New things in SL

I think there is a role for basic prims, but for more elaborate things, there is a need for mesh. I think it will be faster (and less costly in uploads) to use basic prims when you can, but for many shapes, the cost of rendering in terms of time is not acceptable for some people (e.g., sculpty stairs). I don't think it is the end of builders as we know it. And I don't think that sandbox conversations will end. I think the content will shift, for sure, but they won't end.

I don't see why we shouldn't be able to do mesh editing *in* second life, at least for modifying an in-world mesh pulling the vertices around.

If the load problems resulting from openspaces was so bad that LL had to shoot themselves in both the foot and kneecap, I don't see how they can add a lot of the things that have been talked about in this thread. At least as far as graphics capabilities and meshes are concerned.

I'd really like to see private estate owners have the ability to replace the sky and surrounding (currently water) textures, like we already can with the ground textures. That shouldn't add any load once the textures are downloaded, and would open up the possibilities for some great themed sims.

Mesh creation or not. If we could get an inworld tool that would work like Google Sketchup, I'd be VERY happy. Coming from a SolidWorks/Alibre background... I luvz my extrusions. =^-^=

Why not? If it's purely graphics the way sculpts are now, the load would all be on the client.

They need to un-stall that part of Windlight, first, I guess.

The real problem with getting these kinds of things through the mill at LL is that the only people at LL who seem to be tasked with specific projects are the ones working on the servers. All the client-side stuff that doesn't directly effect the servers gets picked up by someone at LL because they think it's cool, and abandoned when they get bored with it or discover something shinier. This has its upsides... there wouldn't be any kind of custom meshes in SL if someone hadn't come up with the idea of using textures for sculpts... but it clearly has its downsides as well.

I too disagree. Having lived with years of buggy updates, and an unreliable client, I'm very glad that they have been focusing in making SL more stable lately.

I think at the moment most of LL's work has been "back end" stuff, which was highly needed but perhaps doesn't have any immediately "visible" effect. One person described it as being that the Lindens were very concerned with pushing things further and further ahead, feature-wise, without too much thought as to scalability and the infrastructure behind it all. This lead to much of the instability of the not too distant past. For me I find that of late the stability of the platform has been much better, inventory losses are much less frequent and the overall experience is much smoother (touch wood). It's still not perfect, of course.

As to things in the pipeline, I've either read, heard or been told that the following are things being worked on. I don't know the extent to which they have Linden Lab involvement, but even still it probably gives a taste of what is to come:

- Dynamic shadowing
- Flexible Sculpted prims
- Mesh importing
- True bump-mapping for textures
- An overhaul of the default animations for avatars
- The whole "websites on a prim" thing
- Localisation of the Second Life viewer
- 'New User experience' overhaul
- Forums overhaul (ha!)
- The introduction of 'middling' levels of sim ownership (the whole OS / Homestead thing)

My own 'dream developments' would be things like:

- A proper inbuilt inventory management system, akin to those used to organise music files, allowing user tagging, multiple object editing at once (for renaming, tagging etc.) and a more 'detailed' view of all objects at once (e.g. like listing creator / date created / number of prims an object consists of, texture dimensions etc.).

- An extension of the above to allow me to create a back-up of things I have created myself and have full permissions to (this might never happen because of the difficulties of IP rights and all, but it would still be pretty useful).

- An inbuilt windlight setting exchange system (I know you can swap the files externally, but this is rather cumbersome, it'd be nice if you could just do it directly through the client itself).

- A second (and even third) tier for managing contacts. It's a minor thing, but I hate having family, friends, business contacts etc. all mixed into one huge list. A more refined contacts management system would be nice.

These might come in vagueries of the distance future, but if a Santa Linden appears in world this Christmas and starts asking for lists from people, I have mine sorted!

Thanks, great list of "pipeline" projects. Exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks for the list! Lots of exciting things, a couple of "meh", and the obligatory OS controversy. Well, sounds like things might be interesting in the next year or so.

Personally, I would love to have mesh importation. So, people might have to use offline, non-LL programs, so blessed what? Texturing is already done with offline programs. And there is plenty of freeware out there for 3D modeling. Why should LL try to reinvent the wheel?

That said, a limited "tweak" ability after import would be terrific. But I think that should be secondary.

One new feature that should make its way onto the main grid before long is the roll-out of OGP (the Open-Grid-Protocol). This will enable the teleporting of avatars from the myriad of OpenSims to the SL Main grid and back.

Suddenly, whole new worlds will open up to the the intrepid traveller. Whether you will arrive with the same skin/clothes/look as you started out with is yet to be seen, but teleporting from the SL Beta grid to OpenSims and back is now a fact of life.

You might also want to hang out in the Beta (Preview) grids once in a while, where they pre-test new features, and ask around at the Office Hours there.

Rock

I'm not sure how you could, since that would violate the content creator's limited license to Linden Labs.

Not if the avatar asset data is fetched from Linden Labs' servers while the OpenSim processes only positional information.

Even setting aside the issue of attachments (or would this only be applicable to plain Linden avatars?) the TOS says that content creators grant a license for Linden Labs to use in *their service*. Or do you think they will redefine "their service" to include any yahoo able to convert a UUID into a RESTful URI?

Even then, what about the license granted to the buyer of the content?

I suppose it's more that I don't really understand why you would want to _stop_ people taking avatars you designed into other worlds... I could only see it if it was a security issue, is that the main reason, or is there something else I'm missing?

That's a license granted by Linden Labs through the permissions system. Unless the creator explicitly said otherwise (as some of us do) that license by definition can NOT be even as extensive as the license granted TO Linden Labs by the creator.
This has nothing about what I or anyone else WANTS, this is what the license actually SAYS. Even if LL changes that to allow wider use of the content, it wouldn't apply to content already licensed to LL.

Really? Surely it can't be granted by Linden Labs? If it was, surely you couldn't sue a thief for violating the license by copying your content without permission, because it isn't YOUR license, it's LL's. You could only sue LL for breaking _their_ license by allowing use of the content beyond what you permitted.

YOU licensed it to LL first.

Sheesh, this isn't dragon magic.