Qie Niangao

Nova Convair wrote: Qie Niangao wrote:[...] If "no land as we know it" means something deeper, I sure wish somebody would explain it. Just read about "Hifi" which was mentioned in the context of SL2. There is a good example: Imagine a city which is held in a serverspace - you enter a building and switch to the serverspace that contains this building - you go to your apartment, open the door and enter the serverspace that contains your apartment. Switching serverspace is like sim crossing But if that will be noticeable then LL should drop everything and leave the work for the pro's. How a serverspace is implemented and hosted is a technical question. The network behind that world will surely be more complex and much more advanced than SL. - You will have to pay for the serverspace for your apartment. - There is no need to run that space if there is nobody in your apartment. But the city of course will still be there - if someone is in. So there is no need to keep everything running when nobody sees it.- There is no size. A serverspace can be an apartment - a city - the little cat NPC that wanders through the world - an area in space with the size of a lightyear? hehe - you'never know whats possible. I don't know of course If thats the goal of LL or within everyones imagination but I consider anything below that level as "steampunk". Oh, okay. So "no land as we know it" is really just an implementation detail about sharding scalability, not a fundamental change that removes all geography from the virtual world, which is what I've been taking to mean "land" and which seems to me so essential to any virtual world worth visiting. I'm not even a purist about "land" being limited to perfect 3D continuity, precluding portals or anything. So as I hinted in another post, I'm certainly not worried about the details of how space is simulated, as long as it is.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: However, when you look at what Second Life became, that system is horrifically inefficient. Even empty regions need to be simulated constantly and a region with one avatar in it uses the same resources as one with forty to eighty avatars in it, with more than eighty avatars in that region being effectively impossible. [...] Yeah, I recently speculated somewhere about the prospects of turning the sharding and the corresponding simulation "sideways" so that spatial interactions among simulated entities always require little communication events, rather than the simulation being strictly isomorphic with space. That seems possible, but I don't know how common it is, nor how easy. It's very true, however, that the current approach is inefficient -- but especially now (and especially on the Mainland) as the "population density" of avatars to land has thinned so dramatically. The effect seems a strangely, steeply nonmonotonic function of price: if recurring Land costs are too low, folks will own too much of it without worrying about putting it to effective use, so avatars will be thin on the ground. On the other hand, if land is too dear, folks won't be able to afford it and most of what exists will sit empty -- which pretty much describes Mainland these days. One thing, though: they could make "sim idling" more complete if they could move running sims among computing hosts. That would be difficult with the current implementation, I'm sure, but not impossible given enough time and effort... and a very reasonable requirement for a new platform.

Nova Convair wrote: If SL2 will really be new - then there will be no land as we know it. No parcelised sims. That means everything and the whole business model will be different. I see this often. People say it as if it meant something, so I presume it does, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what. If it's supposed to mean what it seems to imply -- that there'd be no geographic model at all, and/or that users would abandon their mammalian nesting instinct in favor of a sort of distributed Blender with a Skype plugin -- well, I think the userbase for anything like that wouldn't be worth a weekend's coding effort. If "no land as we know it" means something deeper, I sure wish somebody would explain it.

ChinRey wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: I read it to mean that LL realizes, finally, that they're charging way, way too low a commission on Marketplace sales, compared to the industry standard of app stores. I would expect (and hope) to see those go from 5% to about 30%. They can't. If LL increased MP commission to 30%, sellers would simply stop using it. Besides, you can't really compare MP to a professionally made "industry standard" app store. Both the service level offered to the sellers and the earning potential is much, much lower and LL really has no choice but to compencate for that with lower commision rates. Doesn't matter, really, whether they charge a lot in sales commission or land fees. Whatever the mix, it has pretty much the same depressive effect on the economy, and the same disincentive to participate. If folks are spending a fortune on land, they won't have as much left to buy creations, even if there were no sales commissions at all. (Yeah, there's the freeloader problem of non-landowners, or the flip-side: folks like me who rarely buy anything that's not land-related, and the specific "tax" rates incentivize different expenditures and experiences. Currently, for example, land revenues are eroding as folks shift towards relatively underpriced content. So there's some effect, but the overall "tax" rate matters much more than how it's apportioned between "property" and "sales" or whatever.) (Oh, and folks couldn't avoid the 30% commission. Note that I mentioned unifying in-world and web commerce. Any means of accepting new content into player inventory would involve that 30% fee, as would any other L$ transaction.)

I do, very much so. I suspect, however, that "land" will be a somewhat different product than what we've come to know. Or maybe just a wider variety. Actually, I have no idea what I mean by this, it's just a sense I get from how extraordinarily cagey everybody has been about Land -- but that spooky secrecy started years ago, on the night of long knives when Jack and his boss were simultaneously terminated.

I read it to mean that LL realizes, finally, that they're charging way, way too low a commission on Marketplace sales, compared to the industry standard of app stores. I would expect (and hope) to see those go from 5% to about 30%. At that point, they'd probably also merge in-world and web commerce (search, sales, listing, etc.) and collect the same commission either way. They should have done that when they GOM'd SLExchange, but the imbeciles running commerce at the time were just lucky to have a place to come in out of the sun.

Suki Hirano wrote: Actually, SL is an MMO. It's massive, it's online, it's multiplayer. The only difference is instead of being 80% gaming, 10% social and 10% cash shop like a regular MMO, it's 80% cash shop, 19% social and 1% gaming. Anyway it's not even that hard to implement considering Firestorm implemented tons of new features and they're a volunteer team. All it is is a queuing script that will auto-tp you when your number is up. But since LL rarely if ever implements new features... yeah I don't expect this to be implemented. Just thought I'd leave this thought here. If it were viewer-side, it would be made obsolete within a week by another viewer that somehow spammed the queue or otherwise gamed the algorithm. It could be done server-side, and that's where those fanciful percentages are misleading. Perhaps 5% of the active SL population care enough about shopping to even try to queue for entry, ever. Only a tiny fraction of a percent, the true shopping addict, would really notice that such a feature existed and use it on purpose more than once a fortnight. So of all the features that might be developed for SL, this seems like something to put on the priority queue to implement just after smell-o-vision. It's actually slightly worse than that. One might naively suppose that making it easier to get into super-busy event sims would increase expenditures. If one thinks about it a little more, however, just the opposite is probably true. In fact, when opening a new event that's only just building up the hype, it may be smart to artificially restrict sim entry enough to make sure that enough folks get turned away to make it a buzz-worthy effect -- this in the vein of RL retail chicanery such as repainting parking spaces to make a new shopping center look busy at opening, then less crowded once established.

No idea, but purely based on superstition: do the differently-behaving regions also differ in Pathfinding ("dynamic_pathfinding" in the sim console) ?

Especially because of the rotation problem, this is also a case in which a sandbox can be useful. First study your land in detail to decide exactly which way it should point and where it should go, then go to a sandbox, use the rezzer to rotate the item to the desired orientation for your parcel, freeze it in place, let it remove all the rezzer scripts, then delete the rezzer. Now, grab the thing into inventory as one big coalesced object, keeping careful track of the exact position of the last object selected. Back on your parcel, rez a new box at the location you want that point on the ship to occupy, rez the coalesced object on that spot, and all the rest of the coalesced object will be placed accordingly -- unless you picked a location that puts any part of it outside of land on which you can rez.

Kind of. It's certainly possible to move the seated avatar all around the object on which they're sitting, and to do that movement dependent on which animation is playing (really, that's the basis of furniture engines like nPose), and to move them in response to controls (that, for example, is how I script seating "adjustment", in preference to X/Y/Z position and rotation dialogs), and that may be what you really need, but... I don't think you can easily use the avatar's pos & rot from before they're seated unless the script collected it before they sat on a sitTarget (edit: as Rolig suggests, above). In my experience, that information is already lost once CHANGED_LINK occurs -- but only when the object has a sitTarget. Otherwise, if the avatar manages to sit on an object without a sit target, it seems to have its prior pos & rot for a brief instant after CHANGED_LINK, so you can kinda guess which part of the room they were standing before they sat. I've used that to put them in the animated "sitting position" nearest where they were standing, for example. So you might possibly be able to use that, if your object is easy to sit on without a sitTarget.

Life Camino wrote: The problem I am having is that it passes one, maybe two keys to the dataserver, then the rest of the dataserver requests are dropped. I'm curious what's really going on here. Is it really "one, maybe two" queries before stuff gets dropped? I'd expected that the list had scores of keys, and the corrsponding queries went out all in a loop, so that by the time the script released control from the http_response handler, a bunch of dataserver events had fallen off the event buffer. Were that the case, llSleep() would have no benefit, other than to delay getting around to processing the long-since overflowed event buffer. On the other hand, that would not explain getting only one or two dataserver events into the queue, unless there were other events also flooding the script's buffer.

Although we've expected them for years, the scripted Experiences now being beta-tested are, I suspect, really more intended for SL2 than SL1 at this point. (I'm having fun with my paltry little Experiences project and all, but to do something really ambitious, frankly, I find difficult to drum up the enthusiasm, knowing the days of SL1 are more than abstractly numbered. Even though I'm pretty confident that some of the Experiences philosophy will survive into SL2, all the details of how scripters use them are surely soon to be obsolete. I mean, it would be kind of pointless to craft an interactive narrative engine in LSL -- as I'd had in the back of my mind originally -- now that we know LSL is doomed if SL2 succeeds.) As to the specifics of SL2 and sim-crossing, those will most likely be quite similar to SL1 and OpenSim (yeah, there are some differences in the details between SL and OpenSim, but it's more stylistic than substantial, as is almost necessarily the case, given OpenSim's constrained objectives). "Most likely" but not quite necessarily. One can dream-up different ways to distribute processing, such as spatial interactions that regularly involve cross-shard communications, rather than the SL approach in which spatial simulation is mostly local processing until a heavy, disruptive hand-off between shards.

I very much doubt there will be significant further improvements in SL sim crossings unless / until SL2 fails. [Edit: Well... unless SL2 shards similarly to SL, with similar geo-crossing problems, in which case they may test out fixes in SL1 before deploying them to SL2. Maybe.]

The process is a little complicated, but I doubt you need step-by-step instructions. Fundamentally, there are just two things to know: First, you can "borrow" tier by removing some of the donation from the group to which the land is currently deeded. Yeah, it will fuss in funky magenta about how the group needs more land credits, but it won't immediately repossess the land or anything. Second, once you've contributed enough tier to the new group and set that as the active group for your avatar, you can use "Buy for Group" from About Land to transfer it directly into that new group, without it ever needing to pass through individual ownership, so you never need to give up that 10% group bonus.

Splatulated wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: Scripts you find on Marketplace that perform this function are almost universally obsolete. That's because the entire functionality has been replaced by a single LSL function. Anybody charging more than L$1 for such a script is ripping you off. what do I do with this ? I dont understand what i just read at all :c Well, the end-user would run a script that calls that function, if such a script were inside a product that needs resizing. The only use-case for a resize script (however obsolete its implementation) is for the creator to embed it into stuff they'll distribute to others. Installing any such script -- or even using one -- is more work and vastly more aggravation than simply scaling the object while editing it in the Build Tool. If you're still using resize scripts on mod-perm objects, stop right now and practice in the build tool until it's obvious why you'll never want to use such a script again. (Off-topic, but the same advice applies if you ever use the on-screen camera controls. Close that window immediately and forever, instead dragging the mouse to alt-zoom and control-alt-pivot.)

Scripts you find on Marketplace that perform this function are almost universally obsolete. That's because the entire functionality has been replaced by a single LSL function. Anybody charging more than L$1 for such a script is ripping you off.

In addition to gridsurvey, Tyche also generates weekly reports to SLU, e.g. http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/1995399-post2232.html from which it's evident that hardware hosting Estate sims is on average older than that for Mainland, although there's a distribution of server classes hosting each. (And yes, server class is no longer reliably predictive of sim performance.) Also, in case it doesn't turn up on first try, the same server instance often (usually?) hosts both Mainland and Estate regions.

On the other hand, it would be better if there were some more effective way to communicate to creators just how worthless they've made their product by setting it no-mod (with those very rare, very specialized exceptions to which Sassy alludes above). There's no way to even leave a negative review on Marketplace without buying the useless things, so there's really no way to warn other buyers what a waste of money they're about to make by buying the junk. When Ebbe shifts somewhat away from land, along with increasing the Marketplace commission to comparable app-store levels, I hope the Lab also provides a 15-minute return-for-refund interval. (That, however, is probably only realistic for SL2, because it needs an efficient way to recall all copies, rezzed or in Inventory, made from a refunded item. That would be extremely handy to have in SL1, too, but it seems the data model doesn't make that a simple query.)

Some do, but you need to be very, very good at what you do. That's because it requires hundreds of people pouring money into SL to support a single person taking out enough money to qualify as some kind of RL "living". (It has to be that way because there's no way that the average SL user is spending more than 1% of their total income on SL content alone.) Put another way, your stuff has to be so good that it compels hundreds of users to spend money on SL who otherwise wouldn't, or to increase spending by hundreds of folks already putting real money into SL content, or to lure away that much money spent on other SL content. As they say, there is no free lunch.

DejaHo wrote: What happens when all the sinks get clogged at the same time? Oh, it could happen. Well, less metaphorically, a time may come when nobody wants L$s at any price. Indeed, across the street, a very prominent Estate owner speculated that the ultimate end of the Linden Lab virtual worlds will happen at the same time that the L$ collapses in value. That sounds correct to me. Thing is, I think there's pretty much zero chance that anything like that will happen when SL2 is introduced. SL1 remains through that whole transition, so it promises to be a non-event compared to other historic changes in the SL economy. Oh, SL2 might eventually lead to that final decline and collapse of the whole enterprise, but not doing SL2 would surely lead to just such a collapse, and probably sooner. Anyway, it's all pretty pointless to speculate. As far as I know there's no way to sell the L$ short, and only an idiot would hoard L$s expecting a big spike in value.

DejaHo wrote: This is exactly what I'm trying to get at - why did you expect a dip? I suppose it's for the same reasons I wrote this thread. A dip or a raise must occur, economics 101. When, and how much? This may be why members of the Council of Economic Advisors generally take another course after Econ 101. The L$ supply is even more tightly managed than M1, with more awesomely powerful levers than mere Quantitative Easing. We know that LL sells L$s on the LindeX to prevent the value from climbing much beyond a target of about L$250/US$. Years ago, we even knew how many L$s they sold, but not anymore. There are also substantial "sinks" in the L$ supply -- processes that destroy L$s, such as upload fees, that generate demand to replenish the L$ supply even when the SL economy is shrinking. Years ago, we even knew how large these sinks were, but not anymore. From that past data, and from prudent business practices, we can be pretty sure that LL never buys L$s. Hence, although we may no longer know exactly how large L$ sources and sinks are these days, we can safely assume that the sinks are huge, and that under normal circumstances, LL is selling a lot of L$s into the LindeX. We can assume all that on the evidence of years and years of a flat exchange rate, very rarely even noticeably perturbed by any amount of bad news that might otherwise erode the L$'s value. Simply put, there must be a very fat cushion of L$ sinks that prevent the value from falling, otherwise it would have fluctuated more in the past. The rock-steadiness of the L$ through the whole cycle of this latest news is further evidence of just how big that cushion must be.

If only that "Kudo" button were replaced with a "Pay" dialog...

Seems a worthwhile way to proceed. Those prices (in Euros, I assume) are higher than what I see here (Newegg's Canadian site), but not outrageously so. Here, the prices for 2GB memory modules are about the same for DDR2 and DDR3. That's completely different for 4GB modules, however, which were always slightly exotic, high-capacity components for DDR2, but very common in DDR3. (So yeah, if you needed to go to 8GB with only two slots of DDR2, that would be expensive.) EDIT TO ADD: I do hope you're also able to do that graphics card upgrade, if you'll continue to use this machine for SL. Specifically for SL, that will make even more difference than the memory, I would guess, although both are needed. The memory, on the other hand, will be especially useful for non-SL uses. Also, incidentally, I know from personal experience that 64-bit Windows 8.1 works fine on a machine with only 4GB of memory: that's what's on this machine right now. (It used to have 8 GB and Linux, but... long boring story.) It's fine running SL and Blender and Gimp, although it will of course swap them out to disk when I change focus from one to the other. I have a big, fast SSD, so swapping isn't that painful on this machine.

Sparks Racecourse wrote: Cheaper to buy a new motherboard and the latest ram. There has been lot of changes to the motherboard in the past 7 years. I bought new ram for older computers, but the cost is much higher. Y'all can believe whatever magic you want about operating systems, but let's at least get the hardware facts straight. This motherboard takes stock DDR2 DIMMs, and they're cheap. (Well, memory prices in general are relatively high now, only gradually returning to the historic lows of a few years ago.)

Linux is certainly not going to magically make SL tolerable on your machine without upgrading both memory and graphics card. In my opinion, once you add memory and replace the graphics card (with something like that 640 you mentioned before, or better), your SL experience will be much improved, whether you're on Windows or Linux. I also suspect that you'll spend days getting dual-boot and a new Linux installation to work the way you want, only to discover that SL performance is nearly indistiguishable between Windows and Linux. I don't know about the typing slowdown specifically.