Why SL cannot succeed - a personal opinion.

Yes, I do socialise with people in-world. Most of them are frustrated by the problems but will not let it ruin their SL-lives or cause them to claim that LL aren't listening to them. We would all like it to be better, but aren't ready to take up torches and pitchforks and line up outside the LL office.

By that logic a human being isn't at all complicated - I mean it's mostly water and few other compounds, when you break it down, right? I mean, it's simple, so why would anybody ever get sick?

Wow, then why do they tell everyone to turn off AOs for performances to reduce lag? Those are just scripts. If what you believe is true then LL and a whole bunch of other people talking about what is causing lag have been outright lying to us all this time.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/29/mono-beta-launch/

Would suggest you find out, then.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/24/inside-the-lab-podcast-with-joe-miller/
- talking about the four priorities of the SL technical team - Sim Stability, Sim Performance, Viewer Stability, Viewer performance.
Also check out the other blog posts from LL about what the goals are with the Havok4 project.

I never claimed they were being introduced FOR THAT PURPOSE - I said that there are aspects in each that will HELP the issue.

And now to the inventory stuff:Let me give you some references from their blog so you can get up to speed on their efforts:

12-Oct-2007 "Inventory Loss Reduction Initiative"
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/10/12/inventory-loss-reduction-initiative/
Where they announce the efforts to reduce loss of inventory using multiple approaches.

28-Oct-2007 "Resident-Reported Inventory Loss Survey Launched"
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/10/28/resident-reported-inventory-loss-survey-launched/
- to try to gather some data so that they had a better picture of what real issues residents were facing.

14-Dec-2007 "Inventory Items Recovered"
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/12/14/inventory-items-recovered/
Where they talk about the active work they are doing to locate lost items and document one of the major successes that they had.

If you feel that a team spending the time to recover people's lost inventories as part of a general effort to stop the problem from occurring was the wrong thing to do, then I'm afraid that I must respectfully disagree with you. My guess would be those residents who had the valuable items returned to them might feel similarly.

I didn't say they were content. Nobody is content with inventory loss, failure to rez, tps not working, etc. The question is whether it's all doom or gloom or whether the other things that SL has to offer outweighs it to the point that tens of thousands of people per day are willing to spend some time in-world. And do you have *any* data to back up your assertion that most people don't come back?

As for Usagi's comment about the "rah-rah"ing - I could just as easily use sweeping, condescending, judgmental generalizations of the other side of this argument, too, but I will desist. So thank you for your comment.

Hey Phil - I know - I think I mentioned it was a sidetrack, but if I didn't, I should have. Something about your use of the word "technical" made my idea pop in my head. Technical vs business know-how. I know that's not what you were talking about, but your post was a good springboard for mine.

Well, to be fair, a lot of people tell you to take off attachments out of superstition. Or desperation. Anyway, I've played a little with Mono on the Beta grid, and it really does execute scripts *remarkably* faster. But that won't necessarily reduce lag, especially on the client side. (Imagine a script that cycles textures in a tight loop; with Mono that loop can execute faster; will perceived lag be reduced or increased?) With Mono, however, it will certainly be true that scripts won't lag the execution of other scripts as much as they do now.

(AOs are another whole can of worms. Script execution may be a part of how AOs contribute to perceived lag, but there's also the effect of downloading animations to every viewer in the vicinity every time the AO switches to a new animation. Fortunately, I don't think they'll be reducing minimum event interval, so AOs shouldn't be able to cause any more lag with Mono than they do now, and might be marginally better because the script itself shouldn't use quite as much sim resources.)

I think, in this particular example, it would be about the same. Any speed boost that you're getting from MONO gets eaten by the 0.2 second delay of making a set-parameters call. I expect that any llCall that doesn't have a delay now but that can be used to grief via the fast execution time that MONO brings will get a delay added...

Hopefully, they'll also somehow throttle scripts that do things like "while(TRUE);". Dunno if the effects of that would be any worse with MONO than it is today, though.

Right! The "Sweat Gathering" world. I'd forgotten about them.

I would be very curious to see what percentage of their active user-base is actually turning a profit, or even a living wage, compared to SL. (if such data is even possible to report on).

-

Phil- All of Second Life can be considered "unnecessary eye candy"... BETTER eye candy therefore is, obviously, an improvement.

--
Faster, better, cheaper... there is no "Right", there is only compromise.

Meade.

Me: "I'm more inclined to think that someone came across all that inventory stuff and made a way to return it".

You: "They "just found" all that missing inventory???"
as though I'd said they just found it, but I actually said that I'm more inclined to think that they just found it.

None. I use my eyes.

The wiki page snippet that you quoted doesn't show anything. All it says is that the viewer that windlight is incorporated into contains a lot of code cleanup. Windlight isn't necessary for that. It's viewer code cleanup. Windlight is just eye candy, and has nothing to do with improving stability.

No Meade. I don't and didn't say that. I said that the way that scripts are run, they can only cause near unnoticeable lag, or words to that effect, and that there are occasions when scripts can cause significant lag. I'll add that those occasions don't occur very much.

About Havoc4. I said that I didn't know if it will help stability or not. Your response, "because Havok4 is absolutely going to help stability." sounded like a rebuttal to what I said, since there was no need to mention it unless it was some sort of rebuttal, but it may not have been. So there's no disagreement concerning Havoc4.

That's very rude. I don't see any need for it.

wow.

i`ll retract everything i`ve said and replace it with 1

silence

saying nothing and just passively standby and it will defenetly fail at every one`s expense,
time to stirr the pot a little...

Ok, I’ve just had a few days of meetings come to an end and now I have some time to kill before heading to the airport. Let me throw my two cents into this thread…

Will LL succeed with SL? This is a good question, but what do we mean by ‘succeed’? Many of us have articulated success as ‘becoming the platform for a 3D Web based virtual experience’ – To explain that further.. the vision would be to have a web experience that would enable us to interact with 2D information as well as 3D objects seamlessly. I could imagine a ‘mouse’ look to do most of the stuff that we do now with the standard web and popping out of mouse look to interact with objects and/or people. I believe that the technology to make this happen is available, but the infrastructure needed to deliver this kind of experience in a global basis - in a compelling and usable way - is still a long way off. LL has started to define and build the infrastructure for the 3D Web and the fact that they are first movers gives them a big advantage AND some big challenges to overcome.

As a resident I get the impression that LL put together the architecture for SL in a hurry and took a lot of shortcuts to get something up and running fast. They did not plan for robustness, scalability, and bandwidth efficiency in their initial architecture. They have been trying to fix it for the last couple of years with mixed success.

In my opinion, the biggest advantage that they have is their philosophy to provide an open environment with tools that allow all residents to create and deliver content on their own. The fact that they try to minimize their role as a regulatory body AND they do not try to make money from every transaction that happens in world is huge. There are very few established companies that would take this approach. However, this philosophy has given them a very large challenge to overcome. The fact that every tom, dick and harry can create ‘stuff’ and that everyone else in world should be able to interact with this ‘stuff’ gives their engineering team a huge problem to solve in scalability and bandwidth efficiency.

So, now they are in a tight spot… they have a ‘quick and dirty’ architecture that needs to be revamped and they have to do it while the platform is actively being used by thousands of people. So far I have seen good plans but very poor execution. I agree with most of you, their top priority at this time should be stability. The one thing that could undermine the advantage they get from their approach and the fact that they are early movers is the appearance of a very stable competitor that would deliver a robust and deterministic experience that would get adopted by the corporate world. This is a threat since corporations have less of a need to have ‘open’ creative tools but they value uptime and productivity of their people using their infrastructure. The company that can start making inroads into the corporate world could start driving the standards for a 3d web experience. Would SL go away? – I doubt it, but they would be relegated to be the Netscape of the new world.. 

Qie is right, RL (Corporate) money is not here yet to invest in 3D worlds as a corporate tool but more as a way to learn and be ready in case they really become the future of the Web. LL wasted some time adding features when there was no competition, I am sure they did this at the request of some corporate partners they were trying to keep happy I think they made their move into the corporate work too early.

On the other hand, there is still no viable competitor. But the other worlds that are in development (the ones we know about AND the ones that are under wraps) are going to put even more pressure on LL. I hope they will have the business acumen to handle the rough waters ahead and the technical skill to cash the checks that the business side is going to write.

In a way they are letting the vision get in the way of the execution. Some things are difficult to fix and take time, but there are others that are inexcusable. This whole 503 fiasco is a good example. How can anyone trust LL to build the future of the web when they seem incapable of dealing with the current implementation? I hope that they have a prioritized list of of things to fix.. starting with the basic stuff that affects everyone’s experience. Things like client disconnects, lag and scalability should be at the very top of the list once these things are under control then go and worry about other stuff and start to find corporate partners…

Ok, long rambling post, I hope this makes at least a little sense… normally I would proofread and do some editing but this time I have to run and I will go ahead and post it as is. 

Yes it is, Jopsy. All I said is that windlight won't improve stability.

Kalderi:

You: "The tens of thousands of residents logging in-world every day minus the few people who come on to the forums to complain would imply to me that most feel it ok to deal with, otherwise they wouldn't log in."

Me: "Then your inference would be very much mistaken. You only need to socialise with people inside SL to know how the general population feels about the problems."

You: "Yes, I do socialise with people in-world. Most of them are frustrated by the problems but will not let it ruin their SL-lives or cause them to claim that LL aren't listening to them. We would all like it to be better, but aren't ready to take up torches and pitchforks and line up outside the LL office."

Where did taking up torches and pitchforks and lining up outside the LL office come into it? My response was to you saying that people logging in "would imply to me that most feel it ok to deal with, otherwise they wouldn't log in." I'm sorry, but I see no reason to continue discussing something when the thing keeps changing like that.

That's not what I meant at all. You can't understand water and a few other other compounds, and therefore understand the human being. But I think you know that, and I think you know what I meant so I won't explain it.

AOs: what Qui said.

Havoc4: I haven't said anything different to what you wrote.


First:
then:
You said in the first post that it seems like those things are trying to address "no fancy new features - get things stable". But windight is a fancy new feature, and it doesn't try to get things stable. Of course they'll try to introduce it bug free - they do that with everything, but that's not the same as stabilising the system.


Inventory losses:

The first two URLs that you provided are about steps to prevent inventory loss. That's what I said they should have been doing, if you remember. The third is about recovering lost inventory. It doesn't say anything about them spending time looking for lost stuff. I think it's probably that in their efforts to prevent inventory loss, they found some reasons for it, and in the process uncovered missing items. And if that's the case, that what I said, which was in response to your statement that "remember a lot of people having items appearing back in their inventory that time? That didn't just happen - someone at LL did a LOT of work to try to make that happen)", which I now concede may have meant the same as what I've been saying.

Windlight client IS a stability improvement for me. I know some are having problems with it, but it's more solid than the main viewer from my perspective.

Obviously, there are other stability problems. The region I spend most of my time in reboots, on average, daily. Judging from the state of things afterwards, most of those crashes involve rezzing and collisions with physical objects. So far I've been unable to re-create the problem in the havok4 beta sims... so with Havok4 is hope that one of my most regular nuisances may finally vanish.

I value data integrity far above uptime and availability. Fortunately, I have yet to have noticed any problems with lost content that wasn't my own fault or, as was more often the case, an incompletely cached inventory, which relogging always promptly resolved.

And Mono? The game is called "Spin the bottleneck" as soon an obvious performance problem is addressed, there's going to be another right behind it, and another right behind that.

And... I really wish that AO's didn't have to be active polling devices. Shame LL didn't implement them more in the style of changed(), so they could passively wait for changes in avatar behavior instead.

That's good to hear Jopsy. As far as I can fathom, the windlight viewer is a brand new one, as distinct from a modified old one. In writing the new one, they have tried to make it more stable, which is what I think was meant when one of them said that windlight is an opportunity to stabilise things.

From the point of view of this thread, it isn't windlight that will stabilise things. It is the new viewer that will do it - if it's done at all. They could have written the new viewer anyway, without anything like windlight as a reason. Windlight itself is unnecessary eye candy, and won't stabilise anything, imo.

Something in there sounds self-contradictory....

I think you're dead wrong on the "unnecessary" part.

First impressions have a huge impact on newbie drop-out rates. Folks will never know if they could be a happy and engaged resident if they gave up on the first day because this place looked flat, stale and 10 years out of date, technologically.

If you think attracting and encouraging retention amoung new residents is 'unnecessary'... well, all I can say is I'm glad you're not a decision maker at LL. Like it or not, this world has a tourist economy and depends heavily on turn-over and new residents. Any other model wouldn't be as likely to fund LL directly (and indirectly through successful resident businesses) enough to be successful.

But then again, "unnecessary" is subjective. The forums are unnecessary too, but here we are anyway, despite the 503 errors.

Just noticed I hadn't voted before either: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-408.

this is an interesting point.

LL should pay some ACTUAL shape/skin/hair/clothes designers some REAL money to develop starter Avs that look a lot better to coincide with Windlight being released.

That's a MASSIVE leap of pure imagination, Jopsy. Where on earth did you get the idea that I think that attracting and encouraging retention among new residents is unnecessary???

Windlight is unnecessary for retaining people - useful, perhaps, but unnecessary. Stability is definitely necessary for retaining people. Spend time stabilising the system, and when it's pretty much stable, then add things like windlight and make it even better. I think you've got things the wrong way round there.

Ok, I know this perspective is going to get me banished from Forumland forever, but here goes anyway.

My view is that SL is having trouble attracting unique RL users, the ones who are actually willing to part with hard currency to stay.

I think that one of the reasons, and only one of many, is that first impressions do count.

SL on the whole does not make a good first impression.

As observed in one of the UK's leading broadsheets recently, it does look like a bad game from the early 90's. The avatars which we all take such pride in, do look a bit like bad puppets, or a teenage boy's doodlings to please himself before he's old enough to buy porn with real people in it.

In my view LL has to upgrade the base environment, and possibly more importantly, change the paradigm a little to provide a certain amount of content themselves.

A world which is designed and created by its inhabitants is a laudable ideal, but not when it's left in the hands of moderately competent hobbyists.

For the most part SL is overflowing with bad buildings, bad scripts, bad clothes, bad businesses... well pretty much bad everything.

Most people who arrive in SL are not overwhelmed by the beauty and creativity of ordinary humanity given the opportunity to freely express its innate talents.

They're pretty much left looking at the results of what would happen in RL if you let the local postman design and build your house, or the local builder design your wedding dress.

Oh well, it was nice here.. I'll get my coat..

I kinda think the Windlight horse has been flogged enough. In reality, it was a quick way to replace a bunch of very krufty rendering code with an almost off-the-shelf product that happened to offer lots of prettiness. Unfortunately, SL's graphics programmers are really just too damned good: they're using OpenGL stuff for which drivers aren't reliable from one release to the next, so they end up spending far too much time "educating" Apple, AMD, and even nVidia. OpenGL should end up being a competitive advantage over DirectX, but that's sure not how it stands at the moment.

Haven't had much dealings with RL building contractors, eh?

I think it's a valid point that LL has pretty much given over grid content creation to residents. It's been a long time since they've even sponsored a resident building competition (remember the railroad stations, anyone?). And the "fresh textures" they have on some download page are pretty far past the sell-by date. I'm actually more concerned about the near total lack of LL-supplied "infrastructure" features on recent continents--it makes newer parts of the Mainland look like a suburban subdivision next to swampland.

But it actually cuts both ways. The standard for a quality build now is *vastly* higher than it was just a year or so ago. And that means the "barrier to entry" for new residents being able to produce passable content is much higher. If it really got to the point that nobody could build anything marketable without expertise in Maya/Blender/etc, the world would empty out quickly.

I find I don't expect them to ever add the sort of atmospheric stuff we see on the older continents. Which is a shame, because it's always nice to happen on an odd Linden build somewhere.





It's really noticeable in some pictures from a few years ago. Everything's moved on to greater and greater complexity. I wonder where the point is that amateur content becomes unviable, because it seems like it should hit that point eventually.

Phil, you aren't listening to what's being said to you: Windlight creates more stability. However, you keep saying over and over, 'Windlight itself is unnecessary eye candy, and won't stabilise anything, imo'

It isn't just 'eye candy.' When a developer changes or augments the graphical engine, which is tied in with all the other systems, with better coding, planning, and optimization...this is for stability. Yes, the new viewer's graphical engine was made to look prettier as a result of these modifications--but also, the general coding of the engine was smoothed over, with specific goals in mind to make it more stable in key areas.

Just because the graphical portion of an engine is modified to add more 'eye candy', does not mean that the new engine offers no other changes...while programmers are augmenting the code, they are also stabilizing other potions as well. This is why game engines tend to get better and better as well as get prettier and prettier...Windlight is much more than just 'eye candy', it is a chance for developers to optimize, tweak, and stabilize key portions of the engine as well.

I think we are clear on that now, right?

Cheers.

Some really good points being made here - Derbor, I loved your post and think you hit the nail on the head.

Colette - your idea about getting the initial Avies looking up to some sort of basic level of attractiveness is excellent, too! Since there are very very few souls who still wander around without wearing some sort of prim hair or clothing, why do you they sill insist on the basic avatars looking so horrible? Think we should get some sort of JIRA started along those lines? If you write it I will vote for it! I mean, heck there are enough in-world freebies that LL could use - it wouldn't even have to cost them much. Why should an avie's first experience of the world be to go to lag-ridden Freebie places just to be able to look semi-decent?

Phil - I'm not to to continue the cut-and-thrust of our little sub-debate, because I don't think we are going to agree on our respective outlooks on what LL is and isn't doing with SL and continuing to talk about it just isn't productive.

I've pondered this before.

I think it may be because most clothing and skin makers would feel uncomfortable about selling LL a set of skins or clothing with full permissions. Why sell LL a set of skins for a fixed price when you can sell a 1000 individual skins for L$2000 each. Would LL be willing to pay 1000xL$2000 for a set of skins with full perms?.

Then there's the bitching that can often take place when LL shows favoritism towards a select bunch of content creators.

I'm very interested in helping new folks into SL - I'm a newbie helper for that reason. But at the same time, if it's really true that SL's economy actually _requires_ new people to be constantly arriving, that's very dangerous. Very, very, dangerous. Red lights, alarm bells, run-screaming-through-the-streets dangerous - because that means that the Capitalism 2.0 guy was right, and it's a Ponzi. (Not a Ponzi "scam" because nobody's deliberately engineered it that way for their own benefit, but still that's how the cookie will have crumbled.)

It's not the same as an RL "tourist town" because in the tourist town, even if no tourist money is coming in, the existing money can still circulate amongst the town's inhabitants, and they could potentially become self-sufficient, growing their own food etc.. Second Life can't do that because its internal circulating currency - L$ - can't pay for tier. And the supply of new residents must dry up at some point, if only because every man, woman and child on the planet has tried Second Life.



Because if they improved them, clothing/avatar makers would complain that their market had been damaged.

People often complain that Lindens don't go out into SL.

Having just watched Torley Linden's latest video tutorial on "Text chat macros" I can see one factor that had not occurred to me up until now.

What would we expect to happen if Torley appeared in the Ahern Welcome Area and started chatting?

Oooohs and ahhhhhs?
Nope.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/31/tips-of-the-week-19-text-chat-macros-20-quick-searching-the-issue-tracker/

In the video, Torley shows how to create chat macros using the gesture facility. Quite neat really!
Then he heads down to ground level in Ahern Welcome Centre to try out his chat lines.

A bunch of noobs are standing around. Here and there are some definitely_not_noob avatars.
They ignore him!!!
Admittedly, the chat lines that his macro is spewing are not very "ane" (You work it out).
But -- nobody responds to him.

They are talking to each other though.
Highlights from the overheard chat (in Torley's video ferkrissakes!!!):

"Crashing happens all the time."
......
"Every two minutes tho?"

He tries twice. No response.

Then Torley flies away.
"I guess everybody here is pretty busy"
"I was hoping to get some replies"

Oh dear!
Not good!
I really felt bad for Torley. He must have needed a lot of cheering up after that one.

However, I felt even more bad for the noobs.
Default shapes and clothes --- and THAT WALK!!!

That would be justified if people only ever used a limited set of clothing/hair/avatar that they picked up in the first days of their SL.
Whatever improved set became the default, it would still be recognisable as "the noob kit".

It's bad enough wading through laggy OI/HI, into some awful Welcome area, and outwards to make sense of what's there and how to get it.
Doing it while looking like a twat suffering from Parkinsons adds insult to injury.