Lab Chat Returns January 21st, 2016 with Linden Lab CEO - Ebbe Altberg

[azza84 Crazyboi]

Hi, my question is why have rolling restarts on mainland now happening less frequently (as told by concierge service) and the general public were not notified about it?

thanks

[Polymath Snuggler]

Given the release-state of Occulus Rift, has LL considered gearing a substantial portion of Sansar's compatability towards browser ( or browser app ) based rendering that will allow the platform to enjoy widespread useage without a long installation.   We've all seen 

, does Linden Labs have any plans to make all Sansar content available in this manner?  If not, Why?

Follow up question : There are literally thousands of people and companies who would enjoy the use of a small easily-hostable,  easily-viewable VR experience for things such as simple walkthroughs of apartment layouts, or small scale teaching experiences that are loadable on-demand etc etc.  Is LL attempting to capture that business demographic?  If not, Why?

[R Dismantled]

I guess if nobody else will mention the 800LI elephant in the room, I will...

Regarding Sunday's major failures, Gridstatus posted the usual warning:

"Please refrain from rezzing no copy objects, making inworld L$ transactions or marketplace transactions and remember to save all builds."

Twelve years, and these still happen. *sigh* Anybody have stats on the frequency and severity of these semi-outages?

Why not have the viewer automatically poll Gridstatus before a user rezzes a no copy object and makes an inworld L$ transaction?

Or pop up the warning in the viewer itself? Because if someone is going full-dive, they're not going to be checking Twitter or the Gridstatus blog. And if they've already logged in, they're not going to see a warning that only appears on the login screen

Follow-up questions:

- What is being done to design Sansar's architecture to avoid single points of failure or chronic back-end service failures that could affect user inventories and/or game currency? 

- How aggressively will Sansar warn active users when there are currently severe performance and stability issues?

- Will Sansar's SLA take into account these user-impacting less-than-total outages, or continue to use SL's current SLA?

[Richardus Raymaker]

12. Mesh

Is sansar going to have a better way to test mesh inworld, objects, clothing attachments. without creating useless assets on the server side.

Do we get some temporarly upload function to test mesh ? This would lower the costs of storage.

[Perrie Juran]

Maybe we should stop responding to the wanna-be Comic Book Hero.

He just uses the responses to validate his fantasies of deluded self importance.

[RusselHobbs]

What the position of LindenLabs about art in Sansar? It will be again a sort of LEA? This LEA in SL It seems to be drowning, a mess all around us. Apparently the committee system don't work, and the current committee is composed by people who are not artists or having particular knowledge about art. The LEA committee system now is completely fault, opaque and they make contradictory choices. There will be some improvement? 

[MBeatrix]

Maybe we should stop responding to the wanna-be Comic Book Hero.

He just uses the responses to validate his fantasies of deluded self importance.

Yeah, you are right. But maybe some replies will make other users understand how dangerous his ideas can be, although 90% of these posts here are focusing on Sansar project, which I'm sure pleases Mr. Altberg immensely. :smileyvery-happy:

[MBeatrix]

Why not have the viewer automatically poll Gridstatus before a user rezzes a no copy object and makes an inworld L$ transaction?

That would be good, if the GSP could be trusted — it can't, unfortunately.

Usually, the posts show up when the unscheduled maintenances already are underway... Most times half an hour later, more or less.

[Marcus Perry]

SL has a very large avaiation community but the very small size of sims and resulting issues make flying tough. Will Sansar cater to aviation (and boating, sailing, racing etc.) enthuiasts more ?

[Qie Niangao]

(I read another post that mentioned C#, and I'd like to ask a bit more detail.)

We understand that C# is to be the scripting language of Sansar, but this doesn't reveal much about the programming environment. In and of itself, C# is an okay language, but without libraries, it's pretty useless -- and for scripting Sansar, what most matters is the Linden-defined library of functions for world manipulation and user experience. So, how and when can we learn more about those functions? Will they be roughly analogous to what we get in LSL, with comparable restrictions on memory and other resource constraints? Or perhaps more restrictions on scripters or script usage will permit less restricted scripts?

[Gusher Castaignede]

I understand Sansar is a platform to create/design a VR experience...

 

Is this project using a new game engine?

Every explorer would need to download the content for every sim/world he or she wants to visit?

Will LUA scripting be used in this platform?

[NVZN]

Great questions, but I'd like to add a third!

3) Given all the new facial bones and finger bones, Ockam's Razor suggests that Linden Lab telegraphing its plans to drive both hierarchies through markerless facial feature tracking (like FaceShift) and finger/hand tracking (like Leap Motion.)

Given that, would it be possible to record face/hand performances on the server side to store as a reusable animations-- without the need to use a 3rd party recording tool-- being able to record a performance in-world (and in context) is key?

 

[Jalynne Ohmai]

One of the anticipated draws for Sansar is its goal of scalability. The existing limit on the number of users in a single sim in SL is a huge issue, seen every time a big shopping event, concert, or even labchat happens; a sim can only fit so many avatars at once. My question is this: How is Sansar intending to implement scalability? Will we be seeing an 'instance' model where the entire sim is copied, and each instance holds a given number of avatars viewing the same content? Will there be a way for people to truly share the same experience?

This is especially important for things such as live music events, where the musician may end up in one instance and the audience in another; the same would hold true for educational talks, classes, and hosting guest 'keynote' speakers. It's also relevant for large roleplay sims, where interacting with a large group is part of the reason for the experience's existence.

 

Jalynne Ohmai

[Joy Canadeo]

Hello my name is Joy Canadeo, and I have been in SL for 9 1/2 years. As recent as 2010 SL “daily concurrency”* was close to 80,000 residents, today, we are looking at about half that.

What are your plans to atrract more creative people, to come into SL who build our worlds,  and assure they remain in SL.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

As a content creator in Second Life since 2004 who uses Blender and Zbrush to make mesh, and is a scriptor who has taken a course to learn C#, I am eager to get into Sansar as an alpha and/or beta tester. Is there anything I can do to put my name forward to be considered when the time comes, and can you estimate when that time might be? I can also make textures and sound files, and make animations. 

[Rya Nitely]

---

Crap Mariner wrote:

If I understand correctly, the Sansar code will be significantly more closed to third-party development and forks than SL.

Have you used a third-party SL viewer?

Have you seen the innovations and user interface features that these developers add which users want?

Have you asked your official viewer developers how much they rely on third-party code?

Do you realize how this might hinder Sansar?

---

This ^

The SL viewer is not user friendly. Useful features like being able to edit by copying and pasting coordinates and texture settings from one object to another is just one of so many features that I depend on in Firestorm. The Firestorm people have recognised what is useful and have made it easier to create in SL,  but Linden Lab don't seem to care about convenience. Even when people ask over and over again.

The Marketplace for instance, imagine if third party developers could introduce new features into the Marketplace, just think how much easier our lives could be, for both customers and sellers.  The MP is a very good example of how requested features are ignored, and what we could expect in a world where third party developers have no access.

Edit to add question: My question is will Sansar be open to third-party viewer development? This is important because it is necessary to use a product to know what customers need.

[Timo Gufler]

Hello,

Sansar seems to have many interesting ideas compared to the current SL version, but my primary concern is, are you going to have a Linux viewer or not? If not, I better start preparing to say farewell to my SL friends...

[Gusher Castaignede]

i think nearly everyone here is failing to recognize that Project Sansar is a whole new platform from scratch to create/design a VR experience targeting VR Headsets... nothing or very little to do with SL. Secondlife will always be Secondlife in its own respects, but Project Sansar takes you up into more advanced requirements and features for content creators. It reminds me of "Blue Mars"...it uses C# and lua..using high-end game engine named CryEngine, but the thing is in order to support many concurrent users at same time every user wanting to visit a sim would need to download that specific sim's content. Another game engine I know UnrealEngine has now started a marketplace of their own that allows users to sell 3d content for their game/world...but be aware that this is advanced 3d content created with 3dmax and/or Maya...

[Richardus Raymaker]

It's a new platform yes, but the make a big mistake if the only concentrate on HMD devices like other developers do. HMD is not going to get intressting for a few years and is in many cases not practical in use. The hardware requirements we dont know, but Secondlife users make the same mistake the try to run secondlife on wrong hardware. Good change that sansar better run.

 

That is why i want to know how good keyboard, mouse and chat is supported. it's a very important part to let sansar be a sucsess. Besides it need to be payable. something that secondlife is killimng , high tier.

sansar is not secondlife, but as long the basic requirements are present, keyboard, mouse and chat / groups support. there's not so much difference between Secondlife private sims or project sansar.

And im pretty sure you can use blender in sansar and not need maya what people think.

[Inara Pey]

Up until a few years ago, if there were serious problems occurring with any of the SL services, the Lab would issue an in-world warning to residents, advising them to refrain from actions which might result in inventory loss, account balance errors, etc., providing those logged-in with the most direct means of knowing when problems were occurring. Given the events of 9th / 10th January and similar events, could the Lab again look at re-implementing these advisories to users, rather than relying on us keeping one eye on the Grid Status Page when in-world?

 

See: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-20081

[Maelstrom Janus]

Lots of complaints about vigilantes, griefers etc suggestion make everyone who goes in pay the premium....maybe then you can cut tiers - currently extortionate - make it easy to track down griefers and cancel their 'subscription' if they cause problems.... Also will we see an end to ban lines and security orbs and the like so that people who want to explore in the new world can do so freely. The current ability of all land owners to deny access by adding names to the admittance list is more than enough to deal with people who dont leave when requested to.....

 

On the payment side can we have a system that allows people who don't live in the USA to pay at fixed rates in their own currency.

[Cain Maven]

We know that much of the focus has been on the technical aspects of Sansar -- concurrency, render quality, scalability, etc.

However: what has been done to ensure that you are implementing the "right" features from a user perspective?

A couple of examples off the top of my head:

• Many basic tasks (putting on shoes comes to mind) could be a lot easier. Removing some of these early hurdles could help with user retention.

• From the perspective of builders and landscapers, the ability to create realistic water in everything from bathroom sinks to waterfalls would improve realism and probably also immersion.

• Creating LODs is a very time consuming task for many mesh creators. Easing this requirement would likely speed up content creation and help Sansar reach the "critical mass" of available products sooner.

This list, obviously, goes on -- depending on your perspective and needs. While I am of course aware that you have been working with a small group of creators in the closed alpha stage, one might be concerned that the feedback has been narrowly focused on technical aspects and not broad enough to reflect the needs of the user base as a whole.

Will you take any steps to ensure that you cover as many bases as possible before committing to technical decisions that might make it costly or difficult to retrofit the platform with desired features?

[Lilith Heart]

I'm a scripting/coding dumbo. So...

1. Will Sansar have a open API enabling the addition of editor extensions by third party developers ? For instance Playmaker visual scripting tool or perhaps Behaviour Designer - Both of these editor extensions are available for Unity and are written in c# I believe.  So .... will it be possible for Unity developers to port their editor extensions to Sansar ?  I rather hope so as it would increase the power of Sansar xMillion.

2. I'm confused and so are others it seems. Will Sansar support a 'Universal Avatar' that can travel with it's inventory to any Sansar world that allows the entry of said Universal Avatar ? 

3. This is not so much of a question but a statement. Surely there will be a map of 'Sansar Worlds'. Without a world map, there will be no sense of community. How will people find each other and interesting experiences without a map ? 

Excited and intrigued by Sansar