So I found this funny article complaining about Second Life

[Rolig Loon]

13 hours ago, Mollymews said:

for example, in another world (not SL) when we walk onto a dance floor, viewer pops up a viewer UI dialog with a list of animations, we can either close/ignore the dialog  or pick a dance.  From the dance floor builders pov, it is really easy to set up. Rez a dancefloor object, populate it with dance animations, set it to Active and done

That is indeed a simple thing to script, as you know.  It's no more difficult than any other dance machine. So, why not write the script and sell it in your Marketplace store as a tool for a club owner to drop into the dance floor? I sell plenty of script tools in my own shop. too.  Why should this be something you expect LL to provide?

[Pixieplumb Flanagan]

Microtransactions absolutely everywhere!

Yes, yes there are.  And you know why?  Because I need prosecco, vim and pasta.  chuh.

[Lindal Kidd]

" Lindens are incredibly hard to obtain without real money and only by unofficial means. Even something as owning your own land costs money. "

LL provided a simple solution to that.  It's called a Premium membership.

[Rolig Loon]

19 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

" Lindens are incredibly hard to obtain without real money and only by unofficial means. Even something as owning your own land costs money. "

LL provided a simple solution to that.  It's called a Premium membership.

Yes!  And, of course, that observation misses the major point that SL's economy is based on residents bringing real money in through the LindeX. Money that people earn in world is all recycled. If most people didn't bring new money into SL, the economy would collapse in a heartbeat.  This is not a MMO with play money that players earn for finding a few buried tokens.  It's a world with a real economy and -- like any RL place that you visit on vacation -- a currency exchange that allows you to carry real money across its border and into (or out of) your bank account. So, it's true that "Lindens are incredibly hard to obtain without real money." That's the way it's supposed to be.  That's the way life works.

[Drayke Newall]

7 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Yes!  And, of course, that observation misses the major point that SL's economy is based on residents bringing real money in through the LindeX. Money that people earn in world is all recycled. If most people didn't bring new money into SL, the economy would collapse in a heartbeat.  This is not a MMO with play money that players earn for finding a few buried tokens.  It's a world with a real economy and -- like any RL place that you visit on vacation -- a currency exchange that allows you to carry real money across its border and into (or out of) your bank account. So, it's true that "Lindens are incredibly hard to obtain without real money." That's the way it's supposed to be.  That's the way life works.

That aside, I still believe a lot more can be done in highlighting to new users how to make money other than premium. The problem SL has always faced is new users are literally thrown into the deep end and have to work everything out themselves. Not a bad thing in some ways, however as I mentioned in a previous post, highlighting ways to make money on noob island wouldn't be a bad idea. Whilst Linden realms is a rather tedious way to earn lindens, for a new user it is one way that should be advertised. Even a pop-up notecard or whatever from noob island explaining "Sl has many great ways to make Lindens here are a few examples. Good at making things, try selling objects created inworld or through external programs like blender.. blah, blah, blah".

[Mollymews]

15 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

That is indeed a simple thing to script, as you know.  It's no more difficult than any other dance machine. So, why not write the script and sell it in your Marketplace store as a tool for a club owner to drop into the dance floor? I sell plenty of script tools in my own shop. too.  Why should this be something you expect LL to provide?

my thoughts come from my experience making components that can be drag-dropped onto a application surface. The properties of a component can be set at designtime (and/or can be set by script at runtime), and when set to Active they just do what they are designed to do

some components are simple, others a bit more complex. Take a simple Label component in a 2D application.  A similarity in a 3D application like SL is the Text property of a prim. Script only then llSetText("Hello World", color, alpha);

the SL prim does have some properties surfaced in the design time editor. Like: Color, Size, Orientation, etc

surfacing the Text property in the same way

Prim -------
-- Color
-- Size
-- Text
---- String:
---- Color:
---- Alpha:

a little more complex component is a door. A door component would have all the properties of a prim, with additional properties

Open -
   Type: Swing | Slide
   Axis:  (vector distance offset from center of door)
   Travel:  (vector distance the door will travel. When Type: Swing then around the axis)
   Time: (float time for door to travel)  
   Action: OnTouch, OnCollision. (choice(s) of methods to open the door)
   Close: (float time to autoclose door after being opened. 0.0 to not autoclose
   Active: True | False.  (when False, door does not respond to the action)

the dance floor example I mentioned is a more than little complex example of this kind of component design. Another more than little complex example would be a vehicle engine component

another more simple example is say a mesh rock, which is distributed Modify and comes with a texture changer script

were it possible for the rock builder to add texture names to a drop down list property at design time (rather than only the single name property as is now) then it obsoletes the need for a texture changer script to be distributed with the rock

a thing that motivates me as a component builder is making stuff that does stuff for people who are non-programmers in ways that they can relate to sooner and more easily

[eyeye Afterthought]

On 10/29/2019 at 1:18 AM, PropaneNightmares said:

Check it out. https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/Second_Life

the best bit for me was point 14 "it's also dangerously addictive"

and point 7, he probably had a point.

[rasterscan]

On 10/29/2019 at 1:18 AM, PropaneNightmares said:

... the player base is small ...

Its the 'wee' hours stateside so this is a minimal figure:

28K + users online right now. It'll be 45K - 55K users later.

Edited November 2, 2019 by rasterscan

[Drake1 Nightfire]

3 hours ago, rasterscan said:

Its the 'wee' hours stateside so this is a minimal figure:

28K + users online right now. It'll be 45K - 55K users later.

3 hours later... 

Will check back at noon SLT. 

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 10/29/2019 at 6:10 PM, animats said:

The swim problem is kind of sad. A few weeks ago I was in Bay City, and a one-day old couple were trying to use a kayak in the Bay City canals. That's a nice way to go around SL. They were having a terrible time with control, though, and kept hitting the walls. The kayak had them doing a paddle animation, but with no paddles, probably because they didn't know how to attach them.

Then one of the couple gave up, and stood. She then sank to the bottom of the canal and couldn't get out. I watched her struggle for a while, and then I IM'd "push PAGE UP". So she did, flew upward, hit the underside of a bridge, and couldn't maneuver out of there because she was now trapped by the bridge girders. Finally she got out, but not gracefully.

I actually find this a very strange story in 2019.

Most people in 2019 have extensive history in a variety of 3D games, so the above story just wouldn't happen. There are all kinds of ways to make that a smoother experience that anyone in 2019 with a moderate amount of modern gaming experience would just intuitively look for and do.

In 2003, I would have expected that. But after 2005, 3D gaming was a norm for millions of people.

Yeah swim not on my default is annoying - but people would quickly just do an assortment of other keybinds and figure it out these days.