Making our own Last Names

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

I'd like too see the Display Name prohibit fancy letters and stuff.  Only plain old text should be allowed. I have seen some get mad when you call them by the system name and not their super hard to pronounce mess they use for the display.

[Sasha Primdashian]

Quote

 

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by Sasha Holden

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 hours ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

I'd like too see the Display Name prohibit fancy letters and stuff.  Only plain old text should be allowed. I have seen some get mad when you call them by the system name and not their super hard to pronounce mess they use for the display.

Don't call them by their login name, do what I do.

 

"Hello Undecipherable-Unicode-Gibberish!!"

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Sid Nagy]

4 hours ago, Rahadin said:

They should bring back old last names.

They did. One only has to pay a vanity tax to get one and one has to be a silly name lover.

[Lewis Luminos]

I've said right from the very beginning that the solution is to allow in the username one single underscore, provided that it's not the first or last character in the username, and render it as a space in the viewer.  Hey presto, last names. Easy.

However, they will never do this, expecially now that last names are a cash-cow.

[Orwar]

   I feel like people focus too much on avatar names, you can put whatever surname for your avi you want in the display name. Only reason I'd consider changing my account name was if I'd signed up when I was 13 and picked some really daft, immature name.

2 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Don't call them by their login name, do what I do.

   If someone uses an eszett for a b, I'll just read it out like an eszett. Hello Ssossssy!

[TheFlyingSaltire]

I have two avatars.  This one has a single name, TheFlyingSaltire, with the display name of Vicki Thomas.  My other one dates back to 31 January 2007, and is Helen Zenovka.  Whenever you see anyone with the last name of Zenovka, you know they've been on SL for a long time.........

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, Lewis Luminos said:

I've said right from the very beginning that the solution is to allow in the username one single underscore, provided that it's not the first or last character in the username, and render it as a space in the viewer.  Hey presto, last names. Easy.

However, they will never do this, expecially now that last names are a cash-cow.

It's also kind of an ugly hack to give characters special meaning in different contexts like you're suggesting. We'd end up with people having three names if this was implemented.

Unless you're also suggesting the removal of current lastnames altogether, hiding it so everybody will be "Resident" with whatever two-part name they choose. That would have a whole other set of issues and you wouldn't believe the outrage of people losing the last names they have and/or paid for.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Helen Zenovka]

I have an old last name........

[Helen Zenovka]

On 9/26/2023 at 4:33 PM, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Don't call them by their login name, do what I do.

 

"Hello Undecipherable-Unicode-Gibberish!!"

 

I'll have to try that next time.

[gwynchisholm]

SL's entire naming thing still throws me off. Like i know why it exists, its just odd that they used this system for so long and havent converted it over to something more reasonable.

Almost any other game uses various other things as a player ID of sorts rather than the actual username, the username is never meant to be important. Examples, Roblox's player ID's use a sequential numbering system starting from the day the game launched and continuing until today, like mine is 11xxxxx from way back in 2008, 1.1 million users approximately. New users are now in the billions. But using that number as an ID means that usernames are superfluous, users can change them whenever to anything else that isnt in use, and previous usernames that have been changed then become reusable by others or new accounts. All that underneath a system that lets you make cosmetic name changes as well on top of your proper username and that on top of your player ID.

And then most games do this in some context, Runescape actually uses an invisible player ID in both games thats sequentially generated just the same but includes letters for locale stamping. An example would be like "114055US5", user 114,055 registered on US server 5, just to make one up as gibberish. You can only see them when users get deleted and all thats left is their user ID in your friendslist instead of their username.

Habbo changed theirs during their hotel merge, since they had whole separate games for different regions of the world and they all just used the username itself as a player identifier. So when they wanted to merge there would be multiple users from different locations that had the same username and as such, the same ID. So before the merge they applied unique ID's to all users regardless of their platform of choice (as there were also website specific clients like for facebook) and regardless of their region they were playing in. With unique tags for each region. So now two people with the same name arent the same to the game, they have two entirely unique ID's even if they have the same username. Then all the hotels merged and they continued to use this new system of ID's.

Like its not impossible for LL to do something similar, to basically add a new layer of identification for all users underneath the current system where their username is their ID. Plenty of other games have done it, and it would allow for names to be mostly cosmetic, kinda like how you can just change your display name to something independent of your actual username. No reason for that username to be unchangable or even required. 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

42 minutes ago, gwynchisholm said:

SL's entire naming thing still throws me off. Like i know why it exists, its just odd that they used this system for so long and havent converted it over to something more reasonable.

Almost any other game uses various other things as a player ID of sorts rather than the actual username, the username is never meant to be important. Examples, Roblox's player ID's use a sequential numbering system starting from the day the game launched and continuing until today, like mine is 11xxxxx from way back in 2008, 1.1 million users approximately. New users are now in the billions. But using that number as an ID means that usernames are superfluous, users can change them whenever to anything else that isnt in use, and previous usernames that have been changed then become reusable by others or new accounts. All that underneath a system that lets you make cosmetic name changes as well on top of your proper username and that on top of your player ID.

And then most games do this in some context, Runescape actually uses an invisible player ID in both games thats sequentially generated just the same but includes letters for locale stamping. An example would be like "114055US5", user 114,055 registered on US server 5, just to make one up as gibberish. You can only see them when users get deleted and all thats left is their user ID in your friendslist instead of their username.

Habbo changed theirs during their hotel merge, since they had whole separate games for different regions of the world and they all just used the username itself as a player identifier. So when they wanted to merge there would be multiple users from different locations that had the same username and as such, the same ID. So before the merge they applied unique ID's to all users regardless of their platform of choice (as there were also website specific clients like for facebook) and regardless of their region they were playing in. With unique tags for each region. So now two people with the same name arent the same to the game, they have two entirely unique ID's even if they have the same username. Then all the hotels merged and they continued to use this new system of ID's.

Like its not impossible for LL to do something similar, to basically add a new layer of identification for all users underneath the current system where their username is their ID. Plenty of other games have done it, and it would allow for names to be mostly cosmetic, kinda like how you can just change your display name to something independent of your actual username. No reason for that username to be unchangable or even required. 

I am always amused when people ask why a system more than 20 years old, designed by people with no experience in designing such systems, doesn't do things the EXACT SAME way as a game made a few years ago, that was designed by actual game devs.

 

The answer is really simple, it was designed over 20 years ago by people who had no idea what they were doing. End of statement. You can rant on about all the systems that came along over a decade later and learned from this mistake, it won't change a damn thing.

[Sid Nagy]

40 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

 it was designed over 20 years ago by people who had no idea what they were doing.

You mean the overlords were humans once?

Edited October 7, 2023 by Sid Nagy
Still Saturday.

[Rolig Loon]

18 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

The answer is really simple, it was designed over 20 years ago by people who had no idea what they were doing. End of statement. You can rant on about all the systems that came along over a decade later and learned from this mistake, it won't change a damn thing.

The naming system has also flip-flopped a couple of times in the past 20 years, so we now have avatars whose system names were created under different rules.  I would guess, offhand, that the average SL user may be a bit ticked off by the name they have but wouldn't care to take the time to change it, even if the option were free. The Display Name option (which is free) is enough to satisfy most of the people who care. 

The one thing that would probably get quite a few people mad would be replacing login names with some soulless machine-generated string, like "114055US5".  Unlike Roblox or other games, SL is primarily a social environment.  Most of the time we tend to engage each other as people, not as "players", and people have names, not numbers.  It is true that in the inner workings of SL we are each best known by our unique UUIDs, so names are a pleasant fiction.  Still, it's our comfortable fiction, it's human, and it fits the sort of world SL has always been.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

If its so hard, how come other platforms let you pick a first and a last name when you signed up.It's only hard because Linden Lab has chosen to make it hard, and to make getting a new last name a money maker.

Besides we have display names now, you can have whatever name you want.

Of course, I've never had a display name, because well, Aldrin is the best name there is.

Its funny though, I never knew my uncle Buzz was so famous, seems like lots of people have heard of Buzz Aldrin the bee keeper.

[Rolig Loon]

6 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

It's only hard because Linden Lab has chosen to make it hard, and to make getting a new last name a money maker.

Yeah, but that's sort of the way RL works too.  It's been a long time, but I don't recall anyone letting me choose my own name when I first appeared in RL. Someone else did it for me. Of course, I could change it later (perhaps with some cost and a bit of bureaucratic inconvenience) and I can have any number of unofficial nicknames and aliases. Still, the name my parents hung on me decades ago is a good chunk of my identity.  I'm just glad they didn't decide my name should be 114055US5. 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

It is a little strange to me that a virtual world that's based so much around personalization and avatar customization to the level we have here (which I've never found in any other MMO/virtual platform) has preset last names. Companies do sometimes charge for name changes (like $10). I came here directly from Everquest 2 (released in 2004), where they let you choose a first name, and then you got to pick your own last name once you got to level 20. That seemed to curb the temptation for most people to create joke names. Had to work for it and pay to change it later if you wanted to.

It's also why random fantasy name generators were so popular for a time. You could always tell when someone used one just by how many names like Mhoryga Wynwarin you'd run into all over the place. 😂

Edited October 7, 2023 by Ayashe Ninetails
Fixing stuffs

[Wulfie Reanimator]

5 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

The one thing that would probably get quite a few people mad would be replacing login names with some soulless machine-generated string, like "114055US5".  Unlike Roblox or other games, SL is primarily a social environment.  Most of the time we tend to engage each other as people, not as "players", and people have names, not numbers.  It is true that in the inner workings of SL we are each best known by our unique UUIDs, so names are a pleasant fiction.  Still, it's our comfortable fiction, it's human, and it fits the sort of world SL has always been.

All of those other games still use proper names, no gamer is happy being just a number. The main difference Gwyn tried to point out is that the account system could've been designed so that the last name had no impact on how LL recognizes accounts so that we can freely choose any last name we want. The example of 114055US5 is exactly equivalent to the random 32-character UUIDs we have.

Edited October 8, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Lets be honest, our "real" user name is firstname.lastname. It would have been nothing to allow people to choose their own last name. It wasn't a matter of technical difficulty, its that LL (always was and still is) terrified of someone slipping in an adult or vulgar name into its database.

LL could allow freely chosen first AND Last names whenever it wanted to.

My "real" name is billijo.aldrin

[Cold Shiver]

Unpopular opinion but I actually like the fact that last names come from a selection. It kind of creates a fun bond with people you never met before. (Unless your last name is Resident, but you can hide the resident last names in viewer anyway). I'm okay with SL's name system, I like it actually but I wish they brought back free last names for new users and lowered the initial price for basic/plus users. It just has a charm to it, I mean I can have any username that's not taken on virtually any platform, it's just the norm. It's nice to have a quirky little connection like that with other people.

[gwynchisholm]

On 10/7/2023 at 4:18 PM, Zalificent Corvinus said:

I am always amused when people ask why a system more than 20 years old, designed by people with no experience in designing such systems, doesn't do things the EXACT SAME way as a game made a few years ago, that was designed by actual game devs.

 

The answer is really simple, it was designed over 20 years ago by people who had no idea what they were doing. End of statement. You can rant on about all the systems that came along over a decade later and learned from this mistake, it won't change a damn thing.

Habbo Hotel and RuneScape are both older than SL and were made by very small groups of inexperienced developers who grew their skills over time. Roblox is a similar story though the accounts system as it’s known now is from 2006, still fairly old. 
Im not referencing games from a few years ago, I’m referencing things as old or even older than sl, created by enthusiasts and hobbyists, not professionals. They changed their system when it was a hinderance, there is no reason sl couldn’t do the same. 
And maybe as to how much of a hinderance it is, simply isn’t too much of an issue for sl. It just feels very archaic. 

[gwynchisholm]

On 10/7/2023 at 4:53 PM, Rolig Loon said:

The one thing that would probably get quite a few people mad would be replacing login names with some soulless machine-generated string, like "114055US5".  Unlike Roblox or other games, SL is primarily a social environment.  Most of the time we tend to engage each other as people, not as "players", and people have names, not numbers.  It is true that in the inner workings of SL we are each best known by our unique UUIDs, so names are a pleasant fiction.  Still, it's our comfortable fiction, it's human, and it fits the sort of world SL has always been.

You don’t really see them in most games though, there’s a similar thing for Minecraft for example, all players have a unique id, but it’s not like you join into servers and everyone’s username is a string of numbers. The whole point is that it makes the back end of the character easier to manage and change. 
Usernames as the identifier opens up a lot of risks in letting users make their ID, and the counteraction to those risks is to limit the players ability to customize their ID. Tossing special characters and adding a character limit, or in SL’s case the names being somewhat controlled by LL. 
For SL where the focus is making a persona of sorts, proper names like that are a good thing. But they could still by all means enforce presentable cosmetic full names on top of an invisible player ID that would be a lot more controllable and open up some more options for character naming.

In SL you can’t have a middle name, the ID system only recognizes first and last names. If you want a middle name you gotta include it in your details or cosmetic name somewhere. If players had just an invisible id to keep track of their data, then their actual username would be cosmetic only, and you could have something like a middle name without issue.

Thats kinda where i see it as a limitation, taking into context SL’s more personal social culture, where you want usernames to be real seeming names. Why limit the options even further?

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

There is a lot of things I resent on this thread! And to let you know how unhappy and angry I am, I will even be ironic, or perhaps even sarcastic

You've been warned! 😠

1. Firstly... you can change your last name for a fee. In fact, this is a very old feature (use to be called "Vanity Names"), dating back to 2009 at least. For a long time, this was the only (expensive) option, depicted here on the SL Wiki: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Custom_Name_Program (last updated on 2011)
   But nowadays it's much more cheaper and straightforward.
2. There used to be huge advantages in limiting the choices of last names to a single integer, back in '02. Such advantages may not be so apparent today, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. With 64-65 million users registered on the SL database (which LL cannot simply dump off their database, as these might have content somewhere that require displaying the creator's name), having 2-4 bytes (I have no idea if they use 16-bit or 32-bit integers) instead of a dozen characters does make a difference. Well, at least, it did. And there were many other technical reasons for this, two decades ago. If I only could remember a few more, I would tell you so. No, just because my memory eludes me, doesn't mean that those reasons are not important!
3. One of the cute ideas that LL had was that this allowed "families" to form — okay, so they were complete strangers to each other, right, but at least they would have something to break the ice — "hey, you've got the same last name as I do!". There were estill ven a few "aristocratic" families — last names used by very popular people (the Kardashians of SL!) and/or groups of powerful content creators, such as the Fairchilds (scripting, land baroning) or the Kunglers (fashion). There were surely more, but I don't remember them any more. Okay, so, I'm well aware that so few of those 64 million registered users are still around (just 1% of those still log in regularly, and 0.1% are online) that, these days, very old last names usually just have one or two members in it. Many have zero. But that's irrelevant since LL is not re-using old last names — unless, of course, you pay for them.
   Also, the "family thing" was as good an idea as Facebook's placing everybody living in the same city in the same group (aye, that's how they started). Neither idea caught on. Facebook has long abandoned theirs (why should you be in a group with 11 million fellow New Yorkers, with whom you don't identify with anyway?), and LL technically had... then reintroduced them again... uh. Right.
4.  Old last names are valuable to old residents! SL is now a vintage product! (It is more than 20 years old = vintage, per definition [never mind that this article feels like it was written by ChatGPT]) That means that these old last names are part of our identity, and we all know — or should know — that Second Life is essentially about identity (even if you change avatars several times per day, or have an array of alts to log in with, that's irrelevant — "identity", in this context, does not mean "unique" or "just that one", but rather the relationship between what you call your self and your visual representation of it as a SL avatar, which is not limited artificially with things like "you can just have one avatar to identify with" or "you have to always look like yourself" or any such irrational limitations which make no sense in a synthetic 3D environment). Oh, and I have turned the sarcasm mode off for this parenthesis. Or perhaps not. You decide!)
5. Having silly Unicode-based Display Names that are impossible to pronounce is part of our identity. They serve no other practical purpose except, well, look weird. Or ugly. Or funny. Soon they'll even have emojis in them! Well, see the point above: it's just another thing that is related to identity. The same applies to fancy group titles too, of course. None of these are important for technical reasons, but they are important for expressing our identity online., 
   Also, if Elon Musk is allowed to name three of his children X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk,  and Tau Techno Mechanicus (and you should look up how their mother — his former partner, Grimes — signs her name on 𝕏/Twitter...), why shouldn't I name myself  ɥʇǝuʎʍƃ, 已丗ㄚ几㠪十卅, 𒋝𒉼𒌨𒐖𒀼𒈦𒀂, ꗱⱲꔇꖦꗍꖡꖾ, or ᘜᗐᖿᐱᗕᐪᕼ? (note: all are pronounced [ˈɡwɨ̞nɛθ]; use the Welsh voice to test it out).
6. I hardly understand why some of you are complaining that "other environments have user IDs, SL just has user names, and that's a mess". Uh... say what? Last time I checked, my avatar's user ID was still d2cdf457-5027-4887-abd8-573c62a85226. That UUID is, indeed, unique, and my avatar's exclusive ID forever. The avatar name, well, that can change. Or maybe not (I'm not interested). But it's exactly like most environments out there: your avatar has an UUID, also known as "avatar key", and that's what matters for the (many) databases. The name is just, well, incidental.
   If you're still skeptic, consider this: any LSL script can very easily retrieve an avatar's UUID. But if you want to get the avatar's name, that's another story. Most scripts can get the avatar name reasonably quickly if the avatar is inside the same region, because, well, then it's already on the simulator's cache. And while there are LSL functions to retrieve the avatar name directly from the databases, when such a name is not locally cached, there is a perceptible delay in retrieving it (and the operation can even fail, although, these days, the servers are waaaay more robust). I mean, it's not that often that you get an object where the creator name is (Loading...) or ????. It still happens, once in a while, especially in very, very old and little used objects which have to be retrieved from the "deep storage" — especially when on a very laggy region. But these were quite common in the days of olde. Whereas avatar keys — their UUIDs — would be gathered instantaneously.
   So: get your facts right, fellow residents! SL has IDs (quite a lot of those, in fact), and avatar names are indexed by UUID.
   It's actually some things out there that use email addresses (which are unique per definition!) as a way to represent a unique key. That's a possibility which was quite uncommon in the early 2000s, mostly because UUIDs are just numbers with 128 bits (no matter if they have a fancy, textual representation), which, granted, is not enough the total particles in the universe (328,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), or even atoms on Earth (130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) but it allows for us to get 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 distinct avatars, which should be plenty enough for the years to come.
7. Last but not least... I'm a bit tired of those who claim that LL was "clueless" back in the early 2000s and therefore "did it all wrong". I'm sorry, I've heard that being repeated year after year after year; 99% of those who were so fond at Linden-dev-bashing are, fortunately, gone (many, long ago, and they're not dearly missed). It is always claimed that LL ought to have hired a few talented, real game designers, used whatever 3D rendering engine was popular back then (possibly the Unreal engine), and applied whatever techniques are common for 3D FPS Triple-A console games.
   That is all very fun and nice to say, but... Second Life is hardly build (conceptually speaking) as a "3D FPS game", even if it looks like one. Rather, it is much more akin a shared Maya/Blender experience, using lossy datagram transmission between what-used-to-be-medium-end (or even lower) machines. We have a few words to describe what this is today: some call it collaborative computer-assisted design; in RL architecture, the closest we have are tools for sharing a common environment using Building Information Modeling (BIM). Some of those tools, in 2023, are even able to manipulate 3D content in almost-real-time, shared by a (small) group of engineers and architects placed on their internal 100 GBps Ethernet network; most of the time, however, "batches" of changes are exchanged using a quasi-standard file format, which is sent to a central database and then retrieved individually by each workstation, and the 3D model updated. One might argue that this is orders of magnitude more complex than Second Life. Well, of course it is; people design, monitor, and do maintenance on airports and hospitals using this technology; and to get real-time updates, well, you need to have a server farm provided by Nvidia, since they pretty much "invented" what they call "Digital Twins" (aye, avatars are included), and they call the technology behind it "Omniverse" (users are called "Omnivores"...really... ha ha?). You can watch the videos of this amazing technology, but be warned... you won't really be much impressed (a digital twin of a factory with thousands of assets? Why, we do that kind of thing routinely on every region of Second Life...): what they call "photorealistic assets" are not that much more advanced than what the best content creators can do in SL, and have been doing for the past decade or so. Any arguments regarding "oh, but this is another level of complexity we don't have, since each and every item on Nvidia's Omniverse is fully parameterizable and configurable in real time, and so forth". Really? So what? All objects in Second Life are parameterizable and scriptable. Granted, LSL is a kind-of-crappy programming language, compared to anything Nvidia might be using. But they have not been around in 2002 with their "Omniverse". Linden Lab was. And they didn't have the server farms that Nvidia has today. They just had a handful of run-of-the-mill co-located servers stashed somewhere in a data centre in San Francisco.
   And they did wonders back then.
   Arguably, they were twenty years ahead on what the state-of-the-art currently is.
   And that's no mean feat.
   Oh, you might argue that we had much better-looking FPS running on high-end consoles back then, with snappy 3D graphics and real-time multiplayer networking. Sure we did. But that wasn't a spectacular breakthrough — rather, just an evolution in terms of what graphic cards could do in the 2000s which was impossible in the early 1990s. Sure, Nvidia was one of the major players that also drove the tech to do amazing things even on a lowly desktop PC. Sure, Philip "Linden" Rosedale is even humble enough to admit that the reason why he founded LL in 1999 and not in 1989 or 1979 was that simply the kind of hardware allowing SL to be possible didn't exist back then; it was just around the end of the millennium that, thanks to Nvidia & AMD (and later Intel...), consumer-grade graphics cards were able to deliver the kind of sheer GPU power for that kind of environment.
   And in case you've already forgotten, the technological breakthrough wasn't even the renderer, which, arguably, by that time, was already a bit dated compared to the "competition". But that's because this so-called "competition" simply worked with pre-generated scenes and content stored in the local disk, having been previously downloaded (or copied from a DVD). That's what allowed "instant", real-time scenes with avatars running around shooting at each other — in glorious 60 FPS. Second Life would take years until it managed to do something even remotely like that. But they were unbeatable in terms of simultaneous collaborative 3D user-generated content in a visually contiguous environment where everything was created by the users and could not be downloaded in full before a scene was generated. The breakthrough, indeed, was 3D content streaming — something that nobody did at the time (because you would have to be suicidal to do that in the middle of a fast-pasted multiplayer FPS). Keeping players in sync with each other was tough enough (it still is!); nobody had a technology allowing the content to be downloaded-on-demand, and nobody even thought this could be a good idea.
   Philip thought otherwise because, well, he was a pioneer (one might even call him the inventor) of audio streaming solutions for low-end networks. Since the only way to achieve the kind of collaborative environment that LL had in mind required dealing with unreliable connections and partial content — for which a streaming solution is perfectly adequate, because that was being used already, just not for 3D collaborative platforms (because they didn't exist... yet!).
   One of the many reasons why the SL renderer is such a legacy quirk from the olden days of yesteryore is because it's the only renderer available in the market that was deigned to work with incomplete data and nevertheless render whatever it managed to download as soon (and as quickly) as possible … ideally, a full scene minus highly-detailed textures and other assets (such as sound, for instance).
   Back then there weren't even any other serious contenders. There was Active Worlds (still around) and things like there.com (not around any more). None were really a "replacement" for Second Life (at least not in the sense that they could perfectly and flawlessly emulate what SL was already able to do back then). Later we had Croquet and OpenCroquet and a few more, all struggling to offer something similar to the kind of experience you could get in SL. It wasn't easy. It was even harder to find a business model for the long term (assuming, that is, that they expected a return in the financial investment made in the development of such platforms); none found that in a reasonable amount of time and ultimately disappeared from the market...

In conclusion...

The idea that SL is sloppily programmed "by people who had no clue about what they were doing" is, well, just a myth. An urban legend which got spread across several different paths in SL; a meme. We should be wary of considering all Lindens, at all times since LL's founding date, a "bunch of incompetent idiots". There have been a few, sure, now and then. It's also important to take into account the enormous difficulty of trying to hire a minimally-competent 3D content creator in the San Francisco area — where rents are sky-rocket high — who isn't already working for Big Tech in neighbouring Silicon Valley. I mean, if you're already working on high-end graphics engines at a much more prestigious tech company than Linden Lab, who nobody really knows. It won't be merely a question of paying better salaries. For a top programmer, it's also fundamental to have a history of having worked for industry leaders in the field... not for former VC-funded startups with little recognition in the overall market.

[Kathlen Onyx]

^^^^^ Wow ok..I read none of that cause no one has time for that.

I recently paid to change my first name from Sam1.Bellisserian to Sam.Bellisserian. Funny thing is that when I originally choose it, it refused to give me the first name option to Sam and I paid for that one too.  Why all of a sudden it lets me I have no clue but I was tired of being called Sam1. I'm happy now.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

4 hours ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

There is a lot of things I resent on this thread! And to let you know how unhappy and angry I am, I will even be ironic, or perhaps even sarcastic

You've been warned! 😠

1. Firstly... you can change your last name for a fee. In fact, this is a very old feature (use to be called "Vanity Names"), dating back to 2009 at least. For a long time, this was the only (expensive) option, depicted here on the SL Wiki: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Custom_Name_Program (last updated on 2011)
   But nowadays it's much more cheaper and straightforward.
2. There used to be huge advantages in limiting the choices of last names to a single integer, back in '02. Such advantages may not be so apparent today, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. With 64-65 million users registered on the SL database (which LL cannot simply dump off their database, as these might have content somewhere that require displaying the creator's name), having 2-4 bytes (I have no idea if they use 16-bit or 32-bit integers) instead of a dozen characters does make a difference. Well, at least, it did. And there were many other technical reasons for this, two decades ago. If I only could remember a few more, I would tell you so. No, just because my memory eludes me, doesn't mean that those reasons are not important!
3. One of the cute ideas that LL had was that this allowed "families" to form — okay, so they were complete strangers to each other, right, but at least they would have something to break the ice — "hey, you've got the same last name as I do!". There were estill ven a few "aristocratic" families — last names used by very popular people (the Kardashians of SL!) and/or groups of powerful content creators, such as the Fairchilds (scripting, land baroning) or the Kunglers (fashion). There were surely more, but I don't remember them any more. Okay, so, I'm well aware that so few of those 64 million registered users are still around (just 1% of those still log in regularly, and 0.1% are online) that, these days, very old last names usually just have one or two members in it. Many have zero. But that's irrelevant since LL is not re-using old last names — unless, of course, you pay for them.
   Also, the "family thing" was as good an idea as Facebook's placing everybody living in the same city in the same group (aye, that's how they started). Neither idea caught on. Facebook has long abandoned theirs (why should you be in a group with 11 million fellow New Yorkers, with whom you don't identify with anyway?), and LL technically had... then reintroduced them again... uh. Right.
4.  Old last names are valuable to old residents! SL is now a vintage product! (It is more than 20 years old = vintage, per definition [never mind that this article feels like it was written by ChatGPT]) That means that these old last names are part of our identity, and we all know — or should know — that Second Life is essentially about identity (even if you change avatars several times per day, or have an array of alts to log in with, that's irrelevant — "identity", in this context, does not mean "unique" or "just that one", but rather the relationship between what you call your self and your visual representation of it as a SL avatar, which is not limited artificially with things like "you can just have one avatar to identify with" or "you have to always look like yourself" or any such irrational limitations which make no sense in a synthetic 3D environment). Oh, and I have turned the sarcasm mode off for this parenthesis. Or perhaps not. You decide!)
5. Having silly Unicode-based Display Names that are impossible to pronounce is part of our identity. They serve no other practical purpose except, well, look weird. Or ugly. Or funny. Soon they'll even have emojis in them! Well, see the point above: it's just another thing that is related to identity. The same applies to fancy group titles too, of course. None of these are important for technical reasons, but they are important for expressing our identity online., 
   Also, if Elon Musk is allowed to name three of his children X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk,  and Tau Techno Mechanicus (and you should look up how their mother — his former partner, Grimes — signs her name on 𝕏/Twitter...), why shouldn't I name myself  ɥʇǝuʎʍƃ, 已丗ㄚ几㠪十卅, 𒋝𒉼𒌨𒐖𒀼𒈦𒀂, ꗱⱲꔇꖦꗍꖡꖾ, or ᘜᗐᖿᐱᗕᐪᕼ? (note: all are pronounced [ˈɡwɨ̞nɛθ]; use the Welsh voice to test it out).
6. I hardly understand why some of you are complaining that "other environments have user IDs, SL just has user names, and that's a mess". Uh... say what? Last time I checked, my avatar's user ID was still d2cdf457-5027-4887-abd8-573c62a85226. That UUID is, indeed, unique, and my avatar's exclusive ID forever. The avatar name, well, that can change. Or maybe not (I'm not interested). But it's exactly like most environments out there: your avatar has an UUID, also known as "avatar key", and that's what matters for the (many) databases. The name is just, well, incidental.
   If you're still skeptic, consider this: any LSL script can very easily retrieve an avatar's UUID. But if you want to get the avatar's name, that's another story. Most scripts can get the avatar name reasonably quickly if the avatar is inside the same region, because, well, then it's already on the simulator's cache. And while there are LSL functions to retrieve the avatar name directly from the databases, when such a name is not locally cached, there is a perceptible delay in retrieving it (and the operation can even fail, although, these days, the servers are waaaay more robust). I mean, it's not that often that you get an object where the creator name is (Loading...) or ????. It still happens, once in a while, especially in very, very old and little used objects which have to be retrieved from the "deep storage" — especially when on a very laggy region. But these were quite common in the days of olde. Whereas avatar keys — their UUIDs — would be gathered instantaneously.
   So: get your facts right, fellow residents! SL has IDs (quite a lot of those, in fact), and avatar names are indexed by UUID.
   It's actually some things out there that use email addresses (which are unique per definition!) as a way to represent a unique key. That's a possibility which was quite uncommon in the early 2000s, mostly because UUIDs are just numbers with 128 bits (no matter if they have a fancy, textual representation), which, granted, is not enough the total particles in the universe (328,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), or even atoms on Earth (130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) but it allows for us to get 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 distinct avatars, which should be plenty enough for the years to come.
7. Last but not least... I'm a bit tired of those who claim that LL was "clueless" back in the early 2000s and therefore "did it all wrong". I'm sorry, I've heard that being repeated year after year after year; 99% of those who were so fond at Linden-dev-bashing are, fortunately, gone (many, long ago, and they're not dearly missed). It is always claimed that LL ought to have hired a few talented, real game designers, used whatever 3D rendering engine was popular back then (possibly the Unreal engine), and applied whatever techniques are common for 3D FPS Triple-A console games.
   That is all very fun and nice to say, but... Second Life is hardly build (conceptually speaking) as a "3D FPS game", even if it looks like one. Rather, it is much more akin a shared Maya/Blender experience, using lossy datagram transmission between what-used-to-be-medium-end (or even lower) machines. We have a few words to describe what this is today: some call it collaborative computer-assisted design; in RL architecture, the closest we have are tools for sharing a common environment using Building Information Modeling (BIM). Some of those tools, in 2023, are even able to manipulate 3D content in almost-real-time, shared by a (small) group of engineers and architects placed on their internal 100 GBps Ethernet network; most of the time, however, "batches" of changes are exchanged using a quasi-standard file format, which is sent to a central database and then retrieved individually by each workstation, and the 3D model updated. One might argue that this is orders of magnitude more complex than Second Life. Well, of course it is; people design, monitor, and do maintenance on airports and hospitals using this technology; and to get real-time updates, well, you need to have a server farm provided by Nvidia, since they pretty much "invented" what they call "Digital Twins" (aye, avatars are included), and they call the technology behind it "Omniverse" (users are called "Omnivores"...really... ha ha?). You can watch the videos of this amazing technology, but be warned... you won't really be much impressed (a digital twin of a factory with thousands of assets? Why, we do that kind of thing routinely on every region of Second Life...): what they call "photorealistic assets" are not that much more advanced than what the best content creators can do in SL, and have been doing for the past decade or so. Any arguments regarding "oh, but this is another level of complexity we don't have, since each and every item on Nvidia's Omniverse is fully parameterizable and configurable in real time, and so forth". Really? So what? All objects in Second Life are parameterizable and scriptable. Granted, LSL is a kind-of-crappy programming language, compared to anything Nvidia might be using. But they have not been around in 2002 with their "Omniverse". Linden Lab was. And they didn't have the server farms that Nvidia has today. They just had a handful of run-of-the-mill co-located servers stashed somewhere in a data centre in San Francisco.
   And they did wonders back then.
   Arguably, they were twenty years ahead on what the state-of-the-art currently is.
   And that's no mean feat.
   Oh, you might argue that we had much better-looking FPS running on high-end consoles back then, with snappy 3D graphics and real-time multiplayer networking. Sure we did. But that wasn't a spectacular breakthrough — rather, just an evolution in terms of what graphic cards could do in the 2000s which was impossible in the early 1990s. Sure, Nvidia was one of the major players that also drove the tech to do amazing things even on a lowly desktop PC. Sure, Philip "Linden" Rosedale is even humble enough to admit that the reason why he founded LL in 1999 and not in 1989 or 1979 was that simply the kind of hardware allowing SL to be possible didn't exist back then; it was just around the end of the millennium that, thanks to Nvidia & AMD (and later Intel...), consumer-grade graphics cards were able to deliver the kind of sheer GPU power for that kind of environment.
   And in case you've already forgotten, the technological breakthrough wasn't even the renderer, which, arguably, by that time, was already a bit dated compared to the "competition". But that's because this so-called "competition" simply worked with pre-generated scenes and content stored in the local disk, having been previously downloaded (or copied from a DVD). That's what allowed "instant", real-time scenes with avatars running around shooting at each other — in glorious 60 FPS. Second Life would take years until it managed to do something even remotely like that. But they were unbeatable in terms of simultaneous collaborative 3D user-generated content in a visually contiguous environment where everything was created by the users and could not be downloaded in full before a scene was generated. The breakthrough, indeed, was 3D content streaming — something that nobody did at the time (because you would have to be suicidal to do that in the middle of a fast-pasted multiplayer FPS). Keeping players in sync with each other was tough enough (it still is!); nobody had a technology allowing the content to be downloaded-on-demand, and nobody even thought this could be a good idea.
   Philip thought otherwise because, well, he was a pioneer (one might even call him the inventor) of audio streaming solutions for low-end networks. Since the only way to achieve the kind of collaborative environment that LL had in mind required dealing with unreliable connections and partial content — for which a streaming solution is perfectly adequate, because that was being used already, just not for 3D collaborative platforms (because they didn't exist... yet!).
   One of the many reasons why the SL renderer is such a legacy quirk from the olden days of yesteryore is because it's the only renderer available in the market that was deigned to work with incomplete data and nevertheless render whatever it managed to download as soon (and as quickly) as possible … ideally, a full scene minus highly-detailed textures and other assets (such as sound, for instance).
   Back then there weren't even any other serious contenders. There was Active Worlds (still around) and things like there.com (not around any more). None were really a "replacement" for Second Life (at least not in the sense that they could perfectly and flawlessly emulate what SL was already able to do back then). Later we had Croquet and OpenCroquet and a few more, all struggling to offer something similar to the kind of experience you could get in SL. It wasn't easy. It was even harder to find a business model for the long term (assuming, that is, that they expected a return in the financial investment made in the development of such platforms); none found that in a reasonable amount of time and ultimately disappeared from the market...

In conclusion...

The idea that SL is sloppily programmed "by people who had no clue about what they were doing" is, well, just a myth. An urban legend which got spread across several different paths in SL; a meme. We should be wary of considering all Lindens, at all times since LL's founding date, a "bunch of incompetent idiots". There have been a few, sure, now and then. It's also important to take into account the enormous difficulty of trying to hire a minimally-competent 3D content creator in the San Francisco area — where rents are sky-rocket high — who isn't already working for Big Tech in neighbouring Silicon Valley. I mean, if you're already working on high-end graphics engines at a much more prestigious tech company than Linden Lab, who nobody really knows. It won't be merely a question of paying better salaries. For a top programmer, it's also fundamental to have a history of having worked for industry leaders in the field... not for former VC-funded startups with little recognition in the overall market.

Is multi-layer sarcasm?

Is inception?

Is daring the usual suspect forum trolls to refute points, since they mostly gaslight and misinterpret things on purpose?

Great job!!