New things in SL

Anyone know when something new will come to SL?

(Windlight and Sculpties for example)

Seems like it has been forever since NEW functionality has came to us end users and creators and I would really like to know what, if anything, they are improving or creating that will have an impact (for the good) in SL.

The Lindens used to be retty good at keeping us in the know when it came to new features etc.

Seems like all Dev is now dedicated towards bugs and all PR has focused on is different ways to nickle and dime people.

I don't like where is SL is going post Cory Linden (creator of the scripting language)

I would like to see something new to keep my creative juices flowing and keep me interested in this platform.

Thanks!

Mono is relatively new, and there should be growth in LSL as a result. New LSL features generally don't get much PR, because they're primarily of interest to scripters, but you can check the release notes to see them.

You can also check Jira to look at enhancements that have been requested and may have high vote counts.

Finally, search seems to get tweaked frequently, but mostly without much fanfare.

However, new features are the enemy of reliability. If you need new features for you're creative juices, then you're not looking at existing features deeply enough. Do you really think all the possibilities have been exhausted? I don't. Just ask yourself what sort of things are now practical to do with scripting that weren't before, not because of new features, but because of better performance of Mono-based scripts.

New features are nice.

But every time one comes out, there are screams of "Fix the known bugs! Make the platform stable! Stop adding bells and whistles!"

Maybe LL actually listened.

I hear ya but MONO and Havok 4 aren't (to the enduser) new things. I understand that I am sure a lot of development went into that.

I also understand that new features are an enemy to stability, but boredom is an enemy of SL in general. Developers need new features to stay interested and alot of us users are looking for an SL 2.0 so to speak.

My concerns are the Lindens aren't even interested in adding new features. There has been little to no progress in this area in a year or so. Almost every blogpost is about how they are going to change things like policy, prices, etc...and really have not listed upcoming features.

I have been in SL for a little over 3 years and one of my favorite things aboutt he platform is it is ever growing and changing. New things to learn etc. Also, I enjoy my friends in SL.

Anyways, point being, they need to look ahead.

The platform is getting tired, the graphics are becoming outdated, the polygon count is feeling outdated, the platform in general is not improving with age.

I am not bashing Lindens or users or Secondlife. Just expressing my opinions.

I was just curious if anyone in these forums or anywhere has heard of any substantial changes to add new features etc, because if so....let me know!

Hehe.

Whining about minute bugs are worthless on a platform like this.

Sure they are annoying, but it has been forever since a new feature has been introduced.

I am not a "ooh shiny...pretty" type of person. Features are not everything for me, but I like to make new items and new interesting things keep me interested in SL.

I didn't mean to come off as a hater, because I am not.

I love my SL.

Id rather take a few bugs and some new features then have a zero bug platform anyday of the week.

I am on SL around 6-8 hrs a day to give you an idea on how often I "play" SL.

You seems knowledgable, but what you said about MONO doesn't make sense to me. I fully know what MONO is (I am an avid scripter) but other than speed and reliability on a busy server, does it really provide that much? Script performance were really never an issue for me and I didn't let server load issues hold me back. To me that was Lindens issue, not mine so I would do whatever I really wanted scriptwise without a secondthought.

To me MONO is more about future abilities rather then current ones, but no one has outlined future abilities.

Also, to answer your question above.. I haven't exhausted everything because I am constantly making things with what I have at my fingertips. At the same time, I've been in SL THREE years....creating selling..etc.

To answer you even further, I:

Create scultpies with ease
Make furniture and clothing and skins.
Make buildings, create landscapes...blah blah
Scripting just about everything
Texturing god in Photoshop
Create Animations in Poser

In other words, I currently utilize everthing in SL and love it. I am just wondering.... What's Next?!

1 User Disagreed.

But that's just one girl's opinion.

There's been (very) brief talk of something similar at Andrews office hour. Sorta sounds like there is at least some support at LL for taking some devs off bug fixing, just for a few weeks, and letting them attack as many low-hanging fruit enhancements as they can in that time.

Personally, I'm all for this idea but I think they're still all really busy with serious bugs and other things that just can't wait. Maybe if that load goes down and SL gets some more stability, they'll be able to do it. Bug fixing is great but it will never, EVER be 100% done. Gotta move the platform forward, too..

haha noted, but seriously there is no such thing as a bugless platform anyways so I would personally take some features. Also noticed the growth slowdown in SL and all the complaints about "crappy" graphics from newbies.

I am just thinking about the future of SL as a growing world.

Next big project seems to be the UI. There's others, such as killing the "duck walk" and stuff.

Yeah, I am all about bug fixes (it got bad for awhile there) but how awesome was Scuplties and Windlight (some love them some don't care).

I am hardly a features whore, it has just been a year or so since anything new has come out (not counting mono and havok) and I would love to know what (if anything) they plan on adding, thats it.

true true.

One idea a Linden had (back in the day) was to actually build AO into the client so then you just choose the animation from your inventory and create your own AO via animation dropdown.

I thought that idea was completely awesome. Then AOs can be traded like gestures, basically. I think this would be more beneficial in the long term then replacing the generic ones altogether. Also this would support people making money off of this as well.

The UI is one thing most old school users probably don't care much about, but I wont fight the change either since Newbies are important to the SL economy and anything that gets a new user to stick around is cool in my book.

How can you not count Mono and Havok4? And isn't Windlight and Glow only part of the standard viewer this year? Mono and Havok4 are both major updates.

Oh, and...



I do. At the least, we're seeing some (IMO) professional updates. How long did we stick with a broken (pre-windlight) graphics engine and outdated physics.

Neither one of those things were "cory linden" projects to begin with.

The reason I am not talking about Havok4 and Mono because as I mentioned above, I am talking about NEW things...not imporvements of old things. I am not discounting those things.

This thread was mean to ask aobut NEW things that is it. not talk about bugs etc that MAY come out of new things or reasons not to have new things.

This isn't supposed to be a argumentative post, I apologize.

I'll give you that: I tend to think of his leaving as the end of a "hobbyist" era. That may sound a little on the snide side (apologies to Cory!), but often times the great innovators are not the best people at making great code. I would not want Steve Jobs to program my iPhone, but I do want him to drive that product where it needs to go.



The reason I questioned this is that, indeed, these have provided new functionality to the server and client, even though it is primarily an upgrade to existing code. Both move SL beyond older, legacy code that really needed to be updates in order to keep SL running, IMO.

Anyway, that I know of, currently in the pipeline are further improvements, as well as the UI project I mentioned above and the Slim client – both largely outsourced projects. The Materials project, one I really want, seems to be shelved. The shadow client seems to be getting some work now and then, but is not ready for prime time. The opensim stuff is ongoing. Some action has been going on with mesh importing and with normal maps. The duck walk thing I mentioned before. Some work has been going into build tools, from what I hear, too.

Best bet, though? Go to Andrew Linden, Prospero Linden, Zero Linden, and others' office hours. I’ve not been ableto make it recently, but I s’pect they can tell you some of the near future stuff.

Realistic dynamic shadows are out there. Independent developers have made viewers that can enable them. The results are on YouTube and are amazing. So I guess we'll get shadows in the next year or two.

Tragedy of the Commons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Shadow Client? Woah I forgot about that talk (it seem like that was forever ago)

Are they still actively thinking about ading realistic shadows to SL?

If so, I just got a prim hard-one.

I know what I said was awful selfish, but honestly how many users out there are conscience of this? All I was saying is that I never let myself hold back a good idea due to such contstraints. I should also mention that I never went out of my way to make over complicated/overbearing scripts either.

Really? You've never dismissed an idea because it would take too long to run? Do you have a script that searches an entire sim for a missing prim, when all you have to go on is part of the prim's name? Or maybe a hud that lets a user do a structured search of an entire store, or better yet, an entire mall?

How about an system that would monitor a sandbox, looking for follower objects? Or other griefing tactics? Maybe even a Bayesian system for early detection of possible griefing attacks?


Have you done anything that works with the RestrainedLife viewer? Have you thought about doing your own viewer customizations?

I think the problem is that many of those would require more memory, not just faster execution. I was very disappointed when I was told that the much-anticipated 64k memory limit for Mono scripts was in fact not an increase at all, because Mono needs 4 times as much space as the old VM to store the same data.



90% of projects that would require a custom viewer will never be popular enough to justify the work involved. Even RestrainedLife is a case of "well, it's what's there" for many people who write things that use it.

Nah, the things I make don't involve that. The things I create are more for fun or to make something more RL. That is probably why MONO isn't that huge for me. I do understand the importance. If anything of mine was ever "clog heavy" it was because of the abundance of scripts rather than the amount of work the script was doing to the SIM itself. I do have a few server type e-mail scripts meant for talking back and forth and updating products, for example, but that is generally two scripts.

All of the things you mentioned are cool ideas but not something I currently care about. My scripts are llSetPos to Setrot, then Linkmesage to change color, alpha, glow, etc on a grandscale (such as a lightshow) or turning on particles in conjunction with the lighting. Or making swords that "talk" to a HUD that display damage, etc. This gives you a better idea on what I do in general.

I have not tried restrained life and honestly, no matter how much I know SL, I am not a Programmer and haven't messed with open source or anything. I actually learned LL in these very forums a couple years ago and that is the only programming knowledge I know. LL is alot like other programming language I've seen in structure, but I am certain they are quite different. You still have to learn functions, opertators, etc that are exclusive to the language you are learning. Also, as the user above me said, I want to see something anyone can see and not expect my friends to DL a special viewer to get functionality that I get...ya know?

Make that 2 Users Disagreed

I've been in SL now 1 1/2 years and feel like I haven't gotten even close to scratching the surface of existing content, etc. much less new additions.

It sounds like the OP is more of a bored creator which can be understandable but not everyone creates. In fact, I've known people who have been on SL for years and rarely leave their home sim because that is what works for them.

Nautilus is something new to see.

Actually, there is a LOT of commonality between programming languages - the functions that differ are usually easy to look up in a reference.

I would like to see LL offering a different structure for LSL, though. I mean, I've just seen a handy script for a slider UI posted on the Scripting Tips forum, but there's no way to make that into a reusable component because of LSL's near-total lack of modularity support. I would have thought that improving LSL would be amongst the easiest things LL could do (it only needs a #pragma at the top to say "this is the new version" and thus keep old scripts compatible)

Make it 3