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.

@lane I don't approach SL remotely like an MMORPG. I build, socialize, play, love, teach, learn here as a distinct personage formed by not only my imagination but long interaction with others and living into being. Yes, some of that character formation happens on MMORPGs. But you generally are not free there to make your world or your part of it whatever you want it to be, right down to the objects in it and how they behave. Please point me to an MMORPG where all these things hold if I am missing something. What is "being yourself" and why is it so superior to being a self that you designed from scratch? What is "yourself" exactly? How much of it did you consciously design and how much accidentally fell together from interacting with the world? Why should you wear the exact same personality or face in SL or any other virtual space as you do in the physical world? Why would that be better? Why would I wish to jump through someone else's hoops just to exist in SL or any other world? Such hoops are precisely why I don't much like most MMORPGs. An important part of the uniqueness of SL is that it is a world - free from any preset script that anyone has to adhere to. Do you think you don't need to know things in order to script or build? It is not the fault of scripts or builds generally that there is lag. Although a much better scripting language that include support for user created libraries and imports of previously vetted code would make things a lot better. As for crashing, it doesn't occur often enough to not be a big deal. There was a time years ago when it was much more commonplace.

@shockwave. Agree mostly with (1), but a decent software company today most certainly can guarantee against data loss. LL should be liable for any losses of data that result in losing virtual goods or inventory. It is not excusable to fail in sufficiently backing up such data. On (2) I would go for entirely PG and a single non-PG category. This mature vs adult distinction is pretty bogus in practice. I really don't care if teens can see/hear everything myself. I realize that for stupid legal reasons someone has to care. I mean we all know in practice (and may remember) that teens know so much that this whole 'protect the kids' thing is bogus. on (4). Every mainland prop paying resident already pays more than that. Not to mention those of us that own regions. So this makes no sense and is totally unnecessary. Rare is the denizen that spends less than $2/mo that goes to LL pockets. Cut on lindens, any tier, cut on sales through the online market - far from utterly free to play. On (6) I don't agree at all that you cut down on griefers by forcing hard identity. I think loss of anonymity and maybe leaks of credit card and real world identity is a far bigger headache for LL and its residents than any amount of anonymous mischief makers. On (7) I agree but.. I was here or rather wasn't on much in 2005 so I know for a fact it was much much worse then than now. On (8) I really don't mind the V2 viewer that much as my build style wasn't that impacted. Some of the features are more logical. Some not so much. But I don't see it as that big an issue. On (9) SL from day one has tried one thing and then another in various aspects. This is not only a pain but also something that we have sometimes benefitted from. Care and more inclusion of stakeholders is needed for sure. The stuff in (10) truly was majorly screwed up. Not sure about (11) as there are too many disasterous copy and backup restrictions now and very messed up non-ownership owner licenses. I think you need to fix that first.

A few problems on my special SL wish list in rough order of how much I want them or how much not having them ticks me off: 1) Remove the prim size restriction. It is extremely annoying to have to stitch together prims for any sizes over 10m, especially since it both counts against prim allotment and causes texturing nightmares. Opening it up so any prim can be up to 100m in any dimension (or even 255m) would make life much much better for all builders and improve build quality. When I used this in some OpenSim building I realized just how unnecessarily limiting SL 10m limits are. 2) Fix group chat. It lags like crazy and sends messages in wrong order occassionally as well. If IRC, jabber, skype etc can do group text messages without such problems then clearly it is well within known technology to do so. If you don't have the people power to do it then contact me to fix it on a contract basis. 3) Rearchitect to distribute busy sim workflow. If you do this successfully then there would be no per-sim lag in heavy load conditions. If you don't do it then OpenSim or one of the offshoots thereof eventually will. 4) Go beyond the horrible LSL. Support full mono scripting and preferably javascript. LSL is one of the weakest languages I have ever used and I have been in the business for over 30 years so I have seen some very weak ones indeed. 5) Stop the legal nonsense that we residents really own nothing although the original idea was supposed to be empowering us as creator/owners. That we have no right to anything we bought or even built whatsoever and that LL can take it all away or lose it by accident with no recourse whatsoever is completely unacceptable. It makes us residents effectively completely right-less feudal serfs. 6) Introduce effective rights granting licensing to works done for hire that give full ownership to hiring party. This includes the right to mke out of game back-ups that aren't crippled by design. Make it possible for a creator to specify that anyone they wish can have all rights that the creator has (Open Source equivalent). 7) Open Invertory management to scripting so we creators can build very effective and innovative inventory management solutions. We will happily do a lot to make it better for everyone, not only for free but actually paying you for the privilege, if you do your part to make the minimal interfacse available.

SL is not a game. I hope a serious game developer can understand the difference. SL is a virtual world or set of worlds. Most of the world is in the hands of residents to make of it what they will given the infrastructure and tools from LL. I have no use for most MMORPGs. But this is my home. I don't if I can verbalize the difference well enough.