what has ll gotten right?

She doesn't get it Weedy, she just wants to be offended.

Your font and color make Starax brain hurt.

Ok, it's very simple. There's a lot of people (and companies) doing professional work in SL. They do not need to know or care about the social world aspect, they just want to get their project done, and there's no viable alternative to SL out there. What you do for fun in SL, I've done professionally for the past 5 years. Multimedia projects, web development, educational applications, they share many similarities with what I do in SL, except SL is much much cheaper and easier to use.
There are LOTS of arbitrary limitations that LL put in place to prevent griefing.
For instance, a script cannot rez an object further than 10 meters from the originating prim. All LL would have to do would be to go into a file and change that 10 to 100 or 1000. We'll pay for it! Let us unleash the full potential of this platform!
When you absolutely have to create an object further away than that, you have to move the scripted object to within 10m of the destination, which is terribly slow.
All these limitations are unnecessary for professional projects, and LL would have everything to gain from having better support for these.
Hobbyist content development is fine. You can keep your virtual world and continue to have fun and make linden bucks off your creations. I just want to show my boss SL and have him not laugh in my face.
Every single project I have done, I ran into these silly restrictions, and had to use silly workarounds that make my system slower and more complicated. Sometimes I even have to tell people that really obvious things are impossible to do. My clients don't understand why my hands are tied. It makes me look unprofessional.
The inworld economy is irrelevant to me, because it's tiny. There's already an economy in the real world, and it moves a LOT more money than this virtual one. It's stupid easy to get RL contracts to do SL projects when you've already spent five years of your life getting similar contracts for other platforms.
Someone told me the other day that some corporation or another had approached LL, wanting to make a game that would require "initial" capacity for 100,000 people. This single project would bring as much land money to LL as the whole world thingy they have going now.
Heck, if I was running LL, I would be getting into the content business, finding projects for and hiring SL people.
Basically, I just want the ability to develop unfetteredly, in an environment that I can control, where I get to choose the tradeoffs, with none of these legacy social restrictions built for a social environment that I haven't even seen in quite some time.

Croquet has none of the restrictions of SL. At the moment it doesn't have much of a GUI, and stuff that involves connecting to other computers don't really work that well. However I think it's likely that it will good enough for the kind of projects you are doing before the end of this year, if not, then at least next year .

Thank you for explaining it to me, Eggy. I think I understand (most of) what you're saying.

But one question - you said there is no viable alternative for your clients out there, but you also said that "Multimedia projects, web development, educational applications, they share many similarities with what I do in SL, except SL is much much cheaper and easier to use."

It would probably be easier for me to understand if I had any idea what your projects were, but seems to me that if there ARE all these other places, they are aren't viable alternatives mainly insofar as they aren't as cheap or as easy to use. Or maybe I'm mixed up on that part; there really AREN'T any other means of accomplishing your clients ends except SL, cheap or not.

And from there, it seems to me that it is cheap precisely because of all the hobbiest people who have bought premiums and are paying tier, and they need to have the anti-griefing stuff and whatnot.

So why don't LL just make a whole separate system for those like you and your clients? Unless the clients themselves depend on having an audience of all the hobbiests and players, in which case we are back to square one, with the need for anti-griefing stuff and this and that.

So what happened to that 100k people game project?

coco

Coco, SL has physics, scripting, a graphics engine and the tools to build awesome graphics, animated avatars and builtin support for multiple users connecting to whatever I make from anywhere in the world. It's essentially a wet dream, it's a brilliant idea, but like most great inventions it came about as an accident - LL was actually a hardware company making VR gloves, and they hacked together a virtual world to demonstrate their glove thingy.
Most of what's out there does not have all of these features. For instance, AW is also a virtual world that doesn't have physics or scripting, or the infinitely customizable avatars that we have, or support for Poser animations.
I used to work with Bryce, which also has "prims", and can import Poser models, but it's a raytracer (basically - it takes 6 minutes to make an image but it's very realistic), the support for movie-making was rather crude, there was no physics or scripting...
SL is like Macromedia Flash, in that anyone can get into it and quickly build something cool. As I'm sure you're aware, the invention of Flash resulted in an explosion of creativity and interactivity for the web. It's everywhere these days, and it rocks. There's people making real TV cartoons in Flash! Heck, there's people making real TV shows in SL - namely me.
About a year ago I worked with Bedazzle on a project that was supposedly a pilot for a reality show but I guess the guy couldn't sell it to any network.
A challenge I encountered there is that you cannot have an object attach itself to another avatar, only to the owner. So a scene that involved tossing an object from one player to another had to involve one of those crazy workarounds SL is so infamous for.
Another project I did was the reconstruction of an ancient greek amphitheatre. Since you can't build large enough cylinders, I had to get Cadroe Murphy to help me mod his ShapeMaker. Great guy
You also have very little control over the land - you are limited to "raise" and "lower", so you can't simply make, say, a 30º slope - I had to carefully adjust the land to match the slope of the theater, which went on for days. Well, these days you could maybe do it with some external tool and somehow convert it to a .raw file that SL can read, but gee, that's a little longwinded isn't it.


That's what I was saying. If you're afraid I'll grief the main grid, then please let me build on another one. Keep my options open. If I can't build objects larger than 10m because they would mess with the physics engine, then let me build them phantom - still good for movies.
Coco - normally, you can visit websites but you cannot change them in any way, and the fact that I have full control over my website does not mean I have control over yours.
SL is flawed in that LL did not build any form of security into it. So anyone who has full control over a server can take over the whole grid, create money, etc. They don't want to work on this because it's not a "cool" feature that most users would "see" and appreciate.
My argument is that SL would "explode" like Macromedia Flash did, if and when it could support the level of openness and control that a RL development team expects.
Also, it's my impression that LL is already falling behind schedule in supporting professional work, as it seems that everyone and their mother is bringing RL projects into SL and charging RL money for it. Flipper, Hiro, Cory Edo, Satchmo Prototype, lots of others.


Dunno. I heard about it from someone who was supposed to be hired but didn't make it (i think). I don't remember the details, but I suppose I could go ask him about it. Maybe these rumors of Bungie and/or Valve being in SL have something to do with that? I'm not FIC, Coco. I'm too busy working to chat with lindens or FICsters and the ones that matter hate my guts anyway

Well, not everyone loves eggs!

If I could have my own stuff, I would have things like that, too. I'd have roofs that you could CUT INTO. Like, cut a piece off of, so it didn't go into the attic adjacent or the room below.

I'd also allow pieces bigger than 10m. And a lot of other little things. A lot of times I am working on something that is so tedious and hard to do, and find myself wishing I had a computer to help me. Thinking, "This should be computerized!"

The first time I thought that, I made myself laugh - here I am, using this computer program to build things, and thinking, "You'd think they'd make a computer program or something to make this easier." The irony of it always kills me.

On the other hand, a lot of the things I used to wish the old-fashioned word processors would do did come about with computers. So maybe there's hope!

coco

http://www.compfused.com/directlink/671/