Coffee Pancake

Innovative new ways to send packets over wires, packets competing with each other battle royale, tap the screen to get your packets moving .. wait your packets are defenseless in the oceanic gap, charge them with GEMS to keep the fishes away .. where do you get these GEMS .. well ... now you ask

I've been threatening to do that here, but I fear I would be murdered in my sleep.

I agree with the OP's sentiment, playing dress up was easier with system bodies. These days it's Maitreya or maybe Slink, maybe you can make things work together without clipping .. maybe you can't. Inventory full of demos to products only sold at events now passed. If you want a product as pictured, buy the fatpack. But it is still better than the standard sizing mess, the avatar proportions were terrible, and slight variability between vendors meant nothing could be combined anyway.

The OP's scary image is underselling the issue quite dramatically. It wont be $12 a month for video. It will be $12 a month for netflix & hulu, another $10 for youtube ... and so on. Visit a site not covered .. and you just automatically triggered the corresponding site fee. With data caps and heavy use fees on everything of course. Thinking you will save money by not paying for the social media package as you don't facebook wont work when half the websites you do use embed facebook code which then triggers the package being included anyway. Don't think SL is a game .. the UDP will classify it as one .. and your ISP wont care about your protests. But then Americans seem to like being robbed blind for mobile data ... (seriously .. data prices here are like gas prices in Europe). The typical net packages they have in portugal (that lacks net neutrality) are carved up site by site with top site bundles, but the actual data costs are so low that even if you buy all the packages its still significantly less than I pay poopcast every month. In general UK internet costs are 50% what the US pays and there a lot of very cheap, almost free options for people with limited needs. Mainly because in Europe, there is this magical thing called common infrastructure upon which companies compete for your business. You can choose any ISP over the existing wires to your home. Here my choice is poopcast or slow poopcast or stealing my neighbors poopcast ..

Club staff typically have eject / ban / tp home powers via an orb, organised security in SL has a long history of supplying both the solution and problem all wrapped in a protection racket.

I'd like to see prims basically free. Twisted Tori are pretty horrible (and about the same as a sculpt), but only l33t builders ever made everything from them. >.> Most prim content is cubes, plain simple cubes.

Pro tip... If you have a clicky object that is owner only (say a tree with built in options), you can set the on click action to pay L$. This will prevent the cursor from changing to a clicky hand when moused over. To click, right click and pick touch. It wont stop clicks being eaten by transparent objects, but it will help from a usability aspect only presenting the click hand when an interaction is possible.

Game engines have very broad scope from the developers side, and very limited scope from the players side. Game engines present fixed content to the user, it can be very broad in scope, but it all has to exist and be coded in before the player ever experiences it. SL does not have the same separation. You are walking around inside the editor, everything can change frame to frame. There is none of the pre-calculation or baking that game engines do between the editor and the playable end result. SL is 100% real time, everything you see has to be processed as it arrives or as it is created (these actions are exactly the same). SL also has a very different server client model, everything to do with the world and your interaction is server side. The client fetches, unpacks and renders only what the server tells it about. You press a key to move .. SL tells the server you did and that in turn works out what happens and tell you and everyone around. You could not make SL in a game engine like Unity or Unreal. Also not true, the bulk of the labs work the last few years has been working on the backend and moving services to HTTP and the cloud. SL now works the best it ever has. There are many front facing projects on the go at any one time, development is slow as the lab has heavy involvement with content creators. The slow pace that new content types are added is for our benefit. Current notable projects include bake on mesh, environment enhancement (windlight assets and zoned per parcel lighting controls) and animesh (adding bones to mesh content and then animating it). All of these have extended beta periods where the lab engages with users to create test content and help define how features should work. There are many other less notable dry technical projects of equal importance, like reworking the cache or further cloud integration. The lab is also working with TPV developers to add contributed features to the client. Everything has to pass a rigorous quality control. SL is not in maintenance mode. It might feel like it doesn't change as everything you see and associate with SL has nothing to do with LL. Making the render engine do more pretty always comes with a high price as it has to be done in real time. Game engines are also able to do a ton of work between the developer and player, this has a massive impact on how scenes are lit, how objects are rendered (or not), physics and so on. SL can not work this way. Yes. You could put SL content in a game engine and it would run twice as fast and be beautifully rendered. But the parts of SL that couldn't be translated are those that define SL. Rez a something, create something, change geometry on the fly, add a script, upload brand new content, arbitrarily change literally everything between frames ... and do it all in a wholly shared way. OpenSim and SL have nothing in common aside from presenting a similar end experience to the user. It is worth pointing out that the SL viewer has been opensource for a very long time at this point and no-one has ever managed to port a game render engine to the client, or the client to a game engine. Significant man hours have been sunk into going over the render pipeline only to end up with the conclusion that it's actually pretty solid. If you feel differently, by all means have at it, we will all (LL included) be very excited to see you succeed. As Apple are depreciating OpenGL, might I suggest you re-implement the engine using Vulkan.

No. No. No. No. The idea that SL has a poopy game engine is not true, has never been true and routinely gets tossed about by people with zero idea of how any of this works.

If you're paying for someone to make a mesh for you. ALWAYS ask for changes or Video of it being made.

Even if you ignore all the marketing buzz about creating "experiences" and "VR" , just looking at what Sansar offers, I have no idea what or who it's for. Without some sort of communal contiguous lobby for people to start in .. it's a collection of bubbles. Where is everyone / anyone, not here .. and that's all you know. How do you even tell people .. come look at this cool bubble I made / found / love. It's like trying to convince someone to check out something awesome, and when they ask where it is .. you say .. oh, it's an obscure corner of the intertubes, you need this client, then search for this bubble, wait 20 minutes for the download .. and then hangout for HOURS for someone to show up, i'm sure they will, you know, eventually. Oh you need to make an avatar too .. Even the act of playing dress up is entirely isolated. What do you think of my outfit ? No? Ok, I will be back in while after I tweak it .. how about now? No?

There is no need in SL for people to play security guard.

It's a fresh train wreck everyday, we're going to be dissecting this for decades to come.

Script can't tell if you're in a specific group, only that your active group matches the group it is set to.

... yeah, but I'm pretty sure addressing people with differing political views as "brain damaged" counts as regular harassment, and attempting to pivot every thread counts as trolling.

Usually, looking for specific edge cases in T&Cs is a sure-fire way of knowing you're being a

I got verbally harassed by a BRAND NAME maker of cyberpunk stuff after I left a SLM review complaining that a trivial update to some cybernetic arms didn't justify a full price repurchase, he went out of his way to message me in world ranting about how much work had been put in, threatened to ban me from his store and from updates (he was also exceptionally crude). The EXACT same arms are for sale from a different vendor, who also has other fully matching parts not sold by BRAND NAME ... so I'm left wondering who got robbed, because sure as hell someone did, probably me.

The trick is meaningful limits that we wont just hack our way around or don't burn the house down around us. LL will never deploy a Li change that will result in auto return triggering when the region boots up after it's applied. There would be pitchforks.

Sculpts were a hack to get more organic shapes into SL. The idea being that you have sphere, and with a little pinching and pulling you have an apple. Sculpts in SL are hardwired to degrade into spheres. The problem came when people started making complex geometry with them, making every possible vertex the format allowed (which wasn't many) count. Soon prim to sculpt converters appeared where you could slap down some prims, and then replace them all with a single sculpt (from apples, to .. a shipping pallet for example). This type of geometry didn't really work when the system tried to degrade them back to a spherical form, even if only by a little. Sculpts allowed us to hack in complex geometry and keep the 1 Li rezzed cost, in effect we found a new unintended use for them, and as rezzed Li costs money, there was plenty of pressure to do this. The problem .. they looked like a scrambled mess of triangles unless you were right up close to them. The bone headed solution (given to customers after they complained about they new items being poop), change the viewers LOD debug setting! In the end, as everyone was fiddling with a debug setting anyway, firestorm changed the slider in their viewer so it doubled the range of LOD values. No more users blindly changing debug settings and no more 1 prim furniture exploding into poly vomit. As a side effect, every single prim and avatar in SL didn't degrade as intended and SL got slower everywhere, most people didn't know that firestorms max detail was double LL's max detail. The end result was that sculpts looked ok in FS and junk in everything else, because if you don't know, you're not going to test your stuff. Then we started create a sculpts that were shrunken down then scaled it up twice the size (and looked close enough, sculpts are not a precise format). But to the viewer this sculpt was twice as big due to the bounding box further forcing the viewer to keep it fully loaded, add in a smattering of creators telling people to mess with debug settings even further and basically switching off viewer attempts to manage LOD (people are still doing this out of habit). We end up with tiny sculpts that look ok from half a region away and a viewer that's struggling to render everything at full resolution. Fast forward and we have mesh, superior to sculpts in every way and really what we should have had in the first place. The problem .. viewer LOD settings are still jacked though the roof and pressure to make everything a cheap to rez is still there. So .. we complain about mesh objects degrading to balls of triangles, mesh creators are twigging that the same bounding box hackery that worked for sculpts also works for mesh, performance is at an all time low and somehow it's textures that are to blame. Sculpts are a poor substitute for mesh and while they aren't bad in isolation when used as originally intended, the repercussions of them crippled SL performance for everyone, everywhere, and we're still living with the fallout today. Bin the sculpts by rendering them as mesh, restore the viewers LOD scale in firestorm, cry about all the stuff we've bought that's objectively terrible but end up in a much better place. Penny is right when she states we need limits, seriously, we will break everything just to save a prim or keep things rezzed at insane distances. Limits that don't hurt are simply not going to be effective at curtailing the runaway performance problems we have today. Object complexity is increasing exponentially along with tricks and hacks to get it rendered, we're knowingly bombing ourselves back to a text adventure. SL can bring a high end rig to it's knees and most users are running with integrated intel graphics and budget hardware. This mess is absolutely hurting retention.

What do you care about most ? Personally I don't care one jot how assets are packaged and stored. That can and should change as technology advances. Remember, not all sculpts are equal. The later ones pushed the format so hard that the defacto standard TPV viewer cranked LOD though the roof to compensate, nuking performance everywhere for everything just so a few objects stood a chance of being rendered, but that wasn't enough .. toss in the sculpt bounding box hacks that intentionally trick the viewer into thinking they are much larger on screen and further breaking LOD rendering. The ONLY use case for sculpts is hacking in geometry beyond the bounds set by mesh and bypassing Li calculations. Sculpts are universally bad, have been superseded by mesh and should be removed. Rendering them as mesh so no one looses any content is perfectly feasible. .. and it's all for nothing if Firestorm doesn't bring it's LOD slider in line with the labs, which they wont by choice, ever. Don't complain about performance when your viewer detail settings are cranked to the max and the viewers LOD handling has had it's legs cut off.. Sculpts forced this, mesh perpetuated it.

We have been in this mess for years. We have layers of fluffs stacked up the ceiling. Lets stop messing about. Today: LSO mitigation project announced to investigate any final holdover reasons for using LSO and possible updates to mono. Sculpt rendering project announced, converting all sculpts to meshes, investigating the best approach to generating LOD meshes. Submit your crazy LSO and sculpts ! Tomorrow : No more new sculpts or linden hair. 6 Months : Sculpt render server deployed, it does nothing but render sculpts to meshes all day every day. The beta grid now shows mesh replacement files if they have been created. No more new LSO. 12 Months. LSO scripts will stop working, Linden hair will vanish and all sculpts will have been rendered. We will have had ample time and involvement, there will be no surprises. None of these things require a lot of work on the part of LL, the extended time frame is for our benefit.

"I shall do the thing till someone with greater authority tells me to stop, and then whine about it." Sighs .. Linden clean up crew to isle 5, a baby vomited and a partially digested food fight has broken out.

LL have to embrace service changes that impact existing vintage content as as possibility. Should LSO script support be phased out. YES. Sculpts? YES. System avatar hair? YES. The list goes on...

Having perused the website a little more I have a few thoughts .... The OP states "He holds an MDiv, a Doctor of Divinity, " Both of which I hadn't heard of before so had to ask Googs, who helpfully explained that "In the academic study of theology, the Master of Divinity (MDiv, magister divinitatis in Latin) is the first professional degree of the pastoral profession in North America.", seems fair enough, helpfully Googlybutt went on to explain what a Doctor of Divinity was even though I hadn't got that far "A Doctor of Divinity is an honorary degree. The title is bestowed to individuals who have devoted their lives to theological pursuits or community betterment.", it struck me as odd that Googums felt the need to further clarify that "By convention, recipients of honorary doctorates do not use the title "Dr" in general correspondence" ... well, until I looked a little further on the website and saw that the OP was indeed using the Dr honorific in his displayname .. in pictures including the names of people who have accepted his services. Never in my life have I seen any professional business, let alone one of such a personal nature publishing the means for clients to look each other up and communicate directly. It's one thing to list other companies as clients, or names lacking the context to actually work out who and where "Job Bloggs" might be, but here we have pictures and names that are easily identified, searchable inside SL. So much for confidentiality. Much of the site carries a self justifying feel suggesting their first priority should be a copywriter and business adviser, hopefully they could convince the OP that publishing a map showing the exact location of their home apartment is probably a bad idea and that while domain privacy might cost a few extra bucks, preventing random people on the intertubes from accessing a verifying a wealth of personal information is certainly worth the money. No one should know where you sleep, let alone the color of the building. I don't doubt of the sincerity of the OP's intentions or skills as a life coach, but seriously .. if this is your desired career then getting help with the business side is an imperative. PS Names matter. Institute is a little close to institution (a word with few positive connotations) and it should be obvious why referring to yourself as ChosenOne is a poor choice. PPS Pursue those real life services you mention aggressively, start planning a book, stop offering a free tablet. PPPS I shall waive my usual consultancy fees in this instance.

SL does have some heavy assets, but it's worth restating that this isn't the sole cause of SL performance woes. If you stuck SL assets and avatars, 1024 textures and all into a game engine you would get double the frame rate. You wouldn't be able to rez a prim and then edit it. So it wouldn't be SL. The SL overhead needs to be taken into account, even if you ripped game assets and upload them to SL (no one would do that, no, never) you wont get anything like the performance of the game engine they originally appeared in. A straight owned land for abandoned land swap program would be awesome, even without the transplanting existing builds. It's never going to happen because we have private land ownership.