Paradigm shifting changes to SL, what are they?

So you'd be out in a new york minute?

Right.. make this about me, very mature, very restrained.

Quite aside from technical features, SL changes its own paradigms. Or at least, the residents do. Ignoring changes caused by additions, changes or subtractions of features, doesn't the way you (me, everyone) view SL change a lot over time?

New groups and fads, ebb and flow between lobbying factions, the way someone like Torley can come along and spend five minutes chatting with you and change your whole perspective on SL, and the other people in it.

I know. It seems a bit like a tired phrase: "You are the change."

Even in the last two months, the whole social dynamic has shifted. Well, from where I stand, it has. Today's SL is not yesterday's SL. It changes and shifts and morphs very quickly. Some aspects slower, and some aspects faster. And the funky thing about paradigm shifts in a place like SL is that they tend to catch you unawares. You hardly notice that your perceptions have changed until afterwards.

I look forward to seeing what tomorrow's SL will look like.

Oh, I agree completely. However, this thread is about what SL can do

Alter the way processing tasks are divided up so as to eliminate the connection between a particular machine and a particular virtual region.

Sea Travel between Island Sims, that way we can have Pirates! talking like them for one day a year aint enough!!!!

It would be a very lonely, empty grid.

I think almost everyone has at one time or another not acted like a mature, restrained adult.

N) Make people frozen (as with the Freeze command Lindens -and estate owners?- can use) in the "dead" pose for 10 seconds (or more... ideally this could be configurable by the land owner and bypassable by TPing out) instead of being TPed home when killed on unsafe land.

Would change combat in SL forever.

Most of these sound like they would require a hardware update to our computers. Many of us do not have the money to do this.

Actually none of what Blaze suggested, with perhaps the exception of text to voice, would have an impact on the hardware requirement side. If anything, better use of caching and a more scaleable graphics engine would help to ensure better performance on the hardware that you do have, not worse. The problem right now with the SL graphics engine is that it sucks across the board. It is not much better on high end hardware than it is on low end because it doesn't scale well or take advantage of many of the features in recent video cards.

The upcoming rendering engine is supposed to change that. Regardless, future updates to the client will always be a trade off between progress and backward compatability. Ultimately, an upgrade will become necessary at some future point, but much of the work they are doing will help to make it run better across the entire spectrum of hardware, from low end to high end, without upgrading.

This is an interesting one. In RL we technically have an infinate draw distance (we can see some stars that are pretty far away...) but in computer terms, an infinate draw distance would take an infinate amount of time to render each frame regardless of graphics card power.

Thus frame rate would be zero

Yeah, that would be cool.

(It's still more accurately prototype oriented!)