Tolya Ugajin

February 6, 2020

1 hour ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Maybe it was using Apple as the shining example of convenience in design. That's exactly the kind of thing they do.

ohhh lol I loathe Apple - inferior products at higher prices. I just used it as an extension of Scylla's post. (I'm really not a nerd)

/me waits for the Apple fanbois to roast him on a stake...

February 6, 2020

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Making something more "convenient" is not the same as taking choice out of someone's hands, and simply doing it for them.

Yes, there should be more convenient ways of dealing with lag built into the viewer.

But taking away their ability to control their own experience is exactly the kind of solution that, well . . . that I'd expect a Sith lord to endorse. 😉

I will grant you one thing - taking convenience to the point where your La-Z-Boy has a built in toilet (a la "Idiocracy", the greatest social commentary film of all time) is going too far!

February 6, 2020

41 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

In all seriousness: Unless I missed something, nobody suggested that graphics settings should be closed off and only adjusted automatically, which would take away control.

Adding a feature to enable auto-adjusting is adding convenience without taking control.

Other games have features like this, the easiest of which to implement is lowering the render resolution dynamically when FPS drops below a certain threshold. Same for shadow and max texture resolution.

Absolutely what I am saying, thanks.

February 6, 2020

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Let me make sure I include only the useful parts:

A product innovation that makes the consumer's experience more pleasant and easy is not treating them as moronic or lazy - that's just, well, frankly that's just a stupid way of looking at it. It's treating the consumer as valuable - their time is valuable, their initial impression of your platform is valuable, etc. There is a lot of feedback on this forum that users (particularly new or returning users) struggle with the experience being poor because of lag. There are ways to fix that now - ways that assume the new user will take the time and effort to learn them. But there are potentially better ways to fix it going forward, that do not require the investment of time and energy by the new customer - who may eventually pay LL a monthly membership, buy a sim, buy landscaping from Luna, buy houses and furniture from Pam, buy clothes from probably 20 people here, buy gachas, buy talking animated genitals, and buy Lindens from LL to buy all that. That new potential CUSTOMER is valuable to a whole lot of people, even outside of the value you personally put on them (potential friends and community members). Reducing the possibility that every new person coming to SL stays long enough to become a "paying customer" (in any or all of the ways I mentioned) should be a primary focus of LL. But, nah, Scylla thinks it's making them lazy and treating them as morons. Here's an idea, and I know it will strike you as being anti-socialist: let's allow businesses focus on making consumers happy through better products and services, and let's allow consumers, let's put our faith in them, to decide for themselves what is "best for them".

BTW, I am in no way saying make it impossible for users to change settings to their heart's content. Once they go beyond being a new user and want to do photography, or build, or whatever they will need and want to adjust settings, and they will also be far more willing to invest the time and effort into learning how. You KNOW I'd never suggest anything that gives me less control I'm saying make the viewer to default to dynamically adjust the various things others are saying "they can do it themselves" to make the new user experience easier. I'm baffled how anyone could get the idea I was suggesting locking out settings controls.

I'm equally baffled at how you could think I am shifting my argument. Lag is a perceived phenomenon, the result of many factors. I have been focusing on how the viewer could be tweaked to make it less of a burden.

While I enjoy the mental image of you in a bikini playing beach volleyball, you know better than to think I take you for empty headed. Although I have noticed you flounce about 😛

February 6, 2020

34 minutes ago, Tarina Sewell said:

The numbers of actual people in world are on decline.

Yes, but that's not as funny an answer.

Besides, when you point that out and offer suggestions of how to turn that around, you get called names 😛

February 6, 2020

31 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

OMG. So. GRUMPY.

Did you drop your Oh-So-Beautifully-Designed-But-It-Doesn't-Have-USB-Ports-Use-Streaming-Instead-BTW-Did-We-Mention-We-Own-a-Streaming-Service? computer on your foot this morning?

I "laughed" at Jane's response to you because it was a non-hostile, glib, and funny response. As you would see if you stepped back a bit.

(BTW she's Canadian, and part of the Secret Network of Canadian Women. You should watch your step . . .)

I'll keep my head wherever I like, thank you very much.

The "useless problem" isn't lag -- it's the idea that most users are too stupid to be able to take the simple steps required to fix it themselves using available tools.

Kinda like how resetting the thermostat isn't a useless problem, but finding some way of ensuring that people don't have to walk the 15 feet to the thermostat in order to reset it is.

Sorry, when did I address this as an issue relating to Linden Lab's viability as a company? I don't recall questioning Apple's success, because it's not at all relevant to what I was saying. Pretty sure PT Barnum or someone else had something instructive to say about this model of business strategy, though.

I'd agree that many SL users are tech-challenged. I'm arguing that a better answer than infantilizing them and reinforcing their fear and ignorance about the UI is to educate them on how to use it properly, so that they become a little less ignorant and fearful about it.

It doesn't require an advanced degree in CS to do so: Lyssa laid it out very nicely above. Yes, it could be redesigned to make it even easier and more intuitive: I'd like to see them do that. But that's not the same as essentially robbing them (and you, and me) of agency.

Now, go get another coffee, and take an aspirin for your throbbing foot, and stop being so out-of-sorts.

You're deliberately missing the point, and it's tiresome. You and the rest of the "don't be lazy" crowd are ignoring the fact that such "nonexistent problems" cost SL new members.

Customers are saying "there's a problem" - and calling them lazy or moronic is moronically lazy from a business practice perspective. Telling them to how to fix it themselves is all well and good, but it doesn't eliminate the problem, it merely tells people how to make it less annoying. Designing a product that prevents them from seeing a problem in the first place is 10 times better, and gets more people to keep using your product. You can call that "infantalizing" the customer, but people who understand consumers call it "good business".

In other words, my sweet socialist, let the capitalists handle making the business better. You just go enjoy Bellisaria.

February 6, 2020

1 hour ago, rasterscan said:

At its peak, what was Gor ?

I can't comment, because for 12 years I've avoided it like I avoid herpes. If you're active enough, you'll stumble across it eventually, but one does not normally seek it out if one is wise.

There are a SURPRISING number of Gor places and, given the traffic on a lot of them, I don't know how they pay for themselves.

February 6, 2020

22 hours ago, Tarin Babenco said:

I have been a away for a few years and recently came back. What happened to SL it’s dead

SL isn't dead.

The sims you frequented before mostly closed due to dramatardism. A few are still there, but now AFK slex places.

All those friends who never seem to be online created alts and never log into their old accounts.

The girlfriend you left behind is now a transsexual furry prostitute with a new user name, and she turned off "show online" for you.

It's not SL, it's you. The SL you left is different, so you need to approach it as if a noob - new friends, new places to hang.

February 6, 2020

Hand and Foot. Formerly Skippo. Funky Monkey was in there for a while as well. I only log in for about 1-2 hours in the morning before work, and 2-3 hours at night after work...

OMFG did I really just say I ONLY log in for 2-5 hours PER DAY? PLUS the time I waste on here?

I really need to get a life.

Anyway, mornings is 1-2 games of Hand and Foot with my girl, evenings depends on how she is feeling and how distracted I am. Normally, we hang out in the Gor sim we're "citizens" of (Gor is rapidly losing it's limited appeal, TBH) for a couple hours, but almost always end the night with a game of Hand and Foot.

BTW - is it weird that we sleep with our skype cams on facing each other in bed all night? I mentioned that to an RL friend and you'd think I had said I had an unnatural attraction to livestock.

February 6, 2020

23 minutes ago, janetosilio said:

Lol I'm a geek, not a nerd. I think...

February 6, 2020

8 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Some drivel.

Oh, I see, I am called "lazy" and your reaction is to laugh. I reply that that the person is being unhelpful, and I should be nice? Interesting difference in reactions.

Sorry, I'm going to be "not nice" instead. You label things as "useless solutions" and "nonexistent problems". Perhaps you should pull your head out of ... the sand. There is literally thread after thread complaining about lag,. "Nonexistent problem"? Sim owners deal with people complaining about lag constantly. "Nonexistent problem"? In thread after thread the experience of new people or people returning after a significant hiatus (remember the OP here?) who struggle with a clunky interface (ie. lag) - "nonexistent problem"? New people come on and ask about lag and oldbies point them to long drawn wiki pages about it, talk through a dozen different settings, and they get frustrated and leave, but a suggestion that could help those people is a "useless solution"?

Drivel.

You can babble all day about quaint, meaningless theories of "technological solutionism", but it's useless prattle. Your snippet about Apple vs. PC demonstrates a complete and utter lack of understanding about how consumer-oriented business (which SL is) survive and thrive. What you call "assuming most of us are slightly moronic or lazy" Apple and successful companies call being customer-centric - and it's why they employ tens of thousands while LL employs tens of tens. It's why their user bases expand while SL contracts. Remember the concept of user base? Recall any useless threads talking about declining user base for SL? That SHOULD be a real concern for people who have invested years here, because you have a lot more to lose as SL becomes more and more obsolete. Technology is passing SL by, and telling new users they need to stop being lazy and instead spend hours learning how to tweak settings and telling them that the problem is their computer only drives them away. New users of something as complicated as SL ARE inherently "moronic" - at least about the platform. And they have too many options for how to spend their time (and money) to be bothered with the learning DOS when they could use a Mac. Your example had one good use - it demonstrated your lack of awareness. The ease of Mac over DOS-driven machines is exactly why Apple became a major company. Perhaps if LL started thinking about how to make the new user experience simpler and better (as Apple did) rather than worrying about how to make minimal incremental improvement to how our cartoon characters look, it would not be such a small, stagnant company.

February 6, 2020

4 hours ago, janetosilio said:

Stop being lazy.

A useless and unhelpful suggestion. I'm sure it's the same sort of myopic thinking that was offered when things like power steering were introduced, or, more recently, "stop being forgetful and turn your thermostat down before you leave, who needs to be able to do it by smart phone?" Almost a billion a year in annual Nest sales later (10 times Second Life's revenue for LL).

See, smart businesses are always looking for ways to innovate and make their customers' experience better. Lazy companies sit back and say "my product is just fine the way it is, our customers can figure out how to use the product better on their own."

You may not need it, but SL is more than just you. I don't need it, but I'm thinking of people other than myself.

February 5, 2020

37 minutes ago, janetosilio said:

They already have that: it’s called low, medium and high settings. Other than that it’s going to vary so much from user to user it’s not going to be any more effective than low, medium and high, because you have some users running SL on a Commodore 64 and some users running SL on a hotrod and most users in between. How would a programmer know where the metric is?

Those settings do not vary dynamically with the conditions the avatar is in, so not what the value of your suggestion is. You're still stuck switching it when you move from environment to environment - IF the user even knows how to do it. Considering how many morons run around with everything on ultra and complain how slow the sim is, plenty of people obviously don't understand.

As for the poor programmer, the same way programmers usually set metrics - someone tells them what to aim for. I'm baffled why, when folks are surrounded every day by devices that automatically account for what sensors tell them is going on (don't like the space shuttle example? your car has multiple systems including the brakes and emissions systems, let alone ACC, proximity breaking, etc.) that do precisely the same thing, people seem to think would be so hard to apply to SL.

Regardless of what the system is running, the viewer knows what the FPS are (it's displayed in the upper right corner, after all). If the target is 30 (pick a number - me, I'd have LL base that target on market research with noobs) and have a programmed list of settings to adjust in steps until it hits that. If you're really running a Commodore 64, guess what - it'll set everything to the lowest setting and a message can pop up saying "hey, this is the best we can do on your POS computer and lousy internet connection, TFB, loser".

February 5, 2020

4 hours ago, janetosilio said:

I’m not sure I would trust a viewer to adjust my settings for me.

You can easily set your viewer up with the appropriate settings for certain situations and save them for use. For example, I have a “normal” setting where particles are lowered, avatar imposters, draw distance, shadows off, frame rate limited, etc. That’s what I normally walk around with. Then I have an ultra setting where shadows are enabled, antialiasing is turned up, etc, etc. Then I have various photography settings just for photos, wide angle, interior, exterior, ultra with some adjustments to water, glow, etc.

All of them are set up at settings that let them run at a decent framerate for me. I have FS and Black Dragon set up that way. It takes a minute to do, but it’s really worth it as far as viewing experience goes.

I'm way too lazy for all that (plus, I avoid busy sims anyway, and I know when I'm having problems, it's usually because I'm on hotel or airport internet), and I suspect most people are as well - not to mention most users are probably too, ummm, stupid to do it. I'm particularly thinking of new users, who are not going to have the knowledge of how to do it, nor the attention span to figure it out. One logs in, it's crappy visuals, "SL sucks!" and off they go to watching prons or Netflix or whatever.

Also, it could easily be a feature you could turn off for more advanced users. It certainly shouldn't be impossible, or indeed all that hard, to program, given that the viewer itself is giving you a frame rate, and the viewer itself can, as you mention, be easily adjusted to give up some super duper pretty graphics to improve frame rate - and the number of parameters isn't all that great. NASA managed to program the equivalent of a Commodore 64 to land the Space Shuttle, and there are wa lot more variables and target parameters in that, not to mention the average low end laptop today has more computing power than the entire fleet of shuttles at the time.

February 5, 2020

44 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

And the part people refer to as "SL" is actually the viewer, which is open-source that anyone could modify (and do). The problem that "SL doesn't properly utilize hardware" is a fixable problem that doesn't rely on LL.

I'd like to see a viewer where you can put in a couple of performance targets (such as FPS) and the viewer would dynamically adjust various settings (such as draw distance, particles, etc.) to attain that performance target. Heck, I'd pay for such a viewer. Last thing I want to do when I land in a busy sim is stop and twiddle with viewer settings so I'm not walking in Jello. Go ahead, turn off particles, shadows, reduce draw distance to 56 meters, whatever, automatically.

February 5, 2020

There are 4 areas to look at. First is your computer. If it is bad, nothing else matters. If it's good, then the next thing to consider is your internet connection. People assume because they pay for high end internet that means it will all be good. But, it may not be consistent at all times, and if you have 6 people running 11 devices, that broadband becomes a narrow pipe quickly, and then, regardless of SL's performance, your experience will be subpar. Third is the management of whatever sim you are on. Badly managed sims, which are not the Lab's fault, but the owners'. Bad sim design, overload of scripty objects, too many people and scripts, etc. This is somewhat an "SL problem" but no matter how good the hardware, bad use is going to create a bad experience.

That leaves the Second Life itself, which, certainly, could improve things, but most users who complain a lot, in my experience, have a lot they could do to improve.

February 4, 2020

On 2/3/2020 at 2:56 PM, Wulfie Reanimator said:

I was so confused until the halfway point...

I must day I was sad nobody else laughed.

February 3, 2020

First full business day of currency trading since Brexit was a done deal and the Pound is trading in the same range it's been for weeks. So much for the gloom and doom of a crash. Now, if they cannot get a reasonable trade deal in place before the end of the year, you might see the pound drop (or rise, for that matter, if, say, UK works out good deals with US, China, and Japan on their own). Of course, it seems unlikely that Boris will concede honoring ECJ ruling as binding on the UK, among other demands the EU has.

February 3, 2020

Indeed it does. A larger club is much harder to swing around quickly, and the resulting lag makes it easier for your quarry to dodge the blow. There will also be a lag any time you miss, as you will be thrown more off-balance with a bigger club than if you miss with a smaller club. This is very much the same with all weapons - you can miss all day with a light and nimble blade such as a rapier and never be off balance, whereas a club will always take you those critical extra microseconds to recover. This is why Club and Rapier Play (CaRP) sims are always dominated by rapiers. However, a good solid club, if you connect, will do far more damage, even if your opponent manages to parry. As Hercules once said, there's no more manly feeling than wrapping both your hands around your big, hard club and pounding away.

Hope this helps.

February 3, 2020

On 2/1/2020 at 2:36 AM, Matty Luminos said:

I'll just leave this here. https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/United-Kingdom/gasoline_prices/

At today's prices, and with today's exchange rate, ours is US$6.29 per gallon. California is cheap.

US gasoline taxes average around 55 cents (US) per gallon, including state and federal taxes. Most states do not assess sales tax on gas. The UK, by contrast, charges $2.82/gal. Then, the UK (and I believe all EU states, but could be wrong) adds on their 20%+ VAT - only a handful of US states charge sales tax on gasoline, and even then our highest states are under 10% sales tax.

In other words, most of the difference in cost for you is your nation's decision to heavily tax it. But, at least you don't have as far to drive.

February 2, 2020

33 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

It doesn't really matter.

I really wanted to ask if people 'regreted' not having more. But, then I decided I didn't want to bring up the regret thing.

I think I regret not having more relationships.

Regret not having more?

Well, I guess if you look at it that way, I regret missing out on around 1.5 billion women when I was single...

February 2, 2020

8 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Hmmm, well . . .

I do have exquisite taste . . .

(As a side note, did you know that chintz was made illegal in early 18th-century Britain? Its popularity was pissing off the native cloth makers.)

hmmm perhaps there IS some regulation I can get behind!

February 2, 2020

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

What on earth would I do with an entire sim done up in chintz????

Redecorate, of course

February 2, 2020

34 minutes ago, Beth Macbain said:

When a man has that many "relationships" and they involve providing financial report, I'd call him a sucker.

I think the findom ladies call them piggies?

Pay piggies, sugar daddies, or johns. Heck maybe they are just customers at strip clubs.

February 2, 2020

8 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

With the greatest respect, Tolya - I'm afraid your view of the european experiment mirrors your view of the American experiment. Having lived in both, those "talking points" ring as hollow as the PACs and think tanks that spawned them. I suggest you explore other news sources than Fox. Australian oligarchs probably aint the ones you want to tell you what to think.

I suggest you avoid making assumptions about people you do not know, because it's foolish. I've had business relationships with Europeans since 2003, and have spent many an evening conversing politics over beer or wine, although I must say they like to talk about US politics more than European politics. These are not "talking points" any more than my news sources are limited to Fox, and nobody tells me what to think.

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