Penny Patton

This right here. I had nothing but optimism for EEP until this. This is so stupid. So incredibly stupid.

Sure, and I should add that just because it doesn't tick the boxes for what I see as a successful SL-style virtual world doesn't mean it can't do just fine in that sex game niche.

Except, no, they didn't. I specified a "robust" avatar customization system. Blue Mars had the MMO "pick from 6 heads" style "avatar customization" so it didn't meet the requirement. One need only spend a few minutes glancing at random SL avatars to see how important avatar customization is. In SL, unlike other virtual worlds, you can make your avatar entirely your own without any CG modelling experience. Decorating your avatar is an activity, both solitary and social. People love showing off their avatars. And making your avatar to your specifications makes one far more invested. I specified that SL itself had let in-world content creation fall by the wayside, meaning it's in-world content creation tools don't stack up to today's standards. If 3DX can't even meet SL's outdated and cludgy in-world content creation tools that means it's falling even further short of meeting that requirement. I also specified making money because the creator business model is another requirement that 3DX is missing. I do have to say, the way you describe adding sitting to an object sounds way more intuitive than SL's SitTarget system, and it sounds like it has a better animation system. But still, without those 3 elements it's clearly missing, I'm not surprised it hasn't toppled SL off the mountain. ( I do agree on crowds, for the most part, but I have to wonder how well SL can do crowds if avatars weren't absolutely packed with performance killing content? )

Actually, last night I was talking with a friend as we both marveled at how virtual world developers all seem to overlook the key elements that made SL as successful as it's managed to be. Robust avatar customization. (No, not just the user created content you can decorate your avatar with, but the appearance editor itself.) In-world content creation. (Not only did simple content creation tools help make it easy for people to jump in to content creation, but it also made creating content a social feature. Remember sandbox building contests? When Sandboxes were always filled with people meeting and learning from each other in-world?) Land ownership. (Avatar customization aside, this is one of the stronger ways to get people invested in your platform.) Making money. (See above.) Allowing adult content. (People like the sex.) All of these elements are crucial in the success of an SL-style virtual world and yet every entry into the race, including Sansar, manages to miss several of these elements. Most entirely lack 1, 2 and 5. (No, being able to create a mesh model to import and wear is not the same as logging in and being able to modify the shape and proportions of the standard avatar, then decorate it with attachments. In SL one of the first things a new resident does is make their avatar their own.) SL also benefitted from a 6th element: Turn of the century hype for a "3D web". This is long gone. It's not crucial to success but it allowed LL to make a lot more mistakes than a developer could make today.

Because saying an idea is bad because you assume LL will do something bad yet also entirely different and not at all like what was suggested is not a productive way of holding a discussion. SecondLife is many things, but if you've used SL at all then chances are pretty good that you've also used it for socializing. I find it difficult to believe that the average SL user has logged in and somehow never interacted with another person in SL. For example, SL is also a creative platform. I've never seen anyone go out of their way to deny this despite the fact that a relatively small number of SL users are all that big into content creation.

And can I just say, because this happens almost every time a feature is ever suggested on this forum, how about when a feature is suggested we just comment on that feature, not the imaginary features we assume LL will do instead?

Except, you already do. A forum, like the one you're reading right now, is social media. Second life is a social platform. Both were deployed by LL. Care about the content, not the label.

I do think it's worth repeating that the reason so many would-be competitors to SL fail is due to the fact that many of these virtual worlds lack much of what made SL popular early on. All the way back in at least 2005 when I joined you had robust avatar customization. I'm not talking user created content I mean the appearance editor. You could make a unique looking avatar with that alone. Most other virtual worlds have lacked that entirely. Blue Mars had you select one of like 6 faces and gave you no control over your body type. High Fidelity gives you no character customization whatsoever. You pick a model. That's it. Don't like your avatar? Replace it with another non-customizeable model. Want something more bespoke? Open your wallet to someone who can make you a custom model. In-world content creation was a huge part of SL's initial draw. It may have been pushed to the wayside since mesh, but I'd argue this has been to SL's detriment, and the lack of inworld content creation at the beginning would likely have resulted in SL ending up yet another failure on a mountain of short lived virtual world attempts. Sansar, HiFi, Blue Mars, et all lack in-world content creation. Marketing is another issue. I knew Facebook was working on a virtual world, but I didn't know it had a name yet, let alone that it was something you could sign up for. Worlds Adrift I've never heard of. Second Life got a lot of free marketing early on due to the virtual world and "3D web" hype being in full swing.That ship has long since sailed.

I see textures like this EVERYWHERE in SL. If it's not most SL content creators, then it's still an extremely common practice. Something that doesn't happen to me in sims I made myself, or the handful of others I know where the creators took time to optimize texture use. And VRAM remains a bottleneck. That's the part you're ignoring. That's the part I'm saying you expect to much of progressively encoded textures. It is not a magic wand to make memory issues go away. It does take time, but it's not that bad. When you over exaggerate something to the point of absurdity you undermine the entire case you're trying to make.

The issue is that most SL creators are uploading textures that look like this: They're automating the UV process and not combining their maps together. So you'll have an object that is covered in 1024x1024 textures, but none of them are actually using more than 256x256. This, again, is one of the reasons why the people screaming that optimization will lead to uglier content are so off base. These content creators would be able to combine all of their textures, reducing the memory cost of their content to a tiny fraction, without sacrificing any detail whatsoever. And it's not difficult to do! They just never bother to figure it out because LL never bothered to put any restrictions on texture use.

Ok, so....can you point to anything I suggested that mentioned anything about tracking your movements in SL? No? Ok then. Maybe we can stop with the dramatics? This is that "social media" paranoia I mentioned. Where people see the words "social media" or "social features", shut their brains off, and immediately assume we're talking about Facebook's worst practices even if that could not be further from the truth.

That would be nice, but I still think you're expecting far too much. If it were really this easy to fix the texture problem in SL, then every videogame in existence would already be using this sort of software and texture optimization would only be necessary insofar as reducing the disk size of the game. Spoiler Alert: This hasn't happened. There's been some great improvements with progressive texture loading, but not nearly to the extent you're talking. It's a great idea in theory, but in practice I just don't think we're there yet. And the fact that SL currently can't do what you're asking of it makes the whole thing moot. Content creators need to reign in texture use. When you do that you can see enormous performance improvements in SL right now. Of course, if the new cache is rolled out and brings about the kind of performance improvements you expect from it, that'll be great. I would love to see it happen. Is there any sort of timeline yet for this new cache? In any case, I do agree that excessive geometry is a big problem too, especially when it comes to avatar attachments where there's absolutely nothing reigning it in.

People forget that our profiles, groups, etc are all social features. One of SL's shortcomings is that LL took the social elements of groups and tied them intrinsically to land admin features. For someone like me, who is often hired to build for various sims and so forced to join the land groups for those sims, it severely limits the number of social groups I can join. As to why there's a limit on groups to begin with, I don't know the full story on that but my understanding is that it is due to how groups keep track of group members for online/offline notification and group chat. If I'm remembering right, when someone begins group chat it's not simply accessing a chat room everyone in the group is passively joined to. It actually has to connect to each and every simulator any online group member is currently in. I believe this is also why there were so many issues with group chat lagging or dropping entirely for so long. I recall at one point LL was planning to try and replace group chat as we know it with something more similar to IRC, but that was one of the many SL features that wound up abandoned. If LL can't fix groups to get rid of group limits, maybe they should look into an alternative to groups, something more focused on the social side. They could call them "Communities" or something.

I don't like intrusive social media features, either. The way i imagine these features being implemented if you weren't interested in them then, much like the web profile feed, you could just ignore it and your SL experience would be more or less the same. Although you would likely see more people at events, and more activity in groups, so you'd still benefit from the features in that regard even if you never use them yourself. I think a part of the problem is that when people see the words "social media" they think "Facebook" and they just immediately assume the worst. You can see that mindset in action through some of the other responses in this thread.

The engine isn't the problem. Not entirely. It does have some very substantial problems, but the engine is not the problem. LL actually has been updating it over the years so it's not exactly as out of date as a lot of people assume. The problem is the content people have filled SL with. Since LL's attempts to curb badly made (unoptimized, framerate killing) content were set up by people who did not fully grasp the problem, SL is filled with content would kill performance in any videogame engine, no matter how modern and regardless of the hardware running it. If you build an optimized environment in SL, it can look gorgeous and run at a smooth framerate even on laptops with onboard graphics. It's actually kind of amazing how well SL can run when you don't fill it with content that just is not made for realtime 3D rendering and avatars walking around literally hogging more rendering resources than some entire sims. If LL wants to fix that problem, make SL an experience that runs smoothly for most users, they need to figure out a way to tackle this problem that they created by lacking a full understanding of the problem to begin with. And they need to do it without flushing 16 years of legacy content down the drain, causing the userbase to ragequit. But since LL still doesn't seem to understand that they don't fully understand the problem, it's like trying to explain colour to someone who has always been blind, and doesn't speak your language. While underwater. Fighting sharks with lasers on their heads.

This has bothered me about the marketplace since before LL purchased it from Xstreet. You go to any online store and shop for something that comes in variants like different colours, in that marketplace you will typically find the item listed once, and from that listing you select the variant you want. Buying a shirt that comes in five different colours? The shirt is listed once, and from that listing you choose the colour you want it in. The SL marketplace doesn't do that. So if you want to shop for hair you are faced with sometimes literally pages and pages of one hair style.There are hair sellers with literally hundreds of pages, not because they sell that many different styles, but because one style can end up being 2, 3 or even 5 pages worth of listings for all the different colours. And this makes shopping for things like hair on the marketplace an even bigger headache than trying to shop in-world, when it should be the other way around. The marketplace should be the easiest and most convenient way to shop. I know Linden Lab is making improvements to the marketplace now (I absolutely love that I can now search my purchase history and get redeliveries directly through the marketplace, that should have been a feature from the beginning but better late than never and I'm just happy we have it now), but this right here, getting rid of redundant listings, should be near the top of their priority list for improving the marketplace. If you want people spending more in SL you don't want to make it frustrating to do so.

It doesn't. It doesn't. This is "mesh causes lag" all over again. Superstitious nonsense. I can practically guarantee any animesh you see in SL has far less of an impact on your performance than any avatar on your screen, including your own. Because unlike avatars, animesh is subject to Land Impact to keep its resource use in check. Adding more skeleton rigs to a scene has negligible impact on performance. If you're really concerned about performance look no further than insane texture use, and the total lack of meaningful restrictions when it comes to avatar attachments. THAT is what is dragging your performance down.

To be fair, Second Life's "social profiles" attempt fizzled out before it even started. All they did was move our already existing profiles to a web format, gave us a post feed (which they almost immediately nerfed by removing one of its more interesting features) and introduced "interest tags" which they then proceeded to do absolutely nothing with. Then they just abandoned it all. And all of this took place over a couple of months. LL is like a cat with ADD in a room filled with laser pointers. The profile feed did let you link it up with Twitter, which was neat, but it was one-way, which kind of defeated the purpose. And that's the real problem with LL's attempts at "social media". They know the buzzword, but have no idea what it means or how to apply it to SL. For instance: Interest Tags were a great idea, that LL did absolutely nothing with. Interest tags could have improved search, events and the marketplace. Imagine if you could apply a limited number of interest tags to marketplace listings, event listings, groups and land. Like, 3-5 tags and no more. These tags would be used in search. If one of your search terms was one of that listing's tags it would get boosted in your search. And since you'd be limited to the number of tags you could apply, it completely bypasses the "word salad" problem that makes finding anything in SL so frustrating. Remember the "Recommendations" tab in web profiles? Probably not, it was worthless. LL used it to generate a lost of strangers who happened to share one or more of your interest tags, the idea being that people would reach out to each other and become best friends forever based on nothing more than sharing one or two interest tags in their profile. When that (of course) did not work, LL thought they could force it to work by emailing that list to everyone a couple of times a month. All that accomplished was a spike in "hi" messages from strangers which most people in SL tend to ignore. Imagine if instead of recommending you stranger's profiles, the recommendations tab would suggest places, groups, events, and marketplace listings to you, all based on your own interests. Suddenly that recommendations tab sounds a lot more useful, doesn't it? Something most SL residents would actually use! Remember how I said LL nerfed the profile feed by removing a feature? You know how you can tag your current location to your feed posts? Originally they had it set up so if you were at a location in SL you could open up a feed window that would display all of the public feed posts made from that location. Effectively giving every location in SL a "shout wall". This feature was a great idea, so of course LL removed it almost immediately. Now imagine if, instead of being LL and removing the feature, they did the smart thing and EXPANDED that feature, so that you could also tag groups and events. Search for an event and if the event is currently active you would see the most recent feed posts made by people at that event. Group profiles could have their own feed page where you could read group member's posts tagged to that group, and all of this could be blended together. One post could be tagged to the land you were at, the event that was currently taking place, and your currently active group. Now imagine if LL created a user calendar that could be synched up to all of this. You'd be able to have events, sales, group activities, new product releases, all relevant to you and all available in a calendar where you could set up reminders, schedule group notifications, etc. You could even see the upcoming birthdays and rez days of any of your friends who make that info public. Groups and Land could also have their own calendars, visible to group members and people visiting a location which made it's calendar public. So if you wanted to see what a given group had going on over the next couple of months, open up the group calendar and take a look. Find an interesting location in SL and want to see when it's more lively? Open the land calendar and take a look at what events and activities are scheduled to take place there. THAT is how you use social media features to make SL more social.

No argument here, there's definitely a hardware bottleneck, but even if LL managed to solve that tomorrow content would still be a major performance issue. And in any case I'm not holding my breath for LL to make such an improvement any time soon. Content, on the other hand, can be fixed right now if you have the know-how. Until I see these other improvements and features making any sort of impact I'm going to remain skeptical. I'm just not convinced LL understands the problem and that comes from years of dealing with them directly. I certainly hope I'm wrong, I'd be extremely happy to see LL make some real improvements when it comes to performance and I will give them all the credit they deserve if I see that happen. One of the biggest problems with how ARC is calculated is that LL has always failed to grasp how textures impact performance and their ARC calculations hardly take textures into consideration at all. This is something they deserve a lot of criticism over until they fix it. That said, as long as LL shoves managing ARC onto individual users setting their own ARC caps, it will never be a useful means of reigning in badly made content. Most people turn off the cap and just ignore it because they don't understand the performance impact, but they do understand that setting the cap means they see ugly pixelated blobs instead of their friends' avatars. I don't need to submit any viewer code for my stance to have any merit, I'm not a programmer but I have a professional CG artist's understanding of how 3D rendering works which is far more important when it comes to understanding how content affects performance. This is an extremely bad take. Here are two versions of one of my avatars, with their respective ARC. Is the avatar on the right "less creative" than the avatar on the left? Does making a mesh model with a dozen textures that look like this make it "less creative" than a mesh model with one texture that looks like this? Of course not, and that's because reigning in unoptimized content in no way impedes creative freedom. It just means content creators would have to be more considerate with how they use resources. Saying people are "fascists" for suggesting LL work in reasonable restrictions on resource use does nothing but derail the conversation into childish name calling.

Here's another article I wrote that I hope is helpful for sim builders: https://pennycow.blogspot.com/2018/08/simple-performance-tricks-anyone-can-do.html

Just in case anyone doesn't remember Nimble, here's a video of it in action. I brought this up to Oz a couple of years ago and he had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't seem to know what Windward Mark is either.

14 years of being in SL. 😜 Seriously, tho, I think one of the reasons LL is reticent to publish their plans for SL is that those plans are constantly changing. They'll be talking up a feature that's "definitely coming soon" one day, then the next none of the Lindens can remember that ever being the plan. Remember Avatar Puppeteering? Nimble volumetric clouds that were going to be added to Windlight? ARCtan? Remember in 2007 LL promised we'd be able to trade windlight settings as inventory by the end of the year? There seems to be a lack of direction and leadership in the Lab. Features only seem to get worked on so long as there is a Linden that feels on working on that feature. If they're fired, quit, or get distracted by a laser pointer the feature gets dropped. That's why I say "LL has been promising a lot of good things" rather than saying "LL is working on a lot of good things". Given their history, the chance that even half of what LL promised two years ago will actually see the light of day isn't exactly good.

You're probably experiencing more of a performance hit because of your avatar than you realize. SL tends to run so poorly for anyone, regardless of their computer's specs, that people tend to overlook performance issues that would be unacceptable anywhere but SL, such as texture thrashing (where textures keep going blurry after rezzing because your hardware cannot keep them in memory due to the sheer amount of textures being streamed all at once) or stuttering (where your computer freezes for a moment or two every so often), let alone the fact that for SL's visual quality, anyone with a computer with a dedicated videocard made in the past 10 years should be experiencing a steady 60fps at all times, at max settings. When SL itself is such a burden on your hardware, being able to judge just how much any individual part of SL, such as an avatar, is affecting you can be difficult. That said, if you're noticing that most people have a lower draw weight than you, you probably want to reign it in a bit. It's difficult for anyone to offer any exact numbers to shoot for because avatar complexity is calculated client side, based on your own hardware. (Hey, Linden Lab, you really should fix that. ARC should be a consistent metric for it to have any meaningful use.) And it gets worse. Avatar Complexity isn't a very accurate method of determining an avatar's actual rendering complexity. ARC fails to take textures into consideration in any meaningful way, and textures these days tend to be the undisputed number one cause of performance issues in second life. Nothing else even comes close. I can tell you that you should always aim to have less than 100MB of textures on your avatar. Even 100MB is excessive for an avatar, but it's downright reasonable compared to what most people have going on these days. 200-300MB is is common, and avatars with 500MB to 1GB are not as uncommon as you'd think. (And it will only continue to get worse as long as LL continues to twiddle their thumbs and hope that the problem will just go away by itself.*) That said, all that means is that not all avatars with low complexity are actually easier to render, but avatars with high complexity are always an excessive burden on your videocard. It's not about computers having limited specs. No one is running SL as well as they should be. You could have a computer that runs most modern games just fine, but struggles with SL because almost no SL content creators bother to optimize their work to make it appropriate for realtime 3D rendering. Some even just snatch high-poly models that were never intended for realtime rendering and upload them to SL. We're talking models created for advertising or pre-rendered footage purposes. At the same time, if you take an older/less powerful computer into a sim that was made by someone who understands the need for optimization, that computer will get better performance in SL than people with much more powerful computers will ever experience in Second Life. *Linden Lab's CEO Ebbe Altberg has more or less said that he just hopes the problem will go away by itself, despite the fact that it has gotten exponentially worse over the years and there have been no sign of that changing. Dare to dream, Ebbe. Dare to dream. You might want to start looking into a plan B, though.

Although, while we're on the topic, I do happen to believe that LL should invest some development in the in-world building tools. Not to compete with content made in Blender or other 3rd party tools, but to allow people more freedom to easily create simple things. Don't underestimate how much of the simple joy of creating was a factor in SL's early success. Let me use another SL feature as an example. If you know how to script you can do amazing stuff in SL. But to do even very simple things, like create a chair or a teleporter, SL requires you to learn how to script. If SL had a visual interface for simple scripted features, like adjusting sit targets, apply texture animations, and creating experience based teleporters, more people would be able to easily create such items on their own. Sure, if you relied entirely on the visual scripting interface you'd never be able to achieve quite as much as those who had a strong understanding of actual scripting, but surely you can see how the SL experience would be enriched. Just imagine if anyone, regardless of their skill level, could easily set up an animesh NPC to walk around their yard, stop to water some flowers for a few minutes, then continue around the house to sit on the front porch for a half an hour or so, then get up to check the mail. Applying the waypoints, the animations, everything via a simple to use interface. Pathfinding that anyone could use, not just people who've spent hundreds of hours eyeballs deep in the LSL wiki.

Who said anything about LL making anything like Blender or Maya? You're making some crazy leaps in logic here. I'm not talking about LL making their own version of Blender in SL, I'm talking about all new features. Stuff that isn't currently possible, or at least isn't possible to do well, in SL with any tools, third party or otherwise. You're on the completely wrong track here.