorry but not everyone is stuck in the 90s.

Careful what you wish for, if Sansar starts to fail, the bean counters will suck every cent out of SL and its maintenance that they can to save it. And if it fails completely it might mean the end of LL and SL gets sold to someone else who just by coincidence is launching a new virtual world under another company name and pulls the plug on SL completely.

And from what I've read so far a VR headset for Sansar is going to me great, but optional, not a requirement.

[Phil Deakins]

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Tegg Bode wrote:

Sorry but who elected you the spokesperson for "us"?

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I elected Qie the spokesperson for "us". The decision stands.

[Qie Niangao]

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Tegg Bode wrote:

 

Careful what you wish for, if Sansar starts to fail, the bean counters will suck every cent out of SL and its maintenance that they can to save it. And if it fails completely it might mean the end of LL and SL gets sold to someone else who just by coincidence is launching a new virtual world under another company name and pulls the plug on SL completely.

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Yeah, that's a concern. That's why I wrote pretty much the same thing. (Well, without the selling part; I don't think SL matters enough to be bought, least of all by somebody starting a new virtual world.)

It's not that I hope Sansar will fail, it's that I accept it's more likely to fail than not, and so I hope it fails quickly, so LL puts the resources into fixing SL instead of squanders them making wings for a fresh pig.

Although it would be costly and complex, there's really nothing that prevents SL being fixed. There's laggy old user-generated content lying around, sure, and no easy way to optimize it in advance of rendering (although there are ways -- they've been debated for a decade). There's nasty spaghetti code implementing such things as all the special cases around permissions, but Sansar will be full of that sort of stuff, too, long before its capabiities approach those of SL. Seen another way, it's several generations of re-factoring behind SL's code.

Sure, there will be SL'rs who try it out, just as they've tried HiFi. Some stick it out. For some, it will be what they always hoped SL will be, and they'll try to make a go of it, although again, that's not make-or-break for Sansar. They have their sights on such larger markets than the whole of SL that it doesn't really matter whether any SL'rs choose Sansar. It's really not being built for us.

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

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Tegg Bode wrote:

 

Careful what you wish for, if Sansar starts to fail, the bean counters will suck every cent out of SL and its maintenance that they can to save it. And if it fails completely it might mean the end of LL and SL gets sold to someone else who just by coincidence is launching a new virtual world under another company name and pulls the plug on SL completely.

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Yeah, that's a concern. That's why I wrote pretty much the same thing. (Well, without the selling part; I don't think SL matters enough to be bought, least of all by somebody starting a new virtual world.)

It's not that I hope Sansar will fail, it's that I accept it's more likely to fail than not, and so I hope it fails

quickly

, so LL puts the resources into fixing SL instead of squanders them making wings for a fresh pig.

Although it would be costly and complex,

there's really nothing that

prevents

SL being fixed.

There's laggy old user-generated content lying around, sure, and no easy way to optimize it in advance of rendering (although there

are

ways -- they've been debated for a decade). There's nasty spaghetti code implementing such things as all the special cases around permissions, but Sansar will be full of that sort of stuff, too, long before its capabiities approach those of SL. Seen another way, it's several generations of re-factoring

behind

SL's code.

Sure, there will be SL'rs who try it out, just as they've tried HiFi. Some stick it out. For some, it will be what they always hoped SL will be, and they'll try to make a go of it, although again, that's not make-or-break for Sansar. They have their sights on such larger markets than the whole of SL that it doesn't really matter whether any SL'rs choose Sansar. It's really not being built for us.

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Here's the basic difference between your position and mine. Looking at how Second Life is set up, I see structural problems that can never be fixed while keeping it recognizable as the same thing.

Here's an analogy: In the 19th century when electrical power grids began to be developed, Thomas Edison and his company made a couple of decisions.

1) They were going to use direct current, because the technology was more mature and they held useful patents. Alternating current was known at the time but there were issues using it with motors and other things.

and

2) The operating voltage for end users would be 100 volts, because that is a good compromise between useful power and a lower risk of electrocution. Edison realized with a new technology like public electricity, hearing about electrocutions would make the public afraid of it.

There was a basic problem with this approach - it was effectively impossible to change the voltage of direct current, which means that the current had to be generated at the same voltage it was used at. Since electrical current loses voltage as its transmitted, to maintain 100 volts Edison needed to use fat, expensive wires and even then couldn't serve customers more than about a mile from a generating plant due to unchangeable laws of physics. His grid required a large number of small generating plants which all needed maintenance and any one could be a candidate for failure. Edison electricity wasn't significantly cheaper or more reliable than the existing gaslight system it was meant to replace.

In the meantime, the problems with alternating current systems were solved by others, and alternating current voltage can be changed easily and cheaply. This meant that an AC power provider could generate power at a high voltage with a large plant far away, send it long distances because the high voltage meant that voltage drop could be compensated for, and then step it down to a practical operating voltage. AC power suppliers could provide power much more cheaply and reliably than Edison could and that made possible the developed world we know today.

You have to figure that if anyone could solve a particular electrical problem in the 19th century it would have been Thomas Edison, and he couldn't fix the DC power grid. Edison's power grid did get fixed eventually, though - when the stockholders bought out the second-biggest AC power utility, changed all their new installations to AC and changed their name to General Electric.

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The way I see it, the remote simulation of land is the basic Achilles heel of Second Life. Any particular patch of land needs to be simulated if anyone is going to use it ever, even if nobody actually is using it most of the time, and yet each land simulation has a cap as far as how many people can use it at once. Simulators cap out constantly even under Second Life's current status as a niche product. It has problems very similar to Edison's power grid - complexity, high operating costs and a lack of flexibility. This approach may have made sense in 2002 for the small, highly dynamic, constantly changing world that was originally invisioned, but it just isn't appropriate or practical for what Second Life became very shortly after it opened. However, everything in Second Life is written for the way the world is currently simulated so it would be a nightmare to try and re-code the existing world. And even if you did? Log in and look around you. The idea of Second Life may be compelling, but the reality? Spotty at best.