Second Life and other virtual worlds - a relic of the past, or a key to the future?

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, FairreLilette said:

But, bump mapped mesh objects really are better quality and that needs to be uploaded, plus the work on the AO's and the UV's need to be uploaded from Photoshop or one will end up with a very flat mesh object.

To clear up a misunderstanding here, all those maps can be applied just as well to prims and sculpts as to mesh. By the time the object get to the render stage where textures and other surface maps are applied, it's all been converted to "OpenGL mesh" anyway so it makes no difference whatsoever whether it started off as prim, sculpt or polylist mesh.

We would of course need to include tools for creating those maps for in-world builds but we would need that regardless of what kind of build system we have.

[FairreLilette]

12 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

all those maps can be applied just as well to prims and sculpts as to mesh. 

Oh yeah, yeah...true.  I was thinking of making bump maps for some artworks I want to plant on a prim the old-fashioned way made from a box. 

 

14 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

We would of course need to include tools for creating those maps for in-world builds but we would need that regardless of what kind of build system we have.

Does it need to be included or would bumps and other kinds of maps generated elsewhere still work?  I doubt the new buyers would give up the upload fees altogether they can make here.   But, we've talked about this subject in the forums before and to me it remains a hypothetical because I am not a geek and I am in the intermediate stage and not the ultra advanced like some of the highly detailed mesh created today.  As for sculpts, I've moved on.  I want to be 100% mesh now plus prims here and there.  

[Drayke Newall]

12 hours ago, ChinRey said:

That's a good point but to be fair, a common problem with out of the box thinkers is that their unconventional solutions can be very hard for their successors to figure out.

Very true and I think this is where Mark Kingdon (I would say the last out of box thinker LL had) fell in that his secure system (among other ideas) was heavily impacted by it being treated as to hard to figure out. Not that it was impossible but that it was simply to hard. Even updating the inworld creation tools, whilst being hard to update is not impossible. 

For many other developers they would have seen that the benefits far out way any hardship for such updates but LL for whatever reason just fail to see anything.

Edited December 21, 2020 by Drayke Newall

[Fritigern Gothly]

6 hours ago, RowanMinx said:

And there was no upload fee when you built everything inworld.  I wonder how much revenue has been generated for LL on that alone.

I think that not many people buy L$ just to be able to upload stuff. Instead, I would think that people buy L$ for general purposes like being able to shop, tip DJs/hosts/dancers, pay rent on their land, etc. and end up using a small portion of that money to actually upload stuff. Of course, this is not counting creators who do nothing but create in/for SL. 

But still, this upload fee does not make LL wealthy. What happens instead is that a small amount of currency which was already in circulation, is now removed from this circulation and basically destroyed the moment it is being paid to LL. This increases the scarcity of this currency, increasing/maintaining its value.

If no L$ ever got removed from circulation, the amount would only keep increasing with every L$ purchase people make, thus decreasing its value which in turn would lead to grossly inflated prices. In this scenario it would be quite possible that one day you would have to pay 5 million L$ for an okay looking skin.

For this reason, upload fees are a good thing, albeit a nuisance to many (including me) and the same goes for the sales tax that LL levies on marketplace merchants, they have the same effect on the economy in SL and helps maintain a rather stable exchange rate of around L$250 per US dollar.

Edited December 22, 2020 by Fritigern Gothly

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, FairreLilette said:

Does it need to be included or would bumps and other kinds of maps generated elsewhere still work?

This is all hypothetical of course since there's no realistic chance LL is going to upgrade the inworld building tools but if they did, I see no reason why they should block the option to import externally made content of any kind, and that includes mesh, textures, other surface maps and everything else we can import today.

[ChinRey]

10 hours ago, FairreLilette said:

As for sculpts, I've moved on.  I want to be 100% mesh now plus prims here and there.  

It's actually amazing how many modern polylist meshes are for all practical purposes sculpts. But I do agree that resurrecting sculpts isn't a realistic proposal. It would have to be redeveloped from scratch, even the file format would have to be changed, and we'd still have the stigma the name is suffering from. It would have been different if LL had done it right from the start but they didn't and it's possible they couldn't due to the limitations in the software they had at that time.

But it could have been made into a very useful in-world building material and it's not as if the other options are realistic either. It's too late now.

[ChinRey]

9 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

If no L$ ever got removed from circulation, the amount would only keep increasing with every L$ purchase people make, thus decreasing its value which in turn would lead to grossly inflated prices.

Yes, that's true but I doubt those fees are very significant that way. It has a little bit of effect but the big money sinks are probably the Tilia and MP fees and terminated accounts.

The fees have another very positive effect though, they make people think before they upload. The assets database is way too big already, we don't want it filled up with more garbage, test uploads and duplicate entries than neccessary.

Edited December 22, 2020 by ChinRey

[SarahThe Wanderer]

On 12/14/2020 at 4:23 AM, Fritigern Gothly said:

Show those jokers videos like these:

 

This video reminded me of this intro scene from the great movie "Ready Player One" replace the Word "The Oasis" with "Second Life" and you get an amazing Trailer for second life, especially the part in minute 1:13.

 

 

[FairreLilette]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

It's actually amazing how many modern polylist meshes are for all practical purposes sculpts.

Yeah, I kind of figured that.  The thing is though with the higher quality meshes that look so realistic, the LoD is about 2.  So, I set my LoD at 2-3 a lot of the times.  Sculpts need a LoD of 4, that's mostly why I left them behind plus sculpt maps can be very boxy for things like dressers and I like curvy things - antique style.  Since I have mostly high quality very realistic mesh items for my home, I keep my LoD low.  I also set my LoD low for Gacha shopping sims which helps to greatly reduce the lag as does a lower LoD at shopping events reduce lag.  There are many people in SL who run their machines on a lower LoD now, I'm not the only one.

[Fritigern Gothly]

13 hours ago, SarahThe Wanderer said:

This video reminded me of this intro scene from the great movie "Ready Player One" replace the Word "The Oasis" with "Second Life" and you get an amazing Trailer for second life, especially the part in minute 1:13.

I really need to watch this movie!!!!!!

[SarahThe Wanderer]

10 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

I really need to watch this movie!!!!!!

If you like video games, you're so gonna enjoy it! 👍

[Janet Voxel]

7 hours ago, SarahThe Wanderer said:

If you like video games, you're so gonna enjoy it! 👍

Or even pop culture from the last 40 years.

[Bree Giffen]

Ready Player Two is already available at bookstores! Or Amazon books.