New SL architecture suggestions

1. have 2 clients, one premium with all the building tools, the second a basic viewer concept with limited building tools and very lightweight. This would fit into the current billing structure nicely.

2.The premium client would be alot fatter and possibly have a 'room' that is hosted on the client machine where 2-3 av's could visit and the owner could even build offline and store inventory.

3.Run a P2P type of network setup to allow for better redundancy for assets, which would be offloaded to the client machine anyway if they have a fat client, making it a smart-fat client.

4.Better communication in game is essential, we need persistent IM inboxes!!! This would limit the in-out world flux of emails and im to mail scripts that must be a major bandwidth drain.

5. Textual content delivery... this could be improved in many different ways from text on a prims ideas to inworld XML or HTML.

thats it for now, If any Linden is reading this you can pay me with stock options when you take these ideas and implement them lol!

-why

There are some stats around that show 90% of av's attempt some sort of building. It is what sets SL apart from other games/environments.

This sounds like privacy. Already been talked to death for years and does not seem to be on the Lindens' radar.

With the open sourcing of the server almost in sight, LL are keeping assets on their own servers. I suspect they will continue to manage residents and their assets even after servers are open sourced.
However, I am sure that the open source community is already preparing fatter clients for better building etc.

Communications do need to vastly improve! But I think httpRequest is the way of the future.

More httpRequest?

Now this is the tricky part. You need to make your proposal look interesting enough for a Linden dev to be attracted to it so he or she will implement it.

Hmmm. Only difference would be the land management tools. But maybe several client versions which are NOT tied to the billing plan. Who would need building tools if (s)he only buys things?



Offline build would be fine and well, but when it comes to passing essential data belonging to others, that should remain in LL's hand. Guess what happens when you build a scripted object and it gets distributed through the P2P network, but a hacked client adds a backdoor script to it? I think the overhead to detemine the genuine from the manipulated version of your object (or, worse, your account balance) wouldn't be worth it.



'IM' stands for 'Instant Message', a way to communicate between two avatars which are online. Having IMs stored over time may be an added bonus. There are other ways to deal with offline communication - if you don't want IM-to-EMail and keep it strictly inworld, a box where one can drop notecards come to my mind.



And why not even a more generalized render-to-primface feature which allows drawing on a prim's side? Text, graphs and charts come to my mind.

This hits the same reason why programmable notecards aren't an option: modify a notecard and it becomes a new asset. Modify a prim with a texture, likewise, I'm guessing.

And a drawing requires some kind of way of recording every pixel, either one-at-a-time, or via curves, which STILL would require a huge increase in communication with the server.

Drawing via particles is doable right now, but a bit kludgey in my experience. It would probably be easier to create a "drawing mode" for the particle system than to create genuinely draw-enabled surfaces.

I guess the 1st point on limiting build tools will severely put a barrier towards content creation in SL, considering that one of LL aims IS to actually encourage people to build stuff in world, let be free or paid accounts.

But if you consider that in a business point of view in regards to barrier to entry, that will prove mostly beneficial to "premium" content creators, not to mention potential monopolies given a "caste" system.

Thanks for your comments, look ahead folks, I'm not talking about SL version 1.18 here!!

It would benefit everyone to allow the mass of potential mainstream users to view and interact with SL with a thinner client. 90% LOL 'attempt' some building you said it!! And when they realize it's not for them do they clean up thier prim garbage? me thinks not. And when they wander around countless junky builds bumping into blocky rotating signs and constantly bombarded by shouting lucky chairs do you think they come back? me thinks no again. A caveat, without some sort of thin client, regardless if its tied into the billing stucture or not, SL will never be able to break into the emerging mobile market.

Does your internet browser allow you to code pages for the web? Do you want it to? or do you want a more specialized tool? (if you're still using netscape communicator 5 you can stop reading now!!) Do you surf web pages with Visual Studio?

I think many days I'm in Sl i would trade the ability to build for a better performing client. Other days I need to build, I would like the choice as a premium member.

I don't think there is a worry of it becoming a caste system . it is already in case you haven't noticed. Besides it's reality... some folks get it others don't. How would it be different than any other technology provider today?

As for inventory assets, you must not have lost anything of value yet without the ability to back it up, and why do I have to have all of my assets inworld if I'm not using them? This seems like a serious resource hog to me. How many million copies of that black and tan freebie rug with pose balls floating around and lingering in people's inventories? My p2p idea was about redundancy , in the same way a RAID disk system protects data. I wouldn't expect that a whole 'object' would exist only on one client, rather it would be distributed over many clients with redundancy. When you are halfway downloading a torrent for example, can you do anything with it? would you even know what is was without the .torrent file itself?

I agree assest management should remain centralized, as should logins and transactions of any kind but I think LL should somehow leverage all the wasted computer cycles from everyone's high powered machines sitting idle while they are camping...


I have rethought the stock options, I will take cash hehe...

-why

Render-to-texture is a common feature of every graphics equipment nowadays, so that is the least of the problems. And like particles the rendering itself can be done client-side... the 'texture' stored on the asset server or in the sim would actually be the rendering program.

In case it is a script, the script may be executed server-side, emitting the actual rendering information (like draw circle here, put text there, put image here...) to the client(s), making it their job to actually render the texture.

The current "caste" system is one of skill. The caste system you are suggesting is one based on money, those who have it have better tools, those that don't, well, they don't get tools--or at least not very good ones.

This is akin to people with money being able to have DreamWeaver (it's a $300 program, don'tchaknow) and those without having......Notepad.

LL is trying to give EVERY user the same capabilities and freedomes as EVERY OTHER user, regardless of RL standing or skill.

What would be better is that on sign-up you get the generic "this is everything" client. If you don't want scripting or building or whatnot, there are other slimmer clients (though how much slimmer they actually are, I don't know--most of SL is streamed, it's why the client is as smal as WoW players WISH their patches were) available on the website.

It's been said before and I'll say it again:
32 MB is a tiny puny insignificant barely noticable chunk of data these days! It takes a mere 60 seconds to download! You want it SMALLER? Go play WoW their patches have hit GIGABYTES (possibly not actually true, I don't play. But I did ask one if WoW ever had patches as small as 32 MB and I got the answer, "not in a long long time."

And as a side note to those who think our post-update logins take forever ("I want that hour of my second life back!", go play WoW. It takes up to 3 hours after an update to log in, if you're lucky.

Oh please. There isn't one single resident on the entire grid who can't afford $10/month. Noone is going to die of starvation because they had to spend money on premium and as a result couldn't afford to buy food .

Someone who's building on a sandbox is going to have a much worse experience with crashes and the accompanying mini-rollbacks, griefing, and being interrupted than someone who can afford to buy an entire sim to use as a private sandbox. That's not a skill issue, that's a money issue and there are plenty more where money matters more than skill (classifieds being one).

No longer true since sculpties hit the grid.

It's not about afordability.
There are people who fall into...
1) Don't have a MEANS to pay (i.e. no CC, no PayPal); could be due to world location
2) Don't want to give out personal information to a tiny company in California
c) Don't want to give out personal information to anyone anywhere on the internet
d) Don't think it's worth $10/month. I certainly don't think so (hell, I make $120 a month FROM second life)



Animations?
Oh right, freely available software.

But wait!

There's freely available software that makes sculpies too.

Oops.

Take a look at the geographic spread. There is no such thing as a country with a high percentage of residents who would have any problems getting a (prepaid) credit card, or a PayPal account if they wanted to.

That's a choice, not an reason. If you don't want to give out personal information on the internet, you can't whine that you can't shop or sell anything on Amazon.

Which is the real reason and why it's a rather hypocritical point. You don't mind leeching SL for what it's worth, but when it comes to supporting the platform you suddenly balk.

Just think what you'd say to a "hey, I don't want to pay for your stuff so why don't just give it to me for free?" customer.

Too bad you didn't feel that way when you were making your point:
There's no shortage of free software to design websites either, but for some reason it didn't matter then. Oops.