Gabriele Graves

These are the kinds of things I had in mind that LL could perhaps make a statement about. One question rattling around in my mind is do they even get stats from TPVs as well as the official viewer? There are so many variants of hardware out there and the what constitutes an "acceptable" experience is extremely subjective. Anecdote: When I started in SL in 2007, my PC didn't have any kind of accelerated graphics and I accordingly got about 5fps at best. I didn't even know that it wasn't supposed to be that way. I still got around and enjoyed SL. That wouldn't be OK for me now though, not now that I've had better.

If others don't share that level of trust then I personally think that is understandable. Everyone gets to make that call for themselves. It seems to me that one person in this discussion who is advocating for dropping low end specs doesn't even seem to have a high level of trust in LL. So there's that.

Speaking for myself, that's not it at all. It's more that I don't automatically trust that LL has necessarily done enough due diligence have made an informed decision about choosing to cut lose N% of users for whatever N really is. LL making a statement addressing some of the low end users concerns might go a long way to put folks minds to rest about it. I personally have no idea which view point is correct but definitely think it's a shame if we lose people needlessly.

I'm not sure this topic is going as Sam intended to be frank, please correct me if I'm wrong Sam. One of the problems with this type of topic is that except for the high profile public cases we hear about, everything else is anecdotal and no offense to anyone but cannot be trusted as presented anymore than any claimed legal credentials can be. That's unless accompanied with case numbers, court districts, etc. of course. I half expected someone who wanted to reinforce their view that taking snapshots in SL and using them commercially is very risky to come up with and post a half-baked story to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. So far I'm very happy to have been wrong about that.

^^^ That

I'm using the latest FS and the AO is working for me just as it did before as far as I can tell.

You seem very certain of that. Perhaps if you can share the source of your certainty, we could all benefit from knowing. This is at least a tangentially related discussion but OK, I'm good with that.

It cannot be disproved either. To your credit but this sentiment certainly seems very prevalent in SL and on the forums at times. Yes that's fine as long as they are at least equal. However, it seems like we lose more than we gain overall. One data point for that is the often discussed inability to retain many new users for very long and the attempts to change that.

It seems to me that people who are complaining about the "negativity" of others here (also an expression of negativity ironically) tend to miss the fact that SL is in decline and has been for a very long time. Does that not suggest that we lost a lot of people over the years, more than we gained and that maybe that was in part due to the many changes where people couldn't keep up? Perhaps we missed ways of keeping them if we had cared a bit more. Don't get me wrong, I don't think for a moment that we would be better off without the new features we have gained but we also shouldn't ignore that they likely came at a cost and so perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss concerns. We seem very embedded in the idea that if we just implement the new shiny then hordes of new users will see how modern SL is and jump in without hesitation but it seems that in fact nothing so far has done anything to stem the continued slow drip-drip loss of existing users as far as I can tell.

For some of us the LL viewer isn't even a viable choice because we use Linux and there is no native LL viewer for Linux anymore. Running the Windows version on Linux under Wine is no alternative for any length of time due to performance, crashing and UI issues.

Soon Toon

I would hope that they are both cached and so which ever one downloads first will be the only one that downloads and the second time is from disk but to be fair I don't know for sure how they are handled.

No worries, all good. As I said I was just musing myself.

Interesting and also good to know, thanks. I suppose in that case LL probably just thought people would do what you did.

I hear you. No disagreement on that from me. It is their job and no doubt. However, I would add that transitioning users from one implementation of an important feature to another is always going to have problems. It would have been nice if there was a way for LL to convert PBR materials for non-PBR viewers but I have no idea if that would have been practical to achieve. The way I see it is that it will all depend on the rate of PBR content creation as to how much it impacts non-PBR viewers. The pre-BoM viewers seeing garbled BoM content was more obvious because lots of early adopters were travelling around with that content. I expect that most of PBR content will come from land objects at first and not for clothing. Sure, there will be some but given the poor state of materials support in general for clothing, I'm not betting that many are upskilling right now.

I'm certain I'm not. Perhaps you just misunderstand me. That's double life not a second life. I disagree that they have the exact same meaning and none of the searches you posted use "second life" either. Nope, not at all. It was just idle musings. 99.99999% of posts on the forums don't matter really either. That's open to interpretation. Some would say that their use of SL is an extension of the entertainment activities of their real life in the same way as any other type of entertainment is and not another life. I certainly see it that way.

You make a good point about the timespan. I underestimated how long pre-PBR FS viewers might be in use with my question as I tend to upgrade immediately unless there turns out to be a problem. Many people don't upgrade often though and I think there is about 18 months before the oldest FS version is blocked from use once a new version is released. In a way though, it's perhaps a bit like when BoM was introduced. Non-BoM viewers saw BoM wearables as a set of rainbow coloured lines and pixels. Perhaps the idea is to try to drive people on to newer viewers sooner? The world didn't end with that effect on non-BoM viewers though and I expect PBR content will be really easy to avoid for a long time.

Thanks and good to know.

I suppose if you cannot tell and do not know it's AI then it will seem more real by default because your expectations are set for interaction with a real person. If you know it's AI though then it will seem less real perhaps. I initially read Replicants in the title and thought of this:

Isn't this just a limited time transitionary problem anyway? If so I can understand creators not wanting to increase their upload costs unnecessarily. For Scarlet Creative, I wonder why they added a second house with the alternate texturing instead of a combined object. Two possibilities occur to me: They expect this issue to go away soon-ish and there's no point in downloading the Blinn-Phong materials as well at that point which would just add to rez inefficiency. Perhaps the extra materials increases the LI of the house which would make adding a second version more desirable. Is this a thing?

"Picante"

I didn't read Sam's post as meaning that you are consenting to taking part in any adult activities by being on adult land, just that you consent that you might be exposed to adult things there.

I'll start the ball rolling with "Whakaaro" which means imagination in Maori.

I've created another topic for ideas here so that we don't derail further:

I posed the question on another topic about whether Second Life is meaningful anymore, especially as social media is often most people's Second Life. Obviously a name change isn't on the cards but as a hypothetical exercise it would be interesting to see what people come up with. This is the topic to unleash your naming creativity. No idea is too daft.