Fluffy Sharkfin

My bad, as a non-American I wasn't aware and just assumed since you were talking about LL trying to attract young people. That being said I'm still not convinced that offering discounts on premium membership is going to be that effective given how difficult it is to get people to stick around even without asking them to spend money. They could but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that one given the current trends in gpu prices etc. Yeah, it's a real shame LL didn't consider expanding the PBR system so it could be applied to things other than doorknobs.... oh, wait, they did! I'll agree that LL could put more effort into creating some impressive PBR environments to show off but let's face it that would be pretty out-of-character for them given their reliance on user-generated content over the last two decades. There's a reason that they're urging creators to log in and test content on the beta grid and it's not because the Lindens are standing around on Aditi feeling lonely, of course they want more data on how the new features are running on various hardware but I'd imagine they're equally eager to have something to look at aside from the armies of Matts that are currently occupying the Rumpus Rooms (somebody really needs to make a marching animesh Matt, or maybe upload some static posed versions, dress them up in uniforms and stage a mock battle for fun).

A discount on what exactly? "Hey kids, come and get your 20% discount on our free sign up and save yourself $0 now!" isn't exactly a compelling sales pitch. LL can't give a discount on the purchase of L$ since it's a resident to resident transaction and while they could give a discount on tier fees it would pointless since that would only matter to residents who are invested enough in the platform to consider owning land and spending a monthly fee on it. The point of shiny doorknobs (and all the other graphical improvements) is to stop SL looking like it's 20 years old.

I must admit I feel pretty much the same way. The only things I'd consider using sculpted prims for now would be: If I want a lot of temp on rez items since (last I checked) using mesh still counts against parcel LI limits whereas sculpted prims don't. In conjunction with megaprims to make large off-sim terrain extensions & decorations. Mesh is far superior in just about every sense except for the fact you can sometimes "cheat" with sculpted prims to save a few LI.

If you like playing with sculpted prims you should definitely take a look at 3D Coat. It fully supports SL sculpt maps and allows you to import them as 3D models, modify and save them and also paint colour, depth, roughness/specularity, etc. directly onto them using either the old SL materials system or a workflow compatible with the new PBR system. If anyone is looking for a way to spice up those old sculpties I'd recommend trying the 30 day free trial!

Absolutely nothing! The majority of people that buy 240hz game monitors do so because they believe that if their game/screen updates 240 times per second it will give them an advantage over other players who only get a measly 60 frames per second, which of course just results in them having to find other excuses for why they still suck so bad. 😅

Improve user retention by removing the option to log out, once you catch them never let them go!

Well I finally decided to roll the dice and run the risk of my antiquated hardware bursting into flames in order to hop onto the beta grid. Unfortunately I couldn't test much since I guess my request to have my account updated on Aditi hasn't been processed yet though I did manage to log in on a very old account (which spent the entire visit as a cloud with absolutely no inventory) so got a chance to see how it's currently running on low end hardware and honestly it ain't that bad! With the default settings I was getting a pretty dismal 15 fps but after tweaking things a little and turning things down to about the same settings I use on the main grid (while still leaving things like local lights, shadows and reflections enabled) I was getting around 25-30 fps. That may seem low but bear in mind this is on a refurbished office PC you can pick up for around $150-$200 with an upgraded graphics card costing about $100 new, so in total about 250 to 300 dollars worth of hardware. Essentially performance is not a lot different from my average fps with the current implementation of ALM when most features are enabled, and for those worried that they won't be able to use SL at all if ALM is made mandatory I tried turning off things like shadows, reflections and local lights and even my $250 potato is getting 70-80 fps while wandering around the Rumpus Room test regions with my draw distance set to 256m (and about 50-60 fps with a draw distance of 512m).

For most textures, especially those with lots of straight edges and geometric shapes like bricks/tiles/fencing, you'll achieve far better results if you create your own height map and then generate a normal map from that. It can sometimes help to then generate a second normal map based on the luminance value of the diffuse, add it as a new layer and then use a mask to selectively add details from it to your hand made normal map but relying purely on a normal map derived from the luminance values of the base texture will rarely yield good or even acceptable results.

OR you can just hand paint your normal maps from scratch in Photoshop like this guy did... (and yes he apparently didn't even bother painting a height map and using a filter to convert it to a normal map but chose to create the entire normal map by hand) I personally wouldn't recommend it, if you're trying to drive yourself insane there are probably easier and less painful ways to do so.

When adding new features it makes sense to at least try and conform to industry standards, which are usually most prevalent in (and sometimes even defined by) the current most popular apps, which due to their popularity are almost always expensive (in other words, it's a coincidence not a conspiracy). In the case of both mesh and PBR neither feature is in any way "locked" to specific apps, any software that supports PBR can be used to generate materials for SL in the same way that any 3D app can be used to create mesh.

I doubt new users care who created the world any more than they care about the individual designers and developers responsible for creating whatever game they buy next, they're probably more concerned with how it looks. Substance Painter is great for game developers and production studios, especially where there's a need to maintain continuity while texturing a large number of assets, however you also need to learn to use Substance Designer (which is the app used to create materials/substances) otherwise you're limited to pre-existing materials available in the PBR library and essentially texturing becomes a matter of dragging and dropping presets, masking and layering and the tweaking of a seemingly endless number of sliders. I'd definitely recommend 3DCoat Textura to anyone wanting to work with PBR materials, especially if they want to do any hand painting and/or have experience with Photoshop since there are a lot of similarities between the two in terms of features and workflow (also at €95 for a full license, 6 x €20 payments for rent to own or €10 a month subscription the price is far more reasonable). There are other alternatives to Substance Painter so if 3D Coat doesn't appeal you could always try something like ArmorPaint or Quixel Mixer

Sadly, as much as I miss EQ Landmark, converting the entire virtual world of SL to voxels is unfeasible. Some type of "local voxel editor" that can bake the results into a set of auto-generated LOD models using algorithms like Marching Cubes or Surface Nets for organic models or simple cubes for hard surface modeling would be a slightly more realistic (but still equally unlikely) proposition.

Flexi-prims can be pretty effective for some stuff, but I wouldn't trade my favourite mesh hair for all the flexi-hair on the asset server! Anyway, since LI calculations don't impact attached objects it's not like the proposed changes would have allowed you to wear ten times as much flexi-hair.

Because I'm mean and I don't want people to have nice things! ...and also because flexi-prims have far more impact on performance than regular prims so allowing people to potentially rez 10x as many would be a really bad idea.

Sounds good (as long as it doesn't apply to any linkset containing flexi-prims). Making prims more useful and encouraging people to make better use of them may even improve the visual quality of SL since at least prims don't devolve into random floating triangles at lower LODs. I still say that if LL really want to revitalize in-world creativity they should be looking into implementing voxels for both building and terraforming... ...but since that's never going to happen I guess I'd take cheaper prims as a consolation prize.

Yeah... I was kidding! Reflection probes will be automatically placed in the region by default so essentially your avatar should always be in range of a reflection probe which is why, as Jenna pointed out above, wearable reflection probes aren't needed.

Outrageous! LL should double the attachment points so that we can wear a probe for each attachment! What if I were standing with one foot in one room and the other foot in another room while holding my hands out of a window and sticking my head in the refrigerator, if I can't have a probe for every shiny thing I'm wearing it's going to ruin "muh immershunz"! 😭

You're right in principle but the problem is that evidence can be easily fabricated. We're at a point where even RL images, audio and video can be easily generated and it would take a digital forensics expert to spot any discrepancy and, by comparison, faking "SL evidence" like chat logs and screenshots, etc. is childsplay. When presented with two conflicting sets of evidence and no way to ascertain the validity of any of it (short of LL getting involved and officially verifying the contents of chat logs, etc. which will never happen) the verdict will undoubtedly rest on which of the two parties garners more sympathy, in other words it will be a popularity contest with no prize for the winner and a witch hunt for the runner up.

I must admit I'm curious to see how LL would word the TOS amendment if they adopted this idea. What's a polite and non-controversial way of saying "By distributing any of your creations in Second Life you are automatically agreeing to provide ongoing support in perpetuity and failure to do so in a timely manner may result in the loss of any rights you may have to any intellectual property hosted on the platform."? 🤔 I'm also curious as to what the general reaction from SL content creators would be, I suspect it would make for a lively few days on the forums!

I'm sorry if I seem a little unwavering in my stance but I just don't see how a creator no longer being around should somehow grant their customers more rights than they were granted when they originally bought the product(s). That would be the equivalent of me saying that because I paid Autodesk $800 for a commercial license for Sketchbook Designer shortly before they discontinued it and announced there would be no further updates or support they should provide me with the full source code and allow me to do whatever I like with it. The reality is that the software still works and I can continue to use it for as long as I have an operating system which supports it, I have the same rights regarding use of the software that I had when I purchased it, just as I would have if they'd continued supporting the product. I will admit that my perspective regarding this issue is quite likely skewed by the fact that I'm relatively well-versed in both scripting and 3D modelling (along with most other forms of SL content creation) to the extent that if I really want something badly enough and can't find it for sale then I'm probably capable of creating it myself, so perhaps when content occasionally disappears along with its creator the loss of the content impacts me far less than the loss of its creator.

There's a huge difference between creating something derived from another persons work and outright declaring that another persons work no longer belongs to them and is instead public property. Even in a derivative work the creator can only claim ownership of the additions, changes and new material that they added while ownership of all the original material is retained by the original creator. As for sparking innovation and creativity I'd argue that's more likely to happen if a creator removes popular products from the marketplace leaving an unfilled niche than if those products were made available to everyone for free. Anyway, regardless of whether you try to frame it as wanting to "democratize creativity and/or content" or just whiny content creators crying about "muh copyright" the fact remains that there is no moral grey area when it comes to taking something that doesn't belong to you without the owners permission... it's theft, it's wrong and, if that isn't enough of a deterrent for you, it's also illegal!

Cloth simulations look very impressive when running smoothly however put 10 or 20 avatars all using cloth physics together in the same area and your frame rates would most likely be so low that you probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the cloth was moving at all.

Perhaps, but the part where artists work was taken without the artists consent and repurposed in a way which the artist never intended or agreed to seems pretty similar to this idea of claiming a creators work as public property simply because they aren't able to object.

It's interesting how quickly this question about intellectual property rights has spiralled through the topic of whether those rights should be respected or not and into a discussion about whether theft is beneficial or detrimental to the SL economy. In a way it somewhat mirrors the current hot topic of AI art where a bunch of people thought to themselves "hey, there's a ton of cool content on the internet and nobody to stop us from taking it and doing whatever we like with it" and then started slinging around terms like "the democratization of art" to justify their actions when in reality those actions weren't so much motivated by a desire to enrich society and enable creativity as they were fuelled by an attitude of "We don't care who it belongs to, we want it so we should be allowed to have it!"