Serendipity Seraph

It would be nice if people simply answer the question instead of giving unsolicited advice and opinions. It isn't too hard is it?

The real question is "So what?". What happens next? Does this signify anything of much near future significance?

The last point makes me want to abandon my private region and run to opensim. Innovation from TPVs has driven a lot of LL viewer innovation and added tremendously to the enjoyment of our world for many many users. To say that no such innovation will now be allowed unless LL viewer has it is an ugly stifling of competition at best. At worse it is merely irrationally authoritarian and stupid.

Well, I think it is cool to see some more games attempted in SL. Maybe it will get LL to notice the very serious limitations we residents and builders and scripters have had to deal with all these years. But I am not here principally to play games but to build, script, and meet with people for fun, romance and business. I first signed on way back in 2004 but didn't really "get it" until some years later. It bothers me a great deal that we have piss ant limitations like only 10m prims with any really control. Why not at least looosen this to 50m if not 256m? It would make a HUGE difference to builders. It would take LL less than a day to implement. It has been asked for many many times but never arrives. I can assure you that these days when I have a good build idea I want to play with I go to Opensim where no stupid nanny is forcing me to all kinds of ugly hacks to build what I want the size I want. I was at a nice in world wedding the other day on a private full region sim. There were only 16 of us attending. Yet I got lagged so bad I crashed and most of the guests did not dare move and have of them were grayed out on in appearance change crucifix pose. There is no conceivable excuse for such remarkably awful performance after all these years. Fix that or be ignored. Increasingly I have no idea why I am paying nearly $300/month for my own region. It performs worse than an opensim region I used to run on a an Amazon cloud small instance. There are no people hardly any more in the area or the adjacent regions. No one hardly can even be enticed by free land to build something cool on the space. A couple of years ago I could log on most anytime and find at least a half dozen friends in world. It was more a matter then of whether to mark myself as not to be interrupted. Today there is often no one else on or maybe one other person. I know longer have to worry about fielding IMs when busy. It is relatively a ghost town.

Four seconds? Absolutely ridiculous for what amounts to a static page. Any competent or reasonably powered web server can do it in a fraction of a second. Do a new feature right or don't do it, please.

Galileo, Apple sells computers across all age groups but is far more represented in college age and up. They are not especially good at going after schools and keep avoiding taking down Microsoft in the enterprise. They don't have a corporate strategy per se to go after the next generation. You seem to have simply made that up. Do you think people at LL are going to listen to you? You are the one making unsupported assertions as if they are fact. You are the one telling people off left and right with your highly opinionated BS. I called you on it. I guess you didn't like that much. Who the heck threatened a CEO? As for your attitude toward adult activities in SL, well, you can exercise your prudishness on your own virtual world if you like but don't try to impose it on people that have been here from the beginning and done much of the work of building this world.

The comment on Apple is just ignorant. My primary worked for Apple and I know really well that there is not such push or internal belief this is so or any numbers bearing it out. They do not make most of their money on school kids at all. They make it on great design and good products, not on being PG, or keeping porn out of the app store. There devices have browsers after all where kiddies can find whatever they want and do. I would advise, whatever you do, not doing anything for a while that is going to tick off more long term residents. Many that are left are very unhappy and hanging by a thread. Snap it at your own risk.

@Mike Check your history of opensim. Opensim was a clean room creation of a SL compatible server starting from open sourced SL viewer code. SL server came first and has a somewhat different (more monolithic I here) architecture. SL server is not open source nor is it derived from Open Source.

I thought Blue Mars is now dead. Why is is still being mentioned as some greener type of virtual grass "over there"?

You are incorrect Mike. It is technically feasible with a rather different server and client architecture. Personally I would be delighted to curl up with my iPad and pop in world for my normal round of building, scripting, interacting. I would be even more delighted by what it would imply - that LL finally caught on that it doesn't have to be one core to one in world region and all that happens on it but that the computational resources flexibly spread the load of whatever regions need whatever amount of resources. It would also say that the relatively monolithic SL server architecture is being addressed and is capable of change without breaking everything. Lastly it would open up greater blending between iRL and virtual worlds, events, opportunities.

OK. Improvements but.. Whether 42 groups or 4200 are allowed is almost totally irrelevant if you have a decent database architecture. Region crossing of late is more problematic than I have see it in some time. "No valid agent id" started appearing crossing from my own region to the one next door for no apparent reason. The reason there is so much handoff overhead is a matter of architecture. Good to see some of it is cleaned up but a lot more could be. If I wanted my avatar hooked to my iRL identity I am more than capable of doing so myself. If I wanted more FB in my SL world I can easily do that now. That said it would be fantastic if you could connect a SL meeting (local or group chat) so that it was optionally accessible from other chat systems or IRC. I have hacks to do that with local chat but not with group chat.

One other builder wish list item: The imprudence viewer includes being able to enter simple math expressions in the text fields when building. These include some useful constants like SQRT2 SQRT3. Very very handy. Otherwise I am always reaching for my calculator. Oh, also please add support for 99% hollow and make all fields significant to three decimal places.

@Nyla I hear you. However, we end up having to name what something is or what the intent is or is not in order to track how we are doing. If this naming and labeling precludes or makes some things of only secondary at best importance then those things lose out when push of full wishlist meets shove of real implementation, maintenance and budget constraints. That is why people find it necessary to be sure things important to them aren't being left by the wayside by over-constrained naming.

@lane You seem to miss the point of others as well. Of course there are real servers, comm lines, etc. bedind a virtual world. But SL was in fact designed to be a virtual world, not a MMORPG. Regardless of whether you are at the "its all make-believe" stage or not, many others have moved on and they are not simply delusional. Second Life is an early Metaverse attempt a la Snow Crash. It is an earlier prototype of eventual upload space imho. Some of our avatars are just as much developed personalities of their own as our physical world personalities. That they are not autonomous and don't have their own physical brain in their own physical body does not make them less so. I have already spoken to the utter death that certifying builders and scripters would bring. We don't want a role to fill except whatever we decide to do ourselves. That IS the point.

@lane You make some wild assertions. Building as you know is capped by prim counts. No matter how inept a builder or how ugly the result you can't put more prims on a parcel than allowed. If the system can't support the allowed prim count then it is the system that has the problem. On scripting LSL itself causes overcommit of memory (partially addressed as I understand it but not completely) and I think that its event driven engine deserves at least some serious examination. So no, I am not buying that ignorant builders are scripters are wholly or even mainly to blame. Region differences can have many causes including different classes of region, different classes of servers, different bandwidth at the client end of the residents involved - to name a few. Saying you should be certified to build or script is to kill much of the innovation of the world deader than a door nail. If you had said the same in the early days of personal computers we wouldn't even be here on such a medium discussing this.