Your Vision - Our Code

[EnCore Mayne]

as a curiosity, does anyone know just how many actual active developers are hacking away at the platform (viewer, server, website) on a daily basis?

of course, as i see it (total speculation) some unknown unnamed individual within the corporate structure of LL has the ultimate responsibility for associating teams, tasks, projects, etc to present and future plans. this individual would most likely work for and along with corporate administrators who may or may not have the slightest inkling about code in general or SL's humongous spagetti code nightmare specifically. as i've read, the scene at the Lab was, and may still be, one that could be construed as rather laid back. there were even historical reports of individual coders "choosing" their own projects. shock, aghast! just making note of the working environment here. it may give some relevant perspective as to how rigourous ongoing demand-based tasks may or may not be achieved in a timely basis. (if anyone looked at the JIRA one might get a hint as to the "timeliness" some reports are addressed.)

not to be overly critical of the Lab's process but it is after all all quite subdued in comparison with their Silicon Valley compatriots. nonetheless, it's all about the code....

whether the "director's" pool of coders works from home or is indentured to perform within the confines of a geocentric culture is another matter. do our fearless leaders come bounding into the Battery Street building clutching their brown paper lunchbags eager to craft logical complexities of unheard and unknown solutions to longstanding conundrums to be lauded by their peers and corporate masters or are their days spent alone staring at a daunting screen of gibberish until someone notices they're not awake?

is there a vibrant and energized corporate culture, or are the cubicles populated with hangers on and dead weight waiting to be fired or something better to come in? are the remote workers a "part of the team" or are they like temporary contractors begrudgingly happy to do some work never knowing the comaraderie of sharing space with your common thinking cohorts.

i hope i've left you with some things to think about. i know how my opinions have elicited controversial responses in the past and i'm okay with that, you've set me apart from the rest of you. but, in this instance, can we not think about how our common world is being bolstered essentially by nameless faceless individuals who have no bearing on how we live our lives? i ask you, is there not a common goal to improve it, preserve it, and know its foundations? what ever happened to SLCon?

[Aishagain]

@EnCore Mayne  You ask questions which have been asked many times before and by and large received vague and unsatisfactory answers.

The structure and function of Linden Lab is fluid and rather amorphous.  At various times individuals have stood out as scions of Philip Rosedale, whose brainchild SecondLife is.

Those, like me, who have infested SL for many years have become used to the shadowy, almost secretive behaviour of the senior executives at LL.  It is not that they actively seek anonymity, they simply do not see why they need to raise their profiles.

At various times individuals have stood out, Oz Linden (his SL alias) was one, more recently Kyle Linden has taken the time to explain various changes in SL; a few CEOs have made their existence known (Rod Humble was one (RIP)).

Those more attuned to the corporate world may know other names, I don't.

What I DO know is that the current crop of coders (who must be skilled at knitting spaghetti) and programmers prefer to weave their magic in relative secrecy; the customer(user) facing aspect of SL is far more intermittent that it once was. Unless, that is, you are able to make the times of the various SL user groups and even then the performance of some Lindens is, shall we say, enigmatic.

What is clear though, is that LL do have a clear goal to improve and innovate within the shambolic code that consitutes SecondLife.

ETA: I really should make special mention of Monty Linden (his SL alias, obviously), who regularly contributes to various SL fora, especially concerning viewer development and is one of the (unfortunately) few LL folk who seem comfortable discussing technical topics with users.

Edited November 18, 2023 by Aishagain
spelling: I kan't spel.

[Extrude Ragu]

I do attend meetings from time to time on an alt. The impression I have is that on the whole LL wants to improve itself, but LL's work on SL is very departmentalized and often even given to third party contractors like Product Engine etc.

The result is that whilst yes SL gets improvements, SecondLife as an experience is not cohesive.

Attend meetings and depending on which meeting one team will ask you questions such as  "How can we improve the marketplace?" "How can we improve Caspervend?". Another team will ask you "How can we improve the simulator and scripting?" and another team will ask you "How can we improve the viewer?".

The truth is the most meaningful changes you can make to SecondLife are ones that treat SecondLife as one big experience, rather than a set of different components.

Lets imagine we are designing a new social game, and want to design a shopping experience. If we were doing it from scratch, we would probably imagine that there is some UI on the screen in the game next to our character, where we can scroll through a list of pictures of shoes or whatever we're shopping for. We click one and it just appears on our avatar. We click another, click click click, oooh I like that one.. BUY. This takes about 20 seconds for the user to demo ten products and find one they like. This is a 'designed' shopping experience.

Now compare that to the SL marketplace. You simply can't have that experience. Even demoing one pair of shoes is an experience that can be measured in minutes. You've probably logged into the game a second time just to visit the marketplace, not all products have demo's, and the ones that do each have a different unpacking system. You've probably realized you can't rez where you're standing and had to teleport away from your social group. All but the most determined customers are going to be willing to demo ten products in SecondLife. This is a 'not designed' experience, it's a combination of properties LL has brought over the year and maintained (Caspervend, XStreet) - It is not the result of big picture thinking but rather users trying to make something - Anything - work in the games existing limitations, and then LL buying it out for a lack of better solution themselves.

Delivering such a 'designed' cohesive shopping experience that is so fast and easy for the user would require modifications to the viewer, simulator, and marketplace all at once and really needs one team of people acting as jack of all trades to get this done.

I personally think SL's biggest weakness is that SL simply can't deliver a designed cohesive SecondLife experience. Trying to get 4 different teams who are free to work on whatever they want to collaborate on a single 'big picture' project like this and deliver it in a cohesive for customer and timely manner is simply not possible. Feel free to prove me wrong. I'm not saying that LL aren't talented, they deliver plenty of quality improvements to each of their products, but they are just that, separate products, and not a cohesive experience.

 

Edited November 17, 2023 by Extrude Ragu

[Flea Yatsenko]

I think SL has a very innovative userbase who can usually fix problems better than LL can. And realistically no one knows something like SL more than the users who can understand the problems. It's actually a really good thing SL users can fix SL's problems and it's something extremely rare that a lot of other companies could only dream of. I think LL kind of knows they are not entirely steering the ship. They are more like the people who keep the ship running and not sinking. And I think that's what makes SL so cool and filled with really awesome user generated content. It's a good relationship and it makes SL extremely unique, even amongst all these metaverse fad things popping up. I think LL knows to kind of keep their hands off the wheel and just let the users take control of most things. In world shopping was a pain, so we got xstreetsl. LL provided bodies were aging very poorly so we got mesh bodies. SL's users almost always fix LL's shortcomings and I think the current LL is kind of realizing that their role is to give its users the tools it needs to make SL better instead of trying to make SL better. And yes, I consider mobile client a tool to make SL better because it should in theory make for a lot more customers which would drive a big content creation push because there's more money and the market is larger.

The shopping experience is gonna get fixed soon, trust me

And yeah I had a rough day in RL so sorry in advanced if some of this post doesn't make sense.

[Kathrine Jansma]

Github does offer a nice view about contributions to at least the SecondLife Viewer, which is developed more or less openly:

Contributors to secondlife/viewer · GitHub

 

[EnCore Mayne]

exactly the root of my concerns Kathrine. i'm subscribed to their updates and don't see a lot of diversity or significant amount of inputs. i suppose i'm looking for more "chatter". it's always nice when one developer comments on some particular process instead of just putting out the code for some nonsensical reason.

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't have any of the technical knowledge or insights any of you have and generally attend the code-cave meetings only once a year, just to see if I need to reduce my level of horror or not.

I tend to think -- over 19 years -- that the "spaghetti code" stuff is actually a myth, a story told to cover up either bad choices or uninformed executive decisions. I think it would be hard to keep the spaghetti code situation going through so many changes and the switch to AWS. Yes, I think Monty (if that's the one I'm thinking who wanted to have Mainland scenes roll out in front of you as your drove) -- is still a dewy-eyed newbie.

So...taking everything you know -- and don't know -- where would you all say the effort with "fixing search" stands at this point in time?

Edited November 18, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 11/18/2023 at 5:54 PM, EnCore Mayne said:

exactly the root of my concerns Kathrine. i'm subscribed to their updates and don't see a lot of diversity or significant amount of inputs. i suppose i'm looking for more "chatter". it's always nice when one developer comments on some particular process instead of just putting out the code for some nonsensical reason.

All the chatter tends to happen elsewhere, before code is submitted/merged into the viewer. Places like the public LL meetings, forums of TPVs, Jira tickets, and of course internally within LL that we can't see.

Edited November 20, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[gwynchisholm]

@Extrude Ragu that is a fantastic example, and I have a little bit of insight into that which is related to the games age. So I keep doing this but bear with me: Roblox. 
Also a relatively ancient game, they had the same issue years ago where the user created content was a bit difficult to try on, same with the hats. You had to go specific places to try the items on for free and then decide if you wanted to buy them, going back to the website to buy it.

Note there was no official way to do this, users do it exclusively, it was not mandatory in any way so many items just didn’t have any option to try them on.

So what did they do? They used their avatar profile picture as a way to try on the items. The way avatar profile pictures in Roblox work (in context to the time, in this case 2006 to 2011 or so) is they’re a render of your avatar and everything you are currently wearing, presented as a jpeg. So all they did was make your rendered avatar wear the item, and send the page a new jpeg. This worked great, and you can actually still use the profiles in 2D mode like that today.

Fast forward some years and they have 3D profiles now, where the profile picture is actually a 3D model of your avatar and everything you’re wearing rendered in openGL for the browser. So trying on items is exactly the same where it updates your avatar in 3D and sends the page a new model to display. They now use this as the entire avatar creation page where you live update the 3D model of your avatar with your items.

Secondlife could theoretically do the same thing, where you have a visual representation of your avatar at the time, ingame or not, sent to the web browser which you could modify and add or remove items from. Or show it on the marketplace and try items on by applying them to your avatar, potentially allowing for basic adjustment.

But the whole thing I’m trying to add here is that it’s a hybrid solution of both styles of implementing a process like that. Where it’s a single issue and attribute that was done separate of everything else, but is also beneficial and used by multiple facets of the game. Instead of having the whole team rework avatars and the shop experience as a whole, a small team figured out how to use an existing small feature for something else, and other teams added onto it, until it became a core attribute of the games design. SL can look at similar problems in the same way, maybe a whole redesign is worth pursuing for the whole development team, but maybe a small team changing up one part of the game will find itself useful to other teams working on other parts, passively involving the whole team.

[EnCore Mayne]

i've been looking around to unwravel the mystery surrounding the personnel on whose shoulders rest the continued functionality of our little world. even tho it contains Ebbe as the head it still seems to have a good number of organizational positions hitherto unknown. as far as i've researched, the phenom of SL's code was admired and revered world wide back in the day. seems passing bits and bytes down the wires of the internet is an awe inspiring thing to those involved in the struggle of developing asyncronous data flow. let's just say my admiration for their skills for keeping the boat afloat while adding more sails to the rigging has been quite substantially improved.

even tho i can hardly understand most of their chatter when they do supply it, i've noticed a few more explanatory notes from the GitHub posts. it's always a bonus to know what's going on under the hood.

[elleevelyn]

the people who keep the SL world afloat in the technical realm are Anya Kanevsky - Vice President of Product, Eric Nix - Vice President of Product Operations and Andrew Kertesv - Vice President of Engineering

Andrew K is a recent-ish hire, Anya K. has been here since at least Viewer 2. Eric Ni. has been here pretty much since forever

Linden Lab dets here: https://lindenlab.com/about

[Katherine Heartsong]

15 hours ago, elleevelyn said:

the people who keep the SL world afloat in the technical realm are Anya Kanevsky - Vice President of Product, Eric Nix - Vice President of Product Operations and Andrew Kertesv - Vice President of Engineering

Andrew K is a recent-ish hire, Anya K. has been here since at least Viewer 2. Eric Ni. has been here pretty much since forever

Linden Lab dets here: https://lindenlab.com/about

Find me the name of the CXO, the one in charge of the overall direction for user experience. Their UX team, their UX researchers. As someone in that field for 30 years, that's someone I'd like to know a lot more about.

[EnCore Mayne]

methinks Steeltoe Rigney fills the bill.