Does LL want to fix SL

[bigmoe Whitfield]

7 hours ago, animats said:

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.

This is it right there.  This is what people are not understanding.    I love SL, I am not the target audience for Sansar and thats perfectly fine.

[KanryDrago]

20 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

This is it right there.  This is what people are not understanding.    I love SL, I am not the target audience for Sansar and thats perfectly fine.

And I am not the target market for Sansar either which is what I have been saying. However you are still not answering the point of what I have been getting at.

Given we think the target consumer is someone who drops in occasionally. Given the experience creator can dictate what you can wear. Given the target consumer cannot easily customise any home they rent(assuming any of the target consumers want one as they only drop in occasionally) . Where is the market for avatar clothes, furniture etc?

Answer is there isnt one. Yet these are mostly the creator types Linden Labs are pitching too.

The only creators who will benefit from Sansar are whole experience creators as far as I can see

These will fall into two camps

1) Companies using it to promote rl stuff

2) Experience creators who charge to goto their experiences

In the case of 1) as I have said I think most companies will create their own custom experience and just give it away on steam or the rift store or the equivalent of the vive store . This is already happening

In the case of 2) why would anyone pay when there are plenty of similar experiences given away free already on steam and the rift store and the vive equivalent

I just dont see any path for creators to make enough to make it worthwhile to create. Sure some may do so for the sheer pleasure of it but not that many.

Nothing you say contradicts my view that Sansar is a solution in search of a problem as in my opinion will be quietly shut down within the next 2 years as their wont be enough consumers to make it worthwhile

Edited November 29, 2017 by KanryDrago

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, KanryDrago said:

The only creators who will benefit from Sansar are whole experience creators as far as I can see

That's what I've understood all along. Do you find fault with that? I don't. What other types of creators do you want to be able to benefit? Clothes makers? Furniture makers? I suppose it may turn out that someone to create an experience in which people can make things, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, KanryDrago said:

... Where is the market for avatar clothes, furniture etc?

Answer is there isnt one. Yet these are mostly the creator types Linden Labs are pitching too. ...

It doesn't seem quite that grim, if I understand the Sansar business model correctly.

These "whole experience creators" are not going to build all their content from scratch. For example, if they plan to supply all visitors with avatar clothes or weapons or whatever, they'll most likely be buying that content with some kind of redistribution licensing from creators in the "clothing" and "arms smuggling" links of the value chain.

Maybe the experience creator will make available upgrades to those items for visitors who want to look cooler, bash more orcs, do better skateboard tricks, etc. -- all more opportunities in the content creation economy.

Really, not that different from SL, except maybe somewhat "channelized" distribution through these experience cartels.

Now, please don't misunderstand me to be suggesting Sansar has more than the faintest prayer of succeeding. But if by some miracle it were to succeed, I think there'd be plenty of opportunity for itinerant content creators of all stripes.

[KanryDrago]

4 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

It doesn't seem quite that grim, if I understand the Sansar business model correctly.

These "whole experience creators" are not going to build all their content from scratch. For example, if they plan to supply all visitors with avatar clothes or weapons or whatever, they'll most likely be buying that content with some kind of redistribution licensing from creators in the "clothing" and "arms smuggling" links of the value chain.

Maybe the experience creator will make available upgrades to those items for visitors who want to look cooler, bash more orcs, do better skateboard tricks, etc. -- all more opportunities in the content creation economy.

Really, not that different from SL, except maybe somewhat "channelized" distribution through these experience cartels.

Now, please don't misunderstand me to be suggesting Sansar has more than the faintest prayer of succeeding. But if by some miracle it were to succeed, I think there'd be plenty of opportunity for itinerant content creators of all stripes.

The problem as I see it is Sansar is being marketed currently to creators and consumers seem to be an afterthought to Linden labs. Now I am not a business genius but it seems plain to me that you need a huge amount more consumers than creators so working out how to get consumers through the door should be paramount not an afterthought. Currently as someone who often uses vr experiences of the sort Sansar purports to offer I see no reason why I would choose an inferior Sansar experience over one custom codes using unreal or unity.

[ChinRey]

On 28.11.2017 at 2:58 PM, 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.

I don't know how resource heavy the Catwa head actually is but none of those figures are relevant.

By now any reasonably big fitmesh manufacturer knows how to cheat the system and get figures that are only a fraction of the actual render cost. The calculated render cost figure is completely meaningless when it comes to fitted mesh.

Asfor scripts, they haven't mattered for lag for years now.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

6 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

The problem as I see it is Sansar is being marketed currently to creators and consumers seem to be an afterthought to Linden labs.

That's most likely because Sansar is still in "Creator Beta" and LL are trying to encourage creators to sign up and create content so that when they open the Tourists/Roleplayers/Fashionistas Beta there won't be hundreds of angry SL residents signing up and complaining that there aren't 100,000 prefab houses/hair styles/pairs of shoes available on the marketplace? 

[Qie Niangao]

36 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

... Currently as someone who often uses vr experiences of the sort Sansar purports to offer I see no reason why I would choose an inferior Sansar experience over one custom codes using unreal or unity.

Well, like High Fidelity, Sansar is a shared VR environment, so there's social gaming for the masses, and for corporates a few specialized team training experiences.

I guess there are also non-gaming social experiences -- basically VR chat (and Adult activities) where the "experience" is roughly what a "club" is in SL. People spend a lot for the privilege of losing money on those all the time. Maybe there's a business there.

[KanryDrago]

45 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Well, like High Fidelity, Sansar is a shared VR environment, so there's social gaming for the masses, and for corporates a few specialized team training experiences.

I guess there are also non-gaming social experiences -- basically VR chat (and Adult activities) where the "experience" is roughly what a "club" is in SL. People spend a lot for the privilege of losing money on those all the time. Maybe there's a business there.

Doubt clubs will work in vr to be honest the viewpoint gyrating while you dance would be vomit inducing. I doubt as well social chat will work well in vr as it more or less constrains you to using voice and thats something SL shows to be unwanted by the majority of those I meet possibly because it constrains the gender they wish to appear to be. While I now appear to be negative about Sansar I was initially enthusiastic about it. The more I heard about it the more I came to the conclusion it was of little interest to me and the more it appeared to me that I could not see it taking off in any big way

[Prokofy Neva]

On 11/22/2017 at 5:29 AM, Qie Niangao said:

The release notes make scant literature these days. That's particularly true server-side, I think because so much server development time is now devoted to patching-over the worst griefer exploits and crashers, and to shoring-up resale of no-copy gacha items as a viable business model even though no-copy has never, ever, been a safe setting for SL content. (For example, oldbies have painful memories of why animations are now almost universally sold copy-permissive -- it wasn't always that way!)

The features that are getting developed are promising but I, too, might quibble with the priorities. To me, bakes-on-mesh and the environment-enhancement project (Windlight redux) are way more important to SL's future viability than Animesh, which seems a nice-to-have mostly targeting a small group of creators. (And a tiresomely bitchy batch of creators, at that, fussing that they won't be sufficiently profit-"incentivized" to painlessly tweak their creations if, god forbid, their customers might tweak those same purchased creations. Such "creativity"!)

Well, what's wrong with that? And so what if it isn't "safe" and copying online is always possible?
The business model indeed relies on them ensuring that people can sell goods without having their designs stolen. Indeed. And that's a good thing.

And any effort Lindens spend on that is to the good. Windlight doesn't matter one whit to me, as it is something that can't work unless you have all the settings right. For one, I won't bother to do those settings, it's a chore, for two, they may not work on my Best Buy graphics card anyway. It is NOT a priority.

As for Animesh, this is utterly opaque to me. I don't like it when creators put things on no-mod, but it's their right to choose the permissions they want.

[Blush Bravin]

On 11/27/2017 at 12:34 PM, Blush Bravin said:

 I am however excited about the new avatars and the cloth physics for clothing that Sansar will have available very soon. 

Apparently, I misunderstood what all was going to be part of the Fashion release in Sansar. Please disregard what I said about new avatars and cloth physics. 

[Klytyna]

4 hours ago, Blush Bravin said:

Apparently, I misunderstood what all was going to be part of the Fashion release in Sansar. Please disregard what I said about new avatars and cloth physics.

Realistically... We already had... LL Project Stupid in Vomit Cam... Improved avatars in under 4 years, with dynamic cloth physics, still maintaining 90 fps, without major investment in leasing 3rd party technology, all coded in house?

Yeah right...  
 

[Qie Niangao]

On 12/4/2017 at 3:06 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Well, what's wrong with that? And so what if it isn't "safe" and copying online is always possible?
The business model indeed relies on them ensuring that people can sell goods without having their designs stolen. Indeed. And that's a good thing.

And any effort Lindens spend on that is to the good. Windlight doesn't matter one whit to me, as it is something that can't work unless you have all the settings right. For one, I won't bother to do those settings, it's a chore, for two, they may not work on my Best Buy graphics card anyway. It is NOT a priority.

As for Animesh, this is utterly opaque to me. I don't like it when creators put things on no-mod, but it's their right to choose the permissions they want.

Sorry, I'd lost track of this thread altogether.

I agree that ideally no-copy instances of objects shouldn't be able to be copied. The thing is, we've been down this road so many times in the past, each time consuming person-months of developer time to chip away at the various ways thieves manage to make those copies. Yes they're thieves, yes they should get thwarted or better, caught and penalized, but getting past the morality it's really a business issue, and every hour spent on it costs value that could be invested in other opportunities. So sure, it's fine LL spends some time on it but no amount can ever be enough to satisfy the no-copy fundamentalists.

(Just to be clear, this is about copying product instances, not about copying the design of the product. It only affects no-copy stuff, which is why resellers of gacha items tend to be much more exercised about this problem than are the creators of those items, most of whom consider gacha a diversion anyway.)

The Windlight changes would allow us to exchange those settings (among other things), as was originally promised all those years ago when the Lab acqui-hired the developers. That would make the feature usable for folks like us who don't want to tweak all the knobs to get the perfect snapshot.

My Animesh comments were about an issue that's water under the bridge at this point, but at one time some creators were fussing that customers might enable Animesh on existing Modify-permitted models which they'd already sold, on the grounds that they couldn't reap a windfall by selling the same product to the same customers but with the Animesh bit set and some animations added -- presumably commanding a higher price than the animations sold as add-ons to their existing products. To support that rent-seeking, nobody else would have been able to offer the other arrangement. Fortunately nobody took this nonsense seriously, but it was instructive to watch those creators tip their hands.

[SaturdayGeeks]

Sadly more proof SL is dying

[Parhelion Palou]

11 minutes ago, SaturdayGeeks said:

Sadly more proof SL is dying

Didn't read the thread, did you? Sadly, more proof The Saturday Geeks is dying.

[Rhonda Huntress]

22 minutes ago, Parhelion Palou said:

Didn't read the thread, did you? Sadly, more proof The Saturday Geeks is dying

Oh, don't take is anything relevant.  He shows up once in a while and never posts anything different.  Literally every one of this account's few posts are identical.

I think it is supposed to be ironic since SL has been on it's deathbed for 15 years now.

[Parhelion Palou]

5 minutes ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

Oh, don't take is anything relevant.  He shows up once in a while and never posts anything different.  Literally every one of this account's few posts are identical.

I think it is supposed to be ironic since SL has been on it's deathbed for 15 years now.

I checked the profile before replying. I figured the reply was a plug for the YouTube channel that was linked in the signature.

[Rhonda Huntress]

17 minutes ago, Parhelion Palou said:

YouTube channel that was linked in the signature.

Ah.

I still have signatures turned off.