experience tools What happened to the Experience forum?

[Kadah Coba]

The Experience forum doesn't seem to have survived the migration, or at least access to it. It never was made fully public as planned after release. There was much info there and the wiki is lacking. Much of exp tools was lacking...

Do we just use the LSL Scripting forum instead now?

[Rolig Loon]

That would seem logical.  I think that forum was meant to be temporary during phase-in of Experiences anyway, and all of the concerns about Experiences are really LSL scripting questions.  They've been showing up here for quite a while already.  The wiki and KB do need updating, though, you're right.

[Qie Niangao]

10 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

all of the concerns about Experiences are really LSL scripting questions.  

Maybe it seems that way to us only because we're scripters. I mean, the feature has some real effects on land management, product packaging and permissions, developing "game"/roleplay narratives, etc., which I think don't get much attention because the whole feature never quite "took off" as originally hoped. In fact, I've always suspected that the complexity of those other, non-scripting considerations is why Experience adoption hasn't been wider.

Meanwhile, we scripters have been using Experience features (notably KVP persistence) to do stuff far afield of the feature's original intent.

Still, I doubt a separate Experience forum would help much, unless it somehow attracted wider interest from non-scripters and the cross-discipline synergy fomented new ideas. (I don't recall much of that in the Experience forum during beta, but that doesn't mean anything.)

[Love Zhaoying]

I can see it getting dropped from forums if it didn't catch on very well..kind of like each new major feature that gets added may fade (see: sculpties, etc.).  

[Rolig Loon]

I'm not sure that I'd agree that Experiences haven't caught on very well.  I haven't seen statistics about usage that would indicate whether they have or not. I imagine that people who may have hoped to write scripts for grid-wide use have been disappointed, since you can only access an Experience's functions and KVP on regions where it is enabled.  Still, there are plenty of good reasons for using Experience tools within a single region or estate (think of shops that want to maintain a customer database or RP environments where you need to be able to animate or move players without asking each time, for example). Those sorts of places would generally require custom-scripted attention rather than systems that I'd expect to find off the shelf in Marketplace. I suspect that if adoption has been slow, it reflects a lack of imagination or willingness to pay for custom scripting.

[Innula Zenovka]

I've been asked to do several pieces of custom Experience scripting.   Whenever anyone asks about it, they always -- and not, to my mind, unreasonably -- expect me, as the scripter, to be able to advise them on everything they need to know about Experiences, including land permissions and land management implications, and to draft advice for them to give their end users on anything the end user might want to know.

[Kadah Coba]

On 3/28/2017 at 2:02 PM, Rolig Loon said:

That would seem logical.  I think that forum was meant to be temporary during phase-in of Experiences anyway, and all of the concerns about Experiences are really LSL scripting questions.  They've been showing up here for quite a while already.  The wiki and KB do need updating, though, you're right.

At least according to posts in that forum, the plan was supposedly to make it public after it left beta.

[Kadah Coba]

I don't think experiences have caught on cause they are still too limited.

• Limit one per premium account: prevents you from really making more than one thing properly..
• Indented for creator/user of the exp to host it on their land, but land costs way too much for that to be viable.
• Cannot transfer to another, so not exactly something one can do commission work without many extra complications.
• Can't really sell anything that uses experiences since:
  • Can't use the buyer's exp key since that would require recompiling scripts
  • The creator would have to maintain premium forever or the experience becomes invalid.
• KVS is likely the most useful feature here and its extremely limited by the above an more. Still simper to use external DB (hell, I've got pure LSL methods with less limitations).

Etc.

[Innula Zenovka]

I'm sorry, Kadah, but you're completely mistaken about not being able to sell items set to experiences.   So long as you allow the experience to run on the parcel on which you (i.e. the end user) want to use the item (which can be bog-standard 512 bit of mainand), then it should work.

My general mode of working is to ask the client to set up an experience.   She then assigns a group to the experience, and gives me group role with the power Experience Contributor, as described in the Knowledge Base article.   I can then write scripts, set them to that experience and compile them, so long as I make sure I'm wearing that group tag when I do it.

After that, anyone who buys the object containing the script I've given her can give allow the experience to run in his parcel, and everything works.   The only problem would be if the customer tried to recompile the script, but that's not going to happen since most scripted items come with no-mod scripts.

Code Violet, who makes the popular AVsitter animation system, takes this a stage further.   Furniture creators can drop her (no-mod) experience tools scripts into their objects and then their customers can, so long as they allow the AVsitter experience to run on their parcel, enjoy (e.g.) dinner tables that temp attach knives and forks to diners' hands using experience tools.  

I'm not sure what happens if the experience owner leaves SL.   I think that the experience should keep on working unless someone at LL's end deliberately disables it, and I can't really see LL deliberately breaking lots of content simply because someone's no longer paying their premium subscription.   You might not be able to make new material set to that experience but I doubt LL would break existing stuff.  I dunno.

Edited March 29, 2017 by Innula Zenovka

[Kadah Coba]

I didn't mean that you couldn't sell them, just that it adds a lot of annoying extra steps and potential downsides for the buyer.

I do not like AVsitter, or at least the way it is often implimented. It uses far too many scripts that use a surprising amount of script time. Last time I check, over half the idle script time and memory on my sim was just AVsitter stuff.

According to SL previously, experience keys expires when the owner no long has premium. I don't think its been stated what happens to KVS when that happens, but for sure at least access to the data would be lost.

I should go back to experimented with KVS again, I had wanted to make an export-import and backup tool for it since LL didn't.

[Innula Zenovka]

What are all these "far too many annoying extra steps" for the buyer?   I think there's only one extra step involved -- opening up "About Land," going to the Experience tab and adding whatever the experience is called to the list of allowed experiences for the parcel.   That's hardly very arduous.

And I wasn't recommending AvSitter as a tool, particularly.  All I was saying is that its creator is distributing a plug-in that enables anyone to use the AvSitter API to create experience-enabled furniture, so as to make the point that people can use the one experience key to make a huge variety of different items for different people to use all over the grid.

I agree that it would be good to have some reassurance about what happens if the owner of the experience leaves SL but, as I say, I would be a bit surprised if LL deliberately broke a lot of content simply because someone left or stopped paying a premium subscription.   

[Rolig Loon]

49 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

What are all these "far too many annoying extra steps" for the buyer?   I think there's only one extra step involved -- opening up "About Land," going to the Experience tab and adding whatever the experience is called to the list of allowed experiences for the parcel.   That's hardly very arduous.

[ .... ]

I agree.  It's no more difficult than having to deed a parcel radio or TV to the land group, and most SL residents have no trouble with that. 

As a scripter, you don't need to be a Premium member or own an experience yourself to write scripts using Experience tools.  You just can't run them until someone who does have an experience sets the scripts in the experience.  As Innula says, if you are doing custom work, you just ask the client to add you to their group in the role of Experience Contributor. It's the same sort of thing you would do if you were a landscaper and someone hired you to terraform their land.  Join the group temporarily, do the job, and leave it.

[Whirly Fizzle]

3 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

I'm not sure what happens if the experience owner leaves SL.   I think that the experience should keep on working unless someone at LL's end deliberately disables it, and I can't really see LL deliberately breaking lots of content simply because someone's no longer paying their premium subscription.   You might not be able to make new material set to that experience but I doubt LL would break existing stuff.  I dunno.

The information given at one of the Simulator user group meetings was:

What happens to an Experience if a Premium user reverts to a Basic account?

• The Experience is suspended;
  • Data saved to the KVP will not be immediately deleted

Ref: https://modemworld.me/2015/07/01/a-further-look-at-the-experience-tools-viewer-in-second-life/

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Thanks, @Whirly Fizzle.   That was written just after experiences were launched, and it left open the very valid question, are experiences transferable in the event of the owner wanting to leave SL, which is pretty much equivalent, for these purposes, to the experience owner wanting to go back to a basic account.   

I guess I'm wondering what really does happen, though.   I mean, I know what's supposed to happen if members of a group that owns land don't contribute enough tier to cover the group's holdings, and I also know what, in most case,does (or, rather, doesn't) actually happen.  

Since I'm pretty sure that disabling the experience actually requires someone at LL to take a decision to do that, I just wonder how often anyone bothers to disable the experience if the owner goes back to a basic account or if the owner leaves, particularly since the premium account requirement is primarily there to prevent people abusing experience tools rather than anything else.   I think I'm prepared to let sleeping dogs lie, though.

 

[Qie Niangao]

It certainly would be a problem if all AVsitter Experience-equipped stuff quit working should Code Violet ever stop re-upping as Premium.

I have more to say about how cool that AVsitter Experience is, but first: It's an example of the many behind-the-scenes ways Experience features are valuable, despite (as I still maintain) the intended Experience functionality was not widely adopted. By "intended" I'm referring to what the developers seemed to expect: full-blown games and role-play environments enabled by Experiences, where KVP is used to keep track of participant achievements, llTeleportAgent implements portals between levels, game HUD and combat meter are llAttachToAvatarTemp()'d, and new SL users flock to sign up because everybody needs more homegrown video games. Instead I think individual features of the Experience project have been unintended successes. (That's also my take on Pathfinding, which is just too heavyweight and quirky for popular use, but more general-purpose component features KFM and llCastRay formed the basis of much valuable content.)

Back to the wonders of the AVsitter Experience. It's biggest win is that it is accumulating a critical mass of folks who've pre-approved permissions, and those users can interact seamlessly with everything that uses that Experience. Also, the API design is very smart in not requiring the participant to be seated on the Experience-scripted object (AVsitter name notwithstanding). I wrote about this in a Bay City Post article ("No questions asked: Wear it!") a few months ago, and set out a sample. (But also read the precautions about how tricky licensing is for items distributed by other items, a major commercial limitation of llAttachToAvatarTemp().)

To me, it wouldn't be immediately obvious how much such an API should enable. Complete pass-thru use of all Experience permissions would doom the Experience to deletion as soon as somebody used it for griefing. To me, it's still an open question what would be safe to distribute that's enabled by my account's Experience.

[Kadah Coba]

Regarding AVsitter, I don't know if this is normal for it or just it being horridly misused, but it does use too much resources. The highlighted are AVSitter things. The top one is something I thing someone was using at this time. #2-4 here are always on top and are just some sitting circles with maybe a dozen seperate instances of AVSitter in its prims. #5 is a script monitor board I was working on and still uses too much script time. #8 is me. The lower highlighted are single instanced AVSitter things (there are a lot more than shown). Newer stuff tends to use it and my friend has quite a lot of those newer things rezed.

 

Back to exp.

I'm guessing many of the concerns that were brought up before have been worked around now. Yay.

Though one issue I see with the single exp key per user is that it could sorta prevent making a traditional experience as LL intended and also selling stuff that uses experiences. Say that I finally deiced to do something with my sim and make "Kadah's super gay yiffy fun time" experience, I couldn't reasonably then go sell something like a region wide TP system or an AVsitter competitor without some potential negative side effects either from the dumb name I chose or people unwantingly getting pulled in to an unpleasant sim experience due to unrelated permission granting. Same would go for selling complete different types of experiences, like a sim TP system and super adult rez-a-home toys.

Yes, I could solve that issue by premiuming up an alt and using their key, but then that's a second premium account I've had to maintain and given how many issues I've had over the years just giving LL my money to pay for the one... lol. It would be nice if LL would offer paid extras for exp tools, like additional keys, additional KVS storage, transferring keys to another user, etc. If priced fairly, I wouldn't mind that. But the same goes for tier, if they ever lower that, I would actually consider making a traditional region/multi-region based experience.

[Qie Niangao]

As with any third-party scripts, there are bound to be creators who use the product without quite understanding how to do so efficiently. For example, I have a really hard time imagining a reason for multiple instances of the AVsitter engine in a single object (unless this simply means a bunch of the "[AV]sitA" and B per-sitter scripts in a single instance of the engine. And I certainly don't see numbers anything remotely like what you're showing in that table for any of the many AVsitter-scripted items on my land, although it's true that I almost always update and thin-out unnecessary helper scripts left stranded in commercial products, so that may reduce the noise. It's not my product or anything -- I too have some quibbles -- but I'd be happy to investigate the specific problem items; that said, I'm not so comfortable discussing the overall pros and cons of a script product here, beyond the Experience-specific considerations.

I do agree that (again) the Lab dropped the ball on the business side of things here. During beta, there was much talk of grid-scope Experiences (we assumed at substantial cost) and multiple Experiences per account (again with some associated charges). I certainly never expected to be stuck forever with the current approach of requiring an ongoing Premium subscription per Experience, and I don't understand the thinking behind it at all. Weirdly, it sort of penalizes those of us who participated in the beta because we used up our one Experience with whatever we did during the beta. Sure, we could just keep adding more stuff to those (and renaming them, I guess) but that would be misleading folks who originally granted permissions.

[Klytyna]

And this children, is why experiences have generally failed to catch on...

They can only be made in limited quantities, by Premium residents, because *obviously* Premium people are *nice* people who would never miss use the power of Experience for evil...

For most people an Experience is something encountered 2nd or 3rd hand, it's not by the person on whose land you stand, or by their furniture maker, it's by somebody you never even heard of who made a script set and sold it to several dozen furniture makers... Exactly who are you giving permissions to?

Granting Experience permissions means a big scary dialog, which warns you in vague terms of just how much power you are giving away, and many people don't like the idea that sitting on a park bench oputside a clothing store means they can be teleported  just because they later visit a different parcel on a different sim whose owner uses the same 3rd party Experience.

 

Experiences are potentially very useful, when used properly and used well, problem is the lack of knowledge about them, and the poor implimentation, where your only 'protection' against their miss-use is a scary dialog popup, and the insane belief that "Premium people are automatically nice because they are Premium, and will never cheat or harm you in anyway"

You can just imagine Madlander Max, the Prim Warrior, putting out adboards on mainland parcels advertising his new 'experience' products, while grinning evilly because his untraceable spoof account alt is using they same experience to write griefer weapins that are guaranteed to work on anyone who sat on a park bench bought from a furniture store that bought scripts from Madlander Max
 

[Rolig Loon]

Those are good points, although I think you may have the bit about Premium account holders backwards.  It's much easier for the Lab to track down Premium members because they have payment information on file.  Therefore, it's not so much about believing that Premium members are "nice" people as it is about knowing that it's easier to catch them if they aren't.  It's not a flawless theory, but it has helped keep Premium sandboxes relatively free of griefers, for example.

The big scary dialog is off-putting, I agree. If people could make grid-wide experiences, as opposed to ones that are only active on their own land, that would be a big thing for the average resident to worry about. As it is, most landowners don't have sprawling, multi-region estates, so the scariness is on a small scale.  I suppose that's one reason why LL decided against letting people have grid-wide experiences.

[Innula Zenovka]

@Klytyna   As I understand it, the rationale for allowing only premium members to own experiences isn't that *obviously* Premium people are *nice* people but that griefers are less likely to create throwaway alt accounts to make abusive experiences if they have to provide LL with their credit card details and pay US$9.50 a time for each throwaway account they create.

I don't quite understand the point of your story about 

25 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Madlander Max, the Prim Warrior, putting out adboards on mainland parcels advertising his new 'experience' products, while grinning evilly because his untraceable spoof account alt is using they same experience to write griefer weapins that are guaranteed to work on anyone who sat on a park bench bought from a furniture store that bought scripts from Madlander Max

What would happen in practice is that people would complain about the abusive scripts and LL would, at the least, disable experience scripts compiled by the alt account.   If it kept on happening, sooner or later (and probably sooner rather than later) LL would doubtless tell Max he had to be more careful about granting Experience Contributor roles in his group to day old accounts and that, if he didn't, they'd prevent his experience being used by anyone to compile any more scripts.

For what it's worth, I've never heard people for whom I've make experience scripts (using their experience and the Contributor role in their group) complain that people are put off by the big scary dialogue box.     

I think that one of the main reasons they haven't really taken off is that most people (including most scripters) don't really know much about Experiences and have never really thought about what they can do with them.   It's also difficult to experiment with them unless you're a premium account.    Personally I don't consider $15 a year (which is all a $72 annual account costs, taking into account the L$300 x 52 they refund you), or even $9.50 a month for monthly membership, a great deal of money, but I do understand that premium membership is difficult if you live in particular countries,

 

[Klytyna]

That's what I mean about the 'premium are auto-nice' thing... you don't have to be premium to pay by credit card, a lot of non premium payment registered people use credit cards, and the Labs have their details.

 

I was asked by somebody I was helping with a build, if I knew anything about making experience based portals for moving around the different parts of the build, I said i didn't but I did know somebody who had written their own for their sim. Problem is, while my experience using sim owner friend was willing to show me how to write the portal script, I can't make them, not premium, and the person I was helping with the build couldn't write them under instruction, as they were non premium too, this has to be common, people paying seriuos amounts of money, to rend large parcels who are NOT premium, and get treated like 2nd class citizens, that has to hurt takeup, and you and I know experiences are not grid wide yet, but how many casual furniture users know that?

Experiences is , it seems to me, LL's attempt to copy RLVa, and like most thin gs they copy, they bungled it, which is a shame, but at least we still have RLVa withwhich to do it right, and no need for damn exp-keys.
 

[Rolig Loon]

Yes, a lot of non-Premium people -- like me --have credit cards or a verified PayPal/Skrill acccount, but ALL Premium people do. And that's the point.  Linden Lab can track down a Premium member with evil intent, but often cannot track down a Basic one.

You can write scripts for an Experience, just as I -- a Basic member -- can, and do.  The only requirement is that the owner of the Experience has to add you to their group at least temporarily as am Experience Contributor.  Then you can script to your heart's content.  When you finish the job, you may leave the  group and your scripts will still be alive.

[Innula Zenovka]

I can see there's a case for making the restriction on Experience Tools Payment Info Used, as opposed to Premium.    That's a judgment call for LL, though.   I don't know how to get it on their radar.   Maybe a jira?

As to the comparison with RLVa, I think that's mistaken.  Rather, I think Experience Tools and RLVa are two distinct systems with some similarities.   The only two identical features they share are forced teleport and (which Experience Tools introduced quite recently) forced sit.   RLVa has nothing like KVP storage (which I think is one of Experience Tools' most useful and powerful features) and nothing really comparable with temp-attach of rezzed objects.    Yes, you can give something to someone's shared RLV folder and force attach it, but it's quite a performance to script and you clutter up their inventory (and possibly give them permanent copies of something you don't want to hand out in that way).   I have done a lot of scripting with both RLV and with Experience Tools and I don't regard them as competing in any significant way.   I'm very rarely in any doubt about which offers me the most appropriate set of tools for a particular job.

Both systems have rather cumbersome, though very necessary, precautions against griefers.   Experience Tools have the restrictions on who can compile experience scripts plus a big scary dialogue box, while with RLVa you have to download and install a third-party viewer, activate RLVa, then find an RLV Relay and wear and configure that.    Neither is perfect by any means.

 

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

One other anti-griefing feature of Experiences is the ability to readily revoke the permissions.

If one were building a virtual world from scratch, one might want that ability for all permissions. For those of us not involved, it will be interesting to see how any of this is handled in Sansar. The Lab has over a decade of corporate knowledge; I hope they don't squander it all on pushing prettier pixels.

[Klytyna]

18 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

One other anti-griefing feature of Experiences is the ability to readily revoke the permissions.

If one were building a virtual world from scratch, one might want that ability for all permissions. For those of us not involved, it will be interesting to see how any of this is handled in Sansar. The Lab has over a decade of corporate knowledge; I hope they don't squander it all on pushing prettier pixels.

That 'over a decade of corporate knowledge' is probably a handicap.

Remember, standard Wall Street corporate wisdom states that computers are not supposed to be fun, but are for business, or education, or high brow intellectual uses.

That's why Project Stupid is being pushed as a VR art gallery, that's why there have been numerous attempts to make SL a place for Art Exhibits, and Education, that's why the destination guide and 'whats hot now' are full of links to empty Art installations.

Hence experience creators being able to set your windlights, so they can make their "Interactive Art Exhibits more 'immersive'".

Prettier pixels IS over 10 years of corporate knowledge Standard Operating Procedure.