Yet another Blue Mars thread

What freedom is there in SL for a newbie to see in one hour? A lot. The freedom of the chaos that is mainland. The freedom of all the freaks hanging out at the help islands. (I met a giant biped hyena there once, who was a lovely fella.) The freedom of builds defying gravity. The freedom of flight and racecars and skydiving and rezzing stuff and shaping it to your liking.

As for BM - as long as you can't even wear sneakers that are marked for the opposite gender, as long as you can't switch gender once appointed, as long as there aren't tinies and furries and werespiders, as long as you can't move even on your own on the fucking golf course, and as long as it is unclear if BM will be pro-sex, do not dare to talk to me about any kind of freedom in BM.

Edited to add the short fort: The freedom to be who you want to be, instead of just one pretty face in the generic crowd.

/me came to SL, coming up on 3 years ago, beacuse I was interested in it as a development platform. I have to say that I'm really disa[pointed in the growth in that area. Yeah, there's been progress like H4 and Mono but that's more internal stuff - it may enable LL to grow the platform but, from where I sit, I've seen very, very little growth.

They seem to spend little time on things that would make me happier in SL. SVC-22. Group chat. Horrible sim performance just going on for months without a word from LL. Adult content. Two monthly fee increases of +50% in two years. Etc, etc, etc, etc..

C'mon, LL. Get back in the game! Your virtual monopoly will not last forever..

Actually, it is the other way around. Meshes are pre-defined. Prims are computed on-the-fly.



Does it HAVE to? No, but then it might not be significantly different enough to be considered an "improvement". If they want to fix the avatar mesh, or make it better, it will likely require the use of methods different enough to render the old UV mappings, attachment points, rotation/translation, and animation system obsolete. Otherwise, what's the point? Heck, I want custom avatar meshes. I want real wings with real bones in them that can be animated, same with a tail. Do you think something that radical a change won't break the existing clothing model?



That actually has little to nothing to do with the hardware architecture, but a core design decision made long ago in the grid/simulator software. They are quite capable of eliminating sim boundaries with the hardware they have, but it would be such a radical refactoring of the core design, it is unlikely to ever happen. (Yes, I know how this is done; I am presently in development of a seamless, zoneless MMO world which does exactly that).



Apples and magnetars. WoW has no need to make "substantial upgrades to their graphics engine", because they intended it to look the way it does for a number of reasons, not the least of which is appeal to all generations, as well as very low hardware requirements. As such, you'll likely not see a significant rendering engine upgrade for WoW for a long time, if ever. About the only reason they would is to make sure the game supports the underlying technologies, and properly follows the sunset paths of older functions and libraries. They certainly have no incentive to upgrade their engine for look and feel reasons.

Graphics are one of those "good enough" kind of things. Eye candy is always a plus, but it doesn't take the most realistic, powerful engine to generate "good enough" eye candy, if the other elements of the game (not the least of which is game play) are also "good enough".



WoW does well what it was intended to do. Even despite its popularity, there are still quite a few folks to whom it does not appeal. I would also deign to say that the majority of "gamers" have never played it, despite their marketing hype. I happen to be one, myself. I don't really like the game or the graphics, and I have other reasons not to play it which have nothing to do with the game itself.

On the other hand, Guild Wars is a beautiful game. I play it often. I also still play old games, like StarFlight, Ascendancy, Master of Orion, Drakhan, Giants, Septerra Core, and many others, whose graphics are often beyond dated.



Other two? You mean platform architecture and graphics? If you consider it "needs improvement" there, isn't that what you are calling "short sighted"?

Prims are pre-defined by virtue of their geometry being on your computer and not downloaded. Their transformations from user manipulation is computed.

Arbitrary meshes would require being download on a per-mesh basis, and therefore are *not* predefined.




Yes, you just said exactly what I did. Glad we agree.




I wasn't talking about eliminating region boundaries. I don't think LL should. I mean making them work well. It would require LL upgrade the network between sims to be screamingly fast to transfer all the data quickly and reliably. Most if not all of the sim crossing issues are the very slow times it takes to transfer the data, or the failure of this transfer. I don't expect they will ever do the necessary upgrades to improve this however.




You are kind of confirming what I said, WoW does well because it's functional (not hampered by needing a high end machine). I think they do have incentives to upgrade their graphics, given newer MMO's like Warhammer Online put them to shame. But given their popularity, they don't have to. Glad we agree.



No argument here.




No by other two, I meant the other two qualities I outlined, functionality, and activities.

As long as....?

When did BM take away this list of freedoms exactly?

Rock

They are quite obviously not there so don't try to play smartypants with me.

I already have a hotel on Broadway!

Yes, dear. *smiles & pets gently*

We're gonna end up in a semantics debate if we're not careful. <.<

Prims do not have any predefined geometry, as in there is no existing data set which describes them before transformations. Their "mesh" simply does not exist anywhere (ie, not "defined" before they are needed to be rendered.



Whether they come from your hard disk or your network connection has no bearing on whether they are "predefined" or not. The data which describes them in actuality does exist prior to them needing to be rendered.



Not exactly, but it wasn't necessarily meant to rebut what you said; just another take on it.



I think it is the only feasible way. The problem with having hard region boundaries is that handoffs are made mandatory in linear time. That means when your avatar crosses the boundary, the simulator MUST do the hand-off RIGHT NOW. With a non-linear hand-off, the simulator can schedule and coordinate it as it has time and resources to do so, which significantly lowers the burden of having to do so.

There is no doubt that hand-offs are a mandatory design paradigm; there is no single computer powerful enough to run a mass simulation of a complex world like SL, and communicate it to all of the clients. The only real trick of any importance is to make handoffs invisible to the user. They should never even know that their simulation has been moved to a different physical machine.

As such, the only real way to solve it is to do away with the hard-grid-boundary design. Throwing more hardware at it might improve it somewhat, but not only is it a waste, there is no guarantee that it will improve it significantly enough to matter.



I didn't say they had no incentives at all, but that for the look and feel they are aiming for, they have no incentives based on those concerns. I think Guild Wars graphics puts them to shame, and Guild Wars is an OLDER game than WoW. However, some of that goes back to what I said; it's the style of graphics they are promoting, and that style doesn't require such upgrades to maintain.

As for Warhammer Online, it may be pretty, but going from 1+million subs to 300k says that it is missing something rather important.



Well, I don't know about anyone else, but SL has more than enough activities to keep me entertained; it doesn't have everything I want, but there are lots of places to go and plenty of stuff I can find to do when I get there. I wish it had a better "game" engine that we had access to, but SL has always strangely avoided it, preferring to be considered a "platform", rather than merely a "game".

As for "functionality", I don't know what functionality you think WoW has that SL doesn't. I can't make my own armor and weapons in WoW; I get what the game developers see fit to give me. I can't use my own animations. I can't script my own game objects. What is there that WoW has that SL doesn't in this area? It is missing some functionality (a "real" game engine, as I said), but does it really need it?

How about ferrets and ladders?

Novis, do you know what a beta test is?

I asked about visitors to SL and BM after BM launches.

Before BM launches it will go through a closed beta test period, fix bugs, take on board comments and suggestions from the devs, then go into open beta, fix more bugs, get more feedback and suggestions from potential users, have many internal meetings and discussions, then eventually decide what their social policies will be (if any) and enunciate those policies in a TOS.

As for playing 'smartypants' with you, perish the thought. Someone who has either an advance copy of the BM TOS, or who compares an open functioning vw like SL with a new vw that is still in closed beta and under development, is way too smart for me.

Chaos and freaks? Who'd have thought that was the recipe for getting newbies to return in their droves. Way too smart for me.

Rock

I can agree with that assessment. The goal is the same, our method differs. I'm just looking at it from the standpoint that LL is very unlikely to change their architecture, and really shouldn't, given how many things depend on it now. Starting from the ground up, by all means...



Yes, I know their style is intentional. But it still looks dated.




Well, I agree there are things to do. But to me, it seems that it hinges on the philosophical choices LL made when creating the world. I am not certain, but it sounds like the 'world' owners in BM will have a lot more control over not only what goes on in their 'world' but what can happen to the people there. I understand LL's motives for 'nerfing' a creator's ability to control what happens to other people, which was to prevent abuse by those with less than honorable motives. But I think to create a really compelling experience, you need that control.

Think of it as 3 Levels of creative control. WoW developers (not users, developers) have infinite control over what happens to players/visitors. BM developers will have a lower level of developmental control over players/visitors than WoW developers, but more than SL developers. But in SL, the developer (you and me and everyone else who creates) has probably the lowest level of control over player/visitors concievable. There are so many good concepts which can not be realized due to these constraints placed on everyone. And sadly this is the tradeoff which had to be made for the model chosen.

It's my opinion that if developers here had more control, they could create more compelling content which would make for a more exciting and popular place to be. But of course this is just my opinion, humble as it is.

SL is still quite wonderful, I wouldn't still be here otherwise.

What would you have liked to see?

A platform that didn't break your content with nearly every new server or client rollout would have been a great start. Once the platform developers recognized that they introduced a new bug, actually getting around to fixing it would be just lovely. We all know that there are serious issues that have been sitting around for a long time, and all too often it doesn't seem as if fixing such things has much of a priority unless it directly and seriously impacts LL's bottom line.


.

I totally agree with this and have been expressing the same opinion for years to anyone who will listen. Noobs are like sheep. They need to be herded, directed and looked after in their first few days. Once noobs complete a well structured simple orientation they should be sent to an entirely developed continent and kept there for a few days. It should be fun and engaging with amazing builds, amazing landscapes, plenty of interactive elements, plenty of chance for them to socialise and interact with other noobs and plenty of things to make them go “ooh” and “aah” in their first few days. Only once LL has impressed the pants off of the casual noob, only then should they be released into the wild. Let’s acclimatise them to our world first, show them the best we have to offer, rather than booting them out of the door straight away onto a mainland that is comprised of 90% shite and mainly devoid of any other people.

LL has the land. They have hundreds of experienced builders and scripters and whatever else in their customer base. We want the economy to grow and succeed as much as they do. They should pay us in free tier and let US build them a continent that they and we can be proud of, that will amaze and astound newcomers and make them want to log on the next day, and the day after to explore this vast new realm of awesomeness.

Will LL do it?

Will they f*ck!

Likewise, believing that it'll be as open and freeform as SL just because "it is in beta, so they'll change things before launching" also seems like jumping the gun.
My bet is that it'll end up a lot closer to Sony's Home than to SL.

If they did that, nobody would stay. Put yourself in their shoes. You are shown a pretty good environment, then when you get in, it's crap. You would feel deceived and cheated. It's called bait and switch. While I do think LL should give more attention to those first arriving, I think it's better to let people discover SL at their own pace and in their own way.

I think they need to let more people back in to the help islands to, well, help people.

And do you know how to read, Rock?

I said repeatedly, as long as even these few freedoms I mentioned are not there, there is nothing in BM that offers my definition of user freedom for me. Currently THEY ARE NOT there, and being beta or not, I see no reason to trust in the developers to add them yet. If they do - cool, nice, might make it an interesting place after all. But right now, they do not offer as much as I'd want, so stop shouting "It'll all be there!" when you clearly have no idea what they will implement and what not.

You missed the point entirely. SL is not entirely crap. There is allot of crap out there but there are a hell of allot of cool places too, so once the avatars have finished their time on the introduction continent then give them 100 LMs to the top rated spots in the world. Let them venture out into the world with some direction and purpose. Let them visit the regions of all the people who had contributed to the orientation continent for example. If people choose to follow this LM trail to visit the sites then great, if not then fair enough. But give them the option of being introduced to the world in a constucted manner.

It's not deceiving people by putting your best products in the windows in order to draw them into the shop is it? That’s good business sense, poeple have been doing it for hundreds of years, and that is what I am suggesting. Your suggested tactic of "I think it's better to let people discover SL at their own pace and in their own way" is the root cause of the current customer retention problem. A good portion of poeple just discover the worst bits (which is allot of the mainland) and leave. You should get a job at LL, you’ll fit right in with that mentality.

As I thought, you don't know what a beta test is.

Just to clarify, for all those that Novis may have confused, all the 'freedoms' that she complained are missing from BM ARE available.

Novis is not a City developer. City developers can decide what will be allowed in their Cities. Novis has visited just three sample cities, whose purpose was nothing to do with Social Policy, but to do with testing the technical performance of a subset of technical functionality, gather bug reports, fix the bugs, then move on to the next set of functions.

Meanwhile, City developers have been developing their own Cities, complete with non-human avatars, flight, shopping, rules (social policy) etc, etc. Because Novis has not been invited in to see the work of the City Developers she proclaims that it does not exist. Well, that is simply not true.

As for AR's TOS and Community Standards, these have not been published yet. The only restriction we are aware of so far that AR have mentioned on their website is No Gambling.

Rock

This

+100

How would someone who has the Blue Mars client and can see the three test cities but who hasn't seen anything else get to see the custom cities being created by the City developers?

The City developers keep in touch via Skype, irc and a closed section of the BM forum.

I have visited several of the Cities under development (using TeamViewer) and several of the devs have visited mine.

We are waiting for BM to let us know when we can upload our Cities to the BM grid. I am not sure if the 3 sample places used during the beta will remain or not, I doubt it.

There are more than the three test cities to explore, there is a post in the BM forum about how to access these others.

Rock

I disagree. Even something as simple as a very plain 35m straight wall is going to have more polygons than needed, and some of those are utterly useless and wasteful as they are not intended to ever be seen by the client, like the hidden faces between adjacent prims. Even if you use a megaprim for that wall (if you can find or make one that is 35m), it will have more polygons than a simple mesh wall would, which would have only two triangles per side.

The problem is compounded when you create something more complex or organic, since the builder will typically end up slicing, cutting, hollowing, and partially hiding prims to expose just the right shape.

All of those wasted polygons, many of them hidden, and most of Second Life still looks like it was made out of Legos

.