I fear for SL

[EmpressLuna Starchild]

Secondlife has been a very important part of my life since 2007 it is the most amazing place to spend my time but I fear for are future one thing I have seen as time goes on is less and less big improvements and eventually it will just stop... to bring SL to where it needs to be is to upgrade the engine to something cutting edge! But the cost how do you spend that much to fix a game this old ? Is are days numbered?  

[Rowan Amore]

18 minutes ago, Tresia Beck said:

Secondlife has been a very important part of my life since 2007 it is the most amazing place to spend my time but I fear for are future one thing I have seen as time goes on is less and less big improvements and eventually it will just stop... to bring SL to where it needs to be is to upgrade the engine to something cutting edge! But the cost how do you spend that much to fix a game this old ? Is are days numbered?  

Join in the discussion of just that.  It was started 2 years ago.and still going strong!

 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

people have no idea of the underworkings of SL,  changing out this engine or this visual engine ect,  are going to break the whole world,  do you want that?  

[Janet Voxel]

are fears are unfounded, at least for a little while 

[CeleneHighwater]

I worry about SL too. It seems that it doesn't get nearly the amount of coverage on the web as Mindcraft or World of Warcraft. SL is better than both in my opinion. And as for breaking the whole world, SL could be taken down for a day to implement a new and better engine if that is what is needed. We definitely need to keep moving forward and we need to stay with the times. SL needs more heavy promotion to make it more relevant!

[Aishagain]

@CeleneHighwater*sigh*

Secondlife was born out of an idea that had relevance in 1995.  It took form in around 2000.  It is of NO interest to the sort of people that would play "games" such as Minecraft and World of Warcraft and as such gets none of the coverage that such highly profitable creations get.

The basic concept of Secondlife is far removed for most of the MMPORGs that inhabit the Virtual universe.  The world that you (and I) so treasure is of no value to those who provide the capital that its current janitors, Linden Lab, need to do the essential day-to-day maintenance of SL

Their interest is purely profit...that the return on their investment is sufficiently great to warrant their attention.  The current owners of Linden Research have, I suggest, examined their possession and have determined the minimum amount of effort required to extract profit from the acquisition of Linden Research and its troublesome ward Linden Lab.

Beyond that, they have no interest in the continuation, or not, of SecondLife.  I mourn that but it is  just how it is, I guess.

I can only hope that my maudlin ruminations are proven false over the coming months and years.  But I am not holding my breath.

When LL created Linden World, it was a concept so advanced that many could not access or understand it.  When it grew rapidly after 2006, the chance to re-engineer the basic structure was lost in the fear that it would lose its pre-eminence during the rebuild.  By the time the rebuilding became necessary for its continued success, it was a task too great for the resources at its creators' disposal.

Catch 22

Edited March 24, 2021 by Aishagain
removal of insects and substitution of time

[Janet Voxel]

[CobaltBlue Mill]

It is important to realize that those who come from a WoW or MineCraft environment will view SL as a game.  But those who come from AOL chatrooms, IRC, or the Palace view it as a chat venue.  I come from the latter and feel that makes it a more enriching experience.  Groups form which are both educational and fulfilling.  I realize LL dislikes people seeing beyond the av, but that IMO cheapens the experience.  When you get to know the person behind the av and see their real lives it broadens everything,  Games have winners and losers, chat enriches us all.  I realize there are the deeply paranoid who don't let even relatives see into their real worlds, their loss.

[Jackson Redstar]

my guess is, whoever owns Linden, is that it is still profitable they will keep the lights on. I suppose the danger being it gets sold at some time for way too much and the new owners expect way to much ROI. But if it can keep squeezing some profits year over year,. don't really seeing it going anywhere

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Aishagain said:

It is of NO interest to the sort of people that would play "games" such as Minecraft and World of Warcraft and as such gets none of the coverage that such highly profitable creations get.

There are lots of WoW & Minecraft players in SL and vice versa.

News media tends to like reporting on New things (it's in the name) SL brings nothing new to the table so the only coverage it gets is "OMG SL isn't dead yet!", even sensational outrage stories aren't worth writing anymore. Where as both WoW and MC offer constant incremental updates and expansions. 

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[CobaltBlue Mill]

It is fair to say that SL is not what it was nearly 15 years ago when I joined.  That does not mean it's dead or dying.  IRC is not dead although it is not what it was in the 1990s, and there are still people using short wave radio, although it is not what it was 100 years ago.  The thing about SL is it's open structure--that a user is free to make anything of it they want.  I have nothing against Wow or MC, except for people who come from those venues and try to disrupt what other people are doing.  Respect for a group is needed.

[Aishagain]

51 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

News media tends to like reporting on New things (it's in the name) SL brings nothing new to the table so the only coverage it gets is "OMG SL isn't dead yet!", even sensational outrage stories aren't worth writing anymore. Where as both WoW and MC offer constant incremental updates and expansions. 

and in saying that you make my point for me!

and Yes, there are many WoW and MC players in SL as such a tiny percentile of those games; players make up a substantial percentage of the SL population.  I'd be curious to know how many long-term SLers are also WoW players.  I know of many SLers that are in the "third Age", like myself.  I wonder how many of those participate in anything other than SL.

[Coffee Pancake]

The days of SL being a monogame for most has long since passed.

Everyone I know plays other titles, often at the same time as SL.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

10 hours ago, CeleneHighwater said:

 And as for breaking the whole world, SL could be taken down for a day to implement a new and better engine if that is what is needed.

Um no, that's not how that works at all,  rip and replace will not work in this instance, to get us havok engine, it took a long time and lots of planning and live testing,  this did not happen in a day,  it would need another round of this and that's IF there was a solution that would work,  "but cry engine or unreal engine"  what do you expect those to change?   besides breaking everything we had made?

[Aishagain]

If you say so @Coffee Pancake.  Since I only do SL I must be in a small minority by now, then.  Jeez I feel more of a relic than ever now!

[Coffee Pancake]

15 hours ago, Aishagain said:

If you say so @Coffee Pancake.  Since I only do SL I must be in a small minority by now, then.  Jeez I feel more of a relic than ever now!

Play some games! if only to get a feel for what your computer is capable of under different circumstances or just plain ole fun. 

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

15 hours ago, Aishagain said:

Since I only do SL I must be in a small minority by now, then.  Jeez I feel more of a relic than ever now!

SL is all I do.  I've never been much for online games or gaming communities.  All of the various computer games that I ever played were single player ones that I loaded to my own computer.   I also don't think of SL as a game or gaming community -- and I'm also not really here for lots of socializing (inworld that is, I view these forums as socializing and I spend a lot of time on the forums.

 

[Aishagain]

@Coffee Pancake I have played one or two games, a couple in Beta and some others.  Frankly I was bored after about 30 minutes.  I'm no fan of shoot 'em ups either.  I joined SL for its social aspect, as do many others.  So what I do for fun used to be away from computers in that rariefied environment called "outside".  That is denied to me for now, also like many.

I know well what my PC is capable of and playing games, RP or not, won't inform me of anything I do not already know well enough to have bypassed it.

[Evah Baxton]

I've taken breaks and gone without SL for years at a time. No big deal... but I think that is only because I knew I could go back if I wanted to...

[Penny Patton]

Talk about updating SL's engine is overlooking a critical element. SecondLife's content is primarily what's holding SL back. Even if you could completely replace SL's engine without impacting the content, said content would still ensure the performance increase would be minimal. People are decking out their avatars with literally a gigabyte worth of textures and enough polygons to fill out an entire modern videogame map. The sims people build aren't much better.

Frankly, it's nothing short of a miracle that SL runs as well as it does. As long as content creators don't care about the performance impact of what they make, and people remain oblivious to the performance cost of the content they purchase, it's not going to get any better.

[arabellajones]

I reckon there are technical barriers. Modern "games" use different APIs for graphics, and make good use of multiple thread. Second Life is stuck with OpenGL and comes from an era when performance increases came from processor clock speed, not multiple cores/threads.

Oh, and I care about performance. I pay attention to things such as LOD when I create meshes. But processor clock speeds haven't changed much in the last ten years. The hot desktop machines have gone from 4 cores to 16 cores. Until Linden Lab fixes that problem, how can they hope to make the visuals better?

[Ardy Lay]

People only compare FPS?  I know that's what's important to eyes and brains.  Does anybody compare Ktris?  I think it's a measure of how much geometry is rendered per frame and per second.  All that geometry is, of course, from the objects rezzed and worn, and maybe from land water and sky?

Is there a functional method in the viewer to NOT load textures?  I see there is a switch in the menu, but does it work?  It doesn't seem to stop all texture loading.  Would be nice to be able to isolate the cause of long frame times between producing geometry and filling it with textures, or has the rendering method progressed beyond where those are separable?

 

[sandi Mexicola]

I tried turning off loading of textures, and it seemed to work.  It was a while ago though.  I think I had to either tp to a new region, or maybe even relog.  I am not sure. 

[Coffee Pancake]

19 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

People only compare FPS?  I know that's what's important to eyes and brains.  Does anybody compare Ktris?  I think it's a measure of how much geometry is rendered per frame and per second.  All that geometry is, of course, from the objects rezzed and worn, and maybe from land water and sky?

 

Normally that would be the measure to watch, but SL has trouble getting a modern GPU out of bed and there is often a lot more going on than simply rendering triangles.

[animats]

9 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

People are decking out their avatars with literally a gigabyte worth of textures and enough polygons to fill out an entire modern videogame map. The sims people build aren't much better.

Sims aren't that bad for a modern GPU. Fixed objects have LODs. Avatars, though...