The price of a pretty sky

Do you really want a bunch of painters and movers trying to hook up the electricity and paving roads?

No, I want more electricians and pavers hired; fewer painters.

coco

More electricians and more pavers would just be standing around wasting taxpayer money, because the city engineers are still working on redesigning the electrical and transportation infrastructures. 50 new pavers and electricians in Linden Lab's equivelant department won't make it move an inch further. Meanwhile, paint is chipping off all the buildings, and the playground equipment is outdated. The infrastructure will catch up.

Onward.

That's not entirely true. I've seen some rather dramatic sunsets. Such as



Not photorealistic, no. But not many other things are. And do they really need to be? If you want to see a real sky open the window and have a look outside



I guess this is where we need to agree to disagree. I just don't find a photorealistic sky that important. Gimmie more options for terraforming and i'll be happier.

a big "yeah, that" to that

I actually have hope that SL is going to be the best thing going and way ahead of the pack, once they get through the growing pains they're having right now.

and that's a good way to describe the current situation... growing pains. They're having to upgrade and redesign a lot.

And I can't wait to see the pretty skies... if some of your computers can't handle it, well, maybe its time to buy a 50 dollar graphics card. Man, I can't believe some of the systems some people are running in here, I have a little 1.4 ghz pentium here and it's never had SL installed. Ever. It's nothing but a glorified file server. Yeah it can run a few old 3d apps but I wouldn't dream of running SL on it. I'm already two computers down the road from that one... its like five freaking years old.

My three year old 2.6 P4 is what I'm using to write in forums, ditched its old ATI card for a nice brand new NVIDIA 7600 GS last year, and I swear it gained a new lease on SL life just by upgrading the graphics card.

... and the dual core Pentium D I got a couple months ago, is what I generally play SL with.

You'll appreciate how big this thing is just looking at your house, and the landscape behind it, without ever having the sky in the scene. But yeah.. terraforming.. hey wait, what about fixing the bugs first!

Maybe this is one of those "Fixing Broken Windows" kind of things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows)

Where prettier skies will reduce neighborhood bugs or something.

Hey, I do understand about having different departments do different stuff. I'm all in favor of the paintjob, or the sky, or whatever. (Long as I can still play.)

But I don't buy this business about redesigning the infrastructure, so we can't do anything else, when it is apparent to me that there are dozens of bugs that COULD be fixed, and dozens more that pop up with every new paintjob which could have been avoided.

They say they are appropriating more people to the task (which belies the notion that it can't be done at all), and that is good. More in that direction, please.

And no - wanting things to work as well as they did last week or last month or six months ago - wanting things to work at all that ONCE worked perfectly - is hardly being reactionary, is it.

coco

I think it comes down to where it is best to place the resources. SL is hurting right now. LL can either place bandaid over the wound to keep it from bleeding or it can stitch the wound. The problem is that if they use bandaid, it will keep bleeding through. They will have to keep replacing the bandaid over and over again. Or, they can go in and stitch the wound and actually solve the problem. But to stitch the wound, it takes much more time and resources then it would to just slap the bandaid onto it.

Which is the best way?

Seems as though they're doing both, and giving the patient a manicure at the same time.

The wounds not big enough for stitches, all we have are a lot of cuts & bruises that are now healing nicely

Yes, I understand that is the structure going on, or so it has been explained to me.

I still won't accept that it is impossible to keep enough bandaids on WHILE someone else is doing the stitching.

I also know that every new paintjob brings a whole lot more wounds, many of which go untreated, so who is deciding that paintjob is so important?

Personally, I think they should put ALL their resources on "edit linked prim," lol.

coco

Hmm is there a problem editing linked prims, seems ok to me

that bug where they won't resize and just keeps snapping back to the old position unless you unlink it, yeah.

doesnt happen all the time, but its a huge pain in the backside when it does happen, and there's no fix except to unlink that particular prim, resize it, then relink it to the set.

Let's prioritize.

Convenience: Ability to modify a linked prim without spending the 20 seconds it takes to unlink it, mod it, and relink it.

Asset protection: Take a no copy item rezzed in world - now it won't uninstantiate until it's confirmed that it has arrived safely in your inventory.

Preventing inventory loss vs. convenience while building. Hrmmm.

Sorry, I think their priorities are in the right place.

I agree - I'm just pointing out the bug. I've been nailed by the inventory loss bug (taking things to inventory and having it *fail* grr) and I find that to be much more important as well.

Actually, it's not so much a question of importance, is a matter of what's possible. The SL client is open source under GPL. If they want to impliment any company's code and that company doesn't want their stuff under GPL, a buyout is the only real option asside from violating the license and open sourcing it anyway.

I agree though, that there are more important things to work on. Such as fixing the bugs that have been presence since 1.14, or 1.15 for instance. Such as the llApplyImpulse line of script commands that have not been updating object positions on the screen properly since 1.15 was released.

Yes, yes, inventory loss is a more important problem.

Now, once you DO unlink the prin to stretch it, like as not your whole linked section will fall apart. All kinds of nutty things cause whole linked sections to fall apart.

Then there is the texture stretching by itself - even though you don't have "stretch texture" checked.

If you spend all your time building, yes, you wish it would work. Or at least work as well as it once did.

coco

I run SL on an HP Pavillion laptop w/Vista and an nVidia graphics card. I haven't had any problems with it. In fact it runs better than my desktop.

The price of a pretty sky is apparently lots of people whining. I'm not sure its worth it. I'm glad I don't visit the forums much.

I think it's basically keeping the competition in hand. Certain other VR worlds are said to have noticeably better graphics than LL, though lacking in other ways. So, now LL gets better graphics.

Private sim owners can do exactly that. And lots of island designers have created beautiful sims with individual ground textures. I'm still using the standard textures because I'm lazy

I personally don't need an improved sky, although I admit that it does look pretty. What I find a lot more interesting and enjoyable: LL is making profit! They're investing and expanding! Yay!!!

No more worries in the lines of "they'll try to sell this baby to Sony or someone", or "Who knows how long it's going to last, I give it two more years at best". SL is profitable. LL buys a team of video game designers. LL takes the first step in upgrading the oldfashioned graphics engine in order to compete with state-of-the-art MMORPG graphics. Doesn't matter if they start with something I personally don't need, it's still great news.