Old Timers Fading Fast

What would have to happen to SL to respark your interest?

not all of us are gone Maybe if they finally made it stable more folks would stick around/come back

~Brie

Make tier 2 easier.

I call tier 2 the point where shopping, exploring, teleporting and partying become stale.

Now I want to learn, and I don't know where to go or how to do it. Tutors would be nice. I like to learn at my own pace.

Not necessarily colleges offering real courses although if cheap enough, I might. But, things to do with SL - especially if the skills taught could be taken out of SL. Graphics, for instance. Animation.

i am not really an "old timer" but i notice that too.

some good people started spending a lot time developing for blue mars, and since my sim is broken for the whole day today (cant do anything there but chat) i am using the time to download the dev kit too atm

BM still does not have a Mac beta, right?

nope, and i dont think they will ever do anything besides windows

A new platform. A real one.

It's still fun for me. New features usually make the SL experience more interesting - shadows will be the next big one for me - they sort of work already on the 1.23 but when we get them without the bugs and slow frame rate it'll be great.

That puzzles me. So many graphics aficionados are Maccies.

They're using a gamer's rendering engine, and gamers use Windows.

I think SL gets much better with each new viewer release. The new servers are probably something to do with it also. At any rate I just don't get the issues that others persistently complain about. This despite the fact I have a mediocre system and I'm logging in from a one-goat town in the nether regions of a developing country.

Prim attachments to avatars look right for a start whereas they never used to match at all. Animations used to be way off kilter when uploaded but just recently I found I can knock off quite complex and subtle manoeuvres in QAvimator that upload perfectly well.

Sculpt maps load very efficiently, although I should say I never use anything larger than a 32 x 32 so I can't speak for those 1024 x 1024 monsters some builders feel obliged to use.

I've looked at the Blue Mars Beta and I won't take a second look for another year. It's too restrictive and I had the strong impression I was playing a video game, which feeling I absolutely loathe and despise. I wasted a week with the stultified interface and in the end it really made me appreciate what we have in SL.

Hopefully Avatar Reality or whatever will fix all that and I wish them all the best because I think the competition would be healthy for the Lindens but it's not for me as it stands. All the creative action with BM is in is Maya and Blender or whatever so why bother with it? It's going to be a world of pre-sold clones if they aren't careful.

I don't want to log into something out of Aldous Huxley - unless of course Aldous Huxley is the sim owner.

What do you mean by "right"?

They have about the same level of illumination as the avatar mesh, and have had for several versions, but the avatar mesh and attached prims are both WAY too strongly highlighted. I wish they'd go back to pre-windlight contrast levels for avatars, but that's not going to happen.

Please check out NCI. We offer free classes and tutorials on a wide range of Second Life skills, and have links and LMs to other places where you can learn more, too. There are also usually NCI Helpers and Officers hanging around the campuses who can answer questions.

One thing that would really get me excited is Physical Avatar. That's the stuff that was in the works like three years ago and was to include "expressive puppeteering"--basically, on-the-fly composition of animations.

One thing that won't get me excited is a new viewer. I don't care if it makes shadows dance on the head of a pin and mirrors bounce light hither and yon, all at a blazing FPS even on Intel embedded graphics. I don't care if it's stereo vision, eye-tracking, and reads brainwaves for input. /me *yawns* about all things viewer-side.

I'm pretty sure LL has a huge yawn in store for me, and little else.

Ditto to this as well as looking in Events - Education. There are soooooo many classes offered by a variety of schools. I spent the first year and a half of my SL attending classes - most are free or very low cost to take (although tipping the instructor is encouraged). I have learned to do soooooo many things this way and also make friends of like-minded people by taking the classes.

I used to instruct at one of the schools before it closed down and have considered offering personal classes/mentoring, but that gets into another discussion like the one on why content creators don't offer more custom work.

I keep meaning to offer classes on my own some day if I decide to not affiliate with a school again, but it's on that long list of things I have to do.

Anyway...take classes!!! And NCI is great...I've taken many, many classes there. (They offer the best series on learning the lsl scripting language, imo.)

I doubt anything could make that happen really..Maybe leaving the economy alone would be a start..those once or twice a year shots in the ass are like man made tsunamis and tornados.
If they want a serious econemy they need to treat it with respect and plan for the smoothest transition possible instead of ok we are doing this and during this we are gonna throw in a few cork screws to throw you off..

that might be a start.

^^This. I'm the same way in that any new sparklies they add are like shiny band-aids to me. I'd like to see the core stabilized, and definately some new forms of expression through your inworld representation. Phys AV and an optional new AV mesh would go a long way for me in keeping the interest.

There gets to be a point where you've done most of it, it ceases to be as entertaining as it used to be, and finding things to keep the entertainment level high enough becomes more work with each passing year. WOW me LL... (lol).

Was just thinking today I wish there was some way to animate other than poseballs and such. That sounds really cool.

I second the physical avatar,great idea that never saw the light of day.
http://avatarpuppeteering.com/

/me waves from November '06 - SL is still bright and shiny to me- sure there is room for improvement- but I love my SL.

LL would have to make me believe they're interested in keeping me around.

it a hold over myth from 1998 when mac did have the graph apps

Well I mean exactly that. They look "right", as in they look 'of a piece' with the avatar mesh and, yep, I guess that's down to matching levels of illumination. You didn't suppose I meant matching cubes and prisms to avatars did you?

And what do you mean by 'several versions? I count only two viewer updates since last October and I'm pretty sure that attachments weren't matching the avatar mesh back at New Year. Mind you there were all sorts of issues like palletized textures failing on nVidia cards and crashes in 'Edit' so I may have given up looking closely at these things for a month or two.

By the way, I don't bother with Release Candidate Viewers or Public Nightlies anymore if you're counting those.

As for Windlight, I made my own low contrast settings and I gave up worrying what other people see on their monitors long before I rezzed. It seems even more pointless with SL because I get the impression every other resident is using a different viewer.

The illumination model for attachments and the avatar mesh were synced in Windlight, but the problem was that illumination model was too contrasty, and that's never been fixed. The level of illumination was a minor matter... you only had to apply a 10% tint to your attachments to fix that.
At least four fifths of all users are using the default viewer with default settings, either the current version or one or two versions back. Don't let the geeks in the forums lead you astray. The behavior of the default viewer matters.

Really, I stay to communicate on an sl level with my "partner".