Does LL want to fix SL

[Vivienne Schell]

27 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

So we'll see what it looks like next month. I'm hopeful!!!

Don´t expect too much. Certain anatomical details will be missing. Due to the 12+ rating. We do not want to scare the chidren. do we?

[KanryDrago]

37 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

I also foresee that the clothing layer will remain since it doesn't follow the body contour of the mesh as the tattoo layer and the underwear layers do. Alpha glitching is solved with baked textures so the need for masking shouldn't be an issue. You can see this for yourself now when using multiple tats and clothing layers on a system avatar. It doesn't cause issues.

 

We have not even seen the default avatar for Sansar yet! It will be revealed with the Fashion release which is scheduled for the middle of December. The current avatar being used in Sansar is a placeholder avatar only much like the prim avatars SL had during it's alpha stage. So we'll see what it looks like next month. I'm hopeful!!!

I wouldn't expect too much from Sansar frankly. I have a powerful computer, have a vr headset and touch controllers. I like vr. Should be a perfect customer ....just one thing nothing about Sansar that I have seen so far remotely wants me to spend a second there. I really cannot see any reason for any of us consumers to want to go there if I am honest. Yes it may be great for creators to use but if consumers don't come who are you going to sell to?

[Blush Bravin]

2 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

I wouldn't expect too much from Sansar frankly. I have a powerful computer, have a vr headset and touch controllers. I like vr. Should be a perfect customer ....just one thing nothing about Sansar that I have seen so far remotely wants me to spend a second there. I really cannot see any reason for any of us consumers to want to go there if I am honest. Yes it may be great for creators to use but if consumers don't come who are you going to sell to?

I remember the same kind of nay saying going on about SL during it's beta phase, and yet, 14 years later we are still here. Sansar is still very much in its infancy. It would be silly to judge a cake while it's still batter in a bowl. You can't possibly know what it will taste like until it's fully baked.

[KanryDrago]

Just now, Blush Bravin said:

I remember the same kind of nay saying going on about SL during it's beta phase, and yet, 14 years later we are still here. Sansar is still very much in its infancy. It would be silly to judge a cake while it's still batter in a bowl. You can't possibly know what it will taste like until it's fully baked.

I am judging from what the Lindens say its going to be

Experience owners can decide what you can wear strike one

Multiple instances of an experience strike 2

Experiences that you havent been too take an age to download strike 3

No adult content strike 4

No easily customisable user housing strike 5

That is before even you get into I have to buy a whole new inventory. Linden labs basically dont understand SL in my opinion and Sansar is SL with all the things taken out that makes SL a place worth coming too.

If I want experiences I can get those custom made from steam or the rift store, same with games. They are already better than anything Sansar can offer. 

Let me turn it round and ask you what Sansar can offer in your opinion to get me to come hang out there like I do in SL

 

[Zeta Vandyke]

10 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

No adult content strike 4

Not entirely in full context

Adult content won't be allowed at the opening of Sansar's creator beta this summer. Ultimately, we want Sansar to be an open platform that enables creators to make all kinds of experiences, but early on we also want to be careful that a single genre of content doesn't come to define the platform and potentially limit its appeal to other creators.

[Blush Bravin]

10 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

I am judging from what the Lindens say its going to be

Experience owners can decide what you can wear strike one

Experience owners are given that control so that those who want to create games or RP events can create the best environment for the purpose of the experience. This does not mean you won't have freedom to choose in all experiences. 

Multiple instances of an experience strike 2

Depends on the purpose of the experience. This could be quite handy in some circumstances.

Experiences that you havent been too take an age to download strike 3

I rather enjoy landing in an experience with no lag and no grayed out textures because everything is fully loaded before I arrive. I plan for long load times, which for me really isn't all that long actually. The longest it's ever taken is around 5 or 6 minutes. I simply load the experience earlier in the day while doing something else. It might take some planning if you really can't stand to wait 5 minutes for a very complicated experience to load. Most times I don't wait more than a minute or two for an experience to load.

No adult content strike 4

No easily customisable user housing strike 5

That is before even you get into I have to buy a whole new inventory. Linden labs basically dont understand SL in my opinion and Sansar is SL with all the things taken out that makes SL a place worth coming too.

This is the basis of all your argument  .. Sansar isn't SL .. isn't supposed to be SL .. don't expect what you like about SL to be found in Sansar. 

If I want experiences I can get those custom made from steam or the rift store, same with games. They are already better than anything Sansar can offer. 

Let me turn it round and ask you what Sansar can offer in your opinion to get me to come hang out there like I do in SL

Sansar is still in creator beta .. it is far far from the point of what it will be. Again, I think you are judging it prematurely.

 

 

[Penny Patton]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

That said, I don't understand how blended / masked alpha is a problem for baking; rather, I should think baking would hugely reduce the cost of the blending effect, layered together with masked and no-alpha textures in the baking process. I'm no doubt misunderstanding something.

Alpha textures can be set to render in four states: Blended, masked, emissive and none and qhen you bake multiple textures into a single texture, that texture cannot be multiple alpha types. You have to pick one. Blended is the obvious choice, because some alpha textures such as tattoos and transparent latex will not look good masked. This isn't an issue when you're baking everything, including the skin, into a single non-alpha texture, but since we're going to be forced to use at least one extra layer regardless this can create conflicts. 

 Let's say I have a sci-fi Tron style outfit with glowing piping throughout. The glow effect is created using an emissive mask. Whoops, but my tattoo layer which shows through parts of the outfit needs to be blended. Conflict. I cannot use that outfit with the tattoo. I've regularly seen people run into an issue where a skin applier they use uses a blended alpha texture for the skin, which creates conflict with their clothing layers. The solution to this is to make either the skin, clothes, or both into a masked texture. Your options are narrowed when all of your non-skin textures are forced into one blending mode.

Not to mention the performance issue I keep bringing up. We really shouldn't be using blended alpha textures for clothing/tattoos/etcetera at all. Ever noticed that halo around EVERY mesh body avatar when they step in front of trees, grass, water and other blended alpha effects? That's created by the blended alpha clothing layers around each body. The lighting issues people constantly complain about, where parts of their outfits don't look right under local lighting? Blended alpha.

1 hour ago, Blush Bravin said:

Alpha glitching is solved with baked textures so the need for masking shouldn't be an issue. You can see this for yourself now when using multiple tats and clothing layers on a system avatar. It doesn't cause issues.

That's because textures baked to the system avatar are only ever a single no-alpha or masked alpha layer. Once you throw blended alpha into the mix the comparison falls apart.

53 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

My catwa head is 8318 complexity with Script info: 'neck:0': [5/5] running scripts, 320 KB allowed memory size limit, 0.014085 ms of CPU time consumed. Hardly seems  excessively resource intensive to me.

Have you ever heard the phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"? That is to say, if you have incomplete information it can lead you to the wrong conclusions. Check the VRAM usage of your Catwa head. Oh, wait, you can't. The tools are not present yet. But they're coming.

51 minutes ago, Vivienne Schell said:

It could be and it would be a shame if it would not. But if Linden Lab seriously is interested in -at least - stopping the downward spiral  there is much more needed than some improvements on the avatar. A lot more.

I'm not sure I follow you. Yes, there are many problems with SL which need to be addressed. Including improvements on the avatar. Or are you suggesting LL should ignore every problem in SL because no matter which problem they address, there are other problems which also need to be addressed, so they might as well not address anything?

Edited November 28, 2017 by Penny Patton

[KanryDrago]

1 minute ago, Blush Bravin said:

 

Sansar is already 3 years overdue, I have little faith it will be a viable platform that people will want to visit in the next 5 years. Every document I have see from Linden labs tells me that they have no clue even what their target audience is going to be consumer wise

[Coby Foden]

45 minutes ago, Vivienne Schell said:

Don´t expect too much. Certain anatomical details will be missing. Due to the 12+ rating. We do not want to scare the chidren. do we?

I want the 'scary' nipples!   And something down there too. What woman would be happy to wear mutilated avatar anyway?
If Linden Lab doesn't provide those then we are again in crazy business of avatar body add on enhancements.

[Parhelion Palou]

3 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

Sansar is already 3 years overdue, I have little faith it will be a viable platform that people will want to visit in the next 5 years. Every document I have see from Linden labs tells me that they have no clue even what their target audience is going to be consumer wise

For Sansar LL's target audience is companies or people who want to create an experience. It's the experience owner's job to decide what user audience they want, then create the experience and market to that audience. Sansar isn't a virtual world, it's a platform for creating virtual worlds.

[KanryDrago]

Just now, Parhelion Palou said:

For Sansar LL's target audience is companies or people who want to create an experience. It's the experience owner's job to decide what user audience they want, then create the experience and market to that audience. Sansar isn't a virtual world, it's a platform for creating virtual worlds.

In which case the users will be one off people sent from someone like Fords website to view a car model, dont see a role for the type of creators there that are in SL

In addition why would any company want to do it when they can create a much better experience without using Sansar and have it work exactly how they want. It isnt that hard to produce a vr program these days.

My prediction still stands Sansar wont have many long term residents that are interested in clothing , housing , furniture. There is just nothing in their planning to entice them.

[Vivienne Schell]

25 minutes ago, Coby Foden said:

If Linden Lab doesn't provide those then we are again in crazy business of avatar body add on enhancements.

Not necessarily. So far there is hardly anyone present at Sansar to show off these bits to.

[Vivienne Schell]

34 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

Yes, there are many problems with SL which need to be addressed.

Right. And I doubt that they are able to adress all of them, or even the most significant ones. Well, they could try, but they could have tried over the past, let´s say - seven years, and they did not. They went for Sansar instead. So my optimism there is limited.

[Vivienne Schell]

1 hour ago, Blush Bravin said:

I remember the same kind of nay saying going on about SL during it's beta phase

I don´t. I remember a bunch of enthusiasts going nuts over it, and a bunch of curious general media people going nuts over the enthusiasts going nuts over it. And in the end it became a big, totally justified international media hype - cause it WAS nuts.

Sansar? Eh, more than one year in beta and if not some VR sponsoring websites would report it as being exístant no one off the SL sphere of interest would know of it. Nothing there to inflame a somewhat broad public interest. Nada. Zilch.

While the big shots with their superior financial power go for their own thing (Amazon for example, with Sumerian), as was to be expected. While something much more advanced like Unity is out there for years. Linden Lab should hope for someone to come along and buy the entire thing before they must trash it.

But that´s another story, and it proves that Linden Lab ever suffered from questionable management decisions. It´s not such a surprise that Second Life still is running after 15 years, because nothing really comes close to it´s potential. But living on potential alone will not be enough for another 15 years, unfortunately.

Edited November 28, 2017 by Vivienne Schell

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

Alpha textures can be set to render in four states: Blended, masked, emissive and none and qhen you bake multiple textures into a single texture, that texture cannot be multiple alpha types. You have to pick one. Blended is the obvious choice, because some alpha textures such as tattoos and transparent latex will not look good masked. This isn't an issue when you're baking everything, including the skin, into a single non-alpha texture, but since we're going to be forced to use at least one extra layer regardless this can create conflicts. 

 Let's say I have a sci-fi Tron style outfit with glowing piping throughout. The glow effect is created using an emissive mask. Whoops, but my tattoo layer which shows through parts of the outfit needs to be blended. Conflict. I cannot use that outfit with the tattoo. I've regularly seen people run into an issue where a skin applier they use uses a blended alpha texture for the skin, which creates conflict with their clothing layers. The solution to this is to make either the skin, clothes, or both into a masked texture. Your options are narrowed when all of your non-skin textures are forced into one blending mode.

Not to mention the performance issue I keep bringing up. We really shouldn't be using blended alpha textures for clothing/tattoos/etcetera at all. Ever noticed that halo around EVERY mesh body avatar when they step in front of trees, grass, water and other blended alpha effects? That's created by the blended alpha clothing layers around each body. The lighting issues people constantly complain about, where parts of their outfits don't look right under local lighting? Blended alpha.

But Penny, once the texture layers are baked, the result has no alpha channel at all anymore, right? Isn't that really the whole point of it?

I'm not surprised that they aren't trying to support emissive mode alpha, which is very cool and I've tried to promote it to friends and readers, but in reality it's used by less than 0.01% of SL surfaces, and probably yet fewer avatars, so even a half hour of developer time to support it is probably too much to justify.

[Penny Patton]

3 hours ago, Vivienne Schell said:

Right. And I doubt that they are able to adress all of them, or even the most significant ones. Well, they could try, but they could have tried over the past, let´s say - seven years, and they did not. They went for Sansar instead. So my optimism there is limited.

I do not believe the growing mountain of unresolved problems is a matter of limited resources. I've been able to sit down and speak with a number of Lindens over the years, including Philip and Rodvik during their respective tenures as CEO. The problem is management. LL decided in the very beginning, that they did not want to hire graphics professionals to contribute their skills to the development team. Because of that decision, they are entirely blind to many of these issues, and completely lack qualified employees to address many of these problems.

Again, all of my comments in this thread have been about what I believe LL should do and why. What they will do is an entirely different matter.

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

But Penny, once the texture layers are baked, the result has no alpha channel at all anymore, right? Isn't that really the whole point of it?

I believed that was the point as well except, as was pointed out earlier, LL decided not to support materials in the baking project. This means you cannot bake all textures down to a single layer, otherwise your skin materials will appear through any other baked textures, including clothing. There will have to be at least two layers to avoid that problem. Which means that the issue of alpha textures will still be present.

Although, this brings up an interesting point. Right now, the baking process only supports no-alpha and masked alpha and LL considers the ability to change alpha modes to be a part of the materials package. If that remains true of the final baking project feature, the baked texture project may only be useful on avatars which forego the use of materials. I can see that being a deal breaker for a lot of people. It would not be the first time that LL devoted a lot of time, money and effort into a project that was rendered entirely useless to the userbase because of a short sighted mistake.

 

[Penny Patton]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I'm not surprised that they aren't trying to support emissive mode alpha, which is very cool and I've tried to promote it to friends and readers, but in reality it's used by less than 0.01% of SL surfaces, and probably yet fewer avatars, so even a half hour of developer time to support it is probably too much to justify.

A big part of the problem is that most of the popular mesh avatars are no-mod so a lot of great effects people wanted to be able to do on avatars since before mesh was even a thing are still impossible on those mesh avatars. Want that cool Tron outfit? A mystic or demon with glowing tattoos? A fire elemental made out of lava and cracked stone? Sorry! Your body is no mod and does not support the use of emissive masks! Believe it or not, I've even seen no-mod apologists nay-saying the feature as well as other great effects you can achieve with a mod body, such as animated skin textures.

On the other hand, you do see these features a lot in furry and anime communities, where mod bodies are the norm.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

6 hours ago, Zeta Vandyke said:

Not entirely in full context

Adult content won't be allowed at the opening of Sansar's creator beta this summer. Ultimately, we want Sansar to be an open platform that enables creators to make all kinds of experiences, but early on we also want to be careful that a single genre of content doesn't come to define the platform and potentially limit its appeal to other creators.

you mean like second life and s e x?

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

... LL decided not to support materials in the baking project. This means you cannot bake all textures down to a single layer, otherwise your skin materials will appear through any other baked textures, including clothing. There will have to be at least two layers to avoid that problem. Which means that the issue of alpha textures will still be present.

Oh, now I see what you mean. Now that I think about it more, I realize I wasn't being realistic at all, thinking I could manually "bake" my own materials maps to apply as one to the composited layers. I'd need to do that separately in advance for each avatar bake. Well, in fact that might be realistic for me because I don't really wear any baked-on clothing and the skin materials can appear through tattoo and make-up layers without a problem, but I'm not the target user of bakes-on-mesh. (Personally, my hopes for the feature are limited to overcoming the wacky lighting of blended-alpha surfaces viewed under ALM -- which of course it won't if there's still a blended-alpha layer above the base skin.)

So yeah, now I'm confused about who will use the feature and how... assuming they ever get 'round to developing it beyond the otherwise useless megapixel baking dimensions that's the extent of the current work.

[Chase01]

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

I do not believe the growing mountain of unresolved problems is a matter of limited resources. I've been able to sit down and speak with a number of Lindens over the years, including Philip and Rodvik during their respective tenures as CEO. The problem is management. LL decided in the very beginning, that they did not want to hire graphics professionals to contribute their skills to the development team. Because of that decision, they are entirely blind to many of these issues, and completely lack qualified employees to address many of these problems.

Again, all of my comments in this thread have been about what I believe LL should do and why. What they will do is an entirely different matter.

Obviously, it isn't a matter of limited resources and I didn't need to sit down with a Linden to figure that one out. They've invested heavily into Sansar and SL is still turning a tidy profit; so clearly the money is there. What they would do given their track record is quite relevant to the solution you've come up with to defragment the clothing market.

An update to the new user avatar with a more generous library of options (made by LL) to customize the avatar would be welcome. If a user wants to upgrade from the basic starter, the option is of course there from the community. Thankfully we all didn't have to wait on LL for a mesh avatar, creators did that for us.

 

 

[femhalf]

On 11/27/2017 at 1:29 AM, Penny Patton said:

Most people are unaware of this, but the applier system mesh bodies use is actually really bad for SL. Every single layer is a whole extra avatar mesh, It's a huge performance drain because while those clothing layers might be invisible to you, your videocard still has to exert just as much effort to render invisible mesh as it does visible mesh. The textures on those layers are still sucking up videocard memory. Even worse when most of the popular mesh bodies and heads are all no-mod so even if you realize the problem you can't do anything about it.

There is no point in LL simply releasing a pair of mesh bodies like that. Their best option is to do an improved system avatar.

Yeah, that would be nice, but this could be a temporary fix.  I don't have faith in LL to revamp the entire avatar system though.

Edited November 29, 2017 by femhalf

[bigmoe Whitfield]

9 hours ago, KanryDrago said:

In which case the users will be one off people sent from someone like Fords website to view a car model, dont see a role for the type of creators there that are in SL

In addition why would any company want to do it when they can create a much better experience without using Sansar and have it work exactly how they want. It isnt that hard to produce a vr program these days.

My prediction still stands Sansar wont have many long term residents that are interested in clothing , housing , furniture. There is just nothing in their planning to entice them.

Sansar is not made for SL users,  that was made clear ages ago even before their closed beta went live.     Lots of accepted this fact, the company wanted to offer a new platform for companies and other kinds users to use and make experiences with.  Sansar is not targeted at people whom use Second Life.   Accepting this will make things simpler for you.

[KanryDrago]

27 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Sansar is not made for SL users,  that was made clear ages ago even before their closed beta went live.     Lots of accepted this fact, the company wanted to offer a new platform for companies and other kinds users to use and make experiences with.  Sansar is not targeted at people whom use Second Life.   Accepting this will make things simpler for you.

Yes I know they said that however

What consumers is it targeted at? Which of these users are going to be full time residents that makes it worthwhile for creators to create clothes, furniture,buildings etc.

Companies aren't likely to use Sansar in any case frankly it is easy enough to create a custom experience that they can control. I use those sort of experience a fair amount as I said I do like VR. 

So you make an assertion which I tend to agree with that Sansar isnt aimed at people that think SL is where they like to be. Tell us who you think are going to be the longtime residents that make being a creator of avi addons there worthwhile. I doubt you can because it is quite clear to me that Lindens don't have a clue who they are going to be either

 

[femhalf]

38 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Sansar is not made for SL users,  that was made clear ages ago even before their closed beta went live.     Lots of accepted this fact, the company wanted to offer a new platform for companies and other kinds users to use and make experiences with.  Sansar is not targeted at people whom use Second Life.   Accepting this will make things simpler for you.

In my opinion, that was a huge mistake on their part.  They already have a userbase with millions of people (active, inactive, and former residents).  SL will likely suffer because of it.

They tried entering an already saturated virtual-world VR market:  High Fidelity, VR Chat, Altspace VR, Janus VR, and so on.  It could've worked if they offered a robust avatar & content creation system.  Instead, it's a restricted generic platform just like the rest, with the exception of High Fidelity.

[animats]

Yes, the virtual-experience VR market is crowded.

The problem with SL as a business is that users need a lot of free time. This limits the market. Sansar is go in, have the experience, go out. It's like the difference between Everquest and Angry Birds.