Offline Sandbox

Truly the lag often makes building In-world a bummer. If each user were to have a personal client Sim to build and script things, creativity and quality of In-world objects would dramatically increase. This would effectively allow the user to create, test, and perfect creations before putting into their inventory and adding to SL. This alone would help out the Sim performance by eliminating lost physical objects due to nonperfected scripts.

There would be no need to allow others to logon to your "Sandbox" this should relieve fears of losing SL users to someone’s personal mini SL. (although it would be a nice feature to allow one other to logon to help out or to be critical)

I know it's been talked about... Seems like it could only push the evolution of SL forward in a positive way.

This would be nice. Especially if it were possible to transfer inventory from your private server to your online inventory.

The problem, I think, is that it would be a monstrously large download, and require the distribution of Havok to the end-user, which I get the distinct impression is something LL is trying to avoid.

But it would certainly be great for building/scripting uninterrupted, texture-tweaking without having to pay L$100 or more per texture to get it perfect, and as you said, experimenting without POing everyone within 500 meters.

I can think of at least 4 or 5 feature requests that could all be solved with the private mini-sim.

On a side note, for LL's sake, even if it were single-login, it would need some way to verify that the person logging in had an active account.

This would be really nice....but.

I think it might hurt the core of the game that is the Community in Linden land. A land with objects and maybe an av uploading objects here and there (nightmare scenario).
Anyway, I think you understand what i am meaning. It would be nice with an offline sandbox but there is always to sides of a coin.....


or something....

Well the lag will be cleared up in 1.1 or so they say.

Been asking for an offline world ever since I joined in January...

It's gonna be a loooooong time buddy...

I kinda like the idea of offline building and importing.

My 1 cent

CatC

I would really like it... At least then I'd crash my own sim when a script goes wild.

The ability to work on scripts and test them without crashing sims or causing other undesired in-game effects makes this feature request as good as gold.

-J

Really awsome idea, and I even posted on this before.

But, if we were allowed to create offline and upload/import to our online inventory, I can see many exploits/work arounds of the current pay per upload system.

Namely textures and sounds.

I could create a box and add 44 sound files or textures to it offline then upload it as one prime.

Yes they could add charges to objects with inventory items but that would only work for sound files.

If I were to take a cube then hollow it then put a texture on each side then upload it, I would only be charged for one prime.

A fix for that would be to charge for textures on each face that are different. But how could the system differentiate from a default or already uploaded texture?

This would need work to make exploits not so possable.

That would not be a problem. The textures, inventory, etc. in a primitive are not going to get uploaded without being seen by the system. Prims don't actually contain inventory items, or even the textures on their faces. They contain only a list of UUIDs. Nothing is getting into SL without a UUID, and nothing gets a UUID without going through the "billing" process. If you uploaded, say, a cube with six textures, those textures would have to be uploaded first and assigned UUIDs. Then the cube would be uploaded, given its own UUID, and then assigned the six other UUIDs for the textures on each face. So you're paying L$70, not L$10.

SL would then tell the client that the uploaded textures had valid in-world UUIDs, and they would not be re-uploaded if used in further "personal sandbox" projects. I'd imagine a full inventory sync would be the way to go: anytime you add something to your in-world inventory, your personal sandbox gets a copy; anytime you add something to your personal sandbox, it asks you if you're ready to upload it.

I like this idea. It exists in Snow Crash's "metaverse." It makes a lot of sense.

The only drawback I see is that building in-world is interesting for others to watch. If I'm building offline I'm not going to draw traffic, conversations, etc. by my presence. (Then again, I made a huge "QUIET SCRIPTING AREA" sign, and I usually give interlopers the cold shoulder, so it would be nothing to me.)

This idea of an off-line sim for staging and development of in-game objects and scripts is absolutely wonderful, but has some technical limitations that will probably prevent it from coming to pass any time soon.

The bandwidth savings for the main world alone would make it worthwhile. Not to mention the reduction in crashes due to untested and buggy scripts doing nasty things.

I'd LOVE to have my own staging area "construct"...

BUT. What this would mean is basically putting part of the sim software on the end user's machines. Not all of it... They wouldn't need the wavelet streaming code (since it's all local), or the sim-to-sim hand-off code (since there would be only one local sim), or avatar-to-avatar interactions (only one avatar, though scripts will still need Say and IM). And while this might seem good that a private sandbox doesn't need as much, it's MORE work for Linden -- They have to make a whole new product that is a cut-down chunk of server. And test it, and maintain it, etc...

It's doable, I think, and valuable enough to the community AND the server that it will probably be done one day... Just don't hold your breath. (Breath? You think that's AIR you're breathing?)

~ Tiger Crossing
~ (Nonsanity)

You know, I see the reasoning for this, but at the same time I see a problem with it.

I understand that lag can make playing in world a real pain in the butt. On the other hand, if you weren't in the world, what type of social interaction would there be?

You see, the reason I don't think this will ever come to fruition is not because it can't be done, but instead it would kill the community. If you have a SL World on your desktop where you didn't need to interact with others, where you could create anything, anytime, no worries about money, lag, prim usage, or people bothering you, then let's face it, a lot of people would just play offline.

No, I think this won't come to light simply because of the idea that Second Life is a social structure, and allowing anyone to do the functions outside that social structure will most probably kill the game itself.

I have to agree with Bob. What makes Second Life so special is the chance to hang around with and collaborate with so many creative people! If I wanted to go and design all by myself I could always just go into the office and play with CAD and paint programs.

I'm sure I speak for many introverts when I ask: Who cares?

Not all of us like SL for the social interaction.

And that is exactly my point!

If you had an SL World on your desktop you wouldn't play SL at all.

How can a company make money if they give people the environment that people want on a desktop, and then have that person quit and just play on his/her desktop? For that matter, how can the community survive?

Even if they were to introduce sometype of check over the Net on some weird key to say if this person can use the SL Desktop version, that would be cracked in a matter of days, like it was done on Ultima Online.

I just can't see this happening for the reasons mentioned in my earlier post, and for the reasons added here.

Due to a rl change of circumstances, I was suddenly taken from SL about going on two weeks ago. I should be back IW by the end of the week, but believe me, during this time I would have loved to have had an offline building program to work with scripts and whatnot. I would have liked to have had a practice builder, something I could experiment with, but not actually upload to SL.

However, I think in the end, I think I would hate what that would do to the online SL.

People keep saying that SL is not a social game. Well, introverted or extroverted, you've been playing in a social game, simple as that.

You can choose to be antisocial in game, but you are still making that decision within a social construct. Your decision to be antisocial is a social one.

I am by no means condemming the antisocial. I spend almost all of my time at my carnival working on building it. I think this is a very valid playing style choice.

In the time that I have been away from SL, I have been working on things for IW. I've been using a 3d rendering program called Bryce 3d. The experience of building and creating in it has been so completely. . . unsatisfying, now that I have SL to compare it to.

IW, despite the fact that I am building something on my own (I have yet to make the leap to partnered building) I am still adding to the collective world that we are making together.

As much as I would have liked to have had an offworld practice builder, I implore the Lindens not to give this to us for what it would do to the world in game. We already have population issues (not enough) and this would only exacerbate the issue. Perhaps when we get more people in world, this would be more of a feasible idea. Until then, my vote is no.

More people are logging on every day... Soon, what with lag from over-population, you might change your mind..?

~ Tiger Crossing
~ (Nonsanity)

That may well be true

However, as much as it pains me, if lag were to get bad enough, I think I would just choose not to play SL.

I very much want more people in world. . . right now, I don't think the population numbers are enough to steadily support free enterprise.

Although, I haven't been IW for two weeks, so maybe things have drastically changed.

Also, everyone I think should hold out for a bit on making judgments on the lag as hopefully some of the issues will be fixed with the release of 1.1

Here's hopin

This thread may be way to old for anyone to read this but if all your looking for is practice building and youd like a nice powerful free user suported 3d modeler google for Wings3D oh did I mention free and lots of plug-ins? have to agree with the import feature but theres so many 3d formats out there things could get trick... .obj would be great but I think it might interfere because certain programs can do things with .obj that I dont think SL would be capable of interpreting.... just my two cents

This has been brought up before (importing from 3rd party apps, usually .dfx format)

The problem is that What you're talking about is representing objects as triangle meshes. SL doesn't work like that. SL doesn't convert your build to a triangle mesh and stream the mesh to the client, it actually only send the primitive definitions to the client, and the mesh is built client-side by the video controller.

If you could find a 3d modeller that only supported the 6 basic prims (cube, sphere, cylinder, torus, prism, tube) and exported the object definition in an open-source format that could be relatively easily implemented by LL, then we might be able to have uploadable objects.

Bonus if it does texture mapping the same way SL does, and you can upload the prims/textures all at once in such a way that the object is completely textured when uploaded.