Would an offline sandbox be enough to make you switch?

No, I wouldn't switch. This's based on my experience when I had a private sim. It pretty much was an "offline" sandbox, since I appeared offline to many folks. Still didn't get anything done though.

Honestly speaking, I've made good stuff in SL. I don't think I could switch and start over.... SL is the one time in my life I feel I'm accomplishing something bigger than the usual daily job routines.

Also, like Torley, I like building in public. Even if I have to sit on a cube most of the time. :>

It would have to be completely totally insanely awesome for me to go gay.

The offline building concept not only gives you a private lag-free building area, but it could also do one other important thing: faciliate optimized meshes. I'm not a 3D modelling expert so I just think of everything being drawn in terms of polygons (less polys means less work for the render engine and higher frame rates). AFAIK, the way SL works is that the polys from one prim are never combined with the polys from ajacent prims (which could happen without reducing the visual quality of the build). So, the render engine is doing a lot more work that it needs to.

With offline building, you could complete your work, optimize the mesh (combine polys), and upload more detailed builds than you can now and not put more work on the render engine.

Oh, and you could do other things like prerender lighting effects and what-not. I'm sure there's a bunch of things.

That would be a very attractive feature.

HP

What if...

You had an offline sandbox that...
- Let you use a simple building system AND import meshes from real 3d software.
- Let you test physics, scripting, etc right there, you could even bring a freind or two in.
- Let you test different optimization methods before importing it all the to the main grid.
- Let you make a 'package' for an item that allowed you to set DRM and control the user's ability to make copies and port the items around to different worlds.
- Ran on your local machine and/or rack under Windows or Unix.

Would you switch?

No! I am not going anywhere *hangs on tight and breaks a fingernail in the process* ...

*shrugs*

Idunno either.

I don't build in sandboxes. Whether or not its offline, it wouldn't affect me either way.

Same as before; I would think it was awesome, and I would use it, but I wouldn't stop using SL unless friends moved over too.

Private sandboxes goes along with an idea I've been kicking around I call "parcel basements". I've decided to get it off my chest and posted a proposal in the Feature Suggestions forum. Take a look.

/13/ef/88671/1.html

I'd like my own offline sandbox. But, it would probably cost me extra.


So I don't have to worry about listening to someone's annoying sounds, or witness something I don't want to see, like a donky kong sized dick running around.

I will be quite pleased if you create an offline build system for SL.

Oooh, just think, Jeffrey could make one with a snap to grid feature that would not require moving the cursor perpendicular to the axis you want to move along to get to the ruler. ( One of my pet peeves with the build editor, it took the fun out of building buildings for me when they added the accursed ruler.)

By virtue of being a third party system, I assume the objects would be created in SL by script in some fashion. This would mean the information used to create them would be on your local hard drive, and as many backup locations as you wished.

It would be a great thing to do Jeffrey.

Maybe you could throw in a way to paint textures directly on the prims faces while you are it.

A good point, although if one used both that would mean switching some of one's time and other resources from SL to the imaginary competitor's system.

Agreed, I don't think I could handle two separate projects like that, so it's an all or nothing kind of deal. Which is why as much as the sound of the offline sandbox is neat (especially if you could just upload your work into the game), there's a personal investment thing going on.

Cool ideas though! Would likely be a spiffy thing.

Suzanne:

An offline sandbox would not be enough to make me switch.

A network-enabled (LAN and/or WAN) sandbox, even with limits, would. Because of bandwidth issues, I'm supposing that guests would be limited from 1-5, and the users would assume all bandwidth costs. It'd probably be easier to host a few extra persons in a LAN environment, especially if using a Gigabit or Ethernet network.

This would not only be enough to make me switch, it'd be enough to make me pay for the client all over again, either by buying into the new game or paying for SL a second time, even at a premium videogame price (say, $50)

Edit: I forgot for a moment that SL uses the whole client/server model. I'd even accept the limitation of having to run my off-grid (but on-line) sandbox on a separate computer.

I wouldn't switch but I would certainly use both MMO's. Heck, if the competitor made an offline sandbox I would think Linden Labs would eventually compete and make one for theirs as well as an option or release a feature that would outweight an offline sandbox. All in all it would be back-n-forth competition.

Why not?

I think that might be an excellent idea for a thread, I have avoided saying "well, then, what would it take to make you switch?" because it would derail this thread.

Do you work for a potential competitor?

</conspiracy!>

The question of what would cause a person to switch to a competive system given that the competition is similar in features except for one area is closely related to the question of what SL should work on next to make the most people the happiest.

I want to know what the Linden office scuttlebutt was that made Ben Linden say that Lindens are expecting competition for SL to appear in 2006. (Please don't mention the old, already existing competitors like Active Worlds. I think his statement was intended to refer to something new, not something that has been around for years.) I have been checking the Google news and such since I read that and I don't see hints.

Giving the Lindens clues about what the Lindens need to add to keep from losing business to an imaginary competitor by asking questions in their forums would be a real bad thing for the imaginary competitor to do.

Troll Heaven for me I pretty antisocial as is, this would be icing on the cake.

I love socializing and building with peeps.. but there are times when I wish I could just work and experiment alone without worrying about crashing the sim.. or like right now.. waiting for procrastinating anchors to come in and track so I have a shot at getting outta here on time....

...instead fire up a laptop , sit in my edit bay, and work on some new swoopdie till they came in. No need to worry bout the antenna farm in the back screwing with broadband either.. go home - upload.

Having my own personal workspace like that would ROCK.

Of course convincing Jonquille to let me get a laptop - thats the hard bit

That would be absolutely killer for business meetings. I don't know about switching, but I'd make a strong pitch for getting one in-house to help make people at separate offices feel like they were part of the same team.

For obvious business reasons there's no way we could use the central servers at Linden Labs for this.

This one might be tough if not impossible with a non-centralized architecture such as SL's-- what DRM has ever withstood hacking? I am no expert by any means, but this has been brought up in prior discussions about LL eventually providing server code for a more open grid.

Wouldn't an offline building system have a problem with the need to access textures, which are stored on the Linden's computers?