performance I think we should, collectively, be somewhat embarassed.

[Sonic Voxel]

14 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

You are not going to break my content or any one elses.   there is lots of love and energy put into some of the older builds.

On 4/5/2022 at 5:48 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

If we don't do something, we're not going to attract a new user base. 

"I'm old and might die soon, SL can die with me #nochanges" is a garbage model to base a business around.

It's not good business to block all platform progression because part of the user base are happily plodding along on computers best left to thrift stores and idiot collectors like me who can't help putting an SSD in everything.

Moving to a new render platform is going to be a multi year project and during that time some drop off in older machines is to be expected. Part of the problem LL have had is an unwillingness to commit to open ended and big projects in general. If it can't show shiny and "growth" in its first iteration then it's not worth doing is the kind of development strategy that gets features half baked and abandoned for years (360 snaps, profile updates, etc etc), or half baked and pushed out the door to universal disapproval and months of languished tinkering (eep).

SL is often a users primary entertainment outlet, it shouldn't be a stretch to expect people to update their gear every now and again - just like they would with any other primary hobby.

All of this ^

@bigmoe Whitfield - did you even read the thread?

 

[Coffee Pancake]

17 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

You are not going to break my content or any one elses.   there is lots of love and energy put into some of the older builds.

What happened to all the drawings you did as a child ... 

SL is a living world first, not some museum or mausoleum.

Break all the content. Give us new systems to create better replacement content.

 

Without platform advancement we will not have a platform.

[Paul Hexem]

22 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

You are not going to break my content or any one elses.   there is lots of love and energy put into some of the older builds.

If we never updated anything because someone put in hard work that one time, we'd still be living in mud huts and I'd be carving "get rid of your old junk so we can improve!" into a rock instead of saying it on these forums.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

5 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

What happened to all the drawings you did as a child ... 

SL is a living world first, not some museum or mausoleum.

Break all the content. Give us new systems to create better replacement content.

 

Without platform advancement we will not have a platform.

Then they can make another world and leave this one as a historical legacy that can be come to and look at or still be able to be used.   SL is unique, I'd rather not have it thrown in crapper just because of places like failbook and vrfat.

[Gabriele Graves]

I'm torn on this one.  On one hand I like the idea of changing things to improve performance and user experience and don't mind if that breaks some things to get that done.  On the other hand, I wouldn't want to have to completely start again content-wise.  Incrementally being moved along is bearable simply because not everything is gone all at once and we have had this previously in many forms, script changes, lighting differences, body/head changes, clothing, etc.  Logging in one day to find you no longer have any inventory, that your land and builds are gone and you are now sporting the latest incarnation of a default avatar would simply be unacceptable to me.

Just a thought:  If LL had decided to "upgrade" SL by rapidly ripping out, modernising and replacing wholesale parts of it to turn it into Sansar which in turn meant starting again from scratch content-wise instead of what they did and should SL-Sansar have sunk as the actual Sansar did then there would be no original SL left today either.  I am grateful they took the approach they did personally.

I still very much hope there is still a lot of scope to improve a lot of SL incrementally with a good amount of content preservation along the way.

I think that LL need to be more proactive on deciding what level of hardware they consider to be the minimum requirements taking performance and the difficulty of supporting aging of hardware into account, document those requirements properly and keep them up-to-date.

Edited July 27, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Madelaine McMasters]

7 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

What happened to all the drawings you did as a child ...

They're under coats of paint. Just before repainting rooms, Mom and Dad would invite me to draw things all over the walls in pencil. They'd jump in, too. I wish I had photos of some of those works. They were impressive.

[Coffee Pancake]

11 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

I'm torn on this one.  On one hand I like the idea of changing things to improve performance and user experience and don't mind if that breaks some things to get that done.  On the other hand, I wouldn't want to have to completely start again content-wise.  Incrementally being moved along is bearable simply because not everything is gone all at once and we have had this previously in many forms, script changes, lighting differences, body/head changes, clothing, etc.  Logging in one day to find you no longer have any inventory, that your land and builds are gone and you are now sporting the latest incarnation of a default avatar would simply be unacceptable to me.

SL is in it's 20th year now and we are still dealing with day 1 systems, many of which were hacked into existence because they we're the easy option rather than the good one.

SL is old enough for there to be second wave users coming back for the nostalgia.

Extending the product by continually building on top of existing systems creates more problems, we end up with something that's constrained by the system it's intended to replace and as a result isn't actually what we wanted (such as EEP). Support for legacy systems end up sitting around forever offering only weird edge case functionality (LSO, System Avatar Hair)

Or worse, we end up with systems that block all future advancement because there is no easy way to translate them forward or build on top of them (Prims, Physics).

SL History is nothing more than lost hopes and dreams that die with the platform rather than preserving its legacy.

A 20 year old hacked together platform that once was ahead of it's time, and is only managing to hold on because the users keep squeezing out every last drop from the systems we have, and when that fails, they resort to cheating (product pictures that aren't made in SL, faceapp smiles on avatar snapshots, a million flickr photos from photoshop).

 

11 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

I still very much hope there is still a lot of scope to improve a lot of SL incrementally with a good amount of content preservation along the way.

No, there really isn't.

That road ran out years ago.

There has been no major movement for the better part of a decade. Everything since mesh has been finding ways to kludge older systems into doing "a bit more".

That's why LL wandered off to make Sansar, that's why there has been no render engine upgrade or overhaul. That's why the datacenter was never updated, got so old it had to be retired, and we're now stuck in the worst possible fit cloud hosting has to offer (always on, full tilt, virtual machines). That's why there is no VR or mobile client or avatar dynamics or procedural content or hyper grid / metaverse or modern physics or client side anything or shaders or games or more than one visual style or growth.

SL is almost the same age as my adult child.

The longer this goes on, the bigger and more drastic the eventual change to remain relevant will need to be, and the smaller the population swing death blow becomes.

SL doesn't survive and scale down to the last person here, it drops dead with tens of thousands online. How many of the current userbase can we stand to lose 5% .. 10% .. maybe 20% at the absolute max. That kind of migration can and does happen virtually overnight in online terms (see FFXIV going from nowhere to #1).

SL actually needs to worry about its users physically dying off.

We don't have a seat at the metaverse table. We're not an aspirational vision of a user created virtual world. We have no input on the emerging standards for the next generation of online presence and interactivity.

We're the butt of jokes. We're a lesson to others. We're what people laughing at Zucker hold up as an example of comparable failure.

We're doing our best with the platform and systems we have.

We do not have the tools to win.

We will vanish in the blink of an eye and leave nothing more than a footnote. (and a million photoshopped fake pictures of what SL was like)

[Solar Legion]

That's nice.

[Gabriele Graves]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

SL is in it's 20th year now and we are still dealing with day 1 systems, many of which were hacked into existence because they we're the easy option rather than the good one.

SL is old enough for there to be second wave users coming back for the nostalgia.

Extending the product by continually building on top of existing systems creates more problems, we end up with something that's constrained by the system it's intended to replace and as a result isn't actually what we wanted (such as EEP). Support for legacy systems end up sitting around forever offering only weird edge case functionality (LSO, System Avatar Hair)

Or worse, we end up with systems that block all future advancement because there is no easy way to translate them forward or build on top of them (Prims, Physics).

SL History is nothing more than lost hopes and dreams that die with the platform rather than preserving its legacy.

A 20 year old hacked together platform that once was ahead of it's time, and is only managing to hold on because the users keep squeezing out every last drop from the systems we have, and when that fails, they resort to cheating (product pictures that aren't made in SL, faceapp smiles on avatar snapshots, a million flickr photos from photoshop).

 

No, there really isn't.

That road ran out years ago.

There has been no major movement for the better part of a decade. Everything since mesh has been finding ways to kludge older systems into doing "a bit more".

That's why LL wandered off to make Sansar, that's why there has been no render engine upgrade or overhaul. That's why the datacenter was never updated, got so old it had to be retired, and we're now stuck in the worst possible fit cloud hosting has to offer (always on, full tilt, virtual machines). That's why there is no VR or mobile client or avatar dynamics or procedural content or hyper grid / metaverse or modern physics or client side anything or shaders or games or more than one visual style or growth.

SL is almost the same age as my adult child.

The longer this goes on, the bigger and more drastic the eventual change to remain relevant will need to be, and the smaller the population swing death blow becomes.

SL doesn't survive and scale down to the last person here, it drops dead with tens of thousands online. How many of the current userbase can we stand to lose 5% .. 10% .. maybe 20% at the absolute max. That kind of migration can and does happen virtually overnight in online terms (see FFXIV going from nowhere to #1).

SL actually needs to worry about its users physically dying off.

We don't have a seat at the metaverse table. We're not an aspirational vision of a user created virtual world. We have no input on the emerging standards for the next generation of online presence and interactivity.

We're the butt of jokes. We're a lesson to others. We're what people laughing at Zucker hold up as an example of comparable failure.

We're doing our best with the platform and systems we have.

We do not have the tools to win.

We will vanish in the blink of an eye and leave nothing more than a footnote. (and a million photoshopped fake pictures of what SL was like)

The problem is that nobody, not LL or anyone else is going to make a "better" SL for all the important aspects of SL, partially because nobody can agree on what is important.  They would make something different.  LL did that and it failed with the current user base, so they pivoted and said it wasn't aimed at SL users but very few users materialised.  Would you rather have lost SL as well?  Why do you stay instead of going to a technically better place?  I would guess because SL gives you something that you cannot find anywhere else.  It does that for a lot of people (still) in a lot of different ways and therein lies it's fragility and it's indefinable qualities.

If LL cannot reasonably find a way to upgrade SL incrementally and still preserve the fundamentals that keep people here as well as attracting new users, then the only recourse is to keep it going for as long as feasible and then abandon it.  It would be incredibly sad but that may indeed be the inevitable outcome.  All things have their time.

 

[Solar Legion]

Just now, Gabriele Graves said:

The problem is that nobody, not LL or anyone else is going to make a "better" SL for all the important aspects of SL, partially because nobody can agree on what is important.  They would make something different.  LL did that and it failed with the current user base, so they pivoted and said it wasn't aimed at SL users but very few users materialised.  Would you rather have lost SL as well?  Why do you stay instead of going to a technically better place?  I would guess because SL gives you something that you cannot find anywhere else.  It does that for a lot of people (still) in a lot of different ways and therein lies it's fragility and it's indefinable qualities.

If LL cannot reasonably find a way to upgrade SL incrementally and still preserve the fundamentals that keep people here as well as attracting new users, then the only recourse is to keep it going for as long as feasible and then abandon it.  It would be incredibly sad but that may indeed be the inevitable outcome.  All things have their time.

 

Now see ... someone actually gets it.

[Coffee Pancake]

12 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

The problem is that nobody, not LL or anyone else is going to make a "better" SL for all the important aspects of SL, partially because nobody can agree on what is important.  They would make something different.  LL did that and it failed with the current user base, so they pivoted and said it wasn't aimed at SL users but very few users materialised.  Would you rather have lost SL as well?  Why do you stay instead of going to a technically better place?  I would guess because SL gives you something that you cannot find anywhere else.  It does that for a lot of people (still) in a lot of different ways and therein lies it's fragility and it's indefinable qualities.

They spent years failing to sell SL and in the end bet the farm on Sansar, which crashed out and got sold, shortly before a LL got picked up by a friend of the founder (because he jokingly said "if this deal falls though, I will buy it!") .. and not for the SL part, for the sexy exciting fintech part. The closing bell has been ringing for years.

At this point, the only thing of meaningful relevance that SL offers that no where else can, is personal, it's my friends and social connections. After almost 17 years here, the focal point for the bulk of my SL friendships isn't SL. 

Sure, there are technical things possible here that aren't possible in other more curated environments, but there's an awful lot of things that aren't possible in SL that are everywhere else. We pay a very high price for the few unique toys we do have.

The problem is that for many oldbies, SL comes with a degree of myopia where they don't ever really look beyond SL. Once upon a time, people who didn't fit in with PC gaming found they did fit with SL (and places like it). In the time since, the gaming landscape has expanded almost exponentially to become far more inclusive, so when it comes to looking for entertainment, there isn't the same overflow of people ending up here.

Even the sex doesn't carry the same weight it once did, not when that now exists under the radar everywhere else.

The unbound creativity on offer here is probably the only thing that's kept us from sharing the same fate as the other fledgling 1st generation worlds.

 

12 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

If LL cannot reasonably find a way to upgrade SL incrementally and still preserve the fundamentals that keep people here as well as attracting new users, then the only recourse is to keep it going for as long as feasible and then abandon it.  It would be incredibly sad but that may indeed be the inevitable outcome.  All things have their time.

It's not magic or unknowable. At this point, there are lots of creative environments to crib from.

What hinders SL most now is an intensity deficient. 

We can do chill all day long, but we can't do thrilling and exciting and overwhelming so well anymore, and we need to be able to deliver those things in order to attract a new younger generation of users.

Being able to offer a more responsive, dynamic and faster paced environment does not take away our ability to chill.

[animats]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We don't have a seat at the metaverse table. We're not an aspirational vision of a user created virtual world. We have no input on the emerging standards for the next generation of online presence and interactivity.

We're the butt of jokes. We're a lesson to others. We're what people laughing at Zucker hold up as an example of comparable failure.

Yes. It's really embarrassing.

I've been saying for several years now that the metaverse is coming and there's going to be competition. For a while, the metaverse looked like a joke. The NFT clown car era got a lot of attention from Q2 2021 to Q2 2022. But now, the actual systems that work are starting to go live.

First, there are the pre-NFT players - Roblox and VRchat. Roblox isn't so blocky any more. They have a new layered mesh clothing system where clothing gets automatically stretched to fit. SL needs something equally good. VRchat continues to grow; 22K concurrent users today, 14K a year ago. VRchat is very lively compared to SL.

Then there are the newer systems. Bored Ape Yacht Club was mostly promotion, but they teamed up with Animoca Brands (Hong Kong) and Improbable (UK) to produce Otherside, which is a virtual world that can accommodate crowds of thousands of people in one area. (Improbable has seamless region crossings working.) It's entirely cloud-rendered, so you can run Otherside on anything that can stream HD video. BAYC is event-oriented. They think in terms of big events where people pay to get in but are logged in for only a few hours. This maps well to cloud rendering, where you have to rent a huge number of servers, but not for many hours.

Matterverse is in early beta. It's based on Unreal Engine 5, so it looks better than SL, and they offer a "cloud gaming" option on Paperspace, for $0.50/hour. Has a nice content editor. Too early to tell how this plays out.

More new virtual worlds are coming from China. Bear in mind that TikTok comes from China and is beating out Instagram and Facebook. There's a huge domestic market for this stuff in China, and it's all phone-oriented. Baidu has Xi Rang. Tencent has Super QQ Show. NetEase is working with Roblox  ByteDance acquired Pico. The Chinese systems probably won't allow much user-generated content, though, for political reasons.

A year ago, none of the above existed. A year from now, most of it will be in wide use. Others are growing in this space, while SL's user counts remain flat.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

7 minutes ago, animats said:

 

A year ago, none of the above existed. A year from now, most of it will be in wide use. Others are growing in this space, while SL's user counts remain flat.

 

The thing is, and I know I'm not alone in this ... 

But, I really dislike all the alternatives. 

... unless SL can step up, we're going to be forced to use one of them sooner or later

[Solar Legion]

Newsflash - you're going to be forced to use one of the other platforms no matter what.

When that happens, it will either be remembered for what it is, for actually being different or for having shifted to step into line with everyone else, with little variation.

If you want the latter - leave.

[animats]

16 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The thing is, and I know I'm not alone in this ... 

But, I really dislike all the alternatives. 

... unless SL can step up, we're going to be forced to use one of them sooner or later

I know.

The real problem is the fun, not the technology. I can see ways to get SL performance and graphics up to modern game levels. I can't see ways to make it far more fun.

Making it less painful for new users, though, is possible. Recommended reading for LL staff: "The Gamer's Brain", by Celia Hodent. She's a user experience designer with a doctorate in psychology. She is also the designer of Fortnite's user experience. So she kind of knows what she's doing.

How's LL's latest attempt to improve the onboarding experience coming along?

Key concept: The new user's first hour must not suck.

Edited July 28, 2022 by animats

[Solar Legion]

Oh and so we're clear on another bit here: One of the "competitors" recently integrated EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) into their platform, causing an insane amount of backlash, some of it from communities that relied on client modifications to even begin to use or enjoy the program. As it stands it also has the potential to become broken/unusable for Steam Deck users if a major enough change occurs (to say nothing about Linux based users, running through Proton). Nor does it touch on the other, non-mod related breakages.

Not a move to even contemplate following in the footsteps of.

Doesn't matter if such is what was meant, either.

[Gabriele Graves]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The thing is, and I know I'm not alone in this ... 

But, I really dislike all the alternatives. 

... unless SL can step up, we're going to be forced to use one of them sooner or later

I'm not a gamer in any sense of the word, never have been and have never really seen the appeal.  I don't even play LL games in SL, just not interested.  I stumbled into SL by accident really.  What grabbed me initially was the open world aspect.  Yes, I fell for the branding of it being a "Second Life" as well but it really seemed from my naive perspective to deliver that.  Even back in 2007 SL was so flexible there was examples of almost everything a person could conceive of, even if it was done poorly.  I didn't care, I had nothing to compare it to.  Now it does many things far better than it ever did back then.  Not all improvements came from SL itself though.  When I started my computer was a potato, I barely got 5fps, now unless I am at a heavily loaded region, I generally get at least 30fps and in a lot of cases 60+.  Obviously I have better hardware now which copes way better than it did before and I can honestly say that the performance I enjoy is as good as I need it to be.  It took a high end PC with a good graphics card and world-class speed internet to achieve but it is there finally for me.

If SL goes, I''ll not be forced to a game or metadvertverse however technically impressive.  I just don't think I would find the same appeal and nothing I can see comes close to the essence of SL.  I would already have a presence at that something else if there was anything that remotely interested me.  So most likely, that would be it for me and virtual worlds.

Edited July 28, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Love Zhaoying]

If SL goes, I may go to OpenSim for awhile, to continue scripting. Then, hopefully something "new-er"  comes along that meets my needs.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

If SL goes, I''ll not be forced to a game or metadvertverse however technically impressive.  I just don't think I would find the same appeal and nothing I can see comes close to the essence of SL.  I would already have a presence at that something else if there was anything that remotely interested me.

You don't see yourself as a gamer so you don't look at how the side of the entertainment pie has grown and shifted over SL's own lifespan, nor do you have a frame of reference for what your computer hardware is actually capable of when running the kind of software designed explicitly for it.

It is absolutely possible find all the same draws that SL provides in game environments, maybe not all in the same place, but that's more than made up for with all the additional magic we just don't have here.

There's a reason we're still sat in our tiny bubble and the gaming umbrella has become an exponential juggernaut, so many in SL (and on the forums especially) have decided for entirely superficial judgmental reasons that anything "gaming" isn't for them, when in reality it's a very broad and diverse umbrella that easily encompasses SL. Gaming has come a very long way in the last decade alone.

Yup, we're back here .. but SL isn't a game because it doesn't have a point or purpose .. surprise! there are lots of games with no purpose or point or monsters or jumping or puzzles or shooting things. The point isn't what the thing is called, it that it's entertaining and stimulating.

Saying you can't see yourself playing games, is a bit like watching one marvel movie and then writing off all of cinema.

Thing is though, it bites us in the ass as this all goes both ways.

People coming from gaming (which lets be realistic .. is going to be most people at this point), who are going to be perfectly happy with a chill make your own fun dress up social platform like SL, get torched on the way in with a disastrously poor experience.

Two decades of technical debt, confusing systems stacked on top of systems, garbage "historical" content with no context, social norms that are so divorced from anything else they are almost alien and a bizarre masochistic form of elitism where people here actually think this is as good as it can or should get.

2 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

So most likely, that would be it for me and virtual worlds.

"I guess I'll just die"

Pffft .. SL will leave such a huge hole you will 100% find things to fill it. Many of those things will be sat on the kick ass gaming computer you happen to have.

43 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If SL goes, I may go to OpenSim for awhile, to continue scripting. Then, hopefully something "new-er"  comes along that meets my needs.

OpenSim is going to be a brutal kick in the pants for anyone expecting to migrate should this all collapse. It's a garbage experience. The exact garbage experience people coming to SL have to go though and we just ignore and pretend we can't see (or pat ourselves on the back for raising above, pinky out). The penny will drop and it will be way too late.

[Gabriele Graves]

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

You don't see yourself as a gamer so you don't look at how the side of the entertainment pie has grown and shifted over SL's own lifespan, nor do you have a frame of reference for what your computer hardware is actually capable of when running the kind of software designed explicitly for it.

It is absolutely possible find all the same draws that SL provides in game environments, maybe not all in the same place, but that's more than made up for with all the additional magic we just don't have here.

You're right, I don't really have much idea about gaming but it doesn't seem like I fit the description of a gamer at all.

I would have thought if there were things that would have any chance of appealing that I would have discovered them even accidentally by now because surely their marketing is better than LL's right? and I found my way here.
 

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There's a reason we're still sat in our tiny bubble and the gaming umbrella has become an exponential juggernaut, so many in SL (and on the forums especially) have decided for entirely superficial judgmental reasons that anything "gaming" isn't for them, when in reality it's a very broad and diverse umbrella that easily encompasses SL. Gaming has come a very long way in the last decade alone.

Yup, we're back here .. but SL isn't a game because it doesn't have a point or purpose .. surprise! there are lots of games with no purpose or point or monsters or jumping or puzzles or shooting things. The point isn't what the thing is called, it that it's entertaining and stimulating.

Perhaps the problem is discovering them then.  I'll admit that I maybe I don't know how to discover them.  I suspect that it is extremely difficult to discover what combination of games would scratch the same itch that has grown from SL without buying and playing many things that have no interest to me.

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Saying you can't see yourself playing games, is a bit like watching one marvel movie and then writing off all of cinema.

Perhaps but when what you see isn't grabbing your interest and you cannot find any movie you like the idea of watching, what would you do?

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Thing is though, it bites us in the ass as this all goes both ways.

People coming from gaming (which lets be realistic .. is going to be most people at this point), who are going to be perfectly happy with a chill make your own fun dress up social platform like SL, get torched on the way in with a disastrously poor experience.

Two decades of technical debt, confusing systems stacked on top of systems, garbage "historical" content with no context, social norms that are so divorced from anything else they are almost alien and a bizarre masochistic form of elitism where people here actually think this is as good as it can or should get.

I don't disagree with any of this at all.

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

"I guess I'll just die"

  That is not what I said or meant at all, far from it.  If I came across as fatalistic in any way then it was unintentional.  I was just being realistic about the likely outcome re: moving to another platform, game, virtual world, whatever.

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Pffft .. SL will leave such a huge hole you will 100% find things to fill it. Many of those things will be sat on the kick ass gaming computer you happen to have.

In all likelihood I wouldn't be involved online in any 3D environments unless I stumbled across something in the future that gives me that same feeling that I get from SL.  It just doesn't seem likely and that would be totally fine.  It wouldn't be a calamity for me and I do believe that some things only work for a particular time and duration, especially the happenstance things in life.

Yes I will find new interests and entertainments for sure, no worries there at all.  What I really meant is that I would spend that SL time on my RL interests and pursuits instead.  I'm not the kind of person to leave holes in my life.  I expect my partner would find a use for the computer even I'm not using it much even if just for spare parts or perhaps I would give it to a relative/friend who's kid is into gaming.  It isn't a big deal for me.

However, when I read all that back it does seem like a funeral speech and it really isn't meant as such.
I hope we aren't at the SL funeral stage just yet or even nearly but I guess we won't know until it is upon us.

The TLDR version is really, "if SL shuts, I'll most likely spend more time and money in RL and not seek out another SL replacement.  Life will go on, nobody dies because of it but unfortunately no-one will be able to have anybody's stuffs either, including their own.  The End."
 

Edited July 28, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Katherine Heartsong]

10 hours ago, animats said:

How's LL's latest attempt to improve the onboarding experience coming along?

Key concept: The new user's first hour must not suck.

This. So much this. It's what I've done for a living for 30 years. I've made a very good career focusing on creating great user experiences. SL's UX sucks in so many ways, it causes me to just roll my eyes and ask, "Why are they doing that in that way?"

There are so many fundamentally poor user experiences now built into the 20 years of the platform, onboarding not the least of them, that I know one reason that SL isn't growing or seem relevant to anyone Gen-Z for example.

If any of the other platforms allows for 50% of the creativity and openness (including adult stuff) of SL with a more modern UX and better looks, SL's days would be numbered pretty fast.

Edited July 28, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[Katherine Heartsong]

6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It is absolutely possible find all the same draws that SL provides in game environments, maybe not all in the same place, but that's more than made up for with all the additional magic we just don't have here.

This one point of yours really stands out for me.

You can find everything SL offers in other platforms, often even better than SL does, just not in the same place. If one platform did start "gathering" or offering these experiences together, then there's an issue for SL. People "hire" a application like SL to do something for them. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough. That's how disruption happens.

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

However, when I read all that back it does seem like a funeral speech and it really isn't meant as such.
I hope we aren't at the SL funeral stage just yet or even nearly but I guess we won't know until it is upon us.

The TLDR version is really, "if SL shuts, I'll most likely spend more time and money in RL and not seek out another SL replacement.  Life will go on, nobody dies because of it but unfortunately no-one will be able to have anybody's stuffs either, including their own.  The End."

I think the issue SL users have with seeing themselves in games, aside from knowing what games there are, is there is a perception of the types of people who play games, who games are for and what games are about .. often because it's easy to find the perennial favorites that dominate the industry offering very specific experiences.

SL sufferers from these same preconceptions or extrapolated snapshots. Janky weird sex simulator 2004.

MMO titles probably tick the most boxes right out the gate, they are built to be "mono games", very much "this is the world we intend you to live in for as much time as you can spare" and don't just offer the one core focused experience. They are also very open to free form user activities, social interactions and group story telling.

They do however come with an onboarding hurdle for non gamers. There is the leveling and learning part of the game when you're taught the game skills you will need, and then there is "end game" where the social side takes priority and doing game stuff becomes more optional. In a way this is very much how SL is too, however the experience games offer is a more linear roadmap from "zero to hero", there are no secret shortcuts like SL has, but then there doesn't need to be because the systems are more structured.

And much like SL .. where learning to play dress up is hard and feels frustrating and unrewarding, the game skills learnt during leveling ends up being a huge and fun time sink.

[Istelathis]

I would love to see some upgrades, but I doubt SL is going to appeal to the same demographic that captures the gen Z or Millennials, such as Roblox, VRChat, or Minecraft.  It will not generate enough hype as NFT virtual worlds did.  Even with upgrades I think it will remain relatively a niche platform desirable by few people.  

The upgrades I personally would find best, would be things like a paper doll menu, which would make dressing a lot easier as well as give us a preview of outfits before we purchased them, and an upgrade to prims, so that we can actually make mesh in the world with a new toolset.

To compete with the larger platforms out there though, LL would probably have to build an entirely new platform, one that appeals to more people, and based upon what I have read on these forums the last time they did that with Sansar, SL was neglected.

I don't really feel ashamed of SL though, I like it for what it is.  Plus this is not the only virtual world I play around in, I enjoy a variety of games.  

 

12 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If SL goes, I may go to OpenSim for awhile, to continue scripting. Then, hopefully something "new-er"  comes along that meets my needs.

Ayep, same here.  I already use it and enjoy spending time over there exploring the hypergrid.  I even fashioned a sloppily written zombie game based upon scripts I found for a couple of different games, it was a lot of fun to goof around with, even though my scripting skills are junk 😜  SL remains my favorite, but if it were to go I would just shift my time spent in SL to OS.  OS will probably always be around, so long as one is willing to host it.

[animats]

39 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

It will not generate enough hype as NFT virtual worlds did.

The hype for new systems has faded fast. Formerly hot has-beens from last year include Decentraland, Somnium Space, Axie Infinity, and Cryptovoxels. None of those achieved enough users to become a viable social platform. Facebook/Meta Horizon? Forbes article: Meta takes 2.8 billion dollar loss on its metaverse bet. Hype only helps with launch. It won't help with sustaining. 

Roblox, maybe. Their technology keeps improving and they're trying to break out of the middle schooler market.

So far, there isn't a serious SL competitor in operation. We're starting to see better technology, though. Matterverse just went to beta. Several new systems from China, all phone-first. The AR goggles people are making progress. There's work going on and money being spent.

It's not too late for SL, but LL has to try harder to keep up.