Extrude Ragu

Eh, using paying customers as guinea pigs is sadly nothing new, just look at all the 'Early access' games. Unfortunately people do buy them, and so that's the situation we have.

If SecondLife had a content review system I would not have ever created in SecondLife or own my region today. As a creator this is a big no-no, and is actually the reason I rejected a more technically advanced virtual world in the past (Sinespace) The things that generally cause lag are known and measurable. Triangle counts, Texture Memory (VRAM) and Draw calls. Might all sound like jibberish to average joe, but all creators worth their salt know what these are. Most creators simply do not optimize not out of ignorance of optimisation, but because it takes them more time. It adds extra steps to their workflows, and sad to say it but a lot of creators are just here to get as much money as they can out of the platform, and cutting corners gives them a competitive advantage over other store owners because they can provide more content which grows their brand and attracts more customers who don't know better. The simple solution to this, and the one that will also be deeply unpopular is to start imposing lag limits on avatars. Avatars are the worst offenders because unlike rezzed items which have the land impact limits, attached items have no lag limits at all. We need VRAM limits, triangle limits, draw call limits. There is no financial incentive for LL to do this directly and will be deeply unpopular the moment they realize they can't put on their laggy mess of an avatar. LL will probably never be brave enough to impose these limits on SecondLife. HOWEVER there *is* financial incentive for region owners to impose lag limits. A few laggy guests can spook off other visitors because they will perceive the region to lag. So give region owners the tools to impose these limits and many will. Let the region owners take the blame. Once such limits are imposed on avatars, customers will inevitably start demanding less laggy things from creators so that they can wear all the stuff they want to wear - This will be how we finally start reigning in some of the stuff that really takes the cake.

Because SecondLife residents are not game developers, and have no financial incentive to optimize the items they create in-world. The truth is, SecondLife is actually a lot faster than a lot of game engines, because SecondLife's engine has to cope with all of the user generated content. But users don't tend to care about performance or even know how to spot an unoptimised object so they will just rez and rez and rez unoptimised junk until it's barely tolerable. In my own region, I create all my own content and use optimization techniques. SecondLife in a well developed region runs at 120+fps on mid-tier hardware. Users are keen to blame the viewers, but the truth is the viewers are doing a herculean effort rendering the junk users tend to upload, it's actually the users habits that need to change, and the only way that's going to happen is when creators who sell to the wider SecondLife audience have a strong financial incentive to optimize their content. Good luck making that happen, because guess what making people put more effort into making money is never going to be popular.

I specifically avoided buying a parcel that was a few meters over 512 because of the tier system. Get rid of this and people will stop abandoning those tiny pieces of land

Death by snu snu

Hey if you're going through and updating the houses, could you be a darling and set the click action to 'none' for everything that isn't a door, window or control panel? Right now, every part of the linden homes is demanding to be clicked with that grabby cursor and hover tips for clickable items, there's nowhere for our poor cursors to rest

Sim crossings. Yes I know it's not practical to simulate the entirety of SL on one computer. But we could make simulators like 10x bigger so we didn't have to cross them so much. Computer processing power has moved on since SL's inception 20 years ago

I do attend meetings from time to time on an alt. The impression I have is that on the whole LL wants to improve itself, but LL's work on SL is very departmentalized and often even given to third party contractors like Product Engine etc. The result is that whilst yes SL gets improvements, SecondLife as an experience is not cohesive. Attend meetings and depending on which meeting one team will ask you questions such as "How can we improve the marketplace?" "How can we improve Caspervend?". Another team will ask you "How can we improve the simulator and scripting?" and another team will ask you "How can we improve the viewer?". The truth is the most meaningful changes you can make to SecondLife are ones that treat SecondLife as one big experience, rather than a set of different components. Lets imagine we are designing a new social game, and want to design a shopping experience. If we were doing it from scratch, we would probably imagine that there is some UI on the screen in the game next to our character, where we can scroll through a list of pictures of shoes or whatever we're shopping for. We click one and it just appears on our avatar. We click another, click click click, oooh I like that one.. BUY. This takes about 20 seconds for the user to demo ten products and find one they like. This is a 'designed' shopping experience. Now compare that to the SL marketplace. You simply can't have that experience. Even demoing one pair of shoes is an experience that can be measured in minutes. You've probably logged into the game a second time just to visit the marketplace, not all products have demo's, and the ones that do each have a different unpacking system. You've probably realized you can't rez where you're standing and had to teleport away from your social group. All but the most determined customers are going to be willing to demo ten products in SecondLife. This is a 'not designed' experience, it's a combination of properties LL has brought over the year and maintained (Caspervend, XStreet) - It is not the result of big picture thinking but rather users trying to make something - Anything - work in the games existing limitations, and then LL buying it out for a lack of better solution themselves. Delivering such a 'designed' cohesive shopping experience that is so fast and easy for the user would require modifications to the viewer, simulator, and marketplace all at once and really needs one team of people acting as jack of all trades to get this done. I personally think SL's biggest weakness is that SL simply can't deliver a designed cohesive SecondLife experience. Trying to get 4 different teams who are free to work on whatever they want to collaborate on a single 'big picture' project like this and deliver it in a cohesive for customer and timely manner is simply not possible. Feel free to prove me wrong. I'm not saying that LL aren't talented, they deliver plenty of quality improvements to each of their products, but they are just that, separate products, and not a cohesive experience.

To be honest sniping land intended for someone else I see being best described as a form of theft. People tend to hide behind the argument that since the system allows them to do something, they can do it. But this does not hold water to me. The system allows you to grief people and say all kinds of nasty things in voice chat, nothing stops you, but does that make it OK? No. If I was lending my bicycle to a friend and left it unlocked for a minute for my friend to take, and a thief came along and took the bike, that would not be OK. I did not consent to that transaction. It is theft. Sure, I could have protected my bike better, but it is still theft and it is not OK. In much the same way, using a bot to instantly find out vulnerable land faster than any human could, and take it from a non consenting user who intended to give it to someone else is theft. Plain and simple. It was not intended for you. It was not yours to take. You simply took advantage of a vulnerable situation and the users lack of technical knowledge.

Because one of the primary reasons people come to SL is to do things they'd never feel comfortable doing in RL. I'm more surprised by the people that come to SL and try to be as normal as possible, makes me wonder just how freaky they must be in real life that normality is their fantasy

The patterns as you call them are not 'patterns' at all. Bark - The darkness 'pattern' you see is the crevaces between the individual flakes of bark. This would be where your normal map and ambient occlusion would come in. Same for linen and nylon, you're looking at individual threads of fabric interwoven which have tiny creases and crevaces, this would all be shaded with your normal map and ambient occlusion. Most PBR materials you can download from websites already come with such maps, it's not work you'd have to do yourself typically unless you were designing a material from scratch.

I agree with the sentiment that it's better to teleport the user back to the inviter rather than out of the region. There is a problem with llEjectFromLand however in that they will be ejected to the same altitude as they were in the main region. Meaning that unless your region is flat and doesn't use skyboxes, your guest has a high chance to end up being sent on a long fall or getting trapped somewhere unintentionally, which is why I personally went with llTeleportAgentHome. I did in the past request llSendToTelehub, to improve this situation as I don't like having guests that just entered the region be immediately teleported back out, but alas it never happened.

Interestingly on my exploration I have come across places where bots are marked as scripted correctly, I even found a place where there's a whole group of like 12 of them all marked correctly. Although I suppose it's possible that LL themselves might have manually marked them

Linden Lab largely depends on real users staying around on SecondLife and continually playing the game for revenue, as users who stick around invest themselves more and shop. A large portion (but not all) users come to SecondLife seeking social experiences. Those users primarily use the destination guide, the world map and the mini map to find places with people to talk to. If a user keeps going to places that the game tells them there are people to talk to, and then finding that there are not people to talk to - The user is exponentially more likely to give up on the game with each failed attempt to find people to socialize with. If this happens, this is the loss of a lifetime of revenue for Linden Lab - A disaster. LL very much should care IMO.

Out of curiosity I visited this sim and used my script to check if they are correctly registered as scripted agents - They're not. With that said, one of the bots did walk down the catwalk to me and started introducing me to the shop, so I suppose at least they're not just purely there to drive up traffic numbers

It would be interesting to see how many bots on the grid are correctly identifying themselves as Scripted Agents. Here's a quick script that checks for scripted agents in the region, and tells you how many there are and lists them off to you. Just put it in a prim and click it:- default { touch_start(integer total_number) { list agents_in_region = llGetAgentList(AGENT_LIST_REGION, []); integer i = 0; integer len = llGetListLength(agents_in_region); list scripted_agents = []; while (i < len) { key agent_in_region = llList2Key(agents_in_region, i); if (llGetAgentInfo(agent_in_region) & AGENT_AUTOMATED) { scripted_agents += agent_in_region; } ++i; } integer num_automated = llGetListLength(scripted_agents); string strOut = "Of " + (string)len + " agents in the region, The following " + (string)num_automated + " agents are automated:"; i = 0; while (i < num_automated) { key scripted_agent = llList2Key(scripted_agents, i); strOut += "\n > secondlife:///app/agent/" + (string)scripted_agent + "/about"; ++i; } llInstantMessage(llGetOwner(), strOut); } }

In my own region as part of the Experience, I implemented a custom mini map HUD, which shows players nearby as green dots, and NPC's as grey dots. Below the map, I show a count of real players on the region to give you an idea of how many actual people there are around. Clicking it gives you a list of profile links, as a quick way to IM real people on the region. Perhaps a green dot-grey dot system on the SL minimap would be a good addition to SL itself.

I am someone who operates some scripted agents in-world. 1 is scripted as a clothes display in my store at AMH. People can select an outfit and it will change into that outfit so the customer can see what the clothes look like before they buy it. A couple are scripted agents that act as NPC's in my anime roleplay sim. They are scripted to walk around using path finding, with complex behaviour based on time of day, who is nearby, personal needs etc. They interact with the environment, and I use a self hosted language model on my personal computer that allows them to talk to guests, each with their own personality and lore. I put countless hours of work into those NPC's and making them fun to play with and guests are often playing with them together. I personally beleive scripted agents are not necessarily evil and do have legitimate purpose that can be helpful in SecondLife - It's not the tool it's how you use it. With that said, Do I think they should be excluded from the world map? Actually, it might surprise you as a bot operator, my answer is Yes, they should be excluded from the world map! Why do I think this? Well, as a sim owner, running my NPC's come with a downside - Some people do come to my sim thinking there is activity at hours when there is not. I don't like this because it might make my guests think I am dishonest or trying to mislead them into visiting - I'm not. I want my guests to always have a good experience when visiting my sim, because it gets people to come back. I actually made a jira precisely because of this problem not too long ago. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234612 The topic has also been discussed on the internal sl discord so it's certainly on people's mind. Nobody is complaining that 99% of the human characters in GTA online are not real people, and the reason for that is the game does not present them to you as real people. People don't mind NPC's, and a lot of game worlds would feel very empty without them. The key is that they are not presented to us as real people. SL does need to differentiate scripted agent and real human to users. We do also need to clean up the less than savory bot operators that really are just using them to game traffic, that just plain sucks

In my own sim I made a tiny parcel in the corner of the region just big enough for an avatar or two to stand in and put the sim rules/experience inviter there. Once that tiny parcel detects the experience is enabled teleports the user to the main parcel. Then in the main parcel I have a script which simply loops through agents in the parcel and checks llAgentInExperience once a few seconds and then llTeleportAgentHome people who aren't - This is just to catch friends teleporting friends thus bypassing the main spawn point.

My understanding is PBR viewer has a 'legacy mode' where it emulates legacy behaviour, this occurs on old sky settings that were made before the new reflection probe ambience slider in sky settings:- When this is set to 0.00 (default on old skies) then the viewer attempts to emulate appearance of old behaviour best it can (But will never be quite the same, because PBR is in the end of the day a different method of shading). Full PBR (Probe Ambience > 1.0) brings the ability to have true darkness (like, actual pitch black) where there's no lighting which is obviously not compatible in legacy content where there is ambient lighting even at midnight, my guess is the 'legacy mode' being seen in the screenshots is probably preventing things getting shaded too dark to avoid breaking legacy content - some sort of compromise. Whether it can be improved? Maybe, hopefully even. At the same time I hope that people don't lose their mind and make sure that any changes they ask of LL for the sake of legacy content aren't ones that ultimately break PBR going forward. We should avoid compromising the future of SecondLife content for content that is long past its prime.

Why did OP mention they are Turkish twice, are they implying there is some significance to this 🤔

Now that I've got that out of my system, Personally I think that at minimum all LL-owned destinations should have a media signboard which shows https://secondlife.com/destinations The viewer should also have this web page on a button available to new users and feature somewhere prominent by default on new viewer installations to help them find it. The existing destination floater built into viewers is very limited in comparison to the full guide and most users don't even know of the full guides existence let alone which URL to access it on. --------------------------------- As for the tram idea, I think it could be used as a method to revitalize some of the mainland, the same way that trains built America. The screenshots I shared above show barren mainland, but mainland around linden roads tends to actually get developed:- Immersion and connectivity funnily enough, seems to actually attract users to develop virtual land, funny that isn't it? Funnily enough, the few times I've played on the mainland, the destinations I ended up sticking around at was some place I reached in either a car, a plane or a train.

You know what, you're right! What All new SL users REALLY need to EXPERIENCE is more of this! https://i.gyazo.com/519cb7c6a4abf2ad8e4d718a824dd2c2.mp4 What kind of STUPID user needs immersion and curated destinations, when they can JUST TELEPORT. You're SO right, there are SO MANY stupid people who join SL! How stupid they are to not figure out OUR game SecondLife doesn't need to attract ANY new users! All of the population are so YOUNG and TOTALLY DON'T have one foot in the grave!! /s

On the issue of people going to play something else due to teleport failure, a similar issue occurs for sim restarts. Tuesdays we can have multiple visitors in our sim but the sim restarts, and the user simply doesn't log in again, or teleports to their home and never returns, which can hurt the momentum of smaller community sims.

I have an issue with OP's statement. OP frames what she wants as a standard expected part of a marketplace purchase that creators opt out of. I don't think that it is a fair statement. There is nothing to indicate to a new and budding creator that including a product image with the bundled product is expected of them. The only way a creator might come to learn of this practice is word of mouth or if the creator happens to think of it themselves.