[Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available]

As for Napster: napster primarily focused on distributing copyrighted music. Primarily. As in, to take a guess, 99% of the music belongs to EMI, or whatever big label. Back in the day the legal situation was very unclear, but they ruled napster to be shut down. SL on the other hand is an open platform, NOT primarily focused on distributing copyrighted material, but focused on the creation of virtual content and social and economic interaction.

Regarding the reality check: I am real, thank you very much. I dont expect everyone to learn blender, far from it. I never wanted to make that statement. What my point was that if you WANT to mesh, its not hard to learn it. If you want to rather use prims, thats also not hard to learn. The choice is yours. If you want to build things, go ahead and prim stuff up. If you have a 3D background and want to put it to use, OR if you want to learn how to do it, again, go ahead. You have all the options

Regarding profit: I see mesh as a potential, but I havent once considered it vital for the well being of my business. Quality is the word here, and if you pit builds against eachother, the higher quality one is likely to attract more customers. I dont see how this changes anything regarding to the current world. If someone does a super awesome sculpt/prim hybrid build, it will sell better than whatever build a day one newbie will put together without practice. The top end content creators already compete in the realm of sculpts, pre-rendered textures and whatnot, giving us meshes only really gives us the option to make assets that are lower prim, and nicer still.

My point has, and will continue to be, that given their talents, everyone has the potential to make great things. I never once said that beginners will be able to create game characters. beginners will make simple builds. But they will be able to do it in two different ways. Either a beginenr chooses to prim up a build, or a beginner chooses to learn a 3D application via some tutorials - and again i stress, there are many good ones out there, and its not hard to learn if you start small like you should. Either way, their first builds will be simple.

My view is that people shouldnt limited in their choice of content creation just because other people can not, or do not want to be able to use other tools than what we currently have. Why limit ourselves because some people only can do simple prim stuff? If we followed that maxime, we would still be in the stone age of SL and wouldve never developed significantly. We wouldnt have sculpts, certainly not voice, no windlight (because people might have old PCs that cant run it, so offering better graphics would be unfair). I hope you see the points im trying to get across here, my view is that youre making it look worse than it really is.

Also, I am not trying to turn the loss of users into something adorable. Its surprising that you accuse me of wanting to secure my own profits - which pays my bills, FYI - and at the same time not care about a decline of the users that I get that very profit from. I pointed it out to be related to the recent decisions by M linden, namely the layoffs, and the rumors of a buyout by MS. these news WILL shake people, and the gloom and doom prophets will most definitely not help things along in a good way either.

If you take a look at the most recent developments and whats to come, you might see that the way forward is to work with LL. they do start listening more than they did before. Project snowstorm is a great example. Putting away the protest signs and contributing will get you further, in my honest opinion. Standing in the way of development with your hands held up and saying "NO." will only get you run over. People tried before, and companies just dont work like that. However you CAN get on board and steer

[Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available]

thats true, it is cheaper indeed. from what I saw its not a bad program at all, definitely a cheaper alternative to 3dsmax´s several thousand USD per license

[Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available]

To reply to your "what if EA gets upset" question. Why didnt Valve get upset when their entire repertoire of CS and HL2 textures was being distributed freely on the grid? Why has TRU textures not been closed down, since even they dont always have only their own material? Why havent people been sued that produce lots and lots of copyrighted material and make profit off their creations?

IF EA gets upset, then the thing thats going to happen is that the offending content gets removed and the offending user gets warned, or worse, banned from SL. Its the current practice.

As for my statement of beginners and professionals alike being able to use mesh: Thats true. A beginning modeller can download blender, work through one or two tutorials, and he will be able to create his first mesh. Granted, not anywhere near what the professional will do. But guess what: Prim building is exactly the same. If youre new to it, its hard. damn hard. The moving controls are unintuitive at first, alignment tools are nonexistant, no mirroring function, nothing. If you dont know the special prim twisting techniques, you often feel unable to reproduce certain shapes. In that respect, its exactly the same.

Furthermore, given that meshes have a prim count rating system, a horrible horrible mesh build is less likely to be successful than well made ones. And again, look at SL prim and sculpt builds. There are skirts that take over a 100 prims, I dont dare guess the polycount, but its probably worth two or three game characters alone. An avatar with prim accessories has a LOD0 polycount of over 200.000, whereas game characters use about 10% of that, maybe 20% if they are protagonist material.

Mesh gives a huge potential. I do acknowledge the danger of ripped content, but I believe that it can and will be kept in check by the community and the copyright holders.

Also, even if you say blender is unusable and LL want to direct you toward max and maya. If you truly want these programs, they can be gotten. It is illegal, but as such your own responsibility. Yet, its how I started out. I grabbed max off the net, and learned to use it on my own. I did tutorials, practised every now and then. After I focused on actual professional 3d work, I earned enough through my SL business to BUY a commercial license, a renderer, and a maintenance contract ontop, and Im planning to buy any other tools I want to use as well.

Everyone has the ability to build, prim, sculpt, or mesh, whatever. it is up to them to use that ability, and be willing to learn. The learning curve is only steep if you make it so. If you want to build a car as your first mesh project, fit to be posted on the front page of 3dtotal.com? Then yes, you will fail miserably and your learning curve will be the mt everest. If you however take it slow, like youre supposed to? Its not hard, trust me. Ive done it, and I´ve seen others do it.

 

next, on the subject of SL changing their strategy. Phil´s strategy change was "fast, easy, fun", and not "whom will you meet today" last I recall. They are investing in infrastructure, giving you exactly what you actually demand. A SL that works, lower lag, better rez times, less crashes. Yet you seem lost in this world where everything is bad, everything will fail, it gets worse. Right now, the user count might be dropping. However imho this is mainly because of bad decisions BEFORE the strategy change. The system was getting bogged down, viewer 2 should have developed with community input right away, and M Linden was a manager noone could get behind, since he didnt speak our language.

Im not saying were in the promised land, we are far from it, and I know much needs doing. but I do say that we are back on track. We need innovations such as mesh to give us a wider market, and enable things such as better graphics rendering, which will be another big step forward. There are many things being worked on.

Lastly, talking about blue mars and IMVU. IMVU is simple, and people can get behind simple. Blue Mars uses the Cryengine, you know, from Crytek, that graphics demo with shooter elements. Its NOT built for midrange PCs. and why does it not attract people? Easy. only licensed people may be builders and content creators, thus there is far less freedom.

I havent really spent any amount of time in BM, but I highly doubt the furry population, or the gorean, BDSM, gay, whatever "different" community really has a lot of free roam there. I just cant imagine it. SL on the other hand may be rough around the edges, but if you want to be ANYTHING, you can pretty much be it. Again, within some legal limits that are understandable.

And the whole SL will turn into facebook thing? No. The profile hasnt changed at all in recent months, the only difference is that the RL tab and SL tab have been mixed. And that there might be possible other integrations in the future for those who want it. Dont want it? Noone forces you to give out, or look at other peoples RL information. You are free to ignore it, just as others are free to not live by the maxime of "SL != RL, dont ask, dont tell"

[Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available]

Well, maybe the free tools may be inadequate, except blender. The point is, you CAN use blender to create 3d meshes just like any other industry level tool. Just like Shockwave posted above, you already cant make textures, sounds and animations inworld, and noone complained when sculpts came around either.

Sure, there ARE inworld creation tools for sculpts now, I give it that. But they dont have the same quality of third party applications.

My point is this. You need third party apps for textures, sounds and animations, as well as sculpts. And now that mesh comes around, which, as someone who works with both mesh AND sculpts, will be FAR easier and straightforward than sculpts, all of a sudden this trend isnt okay anymore?

Furthermore, SL´s policy never changed. Why does their strategy change to "whom will you meet today" when they give us MORE tools to create awesome content inworld? I fail to see the logic. SL has always had the same philosophy, allowing us to create a world. Bad decisions have been made, but I fail to see where the focus shifted away from content. Everyone can still create, everyone can still upload things, sell things, own land, do what they want pretty much, save for some legal barriers.

I can give you a great reason why the whole turbosquid fantasy wont work. The same reason you named before. A mesh which hasnt been built for SL will hardly function in SL. Go look at the beta. Each mesh has a prim count rating assigned. If you want to import that 5-trillion polygon attack chopper, fine. But be prepared to spend 500 prims on a parcel for it because of its complexity.

The argument of ripping off also doesnt uphold. Look around for a moment, and you will see TONS of ripped content from all kinds of games, copyrighted designs, characters, guns, cars, whatever. Do you really think mesh will change anything about what already is going on in world? SL has always been like this, and will not burn to ashes because people actually get a VERY potent creation tool in their hands now.

That said, I look forward to mesh. Its a huge potential to make proper SL content, and its a needed step forward. Prims are a great builder tool to start people off, and mesh will allow professionals and beginners alike to bring their creations into SL the way they imagine them to be, beyond the limits of what sculpts could offer previously.

[Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available]

so according to your views it needs a rollback to a MUCH worse codebase, a MUCH worse viewer, dumping a ton of features? lets make a list of what youd drop.

• sculpts
• windlight
• outfits
• avatar alpha
• the AWESOME server 1.38 script functions which contribute to greatly lowering the amount of scripts people need for certain stuff
• mono
• http textures
• the upcoming new asset streaming architecture
• display names, increased sim height to 4096 meters
• vertex buffer objects (great performance boost)
• a metric ton of bugfixes and stability improvements
• voice chat

If you honestly believe that all this should be dropped because you dont like 2.x´s UI - which is what im sure itll boil down in the end - then maybe SL isnt for you. You should read up on all the stuff that happened since 1.01, Im sure I forgot a bunch of wonderful additions in my little list.

As far as having respect for its clients and helpful, friendly and intelligent staffing, THAT I can get behind. I havent had many issues, but ive heard a lot. As for the 2006 ToS, youd have to tell me what that actually spelled out. Gambling was a necessary ban in my eyes, not much lost there, the economy more than recovered. As for ageplay, I dont really like a pure fantasy between consenting adults being made a banable offense, but they had to cover their bases i suppose.

[Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available]

Hmm. that might be your views, but in all honesty, a lot of people see things like this:

• Viewer 2: admittedly a desaster at the start. Is now maturing into something very very nice
• Mesh import: will be one of the greatest things in SL´s history. will introduce some issues, but the possibilities are immense now
• server RC channels: a great way of getting software tested more efficiently, and it accelerates development a good deal. you can /see/ that things are moving forward
• marketplace failure: what marketplace failure? the new site is a superior replacement to xstreetSL. it offers more options to merchants and I find it reasonably easy to use
• search desaster: agreed, but being worked on
• buggy mono implementation: again, being worked on, most the bugs are ironed out now. i agree though, it shouldve been in focus earlier on
• teen merger: cant speak about that yet, but any teens wanting on the main grid to have sex already are here anyways. I doubt itd change much in the long run

[Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available]

I suspect some driver/hardware issues. 2.4 is a beta, so bugs are to be expected. the best you can do is use the jira and report your findings. give them a good description of what exactly happens, where it happens, on what hardware, drivers etc.

That way, they can get it fixed, and you wont have that problem anymore, most likely. Until then, try 2.3, which is a release build and as such, more stable. And as a scripter, I can only stress the importance on giving a proper, detailed report. Else, pretty much everyone will have a hell of a time finding where the error happens.

[Try Out the New Viewer 2.4 Beta, Now Available]

I would first like to say that this looks like a very promising release. Ill hold off until 2.4 goes live to check the enhancements, but the whole graphical renovations sound great.

With that said, I would like to know if the new, deferred/GI based renderer will ever be performant on ATI cards. I hear some Nvidia folks having decent FPS (I acknowledge its still in development), yet with a hd9570, a rather powerful card, I can barely break 10-15 fps most of the time. FSAA doesnt work at all and wrecks the FPS as well. Again, I know its in development, I would just like to know what plans exist in that regard.

On another note, regarding the people demanding LL go back to 1.x code. You all do realize that 1.x code is much, MUCH worse than the 2.x base? Just because you dislike the UI, you do not have to make demands to force LL back toward a much worse codebase, making things worse for everyone.

The UI can certainly be disagreed about, but personally I find it gives me a LOT more screen space. Sure, it does get cramped if you have the favorites bar, adress bar, and sidebar open at all times. thats what I dont do. I dont need the adress/favorite bar, I simply use the mini location bar instead. And my sidebar is closed when not needed, and the buttons are easily forgotten about. chat and IM are wonderfully space efficient, and I couldnt be happier.

Ontop of that, the UI is nicely in the background, and looks more modern and serious. whereas the old SL UI was a mix of different concepts (dropdowns, pie menus, floating windows everywhere), the new one is coherent in its design. Im sure as time goes by, there will be more ways to make 2.x behave more like 1.x, with more floating windows instead of sidebar docks, and already we have nostalgia skins which bring back the old blue buttons.

My advice for those who dislike 2.x:

- lay off the hate. If you dont like the UI, then vote for jira issues to give you more freedom in using it, and the options to revert it more to the 1.x behaviour.

- try 2.3 or 2.4 - if you only ever tried 2.0 or the beta, then you should notice a few big changes. The viewer has come a long way, try it out with an open mind.

- lastly: 2.0 is NOT 1.23.5. it will never be. so stop trying to use 2.x like 1.x, since that wont work. it takes a bit to re-learn, but take it from me as a content creator, who spends most their days inworld - the new viewer is better. much better.

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

I wouldnt say its elite few. Everyone can download blender & gimp for free, read tutorials, and make a few basic meshes. Secondlife has a lot of potential, and mesh is one of THE steps ahead. Why should the talented people be held back, just so people with less talent dont look /too/ bad beside them?

The rule of "everyone can create" still stands. At the same time, no matter the toolset complexity and richness, there will always be the "elites" and the more casual people, as well as those who are trying to learn. Should you deny the advanced people the option to make better stuff which benefits everyone only so those learning feel better about themselves?

 

On the actual topic: I believe that these changes are very welcome. 40 groups will make my life a lot easier, and its about the right number. You might want to consider offering 75 or more for premium account holders. That, along with the already better premium customer support might make the premium account product a bit more appealing for people other than land or sim owners.

The group chat change is also very nice, though I do wonder if that will also include IMs. Not that they are laggy, im just curious whether the entire IM/group chat infrastructure will go xmpp or just group conversations.

All in all, im happy to see that linden is moving forward. there are many topics Id also like to see (such as a better and above all, more performant renderer, and the C# project to replace the aged, and very inflexible LSL syntax), but im hoping for the future on these. Its important to tackle one thing after the other, and I believe LL is doing that