Coffee Pancake

I can assure you, this man is not a marxist or supporter of marxism in any way shape or form, neither is his company which due to a vocal conservative persecution complex favors right wing media.

Removing or simplifying the edit controls wouldn't make the viewer appreciably lighter or more performant. It would just remove some UI .. that you now have to switch viewers the moment you need to move stuff in your home or tint something. LL did have a simple UI viewer for a while which bombed SL back to the bare minimum to explore and chat with people, it was a disaster, no one found it useful and it had no impact on retention. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/03/basic-second-life-viewer.html A result of this project is the viewer still ships useless touch-like controls for movement as the default.

Low flying slow moving LOUD helicopters has made me seriously consider scripting a turret to blast them out the sky.

SL's UI problems all stem from the files/folders inventory paradigm. It offers a lot of power, but falls far short of the systems games have evolved to manage collections of things. What SL really needs now is collections, tagging and avatar slots. EG A special kind of folder that contains a collection of inventory items including an image and tags. This can then be presented to the user as a single item with a visual icon and list of tags derived from a notecard in the collection. By default the contents of collections are not shown to the user and can be presented as a visual inventory system (like the excellent wardrobe, but without the headache of needing to manually set everything up). Avatar slots would simply be named groups of attachment points that tagged collections are dropped into. EG An item collection tagged as a body would be a single item that is worn in the body slot, this can then be used to filter accessory collections by the type of body. Retro fitting this to the existing paradigm would be possible, but there would be a of of manual work on our part to sort all our stuff so it worked correctly, new products could just be sold ready packaged.

Obeying Santa.

Stylized avatars are easier to work with and don't trip people into the uncanny valley. SL avatars can easily be borderline, we don't see it as we have literally broken our brains by staring at our avatars for years.

My Food

Or you could just be wrong. A poly limit would not make SL faster. The vast majority of items would be below that limit, and those that weren't would circumvent it by using a second mesh .. which would be worse. Please show a single SL item with 1GB of textures.

SL's problem is fundamentally an architectural one. Games (and most everything you will ever play that uses 3D graphics) provide all the information needed with the rendering engine, all organized and ready to be loaded and put on screen just as quickly and efficiently as possible. All the content you might ever encounter is set in stone. SL isn't like that. Every asset is a trail of breadcrumbs that explodes into lists of objects and textures, each must be downloaded on demand and decoded ready to display on screen. No objects are fixed so prebaking anything is impossible. Any object or texture can be changed from one frame to the next. This gives us a very powerful creative platform, but comes at a cost. They don't make them like SL. On purpose. This is a misconception. It's not "bad content" or "lazy creators", it's the systems that have to deliver that content to the GPU. SL meshes can be on the higher poly count end of things, but this alone isn't the problem. Any modern GPU will blast right though SL models and spend most of it's time sitting around waiting to be told what to do next - This is why buying a better GPU only brings small performance improvements typically due to better IPC efficiency or boost clock speeds. A particularly painful example is rigged mesh content consisting of multiple separate meshes (like bodies with alpha cutouts). A list of animations acting on the avatar must be resolved and then applied to each individual rigged mesh by the CPU. This scales linearly, so 10 meshes takes 10 times longer than 1 mesh, and each mesh attachment can be made of many individually rigged parts. Again, this isn't a creator problem, in order to provide the alpha cut out functionality they have to use many meshes. The end result is that SL slows to a crawl in a crowd. The actual rendering part is only a tiny fraction of the entire frame loop. SL creators are for the most part very conscious of the content they create. What doesn't help is the poor mesh uploader's tendency to create garbage looking low detail models, especially when pushed hard to achieve a lower Li score (Li is a billing and land accounting measure, not an indicator of complexity). This results in users cranking up their detail settings to compensate. If you put SL content in a game engine it would fly. But we wouldn't be able to do most of the things that define SL (without incurring a much larger performance cost) ... and we would have Sansar or Blue Mars, and everyone _really_ loved those.

Bingo.

You really need to rethink your choice of analogy here. Getting fact checked is in no way comparable to the holocaust.

That's what the alpha is for. It fixes this. By design. On purpose.

Compared to other online / virtual social spaces and games with social elements, we have a long way to go. SL social is mostly group chat, which is great and shouldn't ever be changed or upgraded in anyway ever. Set in stone. Sacrosanct.

The biggest difference between SL content and AAA game content is ... lighting. We don't tend to light anything, because lighting is hard.

They have the money, devs and legal to clone Tilia over a lazy afternoon. Probably name it something equally vague like MetaCash .. such a good name, and only treads on the toes of some random no one cares altcoin. It's almost like you already know what a company named MetaCash would do, just from the name .. I bet they would have an app too.

This is the confusion. That branch logged in to special regions (IMO a good solution to ghost avatars in world) and then allowed sending IMs. That was it. There isn't much of a new direction from there unless logging in and messaging people is now off the table.

This is very much a thorn in SL's side and it's only grown bigger over the years. The tone in SL has very much shifted, newbies aren't like this. I think the problem is that as the platform and it's users have aged territorial instincts have only grown to the determent of the platform and experience as a whole. This is a systemic problem and we need a systemic solution, and it will probably be a foul tasting medicine. Personally, I would start by removing all notions of parcel based privacy. No access lists, no bans, no security orbs. Set the tone that SL is a open world where anything can happen. Sometimes that happening will be a jerk, but I'd bet that more often than not, it would be the kind of fun SL is sorely missing. We would of course find new ways to carve out and enforce the lost security that would be far more personally engaging. What's better - The jerk who never managed to do any harm because he was banned, or the jerk who showed up and got his ass handed to him by a group of friends demonstrating and reinforcing a shared social bond. It's easy to think of disruptive actions in a polarizing light, but when the only outlet to be disruptive is interpersonal & emotional drama, we're all left hiding in our homes terrified of being actually hurt. (you know you want to .. 🧁)

SL is an anomaly in large part due to it's ass-backwards design. Games and game engine derived content can't do what SL does without incurring massive penalaties. I think the simplest analogy is LEGO. A game engine derived experience is a fantastic boxed Lego set, it contains precisely the bricks needed, a cohesive presentation and a well thought out linear instruction manual (or two). It will build what it's intended to build and maybe some minor deviations on the same theme. Good luck building a house from this space ship. SL is a bucket of mixed up LEGO bricks that's been dumped out on the carpet, mixed up bricks from hundreds of sets (and some blocko, action figures and plushies mixed in), with more being found around the house and tossed on the pile. Houses and space ships are equally likely, but it will take a whole lot longer to assemble and it can't ever match the presentation or experience of the boxed set. Graphics cards are designed explicitly for boxed sets, and boxed sets are designed explicitly for graphics cards. All our previous competitors have used the boxed set approach, even Sansar did allowing users to create and then publish a boxed experience. No one is making platforms like SL on purpose - in the same way you can't buy a random amount of random bricks in a random bucket directly from LEGO. (To continue the LEGO theme) They don't inspire confidence for a Master Builder .. but the vast majority of people aren't going to put the time in to become that. Is already more personally interactive and more fun than anything you are likely to find in SL outside of frenetic moments in furry sandbox communities. It doesn't matter what it looks like or what you can't do. Give people a theme park and they will go have fun. Give people SL and those who stay will have to explain what they have built, and how it captures and embodies the concept of fun.

States are best thought of as a way to have 2 very different scripts in the same script, however due to the memory overhead the practical use cases are limited. A simple example would be a lamp that could be rezzed or held. Most examples that use states do so unnecessarily, eg an object that has a loading and running phase, and there is no downside to just merging both states into a single one. I rarely find them to be necessary or beneficial, they certainly shouldn't be thought of as OOP classes.

If the text appears in green, then it came from an object, probably worn by the person saying things "as you" Right click on "your" name that said the offending sentence and you should be able to identify who it belongs to. report them to club staff. With the owner information shown on screen you can then report them to LL .. a screenshot is included with the report so make sure it shows whats needed to aid in identifying the person and what they did. Keep your report calm, clear and concise.

What apple silicon viewer? We still don't have a viewer that doesn't depend on opengl. 😂😳😭

They have to be better to get your attention. To suggest SL is defining some kind of high bar that FB or Epic must meet for general mainstream adoption is a fantasy. They could be objectively junk from our perspective and they will still suck all the oxygen out of the room and make themselves the center of all discussion. They will poison the well and they will steal ideas from others, FB is already well documented for wholesale ripping off products published on their own VR platform without repercussion. Their mantra is "Copy, Acquire, Kill" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-03/facebook-accused-of-squeezing-rival-startups-in-virtual-reality

They haven't even started shipping yet, and at $$$$ for a M1X MAX PRO GUSH RAGE edition it's going to be some time before any SL users have one, it may be months before we see anecdotal "it works for me" stories, objective AB testing is unlikely to ever happen. I know of no third party viewer devs with an M1 (of any kind)

Change debug setting ExternalEditor to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe" "%s" (adjust as required for your editor wherever it may be installed) The work flow is now, open a script in the viewer, make the script edit floater nice and small (you still need to see it for errors as LSL is compiled on the server, not locally), press the "Edit..." button on the script floater, the script will open in your external editor and reset in world. When you save your script in the external editor, the script in SL will update, save and get recompiled. Install the VSCode LSL extension in VS Code Optionally, download LSLint from https://github.com/FixedBit/lslint/releases/ unzip and place the exe somewhere in your path and install LSLint for VSCode This will catch things in the editor and nag you with little popup notification messages (It's handy .. if clunky, the popups are notifications rather than a list).

I think you're missing the scope of FB's goal, the platform advantage and the knock on effect that will have on SL. We don't exist in a vacuum, this is a delicate balance between creators, business and consumers. A subtle shift in any area of that balance can easily tip us off a cliff. FB can create a competitor double the size of SL just off the platform exposure they have, it would be a miserable failure by facebook standards. A lot of SL creators doubled up their business in Sansar when that launched and it didn't impact us as very few users followed them. The creators stayed invested here because SL was still their primary earner. When FB go live, the moment they open the doors to external content creators, a ton of ours will do the same again, it would be dumb not to. By sheer scale of users, FB will become their primary income overnight, social migration will be slower, but it will happen. We end up left with a much smaller less invested set of creators, fewer events, lower incomes for everyone involved, less money to pay the lab, regions close and the cycle just feeds back into itself. And remember, that's just if FB fail miserably and only manage to make a platform double the population of SL. We have already seen this with certain long standing RP communities who bailed out of SL as a block. Once a few friends move, the rest follow them and it snowballs, we're left with empty regions their owners are unwilling to drop but can't just keep paying for them forever. The regions eventually close and community hubs are all that remains. FB & Epic (etc) are unlike any competitor we have ever faced before who had to start from literally nothing. They are the dominant point of call on the internet with established entrenched users and billions to burn. We don't even represent a tiny fraction of their users. They don't have to be better. They just have to be bigger. The only way we come though this is if SL can be positioned to ride their coat tails and get media coverage that mentions SL in the same breath as this brave new world. Right now, we might as well not even exist for all the coverage we're getting. The advantage we have is it will take some time for FB to gear up and to make all the mistakes LL have made. Stuff like virtual business meetings, we've learned the hard way that it's a non-starter, yet that's what FB decided to open with. Sadly I suspect the Lab might try to push that angle yet again and try and get attention by saying "look, we can do meetings too" rather than pushing an alterative social vison and how they plan to extend and push the boundaries of the metaverse concept. They may also try other things like further segregating or purging adult content in the hope that's the stumbling block. We desperately need tangible growth, and from the stats we get to see, we don't have it and tinkering with the new user experience is not going to do it alone. Expanding the platform, scope and vision is the only way up from here. Media will always favor the new and the rich. There is nothing new or exciting on the horizon for SL that we know about. We don't even have a CEO and our original bedazzled visionary has washed his hands of us to go play with the new kids.