Chairman of the Board is on LabGab

[Drayke Newall]

7 hours ago, LibGwen said:

That's because the makers of goods have decreed that we can no longer wear each other's clothes.  Pre-mesh we could sculpt our bodies to look like we wanted and wear any clothes we wanted if we were able to put the work into tweaking a copy to fit however we wanted to look today.  Now we have to accept a narrow band of stereotyped clothing and stereotyped body proportions or hunt the old stores for what we really want--or be shut out.  And often be shut out *because* we insist on wearing what we really want.  A person has to be pretty artistic or pretty stubborn to continue to do things their way in the face of such exclusivity.

Whilst that does play a role in user retention etc it wasn't what I was talking about and the drop in concurrency ties directly to two things happening in Second Life. Mesh creation out of world and marketplace. Two Scenarios, tell me which one gave higher concurrency and user retention.

1 - Pre-mesh and marketplace purchase:

• All object content was created in world with the prim system apart from textures
• All textures were sold in world to allow people to place those onto prims inworld.
• All people wanting to build had to go to a sandbox or their own land to build those items usually socialising as well
• All items were sold in world in stores that people had on either their own parcel or rented.
• Users wanting to purchase something searched in world and bought inworld at those shops/malls.
• Friends were made not just at one or two places but many places. Many of my friends I met shopping at malls and creating at sandboxes.

People had to build in world (be logged on) and also have a place to sell that object. Mainland was much, much more full than it is now, malls were everywhere, people socialised whilst shopping, met new people. People that couldn't build extravagant things were still able to build their own home, build their own club, shop etc and buy only those things they needed that they couldn't build. There was no comments in forums from new users saying "where is everyone" or there is nothing to do in Second Life or 'green dot hunting on the map'. You always saw people and had something to do or learn whilst socialising with your friends.

2 - Post mesh and marketplace purchase:

• All mesh objects are built out of world. No need to log in unless for about 20 mins to upload and/or test.
• All textures are made specific to those mesh objects meaning inworld texture use became obsolete.
• All people wanting to build never need to log in.
• Creators dont need land to build, dont need an inworld shop, dont need to socialise etc.

A creator now can spend all of 20mins in second life to upload the item to the MP listing and then never log into second life again and just update when needed all based on marketplace. They earn money whilst second life never sees them.

This has an impact on LL profits. You had more people uploading textures, more people buying or renting land, more people staying online exploring, socialising. This giving users the ability to advertise to their friends who didn't play by saying SL is fun, enjoyable lots to do, you can build your own home, earn money, shop in malls etc. Now 2/3rds of Second Life content is locked away for only those that know how to use third party software like Maya, blender, etc.

Now I am not suggesting out of world mesh creation should go, nor am is suggesting the marketplace should go. However inworld competitive systems and incentives must be provided to bring back all of the features that made SL popular. Bring back a competitive inworld building etc. Have a premium subscription model for creators that gives them incentives to have a physical inworld store, such as no MP fees if you have an inworld store.

Edited June 26, 2021 by Drayke Newall

[Alwin Alcott]

what a plans and dreams ... while he said nearly nothing in the interview, and the things that are really shown .... only drain the the users wallet more.....

After the lies about better, cheaper and what more about the cloud... it's hard to believe they invest the newer raises in SL only. Never forget, investors come to fill their wallet, not the company.

I seriously doubt if this product is able to step over the image they build so carefully (sarc) in the last 11 years.

btw ... it's no the users to blame.

Edited June 26, 2021 by Alwin Alcott

[Coffee Pancake]

In world mesh editing is a real problem, anything less than a full fat blender-esque experience is just going to present a wall users will slam into sooner or later and either be forced off line to dedicated tools, or have to accept that their creations are always going to sub par. The further away from mechanical or architectural building someone wants to get, the bigger this divide becomes.

We see this with prim to mesh based solutions .. the resulting geometry is over complex hot garbage and still looks like it's made from prim. Only now it's set in stone and has terrible LOD's. The closest we ever got to this approach being viable was a few sculpt generators like sTwo Acker's cord generator. But even then, the resulting model still leaves it up to the user to apply flat lifeless textures (and why so much stuff from this era was shiny).

Hybrid approaches work. Build a simplistic mock up in place in SL with prims, export those to blender and then use as a guide for actual iterative modeling (cleaning up prim exports can be done, but it's often more work than just starting from scratch).

Local mesh (like local textures) could be a way to overcome some of the disconnect from building in world, even a blender plugin that mirrors an object inworld should be possible, but sharing that between users falls foul of the shared experience in ways LL have explicitly forbidden in the past and would likely require a 3rd party service or viewer to viewer communication and all the privacy freakouts that would entail. (I don't see LL building the services required to support this into regions).

Short of builder communities offering places for avatars to sit and screens to show streams of external software I don't see any practical solutions.

LL are calling this the year of experiments, anything requiring more than a months development time is just not going to get any traction. They just don't do big open ended software projects for SL anymore and have been burnt pretty badly by things that seemed simple at face value (like EEP).

I used to spend the bulk of my time in SL building with friends, but that ship has sailed. If you really want collaborative mesh building, you're on your own and the end result likely wont have anything to do with SL.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

(cleaning up prim exports can be done, but it's often more work than just starting from scratch).

Not really because when you build from scratch in Blender, you start with prims too. Then you merge and reshape them just as you do with prims exported from SL. There are a few steps in the process that are different but not so much that they make much practical difference. And of course there are basic shapes avaiable in Blender and not as SL prims but there are also some SL prim shapes that requires quite a bit of editing if you want to make them from scratch in Blender.

Exporting prims used to be a bit more complicated but now that Firestorm's export function allows for consolidated UV maps, the one big hurdle is eliminated.

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

They just don't do big open ended software projects for SL anymore and have been burnt pretty badly by things that seemed simple at face value (like EEP).

Was there a proper post-mortem on that? Doesn't need to be public, but needs to be done.

Because it can't simply be the result of the wrong project assignment for one developer, or even if that were true, it would be important to understand how such a management failure would be possible in an organization. Sure, maybe it was a more challenging, wider-scoped project than was clear initially (maybe), but that too is a fixable source of failure, and whatever it was, the Lab must learn to do big development projects successfully again.

And if a developer says the problem is all the messy, legacy code, they should be fired on the spot. That's always an excuse, never a reason.

[Sid Nagy]

11 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

What part of the experience has supposedly improved since the move to AWS?

 

The rezz time experience in Bellisseria is a bit longer now.
Quite an improvement.

But I think he was talking about the possibillity to get a private region again.
So it improved for the people want to shell out their Shekels big time (in Linden Lab's pockets).

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Not really because when you build from scratch in Blender, you start with prims too.

Depends on technique .. I find final model prim exports to be a nightmare of hidden and intersecting faces with the overall geometry more suited to a 3d printer than a real time rendering environment.

 

[Extrude Ragu]

3 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

But I think he was talking about the possibillity to get a private region again.
So it improved for the people want to shell out their Shekels big time (in Linden Lab's pockets).

Wasn't the whole reason they ran out of servers because they had stopped buying them to move to AWS? And then of course, we imported some Chinese... joy...

[Phil Deakins]

10 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

... and the drop in concurrency ties directly to two things happening in Second Life. Mesh creation out of world and marketplace.

And now you've mentioned the other thing that I've been saying for years destroyed the fundamental nature of SL - the marketplace. Mesh and the marketplace together changed SL fundamentally, to the detriment of its users, and, imo, to LL.

Edited June 26, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Coffee Pancake]

23 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

And now you've mentioned the other thing that I've been saying for years destroyed the fundamental nature of SL - the marketplace. Mesh and the marketplace together changed SL fundamentally, to the detriment of its users, and, imo, to LL.

We had xstreet ... which if LL hadn't bought it, would have slowly matured to something that at the very least replicated the SLM as we know it today, probably surpassed it significantly.

Take away mesh and we have over cooked sculpts x1000 .. which would be soooo much better. 🙄

[Silent Mistwalker]

31 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We had xstreet ... which if LL hadn't bought it, would have slowly matured to something that at the very least replicated the SLM as we know it today, probably surpassed it significantly.

Take away mesh and we have over cooked sculpts x1000 .. which would be soooo much better. 🙄

I was one of the few people that were completely against sculpts. I wanted all the [mesh] objects from my Sims 2 game in SL. That includes all the downloaded content I had. Took 10 minutes to load the game I had so much stuff stuffed in it. 😆

Edited June 26, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker

[Lucia Nightfire]

11 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Wasn't the whole reason they ran out of servers because they had stopped buying them to move to AWS? And then of course, we imported some Chinese... joy...

No, it was because after the first expansion of Bellisseria they had consumed over 1000 regions.

[Drayke Newall]

On 6/27/2021 at 12:10 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

We had xstreet ... which if LL hadn't bought it, would have slowly matured to something that at the very least replicated the SLM as we know it today, probably surpassed it significantly.

At least with xstreet you needed a parcel (usually was a shop) to actually have your magicbox rezzed. Considering xstreet was 3rd party and couldn't do the coding LL did to replace the magicbox, if LL never purchased xstreet a person would probably still have needed a place to rez their magicbox and that was most of the time their store. When LL removed that need, stores started to disappear as the final reason to keep them was gone. I do agree with you though that xstreet would have been vastly better than the marketplace now if LL never purchased it.

Also, there were ways available to LL to make it so that marketplace didn't completely destroy the inworld shopping experience. You touched on one earlier (in another thread) where LL ties the marketplace to inworld delivery (via marketplace vendors) thus removing the need for laggy script vendors like caspervend etc.

Another would be to incentivise creators/store owners to have an inworld store or quite simply they could have made the marketplace a by product of the inworld store by making it so that the only way to get a listing on marketplace is to use an inworld LL vendor system tied to marketplace. This would mean the inworld shopping experience remains but people also can buy online.

On 6/27/2021 at 12:10 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

Take away mesh and we have over cooked sculpts x1000 .. which would be soooo much better. 🙄

As you are aware every bad/semi-bad system has been introduced as a by product of LL's lack of foresight. Megaprims, sculpts, liquid mesh, onion layer bodies, unoptimised mesh, clothing complexity. The list goes on. This also includes making inworld creation obsolete due to not thinking about updating the inworld creation system to at least have a basic competitiveness to external mesh.

No one is suggesting mesh is bad just the requirement for it to be created out of world.

[animats]

On 6/25/2021 at 11:02 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

have been burnt pretty badly by things that seemed simple at face value (like EEP).

Wasn't EEP an acquisition?

 

On 6/26/2021 at 5:58 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

I find final model prim exports to be a nightmare of hidden and intersecting faces with the overall geometry more suited to a 3d printer than a real time rendering environment.

Yes. Even merging the prims into a single mesh object using Blender's semi-constructive solid geometry functions doesn't work. You can do a union of two mesh objects and drop the useless interior geometry, but what Blender generates is not as simple as it should be.

I don't see in-world editing in SL's future. Everyone else who has in-world editing is voxel-based, like Minecraft, Roblox, and Dual Universe. Most of the newer worlds seem to have people editing outside of the world using the Unity editor. SineSpace (by the way, Breakroom is Sinespace for business), Sominum Space, and Decentraland are all Unity editor based. In Decentraland,  the unit of editing is the entire parcel - you check out your parcel to your local machine, edit, and upload to check it back in to the world. That's worse than what we've got. There's no off the shelf solution to buy or copy for SL-type in-world editing.

(Has anyone tried Blender with NVidia Omniverse? It's an online collaboration system. You're supposed to be able to set up a shared editing session, where multiple people can see what you're doing in 3D as you edit. It could be useful to do that for big projects, like Fantasy Faire.)

Edited June 28, 2021 by animats

[Coffee Pancake]

57 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

As you are aware every bad/semi-bad system has been introduced as a by product of LL's lack of foresight. Megaprims, sculpts, liquid mesh, onion layer bodies, unoptimised mesh, clothing complexity. The list goes on. This also includes making inworld creation obsolete due to not thinking about updating the inworld creation system to at least have a basic competitiveness to external mesh.

No one is suggesting mesh is bad just the requirement for it to be created out of world.

Megaprims were based around exploiting a bug and once fixed ment no new sizes could be created. This is why almost all the mega prims were made by that one awesome person (till LL added support for them and we could just make our own).

Sculpts weren't bad .. we made them bad by pushing the geometry well beyond the intended use because a TPV cheesed the LOD code ... something we are all still dealing with the consequences from.

Liquid mesh was a dumb and at least 73% unnecessary drama because we were angry at LL.

Onion layer bodies aren't bad - segmented mesh bodies with the ability to show / hide sections is what makes them bad. Do the math and see how many meshes that actually requires for a mainstream body.

Inworld mesh editing is a dumb idea, we would have the worst mesh tools in the most cluttered editing environment possible with no texture tools. In world would give us the most unoptimized mesh possible. 

 

 

[ChinRey]

33 minutes ago, animats said:

Wasn't EEP an acquisition?

Windlight was an aquisition, EEP was developed by LL, presumably as an upgrade to Windlight.

 

51 minutes ago, animats said:

I don't see in-world editing in SL's future.

Me neither but I do see a potential for a virtual world with up-to-date flexible and easy to use inworld building tools.

Second Life used to be that virtual world and this more than anything else was what gave it an edge over mesh and voxel based environments during the first few years. I do not believe that market niche has evaporated, it's just that SL abandoned it and by now it has moved so far in a different direction there is no turning back.

It's not only about making it easy for casual builders btw. It's also about being able to assemble fairly advanced temporary installations and simple early interactive 3D sketches fast.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

47 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

It's also about being able to assemble fairly advanced temporary installations and simple early interactive 3D sketches fast.

I can totally get behind better pick and place tools.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

On 6/22/2021 at 5:30 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

Growth growth growth growth growth. This one is going to be tough, LL haven't managed it in a decade going carefully, and without platform change, likely wont. I don't wish to sound pessimistic but no amount of Linden homes or tinkering with premium or land product stack is going to suddenly change SL's fortunes. Focusing on the new user experience implies sign ups still have terrible retention, although again .. tinkering with newbie island parrot isn't going to change that.

There needs to be a step change in how SL feels. People starting SL for the first time have basic expectations (such as performance, responsiveness, a familiar and understandable UI design language, etc etc) and the SL first impression is falling short.

It's notable that anything that will change the fortunes of new user retention are going to cause difficulty for the #nochanges userbase. In short, ... The importance of new users can not be understated - we need new people more than we need literally everything else we have in SL now....

Targeting an older demographic is also fraught with problems. SL has an older userbase, but that in part is because they have been here 15 years at this point (and why #nochanges is such a big deal). We need to be targeting late teens, we need to be grown up virtual world that offers a coming of age experience that puts eye opening personal growth on the table.

Growth could mean unpleasant changes (especially to the #nochanges crowd). We need to exercise restraint when reaching for the pitchforks.

 

Yeah, this struck me as one of the main takeaways of the talk. It's an important point. At some point a good proportion of the userbase is not going to be there anymore, so LL has to look at ways to reach younger audiences now (no good doing that 5 or 10 years down the line), and I think this will impact a lot of decisions they make going forward.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

5 hours ago, animats said:

I don't see in-world editing in SL's future. Everyone else who has in-world editing is voxel-based, like Minecraft, Roblox, and Dual Universe. Most of the newer worlds seem to have people editing outside of the world using the Unity editor. SineSpace (by the way, Breakroom is Sinespace for business), Sominum Space, and Decentraland are all Unity editor based. In Decentraland,  the unit of editing is the entire parcel - you check out your parcel to your local machine, edit, and upload to check it back in to the world. That's worse than what we've got. There's no off the shelf solution to buy or copy for SL-type in-world editing.

 

Unfortunately I think you're right, and LL have already as much said that mesh is the way to continue with SL. I can't see that they are going to do anything to change that. On the one hand I think it's been good for SL in that it's brought new content creators and up'd the aesthetic quality of items. On the other hand it's destroyed the wonderful culture of inworld creativity that once existed, which is such a shame, and in my view a real lacking.   And I don't see how that can ever be brought back without the ability to create mesh inworld.

Maybe in 10 years or whatever there'll be something new that will enable that to happen (tech changes so let's keep a little ray of hope..) and allow a choice of either building inworld or externally - best of both worlds. But for now, I think we're stuck with building mesh externally:(

[Phil Deakins]

On 6/26/2021 at 3:40 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

We had xstreet ... which if LL hadn't bought it, would have slowly matured to something that at the very least replicated the SLM as we know it today, probably surpassed it significantly.

xstreet and onrez were used but, when LL bought them and openned the marketplace, they PUSHED all users to shop there. You couldn't even log into the SL website without being welcomed as a "marketplace user". The whole thing pushed people into using the marketplace as the default place to shop instead of actually shopping in the SL world, thereby causing a fundamental change to SL. It was a major part of the destruction of the fundamental nature of SL, which is what I said.

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

 It was a major part of the destruction of the fundamental nature of SL, which is what I said.

But you're still here? So obviously the sky didn't fall.

Remember this?

On 6/26/2021 at 10:23 AM, Phil Deakins said:

I have never been a shopper in SL. I can probably count the number of items I've bought in SL on the fingers of one hand. 

You're a self confessed "not a shopper" and have no idea of the state of shopping in world.

You're just going to have to take it on trust from a shopping addict that shopping in world is not only very much alive, it's bigger and more vibrant than ever.

I'm more upset about the removal of SL's particle cloud layer.

[Phil Deakins]

6 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

But you're still here? So obviously the sky didn't fall.

Remember this?

You're a self confessed "not a shopper" and have no idea of the state of shopping in world.

You're just going to have to take it on trust from a shopping addict that shopping in world is not only very much alive, it's bigger and more vibrant than ever.

I'm more upset about the removal of SL's particle cloud layer.

<sigh>

I didn't say that the sky fell. I said that those 2 things changed the fundamental nature of SL. And that is absolutely true.

You don't have to be a shopper to know that once there were shops everywhere, but now there aren't many by comparison with pre-marketplace. I have been in this world for quite a long time, y'know, and you don't spend a huge amount of time in a place without getting to know it, whether or not you actually partake of all that it has to offer

 

 

[Coffee Pancake]

6 hours ago, Evangeline Arcadia said:

Yeah, this struck me as one of the main takeaways of the talk. It's an important point. At some point a good proportion of the userbase is not going to be there anymore, so LL has to look at ways to reach younger audiences now (no good doing that 5 or 10 years down the line), and I think this will impact a lot of decisions they make going forward.

The teen grid, for all it's sins and problems, really did help to onboard people who ended up remaining long term residents.

I don't think that could ever be resurrected, but something for that audience is a must.

[Sid Nagy]

The platform is 18 years old and has to live with its history of sometimes bad decisions.
That can only be upgraded with major fixes and lost of compatibility IMHO.
LL tried with Sansar, I don't think they will ever try a SL The Next Generation again.

In the end SL is only in good enough shape to sit out it's time.
As long as enough money flows towards LL we'll be fine.

Some more duct tape and some shiny stuff and SL will most likely be good to reach SLB21 or even 25.
Most likely LL will dive in maintenance mode even more.
Mayor overhauls and fixes will not happen IMHO.  C'mon LL, prove me to be wrong.

Edited June 28, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Evangeline Arcadia]

5 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

The whole thing pushed people into using the marketplace as the default place to shop instead of actually shopping in the SL world, thereby causing a fundamental change to SL.

I'm questioning if that's really true - I think something that has really changed over the past few years is the increase of shopping events - they are all over the place, and I think they encourage people to shop inworld rather than the marketplace (I mean look at how much Seraphim website has grown in terms of users over the past few years...). Prior to that maybe there was more seeking out individual shops and shopping at stores on their own land as the default method.  I know that's what I did (also when search was way better and you could actually find stores, but that's a separate gripe....). But now I find new stores largely through events, even just the weekly sale events, not even necessarily the larger ones.

I don't know. Just a hunch.