Second Question: In your opinion, what have been the greatest SUCCESSES in the 15-year history of Second Life?

[PhantomPixel]

On 8/15/2018 at 2:09 PM, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Firestorm

I really wish they would develop a new viewer tbh.

Firestorm is good for features but is such a beast now. Out of all of the third party viewers firestorm is the most taxing, resource wise, on both of my computers (mac and gaming pc). My friends often report the same thing. I would love to see someone design a whole new viewer experience from the ground up with a nice new modern looking ui, custom designed icons and layout etc. I mean I LOVE the sansar browsers design style, not too fond of sansar as it stands as a project but their viewer / browser..is on point. Something like that but for SL would be amazing.

[Phil Deakins]

Perhaps the problem with Firestorm is that it does so many extra things. A possibility might be to seperate some stuff and have viewer versions for specific things, such as a builder's viewer. Similar to some programming languages that are not general purpose, but are designed for certain types of programming.

Edited August 17, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Whirly Fizzle]

Firestorm source code is open source.
Go for it
https://hg.phoenixviewer.com/phoenix-firestorm-lgpl/

[Qie Niangao]

Thinking about a "new viewer" reminded me of what I think may be SL's greatest success, but at first it sounds negative: Over more than a decade, Second Life has weathered all the controversies in the other thread (and more). That's kind of a big deal. The Lab has amassed a large store of corporate knowledge about what not to do, what to do differently, and how to recover when there's trouble.

For example, I doubtLL will ever release another "new viewer" with as little user consultation as Viewer 2. That was an expensive lesson, but I think they learned it.

That's why my response above included the end of RedZone and Emerald and adfarming, and could as well have mentioned casinos, in-world "banks" and "stock exchanges", and a dozen other misadventures that Silicon Valley's "what? me worry?" mindset would inevitably let bloom... right up until they threaten the very viability of the business.

(FWIW, I credit Robin Linden with helping define a company culture resilient to such threats. Tenacious customers had something to do with it, too.)

[Phil Deakins]

50 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Firestorm source code is open source.
Go for it
https://hg.phoenixviewer.com/phoenix-firestorm-lgpl/

Not me lol. I have mpore desirable (for me) things to spend my time on.

[PhantomPixel]

2 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

Perhaps the problem with Firestorm is that it does so many extra things. A possibility might be to seperate some stuff and have viewer versions for specific things, such as a builder's viewer. Similar to some programming languages that are not general purpose, but are designed for certain types of programming.

That would be a fairly neat idea.  I would love to see something new come along. Firestorm is at a point now where it is just SO SO SO bulky and uses up SO much CPU% compared to other viewers such as V3 and Alchemy that it is just ridiculously taxing on a system and with each release they just add more and more features. Which isn't a bad thing but it would be nice to see something new and sleek hit the market, coded from the ground up to be a newer faster lighter weight experience, perhaps with the option to load a more detailed experience if the user so did wish it. 

[Klytyna]

Rigged and/or Fitted mesh thigh boots...

Yeah it's not as big a deal as Havok, etc., but...

It's one of those things almost anyone can take advantage of, that improved SL for many in a small way every single day.

Not having legs that looked like giant leather textured "toddler friendly scissors" every time you walked or sat or stood, and the two separate sculptie based sections of the boot overlapped badly at the knees.

It's the LITTLE things that make a real difference to most people, things so little, they don't even think of them.
 

[Rhonda Huntress]

Keeping a 15 yo database of haphazard and grossly un-optimized content operational.   That feat boggles my mind.

[Whirly Fizzle]

2 hours ago, PhantomPixel said:

Firestorm is at a point now where it is just SO SO SO bulky and uses up SO much CPU% compared to other viewers such as V3 and Alchemy that it is just ridiculously taxing on a system and with each release they just add more and more features.

Honestly is shouldn't.
I regularly compare performance/CPU use/RAM use of Firestorm against the LL viewer & with comparable settings I see no measurable difference.
If you are having problems with only Firestorm munching up your CPU, then it's worth filing a support ticket with Firestorm so we can do some investigation.

 

[Lindal Kidd]

Regarding the parcel privacy sub-thread here...

Guys, Parcel Privacy ALWAYS works as expected, at any altitude, if one avatar is ON the private parcel and the other is OUTSIDE the private parcel.

The JIRA is written for a special case.  In this case, BOTH avatars are on the private parcel, with one of them on the ground and the other above 50m.  In my opinion, the fact that privacy works AT ALL in this situation (with or without anyone on the ban list) is an undocumented feature, and its partial failure shouldn't really count as a "bug".  (By the way, LL, I'd love it if you could implement privacy based on a specified volume of space rather than just parcel boundaries.  Apartment dwellers all over SL would thank you.)

But let's try to keep the thread on topic.  Successes only!  There's another thread for failures and controversial moves.

Clubs are certainly a huge success story, collectively.

How about the elephant in the room, though:  Virtual S - E - X!

And to generalize that:  LL's philosophy that "everything not specifically forbidden is permitted...and we will forbid as little as we can get away with."  They let people take SL and run with it.

[PhantomPixel]

5 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Honestly is shouldn't.
I regularly compare performance/CPU use/RAM use of Firestorm against the LL viewer & with comparable settings I see no measurable difference.
If you are having problems with only Firestorm munching up your CPU, then it's worth filing a support ticket with Firestorm so we can do some investigation.

 

Been there, done that...the basic answer was.....that a number of Mac users have this issue but not enough that they are going to do anything about it

[PhantomPixel]

6 hours ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

Keeping a 15 yo database of haphazard and grossly un-optimized content operational.   That feat boggles my mind.

Some of that stuff is still in use though. I mean, I still use several things that I acquired when I first entered second life. Plus I paid good money for some of that content....whether its dated or not I still paid for it and I don't want to have to give it up because someone feels some kind of way about how old or unoptimised it is. If you want to argue the point of not optimised....one word....mesh. Thats about as unoptimised as you can get considering there is no realistic limit on how many verts a mesh can have and more often than not you end up with highly complex models being brought in world being created with at least 50x more verts than is actually needed to create that object. I mean I have clothing in my inventory that when rez out in world have a land count of 500-1000+. Yet those with more experience can bring in entire mesh mansions with all manner of detail and have the land count under 300.

Edited August 18, 2018 by PhantomPixel

[Lara Aulder]

Gachas.

[Fionalein]

8 minutes ago, Lara Aulder said:

Gachas.

those belong in the controversy thread

 

[Phil Deakins]

9 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

By the way, LL, I'd love it if you could implement privacy based on a specified volume of space rather than just parcel boundaries.  Apartment dwellers all over SL would thank you.

There's a security orb that does it.

I was writing a new one recently, just for the pleasure of writing it. It can automatically find all the parcels that the owner owns in a sim, and protect up to 6 parcel shaped layers in each, and also up to 6 boxes in each. The boxes can be as small as a piece of furniture. (I remember one forum user who wanted to protect only his bed). 6 is used for each simply because there are always some other necessary buttons, and a menu can only hold 12 buttons.

I kept completing it, but then I kept adding more to it, so it was never finally finished, but I do know that an orb is on sale that protects boxes, or at least one box. I don't know about multiple parcel-shaped layers for skyboxes/sky areas though.

Edited August 18, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Ethan Paslong]

7 hours ago, PhantomPixel said:

Been there, done that...the basic answer was.....that a number of Mac users have this issue but not enough that they are going to do anything about it

but... i hear you complain/remark about Firestorm... why not blame it on Mac?

I have no connection with Firestorm otherwise than a user, and really... at my GTX 740m and GTX 960m i can run SL at mid/high, fps at my home + 70 and at other places mostly 25/35 .. it works fine.

Don't only check your viewer settings ( that first... stop hitting all sliders to the max) but also be sure your machine uses your resoursces wisely .. heared one inworld recently... "oh the lag is so bad"... had netflix, youtube SL and few more minimized/at the background running....ehm... yeah i really wonder why ....

Edited August 18, 2018 by Ethan Paslong

[Theresa Tennyson]

This will sound sarcastic but I mean it sincerely...

One of the greatest successes of Second Life is how much of the labor needed to run something like the "world" - viewer development, content creation, land management, etc. - was able to be farmed out to volunteer/part-time/commissioned workers. It's a very Uber-like arrangement and it started before much of the rest of the gig economy.

During the "Golden Age" of Second Life, when it was booming and everyone wanted in, Linden Lab was losing money. When that happens? That thing is going to change or go away. Now, and for quite a few years, Linden Lab is making money because their fixed costs are lower. Far better-capitalized companies like Google and Sony tried to create similar enviroments and they crashed and burned.

Are there problems with how Second Life works now? Most certainly. But it's here to have problems.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Just mentioning Firestorm as an SL success because I suspect close to 80% of all SL residents use it. I don't have the exact numbers. Maybe someone can help me with that.

[Whirly Fizzle]

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Just mentioning Firestorm as an SL success because I suspect close to 80% of all SL residents use it. I don't have the exact numbers. Maybe someone can help me with that.

Close enough.
A little lower when counting number of unique users who use Firestorm. A little higher if you count the number of online hours spent on each viewer.

In the last 30 days, there were 9,940,990 sessions run on Firestorm totaling 17, 672,374 hours logged in.
Pretty mind boggling!

A little out of date now - this was uploaded in 2014.
I love to see all the name fly by showing all the coders who helped to give us this beautiful world 

Quote

A visualization of 2575 days of Firestorm development, from it's Second Life roots, though to the current release. Best watched in HD! Confused? Read on... Each dot represents a unique file, and its colour represents a different file type. Links between files are folders. Whenever someone flies by and "zaps" a file, it means they did something with it in real life. You can see as people work on new features or bugs, as they'll fly past certain files and zap them as they go. 40,301 commits made by 339 contributors to produce 1,594,661 lines of code, creating one stunning viewer

Video Credit: Mobius Ryba (Firestorm developer)
Software used to create this: Gource

Edited August 18, 2018 by Whirly Fizzle
Added credits

[Love Zhaoying]

4 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

During the "Golden Age" of Second Life, when it was booming and everyone wanted in, Linden Lab was losing money. 

Why?

[LittleMe Jewell]

6 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

16 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

By the way, LL, I'd love it if you could implement privacy based on a specified volume of space rather than just parcel boundaries.  Apartment dwellers all over SL would thank you

There's a security orb that does it.

From the surrounding info in Lindal's post, I think she is talking about the Privacy settings that keep chat/sounds in your parcel and keep folks from seeing people in your parcel if they are outside of it -- but she wants that "parcel" to be an area , so that an apartment up in the sky could not see/hear stuff in the apartment below.

 

 

6 hours ago, Ethan Paslong said:

Don't only check your viewer settings ( that first... stop hitting all sliders to the max) but also be sure your machine uses your resoursces wisely .

A lot of us multi-task while in SL and often don't realize how much of a strain other things put on the computer also - especially browsers with lots of tabs open eating up memory.  I wasn't paying attention one day and ended up with Chrome and Firefox both running with about 20 tabs each.  The total memory being eaten up was astounding, not to mention the misc cpu cycles being used in the background.

[PhantomPixel]

7 hours ago, Ethan Paslong said:

but... i hear you complain/remark about Firestorm... why not blame it on Mac?

I have no connection with Firestorm otherwise than a user, and really... at my GTX 740m and GTX 960m i can run SL at mid/high, fps at my home + 70 and at other places mostly 25/35 .. it works fine.

Don't only check your viewer settings ( that first... stop hitting all sliders to the max) but also be sure your machine uses your resoursces wisely .. heared one inworld recently... "oh the lag is so bad"... had netflix, youtube SL and few more minimized/at the background running....ehm... yeah i really wonder why ....

Your telling me things I have already done, its not just on my Mac its on my gaming computer also which I did state in a previous post. I also stated that the issue was firestorms cpu usage....not lag....not a slow connection....CPU USAGE. As well as stating I have several friends who report the same issues. I have checked all of the things you are mentioning in the past, lowered graphics, shut down other programs etc etc and the simple fact stands that firestorm for me is the most resource heavy viewer out of them all. The only reason I still use it is due to the lsl preprocessor. 

[Lindal Kidd]

9 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

There's a security orb that does it.

I was writing a new one recently, just for the pleasure of writing it. It can automatically find all the parcels that the owner owns in a sim, and protect up to 6 parcel shaped layers in each, and also up to 6 boxes in each. The boxes can be as small as a piece of furniture. (I remember one forum user who wanted to protect only his bed). 6 is used for each simply because there are always some other necessary buttons, and a menu can only hold 12 buttons.

I kept completing it, but then I kept adding more to it, so it was never finally finished, but I do know that an orb is on sale that protects boxes, or at least one box. I don't know about multiple parcel-shaped layers for skyboxes/sky areas though.

I know that most, if not all security orbs can cover a specified volume to prevent physical intrusion...are you saying there's one that makes avatars in that volume invisible, and blocks their nearby chat?  That would be awesome.

 

[animats]

20 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

And to generalize that:  LL's philosophy that "everything not specifically forbidden is permitted...and we will forbid as little as we can get away with."  They let people take SL and run with it.

Yes. Fortnite will boot users for not fighting. Some people were logging into Fortnite and just building or watching. The system will eject them for that.

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Why?

To be honest, I'm not sure they were losing money, but supposedly that's why M Linden was brought in. During the boom they were starting overseas offices and buying hardware (and finding places to put it) at a furious pace. Then things like the OpenSpace pricing fiasco, suddenly stopping the build of the Gaeta continents with one left as an angular little slice, and laying off 30% of the workforce kind of screams, "Hole in the money bucket! HOLE IN THE MONEY BUCKET!!!"