Parhelion Palou

The comments in the video about number of users and the SL economy was just to show the audience that SL isn't a dead dog. LL's position is that they're making a lot of money from SL. They want to keep making money off of SL for as long as they can. One way to do that is to move the hardware to the cloud. Then they don't have to deal with hardware maintenance or upgrades any more. Assuming their cost drops (especially if they're shutting down empty sims) then that's potentially more profit now, but it also means SL can decline further and still make a profit. They might be down to one employee pushing the weekly roll button (tradition, ya know), but they'd still be making money.

By using 9 and 2 rather than 9.0 and 2.0, you're using integers rather than floats. The system is doing an integer divide of 9/2, which is equal to 4, then casting it to a float: 4.00000 Pretty close to simultaneous with Innula

Some will last awhile. The Galapagos penguin lives on the Galapagos Islands and off of Ecuador's coast. As that area warms up they can move south. Most of the other species of penguins won't be so lucky.

Sansar itself won't have universal avatars. I don't think it's implemented yet, but experience owners will be able to specify what avatars look like within their experience. I''m tempted to create an experience just so I can make everyone be a penguin.

Tara said the data center is using a lot of old hardware. Updating the hardware practically requires a data center rebuild (new racks, new fiber, etc.). Some interesting bits from the talk: - SL is still getting somewhere between 0.75 to 1 million monthly average users. In 2016 the in-world economy generated around 1/2 billion US dollars. - Some parts of SL's system are extremely sensitive to latency. They won't work if you put them in separate racks. So far they haven't had to deal with it, but they'll have to when moving to AWS. - Third party viewers are a problem. This is one I don't get ... the third party viewers are mostly based on LL's viewer code. If the viewer has to change to work with AWS, I'd think that change would become part of the next releases of the third party viewers. One of the NWN comments indicated it could be a security problem with AWS. I thought Sansar's no 3rd party viewer policy was to maintain consistency, although experiences could provide plug-ins to change the look & functionality of the viewer. Perhaps it's something to do with AWS.

SL has long been running multiple sims per server. A full region uses one CPU core. A homestead shares a CPU core with 3 other homesteads. In the old days a quad core server could handle 4 sims. I don't know what LL is using now, but they could be running 16 or more sims on a server. I wonder how on demand sims would work in SL, which was designed for sims to run constantly. Only LL can shut a sim down; a region owner can only restart the sim. How much content is out there that expects the sim to be running constantly?

I'm not sure a sim can safely suspend then start again where it left off. If it has to be shut down then it'll have to do the region start-up process. The person doing the talk, senior systems engineer Tara Hernandez, said that they're still working out when to shut regions down. In the case of a very popular region, she said that if the region becomes empty but is likely to have someone show up in 5 minutes then they wouldn't want to shut the region down because they want to maintain high speed. If it was near instantaneous that wouldn't be a concern.

The New World Notes blog yesterday covered a Linden Lab talk at Amazon's AWS re:invent 2017 conference, in which LL mostly talked about Sansar on the AWS cloud but also covered moving SL to the cloud. LL hopes to have the migration finished next year. I think we now know why LL moved some Sansar developers to SL. They're already familiar with the work needed to run things on AWS so now they get to try it with SL. LL wants to run regions only when someone is on them, though busy regions could be kept running to save start-up time. (per NWN and LL's talk) I believe next year will happen just as much as I believed Ebbe when he said in the summer of 2014 that an alpha version of Sansar would be out by the end of 2014 or early 2015, with a beta in the summer of 2015. If LL has Sansar developers (who are likely new to SL) doing the work, they have no clue how SL works. They're used to experiences which don't interact with anything outside of themselves, so they're fairly easily started or stopped as people enter and leave them. With SL they have to decide how to handle the regions around the region someone is in. Does the person on the region see nothing, then suddenly the region next door appears when someone enters it? What happens with region crossings? I don't see any way that region crossings won't be worse than they are now. Teleports would be slower if you're teleporting to a region that isn't running at the time, and might be slower anyway. How fast can one simulator instance talk to another one in the AWS cloud? The plus side is land could get cheaper since LL won't be paying as much to run it. Other than that, is there anything good for us in the move?

The invisible avatar and pushing sounds like something others have complained about at the various Social Islands. If that's where you've been, the best way to handle the Social Islands is to go to the portal section and go somewhere else as soon as you can. The private help groups have better policed areas and offer much more than can be found on the Social Islands.

LL said that moving SL to the cloud could allow them to offer new/different ways to have land. (Paraphrased) The statement was vague. It's likely to be a few years before they can move SL to the cloud, so I wouldn't worry about it yet.

Sumerian is not what you're thinking of. From the description it's the same as Sansar and Sinespace -- someone creates the experience and others can visit it. The bit that's different is Amazon's build process includes a NPC who will narrate the scene for the user. The sample scene is like looking at a 360 degree photo ... you don't see yourself. The website talks about creating characters (called Hosts), but they're non-player characters. There might not be avatars at all. That makes Sumerian something like Sansar or Sinespace but less so -- no interaction with other people. Everyone sees their own copy of a scene. If that's so, then meh. Sumerian is no danger to SL.

For Sansar LL's target audience is companies or people who want to create an experience. It's the experience owner's job to decide what user audience they want, then create the experience and market to that audience. Sansar isn't a virtual world, it's a platform for creating virtual worlds.

LL released a complete avatar for SL many years ago. They've done the same for Sansar. Sansar is somewhere in the alpha-to-beta stage of development, so the avatar is still being developed. Features are added as they're ready. It would be great if cloth physics could be added to SL, especially if it also worked for home & garden things.

Yes

Linden Lab started out researching haptics ... they wanted to build a gadget that would let people move around in virtual space. They ended up with something they called "The Rig". Linden World (now SL) was created so they'd have a place to test it. I don't remember why they dropped the hardware aspect ... probably because the technology wasn't there to make it viable or because they couldn't get funding. LL's investors liked the collaborative build capabilites of Linden World, so LL went that direction. Philip Linden did think that SL residents might form a type of government -- being in SL in the early days was similar to a group of people finding themselves on a deserted island, so why not? I misspoke in calling the original SL a social experiment. It was an experiment with some social aspects. Nobody knew in 2003 if there would be enough people interested in real-time collaborative creation to make SL profitable. At the time 3D content was created by professionals and user interaction was limited to what was designed into the content. (Like Sansar, except the experience creators don't need to be professionals.) More off-topic than the previous: SL started out as a sandbox. Everything SL is now came from that. LL didn't start out to build a 3D chat room, a roleplay area, sex spaces, educational or commercial areas, art displays, or anything else you can find in SL. They built a starting point. After more than a million people have worked it over, SL is now more things than anybody knows. LL has no way of knowing everything SL is used for. That's one reason SL is so hard to market, or even to describe.

As Tari said, and you were told in another thread, try Movelock. In Firestorm (which you use), the shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+P or Avatar->Movement->Movelock via the menu. Remember to use the same shortcut or menu item to turn Movelock off when you do want to move.

Second Life was created as a social experiment. Philip Linden (I'll stick to SL names) wanted to see what happens when you put a bunch of people in a world and let them do their thing. It didn't go the way he expected, but SL grew. Around 2006 the prognostication companies got wind of virtual worlds (SL was only one of them) and started doing their thing -- hyping virtual worlds. The internet was going to go 3D. We'd all be shopping online by walking through virtual representations of RL stores. People all over the world would hold meetings in virtual space, saving millions in travel costs. Linden Lab wasn't immune to the hype, and companies weren't either. They got into SL whether LL pushed it or not. MacArthur Foundation started studying virtual worlds (and had several regions in SL). The hype wave hit the rocks and collapsed, just as has happened since with 3D TV and will happen with virtual reality displays. M Linden was the one who really tried to push SL to corporations, but by then corporations had already decided against virtual worlds. M's time with LL was when things really went downhill. LL got rid of staff, including many who were good for SL. Things have been improving since M's time; at least LL is listening to us again. They're actively working on improvements and spending a lot of time fixing underlying problems that have been festering for years. @Penny Patton: What features has the userbase begged for? Most of the userbase barely knows LL exists. They don't read the blogs or these forums and certainly don't know about Jira. To be generous, I'll guess that 0.5% of the userbase deals with LL outside of buying/selling Lindens and paying tier. Some of them request new features, but that 0.5% represents a lot of different factions that want different things. LL isn't a big company; only a few requests can be satisfied. I suspect the only feature the userbase in general wants is no lag (and free land).

Interesting ... what planet is that on? Not this one.

@Rakis Heron : You can read about LSL here: LSL Portal However, if you insist that SL uses Java, then please create a class named Car, add methods for Start, Stop, Turn Left, Turn Right, etc., create an object of that type, and get it to compile. LSL is roughly based on C. Java looks somewhat like C, but that doesn't make LSL Java.

Mesh bodies, hair, hands, feet, heads, clothing - just like a mesh table or anything else - are objects. It might be possible to figure out what is what in order to draw them first, but it would be messy and very fragile. (Broken more often than the feeds.) Best to alpha out anything on the body that you don't want showing.

You submitted ARs for what you saw, right? LL can't do anything if nobody tells them about it. How many people who are into SL combat are wanna-be serial killers or terrorists? Better to get rid of SL combat completely than allow people like that to be in SL. That sort of thinking is a great way to reduce SL to nothing. If you see something that's against the TOS then AR it. If it's something you don't like but it's within the TOS, stay away from it.

In reference to the thread title: "emote classes...helping the the antisocial be social" Why push the antisocial to be social? Perhaps we like being antisocial. Bah! Humbug! In my opinion, emoting is best served in small doses. Something like "/me sets Maddy on fire" is fine, but a long sentence is too much.

My response was to greek Wingtips' statement that it was stupid of LL to allow people to create incompatible mesh avatars. LL doesn't allow or disallow anything as long as it's within the TOS. His idea of a LL-provided generic mesh avatar that others could modify wouldn't have kept the market from expanding into a lot of incompatible avatars anyway. The range of shapes people want is too large for a single mesh avatar to handle. I think Penny's idea of an additional base avatar has merit, though it would fracture the clothing market even more. I'd love to see LL at least give an easy option to switch from the standard top-down camera to one that's set up better. I'm not sure what you're getting at with professional content creators. It sounds like you want LL to either hire or somehow support a group of professionals who would report back to LL on how SL is working in terms of content creation. I suspect they're already getting some of that from the user meetings they have on various topics.

You keep missing the point. LL doesn't tell creators what they can and cannot create as long as it doesn't violate the Terms of Service. It's free enterprise (mostly). If LL introduced their own mesh avatars (hopefully better than the abysmal starter ones from a few years ago) there's no guarantee that people would use them, at least not until enough content was created (by residents) for them. If LL didn't provide the tools to use to create clothing, makeup, tattoos, etc. then their mesh avatar would fail. LL didn't double the land impact, except in one small case. Mainland regions went from 15,000 to 22,500. Estate regions went to 20,000 but estate owners can pay an extra $30 per month to raise the limit to 30,000. That's the one case where the land impact doubled.