[LL needs to implement a way to detect bots via script - urgently]

A thought: Would setting a anti-bot CAPTCHA on log in similar to how MFA works for accounts that are presumably human (aren't marked as a bot under 'Accounts') would help streamline a way to simply tick off 'no bots' under land options as a default land management option? It will be an extra step when you attempt to log into SL as a human, but it will help force bots to function online by being properly labeled as bots under the 'Account' menu.

 

Any thoughts on this? I could be missing something that could be exploited, but it's just a thought I'd toss out there.

[CasperTech Acquisition Discussion]

19 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

There will be no changes to how any of the products operate for a while and we hope to start off with bringing some new, exciting and additive features on board.   Maintaining service continuity and stability are key for us.

If there are any additive features in the future and it must take a fee, can it be an optional addition to preserve Casper's current base feature model? If not, will you consider this as a suggestion to prevent any catastrophe that will discourage users in the future?

[New Gacha Policy Discussion]

12 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

You still have to pay for it, and again random "chance" making  that vendor a game of chance. Ergo gambling. 

No you don't because you always know what you're getting next. It's a vendor swapper, essentially.

Optionally you can pay for it if you don't want the item displayed to get the next item or you don't. You're not tossing your money into the void this time. You know exactly what you're paying for. What makes this gambling isn't because there is chance in the equation, it is tossing your coin into something with no knowledge of what random thing you'll get. In this case you do know, like looking at a normal single item vendor.

tl;dr This circumvents that by showing you what the item you get will be. It's technically single purchase vendor that changes the advertised product after a transaction.

 

Is this good? I'm not saying it is good, but it is not gambling. But functionally it'd be disastrous because it's going to increase group spam and camping like the old days when luckyboards were huge, except x100. 

[New Gacha Policy Discussion]

Just now, Sammy Huntsman said:

You are not getting it. You say it is a random vendor. So there is a random chance you may get one dragon or the other. That is literally a game of chance. So that is gambling. 

There is a random chance you may get one dragon or the other, without having to pay for it yet. That's the key.

[New Gacha Policy Discussion]

3 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

It literally says gacha on it, and you don't know what you are gonna purchase. As you could get a common rare or ultra rare. So you are literally taking a chance, if you were to pay the 100L on trying to get the rare. That is gambling. Lol 

Well yeah, it says gacha, 'rare', and 'ultra rare' because the creator didn't feel like digging up their ad and changing the text on it. Seeing that the vendor they made is also in blender, I think it' s a WIP, so they're probably going to change it inworld. 

They'd have to call it like, 'random vendor' or something, because that is what it is. It's not gambling if all it does is change its vendor face to the exact item you're going to get next if you pay into it. You still know exactly what you can buy at that moment.

[New Gacha Policy Discussion]

4 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Roulette is gambling.

No you're misunderstanding how the above vendor I'm talking about works:
What this vendor is doing, is randomising the next item coming up. So it's like 'up next: This item is now up!' the user knows exactly what they are buying. They can go 'Eh this isn't the item I'm looking for' and wait for someone to get the item they wanted. This is NOT gambling.

You know exactly what you're going to get if you put your L$ into the vendor, but if the item showing is not what you're after, you can wait.

The chance part is if the item you want is the one up next. Not the one you're buying.

 

Anyway my joke was, this is going to create campers and group spam on events and is a terrible idea.

[New Gacha Policy Discussion]

14 minutes ago, Kyau Brodie said:

Positive Wavelength has already created a new system for their avatar gacha that complies with the new policy.

https://gyazo.com/01e167001234bf29857c7522ebdb6e89

...Huh.

You know what? I that does work. It's like a pay-in random item lucky board or something. You see what's on the board, you pay for it instead of putting in your name. It's like...an item roulette. 

Though I think that'll get a lot of people spamming like 'this item's up! someone get it so it moves over!' and probably increase foot traffic or camping lol.

Then everyone and their mom tries to get into events and screams about vendor campers.

[What's your favorite 'old thing' that is now 'new' again because of BOM?]

Skin detail layers. Small shading/highlight tweaks on the nose, eyelids, cheekbones, moles, scars, and whatever you want to make your skin feel more unique to your avatar. Creators are right on making it again because of BOM and I am living for it.

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

16 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Sounds like you're trying to persuade yourself, since your answers are so threadbare. A few educators...the hilarious canard that most people don't want sex...the claim that the Roblox economy is "like" SL. Yet any tech news article on this topic will tell you there's a conundrum here. Roblox has 150 million uses, yet paid out only $250 million to developers. SL has only 40,000 concurrency, 500,000 users or whatever (certainly under a million), yet it paid out $450 million plus to those merchants. Hmm, what's wrong with this picture?

To be fair, Roblox's UGC program is only reaching two years old and users have to sign up with a portfolio to get approval from it (likely to moderate Intellectual property and making sure the developers will work within technical scopes to keep content from going out of control like SL. To add, it's also not easy, since I have a few friends unable to get approval in 2020).

It won't make a total as high as SL at this moment due to the number of users able to sell content and SL's free market existing over a decade.

[Interesting video about photo/texture intellectual property]

Lesson here is: always use stock image or creative commons websites if you need to use images for a texture, because they exist for a reason. 🤣

Some freebie sources for the lurkers I remember from the back of my hand:

https://ambientcg.com/

https://www.textures.com/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

[dev kits, morality and rats with ponytails]

On 6/30/2021 at 7:37 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

In part it's to try and prevent people taking the dev kit and rolling there own mesh body from it ... which is silly as it only stops the honest (who aren't the ones pirating!) .. bit like walmart staff checking receipts as people leave the store (they can't stop you physically or even lay a finger on you, have no right to search you, and can be walked past).

It's really silly because the people who are looking to steal the body are just going to right click and save it off a random person, not put their brand and name in that body brand's radar to be slapped with a law suit LMAO. They're so out of touch they punish their supporters more than they protect themselves.

 

On 7/18/2021 at 9:44 AM, FreeToSL said:

You cant just transfer weight and call it a day, you always have to tinker with the weight manually.  If the mesh is original, UV is original, and the rigging is partly manual, what would the DMCA claim be ?

Also, there are a bunch of bodies you can get to start with, I think eBody you can get, Tonic costs like $L 100, the zooby body, etc.  its only a couple of the big brands doing the dev-kit monitoring.

You're right. If you rig something to a pirated dev kit they can not legally do anything because you're not breaking IP. They'll just blacklist you on their personal list but that's it.

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

So I've been lurking and I've decided to bring up a few points from a content creation perspective:

SL did have an active FPS and combat community back in the day (SLMC/SL Military), but the script language (LSL) is not good. There are a lot of workarounds that need to be made to get something that would have been done easily in a standard script language. Script kiddies in this community are really talented and clever, so they did what they can, but when something better comes up, they will leave because LSL is a pain to work with and you need good scripting for SL to be functional and fun. I will highlight three examples reflecting this: a completed pathfinding system that isn't broken and unusable for NPCs, a decent particle system that isn't outdated, and sounds playing from child prims to reduce script lag. There are a lot more where that come from, but those are three really basic examples LSL doesn't work with.

Let's do a small look into performance: SL is still very outdated in how it runs on computers. It runs on one thread, meaning that a high end computer will still be lagging with SL because it's not utilizing the potential opened up by newer machines. This is a problem because of how much we have to load in SL. Its competitors run on multiple threads. 

Materials and shiny metals are something we don't have, and by default setting SL on low graphics turns off every essential rendering needed to make tiled textures look good. Why is SL laggy? Because the average user can't see shadows or ambient occlusions, so we have to map and bake all our textures in so it looks appealing enough. Texturing metals to look metal requires you to bake in reflections because there are no good reflections to begin with. If SL had Playstation 2 graphics and cube maps, that'd be a big improvement, however, we don't have that. SL materials only covers glossiness (like plastic gloss) and bump maps. 

Animations? We don't have inverse kinematics. It's a standard and it's something that needs to exist for the avatar's foot to interact with bumps on the ground. It's also used for holding objects like a bat too, where both your left and right hand regardless of shape, is actually holding onto the bat instead of one of them just floating offset. An animator has to make multiple animations with guesses on shape to make sure we can have two handed things, or just go MEH and hope people change their shapes.

Creators can't upload or link mesh larger than 64x64. This means custom landscapes can only be frankenstein'd together, and a lot of work needs to be done making each chunk of that mesh work properly between physics. Do you want a seamless, vast, and unique landscape? A fully designed road map of a city that isn't turning in set 45 or 90 degree angles with a road kit? It'll be a lot of extra work to puzzle it together within those limitations, or take extra weeks to get it working with hours of LOD organization.

We don't have flexible mesh. This is such a basic necessity that would have made content creation easier for the creator, and we just don't have it. Capes? Gotta rig it like some weird stiff thing that hopefully won't clip when the arm moves. Bottom of a coat? Gotta move like weird offset floppy pants with weight painting that needs to be trial and error'd as much as it can because it'll clip when the legs pose too far. It was nice just assigning a coat or cape in VRchat to flop around instead of having to balance out weights for 6 hours straight so your coat moves like a stiff pant extension.

We could use better land impact and ARC rewards for lower poly mesh on highest, and balanced LODs for high, low and lowest. Right now as it is, the system punishes professional low poly, low texture memory content harder than a million poly 8+ texture faces mesh uploaded with the exploit to have 0 LODs on distance.

These things are why SL can't be as fun as it potentially could be. What I've mentioned above are all examples that other platforms have. All of the above could have made SL better, perform with better FPS, and have so much content to interact with.

 

 

Now, I know this is a huge block of text, but here's the short summary of it all:

SL has the potential to be fun with roleplay, point and click mysteries, FPS combat, and everything in between, but it's locked behind these outdated limitations that work against content creators harder than it helps when compared to other creation platforms like VRChat or Roblox. We have the community, we have the talent, the market, and the community pays that talent generously to the point where they can make a living off SL. However, I can't express how difficult it is to work with SL and the amount of hoops needed to be jumped to make anything basic look like it works.

 

 

I know we're all looking into market trend and trying to prove why stylized games like Roblox is doing so well, but that's what they are: stylized, and we don't want to judge something for having a style when every technical aspect of it is superior to work with. When it comes to the creation part, they are leagues easier and better to create content for than what SL is currently providing. SL content creation could be a lot more fun if we didn't have to take the time to MacGyver everything we do. Every content creator is a professional MacGyver, and they get no credit for this.

Let's not bash the incredible creators doing what they do on SL. They are doing their best with the old and outdated tools provided to them. Those Fantasy Faire sims are great and not forgetting to mention, they are shopping sims for cancer research so yeah, they're mainly for sightseeing ONLY and had constant high foot traffic of 30-80 users with hundreds of vendor scripts from 20+ shops, so they're not good examples to show how fun SL is. It's inspiring, yeah, but imagine the amazing things these same creators could make if they had modern tools at their finger tips...

TL;DR: SL has outdated tools for content creation and creators can't have fun with SL. SL has a nice market and pays well, but it's not appealing to an audience thriving like Roblox or VRChat because of stifled content interactivity and performance issues from outdated software. If SL updated their core tools, it would be able to compete, but right now, the only advantage SL has is its years of avatar content and its internal market.

I could even say SL is lucky right now because VRChat currently doesn't have an internal market. It's got a competitive userbase but Creators have to sell source files on gumroad, which is...not safe for a content creator at the moment since it's sold on trust that the user isn't going to reuse those source files elsewhere, or worse: sell it.