Linden Labs, Will You Ever Create A Mobile Phone App For Secondlife?

[Nalates Urriah]

On 1/16/2020 at 2:22 AM, Alwin Alcott said:

it would be a lot more helpfull when LL would make a weekly newsletter and keep people informed instead of inworld hours that half the world never can attend if they don't want to wake up at midnight, or later. In lot of cases they try to look like a worldwide business ( mainly in getting money) but as organisation it's still acting as the 5 headed group that started17 year ago in a garage.

Inara's blog and the Linden's Featured News provide that. A well read post gets less than a thousand views. I see little point in the Lab spending time publishing a newsletter. The SL blogs have all the stuff of general interest. The tech is of interest to very few. (We still have people that do not know what BOM is and wonder why people are red, yellow, and blue.) Before I got bored with reporting the tech news on my blog interest peaked at 3,000 pages views per day. Over the last couple of years that trailed off to <=300 page views per day.

The advantage to the in-world meetings is we get to ask Linden engineers questions. Often people are in the meeting complaining about a problem before the Lindens are aware there is a problem. The voice-meetings cover a lot of ground.

With a worldwide user base the time of the meetings is a problem. Since the main office is in California, the majority of employees are on California time. It is tough on those living outside the US. There is no cost effective way to resolve that issue. However, Inara's blog and Pantera Północy videos of the Third-Party Viewer meeting give everyone an opportunity to stay up on the tech news regardless of time zone.

[Fauve Aeon]

2 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Content optimization is only half the story when it comes to performance, it gets a lot of attention here as it's the only factor we have any control over. The complete issue is far more systemic and can't be changed. You could put the same OTT content from SL in an actual game engine and it will render a lot faster, but game engines can't do what SL do.

Again .. this is why LL wandered off and made Sansar, it's very different from how SL works because of all the lessons learnt from our side of the fence. I would go as far as to say we're more likely to see a functional mobile port of that platform long before SL just because of the design differences.

It wouldn't really make much difference as the initial content would have to be fetched, processed and rendered. Impostors in SL are created on the client, so they would still be slower than just not rendering people at all.

The stuff that needs to change to make SL run well enough for mobile (or well enough for desktop!) is all stuff that's pretty fundamental to how SL works.

The best we can hope for at this point is perhaps some kind of  rendered avatar dress up, just your avatar and nothing else. But even then it presents a number of daunting challenges translating SL's file/folder inventory system into something practical. Wouldn't be surprised that if we did get anything like this, it would only allow switching of previously saved outfits.

Example: 7seas fishes are nothing but a server call between fishing rod and fish server interacting until one is ‘caught’, then it is given into inventory so they are prim fish when worn as a pet, but just a flat prim texture photo of the fish that moves about when ‘sent’ to the aquarium inworld. I was thinking of things along those lines of thought. Particles, sprites, textures, something saved...then some things rendered more fully on a sliding scale. 

[Ulrika Tomsen]

On 1/13/2020 at 2:04 AM, Frank Ziplon said:

Be careful what you wish for, a phone app would cost money to develop, not to mention the additional support costs, if they did develop one, they would have to recoup those costs somehow. In all honesty no phone is going to give a great SL experience, I've tried Lumyia and it was consigned to the digital bin, it's hard to navigate, takes forever for scenes to load etc. You really are missing nothing. Yes you could just use it to communicate, but in all honesty anyone from SL I choose to communicate with to that extent has other options, such as my skype or whatsapp.

For me personally a well functionating App would be fine, as i would have the chance to join concerts in SL when not at home and in reach of my PC.

I sometimes use Lumiya for that, but alone tp to a place and waiting till the small part of the surrounding i set my focus on takes some time.

And navigate to get that desired spot can be a pain in the ass.

Chating ist nice with lumiya, when you got used to who it works. Whattsapp is no option for me, as i dont share my RL-phonenumber in virtual. And skype... Somehow it is not used, dont know why.

 

Edited February 9, 2020 by Ulrika Tomsen

[WhisperingPond]

Rather than having an app for all of SL, I would love an app for buying $L, making auction bids, sending and receiving mail and messages, etc. An app for handling the non graphical business side. Even the money and meter conversion. All in one app.