Would an offline sandbox be enough to make you switch?

Not what you meant but that's what I worry about. I wouldn't *switch*, but if I had an offline sandbox, I'm afraid I'd get fired from my day job.

Jess (can't run SL at work because of the firewall)

Since the textures are generally full rights permissions they could be saved to the drive but then they have to reupped back to the server when uploading which is a whole 'nother ballpark. There would have to be some kind of texture translation (UUID check type thing) between what's on the asset server and locally. Unless it worked with textures directly from the asset server but then yea...it wouldn't be offline then, wouldn't it? No. If I were to build offline I sure would like the ability to texture. So how could it work out? Well...

The only way I could see this happening as far as making textures work is that when using textures that you already have on the asset server they have to be named locally on your computer by UUID's and then when uploaded they are compared to what you have in your inventory. If it does not exist it will ask if you want to upload it.

EDIT: YOu could go a little more further with this by using a translation file or registry of sort to hold the information as well. The offline program would possibly manage this file.

Originally Posted by Torley Linden
I... like being social in sandboxes.

I used to play with lots of "offline sandbox" programs. But they were lonely and I couldn't show anyone else what I was doing. So I stopped using them.

_____________

Where did you did you get these offline sandboxes

Ah, this was over a decade ago. Early experiments in VRML and similar things. There was a company, Virtus, that made programs like Virtus VR--very rudimentary to what we have today in SL, 3D construction kits, and I made some houses. SADLY I COULDN'T INVITE ANYONE TO COME OVER.

I am also referencing, in some aspect, to "sandbox" games in the general sense like SimCity 2000--which fascinatingly enough, Robin Linden (Harper) worked on! I couldn't have foresee it then that I'd be following her lead at Linden Lab years down the line! Incredible, huh?

Anyhoooo... so that "social sandbox" dream kind of faded out for the better part of 10 years... until I discovered Second Life, which has really been a second childhood for me! It's been marvellous.

BTW, I've merged Rax's Q into the original thread it came from, as it's about the same thing!

Heya Rax, I'm sure Torley will jump in any moment, but she probably wasn't talking about Second Life offline sandboxes. There aren't any prim building Second Life offline sandboxes that I know about, but there is a lot of other non-SL software that could be considered "offline sandboxes", such as Maya, 3DS, or even music production like Reason, Logic, etc.

Torley hasn't been a Linden very long, so anything she "used to" do, wouldn't have included any top secret access to LL goodies.

Am I wrong Torley?

[edit] She beat me to it! Of course!

LOLEX... I know of no SL-specific "offline sandboxes".. Even the internal builds and whatnot are networked!

However, I add: "yet". Future's a big place!

Thanx Satch. =^_^=

Tonight I heard someone ask "Where can I find a sandbox where there isn't a hundred avatars around?".

I think some of the often repeated desire for an offline sandbox isn't really people wanting to be offline, but rather people wanting to be able to build in peace.

Do you think mebbe the Linden sandboxes we currently have are too crowded? Should we have more? Ifso, what additions? (I remember when Sandbox Island was called Island Sandbox and was special because of its isolation.)

aye biuld, experment and fail in peace ... for me its not really other ppl around me is the amount of garbage in the sandboxes, recently i wanted to shrink down a copy of my store for show and tell, i think i went to about 5 public sandboxes, ended up in a sim sandbox, and even in the 1 sim that barley had enugh space for me to plop down a 30m2 biulding for 2 min there was sooo much crap,

you know 15 choppers cars everywhere 3 or 4 quarter sim sized biuldings abandoned prims, i think there was a 10m physical sphere rolling around off the hillsides (cant rember if it was this perticular time or not)

maby if it were made where your stuff vanishes when you do.. untill then i only go to them if i have to

Would be nice to see the Lindens be proactive on this subject. The few upstarts like my own have basically been met with "meh, if you do it, great." Not exactly a way to incent someone to help out.

Despite this, work on my own has been stalled until the semester lets up a bit. Worst case, I'll have to start again after I graduate in May.


On the Blender tool so far, I have all base prim shapes working properly and a stock UI I built and used in a few screenshots here and there (link). Cut, advanced cut, hollow shapes and sizes, level of detail, and so forth work. Skew and twist are on the chopping block when I have time.

But remember, I'm just a resident - so I have no access to backend resources, nor do I have the patience to hook this up with something like OGLE. Textures are a maybe-after-the-first-build-works. The rest will get piped through XML-RPC or, at worst, email. And once it's done, chances are I'm moving on from my SL projects to just do my own thing.


Call me jaded, but I've been here doing the cheerleader routine for a while now. It just doesn't sound like many people up there are listening, so my reaction has been to ultimately go elsewhere. Once I've kept my commitments to folks here, anyway.

Well heres one scenario - I'm at work waiting for cable to be hooked up at home - long weekend , moved house, it sucks.

I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do in SL before the move - but was so freakin busy I couldn't get it done... so now I'm waiting on cox cable with my thumb up my arse while my ideas are whisping away into the ether.. the iron is out of the fire and its cooling, and many cool things are vanishing from my minds eye like fog on the morn.

What I *could* have been doing the other night instead of deliberatly setting sim dudes on fire was work on these things... and tomorrow when the cable man comes all these nifty things could have been uploaded to SL for testing...

...Instead folks will have to wait till my 'give a shit' repairs itself and I'm back in the creative mood again, flip through my 'to do' notebooks and find those entries appealing once more.

I think an offline sandbox - even if its just your basic av and stuff you upload to it that you have full perms on - is a freakin cool idea... I would pay extra for such a thing, and not blink as I whipped out my credit card.

I don't see anything on the horizon that would even make me consider switching. The value in SL right now is the mix of building, economy, and society. A competitor would have to have a better story for each of those. The nature of what the SL client does is impossible to do without enormous CPU and bandwidth and memory consumption. There.com's crippled building capabilities are the reason its client is faster; if it was equivalent to SL, it'd be just as slow. Any new competitor is going to have a hard stern-chase to catch up on economy and society with SL.

Anyway.

To me, sitting on a fat cablemodem pipe, broadband network connectivity is a basic life support function. It's like asking if I want to be able to SL with the power lines down, or with gravity cut off. If my cablemodem is down, SL is the least of my problems.

As for online sandboxes, what's the appeal? Is it just for people without land? Premium's not that expensive, and land is cheap, and then you can build in peace on your own land.

No, what I want is better online building tools:

* CSG and regular polyhedrons at the very least.

* Larger building units than the 10x10x10 block; how can I build a tree that grows to the moon 10m at a time?!?

* Snap-to join connectors that really work. I should be able to click on a side of a prim, select "add connectors X meters apart", and have it be like Lego(tm) bricks. When I'm done snapping things into place, I can remove the connectors.

Lets not forget that with an offline sandbox there may come better tools, more control, etc. The building blocks of prims need to be upgraded badly. A system like Maya as an offline tool that could be directly imported into the game would be phenomenal. Creating something that detailed in game would not exactly be ideal (unless it dropped in to an entirely new interface)

Definitely and for sure, Torley -- I remember when Island Sandbox was a virtual desert. But these days at any given time of the day or night you can't walk 4 steps in any direction without stepping in someone's build. I'd love to see 3 or 4 more of them, to even out the load.

Jess

I remember that too! One time, I rezzed thousands and watermelons and Cid Jacobs came over--it was just us two for a goodly amount of time, 4 AM SLT.

I'm curious tho: aren't there a lot of Resident-run sandboxes to help with this?

The good thing about digital content is that you only need to make it once, and then it sits around gathering dust and making you money while you sleep. Even for coders like myself, every new project is made easier by the fact you accumulate an extensive library of code over time that solves a lot of problems and works around a lot of limitations.
If some new SL clone popped up and, say, Nephilaine wanted to sell stuff in it, all she would need to do would be to adjust her clothes to a slightly different set of avatar meshes.

I guess it all depends on how different the clone is. [Pie in the sky mode]Lets say a new version of SL appears that allows you to design clothes as a separate mesh that are deformable with lighting and shadows that don't bring your system it its knees.[/Pie in the sky mode] Then she might as well design everything from almost from scratch. I wager her base layers might be re-usable in some form. Regardless, you would see her creation of new content for SL slow as she focused on the new world - all depending upon demand of course.

It won't be anything new. It will be the same process that happened with ActiveWorlds/There and SL.

The next competitor to SL will siphon off content creators by offering them to do things that you either can't do in SL or are just two painful to do. And they will bring others by showing them "look what I can do in X".