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Coffee Pancake

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Everything posted by Coffee Pancake

  1. Coffee Pancake
    The problem we have with making a clean break SL viewer that presents things in completely new ways is three fold ... Linden Lab servers - LL run the servers, which are developed to run hand in hand with their viewer, the servers are engineered to only send the information the Linden viewer needs in that moment (and the viewer is dumb like a rock). The further we get from the Linden way of operating in the viewer, the more frequently we find we need data that we just don't have .. and then have to try and come up with hacky ways to trick the server into sending it. This gets complicated and becomes prone to random breakage. Linden Lab code updates - LL publish a lot of updates to their viewer, the further we get from that base the more work is required on our part to 'merge' their changes into our code .. simply put, we have to take their changes to maintain compatibility with their grid, but not the parts that undo the work we have done, and potentially adjust our code to work with their new code. This is a huge amount of work, which leads neatly into ... Our time - There are only so many TPV developers with the skills and deep knowledge of how the Second Life platform operates (enough to count on your fingers) to do the work to build this whole new viewer experience, there is no pay or monetary reward and it can easily end up being a full time job (in some cases, a full time job on top of an actual full time job because people still have to eat). A complete rework would be a huge undertaking and is well beyond the scope of what talented hobby developers can hope to accomplish, for free, in their free time, that they could be spending doing anything else. Right now, we (Catznip) basically break even with donations covering hosting & bandwidth costs, and because we're a two person team, it's really easy for RL to happen and take away all the spare time we've intended to work on viewer stuff (Kitty is in the bad habit of using her holiday time from work to work on the viewer). Even the mighty Firestorm is entirely volunteer run and probably breaks even on hosting and licensing costs. If there was a way we could earn a living working on these projects then yes, absolutely it would be possible.
  2. Coffee Pancake
    We've been making excuses for janky systems, p-poor usability and zero attention paid to accessibility for almost 20 years. I think it's more constructive to stop doing that and make it clear that we expect better from LL. Lets start with screen reader support in the viewer, even if that's just for chat and IM.
  3. Coffee Pancake
    legacy content doesn't block newer graphics some legacy systems block new systems, and replacing those systems would make content that depends on them to cease functioning if provisioning some backwards compatibility couldn't be accomplished. A good example would be physics. What we have right now is lukewarm garbage, but there is a huge amount of content that depends on physics working a certain way (even if that way is actually broken). Replacing the physics system with something clientside would allow for far more responsiveness in everything we do in SL, it would be literally game changing, enabling a lot of highly interactive content and experiences. However, It's not possible to have two physics systems in place, and stuff designed for the old system would likely need to be rescripted, effectively breaking huge amounts of it. Recreating content that has been rendered useless by such a change would be a huge economic uptick for SL.
  4. Coffee Pancake
    (my current desk is chaotic evil, although we just got a new big panel so were able to retire a couple of weird ones)
  5. Coffee Pancake
    it being posted here creates a strong implication that SL is the context for the question without the OP needing to explicitly say "IN SL"
  6. Coffee Pancake
    The fear isn't that this bumps one specific profession, it's that this is the tip of a very large iceberg and we're seeing similar inroads into other areas once considered protected human spaces. In the short term we can expect dramatic increases in capability, the size and scope of projects can grow well beyond what current teams can accomplish in commercial timeframes, in the medium term we're relegated to an oversight or editorial role and in the end we simply can't compete. The only realm with some protected superiority is the physical one, and only because simulation can't match real world complexity and variability. It's not practical to build a complex enough simulation that can trial and error train a model in a reasonable timeframe. Yet. Current AI is limited by hardware, that will change. Asianometry have done some very good videos on the subject from an industry perspective. The Coming AI Chip Boom - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0948yq2Hqk Running Neural Networks on Meshes of Light - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0yj4hBDUsc
  7. Coffee Pancake
    You're missing the point and not seeing the wood for the trees. There is the literal act, and there is the abstracted personal meaning those acts inspire. Remember, it takes two to tango and some psychological & emotional goals might take convoluted or visually extreme steps to accomplish. Understanding this is not required to participate.
  8. Coffee Pancake
    To get ONE good design from a human the client needs to accurately describe what they want. Broad range of skills is required by both the artist and the client. Picking one good design from INFINATE variations. Simple skill on the part of the client, there is no artist. Picking the one perfect design that maximally appeals to inspire a precise response in a chosen demographic of monkey brains takes no one at all. Right now there is some skill is poking the AI, because the tech is output focused. This will change. We still need a human touch up artists to fix flaws and correct for "dreaming". Betting we could get an AI to do that too .. and another one to do context aware composition .. This represents the dawn of a new art period and bombs human art back to a niche populated by few with exceptional skill and personality. Future controversies wont be about the content of the work, but whether the worker had help .. or whether the worker even had agency.
  9. Coffee Pancake
    Remember when friends were a thing? ... Someone should bring back having friends, that was cool.
  10. Coffee Pancake
    Scripters do not make third party viewers. They are entirely different skillsets so far removed from each other that even suggesting it is laughable.
  11. Coffee Pancake
    Passes you a tub of ice cream that just started to melt.
  12. Coffee Pancake
    "Obscenity" alone is enough to ban most everything even vaguely adult in SL and leaves it all subject to the whims of the interpreter, the rest is just gilding the Lilly.
  13. Coffee Pancake
    I think it works as a safe umbrella term for everything that spawned from it, however distasteful whatever the current trending fantasy keywords or themes are. Many might not even look like CARP at first glace, a great deal of effort has gone in to minimizing the effort needed to play. CNC is a better term, but perhaps harder to explain. Some have an intentional pedantic difficulty understanding such statements.
  14. Coffee Pancake
    Thing is CARP was never about roleplaying or simulating R*pe, everyone entered a shared playspace, spent significant time messing about getting their avatar looking attractive and figuring out how combat systems worked. Encounters were pre gamed, flirted and teased, people had their favorites, and it rapidly got to the point that the play spaces dried up and everyone would hang out in the lobbies. People figured out it was just easier to get a room, or better yet, own a room and put actually good predictable things in it. In effect, creating the least surprising surprise sex adventure possible. The CARP locations & groups became a starting point for people after a particular dynamic to their RP. The key words and themes have changed, but the people haven't. Fantasy always dies on a hill of practical reality, people are lazy, it's a lot of work, truly random encounters can be fun but the novelty wears off real fast once mediocrity comes calling. So the themes and surprises change and have to keep changing, but not too quickly as no-one is actually after that anyway.
  15. Coffee Pancake
    Marginally.
  16. Coffee Pancake
    There are other viewers on the list ... *waves her hand jedi like* ... try Catznip ..
  17. Coffee Pancake
    There is no derender of any kind in the Linden viewer. You will need a third party viewer - https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory I think they all have derender in some form, although the specifics of how and where might differ.
  18. Coffee Pancake
    because you made the mistake of listening to everyone else about what makes for an acceptable bed time and sleep schedule .. or at least that's what goes through my mind when i come alive as the sun sets
  19. Coffee Pancake
    I think some people here are working on the assumption that AP has to happen for it to count as AP to LL. Just talking about AP in SL can be enough. Or having someone talk about doing AP at you while you naively ignore them. It's understandable why the reaction to young looking avatars (even if they are 18 or over) is so visceral, even if it and perhaps LL's stance is incorrect (I'm on the record as being opposed to permabans). This.
  20. Coffee Pancake
    The issue isn't the bans from regions, it's that they will likely be generating abuse reports in the process and that only has to stick once for full account termination.
  21. Coffee Pancake
    With Henri on this .. OP needs to double check their numbers.
  22. Coffee Pancake
    Yes it is, however age of a person isn't .. and when people create an avatar that isn't explicitly a character, more an extension of self, that subjectiveness is lost and it becomes personal. One of my RL best friends is a school bus driver .. who routinely gets mistaken for a high school student, and upon showing their employee ID badge with a photo has been asked "where did you get that". In so far as SL goes .. obviously not a tween or younger is as good as subjective gets.
  23. Coffee Pancake
    I'm just upset that I can't pull it off .. and my eyeliner/shadow skills are rudimentary at best (didn't paint eyeball - Win !!)
  24. Coffee Pancake
    A cherub avatar is a stylistic choice, the suggestion of impropriety and implication of that suggestion is entirely external. It's also not hard for young adults (yet still very much adults) to look like that on purpose IRL. Youtube - kawaii makeup tutorial Remember, 18 is adult, even if at 18 they are hella young .. that's ok, that's the line and they are on the ok side of it. It might be unethical for someone apparently much older to date an apparent 18 year old, but that's for them to deal with.
  25. Coffee Pancake
    This. Progressing the scripting engine ceased when they restructured 10 years ago, closing UK offices and letting 30% of staff go (article reads like it could have been posted yesterday) which included Babbage Linden, that one guy who knew how any of this worked and was at the time working on C# support. Oops. Since then we have had minor command additions to complement feature changes, quality of life shortcuts or the bare minimum to keep compatibility with the wider internet. Scripting in SL is massively under powered, lacking in capability, and fundamentally treated as an after thought checkbox by the powers that be. We have been begging for more memory for a decade and here we are splitting scripts into multiple parts to work around a limitation that would be TRIVIAL for LL to remove. A work around uses significantly more memory and processing time and is the least efficient solution possible. Scripters, as Intelligentsia as that makes them, have been able to exert almost no influence beyond tinkering at the fringes. They have either been broadly ignored or LL are so fantastically out of touch they have no idea how people are using their platform. Advancement in programming language capability is a basic sign of life and viability. By this measure, LSL is a dead language that has been allowed to wither and die in the only place it's used. Opps.
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