SL - Year in Review (and looking forward)

[LittleMe Jewell]

I miss Oz's insightful and sometimes comedic input on things here and there.  I never really knew Ebbe, but I know that SL ran wonderfully under him and he will be forever missed.  Overall, I think LL did pretty well in 2021.  They have might plans for 2022 and I hope they can pull it off. I'm definitely looking forward to what they come up with for the Premium Plus package.

 

 

[animats]

Linden Lab has a roadmap!

• Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness
• Premium Plus - a new upgrade option with added features and extras
• A new mobile viewer to enhance and improve your Second Life experience
• Improved group chat reliability
• Viewer and script performance improvements 
• New user avatar customization and improvements
• Updated mesh optimizer
• Search engine improvements
• Improved materials and terrain
• Adding web marketplace variants
• …and much more!

First time in years we've seen anything that looks like a plan. This is encouraging.

• Avatar “expressiveness” that brings camera-based gestures and movement to your avatar for a whole new level of interaction and connectedness

Now that's moderately difficult, but other systems already have it. It should be popular with machima makers. Videos made in SL won't look so dead.

• A new mobile viewer to enhance and improve your Second Life experience

Limited, cloud-hosted, or needs 5G? Really, a must-have to gain market share.

• Updated mesh optimizer

That's already in test. It's essentially the same as the one in Blender.

• Improved materials and terrain

PBR? Subsurface scattering for skin? Nanite ground? Should be interesting.

 

 

[Chic Aeon]

38 minutes ago, animats said:

First time in years we've seen anything that looks like a plan. This is encouraging.

 

Some of those goals in the list have been on and off the roadmaps a few times already (looks like seven). Nice to see a list. Hope that some come to fruition.  I am still worried about that lindens to USD becoming taxable under Tilia edict though.  We still haven't heard explanation about that and the change would be a game changer for many people --  and not in a good way.   

 

Fingers crossed that the future is bright. 

[ItHadToComeToThis]

I see we have yet another rough release date for Premium When....I mean Plus.

[Prokofy Neva]

I think the Lindens will not do most of those things, and most of them aren't important to me personally (mobile version, avatar expressions, avatar customization).

Yes, relief from the great cost of texture uploads would be great if they implement Premium Plus -- but they have put that off for so long that there must be serious problems with it, either financial or ideological (I can't see that it is technical).

If "fix search" meant to "make it like 1.23, to make it like Firestorm, Alchemy etc still have it or at least to put it back the way it was in 2020," that would be great. But judging from the work done for the last year, it is likely headed to becoming even worse.

 

[Qie Niangao]

I'll be interested to see what features Marketing puts in Premium Plus, targeting what price point. I'm thinking reduced upload fees would be scant draw for most with funds for a heftier subscription, but marketing is magic to me. I'd pay more if it came with a grid-scope Experience license—it's the sole thing I really want—but on the other hand I'm not sure I trust the grid to just anybody with a few extra US$ per month.

About "Avatar 'expressiveness'," does "camera-based gestures and movement" mean the avatar will try to mirror what a cam sees on the typist's face? Do many SL users really have or want a cam pointed at their faces, and are adequately lit for the cam to distinguish whatever shades of "expressiveness" this should convey? (Personally, I have cams all over the house but nothing looking at my SL-ready workspace—but I'm also not thespian enough to ready Qie for that kind of stage, so I'm not really the market for such a feature anyway.)

The mobile viewer is the only item on the list that I'd expect to really matter to SL's viability. The main trick here is deciding what minimum level of graphics technology to target. Some gaming phones have substantially better graphics than the average SL user's PC, and phones get upgraded a lot more often than PCs, so it's tempting to aim high—it'll still hit a much larger audience than the entire VR headset market, for any foreseeable launch date, unless Meta starts giving away Cambrias in Cheerios boxes. (Network bandwidth will be a little tight except on home / office WiFi, but I don't see that dictating product decisions all that much.)

Edited December 24, 2021 by Qie Niangao

[animats]

I'm not sure what Premium Plus should have, either. SL already has private communities of elaborate houses, such as The Grove and the Fruit Islands. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, currently in the Destination Guide, is perhaps the most impressive home in Second Life. It's not just a big build, it's one done with artistry. So you can get a luxury lifestyle now, if you want.

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, animats said:

I'm not sure what Premium Plus should have, either. SL already has private communities of elaborate houses, such as The Grove and the Fruit Islands. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, currently in the Destination Guide, is perhaps the most impressive home in Second Life. It's not just a big build, it's one done with artistry. So you can get a luxury lifestyle now, if you want.

Well we know that they have been planning on "discount" texture uploads for a long while (years?) and you can see evidence on the beta grid -- or still could the last time I was there. 

 

Some obvious things that people have repeatedly said they wanted would be:

• Homestead purchase without having to buy a full sim
• A "Belli" type area but with bigger lots like double sized giving people more land impact and fewer houses per sim
• Yet again more groups (I don't get that personally but I sure hear it a lot)
• Yet again more attachment points (like the two animesh attachments for premium type thing)
• The ability to have more than one Marketplace store

Just some obvious ideas

 

[Prokofy Neva]

12 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I'll be interested to see what features Marketing puts in Premium Plus, targeting what price point. I'm thinking reduced upload fees would be scant draw for most with funds for a heftier subscription, but marketing is magic to me. I'd pay more if it came with a grid-scope Experience license—it's the sole thing I really want—but on the other hand I'm not sure I trust the grid to just anybody with a few extra US$ per month.

About "Avatar 'expressiveness'," does "camera-based gestures and movement" mean the avatar will try to mirror what a cam sees on the typist's face? Do many SL users really have or want a cam pointed at their faces, and are adequately lit for the cam to distinguish whatever shades of "expressiveness" this should convey? (Personally, I have cams all over the house but nothing looking at my SL-ready workspace—but I'm also not thespian enough to ready Qie for that kind of stage, so I'm not really the market for such a feature anyway.)

The mobile viewer is the only item on the list that I'd expect to really matter to SL's viability. The main trick here is deciding what minimum level of graphics technology to target. Some gaming phones have substantially better graphics than the average SL user's PC, and phones get upgraded a lot more often than PCs, so it's tempting to aim high—it'll still hit a much larger audience than the entire VR headset market, for any foreseeable launch date, unless Meta starts giving away Cambrias in Cheerios boxes. (Network bandwidth will be a little tight except on home / office WiFi, but I don't see that dictating product decisions all that much.)

What is it that you want to do with a grid-wide experience? Is this about trains?

You're right that anything you'd want to do of this nature can't be seen in isolation, but has to be seen in the context of everyone wanting to do it, or rather anyone, those who want to bother, and that could inflict unfreedom on some in the name of freedom for the few, like so many things in SL.

I continue to see SL as a world, a place you go, not a thing to watch, like YouTube, or chat with, like Messenger. So why do you want it on your phone? There's a serviceable app that enables you to do some things on SL, it's called Lumiya.

I often notice that tenants turn OFF the ability to have voice on their land. In fact people don't use voice as much as imagined. You think hearing Lindens in office hours, and hearing idiots in the welcome areas, that there are "all these people who use voice." In fact, there are not and people actively push it away.

[Maryanne Solo]

12 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

 

👀😲🤔

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

• Homestead purchase without having to buy a full sim

That would be awesome,

4 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

• A "Belli" type area but with bigger lots like double sized giving people more land impact and fewer houses per sim

Double prim belli land set up like horizons would be a nice option too.

4 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

• Yet again more attachment points (like the two animesh attachments for premium type thing)

From a technical perspective, I'm not sure we would get that. Avatars and rigged attachments being the single biggest performance issue facing SL right now.

4 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

• The ability to have more than one Marketplace store

I W I S H

[Sammy Huntsman]

12 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

That would be awesome,

Double prim belli land set up like horizons would be a nice option too.

From a technical perspective, I'm not sure we would get that. Avatars and rigged attachments being the single biggest performance issue facing SL right now.

I W I S H

I wish we had the ability to be able to have sub-parcels within parcels. It would make apartment living possible in SL. 

[Lucia Nightfire]

With Premium Plus, I'd like LL to figure out a way to offer users the ability to buy more prims or to exchange land tier for more prims.

If I was a Premium Plus user and l already had enough land in a favorite/ideal Mainland region or there were no other parcels in the region for sale,

but wanted more prims, I could interface with a "Region Prim Contribution" floater and enter the amount of prims up to a max based on the amount of available land I had left.

If I had 1024 sqm land available, it would allow me to contribute 351 prims to the my land's "parcel land capacity" in the region. This would consume my remaining available land.

This would also be tracked in the user's Land Use Fees page.

The same kind of interface could exist for contributing prims to a group or maybe donated tier could be exchanged for prims by a Premium Plus group owner.

A maximum increase of 2x prims would probably be the parcel/land limit. You wouldn't want someone to be able to dump a region's worth of prims on a tiny parcel even if they could afford it.

Sounds complicated to introduce to the existing infrastructure, but I know it would be a hit.

Edited December 25, 2021 by Lucia Nightfire

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

I wish we had the ability to be able to have sub-parcels within parcels. It would make apartment living possible in SL. 

It could just be an extension of prims.

Create a cube, mark it as a special new type "volume", it becomes invisible to everyone but the creator and phantom, then you could set various parameters for that volume overriding land settings or whatever we could dream up for avatars contained inside the bounding cube. It would open up a huge range of possibilities and give us true 3D parceling and a lot of other cool options.

(Like being able to specify an EEP preset and audio url for the volume, bam, you have an indoor space with different lighting to the outside and your indoor radio only plays indoors)

[Qie Niangao]

11 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

What is it that you want to do with a grid-wide experience? Is this about trains?

You're right that anything you'd want to do of this nature can't be seen in isolation, but has to be seen in the context of everyone wanting to do it, or rather anyone, those who want to bother, and that could inflict unfreedom on some in the name of freedom for the few, like so many things in SL.

I continue to see SL as a world, a place you go, not a thing to watch, like YouTube, or chat with, like Messenger. So why do you want it on your phone? There's a serviceable app that enables you to do some things on SL, it's called Lumiya.

I often notice that tenants turn OFF the ability to have voice on their land. In fact people don't use voice as much as imagined. You think hearing Lindens in office hours, and hearing idiots in the welcome areas, that there are "all these people who use voice." In fact, there are not and people actively push it away.

Smartphone client: I'd never use it myself (same as I never use voice) because I have a cushy full-tower PC quietly humming under my desk (and other stuff to do with my ears), but that tethered PC is increasingly rare, especially in a very large market of potential "social engagement" users, a potential that SL has left untapped for a long time. I think it's tablestakes if SL isn't to be left completely in the dust by new "metaverse" entrants.

There are also those—not me—who would use SL both on a PC and when away from their desk on a phone; in fact those are the main users of Lumiya. Lumiya was a very impressive feat of development and can-do design—I wish the Lab had more of that attitude more often—but I understand the developer has been incommunicado for some years now and meanwhile things have changed not only with the SL platform but with the wider Internet plumbing. So Lumiya is not only gradually shedding usable features, its whole connection with the grid is hanging by an ever more tenuous thread. Nobody should count on it continuing to work, month by month, but some have no other viable option.

Grid-scope Experience: My immediate uses wouldn't be train-oriented, although now that you mention it I could simplify some rail-related programming using such an Experience. Both that potential use and everything for which I've most wanted a grid-scope Experiences would use a single feature completely invisible to other residents: the "Experience Persistent Store" aka "Key-Value Pair" or KVP memory. As you may know, LSL scripts are very memory constrained, which users have augmented with horrifically kludgy, inefficient work-arounds, including using more scripts and/or communicating with one or another breed of outside server. It's hideous and adds to SL scripting's reputation for dreadful reliability and poor performance. KVP gets around a very large share of that memory limitation problem, but not only that, it makes possible the nearly instantaneous sharing of a single, relatively large chunk of memory, across every script compiled with the same Experience, anywhere on the grid where the Experience is enabled. That's a huge win compared to all other forms of inter-process communication available to LSL scripts. I use it a lot across my own parcels and I'd be pretty excited about being able to give others access to such scripts, never using Experience Permissions at all.

But that's just me. Others would do exciting grid-scope things that do rely on Experience Permissions, so it's important to clarify that grid-scope would not come with the auto-granting of permissions that are conferred the Linden "cornfield-like" Experiences. Only users who actively grant such permissions could ever be affected by an Experience, and then only as long as they don't revoke it (very easy in any viewer) or prevent it from running on their land. Grid-scope Experiences default to being enabled everywhere but are subject to landowner choice to disable them individually on any parcel, sort of like turning off voice. They do not default to being enabled for every user.

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Smartphone client: I'd never use it myself (same as I never use voice) because I have a cushy full-tower PC quietly humming under my desk (and other stuff to do with my ears), but that tethered PC is increasingly rare, especially in a very large market of potential "social engagement" users, a potential that SL has left untapped for a long time. I think it's tablestakes if SL isn't to be left completely in the dust by new "metaverse" entrants.

There are also those—not me—who would use SL both on a PC and when away from their desk on a phone; in fact those are the main users of Lumiya. Lumiya was a very impressive feat of development and can-do design—I wish the Lab had more of that attitude more often—but I understand the developer has been incommunicado for some years now and meanwhile things have changed not only with the SL platform but with the wider Internet plumbing. So Lumiya is not only gradually shedding usable features, its whole connection with the grid is hanging by an ever more tenuous thread. Nobody should count on it continuing to work, month by month, but some have no other viable option.

Grid-scope Experience: My immediate uses wouldn't be train-oriented, although now that you mention it I could simplify some rail-related programming using such an Experience. Both that potential use and everything for which I've most wanted a grid-scope Experiences would use a single feature completely invisible to other residents: the "Experience Persistent Store" aka "Key-Value Pair" or KVP memory. As you may know, LSL scripts are very memory constrained, which users have augmented with horrifically kludgy, inefficient work-arounds, including using more scripts and/or communicating with one or another breed of outside server. It's hideous and adds to SL scripting's reputation for dreadful reliability and poor performance. KVP gets around a very large share of that memory limitation problem, but not only that, it makes possible the nearly instantaneous sharing of a single, relatively large chunk of memory, across every script compiled with the same Experience, anywhere on the grid where the Experience is enabled. That's a huge win compared to all other forms of inter-process communication available to LSL scripts. I use it a lot across my own parcels and I'd be pretty excited about being able to give others access to such scripts, never using Experience Permissions at all.

But that's just me. Others would do exciting grid-scope things that do rely on Experience Permissions, so it's important to clarify that grid-scope would not come with the auto-granting of permissions that are conferred the Linden "cornfield-like" Experiences. Only users who actively grant such permissions could ever be affected by an Experience, and then only as long as they don't revoke it (very easy in any viewer) or prevent it from running on their land. Grid-scope Experiences default to being enabled everywhere but are subject to landowner choice to disable them individually on any parcel, sort of like turning off voice. They do not default to being enabled for every user.

Lumiya is good enough. For me, it was vital when I had to go in the hospital and my son was traveling and unable to help do simple things like upgrade tenants to residents. You can do that on Lumiya. You can chat and it is bare bones but really all I want from a phone. If I am not seated at my desk working, why would I want to be on SL? Or Facebook? Or any of those things. The only reason I carry my phone around is because my children, adapted to all those things, worry if I don't answer them on one of these servers for half a day. But I don't feel compelled to look at it. It's nice to get away, in fact. I guess this is the older generation.

I have to say I don't follow you on this memory issue. Aren't the experiences stores on the Lindens' servers? Are you saying they are inside residents' scripts? My only complaint about Experience is that even when you have it enabled on a parcel, when you come from one to another, crossing from one sim to another or even one parcel to another, it tells you "Experience is not enabled." I get that even crossing from a Bellisseria parcel out on to the Linden road. Of course you can't put an Experience in a Linden road. But why does it care? Why does it need to tell you that? You came to that parcel from an Experience elsewhere, using a TP experience that had either touch or volume detect. Or maybe you used Experience on that lot to give something to someone wearing a special magic item. Or maybe just to enable drinking a cup of coffee from a pot. The Bellisserian mailbox requires enabling Experience, so I do, yet it tells me it's not enabled if I step off that lot. That's a puzzle. But maybe what you're describing would cure that?

BTW do you have a house in Bellisseria?

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Lumiya is good enough.

I think a Lumiya replacement would be very welcome. The problem is Lumiya itself is very much on borrowed time.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I have to say I don't follow you on this memory issue. Aren't the experiences stores on the Lindens' servers? Are you saying they are inside residents' scripts? My only complaint about Experience is that even when you have it enabled on a parcel, when you come from one to another, crossing from one sim to another or even one parcel to another, it tells you "Experience is not enabled." I get that even crossing from a Bellisseria parcel out on to the Linden road. Of course you can't put an Experience in a Linden road. But why does it care? Why does it need to tell you that? You came to that parcel from an Experience elsewhere, using a TP experience that had either touch or volume detect. Or maybe you used Experience on that lot to give something to someone wearing a special magic item. Or maybe just to enable drinking a cup of coffee from a pot. The Bellisserian mailbox requires enabling Experience, so I do, yet it tells me it's not enabled if I step off that lot. That's a puzzle. But maybe what you're describing would cure that?

For scripters, an Experience comes with a bunch of functions, most of which (but not all) rely on a set of resident-granted permissions. Those permissions are what get in trouble when crossing parcel borders into areas including Linden roads that don't enable that particular Experience, and the way that condition is handled is pretty ungraceful (and some scripts amplify the messiness with unnecessary error messages to the end user).

Now that you mention Bellisseria, I'm reminded of one other grid-scope Experience I'd like somebody to make: A universal Linden water swimmer, complete with standard physics effects including buoyancy (so not merely an AO). This comes to mind because my little Bellisserian houseboat notices when a visitor has plunged into the water, and if they'll participate in an Experience they get an auto-attached swimmer HUD that's just a modified version of Thor's famous freebie (I think based on this one ?). It's not great, but it beats drowning—except, being land-scope, it fails utterly at the parcel border, which is depressingly close to the dock. (On the plus side, if they manage to swim to a flexi net hanging from the deck, the same Experience lets them shimmy up the corner of the houseboat to the upper deck, next to a diving board from which they can dive if they just bump into it.) Ignoring the rest of the silliness, the automatic swimmer is something I really think should just be inherent to Linden water, but failing that, I'd sure like to offer one to visitors so they could continue swimming past my parcel boundary.

Finally, back to Experience Persistent Store: that memory is on shared Linden servers and accessed by user-written scripts running on our familiar "region" servers. That's not a wholly new architecture for LSL: it's conceptually similar to notecard reading (notecard contents are stored separate from individual regions, too, accessible by scripts running on many regions simultaneously). Unlike notecards, though, Experience memory is written by scripts, not merely read, and it's not limited to sequential fetches.

[ETA: Scripters will observe that notecards aren't strictly sequential either. Their lines can be read in any order, you just need to know which line number to read. In contrast,  Experience store is "content addressable" in that retrieval is by a "key" index, not merely a line number.]

Edited December 25, 2021 by Qie Niangao

[Innula Zenovka]

9 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

the automatic swimmer is something I really think should just be inherent to Linden water, but failing that, I'd sure like to offer one to visitors so they could continue swimming past my parcel boundary.

In the absence of a grid wide experience, how about, rather than temp attaching the swimming hud to visitors who fall it, rez a life preserver near them in the water, force sit them on it, and then have it offer than a swimming HUD which they can then attach from their inventory if they wish?  The life preserver deletes itself when they unsit?

[Silent Mistwalker]

[Qie Niangao]

9 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

In the absence of a grid wide experience, how about, rather than temp attaching the swimming hud to visitors who fall it, rez a life preserver near them in the water, force sit them on it, and then have it offer than a swimming HUD which they can then attach from their inventory if they wish?  The life preserver deletes itself when they unsit?

Thanks. That could certainly be done; the "feel" is pretty different, though. To be able to swim, the visitors would be offered an item they need to find in inventory and attach, and which detaches back into inventory, same as if no Experience were involved at all. The Experience seats them on a temp-rez'd life preserver which beats drowning I suppose, but it's not the most exciting payback for granting all those scary permissions.

[Coffee Pancake]

8 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

but it's not the most exciting payback for granting all those scary permissions.

Those permissions need to be made a lot less scary.

 

[animats]

On 12/25/2021 at 5:27 AM, Qie Niangao said:

universal Linden water swimmer,

Swimming should be part of standard avatar behavior. If you want to stay underwater, you should need a diving attachment like a weight belt to pull you down.

[Jennifer Boyle]

What I want most is better, more consistent performance. I see enormous variations day to day. I spend 90 percent of my time in one of two sims. Most of the content in both hasn't changed in months or years. My cache is set to the maximum size and is on a separate SSD, and I have a 1,000 mbps internet connection. Some days, textures load almost instantly when I log on or TP into a sim. Other days, they take a very long time, and I wait, and wait, and wait, and wait for the expanse of gray to go away. My impression is that since the move to AWS, average performance is better, but there is much more variation, and the worst performance is significantly worse.

It's probably not technically feasible to offer improved performance to some users in return for higher fees, but it's the thing I most want. Or, maybe it is; could they prioritize certain users when allocating bandwidth at their end?

More groups would be nice, as would better inventory management tools, increased LI allowance, etc. Relaxation of any limit for which it is feasible would be nice. LL had the right idea when they let premium members have the ability to enter full sims. Although I personally would not use it, letting people own homesteads without owning a full sim would be good; it seems to me that the only purpose of the current restriction is to make it necessary for most people who want a homestead sim to rent it.

[LittleMe Jewell]

2 hours ago, animats said:

If you want to stay underwater, you should need a diving attachment like a weight belt to pull you down.

Why?  Just because it is that way in RL?  There are so many things in SL that violate RL physics rules.  I can fly here, without a vehicle.

[Paul Hexem]

On 12/24/2021 at 4:58 PM, Chic Aeon said:

• Homestead purchase without having to buy a full sim
• A "Belli" type area but with bigger lots like double sized giving people more land impact and fewer houses per sim

These are options they have to seriously consider.

Server costs being what they are today, there's no excuse for the price of land anymore.