A Look Back, A Look Ahead

Why are so many people requesting a M Linden Bear? I don't get it. Just asking lol.

<<Scratches her head in wonder...

My One year SL experience was great til well you all know what I am going to say..So right now I am just enjoying my little slice of SL and hanging with my friends...I do hope 2009 is a better year for all SL residents. Many wonderful New Years blessings to everyone in RL and SL.

1) Thanks for the opportunity to collectively pool some of our fave sims and activities for the past year. A great concept.

2) To the relentless whining cabal of "business" people who insist on hijacking every blog and every thread with thier litany of complaints.... please, give it a rest.

I might suggest for the upcoming year a blog for all the sorely wronged SLers to hiss and spit about every perceived injustice. Maybe if they stay in here, and not on-line, the monumental chips on thier shoulders might cause a little less lag for those of us who actually enjoy SL.

Then I appreciate that you take the time to come onto the forums while you're on holiday!

M I can personally say that I have seen some very big things and want more big things from LL. Also I heard about this server release to the public can you confirm or deny that ? oh and best place to visit Coral Sea Estates. ^^

ps. Can I haz bear too?

Lies! All lies! We all know the real truth! You're chained down in the sekrit sub-basement on Battery Street, forced to do the FIC's bidding!

The real torture is eating southern food that contains cream cheese and sausage in everything!!!!

Torture? That's a strange concept of torture.

Hi M,
at first thanks for holiday wishes and i send back best wishes to you to lead secondlife out of this crises.

Then i look back to 2008 i see:
- a ripple of bots who swashed over SL
- the last well-known german real life company left SL
- many professional agencies and content designer stopped creating content and goes off
- mass of freebies wasting inworld biz and leading to crash the same system.
Then i take a look to future 2009:
- i dont know which line SL will take
- but i know this will not be my line. I joined SL some years ago with view of good ideas in creating 3D web publications. My intention was the visualisation of geographical informations. I never was interested in an further MMORPG. But SL is now not much more than this.
So i stopped creating content, will shrinking the usage to one or two hours per month, will dropping most of virtual land, reduce the costs to nearly zero and go back to real world content creation/biz.
But i get not angry with lindenlab or secondlife. I collected so many ideas, informations and know how about virtual worlds/web 3D ideas in this years and i think this will be very helpful. I think virtual worlds will be an essential part of future web, but (dont get angry with me) i lost the hope that secondlife will get a main part in this future web.
Secondlife is a good community platform for people who using it as cheap hobby but sustained over last years a very bad image for real world business projects. (this is my own experience, perhaps other people have other impressions)
And so i have to shrink, time is money and i worked too hard in SL last years and want not to be compared with an addicted WOW onlinegamer.
But this is only my own way.

I wish you and your company many luck for 2009 and hope that you dont need this.

Kalderi, thank you for your kind post. I'll get you a bear soon!

Lots of top picks but I'd like to bring your attention to this JIRA "pick"

SL Scalability - not OPENSIM

Although LL's cooperation with the OPEN SIM movement is admirable I hope it is not distracting the company from making SL itself scalable.

OPEN SIM is a project with many contributors and will no doubt provide virtual worlds for thousands of people but they will never be as feature rich and as failsafe (relatively) as SL - as long as its OPEN SOURCE.

I don't want to be messing with some Opensim world that I cannot take my SL stuff to. That I cannot program and my creations are not as secure from copy.

Not until some IBM - SUN - MICROSFT company takes over Opensim and adds the necessary $-provided-functionality will it ever compete with SL.

Well folks at LL here is the situation - whether you like it or not LL is in a Microsoft-like-monopoly of feature-rich virtual world technology and you have to do what Microsoft did in order to give your product to the millions more who will be wanting to inhabit its virtual universe. Nobody liked it, but as long as Microsoft put out the technology that was wanted, - we (and the law) put up with it.

If LL can scale SL it will be doing it's future customers a big favor . Customers that otherwise would be floundering for years in Opensims that would do little more than frustrate the hell out of them. (as we already have gone through with SL's teething)

Nobody liked the way Microsoft put Lotus, Netscape, Wordperfect etc... out of business but at this point in time all SL might do is put the SIMS out of business!
(And maybe one day merge with - MySpace, Facebook ? ).

So lets focus on scaling SL.

How can we ever get 2 billion avatars in one virtual universe as feature laden as SL?
How can we get 40,000 AVs to attend one SL Event? In one chatroom?

EVENTS HANDLING
Have Sim owners declare Events in advance?
Have them pay for extra hardware to be auto-switched to their sim?
Have the server go into EVENT MODE and auto-reduce draw distance, AV-Imposter distance etc..., yet still deliver the "event stadium" to all ?
Deal with impromptu events?

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-3007

M(Linden) I am an estate manager and was wondering would the abilty for us to download the raw files ever be turned back on? Also Happy Holiday's and hope all has went well on your needed break Also what is this about a bear I am hearing about

..... thankyou for the downhill skiing over 3 Linden sims totally devoted to nothing else!
get the chairlift across the frozen river from
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Wengen/28/229/86

pickup your free skis, boots and poles

I think it would honestly take a cray super computer or a massive clustering of servers which in turn could take down half the grid. I am not sure what avail resources the lindens do have for extra machines persay.

You haven't been to the "best" of SL until you've been to the Fantasy Continent and, specifically, the Isle of Wyrms (listed in several SL guides as one of the "top ten" places to visit).

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Limbo/128/224/100

As for 2008, I spent most of it working hard to get you all to do something about the abuse of the mainland. Something which should not have taken more than a couple of weeks, instead of all year (and we STILL don't have the landcutting policy Jack kept "promising" us for the last month and change), to resolve.

I am HOPING that I don't have to spend all of 2009 doing all of your work for you again, and doing extra to convince you to do it. I would like to be able to focus on MY stuff for a change.

Customer Service, Customer Support, and Communication. The three big "Cs" that you all really earnestly have to work on.

Exactly the point I was trying to make on page four of this thread. Again, I think Linden Labs should consider a "franchisee" model for Second Life, where qualified, trained individuals and companies could buy a franchise from Linden Labs, acquire sims and other rights and abilities at a discount from LL, and then provide services and support to paying customers. The grid is becoming too big for a centralized approach to everything, this is not a good direction to take for future growth and customer satisfaction. Linden Labs should focus on creating the basic infrastructure for the 3-D web and then allow independent franchisees to supply land and provide support, IMHO.

First of all Happy New Year to everyone at Linden Labs

My main wishes for 2009:
- stability;
- more comunication between LL and residents (and seeing you in the foruns is actually a good sign of that M) ;
- dinamyc shadows;

I just have to add that I think SL has many amazing places, its still a wonder to me to see how beautifull some places are, from the top of my mind:
Hosoi ichiba,
La reve,
Rustica
Sta Maria,
Templum ex Obscurum,
Tempura
Straylight.

(and I would love a teddy bear too )

Hi

I'm in the release team and was asked to comment on some details of our plans.

We are painfully aware of the slow texture loading, and addressing it has been made a top priority for 2009.

As usual, there seem to be a variety of potential causes, all of which need to be investigated and tested. Some of the potential culprits include:

* viewer side texture caching insufficient?
* maybe rendering just being slow?
* simulator bloat reducing performance of the proxy transmission of the textures?
* UDP transmission failing and textures not being retransmitted?
* grey textures not being recognized as "missing", so no retransmit being requested?
* something different altogether??

At this point, I am just guessing.

Both the rendering pipeline and the texture pipeline have been elevated to "Technical Must Dos" in our planning. Restructuring the texture pipeline will provide a variety of benefits, including relieving the simulator of the proxy duty and allowing for off the shelf server side caching and "edge siting" (moving the resource closer to you, the user).

Remember, we want to have our own meetings rendered well too! - Oh, and if this was easy, ...

Been noticing a lot of that recently as well. I use the RC, but sometimes I can point my camera right at an avatar and they'll never load past gray.. If I turn my camera around them, however, sometimes they will start to load up. Curious.

An you, CG were one of the good adversaries with a snowball. Got some good hits on me, you did.

Mari

Well, I can throw some pointers your way.

It appears to me that the viewer isn't really paying attention to cached textures. It appears that it fetchs the texture from Asset regardless of whether or not the texture is in the local cache. This would also explain the high load on Asset with the new viewers.

You go to a sim filled with trees and wait for them all to load. Then teleport to another sim with the identical trees, and you have to wait for all the textures to load again. This indicates to me a failure of either the cache to tell the program that the texture is present, a failure to load the texture into cache, or a failure of the program to fetch from the cache rather than rush back to asset and get it again (and again, and again...)

No but it would take LL investing a few good sized bags of cash in development resources..

This is one of the mainy things we are investigating.

See also:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8503
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-9509

Maybe you have to find a system so that you can autoscale the size of a texture to the size of a prim.
It is possible to put a 1000x1000 texture on a 0.1x0.1m prim.
Maybe it's better to keep different sizes of the textures on your servers and use the one that is best for the size of the prim by default.


One other thing that can help maybe:
Why does every creator of a script has to compile it to mono ?
Why can't you compile all scripts to mono by default ?


AND ... a message to M:
Can I have a bear to ???
Thanks !!

Because we wish to ensure that the creators are satisfied with the mono performance. There is no way for us to actually test all the millions of scripts out there, and it is very likely that at least one of them would actually rely on some timing quirk or other. By having the creators recompile themselves, we were able to detect many problems before they spread out to the users of the scripts.

Ok, but what with all those designers that aren't updating there products or aren't in SL anymore.

Maybe it's an idea that I can choose to let it run in mono or not.

And if mono is that good as you always said for performance why do you still say that mono can be slower then normal scripts.
Then there is something wrong with mono or a part of it.