SL 2022 ROADMAP

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

I want to see proper LL mesh bodies, that are just as customizable as ones you buy.

Absolutely. It should also be open source so people can make free derivates and include documentation and dev kits for blender.

4 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

That and closed source code, and viewers have to register to get the code. This will deter copybot viewers popping up.

It will do nothing.

No one needs an evil viewer to snag content .. if anything, it just gets easier because they don't have to trust an evil viewer with SL login credentials. The best tool at our disposal to combat IP infringement is the DMCA.

Second, there is no way to stop an unauthorized client from connecting to the grid, the original copybot (a benign novelty that just made one avatar look like another) didn't need a single line of Linden code. If there was a way to make this work, sharing netflix passwords wouldn't work, VPNs for accessing media in other regions wouldn't work and cheating in competitive gaming wouldn't be a thing. At best it's a futile waste of time, at worst it's an arms race the lab can neither afford or win against a foe that's in it for the race itself.

Third party viewers that appear in the TPV directory already register with Linden Lab. They have our real life details. They know who we are.

4 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Also fix that dang crash copy bug. It's been how long and LL has not tried to fix that.

First make sure your PC and drivers are all up to date, if that fails try drivers direct from the hardware manufacture rather than windows update. The SL viewer depends on a lot of code beyond the viewer.

 If you can provide a precise list of steps to make it happen, repeatably , file a JIRA with whoever maintains your viewer of choice and a developer will love you. Bug fixes are widely propagated between all the various viewer projects, so if someone can create a fix, everyone, no matter what viewer they use will end up with the fix too.

Fixing bugs without being able to trigger the bug is almost impossible. 

[Sammy Huntsman]

36 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Absolutely. It should also be open source so people can make free derivates and include documentation and dev kits for blender.

They should include dev kits, for all softwares. Including 3DS Max and Maya. Not everyone uses Blender.

[Coffee Pancake]

10 hours ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

They should include dev kits, for all softwares. Including 3DS Max and Maya. Not everyone uses Blender.

3DS Max and Maya both cost $215 US a month to license (or only $4590 if paid every 3 years!).

Anyone that can justify that spend making content for SL will have all the skills required to use blender. Even major studios are switching over.

It's a pretty safe bet that anyone using Maya or Max for SL is either on an educational license or copybotting pirating it, and they should be switching to blender.

[animats]

22 hours ago, Nathan Zetkin said:

• Premium Plus - a new upgrade option with added features and extras

Charge content creators more money to make things

That would be Decentraland, home of all those expensive NFT items. Make big money, right? No. It costs US$500 up front to put an item into Decentraland. And it has to pass a "curation committee". There's a 10,000 triangle limit per item, too.

That place is a lot less decentralized than they claim.

[ezebongiovi]

I think they should work on performance first, graphic quality improvements and networking. Nowadays it's unacceptable to play with 200ms connection delay and less than 60 fps. I took a look into Sansar and it's far superior when it comes to those specs. It's lack of features is what makes it lose the war against SL. But if you take a look to any modern video game or simulator, you will notice they run much more faster and look much more stunning than SL.

I believe that a simulator must be immersive, and it cannot be immersive if it's slow and looks unreal. I'm more into a "Fix SL" campaign than those new features they are planning for 2022 roadmap. It's not about adding "premium features" where you pay to get a few more prims or lands, it's about rasing the quality bar to compete with 2022 standards. That's just my opinion. Would be glad to hear what the community thinks about this.

[ChinRey]

15 hours ago, ezebongiovi said:

Nowadays it's unacceptable to play with 200ms connection delay and less than 60 fps.

Unfortunately 200+ ms connection delay is inevitable for a virtual reality that is shared across the entire world. There's this pesky thing called the lightspeed that limits how fast data can be transferred even under perfect conditions.

Edited January 29, 2022 by ChinRey

[Furholio]

But didn't LL annouce the possibility to move your sim to a datacenter location of your choice? that could help to at least lower YOUR latency on YOUR sim

[Arielle Popstar]

3 hours ago, Furholio said:

But didn't LL annouce the possibility to move your sim to a datacenter location of your choice? that could help to at least lower YOUR latency on YOUR sim

I can't say I have seen it as a specific announcement but yes, it was brought up as a potential benefit of moving to cloud servers in some meetings. 

[Odaks]

11 hours ago, Furholio said:

But didn't LL annouce the possibility to move your sim to a datacenter location of your choice?

There was a hint of that, in the very early days of heading towards AWS. I've never heard a word of it since and can only assume that it is not going to happen, at least for the foreseeable future.

[HarrisonMcKenzie]

On 12/24/2021 at 9:52 PM, Sammy Huntsman said:

Can we have subparcels, so we can have parcels within parcels. So we can have apartments in SL.

I do like that idea.

On 12/27/2021 at 11:34 AM, Lokiande said:

But realize that your playerbase is adults, doing adult things, who will very likely throw a *****fit if/when actual children get access to SL.

This is definitely a challenge, but as noted, "younger" doesn't mean kids. Any organization or business needs to attract new members/customers if it is going to survive. Real world social clubs (thinking things like the Canadian Legions) are dying out because the average age is far closer to 70 than 30. I would hazard that the average age of SL peeps is quite high as well, with a very small number of new users. Making it easier to play around casually on mobile or maybe enhancing the UX could make SL a lot more welcoming to growth, especially in light of this resurging interest virtual worlds.

On 1/1/2022 at 12:54 AM, Sammy Huntsman said:

They should include dev kits, for all softwares. Including 3DS Max and Maya. Not everyone uses Blender.

Please sing this from the highest mountain. I am having such a hard time rigging in Max because nothing uploads. Anything rigged completely breaks upon upload because I can't seem to get the bone characteristics to match.

Not everyone uses Blender nor cares to learn. There are a lot of students who can cut their teeth here because the barriers of entry are a lot lower. Yes, any skilled Max or Maya user can transfer those skills to new software once they learn that new software, but we have to remember that creators in SL are often hobbyists, not professionals, so they might not know how to do that. And after spending X amount of time learning something like Maya, are you really going to want to have to switch and do it all over again.

[Debs Whimsy]

Personally, I think SL needs to stop looking at new until they've fixed the old. TP issues are still happening. Group chat glitches are rampant. Those are just two of the top I still see yet we never hear anything about them from LL. Premium Plus is just another cash grab; make us think they are giving us so much while they really aren't, but continue to leave us with the same glitches. 

It doesn't mean I don't want new features, but fix what you've got first. You won't attract new people with a product that doesn't work right. 

[Evelyn Takeda]

Security is #1 priority of SL,there people who is crashing regions when they feel like it EVERYDAY and LL is absolute incompetent and useless to do something about it,this problem is going on for a long time,many SL users are leaving to open sim because of this,and many of you blind users asking why SL is more empty every week and tons of land for sale. Keep asking for silly improvements,focus on keeping people here,and bringing more.FIX -->SERVERS SECURITY FIRST.

[Solar Legion]

Oh look, hyperbole returns!

No, people are not crashing entire regions every single day - knocking users offline does not require such a thing.

No, large numbers of Second Life users are not leaving to Open Sim on any regular basis "because of this" - not even close.

The "blind" ones are the ones peddling such absolute nonsense.

The "blind" ones are the ones that cannot be bothered to do more than a casual examination of the Destinations or other such lists/searches. They are the ones who cannot wrap their minds around there being an ebb and flow to user numbers and land sales/abandonment. They are the ones that conflate people moving on in general with the above nonsense.

Overloading a region is not a security issue. Nor is having your Viewer shut down thanks to your own system being asked to do too much.

Log-in information being leaked, payment information being leaked (among other things) - these are actual security issues.

[LilithServil]

Really wish the topic of flexible mesh would crop up again. I know it was talked about... forever ago and was canned (I think).

Comparing SL to something like VRChat as far as quality goes, you can immediately tell VRChat avatars tend to look better in motion. Modelled hair, ears, tails, capes, etc that actually move with physics look infinitely better than multi-segmented prim hair/tails that constantly freak out and separate into their individual pieces when they move too fast.

I don't even care if it's similar to Animesh where you're restricted from having more than a couple flexi-mesh pieces attached to keep lag down, just... Please. Bento is nice and all but some things look so inexplicably off about rigged hair being incapable of moving away from the shoulders/chest, tails remaining in the same rigid sway animation while doing a high-energy activity like dancing/jumping, dresses stretching and warping when you walk/sit/jump, etc etc.

Not sure how much of a performance hit mesh with jiggle physics would cause, but I feel like in the long run it'd be better than people running around with 16+ segments on a flexi tail each with a different high res texture, or flexi hair, or whatever else people still would rather use flexies for to simulate more natural movement than mesh allows for.

[Lucia Nightfire]

10 hours ago, LilithServil said:

Really wish the topic of flexible mesh would crop up again. I know it was talked about... forever ago and was canned (I think).

Comparing SL to something like VRChat as far as quality goes, you can immediately tell VRChat avatars tend to look better in motion. Modelled hair, ears, tails, capes, etc that actually move with physics look infinitely better than multi-segmented prim hair/tails that constantly freak out and separate into their individual pieces when they move too fast.

I don't even care if it's similar to Animesh where you're restricted from having more than a couple flexi-mesh pieces attached to keep lag down, just... Please. Bento is nice and all but some things look so inexplicably off about rigged hair being incapable of moving away from the shoulders/chest, tails remaining in the same rigid sway animation while doing a high-energy activity like dancing/jumping, dresses stretching and warping when you walk/sit/jump, etc etc.

Not sure how much of a performance hit mesh with jiggle physics would cause, but I feel like in the long run it'd be better than people running around with 16+ segments on a flexi tail each with a different high res texture, or flexi hair, or whatever else people still would rather use flexies for to simulate more natural movement than mesh allows for.

VRChat avatars allow for dynamic bones and colliders, or what they now like to call "physics bones".

The content creator community has brought these facets up in the meetings with LL for years only to receive fear from developers at the possibility of offering an equivalent.

Many if not most other MMOs use these features now.

As long as SL devs wish to remain ignorant, fearful or even skeptical of industry standards and user needs, this platform will continue to be behind the times, growing at a wider margin with each passing year.

[Coffee Pancake]

15 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

VRChat avatars allow for dynamic bones and colliders, or what they now like to call "physics bones".

The content creator community has brought these facets up in the meetings with LL for years only to receive fear from developers at the possibility of offering an equivalent.

Many if not most other MMOs use these features now.

As long as SL devs wish to remain ignorant, fearful or even skeptical of industry standards and user needs, this platform will continue to be behind the times, growing at a wider margin with each passing year.

If VRChat was more accessible to desktop users and didn't constrain itself to the VR paradigm, SL would be toast.

[Lucia Nightfire]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If VRChat was more accessible to desktop users and didn't constrain itself to the VR paradigm, SL would be toast.

Toast? SL will always have it's faithful, slowly declining, diehard userbase 👴👵......until we all finally die from "natural causes"...which isn't far ahead...cough...💀💀

[Coffee Pancake]

4 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

Toast? SL will always have it's faithful, slowly declining, diehard userbase 👴👵......until we all finally die from "natural causes"...which isn't far ahead...cough...💀💀

The minimum viable population will be reached well before the bulk of us die off. Belt tightening from LL and shifts in billing policy is the first sign that's happening.

Edited April 10, 2022 by Coffee Pancake

[Sid Nagy]

The next couple of years the money will get tighter for a lot of us, due to the worldwide high inflation rates.
That will affect a lot of entertainment budgets too. It might speed up the process as well.

Tinfoil hats anyone?

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 12/26/2021 at 8:57 PM, animats said:

You could buy digital property and clothes with real money and hang out with other blocky avatars.

Wrong VW. They described Active Worlds, not SL. It's in AW that you see blocky avatars.

 

They did improve them a bit over the years but still blocky.

 

Still, they don't even come close to being as good quality as what can be found in SL. When SL opened in 2003, you didn't see the original block avatars, they had already been replaced with Ruth.

AW's software/engine is several years older than SL's.

[LilithServil]

8 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

VRChat avatars allow for dynamic bones and colliders, or what they now like to call "physics bones".

The content creator community has brought these facets up in the meetings with LL for years only to receive fear from developers at the possibility of offering an equivalent.

Many if not most other MMOs use these features now.

As long as SL devs wish to remain ignorant, fearful or even skeptical of industry standards and user needs, this platform will continue to be behind the times, growing at a wider margin with each passing year.

Even PS2 and Gamecube games have proper physics engines with jigglebones and flexible pieces. LL really, really needs to prioritize figuring out some way to allow users to give mesh wearables proper physics instead of shying away from it. Even if it doesn't have good collision and just functions like a fancier looking flexiprim, it'd be a hell of a lot better than wearing items that should naturally flow with your body only for them to be taped down to SL's skeleton due to the limitations.

[MrHGee]

I'd rather they just update SL to actually be able to use PC hardware newer than 2010 properly.

 

Stop limiting it to people that use a dual core Pentium laptop and Intel HD graphics.

 

Use more than 2 CPU cores and use the 4 to 12GB of GPU ram most of us have.

 

Been on SL for over 10 years and its performance with 'performance hardware' has gone nowhere. All well and good throwing more stuff up on screen but you need to improve the code and hardware usage to make it all work smoothly. Less garnish and frippery and more raw hardware performance please.

Edited May 29, 2022 by MrHGee

[Codex Alpha]

On 1/1/2022 at 5:14 PM, animats said:

That would be Decentraland, home of all those expensive NFT items. Make big money, right? No. It costs US$500 up front to put an item into Decentraland. And it has to pass a "curation committee". There's a 10,000 triangle limit per item, too.

That place is a lot less decentralized than they claim.

Oh but then we can 'pretend' that our low poly knight helmet is of 'rare' and 'legendary' status with only a few available (in digital goods which are limitless) and then we can charge $1500 USD for it .

Listings cost is proportional to the false scarcity rating of the product. What a crap system.

God NFTs and this whole system make me want to puke. It's all lies and I don't want any part of it as a creator.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Codex Alpha

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 1/28/2022 at 10:17 PM, ezebongiovi said:

I think they should work on performance first, graphic quality improvements and networking. Nowadays it's unacceptable to play with 200ms connection delay and less than 60 fps. I took a look into Sansar and it's far superior when it comes to those specs. It's lack of features is what makes it lose the war against SL. But if you take a look to any modern video game or simulator, you will notice they run much more faster and look much more stunning than SL.

I believe that a simulator must be immersive, and it cannot be immersive if it's slow and looks unreal. I'm more into a "Fix SL" campaign than those new features they are planning for 2022 roadmap. It's not about adding "premium features" where you pay to get a few more prims or lands, it's about rasing the quality bar to compete with 2022 standards. That's just my opinion. Would be glad to hear what the community thinks about this.

You say all this as if Linden Lab was not the creator of Sansar more than a decade after SL was opened to the public.

[Codex Alpha]

On 12/23/2021 at 11:02 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

 

From 

2022 Roadmap

 

• Improved materials and terrain
• Adding web marketplace variants

Imagine if the PBRs no more PBR to spc conversions, one less hassle in the workflow, though admittedly might be too late (looking at greener, more modern pastures)