SLCC 2006 Sponsor No Longer Attending

Sadly Khamon - I don't and that seriously sucks.

Although the idea that simultaneous users isn't going up is pure hogwash. I remember the firs t "Log-a-thon", the one where LL gave away a lifetime account as bait... and they STILL couldn't meet the 5k goal.

Now, 5k is what you have on in the slow hours.

The number of simulataneous users is increasing at roughly 5% per month. Good, but not nearly as "explosive" as the 15-20% per month increase in registered accounts that is generally quoted.

This is so. And given the number of people who went for alt-itis... and I'm sure the griefing-sorts may register as many as a couple dozen accounts... I take that into account.

Still, the Linden blog mentions something like 200k as the "logged in over last 60 days" number, and the concurrency is still up. SL is still a long way from World of Warcraft, but I wonder if that's even an appropriate benchmark. AutoCAD's numbers probably suck compared to WoW, you know?

Sure, >200k accounts have logged-in over the past 60 days, but that doesn't tell us anything about account usage and retention. And remember, that number also means that over half of all registered users haven't touched their SL account in over two months.

Total accounts (i.e. the front page number) is increasing at roughly 18% per month, and the 60-day login number is increasing at a whopping 30% per month. And yet concurrency is only increasing at 5% per month. This all suggests that there are a comparatively small number of users who log in regularly, and a large tail of people who will try SL briefly and abandon it, or log in with low frequency. I'd love more information with which to calculate actual account churn rates....

WoW is as good a benchmark as any, given that both platforms are effectively chasing entertainment dollars. Like it or not, call it a game or call it a platform, that's SL's niche.

Amazing, nothing you say is EVER worded nicely. How difficult would it be to say the exact same thing but worded a bit nicer and not be so condescending?

Personally I find it impossible to give any amount of validity to anything you say because it is always so mean spirited.

Imagine how good SL could be if it integrated a physics processor, like physx.

for all of the mantra that SL innovates not administrates, i have not seen it do a hell of a lot of either.

Clubside, like many others, I'm also sorry to see you go... or perhaps I should say, to see you become "less active". Probably the biggest reason why I'm actually sorry is because I will certainly miss your well-elaborated constructive criticism of Linden Lab's technological prowess. You're certainly very good at debunking the "myth" that LL are Master Achievers of Metaverse Technology.

Analysing your critique, and the way you compare LL (and SL) to some recent developments in popular games, either on the PC (the Mac hardly has them, in spite of the efforts of Aspyr to port as many as possible) or Xbox/PS2, it seems to me that you follow Linden Lab's concept of making Second Life "a platform for developing games". This was in fact their concept, if you take a look at their presentations and interview in 2002/3. At that time, the concept of a distributed grid with user-created content was so radical that one could "forgive" LL if their product simply looked like "ActiveWorlds on steroids" — not too fancy (even for 2002). But it had the compelling advantage that amateurs — and not only die-hard 3D game programmers! — could and would be able to tinker with it and create amazing things with simple primitives and a simply primitive programming language (pun intended ;) ).

Thus, the Linden Lab of 2002 was near to what Multiverse is doing today. The difference was the approach. While Multiverse is a more standard platform, in the sense that all content gets created by the professional designers, and programmed by top-of-the-line game programmers, each one developing its own (and mutually incompatible) "game platform", Second Life tried the approach of an "unified grid": different types and styles of games, all integrated in the same grid, and with one single avatar, you would be able to join any of those games.

One would expect (had LL persisted on that approach) that several things would happen simultaneously:

1. A drive towards the best and fastest possible engine, to keep up with the competition. A lot of excellent engines were available already in 2002, and they (and the graphics cards to support them) would quickly become better in a few years. Only by keeping up with the technology of the competition would they be able to catch the professional programmers' and content developers' attention.
   
2. Adding a plethora of features allowing all types of potential 3D games — from combat, to car racing, to strategic planning (like a SimCity MMORPG), to adventures and missions. This would mean a lot of redundancy in the code, in order to support them all; but it would also mean that LL would be on their toes. It would not be enough to point at a single example of a good 3D game to use as a reference model; they would have to compete with all of them.

But by 2003, two social MMOGs raised quickly to proeminence: There.com and The Sims Online. What Linden Lab apparently saw is that their own engine was way too slow, too cumbersome, and too unatractive to appeal to a crowd used to fast-paced action. Instead, social MMOGs, with user-contributed content, seemed like a reasonable and realistic option to achieve. They had two major advantages in 2003 over the competition:

1. All content is user created, and not just part of it; users don't need pre-approval for their content; the building tools are designed for amateurs, and even LSL, despite all its faults, limitations, and cumbersomeness, is rather well suited for the amateur that just wants to touch on a prim to open a door or get a notecard;
   
2. They had in 2003 far better-looking avatars, crucial for a social MMOG. They were also infinitely customisable — not only the physical skeleton (except for the limitation on absolute sizes and having always a somewhat humanoid-looking avatar), but things like clothes on different layers. Only in three areas did SL's avatars lack realism: hair, feet, and hands; but they far than compensated for that with all the rest of the customability. Again, in the hands of amateurs, not pros.

As 2003 passed and 2004 was entered, it was clear that the goal of turning Second Life into a "major MMOG creating platform" was simply impossible. One reason was purely economic — to create a large-scale game inside SL, the costs would be prohibitive, and near to impossible to maintain in the short term (contrast WoW's 500 or so servers, for 7 million users [and a few million simultaneously], with SL's 4200 or so servers, allegedly serving 400,000 users but never more than 10,000 simultaneously).

The other reasons, of course, would be that a "game" deployed inside SL would always have a 1995 look, with limited gameplay, a primitive physics engine, and such low FPS overall to make it unplayable. Even for free.

LL quickly abandoned that marketing stunt. Instead, Second Life became a social platform, with its own content-based, land-based, and event-based economy, as well as several services to support this economy (like DJs to keep parties alive!). In late 2004/2005, Second Life became a "country". Slowly but painfully, the original intent of deploying any serious 3D games inside SL was replaced by social games — casinos, Tringo, trivia contests, card games, and all sorts of simple games that do not require fast FPS to be enjoyable. As a matter of fact, "fighting lag" for any event with more than 25 participants became the obsession of the content producers.

This made naturally LL abandon all efforts to support the games developers in SL. Physics is much like it was on beta; vehicles still crash when crossing borders, and they seem primitive even when compared with SL's nearest competitor, There.com, not to mention any 3D racing game on the PS or Xbox, where they look jurassic, not primitive :) The whole "harm" system, tied into the interface, was left as a stub; people had to design push guns instead, since there wasn't anything else. Although we gained HUDs at a much later stage, they are no replacement for good interface reprogramming, just a quick hack to allow at least some interaction with other elements on the platform — almost always through llSay() instead of an inter-object communication system, long promised, but never implemented.

Instead, the focus was placed on more economical and social tools. In mid-2004, customisable animations were added. In late 2006, we'll finally get some good group tools. And actually that's all that we got in two years. Still, it's much better than what the games developers got — which was basically nothing.

Social games also need content, so in two years, the building tools got an upgrade. Also, there were some niceties added here and there: rippling water (a standard on all games since 2000 or 2001... and which was broken for years in SL), better shiny support, a new lighting model, flexible prims. At least on this area — nicer content for the socially-minded — we saw definitely some improvements in 3 or 4 years of development.

But the major development area of LL is fixing bugs and dealing with limitations. They're absolutely swamped by that — in fact to much, that for almost a year there was not a single major feature introduced: only bug fixing and dealing with limitations, with patches almost every week. Only very, very recently — a work of about 6 months, announced in January 2006 — did LL start to release some brand new features, at a timid rate. But it's far better than nothing at all; people are so thirsty for improvements, that I believe that some would even drool at the new pie menu... just because it is different and you can tell that something changed.

Scripters who are my friends always tell me that they spend 10% of their time on the creative aspects of code, and 90% dealing with workarounds, fixes, and going beyond the limitations. This means that the whole concept of SL as a rapid prototyping tool is put in question; anything developed in SL takes up to ten times as much as developed on another platform — and usually with lower results. Naturally enough, a script that deals with a workaround on a limitation, once developed, can be re-used again — that's not the point. The question that begs to be asked is why the limitations are built-in. In some cases, it's the outdated physics engine — that is an understandable limitation. In other cases, the argument is usually "dealing with abuse". This is a fallacy. I understand that the argument for being able only to rez one prim every X seconds (depending on mass) was to prevent people to write a script to bring down the entire grid on its knees. Still, all experienced scripters know how to use script farms to work around this limitation — and so do all the crackers. The "regular user", the one that is just learning, is the only one suffering because he doesn't know the workarounds. And this happens with all the built-in limitations. The only thing that they managed to create is a clear separation between the class of experienced scripters (which includes the crackers and griefers) and the rest of the world who might have learned to programme but now needs to understand first how to deal with the limitations.

All in all... the more SL seems to grow, the more limitations you seem to get. It's now routine to see people advertise events where you are not allowed to enter if you have primmed hair (or clothes), and you have to turn off all attachments, to keep lag down; and the site of the event is just prim cubes with blank textures. One wonders where the point is? An interesting event with 50 avatars becomes a slideshow of low-rez avatars and an IRC channel. So it seems that even the purely social aspect of SL is not working so well as it was intended.

From your post, Clubside, I noticed that you focused much more on the aspects of the client software than on the server side. My personal experience comes however from the server side... and even there things are so strangely implemented that one wonders where these ideas came from. Philip & Cory's white paper on the grid technology (sadly not as easily available as it once was) is fantastic from an abstract, conceptual point of view. But the implementation of it is... naive. For some reason, the notion that all information needed to be centralised somehow — instead of distributed — was never thought as being the major point of failure. I have seen posts (and in-world conversations) of people without any experience in computer networks who, in five minutes, were able to convince me that you would not need any centralised system at all, by just tweaking the way assets are tagged. Also, I'm always impressed why the "asset cluster", when misbehaving, tends to need 4-page explanations from expert database managers to explain the "MySQL failure cascading effects" that will ultimately bring the whole grid to its knees — login server, user server, and the "cluster" (with quotation marks around it... I never saw a "cluster" that failed so much in my life, when it was supposed to guarantee, say, 99.7% uptime, a more than realistic estimate). These explanations come from residents who are RL database (or ISP) admins, used to deal with millions of users logged simultaneously. They are supposed to know how to do these things with their eyes blindfolded (I can only claim for myself being able to put up a set of old 486 to deal with 10,000 simultaneous users logged in... hehe... that was just the level of technology that was available in my olden days :) ) — so one can only wonder why Linden Lab never bothered to hire people with those qualifications. We all know how many hundreds of thousands of top-level system administrators are currently unemployed, still as an after-effect of the Internet bubble having burst... so it's not like in 1999, when it was almost impossible to hire anyone in this area!

Sooo to make a long post end on a positive note. I believe, Clubside, that you have evaluated Linden Lab's performance over three months, based on your background, and your professional experience, as well as the level of development that you know that a fairly-sized team can accomplish, and found out that something is seriously wrong at Linden Lab, for some unexplainable reason. One can only wonder at a certain level of autism from LL — they close themselves up and refuse to talk about what they're doing right now. This was a strategy that begun around May/June 2005, where they gave up timelines, and announced that "new things will be introduced when they are ready". Like many of the people that posted on this thread, I've also abandoned development when I was promised that certain features were "due in the next 6 weeks" — and all my work would be obsolete by then, so it was pointless to think about it any more. Those 6 weeks turned into 6 months... and then a year... and probably another year. But how could we know? "Timelines" are "guidelines". We have more unfinished stuff at LL than finished ones. Havok is the best-known example, but what about things like the 2.0 renderer, shown in the summer of 2005, which was able to render "millions of prims" on a medium-end machine? What happened to Speedtree? Why do we have to wait for the uBrowser to support Flash to have HTML-on-a-prim? And why are we asking the same questions over and over again? I expect that in 2009 or 2010 we will be still asking them!

So, is Second Life doomed for the likes of you? I hardly think that, and will carefully consider that opinion in late 2007. I give until then to Linden Lab to carefully review their opinion on how a company should be run. I made a comment to Philip's "Tao of Linden" post, proposing instead a few koans under the "Zen of Linden" (that comment was sadly deleted, I'm sure it was a mistake):

"If everybody only works on what they like to do, how will problems that nobody likes to fix get ever solved?"

Solving that paradox is something that LL will have to deal with until the end of 2007, or the model of a company based on the "Tao of Linden" will never work. Sorry, Mr. Rosedale, no Nobel Prize on Economics for you :)

In any case, there have also been some slight misunderstandings on what LL's "duties" to their customers are. First, we should analyse what LL is, what they say they are, and what people think they are. Once that gets sorted out, things will be much easier to understand.

LL is both a 3D content hosting provider and a software development company. Taking that as granted, they are a 3D Flickr/MySpace — a nifty "Web 2.0" technology deployers, but extrapolating into a 3D world. This means that they should follow a similar model:

1. Tools for user-created content
   
2. APIs for interconnecting with other applications
   
3. Easy, customisable way to create content and interact with other people; the target is the amateur, not the professional
   
4. As free to join as possible

You'll see that SL fits into this model very nicely.

What they are not:

1. A community. Instead, they support the technology to allow for several quite different communities to co-exist. Think about the "fragmented landscape" model: several communities sharing the same virtual space, but separated.
   
2. Moderators or arbitrators of this community. Their interference is minimal, mostly enough to comply with Californian law, and nothing else much (ie. no hate speech, no adults on the Teen Grid, etc). They are not here to become "rulers" or "governors" of their grid, but to provide us with the necessary tools to do that for ourselves.
   
3. Providers of non-SL related tools. These can be nice add-ons, but it's not their core business. Resources are not to be allocated to forums, blogs, or whatever comes next — but only to make the 3D virtual world technology work.
   
4. Fair and impartial. They're a company with an agenda. They're not a holy order of monks and nuns. They drive Second Life to what they think that benefits best their investors.

What they should do in order to keep the focus on their core business:

1. Engage partners and users in dialogue. Linden Lab is the only software house I know that does not have a partner programme, and that has even discouraged actively the creation of SL User Groups. Instead, they have "developers" and the "Second Views" programme. They're irrational perversions of what a software house should be doing — encouraging work with their partners, and fueling users' comments and complains through a channel, the User Groups.
   
2. Get rid of everything that is not strictly SL-related. At least they're doing this quite well. I would even get rid of the "Official Linden blogs", not only the forums. They are a waste of time and Linden resources. Don't talk to me about "providing channels for users to complain". Encourage SL User Groups and let them run the forums — with thousands of opportunities to do similar things, not tied to LL's resources. This is naturally not well accepted by the few hundreds who post here every day, who feel that it's a company's "duty" to provide forums. It isn't. Even if they did, they would require professional moderators — not trigger-happy RezMods — as employees or outsourced experts. Still, the discussions should be restricted to technical issues only, like on any reasonable software platform.
   
3. Define clear timelines, and publish them. This means mostly informing their audience if they're even attempting to go beyond the socio-economic MMOG model. It also means getting rid of the silly "Tao of Linden" nonsense. They have now 4 or 5 "project managers" — these seriously need to get a whip ;) Or perhaps a carrot, to encourage the developers to work on things they don't like. I'm all for creativity in the workplace, but I much favour the Google approach, which has always been used in the companies I worked for when I had a chance to define the working policy: work hard on the boring (but needed) work 4 days a week. One day a week, you're free to develop whatever you wish, by yourself, or with your colleagues. This means that boring stuff gets done, but that the company is effectively spending 20% of their resources in research & development by encouraging creativity. Now, 20% on R&D is quite a high value in budgeting! One should never neglect it. The alternative to the Google approach is the Microsoft approach: create a R&D taskforce that are free to develop whatever they want — but this team is isolated from the rest of the developers (Microsoft does not spend 20% of its budget on R&D, but 1 USD billion per year is a rather nice figure for R&D anyway, in absolute terms...)
   
4. Don't fear setting objectives, and meet them. World Domination Now™ comes at a cost: proper planning. While at a tactical level LL is quite good at that — ie. they have all sorts of procedures to deal with emergencies and exploits, and I personally haven't seen any company dealing with a hurried emergency patch in the wee hours of Sunday to deal with those issues. Or at least one that was so quick on its toes to do its best to fix things so fast. Well, perhaps I just have bad experiences with software houses :) On the other hand, on the strategical level, there is much to be desired. One can only get the feeling that LL does not know where they are right now, and where they want to be in 3 years. Setting the target on "one million users" is rather a weak one (considering that most of their marketing relies upon good PR). What about a more ambitious one — setting the target on one million paying customers, with 100,000 of them online simultaneously? That means developing the technology to support 500 (!) avatars on a single sim in the same event, with full flexihair and open llListens() on all their attachments. That should indeed be a goal, say, for the end of 2007. Even if they don't reach it, they'll at least work towards it — which is way more than what they're doing right now.
   
5. Don't fear your customer's technical abilities — work with them, instead of fighting them. This is one of the more shadier areas of LL's attitude. On one hand, they try hard to encourage people to work with them (see the recent example on the libsecondlife library development). On the other hand, they seem to be afraid that the users do much more complex and interesting things that LL itself is able to provide, and tends to steal the limelight from them. Someone knowledgeable predicted that in 2006, companies working with LL will show a greater profit from SL than LL itself. Now this is something that LL does not need to be ashamed of — instead, they should encourage that trend to grow. This will mean that soon they'll be able to say that SL's overall economy might be worth 1 USD billion a year, but companies working with LL will add, say, a few hundred millions to that — and next year, perhaps more (who knows). That doesn't "weaken" Linden Lab in any respect, it only reinforces that their model is pointing in the right direction.

... and finally:

1. Don't ostracise the ones providing constructive criticism; they might know more about how to run your business that you do. This is something that for instance Dreamhost (the cheap SF-based hosting provider) learned quickly. Dreamhost is too cheap for providing high quality hosting, but I find it amusing that they assume their customers usually know about hosting much more than they do, and are always eager to hear about their customers' way of fixing things. Although their overall tone is hilarious (and not serious as LL's), and they're perhaps not the best example in the world (no SLAs on any package... thus they're cheap), they have the right attitude. We know that the average age of users in SL is around 33 years, and not the more usual 20. What we don't know is the average curricula of those users. Speaking strictly from the people I'm in regular touch with, almost all of them have created companies larger than LL, supporting more users, and with far better business models — they just didn't have the stroke of luck to get the right venture capitalists at the right time ;) In any case, the interesting aspect is that LL does not only get free content (which they love), but free consultancy (which they despise).

Now, this should change radically. Consultancy, in some circles, is even more expensive than software or content development. And LL has a vast amount of that available in SL — at all areas, from a pure technical point of view, to social issues, to moderation issues, to technical writers, to lawyers, to marketeers, and to many many business managers. I hardly expect other socio-economic MMOGs to be able to attract such a knowledgeable crowd; and every day I'm astonished at the level of expertise that my fellow residents have.

Some days I have the distinct feeling that Linden Lab fears those knowledgeable users — instead of capitalising on what they can do for them. Just look at Google! Their users are also quite knowledegeable — and what does Google do? The Google Summer of Code, to bring together all that knowledge and tie it into their own technology more stronger. LL does not even organise a user convention — it has to be the users themselves to set up things like the SLCC, and like Clubside showed, sponsor it from their own money :) (of course LL is also a major sponsor, but that's not the point) Instead, what LL does is... the Second Views programme, a perversion of the concept, although I can imagine that it was rather useful to some.

Now, the 64 million L$ question is: "how much is Linden Lab willing to change?" In the past, we have seen Linden Lab changing — from developers of a platform to create MMOGs, to "building a country", to whatever they are right now (hard to define these days!). One naturally asks if they are willing to change again, to be able to address all these open issues, or if they will become more and more autistic instead, and keep repeating the "Tao of Linden" mantra to keep all employees happy. In my past experience with LL, I saw them change unpredictably, and to an extent, I think that the SLCC next weekend might be a turning point in their attitude. At least I hope so. Some things are going under way that might or not might be revealed publicly there. If they are, it'll be for the better — either way, LL will respond and adapt to change, reinvent itself, and become something else. That has been their tradition so far, and I expect them to stay true to it.

Then again, I'm a stubborn optimist :) I wish you could be one as well, Clubside, since SL definitely needs more stubborn optimists around...

Gwyneth, If only you could do that as a speech at the SLCC ... !

From an outsiders pov that's a marvelous summary. You've encapsulated SLs progress and problems with pin point precision.

A recent conversation with one of the LL developers did give me cause for optimism though. During our chat he revealed LL's painful awareness of the problems and hinted (without revealing fine details to me) at forthcoming improvements. Let's hope it's so ! I'm not sure if I'll feel like hanging around after another year if it goes forward as slowly as the previous one.

Leave it to Gwyneth ;0 always with the insight ;0

Gee gwynneth, interesting post.

But it is a tekki wikkiati post extraordinaire. You are obviously somone with a lot of knowleged who sees SL as some great technological challenge. What you propose will improve the platform as some tool for virtual development.

Great.

However your long, techically detailed post misses the point. LL seel Sl as a community. Most users do not come to SL because they want to use it as a platform to create environments to make money. SL is a place where largely casual users come to hang out. User expectations are that LL will administer, user expectations are that entertainment will be in place, user expectations are that there will be a forum, user expectatations are that there will be a level playing field.

Whatever SL's intentions, they have marketed to, and obtained a basic user base of casual gamers looking for a social MMOG wher they can look sexy, buy clothes and do stuff they cannot othersie do, or afford to do in SL. Then they show up and realize its really supposed to be a platform and not a game..and that it is supposed to be some sort of three-d internet. They are also told get a job, or go somewhere else. And they do. SL has huge user retention problems, and to my its no mystery why.

Thus whatever the tao of linden is, for all pratical purposes LL is not delivering what they are marketing and this creates problems. And if SL is supposed to be a 3-d internet, how come I can't check movie times on it, or buy stuff at amazon.com.

If SL is a development platform, fine, then expect that you will find the 100,000 people (at the most) who want to development work in america on a virtual platform. The environment should cater to them: no community, LL can be innovators and and not administartors, no forums, no stipends, no yard sales. The thing is, that you need the gamers, the casual users, those who like to hang out and not create, to provide a market base for those who do.

Basically LL promises one thing with its marketing and delivers another with its product. The bleedign ulcer in SL is not creative and talented people who want to develop-its people who want to play with what the developers make. SL is turning into a giant word perfect-people can use it to make wonderful and creative novels. But there is going to be noone to read them. I hope all the authors are happy sitting around staring at stacks of unused manuscripts on their shelves.

This is one of the most interesting threads I've read here, and is argument for the forums to stay on it's own.

I really don't have any more to add.

I agree. I rarely read posts longer than a page as a matter of principle (well, ok because of my fleeting attention span...just think Dory in "Finding Nemo" ) but Gwyneth's response is brilliant.



Sadly, it seems that LL is so overwhelmed that they probably won't even notice Clubside's lack of participation.

Jake, take a moment to read Philip's blog. He's honest enough to admit that SL will not be a community, but several communities. What this means is simply that LL's "vision for a community", whatever it was before December, 2005, does not apply anymore. Second Life, as a whole, will be a meta-community: a place to foster communities inside the same space, but those communities will have little to do with each other, except for sharing the same virtual world.

Clearly Philip has dropped the idea of "one world, one community" but embraces the "one world, several communities" concept. This naturally means "what works for me doesn't work for you; and vice-versa". Once you accept that — and Philip at least shows he accepts that fully — it also means that Linden Lab has no job in "directing the community", but that it's all in our hands really.

Some would love LL to be more intervenient in "the" community; some would prefer less interference in "the" community. But the truth is simple: there is not a single community! Thus, LL has to step aside, and watch the communities grow. And this is what they have been doing — for at least half a year. Perhaps more!

Laukosargas, to be fair... in January 2006, Philip hosted one of his best Town Hall meetings in recent times. What he did ask was for patience. He enumerated a list of important developments — most of them to be rolled on the main grid starting past June. Yes, as you imagine, we're talking flexiprims, the new lighting system, in-world HTML, and the new group tools. Except for those — due in about 9 days — we have all that he promised, although we all expected much more from HTML, of course.

The next step is for us to speculate about. My bet is on this. Sure, it won't interest anyone but the developers; but keep an eye on Pheonix's blog to have an idea what these guys at LL are planning to do right now...

Sweetheart, people DO get disenchanted and go - for good. A couple of good friends did recently, taking stuff from SL that isn't going to come back.

Frans, I think you missed the point. From an employees point of view the Tao is just too good to be true. Who'd quit a job where you could do pretty much whatever you pleased with virtually no supervision?

I'm a 'veteran' about a year older than this hostile person that you've quoted and I do NOT share his/her views for a nanosecond! (nor do most of the 'veterans' that I know on a personal level) For one, 'the good ol days' were even before my time so he/she is as clueless as the person he/she lashed out at. In my personal 'good ol days' SL was much less than it is now. So much has changed for the better including all the new users (albeit not all people will agree with me here). SL is FAR more stable than it was, has more and better building tools and of course a ton more 'pretty shiny' things (which may just be a ploy to distract us from the problems that either remain unfixed or have appeared with whichever update)...heh. Overall, I love SL for what it is...not a first person shooter or fast paced game of any kind (tho I love those games also), but a world in which we can meet all types of people from all over the world and interact in a somewhat realistic environment as well as be creative far beyond what we could do in any other type of 'game', novices and professionals alike.

As far as the 'age' of an SLr...IMHO it has NO bearing on what they can contribute to SL. I've known 'veterans' that are so full of themselves that it's not even close to funny as well as many that tend to be rather unproductive/non contributing (whether it be building, scripting, texturing or simply being a good person to hang out and chat with). I've also met many 'noobs' that have simply amazed me at how quickly they've learned the inner workings of SL and/or have just been all around great people. Griefers have no predefined age, nor do idiots and self proclaimed know-it-alls.

Just like in the real world, everyone HAS an a$$hole but not everyone IS an a$$hole...guess we all just need to carry a big roll of toilet paper, some latex gloves and a butt plug around with us for the times we encounter those that are.

So Duntroon (and all other noobs out there), welcome to SL and please don't let naysayers and idiots like this discourage you, we need you as much as we need the first person ever to join SL...after all, without noobs there would be no veterans.

This is so so true. I made this very point to Andrew Linden on SL Answers recently, and he kept completely ignoring the question, so I reposted it. After he ignored it 2 or 3 times I figured they didn't care that they were deliberately handicapping us for no valid reasons.

Gwyn,

Excellent posts, and "intervenient" super cool word I did not know about.

Clubside,

I have been watching your activities with awe and admiration
esp. as your SL age appears to be the same as mine.
You are clearly extremely intelligent, and your motives appear
at first glance to be somewhat altruistic.

I think the things you are/were trying to do are awesome.

It appears that you perceive that you will not achieve your
expected result.

I agree with a great deal of what you have written.

Although I am not pleased with your decision to withdraw
from the convention.

I can see how you are disillusioned especially after going
to great lengths of effort and expense. It is also honorable
of you to complete the projects you have begun.

One of the things I respect about you is your civility and clear
intelligent communication. One of the bright lights in this
mass of various emotional storms that is the forums.

I feel a little bit sorry for you in that it seems that you could
have done some hardheaded research before investing so much of yourself into these projects.

With all that being said I implore you to change your mind
and attend the convention. Speak your mind about what needs
to be done. Go forth and BE, dont fade in a fog of disapointment.

I would advise to be a little more selfish, in a rational way.
Be clear on what your expectations are. Scale back on your
financial investments. You can still be a very large force of
positive civil change.

I think that many many of the posters in the forums have very
valid points that are lost in an overly negative and hostile
delivery.

And as many have already mentioned you will be a great loss
due to your ability to effectively communicate in a clear and intelligent manner.

Go to the convention and make your concerns known in your
usual manner, say the words that need to be said devoid
of anything that could be construed as negativity or personal
agenda.
It is these kinds of speeches that hold the most power.

To come as far as you have and then to just back out
seems to me to be less than.

And does not fit the character I have come to associate with
my perception of you.

You may as well go that far, even if you still plan to leave.
At least it will complete the sentence your participation has thus far formed.

This reminds me of that critical point of so many inspiring movies.

I have learned that people and organizations of people in what ever incarnation they may comprise, never meet my expectations exactly, and I have come to accept this as a
basic attibute of reality.

What I have come to depend on are those positive surprises
that our actions may sometimes generate.


just Go for it Clubside! Go to the Party!

I agree with the first two paragraphs but the use of the phrases "is not" and "LL has to step aside" doesn't quite describe it for me; the fact is that they aren't aiming at a single community, and there is very little if any work going on to promote that idea. A grid of seperate communities has been my perception of what the future of SL is envisaged as for quite some time, I've seen nothing to contradict that, and that's why I've made many of the choices that I have. If the grid is going to become a confederation of island states mixed in with mainland chaos, I want to make damn sure I'm in a good island state.

Oh, and I can certainly confirm the scripting thing. When I talk about LSL to other programmers without experience of it, I always point out that the actual language is easy but it takes a lot more than understanding how LSL works to actually be a competent SL programmer. Coping with all of the undocumented features, updates and differences in performance by sim or time is the real skill.

Unfortunately Jake I don't believe the current hardware physics solutions could be applied to Second Life. PhysX is designed to allow a client-side API to offload processor calls to a supported engine (much like Photoshop accelerators in terms of narrow-VAR, and exactly like GPU accelerators we get from ATI and NVidia for DirectX/OpenGL acceleration).

There's no reason a hardware acceleration solution couldn't be developed, but at least with the multi-processor server architecture of Second Life it would be catering to quite a narrow market. Given the fact that no rendering should be happening on the server, it already has the horsepower to handle the server physics, though I guess if an off-the-shelf solution presented itself Linden Lab would certainly look into it. Much of the core of Second Life is built on exiting technologies and they have shown a desire to leverage these solutions when applicable (the asset server, MySQL and Havok being just three examples).

Howdy Gwyneth,

You have brought a lot of historical information to the table that perhaps I missed (or conveniently buried my head in the sand to avoid) when reading the History Wiki, and I want to be able to respond to it and your perception of Linden Lab's possible "endgame" that you describe. I need a bit of time, though, since I am still trying to deliver a number of items for lauch with the SLCC and have been taking a break, re-watching the first season of Lost on DVD and checking out the stack of games I had waiting for me since I began my Second Life journey.

I pulled this quote to make sure you had seen my batch of replies on Page 3, as my intention was certainly to focus on the server-side of things from the beginning. My prime issue is terms of Linden Lab's "updates" since my joining have been that they were client-side, while the "bedrocK" or "backbone" remained mostly unchanged.

I tried not to belabor the role of Havok in the mix, as it is no be-all solution, but it is the most interwoven. As I said in my reply post, most everything that we see rendered in-world that is not a UI element relies on Havok, whether physics are enabled on an object or not. It might be interesting to know for those who do not have access to the "Estate" dialog that there are two primary buttons under the Debug tab of that interface. The most important is "Top Scripts" which can help LSL coders and Estate Managers track down what is in need of optimization. The second is "Top Colliders" which is wholly Havok dependent. At the same time "Scripts" often also rely on the interaction with Havok. And in the end, something people often malign, the "prim limit", is itself in existence simply because this version of Havok doesn't handle triangles (and ultimately prims) as efficiently as later version do. The hard limit that exists may one day be shattered should the optimzations added to subsequent Havok releases be integrated. The computing power of the servers has been increased as Linden Lab has outlined in thir server class upgrades, yet the physics performance has not scaled with that increased power.

So yes, Gwyneth, the server is the key to me. Better performace under the hood will draw more of your valued optimists who will push the needs of the interface, the database and other middleware.

Thanks again for the detailed post, once I get a chance to best organize a response so it's not one pull-quote after another (as you so nicely avoided) I will get back to you and everyone else who has taken the time to contribute to this thread.

Yeah but he sells SL on community and does not deliver multimple communities. If i had known SL was a platform and not a game, and that I would have to make my owm rules and enforce my own social norms, well I would have stayed in never winter nights. Many people are less patient than I. If the marketing does not match the product..change the marketing, or it will ne no world /no communities. It is not really relevant to argue what SL is, its more relevant to argue what people think it should be, and what LL tells them it should be.

Of course I look at it more cynically. As SL has grown the costs and difficulties of administration have been skyrocketing, and the one world, many communities thinking is fiscally convenient. Of course whjat is really interesting to me is LL's role in the whole IP aspect, and whether, in fact copyrights are created, and does LL assume a contractual duty to enforce, and whether they are , in fact, a safe haven under the dcma.

The first person with a hundred grand to blow on litigation could discover some cery interesting truths about virtual worlds.

I totally agree with the "multiple communities", Ordinal, even if I might be accused of plagiarising Prokofy, who has defended that view for a long time as well...

As to scripting... *sigh*. I wish that Karsten had not made it so clear to us... I'm very sad to know about the lack of reply of Andrew Linden to that issue...

Clubside... perhaps after reading all this... you might feel encouraged that there is indeed a very important place for you in SL: being a thorough, intelligent, consistent, pragmatic, realist, and, more important than that, knowledgeable critic of Linden Labs. So even if you reduce your participation in-world, I can only hope that at least you'll be able to throw some insight in what LL should be aiming for.

Do you really feel that way?? I would say it's hard to imagine a single platform with so many different communities! The hard task is to deal with all of them... even if you try to group them together, the question will always be: where exactly to place them? Gorean and Star Trek and Star Wars fans under "role-playing", as well as the Elves... but then where do you put the BSDM and furries? Oh, alternative lifestyles... but then again... Goreans are also an alternative lifestyle... and where to place the steampunk fans? You see how confusing it can be. There is truly no one-size-fits-all "community", and my guess is, it hasn't been "one community" at all, for a long time, well before my own time...

I haven't seen any (taped) video keynote speeches from Philip lately, so I can't truly judge if he uses the "one world, one community" tag to describe Second Life. The few snippets I have seen here and there tend to show that he truly does not say so.

From the website:

Notice the use of "vibrant society of people" and the wide range of different groups, depending on specific interests...

Interesting enough, click on the What is Second Life? Today it truly reflects what it is — a blank page [at least the non-English pages show something!]

And actually, the SLCC should be called "Second Life Communities Convention"

That is a marketing issue. You might be right. Some people would simply disconnect, disappointed, and never log back again. It happens to a number of newbies I happen to meet — they simple expect people to tell them what to do, and are quite disappointed when they have to take their Second Lives in their own hands.

I'm glad you stayed, though!

LL is not a police force... they will just comply with the law. They're neither a registration office, nor a legal counsel for people wishing to register their copyrights, and they most definitely don't "enforce" anything. All they do is to respect your copyrights and make sure that if a valid DMCA claim is presented to them, they'll remove content as appropriate. That's all they do; it will be up to the ones doing litigation over held copyrights (in RL) to present their claims according to the stated procedure...