LL Reaches Out on PBR

[Porky Gorky]

2 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

And some already have, go check the MP.

Oh, I didn't realise the Moles sucked so hard.

The easiest solution then is for LL to go to an existing modular mesh creator and commission them to build the library for a fee or for LL to purchase the rights to an existing modular asset library. 

I’m going to guess that this is not the way LL rolls.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

13 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

My knowledge of

The trellis on the right, is a kit, one of those "snap-to-grid-size 3.296592 m" kits. The flame lights on the pillars are from a zero L$ freebie kit on the MP.

The garden walls are made from those "mesh primitive shapes" I mentioned before, and before ANY Fossil Troll want's to know why I used MESH cubes and half cylinders to make them, it's because putting ALM BP materials on CUT prims causes massive LI spikes, doing that on the mesh pieces, does NOT.

The ground is actually a "full perm beach" piece.

Total cost for parts and textures 53 L$.

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, Porky Gorky said:

Oh, I didn't realise the Moles sucked so hard.

I'm not going to make derisive comments about any particular creators efforts but that seems to be the general consensus a lot of the time.

2 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

The easiest solution then is for LL to go to an existing modular mesh creator and commission them to build the library for a fee or for LL to purchase the rights to an existing modular asset library. 

Nope.  Too much opportunity for self-promotion and too many ways in which they could profit personally by making it more difficult for other creators to offer compatible content while having all the necessary information to churn out endless variations of their own add-ons.  Better to hire actual professionals, given the number of lay offs in the games industry over the last year or two there are plenty of CG artists looking for the opportunity to earn money through either one off projects or permanent full-time or part-time employment.

5 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

I’m going to guess that this is not the way LL rolls.

There's been rare instances where LL have commissioned the creation of content but mostly they leave it all up to their residents.

[Porky Gorky]

1 minute ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Nope.  Too much opportunity for self-promotion and too many ways in which they could profit personally by making it more difficult for other creators to offer compatible content while having all the necessary information to churn out endless variations of their own add-ons.  Better to hire actual professionals, given the number of lay offs in the games industry over the last year or two there are plenty of CG artists looking for the opportunity to earn money through either one off projects or permanent full-time or part-time employment.

Well F@!k it then. Forget it. The idea is scrapped. 

Anyway it’s bank holiday Monday, I need to mow the lawn, wash the car and all the other things middle aged English men are required to do.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

5 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Well F@!k it then. Forget it. The idea is scrapped. 

Well there's always the very remote possibility that a creator in SL who really enjoys creating just for the fun of it and has no interest in profiting from it will decide to just release a bunch of full perms assets because they're bored and have nothing better to do?  

5 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Anyway it’s bank holiday Monday, I need to mow the lawn, wash the car and all the other things middle aged English men are required to do.

Enjoy your bank holiday, having just spent two days working late shifts at the local hospital my day is going to consist of sitting around enjoying the fact that I'm not stuck in a hospital for most of the day!

Edited August 26 by Fluffy Sharkfin
typo

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 hours ago, Orwar said:

Very much made me miss The Sims for ease of building stuff

https://www.youtube.com/@lilsimsie/videos

A lot of her videos are a bit "unpaid EA shill" but her speed-build tutorials with advanced cheat code tricks, are pretty good.

She even got invited by EA to make some of the default lots for some of the neighbourhoods.

 

Edited August 26 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Zalificent Corvinus]

19 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

and all the other things middle aged English men are required to do.

...telling the spouse that you need to go out to the builders merchant for a fresh tin of Elbow Grease, and a large bag of Nail Holes, before you can finish putting up the new shelves.

The Builder's Merchant that happens to be next to the pub... Don't forget to buy breath mints on the way back!

 

[Porky Gorky]

10 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Well there's always the very remote possibility that a creator in SL who really enjoys creating just for the fun of it and has no interest in profiting from it will decide to just release a bunch of full perms assets because they're bored and have nothing better to do?  

Predominantly all I do is make modular environments, both at work and in my spare time. I have hundreds of kits that I can sell commercially including many that would work in an SL starter asset library. But the idea of providing them to LL for free doesn't sit well with me. It’s not just because I am a capitalist, i’ve given kits away to indy game and mod developers before as well as giving them my time for free. But LL is owned by multi millionaires and backed by a huge investment corporation, so yeah…I won’t be doing that.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, Porky Gorky said:

Predominantly all I do is make modular environments, both at work and in my spare time. I have hundreds of kits that I can sell commercially including many that would work in an SL starter asset library. But the idea of providing them to LL for free doesn't sit well with me. It’s not just because I am a capitalist, i’ve given kits away to indy game and mod developers before as well as giving them my time for free. But LL is owned by multi millionaires and backed by a huge investment corporation, so yeah…I won’t be doing that.

That's fair.  I guess from my own perspective I'd see it more as giving back to residents and the platform as a whole rather than to LL.

[Porky Gorky]

14 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

That's fair.  I guess from my own perspective I'd see it more as giving back to residents and the platform as a whole rather than to LL.

Shhhhh, don’t say that!

Now Zal is going to tell me I have no principles again and I will have to pay my Psychiatrist another £200 to tell me what a great guy I am. Thanks allot Fluffy!

Edited August 26 by Porky Gorky

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

13 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Shhhhh, don’t say that!

Now Zal is going to tell me I have no principles again and I will have to pay my Psychiatrist another £200 to tell me what a great guy I am. Thanks allot Fluffy!

You may be lost for words, but your forum avatars eyes speak volumes!  

[BilliJo Aldrin]

2 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

And the difference versus prims would be...?

the difference would be that mesh is way cooler than prims 😂

[Charlotte Bartlett]

3 hours ago, Porky Gorky said:

The difference would be finished textured modular mesh components compared to plywood boxes. Modular mesh would make the initial building experience more accessible. But mesh and prims can continue to co-exist. I believe my original suggestion of a mesh asset library was a solution to the “mesh killed in-world building” argument in which prims have apparently become obsolete.

Adding a single polygon plane to the "prim" build set would be a small and achievable addition along with a knife tool for cuts (less small and achievable) to provide more mod / create capability in world to existing assets.    

Even with the above, the reality is SL is no longer what is was pre 2011 and the term I always thought described SL then was "easy entry crafting and socialisation". Those of us that made things inworld were "crafters".  Within a few hours of tinkering you could create something.  Everybody was generally on the same level playing field with the same tools available in-world - it simply came down to how they could creatively manipulate those tools.    The fashion and texture crowd were slightly a bit more off platform with texturing skills.

Effectively for those interested in that side of things - it was crafting.  We had a sandbox where we could all build, script, photograph and create what we imagined.  We were able to express this creativity whilst socialising / connecting at the same time.

That range allowed the appeal to cover some really broad wants,  from a casual user who wanted to make friends, to a techie who wanted to see how far the tools could be pushed, to somebody picking up a cube for the first time and finding it could become a house.  Combined with every shade of grey (not goo)  in-between and around.  That appeal was genuinely broad.

When Mesh uploads started 13 odd years ago it changed the narrative and the sandbox concept / playing field.  

SL was no longer what I thought of a crafting/socialisation platform.   It became a commercial host for content created off platform for consumers to interact with.   There was a major fork in the path.  The path selected was consumerism and shiny.   In my opinion, that effectively shut down the easy entry and crafting element.  It also repackaged socialisation to exclude the crafting rezzables part of the what SL offered. 

That path required increasing adoption numbers to feed the machine.   The machine then needed to keep pace.   However, no matter what new shiny came - it did not attract the numbers.  Those far more intelligent than me will have a better idea why.  Whilst, it never can be shiny as a AAA game  - the reality was the broad appeal I mentioned above was perhaps we didn't actually need or want the shiny - let's not forget things like Blue Mars, Sansar etc). For me personally, we lost the crafting aspect, and this  cut off the easy entry hook and a major part of the socialisation capability, opportunity and expression.      

Combining that with the fact  imagination/creativity becomes truly painful with off platform creation, it limits that field for folk to stay in world and build or maintain relationships.  Now it's all heads down in 3D tools in a mechanical pipeline workflow away from SL.   Effectively any "creator" who spent time on creating items left SL during the creation pipeline and only returns for upload and support.

You can try and give more "easy entry" to help capture the hearts and minds of new crafters such as more assets.  However,  in reality, the platform delegated "creative freedom" to off platform.  This  does not appear to be reversible as consumerism is now a major part of the user base and you can't walk back 13/14 years of "mesh" content nor replicate that capability within the platform (i.e. blender).     Easy entry becomes unsustainable as I suspect some users quickly see they have to convert to consumerism or learn complex "stuff" as the playing field no longer has a defined boundary - hopefully a few creative crafters prevail still.   My closest friends who kept me in SL were all made through crafting on platform.       I am using that word purposely versus creating.

LL also tried to go full shiny with Sansar and that failed and I am not going to trigger people using the word starting with P right now.   They can't bring back "crafting" and sustainable "easy entry".   Perhaps all that is left is the socialisation angle but that brings us full circle to things like the mobile app and the challenges there.

That was not meant to be such a long post, but I still love Second Life, it's always had its faults and problems but I have always wanted to take on the challenge and push forward.   I truly hope whatever path comes next, and how these challenges are solved (and they will differ for every single person who has a different reason for using SL to me) are going to be really important over the next period for those of us who truly want to see this place around for a long time still.    
 

 

[Orwar]

3 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

You may be lost for words, but your forum avatars eyes speak volumes!  

   Dark mode user detected! 

5 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Been there, done that, worn the pizza eaten the t-shirt.

 

   Yours came with a pizza?

   Oh, there's an idea for IKEA .. Of course, people wouldn't understand the instructions for how to eat it.

[HeathcliffMontague]

14 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

Why do we expect users to learn everything else and not the answer to "what's a dedicated GPU and do I have one?"

Yeah. That one actually grinds my gears as well.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

10 minutes ago, Orwar said:

people wouldn't understand the instructions for how to eat it.

Unless they were Swedish...

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

18 minutes ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

Adding a single polygon plane to the "prim" build set would be a small and achievable addition

Box building and other components

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Box-building-and-other-components/5818177

 

Already available, FREE, courtesy of the forum's own @Chaser Zaks.

 

[Orwar]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Unless they were Swedish...

[HeathcliffMontague]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Unless they were Swedish...

 

Hey! Leave my neighbours alone! I get to ridicule them, you don't  

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

21 minutes ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

You can try and give more "easy entry" to help capture the hearts and minds of new crafters such as more assets.  However,  in reality, the platform delegated "creative freedom" to off platform.  This  does not appear to be reversible as consumerism is now a major part of the user base and you can't walk back 13/14 years of "mesh" content nor replicate that capability within the platform (i.e. blender).

There's a lot of truth in your post but, while I agree that the vast majority of SL users are now "consumer brained" rather than being interested in creating things for themselves, I still don't see the harm in having more "building blocks" for people who are interested in "crafting" to play with.  You may never be able to recapture the spirit of creativity that residents had back in the early days (and even then I knew plenty of people who never so much as tweaked a prim or linked two of them together) but perhaps if there were more people posting pics of content they've pieced together saying "Hey, look at this cool thing I made!" it would attract just a few more new residents that think "Hmm, that does look cool, I want to try making something too!".

[Theresa Tennyson]

25 minutes ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

Even with the above, the reality is SL is no longer what is was pre 2011 and the term I always thought described SL then was "easy entry crafting and socialisation".

It didn't. I joined then and I remember telling a friend about that time, "We can instantly teleport from one end of the world to the other but it just took me five minutes to put a slice of watermelon into a bowl."

[Zalificent Corvinus]

9 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

if there were more people posting pics of content they've pieced together saying "Hey, look at this cool thing I made!"

A couple of commercial buildings, a couple of full perm build kits, some full perm ALM-BP Texture sets, and a couple of freebie ships, edited to de-vehicle them for static scenery use.

And quite a lot of custom editing, placing and adjusting projector lights, etc.

Welcome to Port Weird.

 

No PBR was harmed in the making of this place.

 

[Orwar]

8 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

You may never be able to recapture the spirit of creativity that residents had back in the early days

   This guy and his pitchfork disagrees! Mostly just for the sake of disagreement. It's kind of what he was made for. Um. I kind of forgot what I meant to say with it though, but hey, 3 minutes of having fun with prims - go me!

[Love Zhaoying]

Idea: LL should create new PBR "Default Textures" (for plywood, etc.).

Observation: New users will never know anything EXCEPT post-PBR Second Life.

 

[Paul Hexem]

15 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Because you're contrasting the social aspects with the technical ones. Some have a talent for the one and not the other. Same as some are good at math and some are good at languages but it is rare for one to be proficient at both.

All you're doing here is advocating that people participate without wanting to do or understand the bare minimums of what's involved in participating, though. If anything, that harms them more than anyone else.

Nobody's asking users to identify BUS speeds or know the math of voltage to CPU hertz.

I don't think "post your system specs, let's see what we can improve" is some kind of complex, insurmountable hurdle that we need to shield people from.