[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

"They persist with this because the come to the entire transaction... with much baggage."

I think it might be better put "with previous experience".

[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

"As for banning people and muffling us on OUR OPINIONS of LL.. isn't that play GOD?"

No, it's trying to keep a communications medium useful.

It's easy to ruin a forum. The techniques are well known: trolling, flame wars, and sheer volume. We can all think of an example.

I won't look on Facebook for SL information until I can sign on to Facebook as my avatar... and that's not going to happen; Facebook wants every account to correspond to someone whose information can be sold. (Never mind that there are people who create Facebook accounts for their pets.) There are other things I don't much like about this announcement... but I hope that LL is serious about communicating with its users, and I am glad to hear that they will try to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high.

[Getting Immersed in Second Life]

I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Ember. The loudest voices are not necessarily representative, or for that matter even sensible.

[Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More]

Do chat logs show display names, or unique names? If it's the former, what's to keep someone from harrassing someone and appearing to be me?

[Mesh Open Beta Begins on October 13th]

"Odds are  extremely good that any clothing designed for any one maker's mesh body  will be completely unusable on any other mesh body, unless by the same  maker and made with exactly matching parameters..."

Strictly speaking, that's true now. Painted-on textures only look the way the designer intended on whatever exact shape the designer used when creating it; otherwise they're stretched or mashed. Prim skirts don't track leg length; if your legs are longer than what the designer based the outfit on, glitchpants are too long and prim skirts are too short... and vice versa.

Admittedly the discrepancies will be WAY more blatant for different avatar meshes, but if RL clothing were like SL clothing, it would all come in exactly one size.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"Who the hell is Schopenhauer?"

He is, or was, a philosopher--at least as relevant to mesh 3D graphics, I dare say, as Shaw.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

BTW, Sculptris Alpha 3, the freely downloadable version, runs just fine under WINE.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"Yes I am  inclined to agree, just seems funny that not all the naysayers are  builders first in SL, makes me wonder what their angle is."

Well... if you follow US politics you may recall the phrase "the professional left". SL has a professional naysayer.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"I don't understand why there is so much negativity toward mesh, whatever the reasons be for people going nuts."

In a word, protectionism.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"Since the  introduction of Windlght and Scuplties as well as Mono amd Viewer 2  Second Life has not only stopped growing, but lost about a quarter of   its paying customers...."

...and as we all know, post hoc ergo propter hoc, right?

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"is somebody going to show me something good done with cheap software...very cheap..."

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/art-gallery/ shows things done with Blender, which is free.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"...no matter how much humour you can put in the nonsense you are carrying on here...."

I think you're being kind. I've yet to see humor.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"Problem with updating avatars to a higher polycount is that the clothing is mapped on the body.... with more poly's the clothing would al need to be remaped... or would look real ugly and stretched..."

 

SL clothing looks ugly and stretched now. It only looks right on the exact shape the designer used when making it--to the extent that your shape differs from that shape, it is stretched or mashed. SL clothing is custom made but pretends to be pret a porter. If RL clothing worked like SL clothing, people would be marching on stores with torches and pitchforks, dressed VERY uncomfortably.

 

Clothing as painted-on texture can never look right. Real clothing is a separate object, and when you put it on assumes a minimum energy position, stretching across concavities rather than being vacuum sealed to the person wearing it. Straps in SL clothing look totally wrong, and just try to read text or recognize artwork on the front of a T-shirt worn by a woman in SL--unless, ironically, she is making use of prim breasts!

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

Happened to me, too. I ended up composing replies in a text editor, copying the text, then reply, paste, submit. Any reply that takes too long seems to fail.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

George Bernard Shaw, author of, among other things, Pygmalion. Also, curiously for this thread, an ardent Fabian socialist.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"Blender is wonky and infuriating, and forces you to buy the manual."

To encumber the discussion with actual data: take a look at http://www.blender.org/download/documentation/ and you'll see links to downloadable documentation and to online documentation and tutorials. They do mention a PDF for sale, but the page appears bereft of coercion.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

Ah. You want a walled garden, to be a big fish in a pond made small.

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"And what will be next? LSL?"

Speaking of LSL, was it really necessary to invent yet another scripting language and implement it in-house, ignoring all the other work done on development environments, documentation, efficient compilation and optimization for languages that already existed and are available everywhere? Wouldn't it have been nice to have started out with that 2.3 order of magnitude speedup by just starting with an existing VM that lots of talented people have worked on?

 

Especially after laying off what, 30% of its staff, Linden Lab can't afford NIH. There are virtual worlds where avatars wear clothing, not paint, and where skirts aren't strips of cloth sewn together at the waist. Over and above competition, recall Qarl né Linden's statement: "The single greatest reason for is the inherent geometric inefficiency of prims. The (only) solution is the meshes project." Lag is the universal complaint. It's what Chris Pirillo fell back on when people called him on his initial ignorant rant about SL. Should the entire population have to continue to suffer it because there aren't in-world mesh creation tools? (Yes, it would be great to have them. Nobody's ruled them out that I know of. Heck, isn't the in-world sculpted prim creation tool the work of a resident rather than LL?)

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"It's  Soviet-style communism to pretend that Mesh, which is highly  complicated, with expensive tools, or wonky and obfuscated opensource  tools forcing you to buy the manual."

This clause no verb. What are the imaginary communists pretending about mesh?

[Next Steps for Mesh Import]

"Let's at  least see you guys argue this one out on the merits of the truth about  it, that it is indeed a Linden windfall to a select class of people..."

...a class so darned select that anyone wanting to join it can. All one has to do is, you know, actually learn something.