What have I missed?

I've been away from SL for about 3 years. I've been trying to catch up on what has happened while I was away, but it is becoming a rather huge task. So I thought I'd just ask a few questions to see if anyone can give me a semi-brief summation. I was never an avid socialite, so I probably didn't follow those type of things in the first place. I'm more looking at how building & scripting changed and the various trends/fads in that.

So a couple specific questions:
How has building changed?
I was very interested to see we now have sculpt prims.

How has scripting changed?
To give you an idea, llOwnerSay and video was the new thing when I left.

What popular scripted attachments are people running around with these days? Did HUDs become popular?

Has vehicle design changed a lot?
I imagine that sculpt prims must have had some impact. The big fun thing back in the day was huge airships.

Have new continents been added?
The last linden land increase I remember was that big circle of land attached by a thread of sims to the mainland.

Do people use voicechat?

Do people still do big building projects in the Cordova area sandbox and the Island sandbox? Or are there better places people use?

I'll find out much of this anyway as I re-explore SL again, but being stuck at work I wanted any input I can get. Also I had a very nice chat with someone that really helped me out in reconnecting to some of the people I once knew. Thanks!

Wow, Siro. Welcome back! I've only been around about five months, so I can't give you all the changes from the last three years. But a couple of things:

Sculpties are huge, but not everyone knows how to make them yet. See the thread here, "Sculpties -- is there nothing they can't do?" Flexiprims are also a big addition, and you'll see them in everything from flags to ladies' hair.

HUDs are wildly popular. I regularly wear my AO, my auto-emote gadget, and my Mystitool. I also have HUDs for offense/defense, shoe control, hair color change, foreign language translation, smoking, swimming, sex attachments, an assortment of erotic sound clips, and one that I can load with a long notecard for giving a classroom lecture. Seems like there's a HUD for everything, and we all need 32" monitors to have any room to peer at the world through the HUD Clutter.

Huge airships are still around. The big thing in vehicles seems to be realistic sailing. There's a boat, and a script, out there called the Flying Tako, which is the basis for most of SL's sailboats.

There are now five continents, I think. The latest was just opened up a couple of months back.

Some people use Voice regularly, but text is still the choice of the vast majority.

Most sandboxes are hives of griefer activity. The really big builds get done on private land.

On the social scene, child avatars are still with us (thank goodness) but sexual ageplay using child avatars has been banned (again, thank goodness). Gambling has been banned. While there are no more casinos, I did run across a thing that sorta kinda looked like one, drew players like one, and lagged like one. Huh, go figure. Two big SL "financial institutions", Ginko and the World Stock Exchange, folded suddenly this summer, leaving a lot of avatars holding the sack. European residents are now being charged Value Added Tax (VAT).

Landbots cruise the grid, looking to snap up bargains. Copybots do the same, looking to either catalog your "for sale" items (good, mostly), or swipe your intellectual property (bad).

Upcoming improvements that are promised Real Soon Now are Havok 4 physics and Windlight realistic skies and water.

Everyone still bitches at Linden Lab, and the End Of The World As We Know It is predicted at least weekly.

In short, it's business as usual.

Having read a bit more, I have yet more questions:

Gambling ban?? Cool, when did that happen?

Age verification? Has this happened yet or are people just talking about it? Will my account be affected?

Gambling got banned over the summer, after the FBI dropped in and looked around, and after it became clear that Paypal and credit-card companies woould have to stop doing business with LL because of the federal law prohibiting online gambling.

Age verification is still being talked about, and yes, sooner or later, yur account and everyone else's will probably be affected.

Unless you have anyone over 18 (Assuming underageness, this is a general statement, not aimed at anyone) who can say they are you.. sure, illegal, but.... probably would work

Thank you very much for answering. Even info from newer people is helpful at this point. I noticed the flexiprims and they're interesting. I also noticed my clothing waves around in the wind now as I never wore anything skin-tight. The sculpties really interest me though as I see them as another potential way around prim limits for detail on vehicles.



I've never actually used a HUD, so I guess I'll have to go out and find a freebie one. I actually use a 47" HDTV as a monitor, so screen real estate is no longer an issue. Part of the reason I was away so long was finding a good steady job so I can buy all the fun toys I've ever wanted. I used to use voice commands for activating some of my scripts, but it sounds like a HUD would be great for that.



Sweet, I'll have to check that out. It is somewhat disappointing about the griefers though. The public sandboxes used to be a great place to do large projects. I have this 100m catapult that I originally built in Sandbox Cordova. But it's not really placeable anywhere else as it takes up a decent portion of a sim and wouldn't make much sense on an island.



Good news about the child avatar thing. I kind of figured that the various $L exchanges would divebomb when LL implemented it into the client. The gambling thing is something I never expected them to ban, but am quite pleased they did. It was just way too easy to take people's money on those things. It was like selling alcohol to alcoholics.



Landbots I know about, but what the heck is a copybot? How can that even work? Is there a thread about it or something?



I'd be mightily pleased and impressed if they do implement Havok 4. I left 3 years ago because I had gotten tired of the physics (or lack thereof).



Well everyone always bitched at LL. So nothing changed there. It's the same in every massively multiperson environment. There's always going to be something to complain about. However, the more silly the complaint (like about UI colors or whatever), the better off the company.

Okay good to know. I somewhat doubt I'll bother with verification though. I never did have a lot of use for the sex/fetish culture in SL beyond selling them stuff. It would have been really interesting to hear the conversation between the FBI and the Lindens lol.

One correction, Siro...

The financial institutions that tanked were in-world investment companies run by residents. They offered insanely high rates of return, and absolutely no guarantees whatsoever.

There are still third party $L exchanges on the web. The best ones use the LL risk criteria, such as SL Exchange, http://www.slexchange.com

Mmmm... 3 years? That was pre- flexis, right?

Another big thing: SL has grown about 10 fold in the past 12 months (in the number of accounts). Lag is expected in most places. Aside from the ban of gambling, camping seems to have diminished in the past year also (yay!!!).

Voice is used extensively by some people, moderately by others, and not at all by yet another portion of the population.

I understand that the demographics have changed too. We have a lot more Europeens now, and more and more large RL businesses have entered SL. Also, a number of universities have appeared in the past months.

Welcome back to SL !

Ooooh okay. I'm surprised someone even tried it. I am also surprised that the exchanges on the web survived! That was somewhat unexpected. It is somewhat nice to see the exchange rate around about the same as when I left.

Err, did you mean Europeans? Or is Europeen some freaky subgroup?

eh--nothing--except we finally figured out how to get rid of those pesky europeans (as mentioned above).

Welcome back!



Not only "sculpties," but also flexible prims and local lighting, both of which have also made a difference. The latter replaces the "hardware lighting" of years past. LL has aos tried to improve the aloha sorting bug, with limited success.



The latest I know of is llregionsay, which allows a region wide object message. I still have to play with it. Some actions were depreciated, mostly particle stuff.



HUDs have become popular. As discussed in another thread, the Mystitool HUD by Mustical Cookie is a biggie. So is Babbler, in my circles. HRDs are also often used with Animation Overriders (AOs)



I think a lot is still going oto come along with this. You'll find just about anything out there, though.



There have been four added since Hetereocera Atoll (which you mentioned). One is still being built. Also, private estates have really taken off, too, leading to a lot of "subcontinents" akin to what Anshe Chung was doing back then.



Nto to any great extent, though it does have its fans.



I suspect many use their own skyboxes nowadays, as the sandboxes have been routinely overrun by griefers. There are some who still do use them, though, and you'll often see some neat stuff in 'em



In late May, I believe, after a coupel months of "it's okay, but you can't advertise it." Sort of the same thign that happened with sexual ageplay, which was banned a bit before the casinos, due in large part to some unwanted publicity ojn German Television.



Seems to be a "coming soon." It's opt in, and should not otherwise affect you at this time.

Other stuff...

The support system has changed, and is mostly on the SL website now; also, LL staff is only usually found during "office hours" in Linden Village..

Feature voting is out, replaced with a bug and issue reporting JIRA system (http://jira.secondlife.com)

You can no longer "rate" a person.

Dwell is gone.

Prims may be rezzed for free, but parcels have a limit as to how many they can support.

The group limit has been raised to 25

Welcome Areas are a lot less populated, thanks to griefers as well as a move towards a more "decentralized" orientation.

Infohubs are no longer in widespread use, replaced by point to point teleporting

A lot of the old sims are vastly different from what you may recall, and may new ones have sprung up. There's some incredible places out there.

Corporations came into the world in a big way in late 2006/early 2007, and have also largely faded out (or become less of a big deal as it was).

SL has gone from thousands of members to millions, with a concurrency of over 50k on a regular basis.

Prim hair and custom skins have become common place, even expected.

Upcoming projects include Dazzle (a UI upgrade), Windlight (graphical improvements to sky and sea), improved search, and Havok4 (better Physics).

Mari
(who clearly missed much on this list)

Must...resist...straight line...

Well, rating a person had become fairly irrelevant by the time I left anyway. Dwell was on the way out with the changes they were making to the interface. Point to point teleporting is something I read about... I guess that means advertising is mostly done through the interface now? As to the prims rezzing for free... I'm not THAT old. I mean, the oldbies used to wax nostalgic about it, but not anything I ever experienced. Good to know about Jira.

What was the deal with corporations?
And how does the minimization of importance of infohubs affect one trying to advertise their goods at a rental mall?

I won me some $L in an oldbie show and tell, so I was thinking of selling some of my creations again after I update them to the scripting changes.

resistance is futile! "I understand that the demographics have changed too. We have a lot more Europeens now!"

BTW there are a fair number of "private" sandboxes you can get entry to that are fairly well protected and mostly griefer-free.

You should try to get in touch with one Red Rogers, who I ran across the other day and who is also newly returned after a similar, maybe even longer, absence. I hope you guys are a trend. : )

I wasn't sure when prim costs changed, an was too busy to look it up on the History Wiki. There's still advertising along roads an stuff (an also on what are called "Ad Farms" - 16m plots with nothign but ads), but most is classifieds an the like.



Well, once SL started to prove it had some numbers, larger companies started to explore presences inworld. An American Apparel store came up, NBC did a tree lighting in their sims, etc. There was a lot of initial hype, and some backlash against them from residents. Somed have lasted, many have fallen by the wayside (which also has led some in the press to claim that SL is the problem, not a company's lackluster build), and some are just now entering (CNN). It's a lot like the early (well, 1996 or so) Web.



It affects it a lot, I suspect. I haven't really seen a lot of infohub advertising since I was a newbie myself (02/2006).



Cool!

Mari

Also, there are now alternate viewers thanks to LL's open sourcing of the viewer code. This is both good and bad. The most popular is probably Nicholaz Beresford's (nicholazberesford.blogspot.com), which helps some people with game stability. The other result are the bots.

By viewer do you mean Client? So I don't need to use the SL client to use SL?

The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.

Correct. And there are some light clients out there for text chat/IM only, no visuals... like SLeek (delta.slinked.net).

I can't. I've been trying for a good 30 seconds.

soooooo.

If you're Russian when you go into the outhouse and Finnish when you come out, what are you when you're inside?

EUROPEE'N

BAHHHAHAHAAAAAAA. /me falls to the ground clutching his sides and howling with laughter.

Get it? Huh? get it? get it?








Well, they can't all be home runs.

Forget the Europeans. Trout, where's my slut rating?

ahhh. Teeny. I see you're a Seattle Mariners fan as well.

You know the RL SL bling that they hand out to LL employees? It's a little known fact that they engrave the corporate motto of LL on each one. If you flip it over it reads "Start slow, then taper off." True story.

/me races off to check for Cristalle's pictures. Oh no! I must have missed one!!

I'll do it tonight. I'm sorry. The last week has been messy in RL.