Coffee Pancake

Maybe time for a vitamin pill or two

Only due to FB's power and reach, any such issue will take many years before it manifests into actions.

I might be wrong, but vaguely remember ban lines being a hot topic 'blight on the landscape' issue years and years back and the Lab's answer was to pull back that information till the last possible moment.

When we made the minimap parcel borders we really wanted to show as much information as we could about parcels, the problem is the viewer doesn't know you don't have access till you're right on top of it. The map is basically a rendering of the the information the viewer has been explicitly sent by the region in that moment. It's not perfect. Extending this functionality would require server changes to give the viewer more information about parcels on the region you're on and it's neighbors.

Ban all 3rd party orbs everywhere. Break scripted controls to eject avatars and manage ban lists, limit to Linden/mole created scripts. Integrate these with parcel controls. "Security" in SL has been a questionable industry since day one and the source of the worst privacy scandals. Red Zone didn't get banned because of how it operated, it got banned because they aggressively marketed that aspect and we screamed about it on the forums for months.

Buying companies to remove their offerings from the marketplace and retain a percentage of the users is business as usual. LL did exactly this when they launched the SLM. We're not an alternative or a competitor to FB, we're breakfast.

We already have that, where do you think all the stuff came from.

A replacement, fully open source, documented with blender & Maya dev kits, commercially viable (ie, not junk, something creators will make content for), mesh body and head made by LL and mapped to all the body sliders is desperately needed.

BRING BACK MENTORS AND LIVE HELP

Starting a project is fun, completing one is happiness. SO.CLOSE ... oooh look, a new project ..

Stares at you in blender. Collaborative building is long dead.

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.