Vivienne Schell
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Posts posted by Vivienne Schell
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"I did not say I was shutting anything down. Where did you get that? I said we're going to invest in our future success in a major way. If you have long term interest in our (and your) success that should be good news to you. If you think I should have told you much later that we're making that investment, when I would have more details, then ok, consider that a mistake I made. Many people want to know that we are doing that and are very happy to hear it. You did not want to know that now, but rather hear a more detailed plan say six months from now?"
Nothing against a better SL. But it´s perfectly clear that SL2 is intended to replace SL1. So yes. you frankly told people that SL as it is now will be shut down, cladded by a wishiwashi "once it´s not proftable anymore" statement and an undefined time span.
As a content creator i am not willing to invest more time and money into a zombie platform unless i know exactly about a migration plan and which parts of my creations will be portable to SL2 and which will be lost (in a technical sense). Communities (which i consider being content creators, too) want to know about the new community rules (like how do you deal with so-called "adult" content in SL2 - nipples or no nipples?).
As a consumer i am not willing to spend any money or time on something of which i do not know exactly if it will be of any value in SL2 or not.
For now all i know is that there will be "winners" and "losers". That´s inavoidable, but you simply cannot keep SL1 going (until 2.0 is up) without any clear specification of "win" and "lose" and by leaving people in total uncertainity and confusion.
The lasting impression is that Linden Lab itself is uncertain and confused about what SL2 will be and look like, and that´s not a promising perspective.
"Better" is not a valuable description, Linden Lab had 11 years to make SL "better" (and made it better in many areas). Not valuable enough for any further investments of time and money. Please clarify. And please do it as soon as possible or the cow you milk will wander to fields where Linden Lab has no benefits at all. And then we´ll neither have SL1 nor SL2.
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"...there are areas where we just have to move forward and do some things in new ways and thus can't guarantee 100% backwards compatability..."
Please clarify: What areas? Is there a migration plan? And if there is one, why will Linden Lab run two competing platforms at the same time - which would be an economical absurdity? Under this more than uncertain circumstances, can you honestly encourage content creators in Second Life to continue with development for Second Life 1.0? -
:matte-motes-shocked:
ya, everything must come to an end, and SL has come to an end. not really unexpected, but yeah. -
In worst case they can shut down the Lab pretty soon. Who wants to spend money and time on an inventory which will be obsolete within a few months? Or on maintaining it? Or on decorating a sim? Or whatever?
A better Second Life is a good idea, but as long as people can´t transfer inventory, it´s a suicidal idea.
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Dear Linden Lab follies,
your announcement certainly is among the worst shaped i ever recognised in the (real life) business world. Why? Because it simply lacks any kind of sensitivity towards the people who feed you, who are your customers. How can you even DARE to tell your existiing customer base (content creators as consumers alike) that you plan to shut down the platform in favor of "developing"(!) a new one without even giving a HINT on the benefits? What the hell will be BETTER there? What are you talking about AT ALL? What is the "spirit of second life" exactly? What exactly will not be backwards compatible? How can you even DARE to threaten paying customers with losing their million dollar investments and gazillion object inventories just because you, the Lindens, decided to come up with a new toy for your own developer pleasure? Sure, something like upgrading a game in the game industry is a common process, but this here is NOT a game. SL is a pile of user created content in any way, and not something which simply can be replaced by ... yes, by WHAT the hell???
How can you expect, after this terribly stupid announcement, that someone will spend a SINGLE dollar more on a doomed platform, while no one knows what is so superfantasticorgasmic great about the follow-up??? Frankly spoken: It would have been better to tell people: "SECOND LIFE WILL BE SHUT DOWN ANYTIME SOON".
Watch out for the Lindex over the coming weeks and prepare for shutting down your office. I doubt that you can run faster as your customers will run. OR clarify and commit yourself to Second Life, its further development and rre-establish the confidence, which you have lost dramatically. Do it soon.
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"I rather face some lag than having to walk around in some generic world only a handful of people can contribute to."
Well, if everyone turns down graphic performance to minimum level only to escape the annoying "bad memory allocation" bug, what´s the difference then?
Linden Lab must fix this, fix it soon and fix it reliably, otherwise this will stop the show sooner or later.
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"..you have the option of turning down a lot of detail.."
Hard to explain to someone who spent some money on a PC or a Mac which can run every high end game on high prefs while simultanously processing win 8, 3Ds and a bunch of background apps without such kind of hassle.
No, this is an exclusive Linden (coding) problem. And with the users... it´s like with the hen and the egg. While LL is the hen.
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"If people would use 512x512 textures instead of 1024x1024 ones, they could add both a normal and specular map and still use less memory."
This is true, but not a valid excuse. Linden Lab allows people to upload, use and abuse all kinds of resource killing things and iintroduced a lot of resource killing shinies all by themselves. The logical result is that it´s totally up to Linden Lab to keep things going. -
Sorry, but that´s a not always working workaround, niot a solution. And this workaround will fail finally and forever once creators start using excessive bump maps as materials. This is a showstopper bug, and nothing less, and it should be fixed ASAP, and if it cannot be fixed: Fire the developers. End of message.
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Yeah, we are busy.
Busy enough to be seriously annoyed by being forced to click something in the world after hacking some inflamatory lines into the local chat floater before being allowed to move our pixels (3.5.0 beta).
Whoever had this glorious idea of degrading the local chatline functionality should fix it ASAP.
Straight ahead.
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One thing for sure: Without adequate revenue Linden Lab will not survive, and without Linden Lab your experience will be as lost as mine. In so far Linden Lab´s commercial success is OUR success, and Linden Lab commercial failure, unfortunately, is OUR failure. Regardless if we like mesh imports or not.
Third parties: You are right that SL always relied on imports, but that´s not something LL as a software company can brag with and cultivate as a business strategy. Nothing beats native formats as soon as it comes to usability and effectively controlling the environment.
Wanna hear the true story on mesh imports?
Object creation with prims is native, and of all indigrients SL relies on this native format ever caused the LESS trouble of them all. And still does. Huge textures cause problems, massive server bugging scripts do, all the shiny but bugging stuff does, but not prims. Instead of developing their pretty successful (and cheap, highly effective and simple) format and toolset further (SL was mafe BIG with prims and native tools, not with imported cubes and spheres), some unnamed Linden managers and board members in their deepest - disconnected from SL subculture - wisdom (and friendship to some business knownothings who wanted to exploit the 3D models of their office skyscrapers in SL) decided to come up with "sculpt map imports", Well, these looked kinda nice, sure, but they caused trouble. Lots of. And the business friends still complained. And the techies at the Lab, desperately trying to keep this mess running, did as well.
"And hell, this renderosity stuff looks sooooo nice! We want this!! And the Google Warehouse! And, and, and..."
This was confirmed by a legion of users, of course, who refused to understand that Second Life is an online environment with a limited technical horizon and not a million dollar AAA 3D game or desktop presentation software and that renderosity, DAZ and google content is intellectual property.
And so they decided to come up with Polymesh imports, supported and confirmed by some employees who were friends with some great 3D modellers in the valley and elsewhere and loved to play with Maya instead of fixing the bugs in SL. Another two years later they came up with it, while a year of betatesting did not generate much more than a handful of enthuisatic hand selected friended creators and their friends importing some stuff onto the beta grid (stolen Halo and WoW models included - following the Hulk).
While, at the same time, someone refused to add a great little tool for aligning prim objects to the native toolset. Which was all free and opensource. But you know, who cares? Now they finally could let their business friends import their office replications into SL, which was most important. Or not? Unfortunately their business friends STILL complained, now on the violence, the sex, the content theft and all this. So the Linden masterminds were left alone with the real users and not really working polymesh imports.
While the only format and the only toolset which ever worked relatively perfect within SL and which made SL big and these Linden masterminds weathy and fat and won them all their business friends was neglected, devalued and ignored without ANY valuable reasoning. Apparently the same happened to the SL user.
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You obviously do not get it, Kwakkeide. Look at concurrency and the state of the Second Life economy. Look at who got laid off by Linden Lab lately (Two prominent product managers, responsible for Viewer 2 and , yes, Poly Mesh development). Second Life does not grow since years. Mesh iimports are out there for months and, as Charlar bragged, replaced 25 percent of the content. Maybe they even replaced 25 percent of users, but this is not a success at all. A success wouuld be 25 percent MORE paying users and 25 percent MORE revenue for Linden Lab. But this did not happen. Sculpties didn´t really "happen" in an economical sense for Linden Lab, and Poly-Mesh fails exactly the same way.
Why? It´s not about that imported sports cars look better than the native ones (while nothing beats the xBox, or a real Ferrari, anyway), it´s about that there is a way too limited supply of imports and a way too limited demand for imported sportscars. It´s about demand, and SL as a whole obviously neither demanded imported sculpt maps nor polymesh imports for further growth - and growth is essential for the further existance of SL. It´s about the economy.
As a comparison, the easy to handle, directly accessible and simple "Minecraft" gained 25 Million paying users without any import function while Linden Lab wasted time and money on developing a polygon mesh import and rendering engine, shaders and serverside solutions which still do not work correctly and do not make Second Life easier, better, more attractive or more frequently used than before. While Unity 3D and Blue Mars (and their hopeless attempt to make shiny imported 3D modelling and exhibiting a lasting experience for the average human being) either stay "promising conceptions", "niche" or vanish as a result of total failure.
No one logs into Second Life for being adviced to learn Blender or whatsoever. And no one logs into SL for just "consuming" what a handful of mostly hobbyist creators think is state-of -the-art in 3D modelling. And way too less people have fun with playing the barbie dress-up-dress-down game. And the ones who have fun with this kind of activity will not spend more money than they did before, anyway. No growth. All this never justified the time and money and attention Linden Lab spent on development. It did and will not win the necessary revenue for Linden lab to survive the rising maintainance and production costs and inflation rate. It´s wasted. An economical failure.
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I don´t bash anyone for the sins of Linden Lab employees, Mikki.
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Linden Lab charges a set-up fee of 1000 US dollars for a sim and 300 US dollars monthly for WHAT? For refusing to develop their OWN platform for their OWN customers?
I doubt that this is a valid business strategy, and all statistics since lately 2009 prove that the Linden Lab strategy (if it is one at all) of favoring imported formats over native ones is a failure.
There simply are no disadvantages in developing native, directly accessible formats and advanced usability. If there were any, neither Microsoft nor Apple nor any other software company on the planet ever had been successful. It costs money and needs developers, of course. Lindens obviously are good for troubleshooting, but this cannot be a valid reason for avoiding any kind of real, effective and user friendly software development at all - not for the price this company charges for it´s products.
Apart from this, NONE of the imports i have seen so far and made by myself so far do need any of the advanced features a 3D modelling application offers. Except imports which blow prim count through the roof by senseless polygon and verticle "beauty" - and are absolutely inadequate for usage in the Second Life environment.
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All these suggestions are useless. There is only one thing Linden Lab can do to make poly mesh useful for Second Life at all:
Give the users of this software better, easier to handle an more effective in-world tools. Let them create these supposed to be "cool" things in-world, natively.
Imported 3D formats alone will never ever keep Second Life alive but will only contribute to it´s slow death, as it is happening since three years (the six wasted months of promoting poly mesh imports included). All this import hype is just another attempt to establish a money sink (by upload fees) and one more deadly sin regarding usability and accessibility of the platform.
Linden Lab must develop Second Life, NOT Blender. This is as if Adobe would make the development future of Photoshop reliable on GIMP imports. Hilarious, ridiculous and totally off track. Linden Lab calls Linden Lab a "software" company. Oh really? So they developed Blender? I should have known.
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You may be right there, technically, but if someone asks for more "common" formats like "onj", this someone has a reason. The reason is that - apart from the Google Warehouse - most of the objects on the web are in "obj" format. And most of these "obj" files are either ripped or distributed under a sctrict "no transfer" license. For the average non-nerd wannabe ripper converting such stuff into collada isn´t such an easy task at all. And remember that out of the currently 40,000 logged in users maybe 400 know what the hell "Blender" is. But everyone can type "free 3D" into google search and get a zillion download links to "obj" files, which are either ripped or..., you know.
I am pretty sure that Linden Lab executives were pretty aware of the risk, and they still are and should be more than ever before with the Protect IP Act on the way. Picking some not sooo popular format certainly was not only a techie decision, imho. It slows down things - a bit at least.
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Why did SL go for collada and not something common like obj?
Because Linden Lab apparently wanted to avoid tenthousand DMCA´s and probable injunctions.
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Why not simply link to Turbosquid and the like, he he? And honestly, a "mesh" can be everything, there is "meshed" stuff en masse, which is specified by mesh as mesh, not as the weird nerd description of a 3D object. At least half of the search results, if not more, are related to the non-geek, RL meaning of this word. "Sculpted Prims" or "sculpty" was at least somehow descriptive for a format, but "Mesh"??? Truly the symptom of nerds making nerd stuff for nerds talking with nerds.
Just call it what it is: 3D Object Imports.
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Agreed. And as soon as the Protect IP Act passes US congress, Second Life could be dust. By encouraging and even charging people for making a content and IP theft paradise out of Second Life - even more than ever before by allowing unrevised object imports - they set Second Life onto the taget list of a business which is very capable of protecting itself - and all but fond of paying money to Linden Lab for opening a Second Life Turbosquid or opening a Second Life World of Warcraft.
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I am sure your two pages of legal advice and that (unauthorized) Miller Chair (generically made from the scratch) are impressive enough to keep Blizzard quiet on rebuilt from the scratch WoW avatars and game models.
:matte-motes-yawn:
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Sure, sure. You are absolutely right. No relevance AT ALL.
You win!!
:matte-motes-kiss:
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Nacy Nightfire wrote: It's in no company's interest to go aggressively after another company as small as LL and jump into full blown litigation. Notices are filed and there is time to comply.
Really?
Look up limewire.com
And the ever ongoing case here:
http://az.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.20110627_0001117.DAZ.htm/qx
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"Well you certainly have no idea what you are talking about. I had to laugh at your post. Not that I think you will, but, go look up Morrowind modding if you think I am somehow going to get sued."
No , i do not laugh on declared content rippers and copycats. The opposite is true. I heartily congratulate Linden Lab for attracting exactly this kind of character with their implementation of unrevised 3D object imports. It certainly will boost the further trust of investors and serious creators in the platform. People will happily be shopping for virtual goods which they cannot be sure of if they are legal or not. It will bring us exactly the kind of content and shiny progress we all waited and begged for.
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When i read some posts here, and if these posts reflect the opinion of the majority of the 3D model importing creators, I am almost convinced that Linden Lab will get sued at some point of the story - just a matter of time. This is much more dangerous than any "copybot" could ever become, and the word "copybot" alone still causes some major hysteria.
And if you are actually supporting the "Oh, we all will get away with a little bit of crime" this won´t help at all. A sim is 1000 dollars set up fee and 250 dollars a month,that´s a lot of money for the average resident. Linden Lab makes millions. Not peanuts.
About the Linden Attorneys - I am pretty sure that they know about the risks of unrevised model imports. They only won´t tell us. It would cause a major exodus.
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Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world
in General Discussion Forum
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"What we users want has been expressed since 11 years, no need to tell this over and over again."
That´s too easy. SL lost more than half off it´s population since the homestead fiasco happened (which was kidding in comparison to announcing a "better" shiny world where existing content will probably become totally obsolete).
Linden Lab did not manage to recover from this self-made blow. But their aim definately is not (and never was, read your Mitch Kapor) running a niche product for a niche audience (face it, that´s what SL is right now). They want mainstream, more revenue, more profits, more users. They only can achieve this not only by introducing a simplified, much more effective technology which will work on smartphones and tablets primarily, but by leaving the niche stigma per se.
And here we are: What´s "better" there? Is "better" meant as a term for describing a niche audience performimg their niche activities in a technologically better way? I doubt this.
Lately since SL lost momentum and half of it´s audience years ago almost everything the remaining users "wanted" were wishes proclaimed by a self centered niche audience and everything but maintream.
Its only my suggestion, but for continuing in the SL niche no one would need a complete replacement of what we have right now at all. AndI I doubt that anything truly competitive will ever be developed by someone else for this niche, which not only demands high tech but high attention and sensitive handling. It´s just too stressful and work intensive for a profitmaking company to deal with all the self-proclamed godesses and gods of the virtual universe and their moods and self centered opinions, only to keep things going in a somewhat profitable way.
So here comes a clear cut. It will and must be a clear cut for Linden Lab (IMHO), but i doubt that it will please the niche audience overly, including you and me, including the ones who favor this cut out of their self centered niche view. Second Life 2 most probably will not be like Second Life 1. It will be much more mainstream, which will include licensed content creation, a lot of painful restrictions and a much less bloated (and capable) client software for tablet compatibility. It will focus on what supposedly sells the best, like the virtual dress up (but never down) game, will avoid any kind of what we know as "adult" or "fetish" content and roleplay, will have a lot less salt and pepper but more family compatible looks and content. It will be connected to social media by default and lose a lot of it´s sexyness. It most probably will be compete with browser chat games like IMVU - and NOT with SL 1. It will not even carry the name "Second Life" (my ten cents).
I guess the plan was and is to let the Second Life "lifestyle" niche exist for while and hope for dramaless extinction born out of extended boredom while transporting mainstream compatible SL creators and their mainstream compatible, not ripped from somewhere/templated products (maybe 5-10 percent of the content offered on the MP) over to the new platform for familily entertainment. Family entertainment isn´t bad, i like the Simpsons!
Not a bad plan, and most probably the only one of value for Linden Lab as a company, but i am pretty sure that it will be painful for all these who neither like the Simpsons nor Disney.