Coffee Pancake

Chat range kills it.

This, as we have seen, is an extremely fragile bond. It only takes a smaller percentage of people from one community to migrate 'somewhere better' and their entire social circle will up and follow. Once it starts to snowball, there is no stopping it and we're left with empty regions that their owners hold for a while due to a sunk cost. Community hubs hold out longest as a place to meet up back in SL, but the core activities of that community in SL never recovers. Sansar initial direction was fine (not great, just fine), but the dithering and constant direction changes and lack of time spent developing community systems really doomed it. It's "experiences" we're also static in nature. You could make a really beautiful campfire for people to stand around, but there was literally nothing for them to do once they got there. The creative / building experience was a disaster and entirely disconnected from the experience of using the platform. Most people who tried it made up their minds in a single session and then never returned. It was also very clearly targeted at other people. The metaverse is a bedrock technology. It's the base used to build everything else. We need a lot more besides, but so long as we're tied to the walled garden, only technologies that can be uniformly applied to entire grid can be implemented. Every region can only ever have capabilities identical and open to all other regions. We can't build massive worlds, or worlds with fundamentally different properties & capabilities (such as instancing) in SL as it stands. If LL don't offer something, then we're SOL and have no choice but to go elsewhere. An open grid would allow the development of regions with capabilities specifically designed around the needs of the experience being created.

It's not even that complicated, the most common activity is social interactions, chatter & hanging out. Everything else is just a route to that. This is one of the fundamental missteps made by Sansar, they figured the club and the DJ were the point, when really they only exist to provide a back drop for the social aspects. Something Sansar was seriously deficient in. Modern 'gaming' technologies is kind of a cul-de-sac. Games are created to present a streamlined series of assets to a graphics card that in turn has been designed to accelerate that very specific use case. It's just a happy accident that GPU cores can be tasked with other jobs. This presents a problem for a platform like SL, much of the fundamental ad-hoc creativity we take for granted (even the simple stuff) isn't built around that catch22. A modern SL wouldn't be able to work like SL, it would be .. Sansar, had that ever been finished. MMO's are in many ways analogous to virtual worlds, especially ones like WoW or FFVIV, and while they can tick a lot of the boxes SL ticks, there are some they can never touch, sadly those are the things that make SL what it is. Oldbies are more reminiscent of the times when they had clout, this is not something SL alone has to deal with. Plenty of big game based platforms have a similar desire for 'the good old times' as can be seen by the rise of WoW classic. There is no way to recapture those days without moving to an entirely new platform .. which will then inevitably grow and change repeating the cycle. SL is a complex system that presents myriad ways for things to interact and weirdness to happen. In a way, the fact weirdness can happen is a good sign, even if it's a pain in the backside. But again, that leads to something that fundamentally isn't SL. It's Sansar, or Blue Mars, or any of the other dead worlds. Sansar ticked all of the boxes you're listing and did so in very well thought out and modern ways.

Who is shopping for social clues on the SLM.

The days of owning media are dead, capitalism has decided that we're only going to be renting everything from now on.

A review isn't an endorsement and shouldn't be seen that way. Plenty of people avoid leaving reviews specifically for this reason alone.

The worry is that he creates a monster that rolls over and crushes us while sleep walking to failure. The size of the market FB can present is such that it if only syphons off 15% of our most active creators and users, we're left fighting for our lives trying to keep the lights on. I really can't stress enough just how little movement it can take to hollow out a community in SL and leave it with no hope of ever coming back. We have already seen this happen with some staple SL communities that have been stable since the start only to evaporate almost overnight. It's not going to matter if the monster crashes and burns taking FB with it, that's going to be a very bitter dose of schadenfreude.

Opensim != SL Infrastructure in the same way Gimp != Photoshop. As it stands, Opensim is a backwater for people who have been banned from SL for *that* or who wish to participate in *that* without a ban. If it was even half the things you claim it to be, it would be bigger and more active than SL. It's never come close. Modern SL grid infrastructure has come on a long way since the dark days of string, sticky tape and the asset server being down. The SL grid infrastructure also has all of us attached to it. Web pages are aging technology. The internet's history is littered with the corpses of excellent technologies that failed to achieve ubiquity. Mostly due to the lure of microtransactions .. which we've had since day one. Much of the problems SL presents getting into the mobile space are asset management based, the mobile platform just doesn't have the horsepower to do all the on-the-fly collection and assembly the standard desktop viewer spends all its time doing. This is something that needs to be solved server side. An open access grid based on standards defined by LL would present a blank slate for mobile development and allow for that problem to be solved independent of LL. A simple example would a mobile proxy region that assembles and bakes content from a regular region into something tailored specifically to the limitations presented by a mobile device. This would of course come with some serious limitations to SL functionality from accessing devices, however is anyone on a cell phone really going to creating content. The SL viewer presents itself as a relic, it's very easy to look at how little the UI has advanced and assume that's the viewer. If Animats puts the stock Linden UI over the top of his vulkan render pipeline, it's going to be in the same boat. It might run better, but that alone isn't sufficient to for it to be perceived as a major advancement by non technical end users. That's a perceptual misconception. The SL grid has undergone significant platform advancement over the years. But from an end users perspective that's like putting a better database on a website, no one see's the database. As someone who's been here since the early days, SL is night and day different, It now does just work. The grid isn't down, content delivery problems have gone away, outages are rare, it's faster and smoother than it's ever been. But it still looks like SL and is used like SL ... which is more of an us problem than LL. It's really time for us to be more specific about what platform advancement should actually look like from an end users perspective. A good example would the rumblings of PBR on the horizon. PBR would be a major step forward for content creators and 3D production workflows. Will average bob see a huge difference in world .. probably not.

[ ] links present a security issue and is the one common vector in phishing attacks and other naughtyness. Show the full URL, it's ugly but it's honest.

SL works because it parallels early internet design principals, it's very easy to see how at launch, this was perceived as the next stepping stone for the wider internet .. 18 years ahead of it's time. We can expect to see all the new metaverse hype to repeat all the same mistakes made by Sansar and the other sterile worlds that have come and gone before, although due to platform leverage, they will all be bigger than SL. Sansar wasn't an upgrade, it was a do over with the lessons learnt from SL applied to modern game platform design. Sansar was intended to be SL 2.0, the design goals were such that it was predicted SL could conceivably be created inside Sansar .. yet it turned out to be yet another dead sterile world nobody cared to invest time in, that ended up almost tanking the company and taking a lot of very senior staff with it. There is a very real risk we will end up crushed by an upstart colossal failure from FB etc. By their scales, a world with a population a hundred times the size of SL will still be a massive failure. Such a platform however will suck out a lot of the oxygen and we can only stand to lose a certain percentage before the scales tip and we face irrelevance. It's with this in mind that I propose what I see as the only viable long term solution. Ubiquity. LL need to pivot from operating a walled garden to being the metaverse's broker. Open source the server code, let people run it on anything, and for a fee, allow it to become part of the SL grid with access to it's currency, markets, assets and DRM. SL as a platform doesn't need to be the best, or the biggest, it simply needs to be everywhere. Open source growth of the platform will kick back into advancement of the platform. So long as a 3rd party simulator operates by the required grid & client connectivity protocols, there is no reason why it can't be radically different from the fixed offering we have today and that raising tide will lift all ships. Run the LL server, opensim or roll your own to your own needs and specifications. Other companies could and should be encouraged to offer their own brokerage services, their own asset libraries, grids and currencies. Simulators could connect to multiple grid services and offer combined services to end users. LL backed by Tilia enter the field with a massive head start and home field advantage. A far cry from the impending messaverse we're about to witness. We can not depend on FB's (etc) inevitable flubs, failures, scandals and miss steps to leave us unscathed. Yes it's going to be a trash fire and we can poke fun from the peanut gallery, but to not take the changing landscape as an existential threat would be a fatal blunder. There is of course a couple of big elephants in the room to address, that being concerns over DRM, piracy and scalability. Piracy as a behavior is inevitable, it happens inside SL already, and would naturally increase should the walls come down. However, as with all forms of media piracy observed to date, the overall impact can be limited by strong controls over access to the grid infrastructure. Profitability demands legitimacy and accountability and that will put pressure simulator operators to keep their houses in order lest they find themselves out in the cold. Platform growth will also do much to limit the overall impact. It's also important to note we're not powerless and unable to push back. Scalability is a key issue and bigger concern in this plan, as we are all painfully aware certain parts of the SL platform do not uniformly scale (group chat being a notable example we're all familiar with, there are others). All parts of the LL service as broker must scale in the same way the wider internet scales, and again, LL have the advantage over competing grids in that they already know all the pinch points and have almost 2 decades experience. We win by becoming Apache, or nginx, or MySQL or email. Built on a set of open standards accessible to all. And by Win, I mean survive.

Meta's TV adverts are kicking in, tag line "This is going to be fun."

BoM is well worth the hassle switching. Just being able to kiss appliers goodbye and go back to wearing a regular skin and tattoos and alphas has been a amazing experience that has greatly simplified dress up. At the time I switched I was able to get a BoM update to my body and head, and updates to some of the applier stuff I had previously bought. I also was able to resurect a whole ton of archived content that I had given up being able to use from before the switch to mesh. I have since spent money on a different BoM only body and new skins and will only buy BoM compatible stuff going forward. Refreshing your avatar is a great way to get back into SL.

http://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/

You know you can generate normals from geometry right? Make a high detail model and bake that onto a low poly model with normal map for upload.

I'm curious what your 3D workflow is now .. I've never used the 3D in PS,.

The metabol client needs to be updated, if it hasn't been, switch to radegast

Can you see why this isn't getting fixed? A linden tests this by searching for people who can be found .. and finds them .. and then disregards the complaint. There could be an account setting that removes a person from search ... like From Firestorm, this flag is missing from web profiles, but that doesn't mean it's gone forever and not used anywhere (it could also be another setting that doesn't explicitly state that it removes a person from search). It also wouldn't surprise me if some LL staff have elected not to be found in search because they don't want random IM's from residents.

But this right here is why LL aren't reworking search. This drum is being beaten loudest by a single land lord with a 30L grievance. You're paying a dime for advertising .. that's worth about a dime. We all agree search can be better, it can always be better, but better for everyone probably doesn't look anything like your 10c use case that dominates any discussions.

More than 2 comments per page (like 30 per page) would also help counter store owners getting a couple of fake 5 stars to push a bad review down.

Encouraging creators and customers to engage with each other more is a win win. The customer gets the help they need and the creator gets important feedback to refine a product. Far more productive all round than a 1 star "thanks I hate it" review.

Just what SL needs ... daytime freakshow TV.

On the whole I think anon marketplace reviews are a good thing. A review can no longer be used or seen as an endorsement or as a reflection on the purchaser (especially good for notable SL users and adult items). As a merchant I would like to see something on market place pages where a customer can contact a merchant if they need support and a route to resolve issues. This is especially important to smaller vendors who genuinely want their customers to be happy and have the time to put into making things right. I would also like to see a page that prompts shoppers to leave reviews for recent purchases, maybe even rewarding them for doing so in some way. Reviews are always subject to being gamed in someway (good and bad), the counter is to get more people to leave reviews and drown less than genuine comments out by sheer weight of numbers. Gamifying the act of leaving reviews a little by adding an average of all star ratings left by an account in the accounts profile is a good counter to review bombing, no one wants to be a 2 star shopper.

A floating text box insisting you RTFM is not and never will be good onboarding. Show me any other game that introduces mechanics & UI functionality by pinning a readme to your screen. Yes yes .. SL isn't a game, but it looks like one which comes with some expectations. Leveraging those expectations increases accessibility. Following a step by step introduction to controls that interactively adds UI to the viewer is faster and cleaner.

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