Penny Patton

Sansar failed for a number of reasons that boil down to LL fundamentally misunderstanding why Second Life managed to have the staying power it has. They failed to recognize the importance of avatar customization, dynamic world building, and, yes, even adult content, among other things. They also focused way too hard on the VR experience. Personally, I still believe an "SL 2.0" could be successful, but whoever developed it would have to understand what works in SL, and what holds SL back. That said, I don't believe we'll see a next gen SL anytime soon.

There's only two things I miss. 1. No-mod being so much less prevalent than it is today. Seriously, people claim to want freedom to customize their avatars and use that to justify no limits on av complexity, but at the same time they've happily given up mod rights to paranoid, control-freak content creators who've made it so much more difficult to truly customize an avatar. And for what? Nobody gains anything from the no-mod plague. It does nothing for the content creators except feed their need to control content even after it's been sold to others, and it does absolutely nothing good for the consumer. It's lose/lose. 2. Active communities. Sure, there's some active communities out there still, but it's not like it used to be. There used to be so many more people around engaging with each other in-world. There used to be a whole bunch of role-play sims all packed to the gills with people. These days SL can't seem to support more than a handful at any given time. That said, I'm under no illusion that the "good old days" were perfect. There's a lot of ways modern SL is better. Features like animesh and experiences were long overdue. A lot of ways it's worse, too (the no-mod plague being the big one), but that's life.

You can use SL's search engine to search for groups based on topics you're interested in. On the search page select Groups then type in a topic that interests you. Like "sail boating" or "Star Trek" or whatever. Click on the groups that come up to see their group profile, and at the bottom should be a "Join" button.

Just as an example of this, these days, most avatars I've seen are using around 300MB of VRAM, and it's not uncommon to see avatars using over half a gig of VRAM. SL's complexity calculations barely take texture use into account so many of these avatars are enjoying low complexity scores even though just a few of them on-screen can cause serious performance issues.

You may be thinking about alpha sorting issues that caused tattoos and makeup (and sometimes skin) to appear to clip over clothing. BOM does indeed solve that. That's probably what people were talking about.

Yeah, those "seam blenders" typically look worse than the seams. This is because they rely on blended alpha textures, which do not render properly under local lighting.

Simply getting content creators to optimize their work goes a long way towards solving lag and crashing issues. This has been tested and proven effective in SL frequently over the years. If there were reasonable caps on avatar complexity and VRAM use then this wouldn't be much of an issue. Of course, when that suggestion is brought up some people get scared that such caps would hurt creativity or force people to have less interesting/appealing avatars, but it really wouldn't. It would simply force content creators to better optimize their work. If they have the skills to create content, then it's fairly easy to learn how to optimize. And a lot of optimization can be done without sacrificing visuals. This really does come down to LL failing to understand that SL content creators aren't simply going to pursue best content creation practices on their own. Most simply do not understand how 3D rendering works and why optimization is important. Once they settle into bad habits it becomes difficult to make content creators understand how their bad practices are affecting performance. Of course, the cat has been out of the bag for ages now and it's not something that can be easily fixed at this point. It would take a long term plan on the part of LL, involving new tools and features, better communication with the userbase with regards to how content affects performance, and slowly reigning in badly made content over a period of years to avoid excessively disrupting the user experience.

I think Cyrule is asking if this is a feasible feature LL could add to EEP in the future. And it's not a bad suggestion, either. There are sim surround terrain skyboxes, and they have their uses, but they also have their own limits and setbacks.

I'm not so sure, given that they'll still have the option to dress it up with all kinds of skins, hair, clothing and other accessories. People didn't flock to mesh bodies because the system avatar was the free noob default. They flocked to mesh bodies because the system avatar is objectively inferior.

Tutorials integrated directly into the SL experience are something I've suggested for years, but I think LL could take it even further. A large part of the difficulty in creating an avatar comes down to the way SL itself is designed. The appearance editor should come with a selection of head and body presets that put an SL user close to their intended bodyshape rather than forcing them to create he shape from what is currently a misshapen barely human starting point. From there users could opt to dig into the body sliders to personalize their head and shape even further. In addition, while I think mesh heads and bodies are great and should be an option, they shouldn't be necessary to create a decent looking avatar. The system avatar needs an overhaul to bring it more in line with today's standards. That would greatly simplify the new user experience. On top of that, I don't think tutorial videos are a bad idea, but LL should make them more readily accessible to users. Like a link in the Help menu to a webpage curating the videos. Combine all these ideas, the interactive tutorials the curated video library and the improved avatar and appearance editor, and you could could put a real dent in the new user learning curve.

A lot of people in SL tend to dismiss these kinds of videos, or get defensive about SL, but they often highlight a lot of SL's problems, big and small. From the lack of proper lighting to the difficulty curve in putting together a decent looking avatar, as examples from this video. These videos can also highlight the strengths of SL. The girl in the video seems to be having a good time creating her avatar, despite the difficulty. Showing the importance of avatar customization, and the sheer amount of content we have available to do so. LL could take away from this video that they need to make avatar customization more accessible to new users, without limiting the freedom we have in creating our appearance.

Like others have said: Content in SL is almost always horribly unoptimized. Content in SL is dynamic, not pre-loaded. SL uses streamed physics instead of predictive. Videogames can also use all kinds of tricks to further optimize the experience, tricks that just aren't possible in SL due to its dynamic nature. Like, in a videogame, the visuals are all built in a way that looks right from the player's POV but if you were able to free-cam around like you can in SL you'd be able to see how they cheat, such as buildings with no backsides and low-poly objects in the distance, away from the track. Now, if you're building your own private estate where you have complete control, you can minimize the rezzing issues by only using optimized content and building with fast rez times in mind. That can help a lot, but it will never be 100% on par with your typical videogame driving experience.

I shop primarily through the marketplace, it's simply more convenient. That said, if I'm buying furniture or animations I always check for an in-world store so I can preview before I buy. The marketplace finally supports redelivering items, too, which is a big plus. Of course, the marketplace has it's drawbacks. LL has been improving it lately, but those improvements come slowly. Hopefully LL will continue to work on making the marketplace a better shopping experience.

I find the reviews to be extremely helpful. One issue I come across all too often is an item being listed as mod/copy, but the actual item you get is no-mod. There's no way to know this is what you're getting before you buy unless someone leaves a review and mentions the problem.

it makes sense on a surface level, but it doesn't make sense for the SL "shared experience". Ideally, all SL users should be able to render all avatars without jelly dolls, and jelly dolls were at least partially intended to convince people to be more considerate of ARC, afterall we all want to be seen, right? Different computers giving different ARC values also kills the idea of including ARC for individual attachments in marketplace listings.

My understanding is that complexity is not a universal metric. By which I mean, an avatar will have a differently ARC score depending on the computer you're viewing it from. I imagine this goes for individual attachments as well. I know this was the case at some time, at least, is this still the case?

We need much better tools as far as optimizing our avatar's render weight is concerned. How about being able to select an object and see exactly how many textures are on it, and the size/memory of each? Being able to see our avatar's triangle count and texture use would be super useful, too. (Jelly dolling avatars based on these numbers is more efficient than relying on ARC, too.) What about being able to open a panel and see the texture/triangle count of all your currently worn attachments, so you can easily spot problematic attachments? Right now people are mostly fumbling in the dark even if they're aware of the problems unoptimized content causes.

1. Reduce the texture load wherever you can. This can help in several ways. It increases framerates for most users as once your VRAM is full fps takes a hit. It decreases load time. Less data to load means things load faster. It decreases bandwidth use which can help reduce lag. It can eliminate "texture thrashing". That's the nasty problem where textures constantly go blurry again after loading. 2. Limit your use of "blended" alpha textures. Too many of these can cause sharp fps decline. Instead, use masked alpha wherever possible. 3. Avoid using content with "gutted" LOD. Bad content creators will often get rid of all LOD levels except the highest and tell people to max out object detail "to see the content properly". A sure fire way to kill fps. 4. Use skyboxes for building interiors. This moves large swathes of content out of draw distance, greatly reducing the load on your video card. That's not to say you can't have the odd building here or there with the interior built right into it for immersion's sake, like an indoor/outdoor cafe or a small gas station, or the lobby of a larger building, just keep it reasonable.

You're overthinking it. I was only speaking of the number, and variety in brightness/size of stars in the sky, not necessarily the milky way clouds and nebulae. Although having those would be great, too. Just making that one change should be simple, as far as these things go.

They look like a starry night seen from the middle of a big city, where you can hardly see any stars. LL needs to do something to improve them so we can have proper night skies that look like one seen far from city lights. We need something like sliders to control the amount and variation of stars seen in the sky.

I have noticed, in Black Dragon at least haven't tested it on other viewers, that windlight settings that include - in the name won't import. You get an "invalid character" popup. Hopefully that gets fixed, almost all of my custom windlight settings are like that.

More than likely it's the windlight imported without any tweaking. I suspect it's just a fact that we'll have to tweak all imported windlight settings to achieve the looks they had pre-EEP. As for the tree, that's actually normal. TPVs did something a while back that made it so fullbright was effected by atmospheric effects but as far as I know the stock SL viewer still displays fullbright items like this. I suspect TPVs will fix this again once everyone is on the same page regarding EEP.

That's fair. I do have an older GPU and I imagine people with less dedicated VRAM are hit harder by textures than people with newer cards with more onboard VRAM. That said, I do believe a large number of SL users have hardware comparable to, or less powerful than, mine. Over the years I've gotten a lot of comments from people regarding the performance boosts they've experienced in sims I built, most recently with that RP area in the Outer Rim sim.

I've done this with multiple sims, always noting my FPS before and after optimizing the textures. I wouldn't put the time and money into optimizing the textures unless I was consistently seeing a high return in performance. Unfortunately, SL being SL I can't exactly show you the sims before and after. To do this I would need to buy two sims, make the exact same build in both sims, then keep them both online to compare. I think we can all agree that's just not feasible. Still, I can point you towards a couple places in SL with optimized texture use and you can see for yourself how your performance fares. Both are fairly "high detail" environments. I urge you to look at not only the FPS, but the consistency, by which I mean you should note far fewer, if any, "freeze-ups" after the sim loads, faster rez times, and little to no texture thrashing. Keep in mind that your experience will vary based on the avatars present. When people quote FPS alone it always makes me skeptical because you can have choppy performance while SL shows you a nice big happy FPS as long as you're standing still. The Ohnaka Strip (A sci-fi RP sim, not only high detail but also full of animesh) (ETA: Well, I can only vouch for the main street area and the branching rooms contained within that sim, looks like they added TPs to other sims that aren't as optimized.) http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The Outer Rim/107/196/3208 The Hentai Arcade (a generic furry adult hangout, but one I know that is mindful of texture use) http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bexington/18/223/403 I'm on a PC with a 2GB GTX 960 videocard and 12GB of RAM and I see consistently higher performance in these sims than I do in similar sims.

Another point here is that nothing exists in a vacuum. Sure, you might have a furry avatar loaded down with a million flexi and rigged triangles, and you could argue it has the bigger impact on performance, but the texture load of the environment is also impacting performance. When both are bad enough (say, 6+ gigs of textures in the evironment and said high-poly furry avatar) saying one is more impactful than the other becomes meaningless because both are killing your performance. Get rid of one and you've still got a laggy mess. That's why so many of those generic furry adult hangouts are laggy framerate killers even when no one is around and why I'd rather spend my time at the hangout that uses less than a gig of textures in its environment because there my framerates are significantly higher even WITH avatars around. (I can jellydoll/derender those at least.)