Remedies to declining SL?

[KanryDrago]

39 minutes ago, Amina Sopwith said:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannise their teachers.” - Socrates.

Every older generation claims that. It has nothing to do with it. Previous generations havent been trying to claim the right to safe spaces to protect themselves from hearing or seeing anything they disagree with. Yes it is a generalisation its true and not all are like that however when universities around the western world are getting their student bodies voting to ban things like...clapping...wearing various pieces of clothing like sombrero's etc in case student's get "triggered" then sorry yes that generation has issues.

When they hit the real world how do you think a demand that people don't clap is going to go down? We do a disservice to them by pandering to them rather than giving them a good slap and saying get a grip

[Amina Sopwith]

16 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

Every older generation claims that.

Yes, that's the point.

My mother's generation was going to hell because of free love and Cliff Richard's pelvis. My generation was going to hell for "inventing" peanut allergies and using mobile phones. My son's generation is going to go to hell because of...well I don't know yet, but give it 20 years and there'll be something. There'll always be some daft news story that's taken out of context or given 500 times more coverage than its actual influence justifies, if it means we can rag on young people. They will leave uni for the Real World, have a little culture shock for a couple of years and then adapt, just like every other generation of new graduates did before them. The sky is not falling down. 

It is all nonsense. It has been going since time began and it will keep going when the "millennials" (this actually used to refer to a slightly older generation; it seems to have shifted its meaning to stay a pejorative term for young people) are pushing up the daisies. If anything, any young person who can manage to get a mortgage and a living wage in the complete mess they're inheriting today is made of stern enough stuff.

ETA: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48417/high-windows 

 

 

Edited December 26, 2018 by Amina Sopwith

[Theresa Tennyson]

4 hours ago, KanryDrago said:

euw just no, millenials are a dead end in human evolution, snowflakes and victims...people who regard applause as triggering. The best thing you can do with most millenials is take them out back and put them down humanely. They are unfitted for life and bound to spend their time on earth whinging about everything. The sooner we get away from that the better for my species

I thought all your species needed was more bridges?

Edited December 27, 2018 by Theresa Tennyson

[Qie Niangao]

1 minute ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

I thought all your species needed were more bridges?

Also crowns and implants.

[Oct Oyen]

2 hours ago, foxfirestorm said:

Anyways, to the topic on hand, though that alone is part of the problem. Second Life does have a fairly active population, but your not going to interest most of the 'young bloods', because they don't want to work for it or, you know, actually think for themselves. Second Life is a highly creative platform for dreamers and visionaries. If anything, that is probably where it needs to aimed at and just stay on that target.

Long as people have fun building, creating, dreaming, and no matter the medium they use, be it prims, sculpt, or mesh can express themselves and maybe turn them a minor profit, people will stay and bring those like minded folks with them.

Every generation has its own slackers population and they will drop out in natural selection process. SL needs to get a lot of new people to try it and let natural selection takes it course. It's also important to present a clear idea what one can do in SL and provide comprehensive helps for the chosen path through video tutorials and mentors...etc. They are tones of tutorials made by SL residents. But one will never find them if one doesn't know what to look for.

In-world prims and editing tools system are very limited and dated. Blender on the other hand is intimidating as hell due to its Swiss army knife nature. There's a great opportunity for LL to create a super simple 3D modeling program based on Blender's code and have direct upload to SL and Sansar, plus export standard 3D formats. Like what Sketchup was before Google bought it, Zbrush is doing that with its free simplified version called Sculptris. The purpose is to get their feet wet while learning the industry standard 3D modeling principles and use SL as a sandbox. If it's done right, it could become the gateway program for getting into 3D creations.

[Callum Meriman]

9 minutes ago, Oct Oyen said:

There's a great opportunity for LL to create a super simple 3D modeling program based on Blender's code and have direct upload to SL and Sansa

Earlier in the year Ebbe promised us a lot of things in 2018 - Bakes on Mesh, EEP, EAM, Animesh - with just a few days left in the year, we got only one of these, and it's a "good enough, ship it" job instead of feature complete. SSP it seems is also no where near finished. I asked Grumpity why EAM wasn't out and the answer was "competing priorities". Things are no rosier on the Sansar side, with 4 years? of development and only a feature incomplete skeleton available.

LL don't have the resources to finish Ebbe's promises to us. Realistically, there is no way they could start a major undertaking like that.

Edited December 27, 2018 by Callum Meriman

[Oct Oyen]

34 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

LL don't have the resources to finish Ebbe's promises to us. Realistically, there is no way they could start a major undertaking like that.

That has been the ways of LL doing things, but they do deliver eventually (most of it); just not in a timely fashion.

LL may not have the internal human resources to add it to their plates. But LL has fundings, they could fund some Blender.org folks to carry out the project. I'm talking about a super simple 3D modeling program that goes a bit beyond in-world prims, has just enough functions to get people to understand the fundamentals of making 3D objects for game engine like SL. Anyways, just throwing ideas out there, hopefully LL is listening.

Edited December 27, 2018 by Oct Oyen

[Klytyna]

2 hours ago, Oct Oyen said:

There's a great opportunity for LL to create a super simple 3D modeling program based on Blender's code and have direct upload to SL and Sansar, plus export standard 3D formats. Like what Sketchup was before Google bought it

I've spent more than 2 decades listening to clueless tech-illiterate buttholes saying that 3D modeling should be EASY, and claiming that "surely they can make it easy for us clueless tech-illiterate buttholes because FUTURENESS!"

You mention Gurgle Screwup... That is exactly the sort of 3D app the world does not need.

Years ago, I was invited to join a games modding team, and like a bloody idiot I said yes...

There were TWO actual games modders, my self and the official team leader, and 18 wastes of human skin, 17 worthless zero skills quasi-illiterate millennial RP trash, and the unofficial team leader, who was a "self taught 3D modeler" with TWO WHOLE MONTHS of experience in... Gurgle Screwup.

This dingbat would crank out a 60,000 poly mesh in two hours in Screwup using only the extrude tool...

Then he'd send it to us, and constantly whine about how it was taking us too long to convert his latest "masterpiece" into a usable game asset.

Typically, each of his "2 Hour Meshes" needed more than TWENTY hours of file format conversion, dismantling, sectioning into material zones, uv mapping, reassembling, rigging, hardpointing, and basic texturing, and then xml scripting to make it into something you could actually test in the game, all done by people who had spent YEARS learning how to do these things.

One of the biggest problems with SL's current content, is that a lot of it was made by peole who THINK 3D should be or worse, already IS "easy" and that all you have to do is pick a name, suggest a basic design and then click the "make 3d digital art and upload to the SL MP" button in Blunder-3D.

2 hours ago, Oct Oyen said:

If it's done right, it could become the gateway program for getting into 3D creations.

Yeah heard that crap for more than 20 years too, install the FREE 30 day demo of "Crap-3D" on the cover disk ofthis months edition of "Digital Artist Wannabe" magazine and then folliw the EASY 4 page center spread tutorial with the FREE assets included on the disc, and YOU TOO CAN BE A LEAD 3D MODELER AT PIXAR!

1 hour ago, Oct Oyen said:

But LL has fundings, they could fund some Blender.org folks to carry out the project

No they couldn't... They need ALL their funding to pay the staff, provide shareholder dividends, and prop up the obsolete before it's finished, Vom-Cam based, white elephant money pit failure that is Project Stupid.

1 hour ago, Oct Oyen said:

Anyways, just throwing ideas out there, hopefully LL is listening

So far the main ideas thrown out on this thread have been...

A Moron Friendly EASY-3D "Make digital Art" button in the viewer.

A MANDATORY "Walk of Laggy Hate" through a SUPER-InfoHub lag pit everytime you log in to drive everyone not called "Bree" off the grid.

A return to the 2003 edition of Noob Island!

A prim tax for people not called "Greek"...

...

These ideas really do need to be thrown out...

Seriously, I really hope LL are NOT listening... They come up with enough bloody awful anti-ideas all by themselves without help like this thread.

 

 

[chibiusa Ling]

8 hours ago, KanryDrago said:

 and bound to spend their time on earth whinging about everything

But, the thing is....you and people like you do THE EXACT SAME THING. Its what makes me laugh about this whole "snowflake" argument. On one side of the fence you have these "snowflakes" complaining about micro aggressions, safe spaces, the attitudes, aggressions and actions of people on the other side, offensiveness, whining, whinging, complaining etc etc. But, interestingly, on the OTHER side you.......have people complaining about the attitudes, aggressions and actions of people on the other side, wanting their own versions of safe spaces away from the snowflake menace, the offensiveness of snowflakes, whining, whinging, complaining etc etc. It seems to me that those on your side are just as big of a set of snowflakes as the snowflakes you seek to complain about. There are literally more similarities between you both than you would ever care to admit to. But you and others on that side of the fence wouldn't ever admit to it because each side is totally oblivious to the fact that what each side accuses the other of......they do themselves......your all snowflakes accept it 😜

By the way im curious, which generation are you?. Would you be the generation that plunged us into debt and recession and spent most of the 80s doing nothing but playing video games, masturbating and whining about the unfairness of the world. Or would you be the generation before that that tended to re write history to inflate your own senses of self importance and gave birth to way to many children and spent a whole decade putting flowers in your hair....whilst complaining about the unfairness of the world [Its all snowflakes]

Edited December 27, 2018 by chibiusa Ling

[Klytyna]

6 minutes ago, chibiusa Ling said:

But, the thing is...

Apparently you are unable to differentiate between...

"Pull your head out of your rectum you whining butthole"

and...

"U cant b callin meh a whinin buthol on da interwebs cos it r a Fedral Crym of Siber Terrism, whot R aginst the LAW! I r callin da Ef-Be-Ei on u fur cryms aginst Murica! Eet meh u euro-commies!"

...

Please feel free to reevaluate your post in light of this obvious difference, now it's been brought to your attention.
 

[chibiusa Ling]

9 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Apparently you are unable to differentiate between...

"Pull your head out of your rectum you whining butthole"

and...

"U cant b callin meh a whinin buthol on da interwebs cos it r a Fedral Crym of Siber Terrism, whot R aginst the LAW! I r callin da Ef-Be-Ei on u fur cryms aginst Murica! Eet meh u euro-commies!"

...

Please feel free to reevaluate your post in light of this obvious difference, now it's been brought to your attention.
 

Idk....there is a case to be made for both sides of the fence stomping their feet like over grown children complaining about the unfairness of it all and how they wish the world was entirely catered to suiting only them.......I'm just poking fun Klytyna, don't mind me. I'm bored right now and playing "poke the bear". 😜

[Paul Hexem]

A platform that looks, feels, and performs like it's from 2004 with some 2012 technology stapled on, with bugs and glitches that go back as far as 10 years or more, with lazy devs that don't know their own audience... Why is there even debate over user retention?

[Klytyna]

2 minutes ago, chibiusa Ling said:

I'm bored right now and playing "poke the bear"

Playing "poke the cave bear" almost certainly contributed to the human evolutionary process... Odds are you are NOT decended from a "bear poker"  
 

[chibiusa Ling]

1 minute ago, Klytyna said:

Playing "poke the cave bear" almost certainly contributed to the human evolutionary process... Odds are you are NOT decended from a "bear poker"  
 

Pfft those bear pokers were unwise, untrained noobs at the game and didn't have several thousand miles and a laptop screen protecting them. Don't throw me in with those old world archaic analogue bear pokers. This is the digital age Klytyna!. Okay its 6.27am I haven't slept yet. I have to ask as your a fellow member of the kingdom of Brexit. Are you of the ilk that is still awake or of the ilk that has recently woken?

[Klytyna]

4 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said:

Why is there even debate over user retention?

Secondwave Lastnamer Entitlement Syndrome...

"Hi Clueless Doublenamer here, rez date 2007, and I just did my quarterly 5 min login to collect my FREE MONEY, and there wasn't as much as I feel entitled to, the Lab MUST FIX THIS NOW!

I think SL is DYING! So I propose a CRUSADE to Save SecondLife, which I will lead! Lets get the discussion of gratuitous examples of the unlicenced possession of illegal quantities of WEAPONS GRADE STUPIDITY started before it's TOO LATE!"
 

[Klytyna]

2 minutes ago, chibiusa Ling said:

I have to ask as your a fellow member of the kingdom of Brexit.

Heh, I've spent more than 4 decades denouncing the fact that traitors in my country pledged our servitude to the Franco-German Euro-Federalist Empire, and eagerly look forward to the failure of Brexit negotiations, and the inevitable open warfare in which we will meet the Euro-Federalist Anti-Britishness squads on the beaches with heavy machinegun emplacements!

5 minutes ago, chibiusa Ling said:

Are you of the ilk that is still awake or of the ilk that has recently woken?

Depends when the painkillers wear off...
 

[chibiusa Ling]

1 minute ago, Klytyna said:

Heh, I've spent more than 4 decades denouncing the fact that traitors in my country pledged our servitude to the Franco-German Euro-Federalist Empire, and eagerly look forward to the failure of Brexit negotiations, and the inevitable open warfare in which we will meet the Euro-Federalist Anti-Britishness squads on the beaches with heavy machinegun emplacements!

I thought it had already failed. I don't keep TOO up to date with the news as quite honestly I'm sick of hearing about it. But last I did check a week ago there was no deal on the cards?. Can you honestly see us leaving though?. They seem to be doing EVERYTHING to try and stall, back peddle, dig their heels in. 

[Klytyna]

2 minutes ago, chibiusa Ling said:

Can you honestly see us leaving though?

I'm sure they would be GLAD to let us leave... If we took that "Trident" stuff off the warehouse shelves and tested it on a suitably disposable target, such as...

Paris...

But enough with the derail... Back to the topic... 

Maybe we could test Trident on that Mandatory Super-MegaLag-InfoHub thing of Bree's to show her that our response to her suggestion is more than...

11 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

slightly disagree with the idea.

...

11 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

I can't guarantee that no one at LL is seriously thinking about it now

Unlikely, even they are not QUITE that clueless about SL's userbase...

11 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

It's amazing how open to suggestions one can become after drinking lots of eggnog.

Are you confessing to spiking the staff eggnog with illegal, experimental "CIA brainwashing Test Camp" drugs?

 

[Selene Gregoire]

28 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Are you confessing to spiking the staff eggnog with illegal, experimental "CIA brainwashing Test Camp" drugs?

 

Edited December 27, 2018 by Selene Gregoire

[Qie Niangao]

5 hours ago, Oct Oyen said:

In-world prims and editing tools system are very limited and dated. Blender on the other hand is intimidating as hell due to its Swiss army knife nature. There's a great opportunity for LL to create a super simple 3D modeling program based on Blender's code and have direct upload to SL and Sansar, plus export standard 3D formats.

4 hours ago, Oct Oyen said:

... they could fund some Blender.org folks to carry out the project. I'm talking about a super simple 3D modeling program that goes a bit beyond in-world prims, has just enough functions to get people to understand the fundamentals of making 3D objects for game engine like SL. Anyways, just throwing ideas out there, hopefully LL is listening.

I think there's something here. I might carve at different joints, but yeah. And if any of these other immersive 3D environments survive long enough to start mattering, it could be very much in Blender.org's interest to have a containerized, API'd version stripped of features all the 3D programs already possess. Lighting, for example. Camera positioning. Object positioning. That's a bunch of Blender code and UI features that could be replaced by those native to the target 3D environment. Other user-exposed features would need grafting from Blender to SL: All the UV mapping... materials mapping... shortcut gestures for selecting ordered subsets of vertices... etc., etc. Lots of work for sure, but the result could be a very substantial subset of Blender functionality embedded in the immersive control environments of other 3D programs.

One wonders if somebody else isn't already doing this.

If such a project were ever picked up, there'd be debate about how much of Blender's features to incorporate. At first glance, I think I'd punt on exposing any of its existing programmatic "macro" features. I don't think I'd include animation creation, but maybe it's more commonly used than I know. The model export/import functions would need major contemplation, too, not least because of the foolish implementation of Mesh in SL, conflating the model with the object instance in a way that would make in-world editing utterly impractical without a bunch of rework. (Not as hopeless a dead-end as in Sansar, but still a lot of rework.)

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Klytyna said:

They need ALL their funding to pay the staff, provide shareholder dividends, and prop up the obsolete before it's finished, Vom-Cam based, white elephant money pit failure that is Project Stupid.

I don't seriously think LL will take on any new ambitious development for SL any time soon, but I also think the end must be near for Sansar. The Steam experiment seemed like a last desperate attempt to see if anybody at all would take the bait. Now nobody is even looking at the dismal usage statistics less than a month after launch.

Maybe give it a few weeks to see if anybody blunders into it wearing that HMD from Santa, then pull the plug.

[chibiusa Ling]

17 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I think there's something here. I might carve at different joints, but yeah. And if any of these other immersive 3D environments survive long enough to start mattering, it could be very much in Blender.org's interest to have a containerized, API'd version stripped of features all the 3D programs already possess. Lighting, for example. Camera positioning. Object positioning. That's a bunch of Blender code and UI features that could be replaced by those native to the target 3D environment. Other user-exposed features would need grafting from Blender to SL: All the UV mapping... materials mapping... shortcut gestures for selecting ordered subsets of vertices... etc., etc. Lots of work for sure, but the result could be a very substantial subset of Blender functionality embedded in the immersive control environments of other 3D programs

It would never work. The fact your stripping out lighting alone takes away one of the huge features that mesh offers aka rendering and baking shadows. What you would be left with is a basic ass version of an already daftly laid out program that would serve no other purpose than providing people with what would basically be modelling for morons. Most serious creators would abandon the notion entirely and just set out to learn blender, especially given that avastar is the main blender rigging and animation add-on for SL, and it would further encourage even more crapware to clutter up SL than there already is (take a walk around the mainland) as well as make the download of the viewer substantially bigger than what it currently is. Having said that what would work better if you were to go down that road would just be to enhance prims. Let us move points and edges along with faces. Thats basically what you would get anyway from a watered down blender in the way you describe it only with less effort.

 

17 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

 I don't think I'd include animation creation, but maybe it's more commonly used than I know. 

To be hones this would probably be easier to implement than your above suggestion. Looking at programs such as Quavimator. It may be basic but I could see that as an extension of the viewer to allow people to make animations on the fly without the need for Avastar. But again, serious developers would all but abandon it in seconds simply for the greater range of features offered and animations they can create just using Blender.

Edited December 27, 2018 by chibiusa Ling

[Qie Niangao]

Just now, chibiusa Ling said:

The fact your stripping out lighting alone takes away one of the huge features that mesh offers aka rendering and baking shadows.

No, no, lighting certainly wouldn't be stripped from the modelling, but rather the lighting would be supplied by the immersive 3D environment through the API to Blender instead of controlled by Blender-native light source placement.

The animation thing... I just don't know if Blender's animation facility is what animators expect now. The idea of incorporating some animation-creation function in SL is interesting, but I simply don't know how serious, mocap based animation is done these days. For example, I still see a lot of static poses coming to market, which I'd have expected to be very niche to photo shoots only, so I'm realizing that I don't understand that area at all now.

[animats]

Well, the Sinespace people bolted in-world editing onto their system last summer.

Sinespace has this working. Linden Labs needs to catch up.

[Paul Hexem]

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Secondwave Lastnamer Entitlement Syndrome...

"Hi Clueless Doublenamer here, rez date 2007, and I just did my quarterly 5 min login to collect my FREE MONEY, and there wasn't as much as I feel entitled to, the Lab MUST FIX THIS NOW!

I think SL is DYING! So I propose a CRUSADE to Save SecondLife, which I will lead! Lets get the discussion of gratuitous examples of the unlicenced possession of illegal quantities of WEAPONS GRADE STUPIDITY started before it's TOO LATE!"
 

I think you missed my point. SL is dying.

The question was, why debate over things LL will never do- they're too busy proudly announcing that they're adding technology to the engine that everyone else considered standard a decade ago.