Blue Moons, Backwards Rainbows and Infinitely Distant Stars

[Rowan Amore]

22 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It's really not .. in SL's case, the rendering is a critical and complex part of the engine. There are no "simple shiny" easy fixes here as Sid is trying to imply, this is not a trivial nothing-burger patch.

 

 

2 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

New stuff is easier to fix?  The developers are probably still employed by LL.  Fixing something someone else developed and who knows how many people have tried to fix is more than likely, a PITA.

And as mentioned by a mole in another thread today, older things are taking longer to sort out.  The memorial area.

1 hour ago, Dyna Mole said:

Yes. As noted in a couple of threads in the forums, it's on our radar. The technology there is quite out of date, so it will take more than a quick band-aid to bring the park up to present standards.  

I imagine it's the same with search and group chat.

EEP developers are still around.  I'm not saying it isn't complex, just easier for the people who designed it to fix it.

Edited June 10, 2021 by Rowan Amore

[Prokofy Neva]

8 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Because ... those are all VIEWER PATCHES we get full release notes and source code .. the viewer is mostly concerned with fetching data and rendering it. THAT'S WHAT IT DOES.

Group chat and search are SERVER SIDE and we get what information LL feel like handing out. We wont get viewer release notes that contain "made search work just how prok likes it". Ever .. because that's not how search works.

CAPSLOCK is OBNOXIOUS every other WORD isn't it.

Guessing how stuff works and then getting angry about it doesn't seem like a fun hobby.

 

That's not actually why at all ... SL is a dynamic canvas, games are a static one. The actual assets we upload in SL can be used in game engines and rendered faster and prettier. 

The arguments here against high detail user content is not based around the raw detail of the things. The engine is by design, weaker, and unable to function like a game engine, and the best we can do is to min/max content to try and streamline the load.

SL's weaknesses are a direct result of SL's core architecture. If we had a game engine, SL would render super fast .. but it wouldn't be SL anymore and half the stuff we do and take for granted wouldn't be possible.

 

Gosh, Corey Linden must have been right when he said Phillip should release the server code, amirite?

Search not working for nine months "how Prok likes it" is the default of SL on a 100 things and I've long gotten used to that in my 17 years in SL. Have you, with your wish list? 

And guess what, search isn't about me, as plenty of other people complain about how it harms their business.

As for this: That's not actually why at all ... SL is a dynamic canvas, games are a static one. The actual assets we upload in SL can be used in game engines and rendered faster and prettier. 

Do I need to state the obvious, that SL is a "dynamic canvas" because -- wait for it! -- it has user generated content constantly uploading? Hello? And not everything needs to be faster and prettier, because it isn't faster or prettier to start with.

They can take their time loading my "atomic table" for example.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Gosh, Corey Linden must have been right when he said Phillip should release the server code, amirite?

If we had the server code then there would be many third party patches by now. (Like there are in the official viewer, that you use every single day .. having had a hand in a few of them, I'd say, you're welcome!)

A really tight SL search that's integrated into the viewer and not using a web page at all would be really cool .. and right now we can't do it because we only have half the puzzle and can only make the best of the bits we get.

 

 

[Prokofy Neva]

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If we had the server code then there would be many third party patches by now. (Like there are in the official viewer, that you use every single day .. having had a hand in a few of them, I'd say, you're welcome!)

A really tight SL search that's integrated into the viewer and not using a web page at all would be really cool .. and right now we can't do it because we only have half the puzzle and can only make the best of the bits we get.

 

 

You don't have server code. But the Lindens do obviously. And at any time they may work on that server code and report back to us. As they have done in the past. Like they did that time Search was broken for literally only 48 hours and Sir Vix *hastened* to IM me. *Hastened*. Ah, those were the days. 

And believe it or not, you have me to thank, too, because years ago when I could still file on the JIRA, I filed bugs, they got squashed, i.e. one that was related to Classifieds, and so it actually said, imagine this, "Second Life is Brought To You By the Lindens and.....Prokofy Neva.....[hundreds of other names].

There is a simple thing to do. And that is to dump GSA and put back 1.23 search *which is in all the third-party viewers hello!*. Yes, this, that, the other thing. But they do it. And so could the Lindens. Another proposition: Lindens buy Firestorm, aquihire some of their devs, the end. The objections to this are philosophical, legal, technical-disguising-emotional, etc. All it takes is a firm hand at the top, and we'll be over this madness.

 

[Phil Deakins]

17 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

and right now we can't do it because we only have half the puzzle and can only make the best of the bits we get.

I think I'm right in saying that Prokofy is talking about the LL viewer, so your use of the word "we" doesn't come into it.

 

13 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There is a simple thing to do. And that is to dump GSA

They dumped they GSA at least decade ago - or thereabouts. They replaced it with an open source Apache engine. I have no idea if they are still using it, or if they have written their own, or got another one.

[Prokofy Neva]

26 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I think I'm right in saying that Prokofy is talking about the LL viewer, so your use of the word "we" doesn't come into it.

 

They dumped they GSA at least decade ago - or thereabouts. They replaced it with an open source Apache engine. I have no idea if they are still using it, or if they have written their own, or got another one.

That's right. You don't know. So you don't know what they have. And they have been secretive about search and that's understandable, because it is gamed and they want to try to mitigate that. This isn't the first time you are making this point. And so I'll respond once again, that what prompted them to put in GSA back in the day was a belief that this was superior to the previous form of search they used -- and in fact it was not. And that's why the third-party viewers don't have it! So whatever they have now -- and for all you know it could be GSA again -- it wasn't as good as the third-party viewers had, and now even that is broken!

[Psyche Starling]

I'm glad that BOM alpha bug was fixed. It was driving me thoroughly up the wall!

[Phil Deakins]

The GSA was waaaay superior to what they had at the time. There was absolutely no comparison between them.

Let me tell you again - LL DITCHED THE GSA A VERY LONG TIME AGO. Instead of referring to it as thought they still used it, try using a form of generic words. You'll be accurate then and it won't appear as though you are making a mistake. I hope that helps

 

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

I think I'm right in saying that Prokofy is talking about the LL viewer, so your use of the word "we" doesn't come into it.

TPV code and features in the official viewer ... what we're planning to submit next ...

[Prokofy Neva]

2 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

The GSA was waaaay superior to what they had at the time. There was absolutely no comparison between them.

Let me tell you again - LL DITCHED THE GSA A VERY LONG TIME AGO. Instead of referring to it as thought they still used it, try using a form of generic words. You'll be accurate then and it won't appear as though you are making a mistake. I hope that helps

 

Your belief that the GSA was superior was perhaps tied to the fact that it put your furniture store on top of search? That can happen.

You don't know that they didn't put it back again.

Since Apache works on the same philosophy, you don't know that they haven't kept that same philosophy -- likely they did.

When there is a relatively small number of things to search for that dynamically update but not that much, GSA may not be the best solution. Techies are enamored with it, to be sure, but once again: it is not in the third party viewers. The old 1.23 Viewer search in all its glory has been preserved like a fly in amber in the TPV viewers. Imagine that! Imagine that! Because it works better.

That's not enough reason for me to switch to them although occasionally I will use one if I am really stuck with an area search problem. 

Just through the sheer luck of the draw, Coffee Pancake and Phil Deakins are fortunate that their names in search/people come up on the very top of the list despite the returns numbering 800, for example, in Coffee's case (which did not use to happen with exact term searches. And say, so does "Prokofy Neva" although not every day.

But all you have to do is plug in the eight names of the Moncierge team Lindens to see how badly a name search can go.

 

[Phil Deakins]

21 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Your belief that the GSA was superior was perhaps tied to the fact that it put your furniture store on top of search? That can happen.

Oh, please don't be silly. A Google search engine is many many orders of magnitude better than the traffic ranked results that preceded it. That's why Google became the number one search engine in the world very soon after starting up. And the only reason why my place ranked so very highly is because, having been a well-known expert in the world for search engine optimisation, I knew how to do it. I actually controlled the top 10 rankings for my main searchterm, moving places up and keeping other places out (one in particular), without any of them knowing I was doing it. And FYI, it didn't require any bots

 

21 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You don't know that they didn't put it back again.

You don't know that they have started to rent it again, and yet you keep suggesting that they ditch it, so you believe they actually use it. It was a very expensive thing, and they needed to rent 3 of them at over $20,000 each. I think it's extremely unlikely that LL now rents the GSA again, since the free Apache one that they replaced it with is based on the Google engine anyway; i.e. Bryn and Page published how their engine works and all other engines copied it. So I think it's extremely unlikely that LL has gone back to the very expensive GSA, since the free one is much more suitable for SL search - because LL can modify the code as necessary. They couldn't do that with the GSA, and the GSA wasn't ideal for SL.

Sorry, but I'm not interested in the rest of your post. I tried to help you because you keep believing something that isn't true, but you don't want any help. I won't try to help you again

ETA: I'm now wondering if you think they bought a GSA, and therefore own it. Maybe that's why you think they can easily start using it again. They didn't buy it. It wasn't for sale. They rented 3 of the very expensive things from Google.

Edited June 12, 2021 by Phil Deakins