For a better tomorrow in SL

What on earth are you getting at?

Converting everything in the database, where that can be done programatically, would not take any more time than a major database update does now. You know, sometimes when you log in after an update, it tells you to wait because it's doing inventory management? That's when it's going through your inventory and updating database entries for some new change. I can't conceive of any possible change that could be done without the assistance of the original content creators that would require months of missing inventory.

And if it requires content creators to update and modify scripts, it wouldn't be a month, it'd be a few days for some things, months for others, never for even more.

And, yes, anything that burned the content to the ground would kill SL.

Agreed.

Maybe the document we all 'click to agree' dodges that point, but... in a case so severe, that document may not hold up.


But I may not complain at all - such a transition would likely make me a mint.

I'd be all over starting up again, and many of the legacy competitive businesses would be swept away.

I think we need to bring back this statement for another go-around:

"I am simply blown away after reading this thread in it's entirety." - Nora Belvedere

Well, speaking personally, land is my biggest investment in SL. However, I'd be very annoyed if a development upgrade destroyed my investment in inventory items. And I think the damage such a situation would do SL as a whole would probably be fatal.

However, seeing the amazing management decisions I've witnessed by LL over the last 10 months, I don't think a minor consideration like that would actually deter LL from doing such a thing.

And forget the TOS. It's never been tested, and if it were to be I think LL would be in for a very nasty shock.

I suppose software companies were upset when their DOS programs were outdated by Windows and became useless. Would you suggest that Microsoft never bring forth a new version of Windows because someone whould be inconvienced? If they would of done this Apple would be the monopoly.

If Linden Labs does not bring forth the new technology someone else will. The customers would go to the new company as will you. This has happened before and will happen again. Change does not happen without pain.

I guess the SL 2 as I invision it could be like the preview of 1.9, a wholely seperate grid whereh people's inventories are converted over and bugs are worked out before the major turn over to the main grid.

But again, I don't see anything other than joints/hinges and vehicles suffering at all. Prim creations would be the same, scripts that don't involve physics wouldn't need to be altered (I mean, LSL works fine as it is barring a few functions we want added), textures would still look like they did (perhaps better because of improved rendering).

The possible need to convert your inventories to a new format exists though. Perhaps they can come up with a better way of storing a cube on their side, or a cleaner method of defining a sphere that involves the addition or removal of a number or set of numbers. Perhaps there would be a new permission system that would have to replace what's currently listed for every object in creation. A typical database is not measured on the order of petabytes, but SL is, so any kind of fundamental changes to prim structures or permission systems would involve weeks or months of adjustments for the DB managmentment programs.


They may reinvent hinges and joints at a later date, less glitchy than before. Or maybe we as a player base can come up with another means of making a joint in the meanwhile. And sure it'd take a few days for us to update vehicles to a new scripting system, but their form would not change only their function.

Like what sort of decisions Doc (I'm new here)?

Hmmm, well, you missed the best one - releasing a server/client upgrade (the infamous 1.7) that virtually brought the world to a standstill for nearly a month? Literally, you could stand for 20 minutes waiting for your surroundings to rez... That cost a substantial number of users.

Or how about instituting free basic accounts? That was outstanding. Yes, it increased the numbers - mainly of alts and griefers. The last to the extent that the grid was crashed on several occasions by idiots.

Then there's the unrestricted release of land - but ONLY to those willing and able to afford an entire sim, or more. Result? Well, I don't quite know how, but SL is now awash with land, AND land prices, decent land that is, have rocketed. Something I hadn't expected, though given that the bulk land releases are in the hands of a very few people the existence of a cartel is suspect.

SL is a WORLD, it has an economy. It's also a business. Sadly the people running things show little sign of having a clue...

No thanks. I'd be one of the first to riot if there wasn't backward compatability with old clothing and skin content. I have literally thousands of hours invested in that content. My tier payments depend on the sale of said content. I'm only one of a huge number of people in the same boat.

You chose a poor example for comparison. In fact DOS programs could still be run under Windows. The original Windows was in fact just a terrible graphic front end bolted onto DOS.

Apple are the only computer manufacturer who have carried out major OS changes, first moving their chip architecture form Motorola to PPC, with very little dislocation. And more recently by abandoning their single digit OS for OSX (ten). Again with virtually full backward compatibility.

They took a lot of trouble over this because they KNEW if they abandoned their customers in mid-stream they were dead.
This is why Micro$oft have been so slow in moving Windows into the 21st century - even with their near industry domination they understand the risks of alienating their customers... Something I don't believe will bother LL one bit - until way too late.

I think they should just stop working on this second life, make another second life, from scratch and then when its done, we go there

I understand both sides of it, and I am someone who would be affected by breaking changes to an avatar as well. However, I also do not want to see avatar development, which has languished pretty badly in the past two years, held back solely because adding new joints or a better mesh will break compatability. Perhaps a happy median would be to have more than one avatar mesh that you select for your avatar, so that existing avatars are not broken, but you could choose the new avatar format instead for your avatar, and people would develop content accordingly for the new mesh.

Nothing stays the same forever - you have been well compensated for those thousands of hours spent on that content as well, as we all have. That is not reason enough to hold back development.

I am still new and must of missed version 1.7. Suppose that you would not release something until it was perfect? Linden Labs probally learned a lot from that mistake and the residents are benifiting from it. The decision to release it was a "hard decision".

About free acounts being "mainly of alts and griefers", I have recieved more trouble from landowners and consider many of them "griefers" because of their actions. There is nothing great about a box or a UGLY building in the middle of a large box surrounded by bar lines! My "free" acount lead me to a paying one, true at $24.95 is not a lot to the land barrons.

About the business sense of Linden Labs? I would have to look at their books to tell you. SL is a lot better than one of the compitition! My Alvatar was the UGLY to the bone! The commands and views were awful. I have deleted the software from my computer.

About the land barons? Think they have good timing and spend a lot of time on SL. Like RL timing is everthing! Do not think that Linden Labs is doing anything special for them. These people have skill in buying and selling land.

The current UV mapping could be adapted to a brand new avatar model without breaking current content, and the avatar can be made to support more than one set of UV's, allowing users to select which mapping a given texture should obey. The wealth and depth of content available in SL is one of it's greatest assets. To do anything to cause all of it to become unusable would be one of the dumbest things LL could ever do. That doesn't mean improvements to the avatar can't happen (in fact I hear they're working on it even now). It just means they have to do it carefully and in a way that it doesn't destroy everything we already have.

I don't know about the other things, but if it weren't for the free basic accounts I wouldn't be here. And SL would have grown anyway, charging money has never kept out the bad guys before so I don't see why it would have done this time.

Likewise, without free accounts I wouldn't be here. And I hear I'm being eyed as a new admin for a sim. o.O
Not to mention I'm an instructor at TeaZers U.

Whenever I see the title of this thread, I think of the assassin guy from Serenity, who said those exact same words.

Great minds and all that. >}
I haven't actually seen the movie, nor clips, nor heard anything about it (except "OMFG it's awesome!", so I can't be credited with stealing lines.

Microsoft paid loads of attention to backwards compatibility; I would not be surprised if you could still run VisiCalc under XP if you could find an old copy. But more importantly, since PCs are (mostly) standalone by nature, you can get a system that does what you need it to do and freeze it. Put another way, since a Von Neumann architecture is a universal computing device you create a virtual machine by what you run on it, and if you are satisfied with your virtual machine, you need not change it. Second Life is the antithesis of this; so long as there is one server grid you run the matching client or you don't play. HTML was designed with some "future proofing" in mind whereby unrecognized elements are ignored. You might be able to look at secondlife.com with an ancient browser; it might not be pretty but you would possibly get something.

Second Life has the advantage that the SL 1 inventory is so simplistic that any second system could easily incorporate all present static objects as a proper subset of a new protocol. As others have noted above, there have been times when the asset schema changed and the client would recognize that and hoist a user's inventory up to the new schema. The work on LSL => Mono shows that they are indeed working on a functional replacement which (at first) will keep the language intact while replacing the back-end VM. Similarly, if done smartly, clothing would not need to change even if the avatar construction changed utterly. I have an elegant proof of this using affine transformations which unfortunately is too boring to fit in this box.

Vehicles could in principle be broken utterly by the mythical SL 2, but given how pooly vehicles work now, it couldn't be called much of a loss. So long as the geometry (like any static build) was kept intact, the remaining vehicle builders would probably welcome a system that worked.

The big gorrilla of the problem for the mythical SL 2 are twofold:

1. Eliminate the non-scalable sections of the system architecture - most notably the centralized asset server of doom and destruction.
   
2. Make the client and / or server considerably smarter instead of having the GPU do virtually all the scene generation. I suspect that it is this reliance on the GPU (e.g. sending 12 tries to the GPU for a cube which the camera cannot see more than 6 at any moment) which is the cause of most of the strong system dependencies and general flakiness of the client.

Those instabilities not caused by #1 are likely the result of #2 and are almost purely the result of optimizing coding for time-to-market combined with 3 years of spit-and-chewing-gum patches.

There is every indication that LL is working on the mythical SL 2, or have simply thrown SL 1 into maintenence mode. I hope it is the former, for SL1's day of reckoning fast approacheth.

To improve my Sl experience a revised system would need to render objects fairly rapidly, like it used to, and to not have gray loading textures that persist for far far too long.

Yes, probably. DOS apps run under a DOS emulation in modern versions of Windows.



After seeing Phoenix Lindens blog and his comments I am not really sure the asset server is much of a bottleneck anymore. The sims themselves run squids to cache any assets used within that sim, so bandwidth and server load is spread out across the grid with the central asset servers being used only as a fallback for cache misses. And you'll always need some kind of storage server to run a region of the grid.

Potentially what they'll do in future is allow non-Linden asset servers. This doesn't "eliminate" them but does allow people who wish to improve performance of their sims to buy and run their own asset servers. Perhaps as it's all based on HTTP groups with sufficient funds could even use an edge network like Akamai to serve assets, making the whole thing as optimized as you can get, pretty much.



Huh? Are you actually a video games programmer Introvert? Because I have done some in the past and this statement doesn't make much sense to me. Sending geometry to the card which won't be drawn is entirely normal and sometimes required for correct rendering.

Now, clipping out objects behind a wall for instance is definitely something that should be done, but this is something that makes sense to do at the tree/object/avatar level not the individual triangle level. Also I suspect LL are suffering from the fact that traditional clipping algorithms (BSP trees etc) wouldn't fit very well with the way SL works.

This also rather assumes the GPU is the bottleneck. It's hard to tell without working at LL but I really doubt it is for most people. SL seems to be CPU bottlenecked most of the time.

Anyway, clipping certainly is unrelated to flakiness and strong system dependencies.

I would be totally pissed if this happened and I lost 2 years of hard work.

I would seek compensation.

Um, Ranma, THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN.

I can take a DOS program and run it on Windows XP right now.

I've also taken a program I wrote in 1982, and run it on Mac OS X today. I'm running Photoshop from OS 9 days on OS X right now.

This is called backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility is absolutely critical to the survival of software development platfroms, and whatever else SL is it is, among other things, a software development platform.

that's one way you could implement a conversion to an incompatible new format, yes. You maintain an emulation for the old one, or a compatibility mode. You could also have your av use the old mesh when wearing an old outfit, and hide the old mesh when you get new clothes.