Coffee Pancake

Now try traveling with a friend in a vech that seats two. I suggest doing the latest drivers of SL on a monday.

To answer this specific point separately. It has been my experience attending usergroups for many years, that they do not exist to present a conduit between residents and platform development. They're explicitly for a one way flow of information. Linden declare the state of play and Linden answer questions on it. Specific issues with the state of play might be raised or highlighted, but the state of play itself can not be affected. At no point can a suggestion brought up to developers affect development budgeting and priorities. Those decisions happen further up the chain and are rooted in business priorities. We do not have a voice at that table. Even if you can get the whole server team to agree that things are terrible, that can't result in action and ends up just making everyone sad.

I don't think these can be fixed without a wholesale architectural shift away from simulating discreet regions to servicing individual avatars. The current system has us being passed hot-potato from one region host to another as we move about the grid with some messy overlap and handover at the borders. Even when working perfectly, as designed the system will always fail on region crossings and will always stall all services for all avatars during parts of the handover. It will also always cost a fortune to host and serve. There is no way to bodge what we have into what we want. There is no actual reason why server resources need to be tied precisely to arbitrary map tiles, many of which remain empty and idle most of the time. We need a new architecture where server resources are allocated directly to avatars and stay with that avatar for the duration of the session regardless of where they go or what they do. The entire grid could be hosted for a fraction of the current cost and scaling would be linked to population rather than map tiles. If a tree falls and no one is there, does it animate every single frame and play all the sounds .. Utter nonsense garbage. If there is no one to observe the tree, there is no tree.

Sure, in the same way that world of warcraft is a retro game (Nov 2004)

GTFO own a lot of land .. so many full regions, it's costing someone a fortune. There are very few active players. If it wasn't for SL Drivers, many locations might see no traffic one week to the next.

No it objectively doesn't. Go and check destination guide locations, 99% of them are empty. Events is so neglected as to be worthless.

It was the most uninspiring garbage the grid had ever seen. Most of SL's userbase AT THE TIME were not here for Digital Corporate HQ's. The gold was the payday handed out to build their pointless soul sucking locations. 2006 was a golden age for all the other reasons. We were economically and socially flourishing, and on the very fringes of all the human mess and complexity, art for the sake of art exploded. Excitement was hanging in the air and the user base evangelized SL as the future of the internet. WE HAD THE METAVERSE. WE MADE IT. IT WAS WORKING AND SELF ACTUALIZING. Then Linden came in and said "oh no, not like that" and hot on the heels of a few other poor "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" decisions, banned gambling. With a single stroke a key platform social tent pole got ripped down and surprising only Linden, the wheels came off the bus. It wasn't just the pure gambling that was lost, it was an entire social apparatus, it ripped the platforms beating heart out and made it plain that Linden were more than prepared to act against the interests of their customers (even if they had no idea what those interests were). HEY FELLOW KIDS - I HEAR YOU LIKE PLAYING GAMES WITH MONEY It took a few years for the money that was sloshing around to dry up and get absorbed, for that part of the tent to fully collapse, but it did ( ... and after some years finally recognizing the damage, we got "skill gaming", what the F were we supposed to do with that). Everyone tried. We pulled up our big girl pants and found other things to amuse ourselves. Worse, viscerally erotic things. "oh no, not like that" The perspective of a long term customer and deeply committed lover of SL, it's that Linden are doomed to echo their worst decisions and impulses over and over and over again. Out of touch to the point that we're left ricocheting between the same three knee jerk policy notes with the same outcomes. OMG gambling, OMG child avatars, OMG all the debauchery. Ban it. Contain. Banish. Here we go again, note for note, only this time we get to live though a mad dash panic to make up for a decade of technical neglect and debt at the same time.

is now ... https://steamcharts.com/app/22330

Sheesh .. look, we get a mention. Right up there with the scumbag Elder Scrolls IV Horse Armour that started this whole mess. This is literally all we get.

I really hope you're wrong ...

No, actually they do need to maintain a constant social media presence. That's how social media works, especially corporate social media, especially especially corporate social media for a social platform. Breaking the schedule will be algorithmically punished and hurt the reach of future postings, it can take months to recover lost position. If the social media manager is on holiday, coverage needs to be arranged, even if that's just sorting out timed posts in advance. That doesn't have to look like an uninterrupted seamless ultra professional service. Having random staffers post a picture and something light and fun would work well/ (Hi, I'm XYZ Linden. Strawberry is still on holiday, I work in the prim mines. Who are all you people, here's a picture of my cat.)

With the exception of a blogger network post on July 3rd. There has been no social posting since June 28th (social casino relaunch). The mobile client has received no substantive update since it launched on June 28th (rendering tweaks on iOS 17th July). There has been nothing about when the rescheduled SLB final keynote with Patch & Oberwolf might take place Social media silence has been noticed by bloggers. The last time this happened was because of the mud slinging medium article .. um ... You all ok back there?

That is not why. It's used because of technical debt. We have the entire history of SL stored in this format, that's not changing, ever.

There is no direct translation between a PBR texture with ORM and BlinnPhong. You can create a passable specular map by taking either the metal or roughness (which ever is most interesting) from the ORM, inverting them, pushing the contrast a little and adjusting the values in SL till you get something "near enough" Chat GPT suggests ffmpeg -i input_orm.png -vf "extractplanes=y, lutrgb=r='255-val':g='255-val':b='255-val', eq=contrast=2" -c:v png output_specular.png I have not tested this. Good Luck.

*sighs* Now I have retro computer envy.