So What's Next, Linden Lab?

For over two (or 3, or 4, or more!) years we've been waiting for:

Sculpties that actually reflect the intricate work done on them by the creators in Maya/Blender,

Flexi items (hair, skirts) that are not phantom for the avatar, so skirts don't fall directly through legs when sitting,

A mesh that doesn't make us look like cartoons,

A decent Orientation Island/ New User Experience,

Improved customer relations,

Forums that reflect 2009, not 1999,

Sim crossings that don't throw us across the grid,

and many, many other suggestions/fixes/improvements.

What gives? Are you just too damned lazy, or do you really want to drive Second Life into the ground? I'm watching talented creators leaving or just giving up because they can't bear to fight your antiquated system any more. Do you care?

Seconded.

*sarcasm* What issues? SL is great! Numbers are up, We project 4643842 new members this month alone, Mainland prices are stable, there's REALLY only 2-4% Adult content, Big Named Educators want to make a home in SL, We have a lot of exciting changes coming up, We value your input, respect our residents, and are one big happy family! */sarcasm*




Seriously, your kidding right? They are more important things:implementing the *adult content* changes, and the *content manager* changes, to worry about anything as paltry as Lag, decreased performance, bad sim crossing, and all the other things we have been screaming for. That was very well said. Now if only they paid attention.

~Brie

Gimme!!

None of that penny ante nonsense. The next big thing is a content management/creation policy that'll be just as awesome as the bot policy was!

Smithers, who IS that young go getter?

/me channels Smithers, "Homer Simpson Sir, One of your termite nerds from sector seven G."

Wow, I'm impressed. I figured you were still a couple of years away from getting The Simpsons.

I think a mesh importer is most likely to happen "soon" (soon in Linden terms = couple of years). That will render sculpties obsolete.
Maybe even custom shaders import might be feasible, i don't know. Hopefully the state-of-the-art looking competition (Blue Mars) will push LL in the right direction here.


I don't think we'll ever see this. It's too computationally expensive. Even current simple flexi objects are performance hogs.


I think the biggest problem here would be backward compatibility. A new mesh might break a lot of existing content. Like, most of it, really I believe it would necessarily mean having two lines of products in many cases, one for old meshes, one for new meshes.


Hah! I don't see any indication of this, quite the contrary.


Apparently their short term goal is to shut this forum down and move everything to that crappy unstable slow unusable blogging software. Hooray!


According to Blondin Linden, they are actively working on making Mono scripts rezzing faster. That should also help with sim crossings.

I reckon the avatar meshes are not at all bad, although there is always room for improvement. I know they don't compare with state-of-the-art virtual humans but as a compromise for a versatile user-created world, they're OK.

I'm not sure that an improved mesh would necessarily break a lot of existing content. As long as it's able to read the texture co-ordinates and apply them to the new mesh it should work, I'd have thought.

For skirts, what's needed is an update of the 'skirt' layer of appearance so that the skirt fits the body shape better and doesn't need glitch pants. I make and wear 'system' skirts and dresses still, and they work fine if you use a modified version of your shape to compensate for skirt poofiness, but it would be nice not to have to do that.

I hear we're getting advertising in all the spare space on ech side of these forum posts.

how about quit with all the fancy stuff and just fix what we have now, like sims shuddering to a halt when people tp into them, or not being able to res a box when building, or changing a script and then you can't upload it

Oh hey yeah, how about an over-40-avatar limit on sims? One that doesn't slow to an amoeba-like crawl if people DARE to add attachments?

Sculpties didn't even exist 2-3 years ago, let alone 3-4 years..

Flex items falling through bodies (or through the ground for that matter, try making a flexie towel and put it on the floor just for fun) is a problem encountered in a lot of 3D applications. It *could* be rendered more properly client side, but that *would* put some oil on the fire for the lag-police: "OMG, take of your prim hair, you're lagging my viewer!" while giving only a minorly improved experience.

A new avatar mesh would be nice, but are you ready to throw away all your existing skins and clothes simply because they won't fit as well on a new mesh? And do you think it's exactly fair to force all residents to buy new skins and clothes for that same reason?
Allowing additional avatar meshes might seem nice, but it will only mean that creators have to state for which avatars their clothes and skins are meant, or you'll end up buying these for meshes that you don't even use or have.

These forums reflect SL as it is now, though you might like some skinning features and a different layout. Those are only bells and whistles, the base functionality is the same as that from any other forum, so no idea what you're after here.

Sim crossings have always been a pain, I'm not fond of them either. Though I found it varies a lot every time. Some crossings go rather smooth, while others teleport me across 2-3 sims at a time. Might have something to do with how close the servers running the sims physically are. If you're crossing sims that are on the same server rack, things might go more smoothly or something like that.

SL can certainly use some improvements, but some improvements conflict with other features, other improvements are technically not feasible, some improvements are a matter of the users working around them, some improvements would be impractical, and some improvements just take time to realise.

As for the reason why people leave: to each his own. I've seen talented creators leave because RL called, I've seen talented creators leave because they got tired of demanding and whining customers, I've seen talented creators leave for so many things, that I can't really be bothered with the reason other people give for their departure.

I don't have any mono scripts on my avatar and I still get thrown across the grid now and then.

Argent: I'm not saying it's an universal cure, but it should at least help a little. Better than nothing I guess.

Surely once LL boffins had 'taught' the new mesh co-ordinates to wear textures correctly, all textures would fit it proplerly - or at least as well as they fit us now.

As an over-40 I object to this ageism!

Pep (How dare you! )

Making the mesh use the old coordinates would basically mean that the new mesh uses the same map, which would mean that there would be little improvement in its uses, unless all clothes/skin creators use bigger textures for their creations, in case they're not using 1024*1024 textures yet. Otherwise, the improvements would basically be lost in detail limitations of the old mesh. Some things might look more fluently, like the bending of a shoulder or an arm, but it won't solve the texture stretching problems that the current mesh has, most notably on locations like the inner thighs and feet. Fixing these would require a completely new mesh, not an updated backwards compatible mesh.

If LL wishes to add a completely new avatar mesh, without having people trash their inventories, they'll have to give people the ability to select which mesh to use with their clothing, possibly "mimicking" the old mesh on the new mesh and vice versa. But the texture map for a new mesh will simply have to be different to really take advantage of it.

Well, sure, it'd be like old prims and new prims. You'd have old shapes and new shapes, old clothes and new clothes, and you'd need a new shape to use new clothes.

This appears to be the case, judging from a recent blog post. LL is using their normal corporate double-talk, but what they SEEM to be saying is:

1. We are going to make it easier to DMCA a content thief. (Yay! But what about the accused's right to appeal? They've said nothing about preventing malicious DMCAs)

2. We are going to implement some sort of standards for content sellers. (BOO! What is this standard? Quantity of items? Quality? Freedom from Adult Content? This is rank bullshit. I'm very afraid that they are looking at a Blue Mars model, where content providers will have to submit their creations to LL, get a stamp of approval, and probably pay a fee.)

It could easily be an option turned off by those who suffer more from lag.


Yep, I'm ready, I would dump every item of clothing and skin on my main and alts if needed to upgrade avatar mesh.
Even if they had a freebie conversion program that just copied existing stuff onto the new mesh, it wouldn't take long to phase out the 20th Century quality stuff.

i sooo want a new avatar mesh, if you are scared that you can´t use your old textures anymore, just dont use the new mesh, it could be done without any problems, just because some dont want it´it doesnt mean it shouldn´t be done.

if you want to look like an old outdated computer game, do it, if you want to look cool and new and shiney pick the new mesh.

i waited for it for over 2 years and i expect to wait for at least another 2 though.

the only answer i got to the suggestions from the lindens was about 2 years ago from torley who told me something is planned, i guess they just are too busy breaking sl or dont care about it...

a new avatar mesh will only look too good anyway and will only serve the evil sex people...

also a new mesh would be a good opportinity for texture artist to boost their sales when many people want new textures for their new avatars, i have everything i need/want for my old mesh, no need to buy new clothing/skins