Good ol days of SL?

[ChinRey]

On 12/5/2020 at 7:33 AM, Lucia Nightfire said:

I miss the level of innovation in the features Andrew and Kelly Linden gave us every quarter.

That ended after December 2013.

I don't disagree with you but the rushed introduction of new features came at a price and it's a price we keep paying today. Sculpts, mesh, fitted mesh, MOP, New Materials, Pathfinding, KFM... they all have serious flaws that should have been avoided, limit their usefulness and keep causing all sorts of problems. On balance, I think it's a good thing they've slowed down the launching of new shinies and spend more time doing damage control and more thorough development work.

[Lucia Nightfire]

33 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I don't disagree with you but the rushed introduction of new features came at a price and it's a price we keep paying today. Sculpts, mesh, fitted mesh, MOP, New Materials, Pathfinding, KFM... they all have serious flaws that should have been avoided, limit their usefulness and keep causing all sorts of problems. On balance, I think it's a good thing they've slowed down the launching of new shinies and spend more time doing damage control and more thorough development work.

To be fair, most of the things you mentioned were not conceived nor implemented by Andrew or Kelly Linden, but yes, there have been far too many partially-implemented features over the years. Even Animesh, BoM and EEP were partially implemented.

I think its better to balance backend work and feature work in tandem.

As far as "slowed down", they've been slowed down for years.

It didn't help that Sansar became a huge waste of time & money.

That platform's failure skewed management's decisions on what to pursue feature-wise and it's unfair because features were certainly not the reason that platform failed.

[Nick0678]

Personally i did like that  SL although at an early stage and being very simple still looked good even without mesh bodies, bom, animesh etc at least for my taste which is more towards fantasy characters. This is a flexiprim gown that i got for my group manager bot back in 2011.

[Gage Wirefly]

In my earliest days in SL, I frequented a little coffee shop on a sim called Mill Pond. People were so nice and it was a genuine community, always people to chat with, very helpful.  That sim later closed because people used dance animations and the owner didn't like it. That actually happened! lol

Later there were a couple of sims named Hallelujah after the Leonard Cohen song. Always tons of friendly people and the owners were super nice also.There was always something fun going on there.  Easily the prettiest sims I had ever seen at the time .  Seems like ages ago as it's all long gone.

 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Is the Far Away gone????? 😮

Oops, no, not that I’m aware of. My bad.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

I think thinking of the past as 'good ol' days' is just looking back with rose tinted glasses and nostalgia. There are good and bad things about any time, past or present.

Having said that there are a couple of things that I think have changed that I miss from the early days, already mentioned by some in previous posts:

• Inworld building - I like mesh for the low LI and a lot of it does look great, but I loved seeing, and I admired, the ingenuity from builders I've seen in the past using just prims. I wish there was a way to create mesh inworld.
• More people talking in chat - everyone seemed to in the old days and it seemed much easier to strike up a conversation with someone. Now, most people don't seem to notice if you type in chat because they are busy in IM's or whatever. I understand why, but I just think people seem less approachable because of it.

I have a lot of fond memories from the early days, that's not to say SL was 'better' back then all round. Some bits yes, others not.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

9 hours ago, Gage Wirefly said:

In my earliest days in SL, I frequented a little coffee shop on a sim called Mill Pond. People were so nice and it was a genuine community, always people to chat with, very helpful.  That sim later closed because people used dance animations and the owner didn't like it. That actually happened! lol

Later there were a couple of sims named Hallelujah after the Leonard Cohen song. Always tons of friendly people and the owners were super nice also.There was always something fun going on there.  Easily the prettiest sims I had ever seen at the time .  Seems like ages ago as it's all long gone.

 

Well, weird.

Gage, I was a regular at Mill Pond for most of the last year of its existence.

And I owned a bookstore on the town square at Hallelujah. (My business partner, Lulu, and I moved it to Chllbo after Hallelujah closed.)

Did we know each other? Were you using the same account then? At the very least we must have had friends in common.

ETA: Weird also that you mention dancing at Mill Pond . . .

Edited December 6, 2020 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Rolig Loon]

49 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And I owned a bookstore on the town square at Hallelujah.

That was you in Shakespeare's Sister?  I remember the place.  It's been so long that I can't recall the geography any more.  I had a shop on Hallelujah Azul for a while, back in 2009.  That was the last of the Leonard Cohen regions to vanish, I think, but I don't remember how it was connected to the others.  I don't even remember who owed the region.  Nice place, though.

[Gage Wirefly]

7 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

That was you in Shakespeare's Sister?  I remember the place.  It's been so long that I can't recall the geography any more.  I had a shop on Hallelujah Azul for a while, back in 2009.  That was the last of the Leonard Cohen regions to vanish, I think, but I don't remember how it was connected to the others.  I don't even remember who owed the region.  Nice place, though.

Owly Indigo and PT Beardmore as I recall. 

[Rolig Loon]

Just now, Gage Wirefly said:

Owly Indigo and PT Beardmore as I recall. 

Good memory!  It was PT Beardmore that I dealt with.  Thanks for coming up with the name.   Gosh, it's been a long time....

[Gage Wirefly]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

 

Did we know each other? Were you using the same account then? At the very least we must have had friends in common.

ETA: Weird also that you mention dancing at Mill Pond . . .

No to all 3.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

35 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Good memory!  It was PT Beardmore that I dealt with.  Thanks for coming up with the name.   Gosh, it's been a long time....

PT, Owly Indigo (who of course had an owlerie behind her house), and Gwen Bieler, who was the last owner of the sim.

They were, all of them, sweethearts.

ETA: I see Gage has mentioned Owly already.

Mariko Nightfire's blog has a fairly lengthy description of the sim.

Edited December 7, 2020 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

On 12/4/2020 at 9:32 PM, Fritigern Gothly said:

I miss being amazed by the magic of everything, being impressed by the clothing and hair, made of flexi prims, seeing stuff that was scripted so it actually did stuff and being blown away by how realistic that friend's avatar looked after she bought this new skin.

Things were so much simpler then, we could still build with prims and it would actually be considered good. I can find a couple of builds in-world which I can show people and they would often be surprised that it was all made of prims, not a sculptie, let alone mesh, in sight.

When I had my club up --- it was made of prims.  This was until very recently.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

49 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

That was you in Shakespeare's Sister?  I remember the place.  It's been so long that I can't recall the geography any more.  I had a shop on Hallelujah Azul for a while, back in 2009.  That was the last of the Leonard Cohen regions to vanish, I think, but I don't remember how it was connected to the others.  I don't even remember who owed the region.  Nice place, though.

Wow, coincidences continue to abound. Is your store pictured in any of the photos on Mariko's blog that I linked to above?

Yes, Shakespeare's Sister was me and my business partner, Lulubelle. Hallelujah was actually our second location -- in another instance of synchronicity, our first was on a parcel provided free for us by Frey Bravin, the guiding spirit and first director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum in SL, mentioned by Eddy on the first page of this thread.

I occasionally have idle thoughts of re-opening the bookstore (Lulu has set up a non-functioning version on another sim). And then I think about converting all the books to mesh, retexturing and rescripting them, updating links, and the sheer work involved in keeping it a going concern, and I think . . . meh.

[Rolig Loon]

18 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Is your store pictured in any of the photos on Mariko's blog that I linked to above?

No, sadly.  If you look at the fourth photo down, there's an archway on the right side.  My shop was down that alley, almost at the end, where it ran into what I remember as a big rock.  I spent a bit of time at the Jiittery Junco, but I always felt sort of on the outside.  IIRC, I had my shop for maybe 9 months toward the end of 2009, maybe into 2010, and then moved to Mayfair, where traffic was better but sales weren't.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I spent a bit of time at the Jiittery Junco, but I always felt sort of on the outside.

I'm sorry. It was actually a really nice community -- much less drama-laden than Mill Pond. I might have got to know you! (And I think I'd remember if we ever met because, as I think I've mentioned before, I knew of you through a few friends like Teachergirl Razor and JJ Drinkwater, and probably others).

[Eggy UwU]

On 12/4/2020 at 11:26 PM, Robin Kiyori said:

People typing in local chat. Mostplaces are dead silent now.

so true! this is why i find certain sandboxes with voice or with people that are active...other than that i barely go to clubs or dead places anymore.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

3 minutes ago, Ignis Dismantled said:

so true! this is why i find certain sandboxes with voice or with people that are active...other than that i barely go to clubs or dead places anymore.

The club my man used to DJ at is pretty dead.  Usually the owner and many members of their only DJ now.

[Eggy UwU]

1 hour ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

The club my man used to DJ at is pretty dead.  Usually the owner and many members of their only DJ now.

i have noticed that as well! it's honestly sad because i like sim hopping, trying to meet new people, exploring, and more, but sadly no one ever really likes to talk or seems to keep to themselves. i mean come on!

[Stephanie Misfit]

Prim building, and the amazing prim builders that we lost with the introduction of mesh. I feel that in some ways SL lost a great deal with the introduction of mesh. A lot of creators have a solely commercial rather than community focus now. I'm not saying that you shouldn't make money from SL, of course not. But in the past, people came to SL, participated in the community and were inspired to create with the tools that were available to us all. 

Shopping malls and shopping sims, rather than events. Yes, some of them were gaudy, but there were some really good ones too. Hell, just give me main store releases like we used to have rather than this endless stream of events. I've noticed that some "stores" that release in events don't even have an actual store, not even on the marketplace, they just release their stuff in events and then you can't buy it once it is gone.

And of course, my old friends. They are all still on my list, even if they haven't logged on in over 10 years, just in case they come back. And guess what? Sometimes they do. During the pandemic I've seen 2 of them return after many years and they were both really pleased to see that I was there and hadn't deleted them. Apparently everyone else had either removed them as friends or had left. It was interesting to hear about the lives they had been living in the years they have been gone.

 

 

[Cassidy Starlight]

The Barbie Club 🙂

[ChinRey]

20 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

To be fair, most of the things you mentioned were not conceived nor implemented by Andrew or Kelly Linden, but yes, there have been far too many partially-implemented features over the years.

Andrew Linden was responsible anyway of course since he was the CTO but to be fair, there's a question how much actual power he had. It's very hard to be in a middle management position when the staff has a tradition for fierce individualism and the top leadership suffers from a serious case of bean counter syndrome. You can't really blame people for failing to do an impossible job.

 

20 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

It didn't help that Sansar became a huge waste of time & money.

That platform's failure skewed management's decisions on what to pursue feature-wise and it's unfair because features were certainly not the reason that platform failed.

I'm still not convinced Sansar actually did harm SL at all, I'm more inclined to say it helped. Sansar did steal a lot of resources yes, but it wasn't a lack of resources that held SL back, it was a lack of coordination and clear objectives.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

I'm still not convinced Sansar actually did harm SL at all, I'm more inclined to say it helped.

I think it was a valid experiment, and they learned a bit about the Uncanny Valley phenomenon. They might also have realised the old truth about what you have in your hand is often better than what you wish you had in your hand.

[ItHadToComeToThis]

-Building in world and

-Anyone being able to just log in and start building instead of having to go through a three month crash course just to learn how to create a hat in mesh.

-No complexity issues

-Flexi everything

-Innovative feel of second life as opposed to the 10 same stores at every event over and over.

-The general community. It’s too clique now. No one chats in sandboxes, small communities are more difficult for outsiders to make friends in, there are no real community hubs left that attract a mix of people and the linden ones are overrun with trolls and other morons.

-The creative community. I miss places where you could just turn up and see what projects were being undertaken that day and just join in and help create something cool.

-Lesser global ego. You should try putting two Scripters together on a project these days...16th century wars were less brutal.

Side note. If LL hosted a small grid called SL Classic....where you start over with a fresh inventory but there are tons of freebie stuff and it’s exactly like SL was back in 06-08 but more stable...would you play and how much time would you spend there?.

[Akasha Sternberg]

Good Rock/Metal clubs operating on European times AND people asking what others are wearing instead of scanning people all stalkerly because they get snapped at for asking... Also not having tons of heads and bodies and almost every day having a new niche body and 3 versions of it added... less events....