Fluffy Sharkfin

It's been a while since I built anything substantial out of prims, in what way have they become more complicated to use? As for Blender, it isn't the only option when it comes to creating content for SL and some of the alternatives are a lot easier to get to grips with.

It's a shame more creators don't make proper use of materials since they can make a staggering amount of difference when creating foliage using flat polygons with textures. For example, here's a set of very basic hand-painted leaves... add a normal map and tweak the specular/roughness a little and this is the result... By adding curvature and a little gloss you can turn a flat plane into a seemingly high-poly surface and completely transform even low poly/LI content into something you'd consider using as a centerpiece.

According to the SL stats page on Daniel Voyagers blog SLs highest concurrency was close to 90k

Don't forget Pressure Washer Simulator! LL could start up a whole new in-world industry... premium members could hire non-premium members to come to Bellisseria and mow their lawns, wash their cars, etc. which would boost the economy and also help with immersion and realism with the addition of a fully functioning class system in SL!

I honestly have no clue, I think there's a "total users online" counter on the viewer log-in screen but it's not something I've ever really paid any attention to.

And before that the infamous Massive Grid Stress Test of 2005 during which they tried to squeeze a whopping 4000 users onto the grid at the same time! 😮 (I can't remember for sure if they managed it or not, but have a vague recollection of the total number of users getting pretty close before the grid finally collapsed and LL declaring it a success anyway)

@Sandra8675 Since you're trying to record the entire conversation rather than just the output from your own mic you're probably going to need to capture the audio from your desktop/application. If you want to capture sounds from the SL viewer along with the conversation then you should set up a group call in SL, if you only want to capture the conversation then you'll need to set up a group call in Discord or Teamspeak or whatever other voice capable software you prefer (you may also want to disable all sound-based notifications in whatever voice app you're using otherwise they'll also show up on the audio track). Once you have your voice call set up click the Add Source button in OBS and select Application Audio Capture (BETA) then, depending on what sounds you want captured, select either the Second Life viewer or the app you're using for voice comms as a source. ETA: You still need to include Audio Input Capture as an additional source in OBS to capture your own voice because the audio picked up by your own mic isn't going to be part of the audio output of the application you're using (otherwise you'd be hearing your own voice through the app every time you talk).

Assuming the objective is to create something which communicates like a human it wouldn't be very realistic if it didn't misrepresent opinion as fact and occasionally make things up entirely.

I'm actually okay with that! On the slim off-chance that they inadvertently create a RL Skynet I have a preference for my terminators being dumb (and also preferably slow and with poor visual acuity)! Also if they could incorporate "questionable fashion choices" into the mix that would be a great callback...

Yes, SL has some very wonderful content and some regions are exceptionally well done! Unfortunately most new users never get to see it because apparently they aren't sticking around long enough to hunt around and find it. They simply look at the Classic avatar and the really old stuff littered around them and think "Ewww this is old and ugly!" and log out never to return. If LL want to capitalize on all the work that they've been doing to bring PBR to the grid they should be planning a complete overhaul of all the new user areas and similar regions in order to really show off exactly what Second Life is capable of in 2023!

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.