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


IreIia
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9 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

According to the first paragraph of that wikicrap... Killing people with Hellfire II Anti-Tank missiles from the cockpit of an AH-64 Helicopter Gunship, would technically be a 'video game'...

You interact with a user interface to see results on a screen in digitally enhanced night vision cam...
 

I hadn't considered that. There are lots of Air Force pilots playing video games with drones too.

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On 27 February 2018 at 9:33 PM, IreIia said:

We should have had an app developed for a few years now with how big the smartphone market has come, and how big SL has gotten and becoming a business and all.

There should be an SL Bylaw requiring that every person who intends to demand the creation of an official phone app for SL because...

"Bringing in more Apehole Muk iSpend Dumbfone using, quasi illiterate,  Type-With-Your-Thumbs Console-Cretins will be GOOD for SL! No... Really..."

...should be forced to spend 4 hours at an Infohub, with voicespam activated, listening to the kind of people they want to bring more of, into SL...
 

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On 3/31/2018 at 6:20 PM, havenstance said:

Furthermore anyone who claims sl is not a game is just lying to themselves and looking for any way they can justify their laziness.

Can we take a moment to appreciate the irony here....

Which group of people in SL can we most certainly say it's not a game for? Creators who rely on SL for all or part of their RL income.

And given how blasted complicated it is, they're not lazy.

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  • 2 months later...

Phone technology wont catch up, there isn't unlimited growth and what we have right now is hard up against physical limitations. A desktop GPU can pull well over 140W, your little cell phone battery .. can manage about 1W, much more than that and it's in danger of coming to a dramatic end. The TDP of the chips on a phone is minuscule.

But worse .. SL is CPU bound. Downloading textures, objects, meshes, movement, decoding it all, rendering prims into usable meshes etc etc etc puts a massive load on the processor. Games don't have to do any of this. A mobile CPU just isn't cut out for a sustained intensive load. Aside from being several orders of magnitude slower in output terms, it can't handle running full tilt. Mobile CPU's are designed to throttle back to almost idle, and then spin up super fast for a split second when you need it, run them hard and they get hot and will throttle back very aggressively ... or they would literally melt themselves to slag in your hand .. and then ignite the battery .. 

Your PC pulls a lot of power and that power results in a huge amount of heat, your PC gets rid of this heat with large heatsinks and fans .. your phone ..has the chips pressed up to a super thin bit of metal .. 

This isn't to say more powerful phones are't coming, but they are selectively more powerful and carefully engineered to very specific workloads. Mobile games are equally carefully engineered to the specific conditions present.

 

We have some text clients and .. they are problematic, they separate people from the world that makes up SL and reduces it to yet another chat app. It's a poor experience for the user and the people they are trying to interact with as Second Life is based around avatar presence.

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Must admit that creating something that melts phones has its appeal CoffeeDujour. I would view that as worth a Nobel..

To those asking for a 'phone app SL' - Why is there no equivalent to SL already available? You number in your billions (probably) so why has no one made anything similar? Mayfly attention span? If you just want to 'chat' then there are options. Use them.

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RE: Phones

Personally I think, in an ideal world where LL had their act together these past 15 years, there should be an official SL smartphone app. It wouldn't need to render the world, just allow people to check their messages, chat, handle some group and land management issues (like ejecting/banning troublemakers), send money, send inventory, send group notices, stuff like that. In this ideal world events would actually be a functional, beloved part of the SL experience and we'd have some sort of events and activities calendar as a part of the SL interface, so we'd be able to manage those from a phone, too.

However, with SL in it's current neglected state, I think LL has their hands full putting whatever resources they have towards improving the primary product here. Since they're currently adding some much needed features, and fixing some long overlooked problems, I'm perfectly content to let LL focus on that. Lumiya is available for Android and does most of the above just fine. The truth of the matter is Android is the dominant OS for phones, so most people probably have one and those who want to be able to connect to SL from their phone have Lumiya. Creating a client for iPhone would cover very few people, so probably not the best use of resources at this time.

RE: SL is/isn't a game

SL is a video game by the generally accepted definition of "video game". Granted, the generally accepted definition of a "video game" is so broad it covers a lot of things many probably wouldn't consider games. There are entire genres of video games, such as visual novels and so-called "walking simulators", that aren't really "games" but they are still called "video games" by the world at large. Since at least the 90's there have been people who've thought the term "video game" itself was dubious and have wanted something more accurate to call these bits of electronic entertainment, but "video games" is what stuck. 

At the end of the day it doesn't matter whether you call SL a "video game" or not. The important thing is understanding how SL differs from the typical video game.

 

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4 hours ago, Kicka07 said:

Even a text based app would be sufficient, until the phone technology has caught up. 

The beauty of opensource means.. you can do this. Get to learning how to program!

Or use: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory/Radegast or any others on the text only section of the TPV viewer list

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory under subset viewers. There are both IOS and Android options there.

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If SL still can't work very well on a dog's doodads gaming computer with all the frills and a supersonic internet connection, the possibility of playing on a phone app hardly inspires hope.

An app to do IM's and a few basics would probably be ok for a few users, but to me that'd be pointless as I don't have any friends and don't care if I can't see myself.

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On 3/31/2018 at 9:14 PM, Klytyna said:

wikicrap

What DO you like, Klytyna?

@everyone else, can we stop debating about definitions and categories? SL exists in a grey area. If someone calls it a game and you disagree, don't get stuck on that one word and focus on the whole sentence instead and the point they're making. 

@cykarushb Smartphones are about as standardized as PCs (more so in some ways). There are a few major operating systems and a wide variety of hardware, except users can't generally swap out components on a phone.

Edited by Wulfie Reanimator
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4 minutes ago, greek Wingtips said:

It's very strange that LLs have not created their own app for iphone and android, maybe they should explain the reason?

we'r at second page with several answers, and you start again with the subject/content of the opening post? There is no answer by LL, because they only make their own SL viewer, all others are made by non LL individuals, so if you want a app, go ahead, build one.

start here

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SL Go was a remote rendered streaming solution .. and no one wanted to pay a monthly for it.

SL Go did roll some basic UI stuffs to allow the viewer to be controlled via a touch screen easier. but thanks to a technical loop hole in the licence they were not obligated to share their changes with the OSS viewer community. >:(

.. as an alternative, you can add the SL viewer as game to Steam and then use home streaming to send SL to a mobile or lower power device.

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It's not going to happen. Because it already has. A couple years ago Linden lab asked for beta testers for some new phone app they wanted to try. I was on the beta test and I figure since it's been a couple years I can talk about it now (it was all non-disclosure at the time). And full disclosure: I haven't read this thread, so apologies if any of this has been mentioned already.

It was horrible.

The way it worked was that the SL world was actually created through a proxy then streamed to your phone. It was sluggish and laggy - not the world itself, but the interaction through the phone. But here's why it really failed: take the entire viewer interface that you see on your PC or Mac, and shrink it down to the size of a phone screen. That's what you got. It was near impossible o interact with, buttons and menus were so tiny they were hard to read and don't get me started on anything HUD.

There are some good text-based clients for SL (on iPhone, at least) - very functional and allows you to do just about anything, except you don't see a 3D world. Better to look into something like that.

Edit to add:

OH, I just realized @CoffeeDujour is mentioning the very app I was talking about! LOL ~facepalms~

Edited by Alyona Su
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  • 1 month later...

Okay so I guess I have to do everything as usual. I basically wrote the entire internet and I guess I'll just have to port over the SDK linux viewer over to android as well. If playing Morrowind on Android  can be done: https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?t=4898 then you won't mind using the cursor as you normally would on a computer.  Give me about a month I'll have it up. 

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9 minutes ago, theunknownsith said:

Give me about a month I'll have it up.

Cool. Good luck.

11 minutes ago, theunknownsith said:

I guess I have to do everything as usual

Everything in SL was made by some one. I was not aware you did it all.  Here I thought Marine Kelly created RLA. 
Does porting someone else's work mean doing everything yourself?  Well, it worked for Bill Gates so may be.

Seriously tho.  Good on you for taking up the project.  I hope you succeed.  It will be a ton of work for zero reward.

See you in September!

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On 6/12/2018 at 7:24 AM, Alyona Su said:

The way it worked was that the SL world was actually created through a proxy then streamed to your phone. It was sluggish and laggy - not the world itself, but the interaction through the phone. But here's why it really failed: take the entire viewer interface that you see on your PC or Mac, and shrink it down to the size of a phone screen. That's what you got. It was near impossible o interact with, buttons and menus were so tiny they were hard to read and don't get me started on anything HUD.

But phones are MUCH bigger now, i.e. phablets!

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