i'm sorry olmy

but this made me laugh out loud.

i'd say something about the fact that we've begged for a whiteboard feature since before 1.2 but i can't kerp mu fongsrs on keyblord am laugfhin so hard

maybe you should only use 500 prims

ha ha ha ha ha ha

who the hell needs to read in a virtual world anyway

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Book challenge?

If a Linden challenges you to jump off a bridge, don't do it!

Why not? Worst case scenario, I transport home

Mean old Ben, he didn't answer my question either.

I wonder when LL will finally realize that there's a reason why most games (among other things) are NOT streamed from the internet on the fly.
What would be so terribly wrong about having a little client-side storage?
And no, the cache won't do. We need something more controllable (and LARGER) than that.
Ideally, we would make a script to permanently store certain assets on the client, or give people an URL where they can download a texture/sound pack, so that loading things becomes instantaneous.
My idea of a game development platform (or indeed any platform) is not this big centrally controlled "world" where a third party tells us what we can or cannot do with it.
If LL ever really wants to provide us with a platform, they must realize that a platform is invisible, and geared towards developers, rather than a social world where little political decisions on LL's side artificially restrict the power of LSL to "protect" the users.
We need something like IEAK that would let us customize the client to make it look like OUR software (branding). We would need to host our own server / grid, alongside with any server-side software we wanted to use.
Bleh, why do I bother? It's clear that the whole platform thing is a bunch of marketing geared towards making us think we are real developers instead of just being here to play a silly game.

it's not silly eggy. a lot of people, including the lindens, take the game very seriously and have a lot of fun with it. the sillines is ll not just admiting that it's a game, as opposed to being professionally useful, and leaving it at that.

in this thread there is much denying of any perception that the lindens are gods. in fact, we could dub linden and resident names into hundreds of ancient mythologys and tell the stories without skipping a beat.

they meddle in our ability to build user created environments by stacking the world as a contiguous, non-terraformable, non-texturable series of continents and islands;

they meddle in zoning by denying us point-to-point transport and forcing us to use telehubs;

they try to force a sense of community and exploration by denying us point-to-point transport and forcing us to use telehubs;

they want to claim that we own our creations yet give us no viable means of exporting objects and using them elsewhere;

the list goes on and on but boils down to the fact that ll meddle in the affairs and abilities of residents without taking any real responsibility for their actions and decisions making them direct reflections of the ancient gods.

that said, it is their world. they built it, maintain it, and can do whatever they please with it. all we can do is ask for development features and hope that one day they'll either come through and back off, or somebody else will. in the mean time, stick your head in the snow and build a 500 prim text display to show olmy how it's supposed to be done.

You know, khamon, I've recently started thinking SL's going to be leap-frogged. I'm not making a prediction, but that's what I'm guessing. Until recently, I thought SL had gotten far enough ahead and especially built up enough infrastructure that I'd be waiting quite a while for alternatives. But I've changed my mind. I think the culture and the internet and the hardware have reached the point where it's probably obvious to a lot of people with resources that LL was on to something that can be expanded massively. LL took the risks and blazed a path, and I think a number of companies will be learning from LL's successes and mistakes and building the next generation of open-ended virtual spaces. It looks to me like SL is locked into incremental updates if they're going to avoid breaking the whole thing. I wouldn't be surprised to see virtual worlds that included import and export of content, server leasing with total admin control, explicit e-commerce support, unrestricted two-way internet access, persistent storage, and the use of popular programming languages, for instance. When you're a trailblazer, there's always the risk that you'll be the Newton rather than the Palm. Although, if that were the case here, I'd hope SL would morph into an iPod of some sort and make Phil and everyone else a gazillion dollars. Don't get me wrong, I have no bad feelings toward SL. But unless LL has SLX secretly in development, I just think a next generation of the system they basically invented will leapfrog them. I've been following Croquet's development, and although I don't think that will be it (too ivory tower), I see enough discussion of various projects there to recognize that a lot of people are headed in the same direction, conceptually.

Or, I could be totally wrong
And, perhaps the gods of SL will consider this an unfriendly theory, and it was unwise to post it

croquet is also (i can't believe i'm saying this) perhaps a bit too distributed. the clients can get too out of sync before commiting to a server induced state. it's not terrible, but it dents the performance enough to edge out ecommerce. on the other hand, it's works fine for educational endeavors. i agree though. it'll likely end up being an open source tower that will simply add to the research pools of people implementing real business and government solutions.

i was being pulled away in the middle of my last post so i didn't get to qualify that i'm not picking on the lindens for being gods meddling in their world to prompt the residents into linden approved methods of trading, socializing, and maintaining order. you're correct in saying that they made a decision and are stuck with it. at this point, it's all they can do, it's all second life can be and those of us that stay have made the decision to work with it as is.

it is grand, fun, joyous, and utopian. i have loads of fun playing my game as do thousands of others including the lindens. i believe that it'll survive in this state for several years and i intend to be here enjoying every last minute of it.

i do not understand the need for ll to present themselves as anything other than gods though. it seems to me that people would adapt quickly to living in a divine court if they understood that second life can only function under such a regime. it's the idea that everybody's equal and everything is supposed to be fair and such that confuse people because they can see that it isn't true and there's nothing they can do about it.

well i take that back. the way to function in a court system is to function in the court system. not rail against it like a fish out of water. maybe we should start hosting polisci events and explain all this. but first, we really need for the employees of ll to talk straightforwardly about it rather than hiding behind claims of being hands-off benevolent caretakers. for example, the press release claiming that juries of residents now have a hand in deciding each other fates was quickly countered by a linden post explaining that those councils only existed temporarily to advise the lindens, with no input from the accused, that they might be treating a resident too harshly.

oh well frell. my attempts to expound peaceful solutions that might help calm the storm keep coming across as bile spewing linden bashing. i suppose i should just give up and let somebody else talk.

Great post Cad, the only problem is that you're assuming that LL invented the technology and that SL was the first...

You list several 'features' you think SL needs in order to survive and advance to the next level or risk being leap-frogged by the competition. In that respect I agree with you. However, SL was not the first and LL did not invent 'online persistant space'.

ActiveWorlds first came into being in 1995. I joined in 1997, and by that time it had most of the features you say SL needs. by the time I left in 2003 it had ALL those features. So why did I leave and come to SL? Because the core technology was still based around 1995 principals. The render engine used was Renderware, itself an ok solution, but they used a version that was years out of date and didn't support modern hardware features. Basically it got frustrating to see so many advances in the computer industry in general which were never reflected by advances in AW.

The move to SecondLife was a revelation in terms of what could be achieved. The avs had proper joints, they moved in responce to the environment as opposed to the 'wooden' models we had in AW. True, the AW avs had anims but they were completely limited to those anims to the point that if you were standing still, your av played a stand still anim. If the ground was not level, then one or both feet would be off the ground. In SL your av will at least stand on the ground regardless of the ground angle. (or try to).


The main thing I've noticed with the developement of SL since being here is that it is very much technology driven. As bandwidth increases and hardware specs get better, then more features are added that make use of that extra power. The video in 1.6 is a good example. The main difference between SL and AW is that SL is kept central and streamed, whereas AW was distributed. the only connection to any AW servers is for the login confirmation, everything else is on user hardware.

Which is the right way to go for the future? A combination of the two would be my guess. A custer of servers providing a large land mass as we have now in SL, then another somewhere else, maybe owned by the same people, maybe not, but connected by a portal of some kind.

My experience of individually owned servers in AW was that of 1000+ 'worlds' available for browsing, but a maximum of 500 - 600 users ever being online at once.... That is a lot of empty, disconected 3D space..

Perhaps part of the perception of Lindens as Gods is because they not only play by different rules, but they live somewhat above (and below) the fray. The ratio of customers to Lindens means that they will never be able to have personal relationships or even be familiar with more than a fraction of us. By necessessity they care about different things than we do - I know, I work in a big company with millions of customers, and while I always try to keep the customer perspective in mind, it's hard to imagine all the things that matter to them.

So Ben disses my 600 prim prototype (which actually works pretty well, though it does have problems) as the wrong approach. I have no attachment to using 600 prims to dynamically display a page of text - in fact I'd prefer a more economical approach, but SL doesn't currently provide any other way to go about it. I've been posting ideas and feature requests about how to improve SL/LSL to allow for more efficient text display, but so far no traction.

I asked Hamlet Linden if he'd discussed his challenge and the feasibility of building a book with LL developers, and he said he hadn't, so I'm not too surprised Ben is criticising my experiment without having that context. But if LL wants to publish books in-world, they are going to have to give us more to work with. Either provide more efficient tools to display a page of text, or fix SL so that a system of 600 scripted prims doesn't bring a sim to its knees.

Surina, I wondered if someone might comment on my use of the word "invent" I agree it's not totally accurate. What I had in mind was the single contiguous space that SL residents inhabit. I think LL got that right. It changes your perspective. But "invent" is probably overstating it. It's always interesting hearing about AW. I remember trying it and just not finding anything that interesting.

I think there also important aspects of SL that are not driven by technology, but by design or philosophy. For instance, what's always struck about the big fights over the role of commerce in SL is the vagueness of LL's intentions. Fizik Baskerville invested money in SL as a business venture, and was harrassed pretty mercilessly for it. I expected the Lindens to step in and state categorigcally that they supported what he was doing (why else sell him the sim?), but actually all I ever noticed was a generic statement that he wasn't breaking the TOS. So LL has left the role of commerce in SL vague, deliberately so as far as I can tell.

Then there's the way LL treats development in SL. Consider the ShapeMaker tool I made, which rezzes large shapes like spheres out of a number of prims. If a guy like me can work out the code for that in trig class, surely a Linden developer could do it while sitting at a light on El Camino. The same goes with Gomez's mirror script, and a number of other useful tools found in typical 3D software. LL doesn't make them, and doesn't support them when residents make them. SL supports custom animations now, but only those produced by Poser, not professional software like 3DSMax. The language and API documentation on SL's site is actually a player wiki that they started hosting. To me this all adds up to LL treating SL like a place for amateur hobbyists.

These are aspects of SL that are based on LL's approach, not the limits of the technology (there are a bunch of others). One of the reasons I'm guessing SL will be leapfrogged is that other people will have a different approach, in addition to getting a chance to build new technology from scratch.

I feel like I didn't respond to everything you said clearly, but I can't type forever and I edit too darned much

I agree with most of what you all said.
However, some things have to be pointed out:
1000 worlds to browse with 500 users online is A GOOD THING.
On the web, there are BILLIONS of web pages, and most of them are empty most of the time.
In SL, people complain about the horrible clutter and the crappy builds. This is because the available space per user is OUTRAGEOUS. We are packed like sardines in a can.
My idea of a world is a vast green landscape, filled with trees, and dotted with the occasional house, or village. Not SL's cluttery nonsense.
500 users is bad, but that's a marketing failure, not a technological one. Being able to host your own server/grid is a good thing. I, for one, would absolutely love to run a server so as to build and script with zero lag or interference. I can socialize on my spare time (which SL often isn't).

Now there is an idea. Just change the SCALE of the land, so that we have, say, four times as much space but the same number of prims.

That right there would make things look ever so much better.