Fmeh Tagore

This is just my opinion and nothing more. I'm writing this because I've been disappointed in what I've heard about Sansar, where I was originally very excited about it. I stopped regularly logging into SL after mid 2013, and every time I log in now, everything fun about SL has just sort of disappeared. All the interesting places are gone, and it seems to be a sea of avatars that look like everyone else. When I log in and go to a place that's decently populated (which is hard to find since LL got rid of the good tools for finding places that currently have a lot of people at them) I can wait 5, even 10 minutes and still half the people have missing torsos, and once they eventually appear, they have the same shape as everyone else because mesh clothing doesn't conform to the proportions of your avatar, you must conform to the proportions of the clothing. Most people stopped bothering to build things once mesh became popular. Sure, some people remained and learned the separate software and the skills needed, but it's only a niche audience who have been willing to do that. Being able to build things within SL was one of the biggest draws to SL. The way it is now, if you use regular prims to build things, you're looked at as if you're using Minecraft. I certainly gave up creating anything after it was basically required to use separate tools and import them into SL in order to make anything that looks decent and doesn't make people think of Minecraft. Once mesh came into place, people stopped having fun in SL. Most of the people who I used to see regularly, stopped logging in. I mean, sure, really dedicated people obviously make things in mesh, but that pretty much cuts out everyone else, and it became more of a fashion show of who can spend the most money in-world to buy expensive creations. Doing interesting things with mesh just isn't possible either. To my knowledge you can't apply visual scripts to textures on mesh other than just changing the textures altogether, no animations, no scrolling textures (and if you did scroll it would look totally messed up), clubs/stores/places that have mesh buildings look more and more like what you'd find in real life--boring. Sure, much more realistic, but still boring. The newer lighting engines bring the FPS to a crawl, they're not very optimized, and most people are still basing their builds on the old lighting engines.... so mesh just seemed to be the big thing, which very few people except the very dedicated actually bother with. And now I'm reading that Sansar isn't even going to have any real in-world building tools other than how to place things somewhere. I've not even read if they're going to have sliders for one's avatars (shapes, skin color, hair, or whatnot), or whether you have to choose from pre-made shapes and everything else. If that's the case, what fun is Sansar supposed to be? Is it simply going to be more of this "Ooh look, I can spend lots of money, aren't you impressed?" or "I just spent 80 hours creating this avatar shape in Blender and it still looks like crap and it still does no good when I put clothing on it becuase the clothing won't conform to my avatar." I mean, what good are these virtual worlds when in order to make anything yourself that looks decent, you have to put that much work into it? And as I said--most of the cool places are gone. Want to go somewhere to listen to music and hear hundreds of "Hooooooooo!" and getting spanked by scripts where nobody actually talks to each other except in private messages? Choose from a select set of genres, don't try to look for anything new, or for DJs that try to expand people's horizons, just choose specifically from top 40 (of today or of specific decades), rock, blues, country, "romantic", hip hop and rap, edm, edm, edm, edm, or edm. If you're a DJ and you want to play something other than sticking purely with one of those genres, you're out of luck finding anywhere to DJ at unless you go to furry clubs and then look out of place because you have a human avatar. Honestly, it seems only the furry hangouts have people that actually know how to have fun in SL anymore. Or even at some of the infohubs where it's the 4chan/8chan SL equivalent where you have to deal with bullying and childish behavior. But at least they have fun... I guess... I personally do not like hearing racial and sexual orientation slurs constantly, or people making fun of other people's intelligence, and so on. Sure, there have always been and will always be people who primarily go on SL to have a house that they can continually redecorate, make the walls a different color, get new furniture for, and not really share it with anyone else because simply redecorating your house is, for some reason, a whole lot of fun for you. If that's fun for you, excellent, I'm glad you're able to find something interesting to do in-world. Personally I don't get the idea of redecorating in SL constantly without trying to share it with a lot of other people. But people enjoy what they enjoy--who am I to judge? But then some of you who do this get pissy and have always gotten pissy that people can, oh no, cam into your house to look around, or they might actually bring their avatar there as if SL items and furniture is somehow a personal reflection of what you do in your real life personal life and the privacy of those things is as important as the privacy of your real life home or as important as homeland security in the United States is to the U.S. government, and you want to get people's accounts terminated over it. That's always made me groan and laugh a little bit, as if you redecorating your house is serious enough to terminate other people's accounts over, yet you claim it's fun. Whatever. I digress. Since mesh has been implemented, it seems that those kinds of things (redecorating, and ooh look, I spent lots of money) are what people seem to find the most fun. As I said, there aren't really any conversations in local chat that happen in clubs or really anywhere anymore. There's hardly any individuality in SL anymore because you can't do anything with mesh items, you buy it and use it the way it was designed and that's that. Sure, things look more realistic than ever, but that's not what made SL fun. Realism isn't what made SL fun. What made SL fun was the almost limitless possibilities without having to have the skills required to create your own games in things like the Hammer engine. I mean, if the scripting engine and the physics engines in SL allowed for reasonable gaming, like an FPS or a decent RPG that actually limits your experience on different pieces of land so you must follow the rules of the RPG (instead of relying on people reporting that you're not following the rules), that'd be a little different. But you can't even make a decently-operating car that steers and accellerates right, it's all very antiquated, like a poorly-written game from 1997. Even things like chess require so much scripting and links to offworld servers that it slows down the SL server you're in. Chess of all things! So what's left? Well, it was creating your own fashion, your own buildings, your own hair, your own club, your own whatever---but since mesh, none of that is worth it unless you acquire the skills needed to literally be able to make your own game on almost any game engine (or you can be satisfied with people looking at you as if you're playing Minecraft). I mean, once you have those kinds of skills, you could easily go on to make things for other games. And sure, there are definitely some side benefits to acquiring those skills, but does that make SL a fun place to be? So... what good is Sansar going to be if it's ALL based on having those kinds of skills? As I said, it will probably be more of that same mindset of, "Look at me, I spend a lot of money in order to have pseudo-individuality!"

There used to be ways of seeing how many people were at locations. Even "Destinations", which was a new function, used to work differently when it was first introduced. It would always list how many people were at a location, and the first entries in the pouplar lists used to prioritize as showing the places that had the most people there first. Previously, like 6 or so years ago, or even longer, land owners were upset with how their clubs were never visited because people would use various methods to find the places that had the most people on them. I remember being on forums like SLUniverse where people who ran small clubs and land owners were happy when LL changed it so people couldn't do that anymore. It was why people used bots so often before--and is confusing why they still use them now. I've been on SL since around '06, or was it '05? Can't remember... but I *do* remember back when attached hair moved one frame behind the rest of the avatars, that was always humorous. I've seen a lot of changes over the years. I remember when the search option would list clubs (or any locations really) that were the most populated first. It used to be easy to find new places with lots of people in them. On a side note, yes, I went back to that club immediately after capturing the video and hung out there for at least an hour--I was having trouble with the viewer crashing a lot, so before I left, I told them that I was having trouble with the viewer. Most of my landmarks for places that used to be popular became invalid about 2 years ago--they simply don't exist anymore. I DJed in Second Life for about 3 years, I was getting known as "the voice" as far as my speaking voice. Almost everywhere has changed. I can't imagine how anyone who wants to get involved with SL now would be able to keep interest--and as I said, the infohubs on SL are pretty much cesspools of bullies and trolls and griefers, it's like SL's 8chan. And now one can't even feasibly customize hardly anything about their avatars now--so much mesh stuff means everyone's body shapes are cookie-cutter, there's no modding mesh stuff--mesh was poorly planned, it was released before it should have been ready. Sorry, I digress.... Anyway, thanks so much for your responses.

I know that land owners didn't like it when people could find places via how many people were currently there, but getting rid of it a couple years ago pretty much destroyed the usability of Second Life. I hardly come in-world anymore because I'd have to spend hours and hours just trying to find a place if I log in at night.

Yeah, thanks. There's no reason for me to go on Second Life anymore unless someone invites me. I'm clearly not going to spend 5, 6 hours in front of the computer just searching for somewhere to go where people are actually going to be. Not. Worth. My. Time. Period. LL has effectively killed Second Life by crippling this basic function. I give it 2, maybe 3 years unless they bring that kind of basic necessity back. People just don't have that much spare time to do absolutely nothing. That's as pointless as an RPG now, sitting there for 80 hours building up a character just so you can see the next area. No thanks. I've been on Second Life since 2006, and this is pathetic. I bet club owners were complaining that THEIR clubs weren't getting people in, so LL probably got rid of the option to list clubs/venues via how many people are CURRENTLY there so that no club would feel like they're getting special treatment. It was probably great for them, but it screwed over everyone else. Good job LL, good job, you've killed Second Life. New users certainly won't go through learning the interface and spend money just so they can teleport around to random places in hopes they'll actually have people there.

Hey Lewis, definitely long time no see. I'm doing great, moved in with my.... well, we're not ready to call ourselves "boyfriends" quite yet, we're great companions, but it's great. Things are great Thanks for the info. Unfortunately it looks like it's just confirming what I was afraid of: This really will be the end of Second Life. I know I'm definitely NOT alone in this: I don't look at whether clubs *will* have shows going anymore, I just care whether, when I log on, that I can find a place that has people at it--and if one place doesn't have a group of people that are having interesting conversation, I move onto the next place. If I have to teleport to dozens of places just to see if someone *might* be there, that's not much fun, that's a waste of time, honestly. I can't count how many hours I'd waste trying to find somewhere with people *before* they offered the Destination Guide, before it was crippled like it is now. Since the Destination Guide was started, I had used it to find places that had people at them--it was the primary redeeming feature about the guide. Basically it would list all the clubs/hangouts/places that the MOST people were at, list how many people were there, and I could choose from that list which one I'd want to check out. Now that's been completely eliminated and I guess I'm supposed to use Legacy methods to find anywhere, like using the useless search options that give results that are totally inaccurate, or like using the map and spending 4 or 5 hours just trying to search for a place with a lot of green dots. So basically, they really HAVE removed the options for doing this in a reasonable way. Very disappointing. I can't see Second Life lasting more than 2 more years at this rate. If new users can't easily find places where there are people, other than infohubs that are mostly populated with griefers and bullies, they're clearly *not* going to stick around. Second Life's new motto/tagline should be: Your Empty World

Yeah, I just saw your post: I mean, what's the point of getting on Second Life if there's no way to find anywhere that people are at? I mean seriously? What is the point? Now that my avatar has been what I've wanted it to be for years, what am I supposed to do in an empty world? What's the point of an empty world? It's empty until I find places that have people at them, and if I'm not given the option to find people, it's an empty world. Again, what's the point of that?

I used to be able to use the destination guide to do this, but now the destination guide is just a useless piece of advertising that does absolutely no good whatsoever in finding places that are popular currently, currently as in the time that I'm getting on Second Life--it doesn't matter if a place is popular during the times I'm not coming on Second Life. I really would rather not spend hours teleporting to empty locations (or places with maybe 3 people there) simply because some piece of official Linden Lab advertising took me there. I might as well use forums or something to find places if that's going to be the case, which means I'm probably not going to log on much. I really want to get back into Second Life, but this makes it hard. Maybe someone can clue me in on how to find places that are populated. I really would rather not go back to 2006 where I'm having to use the map and spend hours visually scanning places to find locations that have a lot of people at them, usually just to find they're all bots. That's a complete waste of time. If I can't find places that are popular at the time, what's the point in me coming on? How am I going to find anywhere that actually CURRENTLY has people at it? Thanks.

Setting it differently than what? I see examples "Test 123"--but what does it actually do? And still--it doesn't answer why people who use 2.2.x aren't met with a "mandatory update", why should people using a 2.5.x viewer be met with mandatory updates?

I'm not talking about the auto-update option which I'm already aware can be bypassed, I'm simply talking about FORCING people to download a newer version. If someone can use a 2.2.x viewer without being forced to update, why are they forcing people who use 2.5.x viewers to download a new update before they can log in? My big complaint about this is that every time it updates, it writes over the exisiting floater_im_container.xml file, so I have to go in and edit it by hand to have tabs on the left every time. Tabs on the bottom are practically unusable once you have more than 5 people in tabs--it's bad enough they don't give a "tabs on left" option to begin with, but to have to go in and change it every time they force an update sucks. Why force people to update to begin with? If people with older viewers don't HAVE to update, why force it on the newer viewers?

Exactly, it's the From: header that I'm wondering why they changed. I mean, I only have to look at the subject line to see that it's from a group, which isn't really THAT much of a pain, but before I could tell just from the sender if it was from a group or not. It just seems like a strange change to make.

Before, when it would give email notifications, it would show the name of the group as the person who sent it. Now it shows the name of the person who sent it and it only shows that it's from a group in the subject line. Why did they do this?

Thanks very much for that

I'm trying to figure out how I can upload an image as my forum avatar. Unfortunately, the brick wall I hit is this: "These are your approved images. If you don't see any images, it means that you don't yet have any images that have been approved. If necessary, go to your My Images page (the link is on your profile page) and upload a new image. After you upload an image, you must wait until it has been approved by a moderator before you can use it as your avatar." Funny, there's no "My Images" link to be seen when I go to my profile page. Is there some alternate profile page that I wasn't previously aware of that they're talking about, or what? Is this not a functional option yet?