For a better tomorrow in SL

What if you had to go a month or two without your current inventories, if you had to start out again fresh with only your plots of land and a basic avatar? What would you be willing to endure for a new version of SL?

Reading about some of the forums and seeing a few responses, it seems more like the thing that's holding SL's jump to a better engine is backwards compatability. For instance, one of the things holding back Havok 2 (or as revealed in a recent post, Havok 3 which is essentially Havok 2) is support for things like hinges in our current Havok 1 engine (hinges are somewhat glitchy by the way). But the question is, would you give up all your bling, your houses, your pretty nuke'em all auto-targetting missiles for a month or two if it meant getting most of it back afterwards but in a better system?

Personally, I'd be willing to give up my inventory on the promise that I'd get it back at the end of a few months. Slash and burn, bring a new system out of the ashes. I can always build more stuff in the meanwhile. I'd rather have a cleaner functioning SL in the long run.


Tell the world what you'd be willing to give up to let the programmers function without at least one piece of backwards compatability to worry about.

The only riots I can see coming is when they eventually have to move to a new clothing texture format...

For the elimination of seams from skins and clothing, I think people would manage.

I'd also like to point out that the more we give up, the less the programmers have to worry about supporting and the faster a new system can be built. This also isn't proposing replacing the CURRENT system right away. But if a new, faster, prettier SL came out with our prims and our scripts, could you do without your inventories for a month or two for that while they worked on backwards compatability?

I like the bold tone of that, "better tomorrow"! It has occurred to me that in going forward, breaking things--there's always a risk of that. And it ain't easy. And weighing what happens can often be a complicated process and require many sophisticated decisions.

I'd give up my avatar. My avatar is my gateway on here to personal self-expression and how I'm literally seen inworld. I love avatars in Second Life and they make the communication so personal and unique, instead of being a disembodied voice without a face (meant figuratively), or even a static picture. (Sometimes I peer into our forum avatars and I see our SL avatars.)

Avatars currently can do so much--and there's so much more I dream of them doing! Hugging and colliding instead of passing through, being able to toss each other around as ragdolls (I understand tossing was popular in the early SL), shaking hands (and other obvious factors), and a child of today's Gestures system. I want better foot shadows, expressive face and other motions that aren't so repetitive and are more "naturalistic", as well as... all the ways our clothes can be worn! So many improvements can be made with attachments too, and the glint of flexible ones on the horizons makes me salivate for more.

Avatars have helped me connect so deeply into Second Life. They are central to my experience here, and it's ironic that through this advanced technology, and learning body language, I've become more human.

I think that's saying something. Giving up your avatar for this is quite a statement. And that's something else I hadn't elaborated on, the whole collision deal that would come with a new server engine. Imagine stepping up to the t-ball plate, the big wind up, and then a grand slam swing that sends your friend standing in front of you a good 20 to 30 meters. >D
And let's be blunt, we all know we'd be doing that in the first few months of a new SL. Hell, I'd play the t-ball stand with my head as the ball.

Which reminds me of something else someone mentioned the other day, they wanted ragdoll physics on avatars not just for the walking and the falling and stuff, they wanted giggly boobs too. ^.^;

I would give up everything except my calling cards.

For a better tomorrow I would say :

Build Second Life 2.0 while maintaining SL 1.x to learn where the mistakes are.. bail the water and keep it running till your done - and learn from the mistakes.

Wouldn't suprise me in the slightest if this is whats being done - too many times I've heard of the mythical '2.0 render engine' and posts of 'havoc 2 working in tests' to make me think otherwise.

Heheh and as for wipes - I've said it before - if the entire world were wiped tomorrow I would look around for a minute - light up a smoke and laugh for 2 more...

.... then load up Devo's 'Here to go!' in winamp, roll up my sleeves and start building.

"We built this city" for me, please

"The Show Must Go On" or "I Would Walk 500 Miles" here. ^.^;

I've read elsewhere in a forum or a blog posting that another attempt at updating the Havok engine (this time to 3, because 2 is "no longer supported" would occur or is occuring. The problem though (again, that I read) was that figuring out how to keep everything working in the new system is stopping it from going forward.

I just feel that if we told LL as a community that we can take our vehicle scripts being broken, or our swings needing to be made another way, that we COULD do without our stuff even if it were for a month or two (so long as we could make new stuff) that it wouldn't be a problem and they can go ahead and make something new.


Realistically though anything prim and texture related wouldn't be hard to cross over. Prims are just calculated objects, those would likely be remade in an hour or two with what they currently have in SL. And textures, while they might be changed (for the better! Imagine a little extra padding in your skin/clothing textures to eliminate seams forever), could for the most part be converted. There's also no reason to believe that the scripting system as a whole would malfunction either. Basically anything regarding physics would likely change (the functions responsible for making a vehicle work, be it flyer, hovercraft, or ground pounder), but basic stuff like llSay or llDetectedName(0) would work as they always had (though we can all hope for a better llDialog system and for llSetAlpha() to affect avatars too. >D ). Sound shouldn't be affected at all (I see no faults with the playing of sounds now as it is, aside from it falling off too quickly).

And yes Siggy, I would ask that they keep the current SL running until their new version was at least as stable and functional enough to include prims, some scripts, and textures. Can the new features for this SL, just focus on the new version.

Fatboy Slim - Build It Up - Tear It Down

For a better tomorrow in SL, ultimately, they'd build SL2 but not tell any of you lot about it or have a signup or login mechanism.

If they wiped everything and we had to start again, it would be the death knell for SL/LL in my opinion. Nobody in their right mind would take the platform seriously if they did that. You'd instantly collapse the economy, you'd destroy those who've invested a great deal in projects, you'd take the whole world back to the dark ages. Basically, you'd piss off an awful lot of people. In a big way.

Moving forward whilst keeping things compatible is never easy. But you do it in small steps, for instance what appears will happen with hinges. You don't do it wholesale, otherwise your whole business will go down the pan quicker than a ferret up a drain pipe.

I'd certainly walk away, that's damn sure as mustard.

Well again, the assumption is it's not all gone forever. If tomorrow there was a meeting and Philip Linden said to all the users, "we have a working system that uses Havok 3 and we can switch SL over to it today with a 6 hour down time, but it'll take a month or two of updating our databases before you get your inventories and land placements back and some objects (like vehicles) that currently use Havok 1 physics may not work," would you vote yay or nay for that change? And remember, the SL community has a HUGE amount of data stored online so a month or two is not an unreasonable time frame.

It's the theory of starting new and working back, rather than building on and making it worse but compatable.

If it would be necessary to remove your whole inventory for 2-3 months, then why would it be possible/feasible to give it you back? I don't understand, if you make that kind of decision, it's made, there's no going back. I'd also suspect that LL would not be able to re-engineer your inventories to fit back in, otherwise why don't they just let you keep your inventories and tell you what needs to change? I don't get the thinking here and, no matter how I think LL's management makes some kooky decisions, this would be a stupendously kooky decision!

Oh and I'd vote no. Seriously, they can't mess around like that. If they want people to take SL seriously this would be suicide. Nobody said it would be easy moving forward, whilst remaining compatible, but that's LL's job to manage in the most sensible, non-intrusive way. If they can't do that, then they're in the wrong business and SL will go the way of the Dodo.

The idea of taking inventory away, re-engineering it and giving it back months later is just laughable. It's not a sustainable way to develop the system.

I can see that there might be a delay - they introduce a whole new system, there are functions to convert old objects to the new format, but it's a slow process given the huge number of objects around in SL.

It wouldn't be much of a problem for me - most of what I create is scripts, and you can back those up quite easily. If I'd spent ages creating carefully detailed objects or huge structures or painstakingly gardened areas of land, I'd be extremely pissed off. It would also mean that SL would be pretty content-light for a while, which wouldn't be good for it.

This sort of thing really needs to be gradual. As I said, I wouldn't mind, but I always travel light, I instinctively organise myself that way. Other people don't.

As long as i got the same items back I could handle basic, self made, library only texture clothing for a month.

I would have to get everything back though..and the same way I had it when they took it. I spent way too much on clothes to have them all gone willy nilly, down to putting real money in to buy Lindens to purchase some sets. (like the zootsuit)

Because I've spent real world money, I'd except recompensation for each article missing or nonupdatable. Say 50L per object?

Id be all for a restart, as long as we got the same amount of land we had back, and some sort of compensation for defunct inventory, as like Jonas, ive pumped cash in here to buy toys.

Backwards compatibility is a huge topic, but the software industry in general has a lot more experience with this than it used to. There are different sides to it:

* Do we deliberately break something as we move forward?

* Did we accidentally break something without meaning to?

which boils down to "How do we manage change?".

I think it's pretty well accepted these days that how backwards compatible a platform is, is directly related to its success. If you look at the story of Windows vs MacOS, sure there were a lot of factors, but one is that Microsoft absolutely nailed backwards compatibility whereas Apple did not, despite being able to evolve the platform through massive changes.

One thing to remember is that every time you break backwards compatibility, some people get left behind. There's content in Second Life already that works fine today, but if something subtle changed tomorrow would be broken forever. Maybe the original creator moved on and it's not open source. Maybe nobody with the right skills cares enough about it to fix it. Maybe the world changed in such a way that it cannot be fixed. Each time you leave people behind like that, they're gone for good.

Anyway, I have total confidence in Linden Lab when it comes to this. Look at their response to string comparisons changing subtly in the 1.9 preview - it wasn't even a change in their code but rather a 32/64 bit issue, yet they fixed it anyway. That's totally the right approach in my opinion. They'll be able to introduce all the interesting new technologies without breaking backwards compatibility - for instance though it would be painful, in theory you could run Havok 1 and Havok 3 side by side, using Havok 1 for the internals of old objects that expect certain joint behaviour.

Maybe this approach means things arrive a bit slower. Then so be it. The price of sloppy compatibility has been observed before, and LL shouldn't pay it.

It seems to me that "better tomorrow" that is arrived at by nuking the database is using a different meaning for "better" than many folks use.

While I, as a newbie, wouldn't lose all that much, I can easily see people who've spent since 1.0 (or whatever) building up a vast inventory of crap ( ) would be rather pissed that all of their hard work was nuked with the stroke of a few keys by LL. Sure, the prim system isn't super-difficult, but even "easy" things can take time.

Ultimately, I can't see zapping everything as anything less than a disaster for LL, or at worst the end of SL in its entirety. If nothing else, what user content would there be to draw new players, and how many old ones would come back to a system that sees fit to blow off all their hard work just because it's easier than working out difficulties?

Uhhhhhh

What exactly are you talking about? I am sure I will find out further on down the thread. But I just felt I needed to say this now: What in the world are you talking About????

Torley, I must had left my brain somewhere, could you please translate what this person is talking about, and tell me if this will really happen???

YOur making a little more sense now... Your soloution: REJECTED.

I would reply that the Private Sim Owners would consider what you are asking for, a breach of contract.

If it takes X number of days/weeks to convert the inventories to the Havok 2 format, rather than plunging SL into a table-rasa void for that period of tie why not start converting the datadase of inventories in the background now so that they're ready to roll on the day SL 2.0 is rolled out? Sure, after that period of time inventories will have changed, so LL would need to track the changes and update / convert as necessary. But that would most likely take a lot less time than the first conversion cycle. Once the update / conversion time is down to a few hours then it would be feasible to roll out SL 2.0 provided that all the bugs have been ironed out. BTW 1.9 still has a very long way to go.