Flea Yatsenko

I agree. I have been building in SL for a very long time and nothing has really changed other than mesh and materials. I remember how exciting it was when we moved from sculpty to mesh, it was unreal, like a new world opened up to us. When materials came out, it was great but it didn't revolutionize anything. It really just ends up having better shiny stuff for most people. But as a content creator, it's tough. Lots of people don't use ALM yet it takes more time, effort, and L$ to upload a material product because there's three textures instead of one and it requires more work. So you raise your prices to account for that, yet there are people who don't even use ALM and you're wasting your time and L$ on a feature people don't use. I'd love for something to light a fire under me again. Like many others, I think they are just burned out because there just isn't enough excitement here. And then you couple it with constant maintenance and issues with logins and marketplace and it's no wonder this place isn't growing like it's capable of. Second Life is really amazing. I'm not here to hate. But it's currently just spinning tires, not going anywhere, because it's not a reliable platform and it's not introducing groundbreaking new features. SL has always been about people showing up because the community creates content that drags people into SL. This place is really cool and a lot of awesome people made it that way (Lindens and content creators). I would love to see people get excited about it and for it to start doing great again.

Why would one of the largest banks in the world invest in a payment processor that's only used for an old virtual world with around 50,000 peak concurrent users a day? Easy, they want to expand the platform. But how would they expand the Tilia platform when it only works in L$ and a payment processing service that isn't theirs? It's obvious they want to expand Tilia to other "metaverse" (I hate that meme buzzword) projects and to expand it globally instead of forcing everyone not in the USA to deal with USD. Even if Tilia prints money, it's on such an insignificant scale compared to everything JP Morgan does.

I browsed over the repo for GET3D. Every model needs its own trained dataset. At the moment, it's simply not "make me a blue car that looks like (model)" It's much more like, "I want to make a chair, I need to make a dataset and train a model." AI is all the rage right now but I think people need to lower their expectations. If you try and make something that's not in the pretrained model you are going to be disappointed, probably. It might be enough to get a virtual world started so people have the basics but it's definitely not going to replace humans any time soon. EDIT: Just as a point, anyone who has tried to use GPT in a niche situation to generate text will know what I'm talking about. It's only really good based on the data it's trained on. Which means GET3D needs huge amounts of existing 3D models to learn from.

I thought the mobile client got canned because it wasn't anything like anyone here was expecting. SL makes a lot of money through land, but with the metaverse being a thing now, businesspeople look at SL and how they've basically established a platform for rewarding content creators in virtual worlds. It has been tried with crypto but that's way over the average person's head. Something like Minds.com is a twitter clone but you earn crypto for your posts. Getting your money out of there is a nightmare, you have to get it off the website into the blockchain, then into a trading site, then into your bank. Tilia makes it really easy, you get virtual currency then send it to paypal then send it to your bank. If it ends up being a service that goes from virtual currency then directly to bank, and from bank to virtual currency, it could make virtual currencies a lot easier to acquire. Companies like Meta are probably looking at their empty and boring virtual worlds and frothing at how to attract content creators to give them a world that's not an ugly and empty joke. SL is basically a working example of building a virtual world with user generated content and having the content creators get paid for it. And the owners of the virtual world don't have to pay the content creators, yet they still get a cut of every sale. This is probably SL's most valuable feature from a business perspective, already mastering the art of paid content creation without the owner of the platform having to pay content creators. I would even go as far as to say that some of the outdated parts of SL are actually a liability to that business. I think LL needs to be careful, if another virtual world can get tens of thousands of active users a day and they make it lucrative for content creators to make money, and get that money easily to their bank accounts, they are going to have some serious competition. Maybe their long term strategy is to become a builder of virtual worlds by giving businesses the tools they need to get the content creator and users seeking content in an empty world chicken and egg problem solved? At this point it's probably better for them to put themselves into that position instead of trying to adapt SL to the modern internet. SL is already at a huge disadvantage because it basically requires a gaming computer to run halfway decently. With PC part prices going crazy having people buy $350 VR headsets and getting them in a virtual world has a much larger market.

While we're talking about the global economy, generally recessions and such have been good for my sales in SL. It's a lot cheaper to go shopping in SL, live your alternative life in SL, etc than it is to go out. It always seems like when times are bad in RL there's more demand to have a "not a lambo" parked outside your big virtual mansion in SL.

I think the real problem with SL is stability and availability. In early SL days, there wasn't much competition. When I first logged in, it was something amazing and there really wasn't anything like that a long time ago. Now, there's a lot more. But if you are trying to get into SL, and you don't really have anything that's motivating you to go in, and you try and log in and something's broken, you just go somewhere else. it used to be you'd keep trying to get into SL because you didn't have any sort of alternative. We are almost two weeks into October, of those 13 days, the 1st, 9th, and 10th are the only days there wasn't any sort of issue with the grid status (maintenance or restarts). Now, when SL was the only thing like it, people could deal with that maintenance. Now, if SL has problems they just start up a game or a different service (like VRChat) and forget about SL. I actually think SL is still a great platform, even with all the legacy cruft that comes with it. Even with VRChat being a copyright infringement free for all there's still more quality content in SL. But the times have changed, SL doesn't stand out like it used to, and if there's something wrong with the grid, it's a lot easier to just leave for something else than it is to try and get in. Maybe it's just me but I don't think SL needs some sort of crazy new feature to thrust itself into the limelight for huge growth. It needs to fix what's stopping people from staying around. And personally I think it's due to the overall stability of the grid. People today have zero patience compared to 10 years ago, they aren't going to deal with problems. They're just going to leave.

People like to leave bad reviews as a form of leverage/black mail. Something like, "I didn't get my way and if you don't give it to me I'll leave this bad review up." I've had it happen before, they didn't even bother sending me a notecard or IM, which I always respond to as fast as possible. And it was something easily fixed. It's normal, it happens. They are probably hoping you offer to correct what they're complaining about (by giving them free stuff) in exchange for deleting their reviews or updating them. Happened to be a few times, and they're all somewhat recent. I think if you block them they're banned from your store, so if they do it I give them what they want to make the bad reviews go away, then block them so they can't buy from me anymore (I hope). There are lots of scammers like that on other marketplaces too, I've experienced it on eBay. In fact I bought something and the seller accused me of lying to them for more free product and said it happened all the time, but I was able to prove it wasn't because the shipping label was damaged. I think the worst part is that even if you give proper response and customer service, these people leave nasty reviews in hopes you'll give them what they want, see you respond instantly, and think it's just because they left you a bad review. When you'd do it normally. It's just a part of doing business in the current world we live in, but it's why you should cherish and be grateful for every good customer you get.

SL is still successful because you can find pretty much anything you want on it. A lot of it is out dated, has performance issues, etc. But SL is successful because it has this content, and poor content is better than no content. Consider all these technical problems with SL, yet tens of thousands of people show up every day. They do it for the content and they just deal with all the other problems. I also disagree with SL just growing because of chance, they were the most hands off virtual world at the time, they really only tried to step in and shape the world when they were under pressure from legal or media. There.com is still alive, you pay $10 a month. If they have user content for sale it's not nearly as featured as the Marketplace link on the secondlife.com home page. You'll see VRChat was successful too, because they had a huge hands off approach to content. And after they added Easy Anti-Cheat people were mad because they had their content (mods) taken away when it was falsely classified as cheating. Walled gardens just aren't successful, it's why all these "METAVERSE MILLIONS OF USERS!" articles all have "we consider roblox, minecraft, and fortnite part of the metaverse" asterisks. If SL needs anything, it needs more features like experiences to create games inside of SL to play. Look at Roblox, it's all user generated games you can play.

I noticed if you log out and log back into a different sim it might work. This should be a pretty high priority bug, I wonder how many people log in, see no one on their friends list, then log out, when they would have stayed in world because people were actually on.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/graphics-card-prices-july-2022 Prices are coming down, big time. The shortage is over in the used market at least. They are going for half of MSRP used when they were above MSRP used. Once we properly enter the recession prices are going to tank hard, people can't afford fuel and food they aren't going to spend $1000 on a new graphics card. They are going to drop further when AMD releases their new graphics cards this fall, they're supposed to be a huge upgrade (Nvidia's will be too) since COVID threw a wrench into product releases and both companies basically skipped a generation. And yes, smaller nodes (nms) are more fragile and not as strong under use. I had an FX 8350, got it to boot at some insane voltages and made it into Windows long enough at 5.3ghz long enough to get a screenshot. My Ryzen, I can barely overclock. Intel has been getting bad too as it gets smaller. At least the smart miners undervolt and underclock for better efficiency, the smarter ones aren't the ones who are pushing their cards to the max, better to mine with two undervolted and underclocked cards that one overclocked and overvolted (power consumption goes up exponentially when you overclock). I had a 7970 (28nm) liquid cooled, I just set basically everything to the max clocks and voltages and used it for 8 years before it died. Wouldn't think about that on a new graphics card, they don't overclock as well and they die quicker. I remember when Intel went to 14nm people who would overclock their higher nm CPUs were killing 14nm ivy bridges like crazy. I actually used to be a huge overclocker and did it for fun, but new CPUs/GPUs are death to overclocking, I don't even really do it anymore, it's not as fun as it used to be and they all die.

Charging for mobile is a terrible idea, that's such a great chance for user growth from a new market. There's a huge market out there that only really uses mobile devices like Android and iOS and they don't have legitimate gaming computers. There should be something for content creators. If you get "free" land with premium, you should get a parcel with some land impact where you can set up a store. It would be a great chance to basically recreate in world shopping malls. LL just needs a way to take some commissions in world because they'd probably lose money from SLMP commission more than they'd gain in premium plus sales. Maybe some perks when you are selling on marketplace as well, but obviously something that doesn't make it too unfair to others who aren't premium plus.

It takes more than that, Sansar had lots of contests to get people to create content and it's not doing very well right now.

People gravitate towards things that are familiar. If someone is looking for a band shirt in marketplace, and one is an extremely popular band, and another is one a content creator invented themselves, almost everyone will take the popular and familiar band. Copyright content harms original content builders.

Second Life still has a ton of value in the fact that most modern websites and "metaverses" want to mix your real life with your virtual life as much as possible. Second Life is old school, back when your account was completely separated from your real life and you were pseudo-anonymous. People don't want their real life tied to their virtual identity, the entire purpose of Second Life is to live out a literal second life away from your first. If people wanted the two to mix, you'd see people's real life Facebook and social media all over their SL profiles. SL's competition is either Meta and big social media, which wants to just harvest your real life data and merge your digital and real personas, and these crypto things which are very infantile and most are probably just get rich quick schemes by the people who made the platforms. That was huge when crypto was new in the early 2010s, lots of fake coins that would get pumped and dumped at the peak by the creator, then they die forever. I tried Metaverse and it's horrifying. They mix your real life with virtual life as much as possible and there's all these warnings about "good behavior", it legit scares you at some point you're going to break some rule without realizing and aggressive moderators are going to come down on you, on your virtual self which is tied to your real self. Big tech is scared of people complaining about sexual harassment (it does happen a lot in VR though) so they try and overly clamp down on things because they don't want negative press at all. Just everything, like you enter the metaverse and you get a feeling that they want your real life tied into everything and they're terrified of getting negative press for any sort of controversial behavior so they shove rules and warnings in your face non stop. It's completely off putting when you are reading all these warnings on an account tied to your real life. IIRC there was already some media hubbub about virtual groping or whatever and they added safety bubbles and whatever. I've never had those such problems personally anywhere online (like getting in trouble/banned), but the messages are still ominous and threatening. It's just not a welcoming environment when you join something and the first things you see are warnings about how your account will be banned if you break rules. But it's way easier to be your other self on Second Life and there's not really any consequences to living out fantasies or whatever. And SL really has that going for it in a way other platforms don't. Plus there's so much content here, you don't realize it until you go to another platform and try and search for stuff and there's just no results. SLMP search might be disappointing a lot of times but at least there's stuff for it to try and search through.

The viewer and hardware has been getting better, but content keeps increasing in complexity. Look how complex a lot of mesh avatars have gotten, those are easily the largest contributors to poor performance. And if LL makes the viewer faster, people are just going to make their builds and AVs more and more complex, negating performance increases. Build tools should show render impact on every object in world, and avatar complexity should add a clearer, more obvious message that X% of people won't be able to display you properly. Lots of people use SL to make attractive and interesting avatars, but for a lot of people there's no optimal way to do it, you can just keep adding complex stuff to your body until you get what you want. Just imagine what improvements we could see if, say you attach something to your avatar and the heaviest and worst offenders are temporarily colored red and the best ones are colored green. Some of the tech stuff that's happening is really awesome, both with LL and Animats. But if you give people more performance for free they aren't going to be excited they have higher frame rates. They are going to keep adding stuff to their builds and AV until their computer slows down and then we are back to where we started. And it's not their fault, it's an ignorance thing because there's not enough tools to make it clear what affects performance negatively. SL has never been very performant, but if you took a modern viewer back to a sim built around ancient hardware and didn't use mesh and new features you'd probably find it runs extremely well. This is just an endless battle between trying to make SL run faster and content creators using the higher performance to make more complex things. The race is not going to end until there's something equivalent to land impact for rendering performance.

They do it because they think it gets a quicker response. But the people who contact me politely always get a higher level of customer service. From my experience, the people who send an IM or notecard first are usually really cool, friendly, nice people to be around and the people who jump right to a mean review to get your attention are, how to say this politely, not the kind of customer you enjoy dealing with and usually not very happy people. But those low reviews for attention are a good way to go from "I want this person to be really happy and enjoy my products" to "please make your review go away"

For all of SL's problems with legacy stuff, I would think SL's content library is one of the largest for any virtual world. And that is where a lot of SL's value comes from. It's not entirely from the technology, servers, etc. It's the users and the content. LL abandoning the content in SL for an upgraded version of SL would put it directly in competition with all the other virtual worlds. Right now, SL is sort of on another level of existence because you can go on SLMP and buy almost anything you want. Not to mention, if you are a content creator you go to SL because it's got the users and it's the platform most likely for you to be successful on because there's more users. If SL ever sees any sort of massive performance improvement and is able to scale to slower devices (like mobile), it would be because of some sort of clever rendering tricks for rendering poorly optimized geometry. There are more technical people out there than me, but you have 3d viewports in 3d modelling software that can handle a really lot of verts for geometry that's not really optimized and it runs fine. Trying to use an existing engine is a waste of time, SL is more like a content editor and world builder than an actual game, even if you aren't one to use the editor and world building features. SL needs some sort of math and render genius to fix some of the problems they have, and very sadly most programming today has gone away from that and shifted to "lets use some libraries or lets use a different engine" and not "how do we optimize our custom in house software?" There are a lot of small steps being made right now to fix some legacy code, and a lot of it is really paying off. Maybe SL can be made to run well with lots of smaller improvements adding up, maybe it needs more. But I think there is a lot of fixing and upgrading stuff without resorting to clever tricks that SL can be massively improved.

Thanks for the test, but do you have vsync enabled? It's really odd for the fps to stop at 60fps unless vsync is enabled, you might get better FPS if you have it enabled and you turn it off.

Frame time is more important than frame rate. If you are averaging frame rate for the last second, and it puts out 30 frames in a second, but it does the first 25 frames in the first 250ms then the last 750ms is the last 5 frames, it's going to feel horrible like the FPS is much lower. SL could feel really good at 40fps if the frame times were consistent and it was using Freesync or GSync, but it needs to be in full screen to use both IIRC.

What kind of gains do you usually see? Trying to decide if it's worth it trying to set it up or not.

Why not? SL already has the problem of cloud streaming games where your input has to go to a server, be processed there, then sent back to the client. Except people are stuck downloading the assets and rendering client side instead of basically sending inputs and receiving a video. I really don't like cloud streaming games and it's usually a horrible idea but I don't see how it could be any worse with latency than what we already have. I don't know how it could be profitable but it would be pretty cool to have streamed video rendering with a real time interface for chat and stuff. I'd even argue it could have less latency at times. Example if you wear something from your inventory, you send the wear command to the server which then handles everything probably in the same datacenter and sends it back to you, instead of all the back and forth we currently have.

Good, the original client missed the mark. The mobile client needs to be something that can engage the mobile audience and get them to become a part of the SL economy. It was just going to be a way for existing users of SL to be able to chat on their phones.

I know, I think a long term goal would be to have viewers share optimized bulk assets instead of just downloading individual assets and trying to make it work like a real game. SL's greatest strength is how the entire thing is basically a world editor for a game, but that means a lot of optimizations you normally get can't happen. But I think it's extremely impressive to get the kind of performance animats is getting considering he's working with dynamically loaded unoptimized individual assets. You could do a lot of optimization if you were allowed to make assumptions that assets in SL wouldn't change and they could be bundled/compiled into something more efficient to handle. But currently every viewer has to assume that at any time anything on a sim can be edited and changed.

I think this is great, I've always been a fan of making the current viewer an "editor" for builders and having a lightweight, high performance viewer for people who don't want to build. The vast majority of users would be very happy with a lightweight viewer that just ran well, let them move a few things around, manage inventory, change appearance, and of course be social. I am a builder but I would use the lightweight viewer most of the time. I'm sure most builders would agree with me.

If you are dealing with that much money it is 100% worth it to pay an accountant who knows this stuff. No one is going to take on that responsibility of telling you what to do with your taxes for free on a forum. It has nothing to do with what LL thinks, you need an accountant and a professional who can give you an honest answer. I think there is potential for you to be able to write this off but you're going to have to spend the money on a professional who can give you an honest answer. What you write off is not LL's responsibility, it's between you and the government. Please ask a professional, you're not going to get free tax advice. But usually you can write off all sorts of stuff. I don't see why you couldn't write off those expenses if you're paying in USD but you need someone who knows what they are doing legally to get away with it. over $10k a year and making a tax mistake is sure to get the IRS all over you, specially considering they want to massively increase IRS enforcement soon.