No Sansar

[greek Wingtips]

Well Now Sansar has  been booted, rightly so, aways said it was a waste of time and money now LL can focus on SL, what would you like to see as improvements and any ideas?

[Richardus Raymaker]

Better framerate,

lower sim prices,

real first person mode.

Xbox one controller support.

[Conifer Dada]

Improvements to the 'system' avatar that do not upset texturing.  A few more sliders and the ability to apply textures to one arm or one foot would be useful. 

A built-in land rental system.

The ability to produce mesh shapes in 'build' mode.

Better performance in busy places - less lag and quicker rezzing.

[ChinRey]

I've posted much of this before but:

As a content creator:

• A way to monitor and control content performance. One that covers all kinds of content, all parts of the rendering pipeline and is based on realistic estimates of how various items and features affect performance that is.
• A fixed RenderVolumeLODFactor.
• A softer and more realistic default windlight that doesn't wreack havoc on normal maps, specular maps and alpha masking.

Yes, I know there are sexier and more popular upates than those but these are all about fixing fundamental flaws that have crept into the core of the software over the years. It's tempting to keep piling up new shinies on top of the old but unless the fundament is strenghtened, sooner or later the whole thing will collapse under its own weight. It's only a question of when.

As a Second Life user in general:

• Sailable waters all around and between all the major continents.
• A variety of themed areas to accomodate the widest possible range of interests and cultural backgrounds. Second Norway is a fairly good example but that's only one. I don't know how many Germans there are left in SL, there used to be a lot but it seems many have migrated to opensim. There should still be enough to justify a "Second Germany" though. Then there are the Spanish, the Italians, the Brazilians, the Japanese, the Indian, the Chinese, etc., etc., etc. That's not something Linden Lab can deliver of course, if they tried we'd only end up with a bunch of Shareta Osumai-ish mockups. It would require highly qualified content creators and land managers from all over the world and yet ideally there should be a way to incorporate housings there into a premium membership. I'm sure there is a way to achieve this but it would take some lateral thinking.

Edited April 1, 2020 by ChinRey
Typos

[bigmoe Whitfield]

5 hours ago, Richardus Raymaker said:

Better framerate,

lower sim prices,

real first person mode.

Xbox one controller support.

Better Frame Rate: that's not going to happen in the long run,  user created content is unoptimized, sorry but it's the nature of SL.

Lower Sim Prices: LL can only do so much before it hit's their bottom line, it's not cheap and it never will be cheap,  Lower the prices go , the more people go nuts and start buying, which in turns means more hardware, more bandwidth, more hands on support,  things that will take anything they earn and make them have to throw it right back into hardware and such,  it's a no win situation on this one.

Real First Person Mode: Not sure I understand this one at all.

Xbox one controller support:  I use a wired usb xbox controller and it's supported,  you just have to set it up, as SL is a keyboard and mouse interface, just like most other mmorpgersthings.

[Anna Nova]

6 hours ago, greek Wingtips said:

Well Now Sansar has  been booted, rightly so, aways said it was a waste of time and money now LL can focus on SL, what would you like to see as improvements and any ideas?

Fix sim crossing.  Don't care about anything else.

[ChinRey]

34 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Better Frame Rate: that's not going to happen in the long run,  user created content is unoptimized, sorry but it's the nature of SL.

That's the idea behind my first point. If people want unoptimized rezzables and laggy avatars, that's ok. It only means there'll be room for less cotnent and fewer avatars in the region.

 

42 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Lower Sim Prices: LL can only do so much before it hit's their bottom line, it's not cheap and it never will be cheap,  Lower the prices go , the more people go nuts and start buying, which in turns means more hardware, more bandwidth, more hands on support,  things that will take anything they earn and make them have to throw it right back into hardware and such,  it's a no win situation on this one.

Nevertheless, that is something LL actually is working on. If we copare to modern virtual realities LL's services are grossly overpriced. Even Ebbe Altberg himself has aknowledged that. The problem is that they are stuck with so many expensive and inefficient solutions from the days when SL was the thing and money was flowing freely. It's very hard to do anything about that and I think they've pushed the alternative solution - shift the load from one grossly overpriced service to another equally grossly overpriced one - as far as it goes and then some.

 

51 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Real First Person Mode: Not sure I understand this one at all.

See the world through the eyes of your avatar - something similar to mouselook camera position but without all the changes in how the controls work. This would actually have been on top of my wish list but unfortunately there is no way it can possibly be implemented in Second Life. It would mean drastic changes to virtually every aspect of SL.

[Sorciaa]

+1 on more sail able water. I was soo happy when I got my houseboat and could take my boat out whenever I liked. Now, its like trying to sail in a Walmart parking lot with all the new houseboats they put up.

[Lancewae Barrowstone]

I saw a new arrival standing in one spot when I landed at a shop.  I went back next day and she was still there and I walked over, she was AFK and earning some meager $L standing by a prim on the ground that I clicked.  I sent her a week's worth of Linden, explaining that I saw her there so she would understand.  My suggestion to SL going forward:

Fix that!  

New players shouldn't have to stand in one spot for hours (no knowing any better) to try to earn some meager in-game currency in order to hope to fit here, to try to DO something here,  to try to BE something here. 

Yes, there are all sorts of answers, yes I know, help is everywhere, mentors are avaiable, explanations abound, Forums are here.  Yet, there they are, intrepid at the Fishing spots.  Or standing alone at a small out-of-the-way shopping spot.  

As untidy as this suggestion is, $L helps newbies.  Their common question is, how do I get a job?  Standing AFK, as a job for newbies, is simply not acceptable.

 

Edited April 1, 2020 by Lancewae Barrowstone
Edit: Let me add that yes I know that sim owners are using these little methods and it's not an "official' job, nor LL's fault, etc. Just using that as an example of a larger issue. :)

[Lancewae Barrowstone]

Edit2:  Yes, I know the argument that they can just buy Premium and the world of SL opens up to them.  That's obvious, and SL needs that income to exist. My approach in this thread is that SL also needs vigor, and that comes from people.

Most newbies start without paying for Premium because they want to understand the game, and may then (like the rest of us) decide that YES, it’s worth investing here, worth pulling out the credit card and BUYING some lindens to do what I now want to do.  That’s just an additional avenue to get to the same point, right?  And it’s one worth not losing.

[animats]

Viewer 3.

The sim-side people are tied up on "cloud uplift", but the viewer doesn't change much for that. So a good project for the next year is a new viewer.

• Target reasonably modern computers. Pick a level that 75% of Steam users have. Steam publishes statistics on that, so you can tell what most users have. That would probably be roughly an NVidia 1060 (most popular graphics card on Steam), 32GB RAM, 4 CPUs, 100GB SSD space for the cache. Weaker hardware should still work, but that's a good recommended level.
• Use Vulkan. Do more in the GPU, more per draw call, more concurrency. Multithread rendering. This is difficult but essential.
• Maintain a minimum frame rate of 30FPS. Cut visual quality and draw distance automatically if necessary, but keep the frame rate.
• Add viewer side support for PBR and impostors, even if the server won't support them yet.
• Add support for terrain impostors in the distance. Instead of seeing water where land should be, show an aerial image of the terrain. Initially, a flat image. Later, put the image on a sculpt of elevation data, with about 4m x 4m squares. Do this like map tiles - 1/4 region tiles, 1 region tiles, 4 region tiles, 16 region tiles. Tiles are rebuilt daily by some bot-like process like the one that makes the world map. Now you can see for many kilometers. SL is big, but it feels small, because you can't see very far. This would fix that. You could then run with lower draw distances and the world would still look good.
• Get smart about asset loading order. Load the stuff that's in the direction the user is going and looking. The viewer tries to do some of that, but not very well.
• Support the PS5 and the XBox X, which have more power than the suggested specs above.
• Support game controllers on all platforms.

The end goal is an SL viewer that performs like an AAA game. It's not impossible, just hard. SL's technology is great decade-old work, but there's been progress and SL has been Left Behind. Yes, it would take staffing. Probably 10 experienced game developers and a manager with a track record of delivering. It's client side; you can hire people who know how to do that.

(At one time I was thinking that using Unreal Engine in the viewer would be a good idea. It turns out to be marginal. Many of the tricks UE4 uses to get performance are in the asset preprocessing in their development environment. SL has to do all the dynamically. Still, a long talk between Epic and Linden Lab about that might be productive. Epic keeps talking "metaverse", and eventually they'll need to be able to do all that stuff dynamically. This might be the project that got Epic to do some of the heavy lifting in that area. This is a management-level problem for LL.)

[Paul Hexem]

3 hours ago, animats said:

Viewer 3.

The sim-side people are tied up on "cloud uplift", but the viewer doesn't change much for that. So a good project for the next year is a new viewer.

• Target reasonably modern computers. Pick a level that 75% of Steam users have. Steam publishes statistics on that, so you can tell what most users have. That would probably be roughly an NVidia 1060 (most popular graphics card on Steam), 32GB RAM, 4 CPUs, 100GB SSD space for the cache. Weaker hardware should still work, but that's a good recommended level.
• Use Vulkan. Do more in the GPU, more per draw call, more concurrency. Multithread rendering. This is difficult but essential.
• Maintain a minimum frame rate of 30FPS. Cut visual quality and draw distance automatically if necessary, but keep the frame rate.
• Add viewer side support for PBR and impostors, even if the server won't support them yet.
• Add support for terrain impostors in the distance. Instead of seeing water where land should be, show an aerial image of the terrain. Initially, a flat image. Later, put the image on a sculpt of elevation data, with about 4m x 4m squares. Do this like map tiles - 1/4 region tiles, 1 region tiles, 4 region tiles, 16 region tiles. Tiles are rebuilt daily by some bot-like process like the one that makes the world map. Now you can see for many kilometers. SL is big, but it feels small, because you can't see very far. This would fix that. You could then run with lower draw distances and the world would still look good.
• Get smart about asset loading order. Load the stuff that's in the direction the user is going and looking. The viewer tries to do some of that, but not very well.
• Support the PS5 and the XBox X, which have more power than the suggested specs above.
• Support game controllers on all platforms.

The end goal is an SL viewer that performs like an AAA game. It's not impossible, just hard. SL's technology is great decade-old work, but there's been progress and SL has been Left Behind. Yes, it would take staffing. Probably 10 experienced game developers and a manager with a track record of delivering. It's client side; you can hire people who know how to do that.

(At one time I was thinking that using Unreal Engine in the viewer would be a good idea. It turns out to be marginal. Many of the tricks UE4 uses to get performance are in the asset preprocessing in their development environment. SL has to do all the dynamically. Still, a long talk between Epic and Linden Lab about that might be productive. Epic keeps talking "metaverse", and eventually they'll need to be able to do all that stuff dynamically. This might be the project that got Epic to do some of the heavy lifting in that area. This is a management-level problem for LL.)

They'll never do any of that. That requires work.

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, animats said:

• Target reasonably modern computers. Pick a level that 75% of Steam users have. Steam publishes statistics on that, so you can tell what most users have. That would probably be roughly an NVidia 1060 (most popular graphics card on Steam), 32GB RAM, 4 CPUs, 100GB SSD space for the cache. Weaker hardware should still work, but that's a good recommended level.

That would be the end of my days in Second Life. More importantly, I don't have any hard facts of course but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it would mean kicking out half the current SL population.

Edited April 2, 2020 by ChinRey

[Maitimo]

12 hours ago, Lancewae Barrowstone said:

I saw a new arrival standing in one spot when I landed at a shop.  I went back next day and she was still there and I walked over, she was AFK and earning some meager $L standing by a prim on the ground that I clicked.  I sent her a week's worth of Linden, explaining that I saw her there so she would understand.  My suggestion to SL going forward:

Fix that!  

New players shouldn't have to stand in one spot for hours (no knowing any better) to try to earn some meager in-game currency in order to hope to fit here, to try to DO something here,  to try to BE something here. 

Yes, there are all sorts of answers, yes I know, help is everywhere, mentors are avaiable, explanations abound, Forums are here.  Yet, there they are, intrepid at the Fishing spots.  Or standing alone at a small out-of-the-way shopping spot.  

As untidy as this suggestion is, $L helps newbies.  Their common question is, how do I get a job?  Standing AFK, as a job for newbies, is simply not acceptable.

 

Yes, fixing the new user experience would be top of my list too, and giving them money would be a part of it. But instead of having them idly AFK for hours, give them a way to really earn it by learning. There should be a staged orientation process, with tasks/quests to complete (how to walk, chat, fly, use landmarks, buy and wear clothes, basic building etc,) and each stage of the tutorial should have a modest monetary reward. That would incentivise players to actually complete the orientation and also give them a bit of spending money to start off with. 

My only concern with this would be players making hundreds or thousands of throwaway alts just to get the money, but if the tutorial is long-winded enough, and has frequent anti-bot checks throughout, it should be sufficient to prevent most people from doing that.

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Discussions like this tend to be dominated by calls for technical and graphical improvements to SL, and the underlying assumption is usually that most users of SL are gamers who are used to high quality graphics, and lots of special affordances associated with animation, scripting, and so forth.

It's really very difficult to know what "most" SL residents are like, because we all tend to exist within our own little bubbles, but I'm not a gamer, and my own experience suggests that, in fact, "gamers" are something of a minority among the great majority of users here. I know a few, but they are definitely a quite small percentage of my friends -- at least "serious" gamers are.

The circles in which I move tend to be filled with people who see SL as more of a social platform. Many of them are using relatively light-weight computers, and a great many of them never have their graphics at even "High," yet alone "Ultra." What they want is low lag, and maybe improved communications tools. They don't actually care much about shadows and depth of field, or even draw distance: they just want to be able to move in crowded clubs without seeing their fps drop to 4.

I think that good graphics are important: I am a photographer, so I highly value this element. But I think it's a mistake to believe that most residents care about, or are even knowledgeable enough to be able to judge how well this platform compares, graphically, to triple A games.

The other thing that I can guarantee is important to most users is the ability to customize their avatars. Right now, customization is a nightmare. BOM will make things a bit easier down the road, but this is an area that really needs to be a focus in the future -- particularly with an eye to making customization easier and more accessible for new users.

Use the games on Steam as a gauge of the kind of computers that we should expect from most users, and you will lose, I am convinced, a huge proportion of residents. A gaming computer is just not the norm here. SL needs to be able to accommodate "power users" who expect good graphics, but that's not the most important task that needs to be done. SL needs to be usable, in a real and practical sense, by people who don't have high-end machines.

[Maitimo]

7 hours ago, animats said:

• Target reasonably modern computers. Pick a level that 75% of Steam users have. Steam publishes statistics on that, so you can tell what most users have. That would probably be roughly an NVidia 1060 (most popular graphics card on Steam), 32GB RAM, 4 CPUs, 100GB SSD space for the cache. Weaker hardware should still work, but that's a good recommended level.

Hell no. That would be me (and a lot of other people I know) kicked out of SL. They should be doing the opposite; ensuring that lower-powered devices like tablets and phones can access SL too, because nowadays those things are all that many people have to access the internet.

 

[Paul Hexem]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

That would be the end of my days in Second Life. More importantly, I don't have any hard facts of course but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it would mean kicking out half the current SL population.

 

28 minutes ago, Matty Luminos said:

Yes, fixing the new user experience would be top of my list too, and giving them money would be a part of it. But instead of having them idly AFK for hours, give them a way to really earn it by learning. There should be a staged orientation process, with tasks/quests to complete (how to walk, chat, fly, use landmarks, buy and wear clothes, basic building etc,) and each stage of the tutorial should have a modest monetary reward. That would incentivise players to actually complete the orientation and also give them a bit of spending money to start off with. 

My only concern with this would be players making hundreds or thousands of throwaway alts just to get the money, but if the tutorial is long-winded enough, and has frequent anti-bot checks throughout, it should be sufficient to prevent most people from doing that.

 

 

23 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Discussions like this tend to be dominated by calls for technical and graphical improvements to SL, and the underlying assumption is usually that most users of SL are gamers who are used to high quality graphics, and lots of special affordances associated with animation, scripting, and so forth.

It's really very difficult to know what "most" SL residents are like, because we all tend to exist within our own little bubbles, but I'm not a gamer, and my own experience suggests that, in fact, "gamers" are something of a minority among the great majority of users here. I know a few, but they are definitely a quite small percentage of my friends -- at least "serious" gamers are.

The circles in which I move tend to be filled with people who see SL as more of a social platform. Many of them are using relatively light-weight computers, and a great many of them never have their graphics at even "High," yet alone "Ultra." What they want is low lag, and maybe improved communications tools. They don't actually care much about shadows and depth of field, or even draw distance: they just want to be able to move in crowded clubs without seeing their fps drop to 4.

I think that good graphics are important: I am a photographer, so I highly value this element. But I think it's a mistake to believe that most residents care about, or are even knowledgeable enough to be able to judge how well this platform compares, graphically, to triple A games.

The other thing that I can guarantee is important to most users is the ability to customize their avatars. Right now, customization is a nightmare. BOM will make things a bit easier down the road, but this is an area that really needs to be a focus in the future -- particularly with an eye to making customization easier and more accessible for new users.

Use the games on Steam as a gauge of the kind of computers that we should expect from most users, and you will lose, I am convinced, a huge proportion of residents. A gaming computer is just not the norm here. SL needs to be able to accommodate "power users" who expect good graphics, but that's not the most important task that needs to be done. SL needs to be usable, in a real and practical sense, by people who don't have high-end machines.

 

23 minutes ago, Matty Luminos said:

Hell no. That would be me (and a lot of other people I know) kicked out of SL. They should be doing the opposite; ensuring that lower-powered devices like tablets and phones can access SL too, because nowadays those things are all that many people have to access the internet.

 

The thing is, technical improvements wouldn't just benefit gamers. Utilizing things like multithreading and 64 bit architecture will benefit everyone, even if gaming PCs would benefit the most.

It also simply doesn't make sense to stagnate and lag out the bulk of users because some can't or won't get hardware that isn't a decade or more old. 

Even cell phones and tablets are running multiple cores now, amd some have separate GPUs, so even they'd benefit from updating the technology. 

Edited April 2, 2020 by Gadget Portal

[Anna Nova]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

That would be the end of my days in Second Life. More importantly, I don't have any hard facts of course but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it would mean kicking out half the current SL population.

I have a very powerful computer, and a good fast connection, but with lousy latency 'cos I live in Rural England.  SL is already pretty bad except for standing around trying on clothes and building stuff - with my latency every sim crossing is an adventure.

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Matty Luminos said:

There should be a staged orientation process, with tasks/quests to complete (how to walk, chat, fly, use landmarks, buy and wear clothes, basic building etc,) and each stage of the tutorial should have a modest monetary reward. That would incentivise players to actually complete the orientation and also give them a bit of spending money to start off with.

They did actually have that for a while. The money people earned from finishing the learning chores wasn't L$, it was a special currency that only could be used at a specific store so it didn't affect the SL economy.

I'm not convinced it's a good idea though. When I first joined Second Life, I didn't stay long. One of the two reasons was that I was instantly hit with the "buy, Buy, BUY!!!" pressure. The message was loud and clear right from the moment I first rezzed: "We don't mind you staying but what we really want, is your money." That was more than ten years ago and it's much worse now. It's the commercial equivalent to the "Hey wanna f**k?" pickup line so many SL males seem to think is appropriate to greet a lady with. It's far more likely to drive people away than entice them.

This has nothing to do with the commercial vs idealism question, it's about one of the most fundamental rules every good salesperson knows and follows: Do not try to close the sale too soon!

Edited April 2, 2020 by ChinRey

[ChinRey]

33 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said:

It also simply doesn't make sense to stagnate and lag out the bulk of users because some can't or won't get hardware that isn't a decade or more old. 

Awww please! The "buy a better computer" argument never held water. We're not talking about decades old hardware here either but perfectly normal brand new off-the-shelf computers.

And of course, it's the connection issue Anna mentioned. In Europe, even if you do have a fast internet, the connection to the SL servers still has to squeeze through the mid/east US bottleneck and that is a serious limitation the user can't do anything about.

This is also a lot about recruitment. No remotely sane person will spend money on hardware just to check out Second Life. They will try log on with the regular everyday computer they have and if that doesn't work, they'll leave for good. It's only after they have to spent a bit of time there and decided they enjoy it before they might even consider buying special hardware for their new hobby.

 

33 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said:

The thing is, technical improvements wouldn't just benefit gamers. Utilizing things like multithreading and 64 bit architecture will benefit everyone, even if gaming PCs would benefit the most.

That's a completely different thing, it's exactly the opposite in fact. Upgrading the software to run more efficiently should lower, not increase the hardware requirements.

Edited April 2, 2020 by ChinRey

[Paul Hexem]

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Awww please! The "buy a better computer" argument never held water. We're not talking about decades old hardware here either but perfectly normal brand new off-the-shelf computers.

And of course, it's the connection issue Anna mentioned. In Europe, even if you do have a fast internet, the connection to the SL servers still has to squeeze through the mid/east US bottleneck and that is a serious limitation the user can't do anything about.

This is also a lot about recruitment. No remotely sane person will spend money on hardware just to check out Second Life. They will try log on with the regular everyday computer they have and if that doesn't work, they'll leave for good. It's only after they have to spent a bit of time there and decided they enjoy it before they might even consider buying special hardware for their new hobby.

 

That's a completely different thing, it's exactly the opposite in fact. Upgrading the software to run more efficiently should lower, not increase the hardware requirements.

All games have recommended and minimum requirements. For the most part, the minimum simply means "modern". Treating SL different and letting people think it's Barbie Dress Up Facebook is why there's always an active thread complaining about lag. 

SL is a game like other MMOs and requires a gaming computer, and should benefit from the same advances in technology. 

[CaerolleClaudel]

This topic seems to come up on a recurring basis. IMO, LL has its own priorities and is going to do what it is going to do. And I hear the people familiar with all the technical stuff saying it is too expensive for LL fix most of the issues, and that fixing the issues is incompatible with the flexibility that sets SL apart from game-games.

That said, though, lag always was the thing I hated most about SL. Probably I am not using that term in exactly the right sense, because I include the 4 fps at clubs in that too. I stupidly used to think that LL would fix it someday, but finally let go of that hope.

The thing that finally got to me, though, is something that LL either can't do anything about or is incompetent at doing anything about, or some combination of the two. I have not really been able to find anything of enduring interest in SL for years. Of course, things change, but the things I most loved about SL are gone and aren't coming back (yes, I am one of those). I tried developing other interests, but was not able to find anything that engaged me long term. Of course, it isn't just SL that has changed, I am older and I have changed, too. Unfortunately, SL and I have changed in diverging directions.

Wrt to newbies, I am not convinced that a lot of new people are joining SL, or that the people who join stay. I rarely saw new people at the places I went. I do agree that a lot of the new people I see seem pretty lost. OTOH, I see a lot of month-old avis with full mesh bodies and awesome looks. I feel that SL does not make it easy to figure things out. Sure, they have the new resident orientation, but that is really basic. In spite of being here a long time when I got my mesh body, and even longer when I got my mesh head (and having experience with the mesh body), I had a really hard time understanding what to get and how to use it. I think LL has a Get Started page on the SL site, but it is Sign Up For Premium And Get A Linden Home and stuff like that. There is a wiki, which I find pretty awful. Maybe I have not done a good job of trying to find LL info, but anything I want to do means an internet search and a lot of digging to figure out what I want to do. I don't think I have ever run across guides and how-to things that just explain in simple terms how to do what I want. Same with finding things to do in SL. And the Destination Guide on the SL website is horrible, with mostly dead LMs.

Anyhow, this was probably off-topic. I don't have any technical suggestions that LL could apply now that they don't have Sansar, or really any wish list that I have any hope of them fulfilling. I guess my point is that it seems like the things that would make the biggest difference to me are not going to happen, either because they are technically or financially unfeasible or because LL's culture does not value them, and after all this time, that probably  isn't going to change.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Gadget Portal said:

All games have recommended and minimum requirements. For the most part, the minimum simply means "modern". Treating SL different and letting people think it's Barbie Dress Up Facebook is why there's always an active thread complaining about lag. 

SL is a game like other MMOs and requires a gaming computer, and should benefit from the same advances in technology. 

You do realize that what you are actually saying is that I'm not welcome in Second Life? Thank you for letting me know.

Oh well, I suppose I could scrape together enough money to buy a game computer but I'm not going to. This thing is far too expanesive already and I have better things to spend my money on.

But I'm thinking about all the other people you also want to get rid of. I don't have any hard facts as I said but the people I know of and remember off the top of my head that you also want to get rid of includes - in addition to many people you've never heard of of course (some of them disabled with very limited incomes and very limited alternatives for soemthing resembling a normal life) - at least three prolific forumites, one well known cotnent creator (and member of what Prokofy calls "the feted inner core") who has made major contributions to SL in the past, one scripter who makes his full tiem living from SL, a well known and fairly big "land baron", etc., etc.

Oh, and also several Lindens. But I suppose LL would have to shell out the cash for something stronger than the MacBook Pros they've assigned to much of their staff if they really wanted to turn SL into Blue Mars 2.

But LL won't get along with it of course, it would probably mean almost instant bankrupcy for them. Not only would they loose much of their current in come stream, they'd also eliminate any chance of ever recruiting new users. It's not as if Second Life is popular among the gamer crowd after all. Even modern virtual worlds like High Fidelity and Sansar, both with far lower hardware requirements than what you ask for and potentially far better appeal to the "high end gamer" crowd, didn't manage to catch their attention.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

I gotta know, do people go onto the Steam forums and complain that Doom Eternal won't run on their Chromebooks, or is this a Second Life thing? Second Life isn't even that hard to run. It doesn't have the DirectX 11 or 12 requirements of modern games, so you can run it on ridiculously old, and now very cheap hardware.

[ChinRey]

2 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

you can run it on ridiculously old, and now very cheap hardware.

Yes and I think we should keep it that way if possible.

That being said, if I take GadgetPortal's snide remark about ten year old computers literally, I have to agree that may not be realistic in the long run. But there is a difference between that and the hardware Animats listed in much the same way that there is a difference between a child's tricycle and a Ferrari.