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The new VP of engineering at Linden Lab


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On 9/19/2021 at 1:13 AM, Nika Talaj said:

I don't know if a real thunderstorm would fall within the capabilities of current experience tools - I'd have to review the experience API. 

Start with a boat at the dock at Rigamarole, and head due south to the new Fantasy regions of Bellessaria. The weather effects are impressive.

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What we have so far is a statement by Mojo Linden that there will be, for now, a focus on "performance". OK. That's reasonable enough. SL is so slow that it's laughed off gamer sites for that reason alone.

Near term, performance could be visibly improved by having the viewers target a frame rate, automatically reducing view distance and quality settings if the draw cycle is using up too much the CPU time. Never dropping below 20 FPS is a reasonable goal. That's mostly cosmetic, but easy to do and useful. New users are not going to tweak the graphics settings manually. Nor should they have to.

Beyond that, it gets harder. There's much that could be done, but few easy fixes.

 

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It's not unusual for today's AAA games to spend the first two years after release fixing bugs and broken content. It's expected now. Some studios will 'infamously' spend 6-8 years fixing their game.

Second Life is nearing its 20th anniversary and the roadmap ahead appears to be another 2 years of bug fixing. In doing so they're deferring new content to 2024 and beyond.

Also it was said in that meeting, and other places in these forums, but I don't agree with the statement that residents are resilient to change. Practically everyone has been updating their mesh body, head and skins every 2-3 years. Because SL residents are agreeable to change. YES. There is that hardcore of avatars from 2004 still attending meetings and shouting Residents are Resilient to change. That's them. And them alone.

The future roadmap should be focused on drastic updates and if it breaks old content, that's okay. My inventory is a museum of obsolete content I'll never rez again. Going forwards SL needs:

  • An updated default body and head, open sourced so everyone can create for it. No onion layers, no alpha cuts, new UV map, support for specular/normals with BoM. Support for IK animations, mesh clothes layering system, and everything needed for an updated avatar. Yes, it will break existing content. But opening the system to new creators will expand the marketplace too.
  • Introduce Sansar style Experiences into SL. Dynamically hosted regions which are only active whilst in use, with larger   footprints than 256x256, add options for instancing when crowded.
  • SL's default asset library is 20 years old. Create a new asset pack for residents and the ability to construct and share scenes, as is happening with those other virtual worlds. New methods of distributing and rezzing content, without the artist/creator transferring ownership of the prims to the consumer.
  • Improve the client performance, it's a relic conceived in the 1990's. A complete overhaul is in order to make it functional with mobile devices and the upcoming Steam Deck/consoles too.

If SL wants to stay relevant, it needs to modernize. No amount of bug fixing and thumb twiddling over ancient issues will take this platform forwards.

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12 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If transcripts are important to you .. then you're probably going to be the person who needs to put the time in and make them.

Not about whether the transcripts are important to me but to the Lindens. The whole week there are meetings every day between residents and the Lindens that are supposedly about finding solutions to problems on the platform. Solutions are presented which Lindens agree and like but it does not go any further than that meeting because by the Lindens own admissions, they do not keep a record of the solutions presented. I've seen it more than once where a solution is presented and agreed on as being good and yet several weeks later when the topic comes up again, the Lindens had to be reminded of the solution that was presented just a few weeks earlier. Why bother having the Lindens invest time into these meetings if everything is going in one ear and out the other the moment the viewer is closed? As an employer I would see that as a large waste of time and talent and would nip that in the bud pronto. As it is, it amounts to little more than a handholding session for residents to voice their complaints, without actually doing anything about them. No wonder so few residents attend them.

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30 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Not about whether the transcripts are important to me but to the Lindens. The whole week there are meetings every day between residents and the Lindens that are supposedly about finding solutions to problems on the platform.

That the JIRA.

Detailed technical actionable items that can be scheduled for developer time.

30 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

\I've seen it more than once where a solution is presented and agreed on as being good and yet several weeks later when the topic comes up again, the Lindens had to be reminded of the solution that was presented just a few weeks earlier.

We can all agree X needs to be better, that's not the same as getting X onto the development pipeline.

30 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

No wonder so few residents attend them.

The magic of it being an intentionally unlisted meeting. On purpose. For that reason.

The TPV meeting is not a forum for people to bring up their wishlists, it's about development that is in progress.

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8 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You're conflating the reasons why it is worth meeting with outsiders who code the viewer used by most customers with the notion that it has to be kept secret, and feigning that the issue is that meeting with them isn't worth it. No, they, and the Lindens, should be accountable, and should have public meetings, and in fact they have been public in the past because I've gone to them. Are the TPVs compliant? A good question always to ask. But since they are near official in their status, they should answer to the public as much as the Lindens. PS search isn't broken on their viewer, and it's worth asking again and again why the Lindens have not fixed search on their own viewer even though there is a small percentage of us who use their viewer because -- why shouldn't we prefer to use the official viewer of the platform provider!

BTW the way you might be interested to know I contacted the long-ago tenants of Ravenglass from the time you rented. And also found notecards from that era. And we figured out that there wasn't a failure to give out ban powers -- as you claimed; the issue was that *orbs were not allowed* but there was a certain tenant who insisted on having them. Sound familiar? Amazing the records the old tenants kept which I didn't even keep myself.

 

ROFLMAO You looked up this account? I never rented from you under this account and didn't even have this account until long after leaving Ravenglass. The parcel wasn't even rented with one of my accounts. That was my RL husband's idea and he still regrets it. Not to mention the fact that if you have found out my main account and used that info, you have broken TOS by disclosing. I have NEVER told anyone who my alts are and I have never put that information on any of my profiles.

So everything you claimed in that last paragraph is a flat out lie. You were the one who would not allow security orbs OR give the renters any parcel rights in order to be able to eject and ban griefers from our parcel.

Edited by Silent Mistwalker
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4 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

ROFLMAO You looked up this account? I never rented from you under this account and didn't even have this account until long after leaving Ravenglass. The parcel wasn't even rented with one of my accounts. That was my RL husband's idea and he still regrets it. Not to mention the fact that if you have found out my main account and used that info, you have broken TOS by disclosing. I have NEVER told anyone who my alts are and I have never put that information on any of my profiles.

So everything you claimed in that last paragraph is a flat out lie. You were the one who would not allow security orbs OR give the renters any parcel rights in order to be able to eject and ban griefers from our parcel.

Again, you keep repeating with no evidence this lie that I had a policy which in fact I didn't have, and there is no evidence I did -- except your sketchy memory of something 16 years ago (!)

I didn't say it was this account lol. Who says I found out any account of *yours*? Read what I wrote, and note that it was other tenants who found that one of their number put in a security orb, which was disallowed. Say, do you have a guilty conscience? 

1) As I do now, back then I give tenants ban powers. That's just basic everywhere, and recognized as necessary.

2) No, I don't allow security orbs because it is so annoying to everyone else -- and that's also common among Mainland rentals. I allow them in skyboxes, an idea that Desmond Shang first started in Caledon, which was brilliant, keeping the ground free and the sky private.

3) If you had a store, why do you need to install a security orb? Makes no sense.

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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So let's go over again what this is about, because it's instructive.

The new VP of Engineering had a long stint at Microsoft (as did Ebbe, the best CEO SL ever had). In my world, that means he is a grown-up, able to show up at work from 9 to 5, and most importantly, work to *customer requirements,* that is, real things in the real world of business, not code-for-code's sake like "avatar foot shadows" and "infinitely distant stars," the sort of thing that again and again becomes the preoccupation of LL coders and their fan base, which are often hostage to the non-democratic JIRA. And that this is a marker for not being in the open source cult.

Taking umbrage at "the very idea" that there is anything like "an opensource cult," someone inevitably points out that "the Internet" runs on open source (except where it doesn't like Amazon.com lol) and that Microsoft uses open source software -- as if that's the point. You're soaking in it, Madge! But the point is rather about the *cult* around it. I use an open source rental script, repeatedly updated and fixed by a variety of scripters, as an alternative to the monopolist, yet I'm hardly in any open source cult. So there's that distinction: the cult is a form of culture that privileges open source software over all others or insists on its monopoly as an idea, and often brings with it demands for freeing up permissions and copyleftism and all the rest -- which is destructive to SL. AND in this case automatically determines that any Microsoft on your resume must = evil. 

When, counterintuitively given their hatred, some people airily point out that Microsoft uses open source software, suddenly their hatred and distrust of such software corporations goes out the window as they try to "tu quoque" their critics. But they ought to care how those legions of free software workers are thus exploited in a giant online sweat-shop. They should be paid for their work. 

Then, as with the debate around the gatcha bans, if someone doesn't like my point of view, they try to dredge up something in my business -- even 16 years ago! -- that they can invoke and thus discredit me and damage my business. It's a very low tactic -- and all the while hiding behind alts, and if any other person begins to tie together their past claims with any other avatar, begins to cry "TOS violation" as a way to suppress criticism. Again, ineffective, and low.

It's all so very SL forums, and the reality is, you don't win an argument by making unprovable claims about somebody's rental business 16 years ago, which are not on topic -- not on this one, or anyone -- but the have to be answered as they are damaging.

So if you want to argue that a past record at Microsoft is a bad thing, you can do it without kneejerk holding up of crosses, and explain why on earth this could possibly be bad for this setting, in which management of software expeditions has been uneven. Rather than sending somebody to make UI sketches, you could set up a list of relevant questions for this person, or benchmarks that would indicate he is "really working," or whatever you like, sticking to the topic of hand: the expectations for the leader of SL's software, which in the case of the viewer, is not used by like 90% of the customers, which is an anomaly, to say the least.

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Again, you keep repeating with no evidence this lie that I had a policy which in fact I didn't have, and there is no evidence I did -- except your sketchy memory of something 16 years ago (!)

I didn't say it was this account lol. Who says I found out any account of *yours*? Read what I wrote, and note that it was other tenants who found that one of their number put in a security orb, which was disallowed. Say, do you have a guilty conscience? 

1) As I do now, back then I give tenants ban powers. That's just basic everywhere, and recognized as necessary.

2) No, I don't allow security orbs because it is so annoying to everyone else -- and that's also common among Mainland rentals. I allow them in skyboxes, an idea that Desmond Shang first started in Caledon, which was brilliant, keeping the ground free and the sky private.

3) If you had a store, why do you need to install a security orb? Makes no sense.

We never put a security orb in. We asked before even buying one. You said no. We honored that even if you don't want to believe it.

No, you refused to give him eject and ban rights on the parcel. I watched you do it.

Back then there were plenty of stores that got griefed regardless of you acknowledging it happened.

You can deny it all you want. I was there. I witnessed the whole thing.  I see what you are trying to do and so do others. You are only fooling yourself. Have a nice life. What's left of it.

 

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