Parhelion Palou

Callum Meriman wrote: They are the ruins from fanatik. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Fanatik-Architecture-RUINS-Summer-ultimate-mesh-ruin-building-prefab/6604821 For something so prevelant in SL I am shocked the forum warriors are giving you such a hard time. These things are everywhere and most people whould know them by sight. I agree that the Fanatik building set could be used to build the rock portion of the build in the picture. Components in the set match up with parts of that build. I don't agree that most people would know them by sight. That might be true for people who build using that sort of set, but most people just look at the build as it is and don't check to see who made the components.

tako Absent wrote: "First... your biggest mistake in the OP was referring to SL as a 'game'. I'm surprised no one has berated you for that, yet. Which would be unfortunate because it would call attention away from the true question you are asking." Stop being a hypocrite. Secondlife is a game. I am tired of this sl-is-not-a-game defense or justification of your computer 3d gaem actvity. Inside sl you play with your avatar , you play with the objects if you are building, you play with the script if you are a coder and you share or sell your creation to others for them to enjoy and play with it. SL IS A GAME AND THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. Everything you described can be a RL activity, so RL must be a game as well. The stakes are higher though.

Do you use CasperVend? Someone just said in the CasperTech group that her vendor was giving out free items randomly and gave the wrong items when people bought something. Unfortunately nobody on at the time had a solution.

Check out New Citizens Incorporated (NCI), Caledon Oxbridge, and Helping Haven for a start. At least the first two along with Builders Brewery offer classes in building, scripting, and many other things.

The open beta will be available to anyone. It should start somewhere between 2 to 120 months from now. It won't be very interesting though ... until people have created experiences and the marketplace gets filled out there won't be much to do unless you're a mesh creator.

I doubt you'd be banned, unless you were the owner of the pictures. It's possible the region NCI is on was restarted -- when that happens everyone is kicked off. Nobody is hacking SL to put out those pictures. It's easy enough to put pictures in a particle generator. Griefers do it to attack NCI because that's where lots of newbies are. If you want it fixed, file an abuse report. It's under Help in the viewer menu. Linden Lab will get to it. New Citizens has nothing to do with the pictures. They're just the target of them. By the way, Linden Lab employees don't read these forums. If you want their attention for this an abuse report is the only way.

LL said they would have viewers for mobile devices, but what you could see on those viewers would necessarily be a subset of what you could see on a desktop viewer. That statement doesn't mean they're planning on optimizing anything for mobile, however the fact that there is optimization to get the 90 fps should improve things for everyone. I didn't say Sansar could or should do all the things that SL can do. I'm selfish ... I want to know if it can do the things *I* need to do in SL, or enough to do the job & perhaps add something cool. I'll check it out in open beta and see.

Vivienne Schell wrote: Avatar complexity and basic 3D structures can most probably be optimised for a mobile compatible level by professional content design, without losing too much eye candy. Obviously LL works on exactly that by developing plug-ins for Maya and other widely adopted, standard pro 3D design applications. It´s targeted at professional content creators wo know what they are developing for: An online multiplayer environment and not a desktop app using unlmited resources. That´s a wise decision, but if the upcoming "experience market" really will change the SL-ignoring minds of the pro studios and freelancers to cooperate with Linden Lab no one can tell. If it does change their minds it should not be a problem to provide the "experience" market with adequate products quickly, and if not, then it will take longer because the skilled dilettants will need some time to get things right. We´ll see. What´s left to deal with are shaders and all the visual and functional bells and whistles, where a modular structure (from "low" experience to "ultra" goggle-experience and a wide range of pre-defined, easy to apply functionality scripts could do the job perfectly. There are many opportunities to make Sansar a working and successful platform, once one stops with comparing it to Second Life and crying for a larger Second Life update instead of thinking big. LL's stated target use is VR goggles, specifically the Rift and the Vive. They want to ride the VR hype wave and hopefully make lots of money/get big. Their graphics engine is designed to get the 90 fps that those goggles want, not to optimize anything for a smartphone. LL has been courting professional studios and developers because they'll need experiences in the marketplace to sell to companies and people to create custom experience for those companies. It's all about the VR goggle market; if it works for anything else that's a side benefit. I do believe that if Sansar is to survive LL will have to broaden their focus, but what we're getting for the initial cut of Sansar *is* something targeted at a desktop with significant resources. That's what Rift & Vive need to operate. Fortunately Sansar should work well enough for any computer that can run SL as long as they're not using goggles. Most people here aren't crying for a larger SL update. We're trying to figure out whether Sansar can do the things we do. If not then there's no reason to waste time on it.

Phil Deakins wrote: Kate Amdahl wrote: Theresa, I think your examples do a great job of answering the question Phil brought up, even down to the first thing someone might want to do in Second Life (though someone should tell that guy he needs to learn to walk before he tries to run!). Phil, I agree that if all you want to do is walk around and talk to people in whatever places you happen to stumble on, using a default avatar, that it's not hard to learn how to do those things. I just don't think people are satisfied with just those things for very long, though. Not for very long, no, although moving, talking and TPing are all that is necessary to explore, go to events, etc. for a long time. And that's not a "steep learning curve". For instance, when I first wanted to go to a place, I asked how to do it, and TPing from the map was explained. That was at the beginning and, with it, I was able to explore to my heart's content. Then when I wanted to do other things, I asked. Over a relatively short space of time, I picked up all that I needed to make the most of SL for me. It wasn't a steep learning curve at all. It was a gentle slope, learning what I needed when I needed it. Second Life seems to me to be set up for people who are willing and able to use very technical interfaces to do very not-technical things. Calling something an "alpha" makes perfect sense if you're creating textures, but next to no sense if you're just trying to use them. The other day, here in the forum, someone asked how to make glitch pants. She didn't need to know that all the time she'd been in SL, but it came up for her, so she asked. That's similar to wearing an alpha layer. Alphas layers aren't needed at all in SL, until such times as the person has got used to using SL and buys some clothing that needs it. That's when they learn it - as and when it's needed. Bit by bit. Nothing steep about it. There's no easy way to identify things that are incompatible or incomplete. Doing human things like dancing and kissing and shaking hands and putting on clothes requires a bunch of extra knowledge. Bit by bit, as and when it's needed. Not steep at all. It's only steep if a person wnats to know everything in the first day or two. SL does not have a steep learning curve - imo. (Highlighted in red) Newbies get to learn about alphas the first day they're in SL. All of the starter avatars use alphas. Check the Social Islands or places like NCI -- changing appearance is one of the first things new residents do. If they chose one of the mesh starter avatars they'll try to use clothing from other starter avatars and get what looks like two avatars merged together. Some pick up freebie clothing (generally system clothes) but don't know to get rid of the alpha layer(s) used by the starter avatar so their body disappears. Less than two hours in SL and they've fallen into the rabbit hole. Then someone tells the poor newbie that they'll never be acceptable in SL society unless they have the latest mesh avatar and the fun really begins.

wherorangi wrote: Parhelion Palou wrote: I've been wondering how Sansar will handle vehicles (as shown in an early video) given the optimization requirement. If you wanted to have a vehicle available but not present in-world (you click on something to mount/rez it), does that vehicle have to be part of the content that is optimized off-line for that particular world? If someone could bring in content from elsewhere and mount it, the optimization for the world might be degraded even if the new content is optimized. One vehicle may be fine for the experience, but thirty vehicles might be too many. So far I've been assuming that anything that can be rezzed/mounted in the world is already part of that world this leads into how avatars are outfitted like if the experience is optimized out of line, then how are avatar outfits optimized for a particular experience, given that we (avatars) arent a property of the experience owner which then leads to where would we be able to change outfits if they were bake optimized. Like would we have to go home to change and bake, or can we change and bake in somebody elses experience ? I hadn't thought about the avatars. I haven't read much from LL about avatars in Sansar either. Perhaps the avatars (not the people behind them) will be the property of the experience owner. Say a large breakfast food company wants to put up a VR goggle experience for the children who eat the company's sugar bombs. They would never accept just any avatar into their experience. They'd have a selection of safe-for-children avatars that you'd pick from when you registered for their experience. You could use your identity across experiences, but not necessarily your appearance. In cases where the experience owner doesn't restrict avatar appearance, Sansar's instancing capability could handle the problem of a highly complex avatar. The system detects that the avatar is dragging down the framerate so it spins up another instance of the experience and puts the avatar in it. There'd be complaints from said avatar that Sansar is keeping everyone from seeing their glorious appearance, but I've heard that's been happening in SL too. As for changing outfits, etc. -- I'm more clueless than usual. That question can go in the bucket with things like: What will the chat system look like? Will it be possible to send messages across experiences? (If so it had better be possible to block the capability or the cereal company will be furious about the things their customers are reading.) Will there be groups? What sort of new and interesting things can be done with the new scripting system? I figure I'll find out in just a few (or several) months.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Parhelion Palou wrote: The vehicle was just one possibility ... the bigger issue is whether it will be possible for a user to add *anything* to an experience. If everything that can be in the experience has to be part of the experience's content when optimized off-line, then a renter couldn't decorate a house with their own things. I was using rez/mount because we rez things in SL but apparently in Sansar we'll mount them. Region crossings aren't an issue in Sansar because there aren't any regions. Everything I've heard has been pretty clear that you'll be able to add new things like furniture, plants, etc. to your experience in world, only they won't show up to anyone else until the experience is "baked." As far as renting, it shouldn't be necessary. For instance, there could be a public area and then a variety of separate experiences linked to it. The ability to link your house to the surrounding land might have to be paid for but it wouldn't be "someone else's land" you're building on. It should be possible for someone to have complete control over their house and have it in the middle of "land" owned by someone else that they could interact with but not change. It would be similar to how The Sims 4 sets up neighborhoods. Here's a simple example - a developer builds a city neighborhood with parks, stores, events, etc. They also build some multi-story apartment buildings. If a visitor likes the city, they could buy an "apartment" - actually a separate experience. The "tenant" would step into an "elevator" in the building in the main city and step out into their own separate place which they have complete control over. When the tenant wants to experience the city they just step back into the elevator. A "five story brownstone" could have a thousand apartments like this linked to it and the city owner wouldn't have any expenses related to them and they wouldn't use any of the "city's" resources. A nominal "rent" for connection rights would be all the city owner would need to turn a profit on the apartments as time went on. Meanwhile, since the apartments are small experiences for few people, the tenants and the Lab would have very low recurring expenses for the apartments themselves. If there was a disagreement between the "city" owner and the tenant the city owner could ban the resident from the "city" but the banned resident could still be able to keep the "apartment." Yes, you can edit your own experience, and Ebbe spoke about using a separate experience for the interior of an apartment or building. The door would load the experience so you show up inside. It's pretty much the same as having the door teleport you to a skybox and just as unsatisfactory. I haven't seen anything indicating whether you'll be able to see from one experience into another. Since doing so could affect the framerate in an unpredictable manner, my guess is LL won't do it. So now you're in a building ... and you can't see the exterior through the windows. In the case of a house you'd be able to edit the interior but not the exterior, or you could put the entire house in your own experience and the community would be roads with a lot of portals into people's experiences. As I said earlier, why bother to connect your experience to any other in that case? Get your own experience and landscape it as you like. You could still go to the community experience when you wished. That's not a good setup for a land baron, which was what I was referring to previously. Sansar's model doesn't work well at all for communities like Nonprofit Commons. We have two regions with parcels controlled by various nonprofits. The structures tend to be open so people walking or flying by can see in, so having each be its own experience wouldn't work. Each tenant would have to give the administrators an idea what they want their office to look like, then one of us would build it ... then they'd ask for changes, we'd make them, etc. Very inefficient.

The vehicle was just one possibility ... the bigger issue is whether it will be possible for a user to add *anything* to an experience. If everything that can be in the experience has to be part of the experience's content when optimized off-line, then a renter couldn't decorate a house with their own things. I was using rez/mount because we rez things in SL but apparently in Sansar we'll mount them. Region crossings aren't an issue in Sansar because there aren't any regions.

wherorangi wrote: Parhelion Palou wrote: land barons Disclaimer: I'm basing this on what I've read from LL, meaning Ebbe. CEOs tend to over-promise and get details horribly wrong. I wish there was more information from the developers themselves, but at least we should get a chance to find out for ourselves within the next 6 months. yes he (Ebbe) has said a number of contradictory things which even with the help of tea leaves and rune sticks, is pretty hard to work out what it is he is projecting like you right about what we hear about how experiences are created. He (Ebbe) says stuff like we cant create stuff in the runtime, and then he says stuff like: we will be able to mount stuff in the runtime if we can mount stuff then we half way to SL-like parcels. Half way meaning in the same way that SL mesh objects can be mounted in the runtime yet not created in the viewer + for land barons the zillion dollar question is that if we can mount stuff. then will it also be possible to partition a experience space ? If so then am pretty sure the barons be into this like be able to build continents, cities, space stations, etc and then partition it and tenants be able to mount their stuff in the rented partitions + if we cant mount in the runtime. and we cant partition our own runtimes then I dont get what the attraction of Sansar would be at all, other than playing games, hanging out at canned clubs and events, etc. which I can do elsewhere anyways I've been wondering how Sansar will handle vehicles (as shown in an early video) given the optimization requirement. If you wanted to have a vehicle available but not present in-world (you click on something to mount/rez it), does that vehicle have to be part of the content that is optimized off-line for that particular world? If someone could bring in content from elsewhere and mount it, the optimization for the world might be degraded even if the new content is optimized. One vehicle may be fine for the experience, but thirty vehicles might be too many. So far I've been assuming that anything that can be rezzed/mounted in the world is already part of that world. If that's the case there's nothing in Sansar for the land barons. I believe LL's vision for Sansar was truly all about VR goggles. That it could be used without them was just a bonus. They're hoping companies who want to get in on the VR goggle bandwagon will use Sansar as an easy way to create an experience, either by buying one from the Marketplace & hiring someone to plaster the company's name all over it or by hiring a group to build a custom one. Those experiences will be walled gardens -- only accessible via the company's website, and primarily used for advertising. That's LL's target market, and rightly so. A company could drop $10K on a Sansar ad campaign without a second thought. How many of us could do that? I expect the VR goggle hype wave to pass fairly quickly (a couple of years max), so where will Sansar be then?

wherorangi wrote: ChinRey wrote: The business related factors are more than enough reason why it's unlikely there'll ever be a "Second Life within Sansar" anyway. You'd have to be clinically insane to try to create something like that on a platform you don't control yourself. no more crazy than the Chung lands empire is, or any other of the big SL estates. Like Red Hearts or USS etc Sansar doesn't seem like the place for land barons because there are no regions or parcels in an experience and changing the experience is an off-line activity. You edit it, the experience's content is run through an optimizer (Penny will be happy about that), then it's published. Once it's published people in the experience can see it. Say you make a region-sized experience, mark off sections, then rent those sections out. The land baron (experience owner) would have to give editing permissions to each tenant, who might then be able to change *anything* in that experience. That would be too dangerous. The land baron could set up residential or commercial experiences and rent them out, but potential customers could just get an experience from LL then buy an experience from the Marketplace to load into their experience. (Yeah, I'm making fun of LL for calling the worlds 'experiences' then saying they want creators to build experiences that would be sold on the Marketplace. One is the simulator, the other is the content.) The off-line editing is what's killed my interest in Sansar. No sandboxes, no builds done by several people working together, and having a community where people could both see each other and decorate their own spaces might not be feasible. Disclaimer: I'm basing this on what I've read from LL, meaning Ebbe. CEOs tend to over-promise and get details horribly wrong. I wish there was more information from the developers themselves, but at least we should get a chance to find out for ourselves within the next 6 months. ETA: Removed an extraneous word.

Bitsy Buccaneer wrote: My read on the situation is that Sansar is (at present) more about limited, controlled experiences. That makes sense because it reduces the glorious chaos and cacophany of textures and objects that is SL. As tech improves, the need for that degree of optimisation will decrease. Eventually (and perhaps much sooner than us commoners might think), everything will advance enough that an open-ended SL style environment is manageable. So I think Sansar is where LL is learning how to build their end of it. If that's the case, they would want SL to continue until it can be more or less merged or VR elements added into the SL viewer. (I'm sure I've gotten some of the wording wrong because I'm not a tech expert, so please read for the big picture and ideas not specifics.) Sansar won't turn into a big open world. That's not what it's meant to be. As Ebbe said, LL wants to be the Wordpress of virtual worlds. They want to provide the infrastructure that companies (or individuals) can use to create their own virtual worlds. Those customers are unlikely to want to have their worlds mashed together. Think Google, Microsoft, and Facebook would like to have their websites merged into a single one? BTW, Ebbe once expected the world/experience owners to provide their own registration systems. I don't know if it's still the expectation, but I can see why a company would want to do its own registration. World/experience owners will advertise their own worlds on their own websites. LL may provide a directory, but with Sansar they're getting out of the business of dealing with the end user.

Vivienne Schell wrote: Amchai wrote: Thanks for the responses ... for one, my rig is definitely VR ready for Sansar Mine too. But what about these 700 dollars for that funny goggle and about the 99 percent majority of stone aged, anti-progress, reactionary, stupid and not yet born ignorant creeps who refuse to buy the 980 GTX hi-end rig which is considered to be minimum requirement for the overwhelmingly stunning next generation VR experience? Haven't heard about the 10-series NVidia cards yet? A 1070 is superior to the 980GTX at less than half the price. Even the 1060 (mid-$200 range) can handle the Rift & Vive, though I'd use the 1070 if I ever wanted to buy VR goggles.

Clariel Rishmal wrote: Think of how amazing it would be to fly between one island and another. No more teleportation hell. Think of all you could see, all you could explore, if we could seamlessly fly from the mainland to the island areas. A virtual world isn't really a world when each island is isolated and separate from the others. Tech limitations in 2009 or whatever dictated this sad fact, but now SL should liberate itself from this anchor around its neck. I believe freedom to fly over the ocean between islands would revolutionize this whole experience. Come on LL, please consider this. How is a mass of thousands of isolated specks that you have to teleport between a "virtual world"? Sounds more like virtual fragments. Discuss this all you wish, but there are no Lindens here so nothing will come of your idea. You can submit a suggestion to Linden Lab here: https://support.secondlife.com/suggestions/

I suggest you add some zeroes after the L$50 if you want anyone to take your offer. What you're offering now is about 20 cents U.S.

Sansar exists because LL wants to provide virtual worlds (they're calling them experiences) to companies/groups/individuals who want to build something to attract people who have VR goggles. Note that Sansar is not a virtual world; it's a hosting service for worlds/experiences. I haven't seen anything so far to indicate LL plans to use Sansar to create an experience of their own (other than as a demonstration for potential customers). Fortunately you don't have to use VR goggles to use Sansar. The computer requirements to use Sansar sans goggles should be lower than SL's requirements because Sansar content (everything in an experience/world) will be optimized before end users can see it.

Check out Virtual Ability - Disability Support and Community in-world. They'll be a good resource for you.

The Bento project viewer can be used on the main grid. The server side of Bento is there already. ETA: LL blog post about it

If the money shows in your US Dollar balance, you can use Instant Buy to buy the Lindens. LL will take the money from your US Dollar balance. Once the balance hits zero then your usual payment method will be used.

You might mean Nany Kayo ... her nonprofit organization Virtual Native Lands had a group of regions. Unfortunately she hasn't been in-world in over 3 years.

Rai Fargis wrote: Thanks for the reply, but I think this is an extremely poor decision by Linden Lab. A decision that throws a bad light on your company. Linden Lab advertised Second Life as VR compatible for years, published a category for VR on the destination guide and released a Project Viewer (3.7) that worked very well with the Rift Dev Kit 2. The broken update for CV1 was disapointing, especially for people who had invested into VR equipment to use it with the new viewer and waited for its release since 2014. VR headsets can work well with Second Life, we saw that with the Project Oculus Viewer 3.7 and the DK2. Using a computer with modern specs, SL could be able to deliver a decent VR experience on the consumer version Rift. If Linden Lab is now giving up on VR for SL, you are breaking your promise to make this work, and everything Linden Lab did to talk this up since 2013 turns out as false advertising. Please at least publish the code for the VR viewer so the community can take over. Part of LL's comments about dropping the Project Oculus Viewer included: " due to some inherent limitations with SL, it may well not be possible to achieve the performance needed for a good VR experience". The consumer release of the Rift wants 90 frames per second (mostly to avoid queasiness, I think). The simulators in SL do 45 frames per second max and potentially much less on a crowded or graphically busy region. The viewer can claim to be doing more, but at most they're interpolating between frames or just looking at the same simulator frames multiple times. LL created Sansar because with a new graphics engine (and a required optimization step before edits can be published to an experience) they can get the framerate the VR gadgets want. As for false advertising, in 2013 LL (and probably Oculus) very likely had no idea the framerate would need to be so high.

The OP's post is over 2 years old. Sansar (what you're inaccurately calling SL 2) is now around 6 months away from public beta. It's far too late to change anything to do with SL compatibility, and doing so wouldn't make sense anyway. Sansar is purely mesh with a new design for the avatars (which we know little about) and a different system for scripting. Sansar is a system for renting out virtual worlds to individuals and companies, not a new LL world. No mainland, regions, parcels, etc. Mesh houses/non-worn items could likely be imported into Sansar to be sold on the new Marketplace. Prims and sculpties don't exist in Sansar. The new avatars may be so unlike the current ones that nothing could be done to import SL content -- I haven't heard anything about it. There are many other threads about Sansar in this forum. Check 'em out.