Linden Lab gone dark again ?

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

4 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

A choker can be a BOM texture. Do you really need it to float ever so slightly above your avatar's skin?

I guess there's an argument to be made that you can't script a BOM texture (and an equally valid counter argument that you can script a prim which would potentially be far less costly to render).  A BOM choker would certainly be far less hassle to fit and avoid clipping through your avatar when animated though!

[Flea Yatsenko]

23 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Rez a prim box. Flatten it to the height you want. Slope the 4 sides in about 5% or less. - Now you have a simple 1 LI plane with beveled edges.

I know, it was just a quick and dirty example of wasting verts, to highlight the problems with sculpties, not a building habit of making everything a sculpty. People want to be toxic about it, whatever. Pick one of the most basic examples of wasted sculpty verts you can think of so the most people can understand, and some people think that's how you build, lmfao. Dunning Kruger mount stupid.

[Qie Niangao]

And this is why we need BoM Materials. That BoM choker will look a lot better with a normalmap and maybe a little shininess. It doesn't much matter whether those Materials are glTF instead of Blinn-Phong, but it makes a huge difference that they'll be BoM not applied.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

3 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I know, it was just a quick and dirty example of wasting verts, to highlight the problems with sculpties, not a building habit of making everything a sculpty. People want to be toxic about it, whatever. Pick one of the most basic examples of wasted sculpty verts you can think of so the most people can understand, and some people think that's how you build, lmfao. Dunning Kruger mount stupid.

It was a good example of how annoying and wasteful sculpted prims can be and, while you obviously know how to achieve those results using both methods, there are plenty of folks that wouldn't have a clue how to do either.  I highly doubt Persephones response was intended to insult your intelligence or abilities but for a lot of people it may have been a revelation.

The new features offer a lot more flexibility and scope in what can be created but it also adds to an already steep learning curve and if the average resident isn't particularly interested in learning then it's going to be a long, laborious climb to get over the hump of PBR.

[Flea Yatsenko]

5 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

It was a good example of how annoying and wasteful sculpted prims can be and, while you obviously know how to achieve those results using both methods, there are plenty of folks that wouldn't have a clue how to do either.  I highly doubt Persephones response was intended to insult your intelligence or abilities but for a lot of people it may have been a revelation.

The new features offer a lot more flexibility and scope in what can be created but it also adds to an already steep learning curve and if the average resident isn't particularly interested in learning then it's going to be a long, laborious climb to get over the hump of PBR.

I can't call people out but it wasn't Persephone.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Just now, Flea Yatsenko said:

I can't call people out but it wasn't Persephone.

My bad, I assumed from the quote in your post that was who you were directing your comment to.

Regardless of false assumptions about your own abilities it does seem to be the case that as time has progressed most residents have shown less and less interest in learning the technical aspects of SL and expect things to just work, and that's probably only going to be exacerbated by the introduction of gltf scene import if creators use it to upload entire builds rather than things that allow users some level of control over how assets are put together.

[CaerolleClaudel]

2 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

or as example how NOT to talk to your customers, no matter their intelectual "status" .
I don't see residents on the forums ever talk with such disrespect about ány Linden 

I would guess that is because Lindens can ban us but we can’t ban them? And IIRC a ban here is also a ban in SL? 

[Persephone Emerald]

37 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

The new features offer a lot more flexibility and scope in what can be created but it also adds to an already steep learning curve and if the average resident isn't particularly interested in learning then it's going to be a long, laborious climb to get over the hump of PBR.

I wonder how useful is it for the average user to understand building techniques and their limitations?

In the before times (before even sculpts were available), I think most users ended up learning how to at least Edit their worn prims. We had to adjust our jewelry, so it wouldn't be stuck in our bodies, We had to shrink, move and rotate our flexi skirts.  Gods forbid we had to adjust flexi hair, but sometimes we did. Most of us didn't build our own houses, but at some point many of us tried to change the textures on the walls, and probably ended up with the whole building looking like a giant plywood box.

Then came the time of sculpties. Now we could buy objects that were not boxy and were not made from dozens of intricately tortured and pieced together prims. Most of us did not make our own sculpt maps, but we could throw a sculpt map on a prim and feel like we had magically created something. We bought sculpts for everything that we now buy as mesh, from the smallest jewels to airships and mountains, not to mention non-human avatars and pets.

Sculpts were weird and cumbersome though. They were slow to rez and could easily block movement even with their invisible parts.

Then came mesh. (Cue the sound of a heavenly choir of angels.) Suddenly SL started to look like other video games. Creators went a little crazy creating the most intricate items they could, but their land impact was often way too high to be useful. Some creators learned how to sculpt and texture mesh more efficiently to create low-land-impact mesh. Now the age of specialist creators was upon us. Where in the time before mesh, the most highly esteemed creators were those who could draw really nice textures, now it was those who could sculpt and texture low- land-impact mesh. The average consumer would never even dream of trying to use Blender, so they no longer understood why some mesh is "good" and some is "bad". They wanted it to be as realistic and detailed as possible, but didn't understand why their parcel would fill up and lag.

One the one hand, having a specialized creator class makes what they sell more valuable, because not just anyone can make stuff now. I bet most users wouldn't even know how to make a wall or a picture frame with prims. On the other hand, they don't understand the work that goes into creating items either, so they also don't appreciate those who make the things they buy. 

[Daniel Voyager]

4 hours ago, Strawberry Linden said:

Hi everyone, I apologize if my absence has caused any kind of confusion. I’ll try to answer as many of the questions I see about me and my work in this post. 

• I had a death in the family so I have been away as I was taking some personal time. 
• I locked my personal blog about 2 months ago as I am trying to reduce my digital footprint under my Strawberry Singh account. 
• We will continue to post important announcements and grid updates on our official social media accounts when we have them. Keep an eye on our status and community blogs for all the info.

Thank you to all those who personally reached out. I’m doing okay now and will be around more often. I really appreciate all the love and support from our wonderful community. 

I'm sorry to hear that Strawberry and glad everything else is alright. We all love you 😊 

[WeFlossDaily]

15 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o in a particularly nasty way, used a hired influencer to push mesh on everyone by mocking and ridiculing those who wouldn't turn to mesh - they succeeded in driving out of SL some of the top prim and sculpty creators by making it seem as if the elements of their craft were doomed. In fact they weren't. And there was this basic hoax being sold, that mesh would mean far less land impact or "prims" and therefore more land value -- when the dirty little secret about mesh is that it is often way more land impact.

The other day I was playing around in Kristen's viewer and discovered I could view the complexity of my avatar in terms of land impact instead of complexity. The results surprised me. Roughly, a 20,000 complexity avatar (me) was the equivalent of 75 LI. Or, at least, according to the viewer it was. This suggests to me that the current complexity system is pretty much designed to make it so we can attempt to lower our footprint on the system but so that also don't realize just how badly optimized we are.

____

By the way, I greatly appreciate your perspective on all of this. =]

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Persephone Emerald said:

A choker can be a BOM texture. Do you really need it to float ever so slightly above your avatar's skin?

Moving the goalposts much?

The point was WHY rigged mesh increases 'lag' not "talk crap about replacing 3D assets with flat body paint".

 

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

That BoM choker will look a lot better with a normalmap and maybe a little shininess.

It will look better than FLAT MATTE body paint, but it will still look like paint.

 

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

but it makes a huge difference that they'll be BoM not applied.

No, not really, it still adds to the rendering time, adding normals and specular effects to the paint. The difference isn't huge.

 

Remember, "death of a thousand cuts", all you did was remove one minor cut and replace it with a couple of others, the bake time for the bom server ( which WILL increase with 2 k textures, 4 times the pixels, 4 times the bake time ), and the streaming time for those 2k bom bakes ( 4 times the pixels, 4 times the file size, 4 times the streaming bandwidth and time ).

 

It's still "death of a thousand cuts". 2K PBR BoM, means 4 textures per channel instead of 1 to be baked and streamed, at 4 times the pixels per texture, so that's potentially a 1500% increase in bake time and streaming bandwidth.

 

1500% increase... That sound like "lag reducing" to you?

 

 

 

Edited August 1 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

22 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I suffer so that you don't have to.

https://x.com/AlexaLindenLL/status/1818762084693520396

I kinda surprised by the people who internalized this vague post and felt called out by it. No judgement, just surprise.  It wasn't who I figured it would be.  I don't know if this post was even about the forums, but we do have some very unkind people here.

Also, I can't help but imagine Lindens and Moles reading some of the posts here in the forums with wild, made up speculations, flat out lies, paranoid ramblings, and personal attacks on them just because they're busy and not here holding our hands and reassuring the few panicking, vocal residents constantly.  

I imagine a lot of facepalms and head shaking.

At times, I really despair for humanity.

I am happy the darkness has lifted and someone official said something. 

Back to bit**ing about PBR or more completely made up sensational stories about SL being sold to Elon?

[discussionbot]

23 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

At times, I really despair for humanity.

I am happy the darkness has lifted and someone official said something. 

Back to bit**ing about PBR or more completely made up sensational stories about SL being sold to Elon?

It’s just another forum on the internet. 

It’s really not that serious as you make it out to be, people like sh*posting when they’re bored, and it’s funny sometimes. 

[AzureWaves]

25 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

I am happy the darkness has lifted and someone official said something. 

What darkness has lifted? To get back to the actual topic, LL has still gone dark. They've pulled back a lot of their marketing/social media activities and haven't come up with a plan to replace that with anything new, or at least they haven't announced anything. The portal is just a sad web page with a bunch of links to not-updated social media

[Arielle Popstar]

21 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

I kinda surprised by the people who internalized this vague post and felt called out by it. No judgement, just surprise.  It wasn't who I figured it would be.  I don't know if this post was even about the forums, but we do have some very unkind people here.

Also, I can't help but imagine Lindens and Moles reading some of the posts here in the forums with wild, made up speculations, flat out lies, paranoid ramblings, and personal attacks on them just because they're busy and not here holding our hands and reassuring the few panicking, vocal residents constantly.  

One would hope that the individual Lindens and Moles do not internalize posts which are particularly negative about Linden Lab either as most negativity directed that way, is aimed at the corporate entity rather than any particular individual. 

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

1 minute ago, discussionbot said:

It’s really not that serious

It's not, but it can be damaging in the name of entertainment 

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

1 minute ago, AzureWaves said:

What darkness has lifted? To get back to the actual topic, LL has still gone dark. They've pulled back a lot of their marketing/social media activities and haven't come up with a plan to replace that with anything new, or at least they haven't announced anything. The portal is just a sad web page with a bunch of links to not-updated social media

/me holds your hand, pats your shoulder, and arranges her face into something she hopes looks sympathetic. 

[discussionbot]

4 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

It's not, but it can be damaging in the name of entertainment

Maybe, but remember we’re on Linden Lab’s website. They could nuke this entire thing in a second if they’d want, temporarily lock it down for a few days or even step up the moderation considerably and mute users spouting rubbish  

I personally think they’re pretty gracious letting people say what they want, mostly. 

[Love Zhaoying]

37 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

I kinda surprised by the people who internalized this vague post and felt called out by it. No judgement, just surprise.  It wasn't who I figured it would be.  I don't know if this post was even about the forums, but we do have some very unkind people here.

Also, I can't help but imagine Lindens and Moles reading some of the posts here in the forums with wild, made up speculations, flat out lies, paranoid ramblings, and personal attacks on them just because they're busy and not here holding our hands and reassuring the few panicking, vocal residents constantly.  

I imagine a lot of facepalms and head shaking.

At times, I really despair for humanity.

I am happy the darkness has lifted and someone official said something. 

Back to bit**ing about PBR or more completely made up sensational stories about SL being sold to Elon?

I think, in general, people feel entitled to be critical, judgmental, and "name-call" as much as they can get away with.

But if someone dares to "call them out" - or even refers to someone else that just happens to be conducting similar behavior to them, they absolutely go nuts.  How dare they.

The louder people protest, the more any criticism (even if not directed towards them) is probably "spot on".

(It's similar to the principle where people criticize others of doing things, which they themselves are doing.  It's a "tell".)

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

54 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

I kinda surprised by the people who internalized this vague post and felt called out by it. No judgement, just surprise.  It wasn't who I figured it would be.  I don't know if this post was even about the forums, but we do have some very unkind people here.

Also, I can't help but imagine Lindens and Moles reading some of the posts here in the forums with wild, made up speculations, flat out lies, paranoid ramblings, and personal attacks on them just because they're busy and not here holding our hands and reassuring the few panicking, vocal residents constantly.  

I imagine a lot of facepalms and head shaking.

At times, I really despair for humanity.

I am happy the darkness has lifted and someone official said something. 

Back to bit**ing about PBR or more completely made up sensational stories about SL being sold to Elon?

I don't disagree with most, or maybe even any, of what you say here Cinn.

That said, I'll repeat what I've already suggested -- that LL could avoid a great deal of this by employing a better, smarter public relations strategy. Or indeed, if they just had a strategy, even. Possibly, the shutting down of most of what little LL did use in that regard -- the blogging network, LabGab or whatever -- is part and parcel of devising or putting in place a new, more coherent strategy. I sure hope so.

But a company that sees people panicking (and surely can't have missed it?) about the meaning of this, or even just spreading "rumours," and does nothing to address that is ("ethical" considerations aside) a company that isn't doing a very good job of managing its public image.

So, yes. A lot of the rumour mongering has been silly, or even nasty. LL's dereliction doesn't excuse that.

But it's in LL's best interest to do something about it, and not just "tut tut" disapprovingly. It seems to me that that's Business Communications and Public Relations 100?

Edited August 1 by Scylla Rhiadra
Clarity

[Porky Gorky]

21 minutes ago, discussionbot said:

I personally think they’re pretty gracious letting people say what they want, mostly. 

When you compare this forum to the God awful one that came before it, this place is like a paradise of civility in comparison.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

Regardless of what that post is referring to, if I see a company in a social media username, I'm not taking that as a personal account.

If JohnNissan, BonnieVerizon, or PeteStarbucks made questionable tweets, I'm side-eyeing the heck out of that company.

[Quartz Mole]

1 hour ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

Also, I can't help but imagine Lindens and Moles reading some of the posts here in the forums with wild, made up speculations, flat out lies, paranoid ramblings, and personal attacks on them just because they're busy and not here holding our hands and reassuring the few panicking, vocal residents constantly.  

I imagine a lot of facepalms and head shaking.

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 minutes ago, Quartz Mole said:

 

I am now forever going to think of you as Ian Richardson.

(Or as a manipulative murderous British politician. Nah. Let's go with Ian.)

[Rat Luv]

48 minutes ago, discussionbot said:

Maybe, but remember we’re on Linden Lab’s website. They could nuke this entire thing in a second if they’d want, temporarily lock it down for a few days or even step up the moderation considerably and mute users spouting rubbish  

I personally think they’re pretty gracious letting people say what they want, mostly. 

It must be really weird at times to go to work and know there's a forum talking about everything you do 

Imagine doing your RL job and then strangers on a forum connected to your workplace saying "We haven't heard from (you) in weeks...they've probably been fired! Actually...the whole company's closing down!"