[I fear for SL]

Talk about updating SL's engine is overlooking a critical element. SecondLife's content is primarily what's holding SL back. Even if you could completely replace SL's engine without impacting the content, said content would still ensure the performance increase would be minimal. People are decking out their avatars with literally a gigabyte worth of textures and enough polygons to fill out an entire modern videogame map. The sims people build aren't much better.

Frankly, it's nothing short of a miracle that SL runs as well as it does. As long as content creators don't care about the performance impact of what they make, and people remain oblivious to the performance cost of the content they purchase, it's not going to get any better.

[Future of the metaverse, and all that]

2 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

I don't dispute that. However, the fact that those features haven't evolved or adapted to the modern trend puts SL in a precarious position.

I don't disagree. Just pointing out that there is no immediate competition.

6 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

to be honest it is that very combination of features and freedoms a person has that limits Second Life in what LL can do to keep with trends etc.

I agree. For the most part. Hard disagree that updating the system avatars would necessarily result in any sort of mass exodus. LL would have to really botch it for that to happen. But I do agree with the broader sentiment that SL's older content is holding it back.

14 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

As I said, Second Life is on life support until Tilia makes more money, of which considering what they are doing wont be long.  SL has been on life support for years, it was just that COVID gave a blip to make it look like it was doing better.

As long as it's still making LL money I doubt we'll see them turning off the lights. SL could remain "on life support" for many, many years.

[Future of the metaverse, and all that]

27 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

What elements are unique to SL now?

Being able to build in world? Nope
Being able to chat whilst building? Nope
Having individual region spaces to build an environment or 'experience on? Nope
Having a large open 'mainland' to explore? Nope
Having a real virtual economy? Nope
Having the ability to earn a virtual currency and trade that into RL currency? Nope
Having the ability to upload custom content and sell it? Nope
Having the ability to create a 3D avatar, customise its look and dress it? Nope
Having the ability to decorate your own house? Nope
Being able to create a scripted environment in a virtual world? Nope

There is literally NOTHING unique about second life now as a whole. Literally every game from 2010ish till now has taken the unique elements from Second Life and not only added them but done so better. Take for example Epic with Fortnite. They literally took the concept from Second Life for their inworld building mechanism (if I remember correctly LL showed it to Tim Sweeney). Putting aside graphics, Minecraft has more capability than second life and that includes Minecraft's Redstone scripting system of pre-provided objects.

The only unique element that Second Life still retains is what its developers wish the world would forget about and focus on other aspects in Second Life. That one unique thing is what keeps the Second Life economy running. It is the red light aspect of Second Life.

Eh. This is only partially true. While other games and platforms have some features reminiscent to SL's, there's no single platform that provides all of SL's key features, as well as the nearly unrestricted freedom to use those features.

I think LL is relatively safe for the time being. No other attempt at a "metaverse" has had any long term appeal, largely because they lack the right combination of features and freedom that remain SL's biggest draws.

How long will that last? Who knows? But nearly twenty years on and we've yet to see a real competitor appear. Even LL's attempt at a next gen platform greatly reigned in the freedom and lacked some key SL features.

 

ETA:

When I say LL is "relatively safe" I mean there's little chance of a competitor appearing and stealing their lunch money out from under them. SL still does have a problem with retention and gaining new users and that is a long term problem.

[alpha hair glitching terribly]

It's a good idea not to use alpha blending at all on assets like hair. Alpha sorting isn't the only issue, it's also why so many hairstyles look strange under local lights (where the blended alpha textures are either really dark, or really bright) and blended alpha is a lot harder for your hardware to render, resulting in lower framerates when too many are on screen (which in SL there often are).

Better to design your hair textures around the "masked alpha" setting and use that.

[New Mesh Bodies...LoveMomma and Aphrodite]

No-mod = No buy.

There's absolutely no good reason for a mesh body to be no-mod.

[Tutorial: How to apply EEP settings to your land.]

I made a quick tutorial on how to apply EEP settings to different elevations on your land.

Reposting it here from the main EEP thread so more people can easily find it.

[Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP!) Feedback Thread]

18 hours ago, Linnrenate Crosby said:

All i wanted was to have mainland default sky, water, day-cycle at ground level and always midday at 2000m... wasn't (too stupid i guess) able to do that

I got extremely frustrated trying to do something similar. I dug around for tutorials and came up with nothing, but I eventually figured it out and tonight I've thrown together a quick and dirty tutorial to help others.

It's actually really simple once you know how. It would be extremely helpful of LL to give us some basic tutorials like this on new features once they release them, rather than leaving us to figure it out on our own.

[I'm sure this have been up before but..]

Here's the tutorial on how to set up my personal camera settings. In my experience this cuts down a lot of the camera/wall/ceiling conflict issues simply by moving the camera lower and closer to your avatar. I based it off the common camera placement found in most modern third person videogames. YMMV of course.

If poking debug settings isn't your thing I do have a scripted camera HUD on the marketplace. It's free.

ETA: I created a request on the Firestorm Jira for them to include these camera settings as a preset, you can support it here: https://jira.firestormviewer.org/browse/FIRE-30781?filter=-2

[What do you do when strangers give you unsolicited advice "fix" your avatar?]

Yeah, like a lot of people it would really depend on the nature of the unsolicited advice. If I'd forgotten to wear/detach an attachment, part of my avatar was missing, or my shape was messed up for others in such a way that could be fixed with a skeleton reset, I think I'd appreciate the heads-up. I make my avatar to be seen, and if people aren't seeing it correctly I'd like to fix that.

On the other hand, if someone didn't like how I dressed, or how I'd put together my avatar and had nothing constructive to say I imagine I'd be less appreciative.

[Is the a simple Guide to setting 2 different Sky EEPs at different Altitudes on my parcel]

I had trouble figuring this out at first as well. I couldn't find a guide showing how to do it but I eventually figured out you could actually open your inventory and open the land panel where the 4 altitudes are listed, and then drag your EEP skies/days to the altitude of your choice and it will apply.

[Dear clothing merchants...]

Yeah, I'm not going to rehash my arguments from the linked threads, but I always encourage people to avoid buying no-mod content. There's almost always a modifiable alternative and if sellers see that no-mod isn't selling then they might rethink their anti-consumer practices.

[Friends list - they add you today and delete you tomorrow]

3 hours ago, Anna Nova said:

If I friend someone, the first thing I do is turn off the 'can see when you are on-line' thing.

So that makes it worthless!

Result. 

No log-in 'Hi, how are u?' chorus!

Whenever I bring up social management tools to Lindens they seem to think that the moment we can manage our contacts we'll stop socializing entirely. But the opposite is true. Since we can't manage our contacts we end up hiding our login status from everyone.

[Friends list - they add you today and delete you tomorrow]

People take this way too personally. Probably because it's called a "friends list" when it should be called a "contacts list".

For what it's worth, I also believe we should be able to organize contacts into categories and assign different permissions to different categories. Such as determining what contacts can see when you log on/off, as well as being able to hide your login status from your entire contacts list if need be, then revert to your regular settings later without having to go through each individual contact to change permissions.

I'm extremely hesitant to add anyone to my contacts list these days because my list is so large that every time I log in I get bombarded with IMs from people. I had to go through and hide my login status from my entire contact list a while back because I was getting 20 or more IMs every single time I logged in, making it impossible to get anything done without outright ignoring people, which of course they also take personally.

I've been saying this for years but I'll never understand why SL lacks such basic social management tools that other platforms have provided for decades.

[Why is VRChat taking over where SL should be? Why is there no Android/IOS client?]

Reminds me of a twitter thread I saw recently. There were dozens of replies like these I just cropped a few.

 

[Any thoughts on the MIRANA body? Or new and upcoming bodies at that?]

Oh great. Another no-mod body.

Hard pass. I don't need to know anything else about it.

[Luca's talk on how to make Second Life more immersive]

All of this is great information for anyone wanting to make their SL experience more immersive. It annoys me to no end, however, that we still need to edit debug settings to get a decent resting camera placement. When LL introduced the new camera controls Oz Linden contacted me and said they'd be including camera settings that are pretty much identical to what's suggested in the video as one of the default presets you could choose from.

Then, for whatever reason, LL released the new camera UI with a bunch of useless presets no one will ever use and these immersive settings were nowhere to be found.

I asked Oz about this and never got a response.

 

 

[new Firestorm update]

Here's a potential fix for the framerate loss.

As I've played with EEP the past few days I've gotten over most of my initial frustration. I think that will be true for most people, given enough time. (Some more time than others.) Still, there are some issues I really hope LL fixes, and soon.

• Moon turns dark near horizon.
• Moon brightness and colour tied to sunlight intensity.
• Everything is overly shiny.
• Not enough stars. We need a stars slider that adds more stars to the sky.

That said, the new features EEP brings to the table are fantastic. Here's a couple of skies that I've been tinkering with the past few days. If LL can sort out the big problems, these new features will totally be worth a few months of grumbling.

[[SOLVED]Interesting alpha 'glitch' in both LL and Firestorm EEP viewers.]

I seriously doubt this is a server side issue. Blended alpha textures are notoriously finnicky, especially when stacked on top of other blended alpha textures. Is that a BOM head? If so you might want to try editing your system hair and shrinking it inside your head if it isn't already. For some reason when BOM makes a part of your avatar invisible it reacts differently with blended alpha than wearing an alpha mask would.

An alternate solution would be to set the hair texture to "masked" instead of "blended". Unfortunately, since content creators don't create hair textures with masked alpha in mind your mileage may vary on how good it looks masked.

[New updated enviroments]

I have a GTX 960.

• No framerate loss that I've noticed.
• No crashing.
• The only login problems I had were due to the big login outtage that happened today, unrelated to any viewer.

[New updated enviroments]

Although it has a few serious issues LL needs to address, the more I play with the EEP editor, the less anxious I get about it.

Here's a quick "anime style" night sky I threw together. I cheated a bit, the moon is actually the sun, and the moon texture I replaced with a hastily painted "milky way" patch of stars that I whipped up in Photoshop. (This does not mean LL is off the hook about the lackluster EEP stars.)

 Some additional thoughts;

• I'm not keen on the sun light colour affecting the brightness and colour of the moon, I'd rather those be independent of each other. Besides, we already have a moon brightness slider. As it is now, to make my stars texture look white I need the sunlight to be super bright. It doesn't show so much in this screenshot but it's very apparent when you're walking around in the scene.
• Why can't we completely get rid of the sun glow? Even at 0 it's still very apparent, when you go negative it creates a light on the horizon you can't get rid of.
• It seems to me that local ambient light sources are a lot brighter than they used to be. I've had to adjust the lighting in several scenes to get them to look right.

 

[New updated enviroments]

10 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

Just once it would nice if they said, "We effed up!  We're sorry!  We didn't listen!  We're tossing EEP like you've asked!"

I wouldn't like for them to toss the baby out with the bathwater. Some of the features in EEP are great.

• the ability to share settings as inventory
• replacing and resizing the sun/moon textures
• being able to set multiple day/sky settings to a single parcel
• being able to script environment settings

If LL can fix the handful of more serious issues (like the moon turning dark if it gets anywhere near the horizon, and the apparently very fixable fps issue some people are reporting) I expect within a year of people playing with these new features it will become more and more difficult to find people who want to go back.

[Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP!) Feedback Thread]

Yeah, that moon issue needs to get fixed. That's real bad.

[Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP!) Feedback Thread]

1 minute ago, Stevie Davros said:

I also had misgivings when using the Beta Firestorm at first, but eventually I got used to the differences in the way things are and I much prefer EEP over Windlight now.

I have a feeling this is how it will be with a lot of people....eventually. SL users were in an uproar against Windlight when it came out, too. Most of the complaints I'm seeing seem to come from unfamiliarity with the interface for EEP.

I have a feeling that the TPVs will work out a better UI for EEP given enough time, and that will help get more people onboard with it. (I still want LL to learn what real night skies look like and increase the amount of stars that appear when they're maxed out.)

[New updated enviroments]

Most of the complaints I'm seeing are:

• the interface
• Linden Lab's default skies

I imagine TPVs will streamline the interface in time, and Linden Lab's default windlight skies were bad so I'm not overly concerned about either of those issues. I'll continue to use my own settings for the most part.

What does worry me:

• the lack of contrast Chic talked about
• faint/few stars when maxed out
• the intense shine on everything

 I'm not sure if the lack of contrast is an EEP shortcoming, or if we're all just so new to the settings that we haven't figured it out yet.

 I like that the new stars twinkle, but I swear that no one at Linden Lab must have ever seen a night sky outside of a city.

 I thought I heard LL was going to reduce the shine issue? Or did they decide not to? I was under the impression that that was what Firestorm was waiting on before implementing EEP. I suppose this is something the userbase can fix by adjusting the materials settings, but it won't be easy and it won't happen quickly, given the sheer amount of affected content.

On the whole, I've only played with EEP a little so far and have had mixed results, but I'm not sure how much of that are the limitations of EEP or my own lack of familiarity with the settings. I adore the new features, I really do, but I worry that we won't be able to make SL look as good as it did with windlight. Time will tell.

 

[Would Second Life Benefit from an Engine Rebuild?]

4 hours ago, Janet Voxel said:

and the ability to take all your stuff with you for most people to be on board

A large part of why SL runs so poorly is due to poorly made content. Besides, if LL is the one doing the developing and their goal is simply to get the existing SL userbase to migrate to a new platform, then they've already lost. They'd essentially be creating a new product with the goal of competing with their old product.

 If a next-gen SL is going to be successful it needs to draw in more than just longtime SL users. Sure, many SL users would eventually migrate to "SL but better", but hamstringing SL2.0 with old SL's problems before it even begins just to appeal to SL users wouldn't be how I'd go about it. I'd aim to make the next gen SL be the best it can be and count on that to draw in all new users, and draw back users SL has lost over the years. Some current SL users would migrate, some wouldn't. I expect in any scenario, classic SL would stick around indefinitely with its own hardcore userbase.