Old Timers Fading Fast

SL hasn't lost it's luster for me at all......I'm not an 'old timer' but I've been on since January 07....would have been 2006 but my computer wouldn't support it lol

The draw for me.....while being visually amazing and appealing to the artist and big kid in me.......is really the potential that this type of virtual technology holds. I will stick around indefinitely because I believe in the implications for the future. I think it's amazing that artists and business professionals and even governments have tapped into what SL is.....and taken advantage of the unique opportunity to reach across the globe and interact with the world, all with the click of a mouse.
To be honest....I simply don't want to miss what ever is coming next. I'm a bit of a contradictory type in terms of my love of technology......as much as I am very grounded and tuned in to the human element and I believe children should play outside more than they do these days..........I am also very very forward thinking (always have been) and I see where this is all going......and tho I doubt I'll live to see the day when we don a visor and have a fully immersive cyber experience.....I'm enthused enough about the process that I will remain a part of it as long as I am able.

I understood that but I prefer the current system whereby I can create an attachment for a skin or an item of clothing using the same texture file and get them to match straight off the bat.

The tint method was a good work around but I was never 100% satisfied with the results and many creators either didn't take the trouble to get it right or they were plain incompetent. I notice a good many attachments in my inventory look pretty crummy now. It's a real shame so many creators were too precious to sell their work with mod permissions. Dorks.


I understand that too. I used to have to work up web sites with maximum accessibility being the main priority. Attention to what happens with plain vanilla settings is almost a rule of thumb for any guidelines on testing accessibility.

I'm very much a standards man myself and I keep my viewer as close to the default settings as I can in order to get an idea of what most residents are seeing. I always view freshly uploaded textures with the default Windlight settings just to be sure I haven't gone way off. I've done it so often that I can second guess what they will look like but I continue to do it anyway.

Still, there's no accounting for the brand and condition of the monitor another resident might be using, which is what I meant above when I said I gave up worrying what other people are seeing. You can only go so far with precautions and testing and after that it really is an act of faith to expect that folk will see what you made in the way you intended.

I prefer my own settings for 'doing' SL as normal, getting out and about or whatever. The weather has the flat, slightly overcast look of a typical Irish spring. I never liked blazing sunshine in RL or SL. I even prefer the way a beach looks under broken cloud or in the rain. Much more interesting.

The Preview Grid looks a bit grim and chilly though.

I didn't say it wasn't an improvement, just that it's not the first thing that comes to my mind when I'm thinking of matching avatars and attachments. It's a pretty minor issue compared to Windlight... which is when they really DID get the lighting of avatars and attachments to follow the same rules.

Pity they did it by screwing up both.

While I have taken a couple of courses in SL and probably will again, I just am not the type of person who learns that way. I want one-on-one tutoring with lots of hands on during the sessions and all of it at my pace, rather than a pace that is designated to fit the majority of a class or the average learner.

In most of the building stuff I've been learning, I have caught on pretty quick (sometimes very very quickly), but I do have a tendency to take a sort of backwards logical approach to things - and that makes classes kind of weird for me.

I managed to get lucky and land in the lap of a decent mentor about the time that my interest in building increased -- or maybe it was the landing in his lap that helped increase my interest. In any case, my building has been moving along pretty decently and I feel like I am learning at a decent pace. If such had not happened, I probably would have ended up searching for a personal building instructor/mentor - and not sure where I would have even started looking for that.

I've been asking myself this question repeatedly this year.

It's obvious that I still have an interest in SL even tho I have barely been able to bring myself to log in much this year. I've disassociated myself from everyone I've ever really known in world, given up a little business that was handily paying my tier, stopped building for a well known fashion designer when continuing might have gotten me more profitable building gigs; I've tried to disconnect as much as possible. But I'm still here and I still seem to care, I just don't know what it's going to take for me to feel an honest to goodness SPARK again.

I even recently made a new alt, got a name I think I could live with, had a thoughtful intention of trying very very hard to gain a fresh perspective by starting new, unattached and open to being amazed by this platform again.

But man, LL keeps pissing me off. That's the thing. It's easy to be in love with SL. It's impossible for me to be in love with LL. And I can't seem to reconcile my disdain for the company with my love for the platform they own.

Besides, wasn't I told by M. that, as a pioneer of this platform, I was obsolete? I'm pretty sure I remember something like that.

Anyway, you asked what it would take to respark my interest. Maybe the real question you should be asking those fading old timers is what made them lose interest in this platform in the first place, and what that might mean for you and your SL business in the next few years.

Viva la Revolution

Sorta like I said above, LL convincing me they're interested in my being around would do wonders for my increasingly poor attitude.. I don't think we're alone in this either.

I've never been a fan of open letters and such but wonder if this is the time to craft one up and send it to the press. I don't think LL would notice if it got sent to them directly.

My interest in SL is at it's highest it's been since the early GeeWhiz days,where earlier this year it was just about non existant. Despite my absolute disdain for LL and it's management of the service, SL is providing the escapism and entertainment I seek from it. As long as it continues to, I will keep my account active.

It's still true - just not exclusively true, any more.

To purposely exclude a high number of potential users seems like a poor business model, to me.

What I'd heard, from another post on this forum, is that they did actually try it but they could not come up with any control system that let an avatar be controlled to do anything interesting. You could maybe wave your hand back and forth or do something very simple but that's all, and that would be no trouble to animate.

It never seemed really useful for in-world interactions to me.. OTOH, if you could make poses (or, better, whole anims) inside SL, that'd really be quite nice. And long overdue.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

1. Sure, stabilize everything. Table stakes
2. Have LL act like they care about us
3. Move all (and I mean all) tools for building and making everything, textures, animations, sculpties, you name it, in world and make them shine
4. Help us (via the platform) to create environments that encourage interaction. I want to go to places where people hang out and do something interesting that makes them talk to each other. In the end, its people that are interesting.
5. Create ways to allow me to extend the platform in never before thought of ways that goes far beyond scripting.

Once you've built it all, scripted it all, seen it all, listened to it all, bought most of it, wore it, drove it, shot it, taught, mentored, sold it, made a vendor, rented it, orbited, been orbited, textured it, animated it, danced to it, explored most of it, seen it come and seen it go, crashed it, built a bot, downloaded the opensource client and modified it, voted for a bug on the Jira, been banned, and made alts of every persuasion, its hard to want to login again. What shall I do today that I haven't already done, too many times?
(insert obnoxious ASCII art here)
I want SL to WOW me again.

Become a sion chicken farmer

You have to be ready to explore new areas and things that may not have interested you at a first casual perusal. Being ready to radically change your SL will ensure you are able to evolve/change with the times and willing to try to make your SL more interesting.

Just set your Mac up to dual boot ("Bootcamp", and run Windows for playing high-performance games. The new Mac laptops have kick-ass graphics, and if the game does not support Mac, you can still play it on your Mac by booting into Windows.

(Macs also allow you to run Windows at the same time as the Mac OS: the MS apps come up seamlessly and just seem like Mac apps on your desktop. But I don't think this concurrent mode supports the high-end graphics for those apps. Good for Word or Powerpoint but not for Entropia or whatever. For games like that, either run the Mac native version if there is one, or boot into Windows on the machine.)

That's a great idea! What does it mean?

I value not having to fuck with Windows and dual-booting and all that crap more than I value playing Blue Mars.

I need the look to improve. Looking at SL compared to other worlds and games, and it's starting to look antique. When I joined, I'd spend a lot of time exploring. I don't so much any more. So much of the look is put on the client side that with the last viewer release I had to turn my graphics down to minimal settings just to function with the lag. That won't get better until I can get a new computer in January. When I do, I will also get Bootcamp and Windows and join Blue Mars. I don't see how SL will catch up.

Stop messing over the econ stop adding things we DONT want then telling us yes we do hell pretty much get the hell OUT of screwing with anything inside of SL and just work on fixing the back end and leaving SL to grow on its own.

Ofcouse they WONT do anything to keep the customers happy lol LL doesnt do that anymore lol

Change SL to RL and you could send that to Washington

This.

For me LL would have to Fix server performance and stop over crowding hosts

I am at my wits end with poor server performance and gets worse with each server update.

SL Wows me every day...Wow there is another thing broken...Wow the lag is even worse with this upgrade...Wow that was a *really* bad decision to make...Wow I can't believe somehow it all still hangs together...just.

Gabriele for the win!

Cheer up, Gel. Prolly just a bulb of garlic under your bier or mebbe your coffin glass just needs polishin.

Seriously, I can't see what other folks are having trouble with on the latest update (grumpy old ferrets notwithstanding). Are you sure you have your viewer on the default hardware settings? You paid your ISP bill? You ain't loggin into 'Active Worlds' by mistake are ya?

A date with Briana Dawson. In Tokyo, on Rosedales credit card.