Latif Khalifa

Shug, I just released Radegast 2.8 which should address this, add server side baking, etc. See release notes.

PRIM_LINK_TARGET is the best thing since sliced bread. Just rewrote 1 script resizer to use it, and it increases perfomance 50-fold. Nicely done!

Acheron Gloom wrote: You are basically just being sensationalist, and everything I've seen you say up to now has been as well. At least thats the best way I can describe what you've been spouting. I've used the feature to drop PE as low as half of what it was originally. And I've used it with mesh in similar ways by using a prim as the physics hull. Just because you don't know how to use features doesn't mean you should discourage others from using them. /post I don't invent things. I test them out and report on my findings. I took a throne chair and attempted to use the new physics features to ease the amount of work simulator need to do, and also hopefully reduce the prim count. The original throne is 22 prims. It has one invisible plain box prim as it's root. You can see it highlihgted in yellow. Switching to the new PE accounting by flipping one of the prims to physics none increased the prim count to 212. That would happen if anyone linked a mesh component to their pre existing object and in my opinion warrants a warning. Then I selected all but the root prim (remember, a simple box), and turn the physics to none on all of them. This resulted in a PE count of 24. Since there is no way to minimize it further this is the lowest PE number you can get. Therefore under the new accouinting have one simple colliding box is 2 prims more expensive than leaving at at old accounting where all 22 participate in the physics. Another thing that people should know about. The reason for these illogical and counter productive PE numbers is Linden Lab's decision to charge "streaming cost" on reguluar prims if they happen to be part of a linkset that falls under the new rules. It is therefore very likely that people not knowing the effect the rules have might decide to link in a mash part of pre-existing linkes which could result 10 doubling the primcount of that set and their parcel becoming full, objects return, etc. I have sent several example objects to Nyx Linden, Andrew Linden and others, and so far nobody has disputed the facts that I have stated.

From the mesh sim release notes: "Child prims can be set to have no collision shape (do not contribute to collision of object)" Do not use this feature! It will always increase your prim count, sometimes as much as 10-15 times. Testing on simple 22 prim linkset it inceased prim count to 212. Also do not link mesh components with regular prims. It will also likely 10 double your prim usage on those objects.

Yeah, performance on homestead regions got severely degraded with this release. Full regions work perfect.

I don't believe that Yoz sees any value in user feedback, despite all his proclamations to the contrary. Let me explain why. There is a bug in Viewer 2 search "Find always resets to start page" - https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1819 which is behavior that most people don't want. It's also commerce crippling since it is a common pattern when shopping to type in some search words and teleport around. This bug is simply a death nail for a merchant that is not on the first page of search. So the conversation with Yoz goes something like this, you explain to him the above, and he'll say "How do you know what people want?" Then you point out your personal experience with your friends, with your 5th year being in Second Life, to which Yoz will reply "not representative", just like he does in his comment in this thread. Then you give link to JIRA and point out number of comments and votes - "not representative". Then you give links to numerous threads on the forms - "not representative". I have not been able to find one resident, one JIRA comment, one forum comment that would indicate that there was any disagreement among the users that this is indeed a bug. But, short of getting 10 million signatures that would account for 50% + 1 Second Life user, Yoz will dismiss out of hand any feedback he doesn't like as "not representative". So it doesn't really come as a surprise that it is Yoz advocating removal of the voting from JIRA. My only concussion is that Lindens in charge of making priorities are confident enough that they know better than their users what they want, and that they really need no tools that would help them making those priorities. Tools would just get it the way. Which is fair enough, smart and talented people can sometimes achieve that. The only real issue I have is why this double speak? Why "improve" communications by removing some of its valuable signaling mechanisms? (Like the blog post about "improvements" in support, which really meant people could not get support anymore)

It has been rather disappointing experience reading this blog post. Its contents were not that surprising but the tone felt downright Orwellian. The pleas how Linden Lab wants to hear its customers sounded to me like the announcement about raising the chocolate ration to 20g a week in 1984. Discarding JIRA votes falls into this category. On one hand Linden Lab wants to improve the communication, on the other it wants to discard very valuable information on how important their customers think certain issues are. More professional organizations actually pay third parties to obtain such information. The only false expectation the voting system creates is that Linden Lab takes wishes of their customer base seriously. Just look at where Amanda recommends as "Places to connect with one another" and "Get the latest Second Life and Linden Lab news". There is myriad of ways to do that, except none of them are in Second Life! It is my strong belief this insistence on out-of-world experiences, be it communication or shopping is what is behind the decline of Second Life usage. M Linden's management team started down this path, where major developments were done without any user input, and where Facebook envy was all-overriding motivation. Viewer 2 don't wants you immersed in the wonderful world of Second Life, it wants you looking at various panels, popups and toasts. The search has made a satisfying in-world shopping experience almost impossible, while we're all pushed towards the marketplace - another out of SL experience. I was really hoping that departure of M Linden and his crew would mean increased focus on this wonderful world we have, and leave Facebook envy in the past, but apparently that is not the case. Second Life is a social network, its unique and wonderful. Don't try to integrate into other social networks so hard, realize what gem you have in your own possession. Allow us to create a whole eco system of apps and services in and around Second Life. Give us APIs and tools, let us build around it.

Welcome Rod, Impressive looking resumé, wish you and all of us all the best luck

External LSL editor feature is pretty sweet!

I'm very impressed with this demo. Despite Wallace's claims it works fine from here in Denmark. There is no control input lag at all, alt-zooming around works as well as in the installed viewer. It seems that they have datacenters around the world for low control lag. Well done, this technology shows a great promise.

Nice to hear that the group limit will be raised. It was long overdue. However the whole section about "Reduced Lag" is not very accurate. The sim freezes that you call "lag events" are still there and there was no visible improvements in server 1.42. Perhaps that is something in the pipeline that hasn't made it into the release server yet?

Really Q? That's the only comment you have on the feedback? To accuse some of us deliberately misunderstanding what you said? I think you are confusing disagreement with deliberate misunderstanding. Disagreeing with your opinion does not imply malice. I think a much more constructive approach would be if you commented on some points raised in the thread here instead. For instance, I would really like to hear how do you explain the fact that the most popular viewer used to connect to SL is the one with most options in it?

Q, The question of options came up during that OH meeting when the issue of chat focus in Viewer 2 was put forward. The chat focus is one of the most often mentioned source of irritation. While your reasoning sounds sound in theory, in practice it is often impossible to go with your solution c) where one interface satisfies all needs. You cannot possibly both satisfy the needs of people who prefer the WASD navigation, and the people who want to be able to just start typing and chat always, without some sort of toggle between those two behaviors. I know that you dismiss the validity of JIRA votes, polls, and other forms of feedback, since those are allegedly self selecting groups of people that do not represent the significant percentage of SL user base. What is a bit more difficult to dismiss out of hand are the actual usage numbers. The majority of time spent online is done using one of the third party viewers. Why do you think this is so? All of them have a vast array of options, and allow people to customize their experience in a far more advanced way than Viewer 2 does. So people are willing to put up with the uncertainty that comes with using a TPV just so they can adjust their experience the way they like it. TPV developers do not have fancy usability labs in San Francisco equipped with large monitors where you can see how couple of people try to use the product and where they stumble. What they do is listen to the actual feedback, and incorporate the features and options most users request. Taking away options, and "we know better" attitude is what made Viewer 2 UI so unpopular. It is most unfortunate that despite all proclamations about how "we made mistakes" and "we will listen from now on", nothing has really changed and that attitude continues unabashed. Unwillingness to really do a significant overhaul of the UI, unwillingness to consider taking some UI elements from 1.23 that worked well, totally ignoring all feedback (see WEB-1819 for the perfect example) does make me feel optimistic about the future of the platform. There is still a chance to turn the ship around, and to break the evil spell of falling concurrency. But for that to happen LL needs people on the viewer team who are able to hear the feedback, who are not defensive every step of the way when their product gets criticized, and who are willing to make changes that go beyond few cosmetic fixes here and there that we have seen from 2.0.0 -> 2.1.2.