A suggestion to LL

[Deltango Vale]

"That is why I think we need a basic simple viewer that allows you the basic things but won't bother you with all the extra stuff."

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I agree, but the viewer must be:

1. Layered like an onion such that one begins at a simple, intuitive kernel and moves outward through compatible layers of increasing functionality.
2. Intelligent. The viewer must conform to the thinking and behavior of human beings, not the whims of some technocrat who has never seen daylight. For all his faults, Steve Jobs understood how humans think. Surely, there is no one left in Silicon Valley who hasn't got the message.
3. Open and organic in the way that the English language is open and organic. Do not construct a private, proprietary system disconnected from the wider world.

[Jo Yardley]

Yes I completely agree.

You should start with a very simple basic viewer and everytime you reach some goal or learn something new, new options and buttons are added.

A bit like a game, if you reach the next level, more things are possible.

This may also show people that SL is all about understanding the steep learning curve and people also like reaching goals.

Give them rewards for goals, such as a free random outfit or something.

-click this sign

-walk to this spot

-wear this hat

-say this in chat

etc, etc.

The viewer changing and adapting to your level of knowledge.

[Freecilla Kuhn]

Hey Jo, you have just described a welcome island with, -click this sign -walk to this spot, we have those already.

Yes a new person only needs the basics and they have to use them to walk but that doesn't mean all the other stuff can not still be there, it just has to be organized, easy to see and use. New people do ask people to help them out at times but when no one is around they usually learn much more by clicking things to see what was happens. They can not do that if the other stuff is not in their viewer. Most people are in SL for over a month before they find the environmental settings and the building tools but those being there unknown to them does not impede them in any way however the basic viewer does impede new people in too many ways.

[Jo Yardley]

Yes but my version of the Welcome Island would not be accessible to people older then a few days, each welcome area would be a lot more basic then the Welcome Islands and most importantly, they would be individual and private.

A newcomer would be all alone in a basic welcome area safe from being harassed or bombarded with naked rude people, annoying gestures, people landing on your head, confusing situations, etc.

[Qie Niangao]

I realize you mean this area to be temporary, only for a newcomer to get familiar with the basics.  I was vamping on that idea, maybe taking it to the point that it replaces sandboxes.

Granted, once in a very long time, one may want a very high capacity but very short-term shared building environment, which need is sometimes satisfied by public sandboxes for those users so socially isolated as to have nowhere else to do that. Otherwise, however, demand for sandboxes would seem better satisfied by this hypothetical private welcome area:  No drahma, no harassment, no governance overhead, and potentially much lower resource demand (no need to maintain a multi-user simulation across multiple connected sessions).

[Thrayce Lanley]

I'm glad someone started this thread, because I've been pondering the realities of the issue of 'SL hardware' for a while now.  I've been lurking various SL fora here and there, and  there IS definately a correlation between hardware requirements and user-count.

I can't remember exactly where I saw it, but I read an official LL post that 60-65% of the current userbase was using 'class-3' hardware, meaning that 60-65% of SL users are running the client on a computer that can BARELY run well enough to stand still and chat.

(if anyone knows where that statistic is, I'd appreciate the citation :matte-motes-smile:)

Now, I'm a long-time Kirsten's User, running all the 'bells and whistles' that make SL a pretty place.  I have to admit, with all the settings of the S21 viewer set to 'Ultra', it becomes apparent that our virtual-home is absolutely gorgeous.  

But, that being said, I've encountered something darker on various 'open' forums...

 I've read thread after thread where someone running ANY SL-client claiming to have decent framerates with graphics set to 'high' or even 'ultra' are soon to become the target of people accusing them of "bragging".  While I don't see any reason for a 'class-divide' among users, I've never really understood why some take the position that LL should dumb-down their graphics code to more accomodate the end-user who is using a ten-year-old comp.

Case in point.  I installed phoenix (iteration from about a month ago) alongside Kirsten's on my system to film video.   I wasn't prepared for what I saw, and it is the lead-up to what I write here.  On KV, my AV appeared as normal, but on the Phoenix Viewer, it turned out that the multi-attachments were not to be seen, shadows were causing a major FPS-drop, and the AA in Phoenix seemed to be trying to set my chipset on fire.  Up to that point, I was under the impression that all the viewers shared a parallel-development sort of thing.  Instead, the harsh reality had set in that this was not the case.

So, I brought this up in the fora and it didn't take twenty minutes to land myself a good scalding from those who insisted that I was some 'rich guy' who's just trying to show everyone up, and that I'm just another KV fanboy simply because I don't use his favorite client.  Furthermore, I was told (on no uncertain terms) that "not everybody has the cash to buy your [expletive] hardware."  

Of all that I've written here, this is the sum: is there really a divide as such between users with a 1998 Dell and a state-of-the-art WhizBang2012?

I have to be careful about writing along these lines, as it's FAR too easy to appear like I'm promoting a class-divide or something.  I'm not.  But with all the fuss about the latest LLV iteration (v4 is it?), I think we should also be careful to remember that there are all sorts of users in our virtual world, all using different clients, under different needs and requirements.  The Phoenix iteration I used in the above example was incapable of using or viewing multi-attachments because the fanbase had requested UI changes instead of edits that would increase compatibility with the other viewers.

Anyway, not quite a rant, and certainly not a complaint.  Just a concern.

Cheers! 

 

ETA:  Someone said earlier that Shadows, DOF, AntiAliasing were for Photographs ONLY.  Again, I'm running KV S21 as my MAIN "Roleplay, hang around and chat, visit places, and shopping" viewer with all of these features turned on, at the ULTRA setting.  While I understand that comment, let's remember it's not necessarily true.  

Furthermore, the poster was also correct when he said one could acquire a decent GPU for 100-200 dollars U.S.  I'm running KV under a 1GB Zotac GTS250, and getting 22-30 FPS on average.  This card ran me $149.99 at Staples.

Cheers again! 

[Qie Niangao]

Couple of things.  Firstly, yeah, shadows and lighting is one place where the V2 rendering code is substantially faster (and better) than V1, so it's actually viable to walk around with full-bore shadows and lighting enabled.  There are some additional tweaks in some test builds that make this somewhat better, even.  (Personally, I love shadows and per-pixel lighting all the time, but can't abide DoF for anything but still images, but I realize YMMV.)

Secondly, there's a growing divide between machines bought for 3D gaming and those bought for high-end computation. Increasingly, high-end machines are being sold with integrated graphics, including the current generation of "enthusiast" motherboards with the Intel Z68 chipset.  Unless you're buying a machine specifically for 3D gaming, you'd never think to get anything but the (rather impressive) integrated graphics -- and you're not going to be happy running SL with shadows and lighting on such a rig.

My point is that we might have expected, five years ago, that new machines purchased five years hence would all be happy running SL with all the bells and whistles.  Actually, five years ago, most would never have imagined that we'd still be counting triangles to manage Mesh complexity, five years hence.  Yet here we are.

[161488303349]

 if is going to be a target fps then i think 24 be it. i think 24 is same rate as television

the newest alpha 3.2.1 viewer is quite fast

i have a nvidia 230m card on my laptop. 4gig ram on windows 7

on med settings and 2x antialiase on my mainland parcel by myself then ...

if basic shader then get like average 46fps

if atmospheric shader then 32fps

if shadows on then 18fps until i move my camera then kaboom!!! (:

the official releases a lot slower like about 20-30% less fps. shadows about 40-50% less fps