Drayke Newall

Relating to cost saving - what Ebbe describes here is how Kitely run their servers on AWS. "It turns it into less capital expenditure to have to buy all the equipment and doing all the maintenance on that. You kind-of pay for what you use; with Second Life [right now], once we’ve bought a piece of hardware, we have to sit on it whether it’s being utilised or not, whereas you can kind-of dynamically scale your consumption as necessary when you use something like AWS … which we believe will reduce costs for use and then ultimately, we hope to pass that on to customers." Ebbe Altberg, VWBPE, March 15th 2018. Relating To Tier "Some experiences might want to have continuous persistence over time, and maybe that’s one type of pricing model, for an “always on” type of scenario. Maybe other will be fine with, “hey, I’m only using this for a few hours in a class a few times a week” or something. and if that can spin-up in a few seconds, and then I just need to basically pay for the time that I’m utilising it. Those could be potential options for us to explore." Ebbe Altberg, VWBPE, March 15th, 2018. Source: Here Then please explain how Kitely (which is one of those 'other grid platforms' you mention) manages their region costs so low. Kitely (run on a modified OpenSim system and on the cloud) charges $39.95/month for 16 joined regions and attribute their pricing being so low due to being able to not have servers always on. Exactly how Ebbe describes in the above quote. Vast difference in cost to LL who charge $229/month for one or to match kitely $3664 for 16 regions. Sure, granted they are a smaller company, however they have proven that region hosting can be very cheap on AWS. Given Second Life still has no mega regions like OpenSim, then surely if Kitely can offer 16 regions for $39.95/month, Linden Lab can offer 1 region for the same price. Taking basic business 101 - for an established business such as Linden Lab that claim 900,000 'active users' per month then lowering tier prices is in their favour. The cost prohibitive region pricing Linden Lab have now locks out the majority of Second Life users from purchasing a region and thereby directly impacts on potential other incomes such as marketplace sales, upload costs etc. There are currently 17,083 active private region in second life. For ease, lets assume 60% are Full and 40% are Homestead. That means $3,092,047 earned every month in tier. To make up the same income on $39.95 for tier Linden Lab would need 77,398 people buying 1 region or even less if some people buy multiple which at lower cost they could. If their numbers are true and they actually have 900,000 active users per month then surely, at such a low price, they could get 80,000 users paying for 1 region each. If LL offered an AWS (not always on region) for $39.95, I know I would buy 2 and get premium as well (I got rid of my premium and region precisely due to LL price gouging). This would net them far more premium members as well as far more income tier wise as as it is available for more people. Add to the fact that it would probably amount to even more users and retaining them, it would increase concurrency and user retention as well as boost marketplace sales and other fee incomes to LL. Possibly even a new hype period for SL. EDIT: Not to mention the fact that most people pay more than $30/month when renting from land barons. Sure such a price reduction would impact on Land Barons however, if you take the figure that say each land baron has 8 subdivision rentals per region then rather than LL earning only 1 region tier from the land baron they could have the potential to earn 8 instead netting more income. Surely 8 direct region sales is better than 1 baron. 8x$39.95= $319.60 to 1x$39.95=39.95.

🙄 Wasn't flaming you at all just showing that Logins do not equate to regular users and that there has been no difference from previous years other than an anomaly. Why do I need a script when gridsurvey is just as accurate. Gridsurvey shows that the users are levelling out to 2019 levels and that now SL concurrency is at mid-2018 levels which averaged approx. 43,000 users. From mid-March to mid-April this year there was an approx. 15,000-user increase in concurrency (so sad - it took a pandemic to see SL reach concurrency levels not seen since 2013) however a rather steep but gradual decline over the course of the year to current levels. This means at most from same time last year there has been 3-4000 user concurrency increase most of which would be still part of the anomaly. Notice in the chart below however that at 17/08/2020 SL concurrency was back to 2019 levels (all gains from COVID removed) and now we are in the high concurrency period per usual. Given past data over the course of Second Life Concurrency (graph below) and ignoring the anomaly of the COVID increase at the beginning of the year, there is no difference in the data as, it has always shown an up and down ebbing over the years. Ignoring the COVID increase anomaly we would be in the high period which is always around Oct – April every year which decreases and has permanent loss happening after April every year. The lessening of permanent loss shown around 2019 can be attributed to the new Linden Homes. Sure COVID has increased numbers no one denies that, however they can not be considered regular and by no means 10,000. It was an anomaly that the data shows is and has diminished back to normal levels just as it does every year. If pointing out facts is flaming then... yeah... EDIT: On a side note the region database shows the same anomaly in the data with a massive uptake of regions during March - April with a much larger decrease in regions thereafter. Meaning that Linden Lab had a nice 2 month bonus and then a loss from the previous years (land uptake wise). Given user comments in this thread alone of regulars dropping regions and premium, I would argue that they are still having losses over past years.

I would like to see where you get the notion that ten thousand signups have become 'regular' users (keeping in mind that an alt account is considered a regular user as far as Linden Lab is concerned if it spends 'x' time in world). Linden Lab have always defined active users as ANY account that signs in for that day irrespective of IP address and a person logging in 10 alts a day is considered 10 active and regular users a day. With that said (during the pandemic), on the 28 Feb 2020 there were (according to gridsurvey - only metrics we have available) 62,362,188 resident sign-ups to date (meaning since 2003 and includes alts, bots, etc). From the last entry of gridsurvey 21 Oct 2020, there are now to date 64,687,961. That means over the last 8 months (till October) 2,325,773 signups have been made. Prey tell, where have they all gone? I cant imagine them being all alts. Additionally, if there are now 10,000 new regular users why hasn't there been an increase in concurrency numbers of which according to gridsurvey are decreasing back to 2019 levels which were the lowest of recent years. Whilst I do hope Linden Lab have fixed their retention issues, given they have been trying for 15 years and have lost in 8 months over 2 million 'sign-ups', I doubt they have 10,000 individual new regular users and also doubt they have converted 10,000 users to regular without losing 10,000 over the same time.

That may be the case however if they had announced progressive updating of their system specs then people by now would have updated the systems to match gradually. The issue they have now is that because they have not updated their min system specs for close to 15 years hardware wise, they are now at the point where it is a case of to little to late as, like you have stated people just buy older systems. So whilst you say that it is a case of LL doing as such would be biting the hand that feeds them, I would argue they have shot themselves in the foot over doing as such. This is not an excuse for LL to not have updated their min system specs over time nor is it an excuse for them not to have implemented features or graphical improvements within their default viewer to help improve retention of new users and keep older ones. The excuse used in years past that SL is different because it is a persistent and user generated world is also coming to an end when the likes of NVidea, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are looking at streaming games virtually without having the software or the game assets installed on the end users computer. This meaning it would be no different if LL did it with second life. We still do not even have reflections in SL on glass despite it being a feature in openGL software for over a decade. LL default viewer is the first viewer any new user will download (unless they have been told otherwise) and for them to solely rely on third party viewers such as BD or posts in the forums no new user will visit for graphical improvements leaving their default viewer stark in contrast just hampers them. Depends on the style and atmosphere of the game. That said, even graphically less demanding games still look far better than Second Life. Lets take Skyrim a game that was released in 2011 prior to your GTA V. It still looks 100x better than SL in all cases and can look 1000x better with mods and runs on relatively low end machines fine. Yes, the same excuse will be used that Second Life is a user generated persistent world however, if the cache was updated to allow for better fetching as well as saving of specific areas, it should be no different to having a game installed on your PC. SL still does not utilise multiple cores of CPU's or more VRAM. When you think the current average system includes a 8gb graphics card and 4 core min now, yet we can only select 2gb vram as the viewer cant utilise any more. Most people have 100mb download speed now yet SLs viewer only allows bandwidth of 2900kb/s as a transfer rate or it affects the viewer poorly. For all those that will say oh but SL dynamically shows assets as you are walking around )so downloads and displays assets as you get closer), this is not an excuse when modern games allow me to download a certain amount to play and then downloads what is needed when i get to that area if it hasn't downloaded it yet. How nice would it be if LL made a system where I can download a connected region prior to me even going there. This would allow seamless views like MFS can achieve.

Whilst I agree Second Life can look good and thanks for the helpful tips I am sure people will find them very useful, I'm going to play devils advocate and say I disagree that SL can be comparable to similar modern AAA games. Whilst yes, looking at your screenshots I would agree with you that SL does look good when comparing it to GTA V but, using that game as evidence "to help erode the myth that SL's rendering engine limits it to the point of making it can only look as good as some old game" is not going to be in your favour. You fail to mention that GTA 5 is a very old game dating back to 2013. Lets compare some more recent modern games: MS Flight Simulator 2020 - Graphics are 100x better than SL both externally and internally with the outside world being generated for miles from actual aerial photos with 3D objects generated with LOD variations depending on height and distance. Cockpits are life like with maps that dynamically show your location in the world and also track weather and altitude with dynamic imagery of surfaces. All of which are impossible in SL. Cyberpunk 2077 - Whilst it may be plagued with bugs and missing promised features the world itself is visually stunning. Modern raytracing allows reflections on the ground to look ultra realistic, lighting and materials are realistic, dynamic weather with rain drops splashing on the ground etc. Second Life cant even compare and many graphic details features are impossible to do in SL flawlessly such as light reflection, atmosphere and model detail. Try getting a perfectly blended low laying fog effect that looks real. These images have film grain on therefore don't do the graphics justice: Cyberpunk 2077 Apartment detail - Tried to find an image but couldn't. Keep close watch on the glass in the apartment which shows reflections of the world around, something not possible in SL as reflections are not even possible which are prevalent in all AAA games leading to have to do duplication tricks to get the same effect impacting performance. Not to mention I wish we could have grass like that that allows blood splatter to appear on single blades of grass. So whilst yes I do not deny that SL can look good. Saying that it can look as good as modern games (even if you say some, if you compare apples with apples as far as atmosphere goes) is not accurate. At best SL is comparable to as you have mentioned an old 2013 game which shows that 'myth' you claim is wrong to actually be correct. If anything can be garnered from the above and especially in relation to cyberpunk 2077, SL is severely gimped due to Linden Labs somewhat weird idea that they need to pamper for people that still use computers from 2010 era. Cyberpunk is a prime example of this as most of their refunds requested and turmoil in their release wasn't due to the bugs but from console players not being able to run the game due to old hardware making it look terrible where on modern hardware it has the best graphics seen in a game to date environment wise. If LL decided to just develop for PC's from 5 years ago and forgo all the old hardware, they could have graphics on par with modern games.

Very true and I think this is where Mark Kingdon (I would say the last out of box thinker LL had) fell in that his secure system (among other ideas) was heavily impacted by it being treated as to hard to figure out. Not that it was impossible but that it was simply to hard. Even updating the inworld creation tools, whilst being hard to update is not impossible. For many other developers they would have seen that the benefits far out way any hardship for such updates but LL for whatever reason just fail to see anything.

True, Unfortunately as much as I am sure the current Lindens are great people, many of those early out the box thinkers are well and truly gone.

You have high hopes for SL which I suppose is good, but as far as the business or gaming world goes it is a dead end. The only thing SL can be used for now is a glorified dress-up chat room and a budget RP venue. LL have missed the mark on so many things with Second Life that it should be a meme. They could have invested heavily in making SL VR possible but gave up on it and went with the software no one asked for SANSAR. If they had invested and managed to get SL (or SL2.0 - a duplicate except with inworld C# programming and vr tech) to work with VR they could have made many things possible, ranging from virtual tours of museums, architectural concepts, realestate walk throughs, virtual car show rooms, virtual store display shopping (competing with Amazon whereby you can order items from RL manufacturers like Amazon EXCEPT you can visually see the product and interact with it). The sky is the limit if they made VR work. Ironically all things that during this year and the lockdowns could have made LL $$$$$. If they had worked on optimisation, graphics, inworld creation tools, directX and opengl versions of viewers and making LSL comparable to C# as far as functionality goes (or made SL2.0) they could have created a platform for game companies or indie game companies to build their games in creating a hub similar to steam albeit 1000% better in that games are accessible with the push of a button and streamed similar to xcloud or GForce Now. Hell, even Amazon which SL servers are now (finally) on has LUNA steaming coming soon. If they had updated their cache system (like the promised years ago) so that it separates regions or region groups into folders that can be selected as to keep there would be no need for constant rewriting of texture and mesh files making the above gaming situation and favourite destinations possible texture load issues. They could have even made groups joinable with a monthly subscription instead of a once off allowing inworld games or groups to be subscription based and take a % off earning LL more money. LL need to start thinking like the above or they will continue to be a relic of the past. This is never going to happen and as an Architect like a lot of others hoped a long time ago for it to be the case there are just far too many better options now. LL had the opportunity to be at the forefront for this however once again as mentioned previously, they just are not forward or out of the box thinkers. Back just after the release of mesh they had the opportunity to look into such tools for architects however LL just don't care about marketing differently other than keeping the status quo. Now with Lumion, Twinmotion and even Unreal Engine supporting Architects and the like there is no chance SL could get in on this market when realistic renders and VR tours are what is needed, both of which LL have shown SL can never compete with. This due to their lack of features and concentrating on features no one except a select favourite few asked for. VR/AR building design - InfraBuild - Formerly LIBERTY OneSteel Want to know why SANSAR failed? Because everything LL tried to market the platform for had already been done by Lumion and Unreal Engine and its graphics looked like a cheap 2010 knock off. To little to late I'm afraid, the lack of VR means no one is interested in meetings in SL. Additionally with Zoom and Microsoft Teams etc, the competition is to advanced for LL to even market into these without ending up with SANSAR all over again.

I agree, however in this case their slow updating and lack of foresight has now created the situation where another program has stepped in when SL could have. LL have missed their opportunity once again. That is the key as it not only helps improvement but if done correctly and managed by Linden Lab can be used as an example of how to optimise. Unfortunately my visits to Bellisseria have completely removed any faith I had (didn't have much) in LL in providing any form of optimisation. Whilst I understand and am grateful for the effort Moles put into things on LL's behalf, they really need to go do a lesson on optimisation. For example, their trailer homes are the same LI cost as their larger homes despite being 1 room and go so far away from optimisation with detailing in mesh every screw and crevice. Both being unneeded details that can be covered by textures and normal mapping. Additionally whilst I agree that the trees can screen from leggier content LL occlusion culling methods are just not up to par to make that possible in any measurable way.

This as always falls back on LL not knowing how to appeal to certain markets as ChinRey has mentioned. It has been the bane of SL in all cases, as with LL not being able to substantiate any good reason for their backward decisions and therefore they tend to do more harm than good. What also goes against them is their insanely slow update and release times. A AAA gaming company can make multiple games with the same amount of staff LL have and support an existing game with updates with far less. Whilst sure SL was founded on the mantra of 'your world, your imagination', that slogan and the realisation of it does not necessarily mean that LL cannot provide builds and systems that run harmoniously with the users creations. Linden Realms as well as Linden Homes are a prime example of this. Why cant the vast swathes of empty mainland be converted into a nature forest park (created and run by LL) such as what ChinRey demonstrated in her post. Why cant they make a train system etc. Show people what can be done. LL really need to look at the new user experience and develop a system whereby the time and effort to learn is reduced not by limiting that time and effort but by disguising it in a system that not only is fun but also appealing to certain generations. Make the experience a game, give them a backstory, give them those objectives they desire. Take experiences, we are still waiting for region wide experience tools. We are still waiting for Linden Lab's proclaimed Pokémon style hunt experience they touted as being region wide. Second life in the first order for a new user is to build their avatar to a certain quality, learn the skills (minor in most cases) needed to use SL and then from there most new users want to explore. Taking LL simple Pokémon style hunt experience we are still waiting for, not only provides an objective for people to explore SL but also engages them in an objective based system that they desire whilst giving them the chance to explore SL, meet people, learn things. Why not do something like that. It also comes down to their lack of feature and script implementation as well as region cost which limits the ability for creators to give new users of the younger or even older generation something they want. If you think of ready player one, it was a hub of all things. That is where SL needs to progress to, being a hub for games, art work, museums, virtual shopping etc. A place where the younger generation can come in and find multiple games within a game. There is no reason why a game like World of Warcraft cant be in second life. This issue simply comes down to lack of programming features within SL as well as cost which are two things LL have failed time and time again to resolve. Until such things are done Second life will continue to be treated as a relic of the past whilst other similar systems progressively take it over.

Never know, perhaps his class mate has decided to do an assignment on the human condition in relation to pretending to be a sock puppet. If so he might want to come here as well to ask about those sort of things... https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Sock-Puppet-complete-avatar/3261788

https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2020/06/04/firestorm-vr-mod-6-3-9/ That's the latest. It is still being worked on just not by Linden Lab. I suppose I should expect Solar to laugh at this post as well considering he believes VR support/testing for SL has stopped.

You weren't the only person to misread it I believe so no offence taken, least you had the curtesy to say as much. Apologies from me as well for not posting the link to the source earlier, I thought it was common knowledge as it was in every major news paper site. My mistake. I also do believe that poll workers do deserve praise for the hard work they do in whatever form it is. Its a thankless task with very little reward. As to trump, he is an idiot in how he behaves but that's a different topic. I wouldn't argue differently. Even if he does contest there is no way he can gain the votes needed. That said, as far as I am aware (that is to say, read) he has the right to contest through court etc so if he wants to go that avenue I don't see why he shouldn't be allowed to, its not going to do any harm either way. If he still refuses to leave then that's a different story whereby I am sure there are policies in place within the American constitution that can resolve that. Think Article 2 of the constitution is about all that President stuff if memory serves correct.

What about tablets using android or ios? Plenty of people use those in place of laptops and are powerful enough to run SL as is. Mobile doesn't just mean phone.

Gee, living in Australia I never knew we had less voters than the USA who has a larger population. 🙄 Who would have thunk it. Please do point out to me where in my post you quoted (or any of my posts here for that matter) I compared Australian and US voting methods. I NEVER said such a thing. I asked whether there was an issue with the machine counting in that link I posted OR whether it was an issue with the media outlet as mentioned in my Edit in my post which you directly quoted. I then made mention how Australia counts to highlight why I am asking the question to show that I am unfamiliar with how electronic counting works. Here I will even quote what I said: "Australia still counts their votes all by hand so I genuinely don't know anything about electronic counting hence the question." If you believe this is comparing rather than highlighting why I am unsure and asked the question, then... um ok... Funny how Mollymews understood my post completely fine and answered it like I had expected yet others didn't. As to the ~6000 votes miscounted here is the article of which county clerks verified there was an issue with counted numbers and had to correct them after it was discovered. Given this error is why when I saw that other post I linked I was curious whether it was another error that was detected and FIXED like shown in the below article or just an issue with the news outlet. https://www.9and10news.com/2020/11/04/antrim-co-clerk-every-vote-will-be-counted-as-cast-despite-early-unofficial-result-error/ But hey, you and whoever else keep believing that I had some other agenda or continue to imply that I am stupid. I'm out.

Let see, definition of being defensive is: "when people talk about someone becoming defensive in the context of a conversation, they are meaning that someone is engaging in emotionally defensive maneuvers designed to ward off their having to experience some unwanted feeling or admit responsibility for some disowned act. People who are acting defensively are essentially trying to protect themselves from feeling a certain uncomfortable way, and from viewing themselves as a failure or otherwise in a negative light" So let then break that down: Do I need to admit responsibility for some act I am ashamed of? No. Am I considered a failure for asking a question? No Did I project myself in the question in a negative light? No. Only thing I said is that your response was not only not helpful in any way to answering my question but as also arrogant. Hey, bright side of Biden becoming president is he may actually fix American education so that people understand basic things like what a defensive tone is. Oh snap, you caught me. I secretly am a huge trump fan and have posters all around my room, wave MEGA flags and go rampaging around America with a gun abusing Biden voters. You should see my trump pencil case! Quick, I need to work out a way to cover up my secret obsession of a political position I care naught about before someone thinks different of me. For what its worth if you actually read my first post correctly you should have guessed that it was a question about electronic counting over Australia's hand counting and whether the video was some form of a correction using the electronic method, error or news mistake. The reason is that recently Australia has been talking about changing to electronic counting so I was curious. No idea why I am writing this as all that's going to come back is your misguided belief that I care about your political drama in the USA. I don't give two hoots who too old for public service your president is.

How am I acting defensive? I have nothing to be defensive about. I wasn't asking why is trump loosing or demanding vote correction etc. It was an unbiased non agenda driven question. I hate it when people respond with the tone you did when a simple question was asked.

You are missing what that video shows. The video clearly shows not just an update to the total votes like you seem to imply but a clear subtraction of votes from Trump in Pennsylvania from when the select that state at the beginning and then at the end. In other words he went from 1,690,589 down to 1,670,631. That isn't a case of Biden gaining an extra 19,958 as that would just mean that Trump would have stayed at 1,690,589 but instead he lost the same counts as Biden gained. As I said I didn't post it to troll or anything was genuinely curious as to what had happened and whether it was a by product of a correction on the counting (like I said we don't use electronic counting so I don't know how it works) or the news station. A simple "oh yeah I see what happened it was a news station error" would have sufficed but instead you talk down in your post to me with arrogance. I am so sorry I didn't sit and watch 3 different news stations that very night to see if it happened on others. I tried to see if someone made a recording of the other stations at that time to counter it and couldn't find one. I asked a genuine question with no bias yet still got hounded which is clearly shown by your tone in your post. Least I learnt not to ask Americans questions lest be scorned. So thank you for the valuable lesson. Thank you Molly for actually answering my query without the negative tone. I thought that may have been the case that it was a news error but as mentioned couldn't find a video for that moment and am unfamiliar as to corrections etc from electronic counting.

Meh, he was in for 4 years and really didn't upset the status quo all that much around the world that I am aware of, at least for Australia he didn't.

I don't really care who wins the election being in Australia however do find it interesting to see all the political vote infighting going on in a country that considers itself a democracy. That said, I have a genuine question that someone here may have an answer for to quell my curiosity. As I understand it votes are counted by an electronic machine in America (of which I assume all these votes are then later hand checked or something for inaccuracy at some stage) and these official counts are then provided to media outlets on the night of the electronic tallying of which they provide live accurate counts. If that is indeed the case, how can the following things happen where an enormous amount of votes switch? Do the votes get calculated by the machines and then immediately after are checked again or something. Just find it odd that these videos show the switching only gives Biden the votes. Is this a downside in electronic counting in that the counting is flawed that it misreads the vote slip? In Australia the majority of votes are counted on the night of the election and I have never seen any time where one party gets a 20k gain whilst the other party loses the 20k. BTW Australia still counts their votes all by hand so I genuinely don't know anything about electronic counting hence the question. As I said genuine question, not a flame/troll etc. EDIT: Of course this could also I suppose be a issue with the news site and not the counting however I did hear of the AG in one states saying 6000 votes were miscounted.

They are making a TEXT based mobile phone client. Not a full mobile client similar to the desktop version to which they should be aiming for.

erm... how long is a long time ago? Empires existed until 1999 and we still have kings and kingdoms.

Not at all, but you seem to also forget that pre mesh everyone had a 'Premium' look. Just because people have made a business in SL at providing bodies doesn't necessarily mean that an upgrade to the system avatar would hinder that. It would be no different to any other competition that other body creators make. As to the rest of your post, I agree to some extent to the earning side of things and that is in essence what my suggestion above regarding the tutorial was. You cant leave noob islands until you have completed your quest in learning how to dress yourself and interact with the viewer. Not old school noob island but all within the viewer through tooltips and experiences etc. Not sure what your quest would be to gain access to adult themed regions considering their very definition is not black and white.

👍

I agree fully especially with regards to the updated system avatar. Sad thing is it will just never happen as Linden Lab just plain out refuse any form of updating the older creation tools to their detriment. Unfortunately for what ever reason they don't see it as a detriment despite it clearly been shown for years to be a major issue. Combine that with many outspoken minority existing members saying no to any possibly positive feature update because they prefer the status quo, old methods or think it will impact on other things and Linden Lab just ignores all the good alternatives. This goes for the inworld prim creation tools as well. Modifying them into a basic mesh system which allows for Booleans would not only help optimise SL content but also keep people (user retention) in world to make items. That kind of inworld mesh system can run in tandem with out of world creation but the naysayer's always win the argument or Lab put in the too hard basket. Think it needs more than that. What little Mesh bodies are available as a starter avatar, all don't even change when editing your shape. That is a huge turnoff to people like in the Vid in the OP who come from any form of game, virtual world, social platform etc that allows such things (90% of people). That leaves them with the default avatar which as heard in the Vid in the OP is looked at as terrible and ugly, hence why many for years have been asking for the system avatar to be updated to a modern mesh.