ChinRey

Chic Aeon wrote: While I don't disagree about the need for new content (in my world but notably not in EVERYONE'S ) I would like to give some kudos to the person or team in charge of the new Linden Portal Park areas. Yes, I should have known better than ake such a sweeping statement. :matte-motes-wink: There's some real qualities in the new portal park build. And if you go to the beta grid, head over to MeshHQ 3 and take a look at the mesh landscape Ruintai Linden has made there. Crude and with some rather obvious flaws, the mesh still has some serious qualities. That guy's got real building talent! It is also important to notice that there have been some really good content creators working for LL in the past. Eric Linden is one of the best builders - perhaps the best builder - SL has ever seen and some of the early Mole builds (Bay City, the Blake Sea Boathouse and Pyri Peaks just to mention a few) are true masterpieces. Oh, and that one piece of flotsam LIbby Linden placed in the middle of Carmichael - that must the most effective use of a single prim in the entire Second Life! (A shame some other Linden who didn't know to leave well enough alone had to add to it recently.) More importantly, it seems LL recently has begun to (re)gain a better understanding and appreciation of what content creation is all about. I only started building a year and a half ago but I soon learned the lesson that if you have problems, do not ask LL for assistance. It's not that they unwilling to assist - quite the contrary, I always found them eager to help - but they never understood a conent creator's point of view so their solutions tended to only make matters worse. Recently this seems to have changed though. Oh, they still mess it up but now at least they seem to appreciate that maybe they need to think a bit first. They hired professionals to build the new wonderful welcome sims, they allowed a group of volunteers to restore Governor Linden's Mansion (not absolutely convinced that was a good idea but at least it's a good attempt) and they've even made some feeble attempts to fix that TOS this thread is supposed to be about. It's not much yet but it's definitely a good start. And a very necessary one too. It's hard to keep track of the ever changing plans for SL2 but last I heard, Ebbe Linden was talking a lot about content - "experience content creators" (apparently thinking we don's have those in SL today) but content all the same. That's great news but LL doesn't really need a new grid for that, they need a new attitude. The moment LL starts to take serious content creation seriously, serious content creators will start to take SL1 and SL2 seriously again. I believe LL has started already and think things will only go upwards from now on. :matte-motes-smile: And that's my seond answer to Charli's original question. The TOS change happened when the communication breakdown between LL and the content creators was at its worst. By now LL realizes it was a mistake even though they may not yet understand how big a mistake it was. We can't expect them to fix the error overnight but they're certainly not going to make matters worse. (P.S. If anybody from LL happens to read this: why not pop over to the Brewery and the Hipsters and the Tower and Little Blue and NCI Hamnida and the other places where the real content creators hang out? You have to be prepared to be overwhelmed with frustrations and unresolved issues that have built up over the years but that'll pass and it's about time we get into a proper dialog how to develop this wonderful world further. Oh, and while you're at Hamnida, why not pop over to Gukyeol and clean up the mess Vandal Linden left there - I can't imagine the oldtimers who hang out at that infohub really need a basic builders' tutorial and besides, it's a bit silly to place such an amateurish one right next to the place where Immy and the other NCI instructors hold their excellent classes on the topic.)

Charli Infinity wrote: Now that Linden Lab is making a new virtual world, do you think they will fill that world with all the mesh created by creators in this world without giving a dime or any credit at all? How would you feel about it that if it happens? I guess I'm just repeating what others have said already but: no there's no realistic chance of that happening. There are many reasons but here's one that should be mroe than enough alone to ansure this wouldn't happen: LL doesn't just need content for their virtual world(s) they need a constant supply of fresh content! As far as I know, there are no competent content creators working for LL anymore. That means they are completely dependant on their users here and they simply can't afford to risk loosing the qualified content creators who still work in SL.

LiamZander wrote: I guess I will have to get over it and start making LOD manually, because it helps drastically. I'm afraid so, Liam. The basic idea behind the LOD models to simplify the visual models of objects viewed at a distance since the finer details will be too small to see anyway. Obviously, the more you simplify, the lower the land impact gets but it's important to remove only the details you don't need and keep the ones you need. The uploader tries to calcualte what to keep and what to omit automatically, but it does a horrendously poor job, wasting LI on unnecessary tris and deleting crucial ones. Even LL admits this. But they claim they bought the best algorhitm on the market for the job and that nobody has figured out a better way yet. Making really efficient mesh takes a lot of experience (and a bit of studying helps too) but even a beginner can easily do a better job than the uploader. (Btw, the uploader does an even worse job creating physics models but making those well does require a bit of knowledge and experience so a beginner may still be better off using autogenerated ones for that.) Aquila Kytori wrote: This is a bug of sorts and only effects certain types of mesh like your chain links AND if the mesh has not been UV unwrapped before uploading. See this earlier thread .. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/LI-count-something-not-right/m-p/2254573#M23880 That's a new one to me - I better keep an eye out for that bug. Thanks! :-)

There are so many tips and tricks I hardly know where to start. You definitely need to do all the LOD models manually though. With the auto-generated ones you can get high LOD (as you say you did) or low LI but hardly ever both at the same time. And for intricate curved items like this smooth normals are essential. With them you can reduce the number of triabngles to a fraction of the number you'd need to get the same look without. In fact, I'm not sure if you can get as smooth looking curves as the one in the picutre you showed without them not matter how many tris you put into the mesh. Then it's all a matter of understanding what LI and LOD is. How the different weights are calculated, how the switch points are calculated and so on and so on. It's not rocket science but it does take quite a bit of studying and/or trial and error to learn how to make efficient mesh. You don't mention which weight it is that decides the LI. The number of triangles and vertices affect the download weight. Doesn't help much to reduce that if the server weight or the physics weight is too high. Well, of course all weight reduction helps a little bit to reduce the risk of lag but when it comes to LI, only the highest of the three counts. Finally, figure out what you need and what you don't need to include int he mesh. And figure that out independently for each of the five models (Five? yes, four visual models and one physics model). Every little unneccessary detail you can eliminate (or replace with some clever texturing) helps reduce the LI just a little bit. --- (Edits: just correcting typos)

I know, I know. I said I wasn't going to post anymore in this thread (but I certainly will elsewhere on the forum). But I have to update a comment which no longer is true: ChinRey wrote: ... The MacBook used to be my SL computer but things have grown so much laggier here the last few months (especially since Project Interesting) it doesn't really work anymore. .... The latest version of the SL Viewer (3.7.14.29638) fixed that. :matte-motes-big-grin: SL still is noticeably slower than it was just a few months ago (visiting the same sim with the same computer and the same pref settings) but the speed improvements 3.7.14.29638 introduced means is enough that it is possible again to visit SL with a two or three years old MacBook Pro.

Lovely! I learned a lot from it and it was fun too! The one thing I don't understand is why haven't you gotten more kudos for that post? You deserve lots of them!

Don't want to spend a fortune on a house when all you want is a base for your Second Life exploring? Just a place where you can get a moment of peace, maybe change your clothes in private and of course tp to if you get into a sticky situation? At Keswick and Coniston you can rent a small 64 m2 townhouse or cottage for just 20 L$ a week. No, that is not a typo, only 20 lindens for a week's rent. The prim allowance is limited of course - 5 prims - but that should be enough to make a cozy little nest with modern, low prim furniture (got a few freebies for you at my Marketplace store myself and there are many other good builders who offer cheap and even free good quality low prim furniture too these days). And if you need more, well, just tell me and I'll increase your prim limit. It'll cost a little extra of course but not too much. There's more too. Greater Coniston is a fairly large project. Total area of over more than two sims (but spread out across five). When it's finished, it will include houses in all sizes from those lovely little cottages to a few full fledged castles. Oh, and quite a few open parcels too - some by the sea, some by the Linden Road - if you want to build your own dream home in the style of the area. Much of it is ready for the public already. And some parts are almost ready - if you fancy a house or parcel that doesn't have a rental sign on it yet, just ask me and I'll see what I can do. :matte-motes-smile: Oh, the style? Yes, this is a themed build and the theme is Northern England. It's all in the part of SL known as the Hidden Lake District where the sims are named after and inspired by places in Northern England. I decided to work with the landscape rather than against it. Fortunately it seems most of my neighbours had similar ideas and the whole region is wonderfully free of major eyesores. Enough variety to keep things interesting but not so much to create the mess you see far too many places in SL. I've tried to make it a modern landscape, but modern with a history! That means you'll find everything from medieval Tudor houses to modern houses side by side in perfect harmony, just as you would in real life. The rules? Oh yes, there have to be some unfortunaly. I already mentioned the overall theme. There's an overall scale too - about average for SL, nothing to big or too small. And the sims are M rated (that's LL's decision not mine) and child friendly (btw, did I mention the playground at Coniston?) so if you're planing to do something really adult, do it indoors. Oh, and it's low lag, definitely low lag and will remain so as long as I have any say in the matter. :matte-motes-wink: Where the 20 L$ rentals are? They're spread around and I can't list them all here. But most are located in the old factory workers' town of North Keswick: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Keswick/183/215/38 For the rest, just click on one of the rental boxes for info and it will give you a notecard with a full list of landmarks. There are only 55 of these 20 L$ houses available and I doubt there will be more of them. Unless some other landowner catch my madness that is, I can't afford many more of them myself.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: Wrong. In so many ways, just wrong. A 486 back in 2003 would never have been able to render flexi hair. Not unless it was optimized. A small 256 or ven 128 texture. Not a 1024 like most ones are OK, a bit of poetic exaggeration there. :matte-motes-wink: But obviously, no computer recent enough to even be able to log on to SL today will have any problem rendering something like that, not even if the hair had a 1024x1024 texture (which I told you it hadn't - look at the render weight for my whole avatar). There had to be some other explanation. Turns out it was a connection problem of all things. A problem with a trans-Atlantic connection caused some packet loss which of course again slowed down the connection, not enough for anybody doing regular internet surfing to notice (when I called my isp they found out it had been going on for three days without anybody else noticing) but enough to keep my cpu too busy to give my gpu the attention it needed. I'm not sure what happened. Either the viewer simply ignored the 9.9 GB cache and kept re-requesting the same data from the server or it was simply overloading with repeated negative status requests (like: "Hi, server! anything new for this scene?" "Nope!" "OK, Thanks!"). In either case it's seriously inefficient code. Drake1 Nightfire wrote: That's the thing, the blu-ray would have to have changed it's minimum requirements. SL has barely changed what is needed to run SL. Sadly, intel graphics have never been good enough to run SL well. ... Can you please show some evidence to back up that claim? You mean empirical evidence? I'm afraid not. As far as I know, nobody's tried to scientifically test changes in lag level over time here. But I have returned to the same sims with the same hardware (and with no changes to the sims) repeatedly over the last year or so and although it never occured to me to make any measurements, the increase in lag I've noticed have been so large that I'm absolutely confident it's real and not my imagination. On one occasion I can be absolutely positve that a software change added considerable lag. When Project Interesting was introduced, I downloaded the new viewer immediately, long before that upgrade was mandatory. That meant I could switch back and forth between the old and new and test them against each other. Now Project Interesting is particularly interesting here since it was intended to reduce "perceived lag". I can assure you that any improvement in that respect was drowned by the amount of very noticeable real lag it added. It's easier if we ignore the timeline aspect. There are so many anti-patterns and other examples of inefficient coding easy for everybody to see. Just a random list off the top of my head in no particular order: There are three completely different ways, with completely different coding, of making an object phantom. (Apparently - but this is unconfirmed - one of them actually forces the server to calculate the collision data even if it will never be used.) SL has as far as I can see (and I've really searched) never provided informtaion whether mesh object with the same asset id are instanced or not. The answer to that question is rather critical for deciding how many meshes can be made as efficiently as possible. Static sprites are fully supported by the SL code but only used for very limited purposes. Now, there is a question whether it's a good idea to keep or not (I think it is but I may be wrong) but since it's in the code anyway, they should certainly be used for all they're worth. SL has always had full support for one bit alphas but it was only made available to non-Linden builders last year, forcing people to use considerably laggier 8-bit alpha masks even when 1 bit would have worked just as well or even better. LSL scripts are still compiled in LSO as default even if Mono is nearly always the most efficient option. In LSL multi-condition if loops are not short circuited Mesh physics shapes can not be controlled directly by the maker. You have to choose between a triangle or a hull based model (with no real explanation or info about which is the best choice for which purpose). These are then converted in Havok models which can sometimes be considerably different from the original. A mesh upload requires five different models regardless of how many are actually needed. Also, all four visual models must have the same number of material faces and identical models are not combined but included separately in the mesh asset. Prims, sculpts and "SL mesh" are all specialized version of the general mesh system and they share numerous traits. Despite this, they seem to be handled by completely different code. Not only does this add unnecessary complexity to the software, it also reduces the possibility of applying features available to one to the other too. Sometthing similar is apparent when it comes to avatars and objects. There are numerous examples where the same code could have been used for both and where a feature available only to one would have been useful to both. But since they are (apparently) handled by completely different parts of the software, reusing code (both to simplyfy and to add features) seems impossible of at least very difficult. SL has two completely different systems for bump maps/normal maps. Usually in 3D design, normal maps are used to reduce lag. In SL they effectively increase lag. (How? Don't ask me) LL failed to respond to a popular demand for higher resolution and more flexible avatars. As a result a large number of different user-created solutions with lag inducing alphas and prim, sculpt and mesh attachments appeared instead of the fairly simple minor increase of the base avatar's mesh resolution that was really needed. LL failed to respond to a popular demand for more three-dimensional clothing. As a result we got mesh clothes, liquid mesh, rigged mesh and eventually fitted mesh. Personally I think fitted mesh itself is a good idea but it is rather render heavy and 99 times out of 100 clothing layers with normal maps would have been both better looking and less laggy (or possibly not - considering how normal maps on objects ended up) And so on and so on. The list can go on forever but I can't. Drake1 Nightfire wrote: We have no idea why they started work on TNP, it's all guesswork. Of course but I think the suggestion they started it because they decided the old code needed to be replaced is an educated guess. :matte-motes-wink: Drake1 Nightfire wrote: What problem? You need to realize that an Intel 4000 chip does not meet the minimum requirements to run SL. That is YOUR problem not LL's. Not really my problem. I've got a more powerful computer I can use. The MacBook used to be my SL computer but things have grown so much laggier here the last few months (especially since Project Interesting) it doesn't really work anymore. I can still use it in my own low lag sims but many of my favorite stores and hangouts have become too heavy. It is a problem for LL though, or rather two problems - or two decisions if you like... The first one is about money. After all LL needs that to pay for their connection lines, their servers, to pay their workers and to give the owners some return on their investments. Now, to get the money, LL needs paying customers. Basically there are two kinds of those. There are power users who are quite happy to spend a few thousand dollars on some cool hardware and there are casual users that aren't. Now, LL can choose to focus on the power users exclusively. There are quite a lot of them after all. But if I understand correctly, they've chosen to try for the much larger market of casual users instead and if they want to gain that, they have to adapt their product to it. One of the most important rules in all kind of busniess is "the customer is always right." The second problem LL have here is that it is actually possible to make a virtual world efficient enough to give somebody on an oldish laptop the same graphic quality as today's SL but with no speed problems worth speaking of. (And btw, just imagine what your computer could achieve in such a place!) It'll be expensive and time-consuming but it's certainly doable. The challenge would be to sell such a world. Most of the people who would be immediately interested are well and truly established in SL or at IMVU and not likely to move soon even if this new world is better. As it is today, such a project would almost certainly go bankrupt long before it had recruited enough paying customers to survive. Things may be a bit different the next year or three thougt because TNP has stirred things up a bit in SL. Most people here won't or can't move - at least not right away and I'm sure quite a few will simply move on straight to this new world. But many will start to look around for alternatives. There may well be enough of them to establish a new faster and more efficient SL soon. And once it's established with enough paying customers to cover the costs, it can start growing. That's what I think at least - and I have actually thought quite a lot about it. :matte-motes-wink: But the only way to know for sure what the future will bring is to wait for it to happen. Except one thing that I'm absolutely certain about: this is my last post on this thread. Been spending more time on the forum than in SL the last few days and I can't go on like that. Cheers, everybody!

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: Can i watch a blu-ray dvd on my TV, yes. Will it look as good as seeing it on my fathers 60" LED tv.. no. Is that the problem of the movie company or my own? Your analogy doesn't work. You can use SL on your under-powered system, but will get a better experience with more power. Or I can just log off and find something else to do. That's fair enough but if enough people do that, who's gonna pay SL's bills? But there's one point I may not have explained well enough. Look at the scene I described again. This isn't highly detailed graphics. This is something a 486 computer back in 2003 would have rendered with no problems whatsoever. Imagine if you try to watch that blue-ray dvd on your TV tomorrow and find out it doesn't work at all. Try it on your dad's LED tv, and get the same small low-res picture your own TV gives you today. SL doesn't need all that extra computer power because of the heavy graphics, it needs it because most of the power is wasted. And the entire system becomes more and more inefficient every day. This can't go on forever of course and it's almost certainly the reason why LL started the work on SL2. Unfortunately, no matter what happens to SL2, it's not gonna solve the problem for the existing grid.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: There is your problem right there... No, there is LL's problem. because: Drake1 Nightfire continued: Why people keep thinking that notebooks and laptops can run SL with ease, I will never know. That's not mystery at all. It's because that's essentially what LL tells you you can when you first come here. LL wants and always wanted SL to be a virtual world for the general public, and they seem to be even more keen on that when it comes to SL2. At least this is what they say. That means they'll have to make sure their software fits the average person's home computer because there is no way the average person will spend money on a new more powerful one just for the sake of SL.

ChinRey wrote: ... In SL1, of course, you're struggling with 20 avatars running through some basic dance animations in a club.... I suppose it's not perfect netiquette to reply to your own posts but I just found another even better illustration of how critical the lag issue is in SL 2014: Right now I'm standing in the middle of one of those empty low lag water sim. Nobody there but me. My avatar's render weight is 20501 (only wearing system clothes and a flexi hair) that is about a fourth or fifth of an average modern avatar. Graphics set to medium but with LOD reduced to 1.0 and draw distance to 56 m. Computer's a slightly old MacBook Pro, not exactly up to date but not unusually slow for a home computer today. OS X 10.9. The lag meter keeps telling me that the frame rate is too low - possible cause, too many complex objects in scene.

insilvermoonlight wrote: So I think I understand that when I put the root prim into the non-rigged item it defaulted to hand attachment. But it doesn't do this with rigged mesh because, well it's rigged? Yes and no. An object will always (re)attach to the last point it was attached to reagrdless whether it's a prim, sculpt, regular mesh or rigged mesh. If it has never been attached to an avatar, it will default to right hand. If the object is a linkset, it's only the root prim that counts, any attachment points the child prims may have had are simply ignored. In your case, the root prim defaulted to the right hand. The hat was a child prim so its previous attachment point simply didn't matter.

Pamela Galli wrote: When I hear "Creator-centric" I think of concentric circles drawn on my back. Because when LL tries to do what it conceives of as "helping" merchants, I have learned to duck. That's how it is. I think the saddest thing is that all the people at LL seem to be really, really nice guys who really, really want to help. It's just that they never understood what their customers actually needed. Pamela Galli wrote: I am pretty resigned to the fact that I have had a very good run in SL, but LL is planning to kill it one way or another, probably several ways. Or maybe not kill, but seriously wound. I don't think SL2 will have that much effect on SL at all. Obviously it all started as an attempt to update SL but by now it's evolved into something so completely different you can't really compare the two. I can't imagine anybody at LL still believe everyody will flock from SL to SL2 the moment it opens. Medhue Simoni wrote: Well, I think the problem is really that they are letting coders pick and choose which creators to listen to. This gives us crap like Fitted Mesh. To be fair, it wasn't LL who came up with fitted mesh. At least two clothes developer came up with different hacks to create mesh that followed the avatar somewhat and LL eventually gave in and made it official. I'm not sure I'd call the fitted mesh idea crap anyway. I think it's a brilliant solution to a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place. Medhue Simoni wrote: Actually, I just heard Phillip talk about voxels, and they are just basically using them to render things that are far away. They must have changed their minds then. Their website certainly makes no such reservations: https://highfidelity.io/ Medhue Simoni wrote: The solution to lag is all about preloading the items for the simulation. Half of the issues with lag are a direct result of caching problems, or the fact that things aren't preloaded, and must be seen first before it is loaded. Oh yes, caching is a solution to much of the problem here. But even so, a poorly made sim in SL can easily contain half a gigabyte or more of raw, uncompressed graphics data. You can't really expcet the viewer to start caching preloading before you've actually entered the sim (unless you've been there before that is) and no matter how compressed it is and how fast your connection is, that amount of data takes time to download. And you graphics card has to deal with the full, uncompressed amount and that's a challenge even for the strongest of them. Medhue Simoni wrote: That said, prepackaged games run smooth, like racing thru the streets of chicago in Watch Dogs, because all the information is already on your pc. That's part of the answer but it also runs smoother because there is so much less data. Builders who make graphics for computer games have no choice, they have to use the resources efficiently. Many SL builders don't care about resource efficeincy at all. Why should they? And even those who do care, where are they going to find the information they need to figure out how? It's this culture of wastefulness that is so alien to all true builders (both in RL and SL) and so evident when the automatic response to "Better, Faster, Greater" becomes "cooler graphics". Medhue Simoni wrote: Yes, we could sell our items on our own websites, but those would only be full perm items. If you did not want to sell your items full perm, then you would have to sell thru LL's marketplace or inworld. Yes, but you don't have to pay inworld and you certainly dom't have to pay in Lindens. Today, you can click on jsut about any CasperVend vendor or CasperLet rental box and get the option of paying in U.S. dollars with your credit card. Your card is then charged by CasperTech who again transfer the payment as Lindens to the seller. It would be extremely easy to rewrtie the software to skip the exchange part and transfer the amount directly as U.S. dollars to the sellers account. It's just that right now Lindens are so much more convenient for those small amounts. It becomes far less conventient the moment Linden starts to charge commission fees. Medhue Simoni wrote: With the new world, they can price land however they want, and it won't affect SL to any large extent. You mean they use completely different hosting rates for the two systems? Hmmm... ... . ... .. You know, that has so many different and interesting implications there isn't enough room on this whole message board for them all. I guess we just leave it open for now.

Vivienne Schell wrote: No, I won´t quit it yet. OK, I won't give up yet either. I actually managed to get some work done in-world yesterday! :matte-motes-smile: Vivienne Schell wrote: And I consider it being one of the dumbest corporate PR decisions I ever witnessed in my life to announce this in such a premature state - in the way Altberg did it. What makes you think it was a decision? Looks very much like an accident to me. Or possible an act of desperation. One thing that is very clear at the moment is that despite their outwards calmness and enthusiasm, the leaders at LL are actually in a difficult situation, they have to update Second Life but they can't. The whole system is so old and loaded with the results of poor strategy decisions, lack-of-strategy decisions, quick emergency pacthes, isolated "brilliant" ideas... I was planning to add a list of the anti-patterns evident in the SL software but here's a link instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Software_design To be fair, not all of those apply to SL but a surprisingly large number do. Even some that should be mutually exclusive. (Like the "Not Invented Here" and "Invented Here" syndromes. How is it possible to create a system that suffer from both at the same time???) I believe their original intention was to simply make a "Better, Faster and Greater" Second Life. Technically that would have been relatively easy for them to do if it wasn't for backwards compatibility. There's no way people here would accept a new SL that looked just like the old one but didn't have that. Building a new and better compatible SL should be possible but it will require an enomrous amount of hard, systematic work so LL went for another solution, a new virtual world so different from the existing SL nobody could possibly expect full backwards compatibility anyway. (Well, that wasn't only becuse of that problem of course. I think they LL really wanted to make something brand new rather than spend time patching up the old.) They may have made a serious miscalculation though. I think they overestimated the value the reputation, customer base and experience they've gained through SL would have. All ths won't be worthless of course and besides, LL has quite a lot of money to invest but even so, essentially this new SL2 will have to enter the vast and fierce multiverse of virtual realities on its own and compete on equal terms with any new virtual world from any new or old company. On top of that, LL can't just abandon SL and sooner or later they'll have to bite the bullet and start the painstaking work of rebuilding the code. One of the reasons I can be so sure of that is what Desmond Shang calls the "Rip Van Winkles", old-timers who only visit SL once or twice a year (if ever) but still are happy to pay their premium membership fees and land tier and rent just for those few moments - or just to still be a part of it. They are the most reliable and undemanding customers a business could ever ask for and it's huge - really, really huge. There is absolutely no way LL can just ignore all that easy money and of course no way these guys can ever be convinced to move to another new grid - or even to another sim. There are other groups in SL who'll never ever move to another grid too of course but the Rip Van Winkles probably form the largest group of unmovable customers. No matter what happens to SL2, LL can not afford to close down the existing SL in foreseeable future and I don't think they can afford to keep it for long without a serious overhaul either. So, right now LL has come up with a new project that actually looks really interesting. I really hope they succeed and I beleieve they have a reasonably good chance. They haven't done much progress on the problem they originally tried to solve though, and there's alimit to how long they can put it on hold.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Well, I'm late again to the party! Better late than never. :matte-motes-smile: Medhue Simoni wrote: Here is my take on it all, or maybe just what I hope. Creator-centric means that they will build the world around what the creators need, to maximize what is possible, and the amount of creators involved. I hope so too. I think you are right, except for two missing words: "will build" should be "will try to build". That's a rather important difference. There are no content creators nor experience creator working for LL. There are nobody at the board or staff meetings or at the office to give them firsthand information about what a 3D world creator actually needs. LL has always tried their best to make SL as creator friendly as possible but without that in-house expertise, they often miss the mark. One example: As I'm sure you all know, there is another team, independent from but partly financed by LL, who are working on another virtual world right now. They're going to base the graphics on voxels which apparently are quite a lot heavier on the computers than mesh. Their reasoning is that voxels can provide better graphics and by the time they're ready to open their world, the average computer will be twice as fast as today so they can afford to use heavier graphics. That's exactly how Ebbe started his SL2 pitch too. "Better graphics", cause that's what all creators want. Or more correctly: that's what all non-creators think all creators want. And of course we do, but not at any cost! I mean, what's the point of making a wonderfully detailed replica of an old motorbike if the environment is so laggy you can't actully ride it? And how are we ever going to find time to use all those wonderful new features anyway? - I mean when you already spend three times as much time fighting the unfriendly interfaces of buggy, bloated and barely compatible software as you do on actually creating? Anyway, as I said, Ebbe started with the "Better graphics" cliché but now he suddenly talks about "experience creators". Now, being a pixel doll can actually be a nice experience (don't knock it if you haven't tried it) but it gets boring fast and I have a feeling what Ebbe had in mind was something a bit more action-filled. And since they clearly want SL2 to be for the masses, they need all that action to work on a perfectly normal average - and even slightly below average - home computer. That means the stipulated doubling in copmuter speed won't even be enough to get today's SL down to an acceptable lag level. There's certainly no room to spend any of it on improved or "improved" graphics. Here's a very simple test: Make a small race track - say about 1000x500 m in overall size. Fill the tribunes with 500 spectators, half of them on "average" home computers, the rest on two year old laptops. Start the race - twelve cars, fifty rounds, full speed, all drivers on "average home computers". The day we can do that with no significant glitches or lag, that's the day increasing graphics quality becomes more important than reducing lag. In SL1, of course, you're struggling with 20 avatars running through some basic dance animations in a club.... So, yes, better graphics would be nice. But there are so many other more important and urgent updates and the only visual feature that should be anywhere near the top of the priority list right now, is working mirrors. Medhue Simoni wrote: Yes, I think the % of sales commission will be higher. I hope it is not over %15 It can't be anywhere near 15%. One important point many people seem to overlook is that nobody has to deal with L$. We can do all our SL buying and selling with RL money if we like. We can even invent our own in-world valuta if we want to. As it is now we don't want to, of course. L$ is reasonably safe, free to use and very, very practical. Things will look very different the moment LL introduce any kind of general transaction fee though. Medhue Simoni wrote: LL was all wrong about land prices for SL. They just thought wrong about it. It's not that simple unfortunately. I know I'm repeating myself here but from an RL perspective, what you do when you buy a sim is simply rent a web server. Yes, it's a server with some special software and some special possibilities and limitations but it's not significantly different from any web server you can rent from any web host. Back in 2003 200 dollars a month was a perfectly reasonable price for a dedicated web server, in fact it was a little bit below average market price. But prices on the open web host market have dropped significantly since then and now you can easily get a dedicated server for 50 dollars/month. LL still charges 2003 level prices for their hosting services. You may think it's because they're greedy but there is actually another very good reason why they can't just drop the land tier: The L$ exchange rate is closely connected to land tier so if LL changes one of them, they'll have to change the other too. What do you think would happen if suddenly overnight you had to pay 1000 L$ for a U.S. dollar? It will happen sooner or later anyway of course but it's easy to understand why LL tries to delay that crack for as long as possible. Medhue Simoni wrote: I also see something like approved game developer that create experiences, like they are doing now in SL. Hmmm. There's something we've all kept quiet about until now. Approved developers.That idea's gonna create quite a stir. Medhue Simoni wrote: What I would like to see, is LL create sets for codes for games, so that any knowledgeable creator can just slap some prebuilt code together to basically create whatever they wanted. This is kind of what is happening with Unity. I think that's an important part of their current plan yes. Seems to me the package they're planning for right now, contains four items: A software system to simplify game buiding A dedicated (mandatory) hosting service for those games A dedicated (mandatory) viewer for those games A selection of auxiliary services (user registration, money transaction etc.) Now, the auxiliary services certainly have some value but not that much. The special viewer may be an advantage but it may also be a liability. It certainly isn't enough on its ow to persuade game developers to choose LL's package. The dedicated, mandatory web hosting is a clear liability, even if LL drops their hosting fees down to regulalr market price. LL will have to seriously sweeten other parts of the deal for developers to swallow this. In the end it all boils down to how well the game building software holds up against the competition. Hard to say right now but I have a suspicion LL has yet to realize there is a competition at all.

Drongle McMahon wrote: If LL is going to limit the number of customers... They don't have to. Now I'm really not sure what you mean. No, they don't have to but I thought you said it was what they plan to do? Let me try an illustration to clarify. If I have an idea that will require the equivalent of - say one sim by old SL measurements - can I got to LL and rent that directly from them on SL2? If the answer is yes, all is fine as far as I'm concerned but it means LL has given up their larger-and-fewer customers idea. (OK, maybe a full sim is a bit bigger than some of the small portions they operate with today but the difference is hardly enough to be regarded as a significant policy change.) If the answer is that they don't deal with land portions as small as that directly and that I have to go to one of their authorized middlemen... In such a scenario, the middlemen aren't "experience creators" in any meaningful definition of the term, let's call them "estate agents", or "land barons" if you like. Anyway, I can easily think of half a dozen good and even more poor reasons why I don't want to deal through a middleman. Drongle McMahon wrote: The model proposes that LL will handle scaleable services dealing with basic identity, inventory and currency. Fair enough. I wonder how much that is worth to each customer. Certinaly nothing near the current tier level. Drongle McMahon wrote: No, it's not a risk, it's a certainty (black market). So how do any websites charging commissions survive? Perhaps because they provide a consolidated service including security. authentication, consolidation of transactions, dealing with tax and money laundering laws etc., that is worth the commission? That's right. I suppose that's one of the systems LL will create and provide. But if LL can do it, somebody else can too. There is no way LL can keep others from creating or using other payment forms than theirs. The only thing they can do is keep their transaction fee (or "sales tax" if you like) low enough to compete. So sales tax is not going to be a "milk cow" for LL. The best they can hope for is a marginal profit from it. Drongle McMahon wrote: They haven't come up with anything yet Yes they have: it will be "Better" :matte-motes-smile: Of course! How could I forget?

Phil Deakins wrote: And what would be the benefit of that to a large land-owner? Why would anyone pay a large amount to run their sims or their own machines when they can run them for nothing on LL's machines - unless you're saying that it eliminates the tier that's payable to LL. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Instead of paying the monthly server rent, you pay a large sum at the start for the rights to the software and then take care of most of the work yourself. Phil Deakins wrote: There are reasons why I simply don't believe it. One is that rumours about special treatment for big spenders (large land-owners) fly around from time to time. Sorry, it simply didn't occur to me until now that this was secret or controversial in any way. A while ago a friend of mine told me about a large commission build he had received. During the talk he mentioned his client were running their own servers and also a little bit about how and why. (He also claimed that their servers were faster than SL's but I don't belive that - I've been to several of those sims and they're just as laggy as the rest of SL). Neither of us thought of this as secret or controversial at that time. Quite honestly I can't see why it should be controversial either. LL offer quantity discounts to large customers - so what? Everybody does. It makes perfect business sense because fewer and larger customers means less work. Some parts of that quantity discount scheme is freely published at SL's website anyway. As far as I can see, the only reason why they don't publish the whole price list is that it's relevant to so few customers it just as easy to deal with them individually.

It is fun. It can also be highly addictive so you better beware! I'm going to be a bit old-fashioned here and recommend you start at the Ivory Tower: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Natoma/210/164/27 That's the place to start learning to build with prims. Some people will tell you that prim building is out now that we have mesh. I don't agree with them (even if I'm a mesh expert myself) but even they will admit that prims are an excellent way to start 3D modelling.

Vivienne Schell wrote: Any kind of 2006 mainland mess was by far more bloody shocking interesting than that. I wasn't here at that time but I bet they were. You know, this discussion has become really depressing. What I've done in SL since it started, is log on, stand a while in the middle of the oak forest I was about to finish then log off again. I jsut can't bring myself to actually do anything there at the moment. What I really want to do right now is abandon land, close account, and leave SL for good. But I can't. Not yet. I'm just not ready to face the possibility that all those endless hours I've spent buiding and learning to build have been for nothing. Besides, I've got friends in there that I don't want to loose.

Qie Niangao wrote: ChinRey wrote: Actually at least one big landowner in SL run their sims on their own servers today. Really? It's not exactly official but yes, you can buy a license for the SL software, install on your own servers and get LL to connect them to the SL grid. Visitors and tenants won't notice any difference. After all, it doesn't really matter to use where in the physical world the server is located and who owns and maintains it. The entry fee is very high though and LL has to enforce some very strict rules how you maintain and run your servers. As a result it only pays if you're running a huge number of sims. And I'm not talking just a few hundred sims here, this is the kind of customer who would acualy be interesting to LL for SL2! joal Oddenfen wrote: now ebby did say that the new sl will not be open source, so i imagine that os sims will stand still now as they only use the tech the linden discard, so i dont think new worlds will come about to compete with them or they would have already, Not necessarily. It wouldn't be difficult to develop an OS based grid to the current SL standard and beyond. It would just be expensive. You'd have to spend a small fortune buying the latest libraries and hiring some programmers to sew it all together. Apparently far too big a project for any of the current OS based grids to manage. Too risky too. Even if you managed to make a new and better virtual world that way, you'd still struggle to get people to leave the good old SL and move over to your place. SL2 might change this though. Most of the people in SL are loyal to Second Life, not to Linden Labs. If they get the impression they have to move anyway, they won't automatically choose LL's new world. And if large groups of creators and entrepeneurs get the impression they're not welcome at all in SL2, they will definitely want to look at the alternatives. If enough of them get together (and they almost certainly will) and pool their resources, we'll get an alternative grid with serious power behind it.

Drongle McMahon wrote: There's no way the model will work though. ... many of the people they reject will just go elsewhere to build their projects and ideas. Why? That was in response to: Drongle McMahon wrote: ... LL cannot be involved with direct interaction with the end-use, the "customer". Instead, they will only deal with middlemen, the "Eperience creators". These will be much fewer than those we currently call creators. I think this elite of experience creators, the only users interacting directly with LL, are those who will be the object of the "creator-centric" strategy. If LL is going to limit the number of customers they deal with directly, they will have to reject quite a few. That goes without saying. Some of these people will just deal with one of the officially approved middlemen of course, some will simply give up, some may try to sue LL... But many of them will try to build their own alternative to SL. We already have that of course, small virtual worlds with a few people in them, big enough for the owners to make an acceptable living, big enough that LL can deny any monopoly accusations but not big enough to be a serious competition to SL. Imagine a hundred rejected entrepeneurs pooling their resources and starting their own virtual world. Imagine that happening not once but a dozen times. Combined, all those mid sized (by today's standards) virtual worlds would be a serious competition to SL. Besides, how are they going to limit the number of direct customers? Are they going to simply select the people they wanna deal with? There are actually very strict laws against that both in the USA and in Europe and probably elsewhere in the world too. Even if they manage to find some legal loophole, they still have to be prepared to spend a fortune on lawyers to fight all the people who'll sue them. Are they going to make the TOS so inedible it'll only be acceptable to a few? Now, that's a thought... :matte-motes-wink: Are they going to set the price so high only a few can afford it? Apparently not. Are they going to offer only huge package deals? Well, they'll have to anyway. Like every single commercial venture in this world, LL wants more sales and fewer customers. That inevitably means each customer will have to buy more. We're not talking about the independent enthusiastic "experience creator" here. We're not even talking about the current big land barons. All those guys are way too small to matter. What LL needs is the kind of customers who are willing and able to rent the equivalent of a thousand sims or more. That's well beyond what a single person is able to administer so we're talking small firms with a handful of employees - located in some low cost country to keep the wages down of course. Drongle McMahon wrote: A black market economy. Yes. As long as offworld real currency transcations can't obviously be excluded, this is a risk. No, it's not a risk, it's a certainty. In fact, it's a certainty that within a month or three somebody will openly set up a complete alternative payment system specially aimed towards SL2 transcations and the only thing LL can do about it is lower their transaction fees enough they'll be able to compete. There is no realistic way for LL to supress a "black market" economy. One reason is that it won't strictly speaking be black market. LL is a commercial corporation, not a govenrment. It has no jurisdiction whatsoever and there's no law to force people to only trade through their officially approved channels. TOS? LL doesn't even have the right to know about any transactions their customers make outside LL's own channels. Imagine you're a experience creator offering lovely private tropical islands with stunning Victorian mansions on them. I rent one of them and pay you 2 Lindens a week. That's all LL has the right to know. The ten U.S. dollars I transfer to your PayPal account every now and then is none of then is none of their business. Even if LL learns about it somehow, they better shut up cause the slightest hint that they've had access to our PayPal transaction histories is enough excuse for us to sue them to death. Drongle McMahon wrote: Exactly, and I presume that is precisely what they are intending to provide by making the the new world! "Better" seems to be Ebbe's favourite word in this context. Indeed. One of the most basic rules in business is that to succeed you need to offer something that sets you apart from your competitors. It can be anything and it doesn't have to be much but it has to be something. It's easy to see what the existing SL's has as that is unique. But there's nothing of it that can be transferred to SL2 so they'll have to find a brand new unique edge for their brand new virtual world. They haven't come up with anything yet but to be fair, they probably don't tell us the whole story and besides, it's still early in the process. Drongle McMahon wrote: this is pretty much how SL is today with so much of the mainlands empty Indeed. The evolution from mainland to estates, that has relieved LL of some of the direct administration burden they get from (almost deprecated) mainland, is the harbinger of the next step. And mainland is of course one of the two things SL has that the competitors don't and can't have. (The other is the big, loyal customer base.) Everything else can be replicated fairly easily outside SL but I can't imagine that anybody will be able to build the equivalent of mainland today. It really makes me sad to watch mainland decline and I'd be more than happy let go of every single improvement and "improvement" LL has made since I joined SL if that would help revitalize mainland. You see, I too have a vision how I want SL to be. What I want is a huge wonderful landscape to explore. With new interesting people to meet and lovely suprise experiences around every bend. And I want ot jsut experiecne but shared experience. You can still find this in SL but it's less of it every day. :matte-motes-frown: But then again, I'm just a blue eyed dreamer. I know nothing about business.

This is getting a bit complicated now since Phil Deakins opened another discussion about the same topic yesterday: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Creator-centric/td-p/2798432 A bit impractical, perhaps we should try to merge the two threads if that's possible? Anyway: Parhelion Palou wrote: So far as I know, LL never paid educators to create anything. Education/nonprofit organizations got a 50% discount on regions. When that discount was taken away (in the middle of most schools' budget cycles), many of the educational institutions and nonprofits could no longer afford to be in SL. The discount was restored in the last several months, but it'll take time before the organizations that were burned will be willing to come back. Oh kay. I must have misunderstood that then. Between us, I doubt they'll ever come back. The presentation tools SL has to offer may have been top notch back in 2003 but they're completely outdated by the standards western world schools expect in 2014. Parhelion Palou wrote: LL's shift in the next generation virtual world (bad idea to call it SL2 because I don't think we'll recognize it as that) is to consider creators to be their customers. The customers will build experiences. Don't think of that as the SL Experience project ... think of it as entire MMO games, virtual worlds, whatever. I think LL is planning on getting into the infrastructure business ... they'll supply the servers, virtual currency, and maybe avatar registration to the experience creators. In the transcript Ebbe said "We still have to think about whether we want to have multiple name spaces. Like do you have to ‑‑ if you come to different experiences, do you have to register all over again or can you have the same tea across now?" He also said somewhere that perhaps a 3rd party would do registration for an experience. He also said LL doesn't want to attract users ... the experience owners will market their experiences to users. But that sounds like they're just openeing a web hosting service for independent game developers! Surely there must be something more to it than that?

Drongle McMahon wrote: The two things that stuck in my mind while reading this latest transcript were "experience" and "scalability". I think there is a realisation that in a system that will scale to the sort of size they want, LL cannot be involved with direct interaction with the end-use, the "customer". Instead, they will only deal with middlemen, the "Eperience creators". These will be much fewer than those we currently call creators. I think this elite of experience creators, the only users interacting directly with LL, are those who will be the object of the "creator-centric" strategy. The business of LL will be to provide infrastructure, and, while there may be cost-covering charges for that service, the real rewards for LL will come from "sales tax" on the services that the experience providers sell. Interesting thoughts and you may well be right that this is how they think. There's no way the model will work though. LL can't limit themselves to opereate through just a few selected middlemen. I'm not even sure if such a model would be legal but even if it is, they can't afford to use it. That's because many of the people they reject will just go elsewhere to build their projects and ideas. Each of them won't matter much but too many of them will add up to serious competition. Realistically, the only way they can limit the number of direct customers is by increasing the entry fee. As for sales tax - well it certainly would add one more piece of realism to SL: A black market economy. :matte-motes-wink: Drongle McMahon wrote: The experiences created will be as diverse as the imagination of the experience-creators. Nah, I doubt it. A creator's imagination is one thing, what he can actually sell is another. I bet you good money that 99% of the experiences will be of the "Living alone in an oversized mansion on a desert island" kind. Only this time they may have mirrors so you can watch both the front and the back of your pixel doll at the same time. If LL really try to limit the number of direct customers, the entry fee will be seriously high. Way too high to do anything risky - better play it safe and go for somethign you know will sell. Drongle McMahon wrote: My favourite will offer the challenge of survival in the face of an aggressive self-sustaining ecology, with limited avalable tools, decreasing admission cost for each day of survival, dangers active when youaren't there. Oh, you mean that kind of experience? Today there are - in theory - two ways you can build something like that: You can rent a server and build your own virtual world from scratch (possibly using those 3D functions Adobe added to Flash last year) or you can go to an existing virtual world (SL is the only realistic option there really), rent a sim and build it there. As I tried to demonstrtate in my first post, at the moment building something like that within the Second Life context has so few advantages and so many disadvantages it isn't really a sensible option. If LL wants to attract quality creators of that kind of experience, they have to offer them a far better deal than they do today. Drongle McMahon wrote: An end-user might participate in as many of these experiences as he chooses to. They would be connected only by single points of entry and exit, keeping the overall interconnection complexity of the system low. The complexity of internal connectivity would be under the control, and the responsibility of, of the experience creator. Inventory could be tranferred (but not all usable in all experiences). All transactions in all experiences would be in linden currency, ensuring the sales tax could be collected. You mean reintroduce the telehubs? Apart from that, this is pretty much how SL is today with so much of the mainlands empty. Oh, there is supposed to a grid where all sims have their place but in the end that's just a bunch of squares on a map. Since the sims aren't actually physically connected, the grid doesn't actually mean anything.

LillyBeth Filth wrote: They are not going to release specific details on technology or indeed any type of plans for what should be obvious reasons. Very good point. LL has actually been surprisingly open by any standard with information about SL2. Vivienne Schell wrote: "experience creator" What is that? Judged by LL´s own "experience creations", namely Linden Homes and such it demands a lot of masochism, extended love for boredom or the mentality of a 12ys old to become a next generation Linden darling then. LOL :matte-motes-big-grin: Actually, the Meadowbrook homes aren't that bad. Outdated by now of course but perfectly OK for the early sculpt age when they were built. Don't really know Elderglen or Tahoe well enough but of course, the Shareta Osumai theme is sheer rubbish. And in any case, the point you're trying to make is very valid indeed: Linden Labs don't have any content creators. This is painfully obvious when you try to bring up some building related issue with them. They're always very nice and polite and patient but they just don't have the reference frame needed to understand what it's about. (That doesn't mean all official Linden Labs builds are bad. They've had good builders working for them in the past (Eric Linden for example - one of the greatest, perhaps even the greatest, SL builder ever) and over the years many LL employees have contributed lovely little miniature builds all across the grid. But even so, they don't have the expertise in-house to understand modern SL building.) As for other content creators - well, obviously they have no animators, texture makers, sound artists or game authors at hand. Apparently they used to have quite a lot of educators (yes, they are content creaotrs too in this context) but I have no idea what happened to them. Were they all lost in the Big Layoff? Surprisingly, they don't seem to have enough good scripters either. You would have thought that lsl is child's play for a professional programmer but they still can't produce something as simple as a working holding animation script for a teddybear (or teddymole actually). This lack of in-house creator expertise is going to be a real challenge for LL now that LS2's focus has shifted from technology to content. They seem to be aware of the problem now though and awareness is always the first step to solving a problem. :matte-motes-smile:

Chic Aeon wrote: Well I am not in agreement with ChinRey's ideas about what the levels are for but .... Aww, I said the list was just a start and a rule of thumb. Obviously things are a bit more complicated than that. :matte-motes-wink: Chic Aeon wrote: TEST which you seem to be doing and that is a very good thing. You can also do the math. Drongle McMahon posted the formula for calculating switch points in this thread: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/LOD-vs-Draw-Distance/td-p/2302121 I have the formula typed into a ready-made spreadsheet so every time I make a mesh, I just enter the dimensions and get the switch points right away. Chic Aeon wrote: Be sure and check what the mesh will look like with your viewer LOD set to 2 (the Firestorm viewer's default - 75% of the viewing public or so) and if you are very conservative at 1.25 which is the Linden viewer default. That's not absoltuely correct. Firestorm's default LOD setting at medium quality graphics is 1.5, not 2.