Jump to content

Its amazing how strong SL seems to be!?


You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 1694 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

I wish I felt the same way. I feel like I bang my head against the Linden brick wall and once every few years it moves an inch forward and half an inch backwards. In the meantime, I continue to have terrible headaches. I think they've made some promising statements in the past couple of years. Animesh is long overdue and I'm already seeing it get used to great effect. There's still a lot LL needs to deliver on, and much, much more that they need to work on but have yet to even acknowledge.

On a very much related note, a year and a half ago Oz told me they were introducing new camera controls and were including my camera settings as a new standard preset....but then it never happened and the last time I asked Oz about it he seemed to have developed amnesia. I has to ask some friends I knew were at the same office hours meeting to make sure I hadn't imagined it. They remember Oz bringing it up, too. I swear there must be something in the water over there. Someone should get the EPA to test LL's pipes and watercoolers.

 

I know the problem. From the Linden side I suspect the number of ideas and people (600k to 1,000k active) they are dealing with is overwhelming. So, I expect them to forget and mis-associate people and ideas. I only remember my ideas. After all they are the important ones... :) 

If an idea is not in a JIRA item they will forget it. Even when in a JIRA unless it is one they like, I doubt they will remember it until the next list review. 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

Just imagine if anyone, regardless of their skill level, could easily set up an animesh NPC to walk around their yard, stop to water some flowers for a few minutes, then continue around the house to sit on the front porch for a half an hour or so, then get up to check the mail. Applying the waypoints, the animations, everything via a simple to use interface. Pathfinding that anyone could use, not just people who've spent hundreds of hours eyeballs deep in the LSL wiki.

I'd love to see this happen. OMG would I love to be able to do something like that. I can't script. I can only tweak a few things in certain kinds of scripts. That's all my brain will allow.

Something I've been wanting since mesh became a reality in SL is to have an inworld mesh tool provided by LL. I mean... I've seen some amazing things done with prims... imagine being able to create mesh inworld even if it is on the "primitive" side.

I can dream... can't I?

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Why do you think they don't have a development plan?

I think what is being said is that most game devs 'publish' what the plan is so that players are informed. Basically all it is, is posting what projects they plan on releasing during the month/year. Lots of them do it. Empyrion: Galactic Survival does it, Planet Nomads, to name two that I play myself from Steam.  You just have to look at the forums once in a while and read those posts to know what is going on. Keeping players/customers informed is an important part of developing now because players are demanding transparency in that regard.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Selene Gregoire said:

I think what is being said is that most game devs 'publish' what the plan is so that players are informed. Basically all it is, is posting what projects they plan on releasing during the month/year. Lots of them do it. Empyrion: Galactic Survival does it, Planet Nomads, to name two that I play myself from Steam.  You just have to look at the forums once in a while and read those posts to know what is going on. Keeping players/customers informed is an important part of developing now because players are demanding transparency in that regard.

Right, well put.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Why do you think they don't have a development plan?

14 years of being in SL. 😜

Seriously, tho, I think one of the reasons LL is reticent to publish their plans for SL is that those plans are constantly changing. They'll be talking up a feature that's "definitely coming soon" one day, then the next none of the Lindens can remember that ever being the plan. Remember Avatar Puppeteering? Nimble volumetric clouds that were going to be added to Windlight? ARCtan? Remember in 2007 LL promised we'd be able to trade windlight settings as inventory by the end of the year? There seems to be a lack of direction and leadership in the Lab. Features only seem to get worked on so long as there is a Linden that feels on working on that feature. If they're fired, quit, or get distracted by a laser pointer the feature gets dropped.

 That's why I say "LL has been promising a lot of good things" rather than saying "LL is working on a lot of good things". Given their history, the chance that even half of what LL promised two years ago will actually see the light of day isn't exactly good.

Edited by Penny Patton
  • Like 5
  • Sad 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

Just in case anyone doesn't remember Nimble

 

I don't, but I remember the buzz around 2007 when Windlight was arriving, because of it.

Everyone was nervous wether they could still run SL.

The implementation came nonetheless. Eagerly announced by Torley Linden. 

Took a while though. I still hardly use it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7/8/2019 at 12:39 PM, Penny Patton said:

 Just imagine if anyone, regardless of their skill level, could easily set up an animesh NPC to walk around their yard, stop to water some flowers for a few minutes, then continue around the house to sit on the front porch for a half an hour or so, then get up to check the mail. Applying the waypoints, the animations, everything via a simple to use interface. Pathfinding that anyone could use, not just people who've spent hundreds of hours eyeballs deep in the LSL wiki.

I agree. I'm trying to do something like that. Over at my house in Bellesaria, there's an animesh NPC in T-shirt, jeans, and ball cap. She walks around, looks at the ocean, and will come over and say hello to anyone who shows up. I have two more NPCs active at my workshop in Vallone. That's a start.

This is a lot of work. Mostly because of bugs LL won't, or can't fix. It took me about 800 lines of workaround  code in LSL and two months of work to get pathfinding animesh NPCs to work reliably. They can now run for weeks without getting stuck or going off the parcel.

The main use for pathfinding seems to be zombies. Probably because that's how the motion from pathfinding looks. Especially on overloaded sims, which cause pathfinding to make too few steering corrections, look bad, and run into things.

This is all way too hard. For the wrong reasons. LL put time and energy and money into pathfinding and animesh, and then they dropped the ball.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, animats said:

 

This is all way too hard. For the wrong reasons. LL put time and energy and money into pathfinding and animesh, and then they dropped the ball.

shrugs for a lot of people it was always a waste of time, I know my reaction to an npc such as you describe would be block and derender on first landing, I suspect I am not alone in that. I don't particulary see npc's as in anyway adding to SL outside of zombie shooter style games. They are no different to the little bots some clubs have wandering around making comments which also get the block derender treatment straight away. Making the thing prettier in no way makes it useful

  • Like 4
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

Seriously, tho, I think one of the reasons LL is reticent to publish their plans for SL is that those plans are constantly changing. They'll be talking up a feature that's "definitely coming soon" one day, then the next none of the Lindens can remember 

I think that’s more of a reason to have a roadmap. That way they can be held more accountable, possibly have a dialog with residents and most importantly get some help from more knowledgeable residents. 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, janetosilio said:

I think that’s more of a reason to have a roadmap. That way they can be held more accountable, possibly have a dialog with residents and most importantly get some help from more knowledgeable residents. 

Problem is LL doesn't want to he held accountable. They never have. They've proven that time and time again.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

20 hours ago, Selene Gregoire said:

I think what is being said is that most game devs 'publish' what the plan is so that players are informed. Basically all it is, is posting what projects they plan on releasing during the month/year. Lots of them do it. Empyrion: Galactic Survival does it, Planet Nomads, to name two that I play myself from Steam.  You just have to look at the forums once in a while and read those posts to know what is going on. Keeping players/customers informed is an important part of developing now because players are demanding transparency in that regard.

That is a fair and reasonable inference.

What was actually written is

On 7/8/2019 at 12:34 PM, janetosilio said:

It would be nice if LL had some kind of roadmap like a lot of game developers use for games. 

I mean I know there’s BoM and EEP coming up, but it would be nice if there was somewhere we could go to see what’s going on with projects they’re working on and official word of what they’re kicking around for the future, things to get people excited about.

In both your comment and janetosilio’s the implication is they are not making posts or providing information on their current and future development work.

You point to a coupe of games you are enjoying and how you can go to their forums and find out what is happening. It seems you are implying the Lab is not doing anything similar. I challenge that idea and suggest you look around and see those types of posts and the systematic flow of information from the Lab.

The primary information channel for the less attentive is the Lab’s Featured News. The Lab has chosen to provide information here that is generally just days or weeks ahead of being useful. There are occasional year or 5-year plan articles. I think most are now more the immediate project plan type. So, as animesh was released more published focus was placed on EEP and BoM.

I have noticed the longer-term plans are appearing less often. But the multi-year projects have been announced and they are in progress. I don’t expect any new plan until after they are complete and the Lindens can test what they can do with the new capabilities. The move to the cloud opens up possibilities.

There are weekly User Group meetings. The Lab’s leading software engineers, operating and marketing staff are at those various meetings. The only limit on questions we can ask of the Lindens is that it be within their domain of knowledge. This means you can’t ask an engineer about accounting or support issues. They simply don’t know that information.

These meetings are based on a US time schedule because the majority of Lindens are in the US and fit these meetings into their work day. So, bloggers have a readership from those that cannot be at the meeting for whatever reason.

Each site has a ‘blogroll’, list of other sites with information about SL. Some of us post videos of the meetings. Nalates YouTube Channel. Inara posts edited audio clips from meetings, events, and interviews about specific subjects. Drax is doing an excellent and entertaining radio show podcast and videos about what is going on in SL. 

In the SL events of SL16B the Meet the Linden interviews were recorded and posted online. I posted one. The leading Lindens were talking about what they have been doing, are doing, and what they are planning.

Result

All the above provides information to those that want it. One just has to do some looking. One only has to go to the Answers section of the SL Forum and ask how to know what is going on to get all the information I just provided.

I am sure someone will go yeah but… and want a list of just the information and project status they want. I think it is an effect from the me-me-me conditioning imposed on the entitlement generation. However, in SL that just isn’t going to happen. SL is moving way too fast. Projects like Animesh II, Last Names, EEP, and BoM have all been delayed when a new rash of disconnects forced the Lindens to stop, study region crossing/TP’s, and upgrade and modernize the process. That work is continuing to a lesser degree, meaning few people on it post-crises. That effort isn’t publically listed or talked about as “project” but it isn't a secret and is discussed on the forum and UG meetings. The Scripts Run % problems are being tackled. Staff is constantly being moved off projects to fix urgent issues.

The nature of users is such that a list of projects creates more problems than it solves. Also, the number of people that are actually interested in this stuff is exceedingly small. A well-attended UG meeting will have at most 30-40 people and typically 15-20. Of the 40,000+ online at the time say 35 is 0.08%. Generally, less than 100 people watch Pantera’s video of the Third-Party Dev meeting. That is 100 out of the say 500k active SL users or <0.02%.

The Lab’s choices are between keeping a few lazy people informed or focusing on things that users care about. We see the result of their choice in Featured News and UG Meetings. The rest is up to us.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Also a roadmap isn’t necessarily a forum post or a forum you can go to to find out what a company is working on as far as a product goes.

The idea isn’t “Oh, I can gather information here, here and here...and also it’s nestled over here.” One, that’s not a convenient way to disseminate information. Two it operates under the assumption that everybody is ok with looking all around for things, when everybody is not. Nor should they.

All a roadmap is saying is: Hey guys here’s what we’re working on, here’s when we estimate it’ll be done. That isn’t that hard to do because it’s just a list of the things. You shouldn’t need to go to someone’s blog or put two and two together. It’s should be a link that says roadmap, you click it and it tells you the things. The things meaning the projects coming up and cool things being worked on.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Animesh did not add any value for me. Maybe it's not even related but I've encountered more problems with crashes after the animesh release. Either way, animesh takes up more juice and I'd rather run SL more smoothly than see a couple more moving things on my screen. I know there's a way to derender each time you TP but it would be cool to be able to derender permanently.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, AdminGirl said:

Animesh did not add any value for me. Maybe it's not even related but I've encountered more problems with crashes after the animesh release. Either way, animesh takes up more juice and I'd rather run SL more smoothly than see a couple more moving things on my screen. I know there's a way to derender each time you TP but it would be cool to be able to derender permanently.

When you derender something in firestorm it offers you the choice of temporary or permanent. The latter means you will never see it again

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

When you derender something in firestorm it offers you the choice of temporary or permanent. The latter means you will never see it again

Hm I guess I could do that.. derender animesh as I encounter them then one by one they will be gone from my view forever.. but I was referring to this:

https://modemworld.me/2019/02/18/firestorm-6-0-2-animesh-release/

  • Derender Animesh: depending on your system, Animesh may impose some performance impacts, particularly where a lot of Animesh is active within a scene. To help mitigate this, Firestorm 6.0.2 includes an option to derender all Animesh in a scene (Developer menu > Rendering > Derender All Animesh). Note that this is only temporary, and derendered Animesh will reappear after a teleport or re-logging.
Edited by AdminGirl
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7/5/2019 at 5:15 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

With the recent hike in fees and premium do you really think LL has the money to spare for a hairbrained idea like this? They're  not going to go to the additional expense of hiring new employees for this and they are already shorthanded. They've been shorthanded since the big lay off a few years ago and they have no intentions of changing that. It's more fun to watch us dance like puppets for them.

People still bring up the subject of the "great layoff" (2010) without actually ever placing it in the correct perspective. So... I'll try to do so here.

In April 2008, the Lab appointed Mark Kingdon as CEO. His appointment came at a time when the company was consciously seeking to switch direction, most notably in trying to make SL a platform for business / a standalone application for the same.  This involved:

  • A redefinition of the platform as a service.
  • The start of a drive to radically reinvent the Viewer (work that eventually spun out to the "Viewer 2009" project, which itself had morphed into viewer 2.0 by the time we got our collective fingers on it)
  • Engagement with the likes of Rivers Run Red to develop “immersive workspaces” within Second Life
  • The development of what would become known as the “out of the box” Second Life Enterprise (SLE) “tool” and Second Life Workspaces.

Part of this drive saw the company undertake a massive expansion, which included opening more offices - some as far afield as Amsterdam and Singapore - and recruiting on a large scale. In particular, and in reference to the "great layoff", this recruitment drive saw the Lab's headcount rise by something close to 50% between 2008 and shortly before the time of the 2010 restructuring (I wish I could quote the exact number; Dusan Writer actually recorded it in an interview with Mark Kingdon from (IIRC) February 2010  - but sadly, Dusan's blog now renders a 404 error in searching, so I cannot give a precise citation).

Many of those hired were not brought in to work on SL as we know it. Some were admin and marketing staff needed to manage the new offices; others were hired to work on presenting Second Life Workspaces to interested business and supporting those business (remember Amanda Van Nuys (Amanda Linden) et al?) Others were responsible solely for the development / provisioning of Second Life Enterprise (SLE) - a product that ultimately went nowhere outside of the US military bulk-buying licenses to run it.

Thus, when the axe fell in 2010, it was these positions, far more then those directly involved in the development and maintenance of Second Life as we know it, that got the chop. And while it is true that  *some* core staff also went as well, it is not as if the company has never recruited since June 2010, or sought to replace those who have since left to seek pastures new - as even a semi-regular glance at the Lab's jobs page will show. 

So can we please stop pointing to events of nine years ago sans proper context?

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7/11/2019 at 9:58 PM, Inara Pey said:

People still bring up the subject of the "great layoff" (2010) ... etc ... etc ..

I am sorry Inara Pey  , but you are out of the topic . In addition you quote Selene out of context  . Slene was talking about a "recent hike"

Is 2010  recent for you ? 

 

Selene Gregoire was answering to Zed Avedon 

Zed Avedon was the creator of this thread and wanterd  to divide en enterprise in several teams "to create competitions" between teams 

I quote him : "An enjoyable competitive employee challenge with a 6month or 1 year time frame"

Selena was arguing to him that this idea is absurd . And yes , it s absurd .  And i don t call this "idea" a "plan"

 

Edited by Miranda Umino
  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7/17/2019 at 1:00 PM, Miranda Umino said:

I am sorry Inara Pey  , but you are out of the topic . In addition you quote Selene out of context  . Slene was talking about a "recent hike"

Is 2010  recent for you ?

 

Sorry, but no.

I was replying to the statement made that "They've been shorthanded since the big lay off a few years ago and they have no intentions of changing that. It's more fun to watch us dance like puppets for them", and pointing out that claims around the 2010 layoffs are so often made without context. As such, I'm perfectly "within the topic".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

54 minutes ago, Inara Pey said:

Sorry, but no.

I was replying to the statement made that "They've been shorthanded since the big lay off a few years ago and they have no intentions of changing that. It's more fun to watch us dance like puppets for them", and pointing out that claims around the 2010 layoffs are so often made without context. As such, I'm perfectly "within the topic".

I never said anything about when. Never mentioned a year. You just assumed that is when I was thinking about. It wasn't.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Inara Pey said:

Sorry, but no.

I was replying to the statement made that "They've been shorthanded since the big lay off a few years ago and they have no intentions of changing that. It's more fun to watch us dance like puppets for them", and pointing out that claims around the 2010 layoffs are so often made without context. As such, I'm perfectly "within the topic".

Regardless whether or not this was the layoff that Selene was thinking of, I appreciated reading the background around this one in 2010.  Even though it was before my time in SL, the 'big layoff' that happened in 2010 is something that I have heard references about here and there from time to time, but I didn't really know any of the details about it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 1694 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...