No technological advanced since the new CEO joined

Has anyone else noticed that absolutely no technological advanced since the new CEO joined, other than prices being hiked up (again!) and the openspace price hike (you pay the same amount for less prims!), the blog segregating and the new home page there has been no technical advancement of Second Life (like shared Windlight settings that we were supposed to get A YEAR AGO!)

It is 2009 and we should really get better looking avatar meshes, the ability to upload meshes (maybe each mesh can have a poly limit or something, and manage it's LOD the same way Half Life 2 does it with it's dynamic meshes). I could ramble on for hours at what SL should have by now and what would be easy to implement. But SL really does need something to improve its appearances a bit, it looks like a badly constructed 1999 era game.

I know some of you will say "But it's up to the residents to make it look better", and you are right to an extent but we could do with a few things to speed up and fix small bugs in SL (such as the ability to make transparent textures use 1Bit alpha instead of 8Bit)

Are we ever going to see any progress or is this new CEO just interested in making money, i want Philip Linden back he might not have done things the best way but at least he tried to keep SL up to times

Damned if you do damned if you don't. Concurrency couldn't reach 80,000 when the new CEO joined. Stability has improved. These are your basics, you get the basics right and then advance.

Amen to that

I hope they won't add new features this year.

Let them fix everything first
Make SL a lot faster before adding more lag generating feautures.

I would dearly love to see an update to the avatar, but it wouldn't really mean much to me until the process of getting in and staying in-world was far less painful.

If they can get stability and reliability improved, then I'd be happy to see technological advances.

Well Chaos I have had several upgrades to the RC Viewer which as now become the Main Viewer, have you downloaded it?
If you say only dealing with Bugs that's Ok I would prefer that before major things started.
Love
June

The concurrency thing is just smoke and mirrors. And do not think you give up advancements for fixes.

I recall a place known as the TEST GRID. There was a time that this was a great place to launch new advancements and get real-time feedback from the user-base.

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They also changed the website. It may not mean much to us, since we don't use it, but the objective was to attract new residents, which benefits all of us. We don't know if that was successful and we can disagree if it's likely to be, but that counts as work done.

They created Blake Sea, or whatever it's called, so they've moved in the direction of directly providing "stuff to do".

There have been two major policy changes to clean up the mainland, and a policy about traffic and bots is likely.

The shadow code is close to making it into a release candidate, so there's been technical progress, too. There have also been behind-the-scenes architecture improvements for increased capacity and reliability.

The 1.22 viewer seems to be the best new release in a long time.

I am not looking forward to new meshes as that will mean remaking my avatar shape which has had the same face and shape since February 2004. New meshes means totally starting all over again and messing with SL shapes is not an easy task.

I seem to remember that in his very first blog post, M said something about "stability being job #1."

One does have to give him credit - we may have had fewer bells and whistles but SL IS far more stable than it was year ago.

Anyone remember last April when half of the sales transactions failed...for weeks?

ya i remember that..and the year before the search going down and teleports with it..
there is a lot less wrong these days..really for the amount logged in i think it is running better than when i first got here ..
a lot less crashing..tp works 99% of the time for me..i haven't had a bad transaction in world that i can remember in a long time..

there are a lot of improvements..a population always growing hides a lot of the improvements i think..but they are there..

They will not fix everything. Ever. It will never, ever happen.

I would be happy if they had fix/add cycles. Spend a few months just fixing bugs then a month adding a new feature or 3 to grow the platform then back to fixing bugs. Of course, changing the cycles based on how well things are working.

I'm impressed by the improved stability, but also by some not-so-evident technical advances. For the first time in a long time, some new script features have made it into the sim code, including the llDetectedTouch*() family, and http_request events, both of which are pretty big deals; somewhere I heard that llTextBox() is in the works, too.

There's a lot of work underway for improving the rendering pipeline, especially for avatars--including the wondrous new alpha mask for avatars, a major advance over the previous kludges for trying to hide hunks of avatar. And although the progress has been spotty, there have been many steps toward faster texture and sculptmap downloads (which is still where I think SL suffers the most).

I'm generally less impressed by pure "eye candy" advances, so an improved avatar mesh would be pretty far down my personal priority queue, but in that surface appearance category, properly flexible sculpties are coming (in the release after shadows, IIRC).

Yup, hiring their own rapid response group in the colo sites and moving to their own fiber ring, just smoke and mirrors, sure. *snorts*

And yes, since there are only 35-50 developers total, of course you DO give up some advancements for fixes. The Test Grid was purposely obsoleted by LL in favor of the Het Grid (Heterogenous grid), which is what allows them to roll out server updates without taking the whole grid offline. So, more frequent (and smaller) updates.

For major rollouts, LL has still occasionally used the Beta grid.

I think LL took the overwhelming user feedback that stability was the highest priority to heart, and it has taken priority over the bells and whistles. Once the deep queue of new technology set in motion by Phil and Cory ran out (voice, windlight, lalala), however, we in the forums haven't heard much about new major technology, other than the rather massive infrastructure reworks necessary to support grid interoperability.
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My shoes don't get stuck to my ass every time I teleport now. That's an improvement.

IIRC Nicholaz wrote the patch for that (or at least one of them)... thank him (and all the other patch and client makers that add so much)

I'd like to see some technical advancement on having terrain and objects draw fast enough, with proper textures, to give me the impression that I'm in a persistent virtual world, and to have sim crossing work so well I feel like I'm in a continuous space rather than crossing from one zone to another.

I'd also like to have the main menu characters appear undistorted using the current video drivers.

I guess I'm just a wild eyed dreamer.

And that points to one more change for the good. User submitted patches, no matter how critical or good were not accepted for a loooong time. Which is really absurd considering that this was the whole point from the beginning

thank christ for that!

Yes I've notice no new eye candy.

However I have noticed the grid being much more stable, with twice the number of concurrent users, items rezzing faster, less lag, transactions working first time more often. The asset server crashing less.

I'll take this over new features any day!

i totally forgot about that one..that was really a pain and happened more times than it didn't..
with such terrible load times back then..i am so glad that one is taken care of..
it was like everything ..even screen huds stuck to my butt it seemed ..lol

I think it's fair to say that advancements like LLNet don't appear to be sexy, but they're bloody well important.

Stability is more important than the shiny. What is the point of the shiny if you keep crashing every 10 minutes, or lag to death? Now, we do need some shiny but it needs to come on a solid foundation. And the shiny is always balanced by usability. Putting off new shiny for a year helps people's computing power catch up. How many folks here have old computers that can't handle the shiny? Not everyone likes to be on the cutting edge.

true..eye candy and the novelty wears off..performance sticks with you everywhere you go always reminding you..hey i'm here to ..lets not go in there because i may have to crash you if you do..hehehehe

I really want to see bump maps, that would add so much detail thats about it for me, I cant even enable windlight anyway