Linden Lab lays off 30 staff

[Chin Rey]

Well I hate to be the only one to disagree with this, but I do, fiercely.

You're not at all the only one but as I said earlier, we have to agree to disagree. This is ultimately a question of what SL's target market should be and there is no "true" answer to that. Besides, it is what it is. Changing direction now isn't going to bring back any of the people who elft ebcause they couldn't find what they were lookigng for but it will alienate quite a lot fo the people who remain.

If LL had put their effort into making an in-world mesh-making tool...

I work almost exclusively with polylist meshes these days but that does not mean I'm a believer in the Church of the Holy Mesh! Everything has to be converted to mesh eventually because that's the only thing the APIs understand. But that conversion can be done - and is often better done - by the rendering software far out of sight from the poor overworked builder. There are several other approaches to 3D modelling and some of them could be very suitable for buiding on location. The prim system we know and love (or hate) is only three of them.

The most obvious solution for Second Life would of course be to build on what they already have. Very few people realise that the prim system we know is a heavily simplified variant of Avi Bar-Zeev's original concept. He had to nerf it because computers still weren't powerful enough to handle what he wanted them to. Un-nerf it, add some functions Bar-Zeev didn't even dare think of back then, add some more advanced culling algorhithms and give the assets database the upgrade it should have had years ago. That should cover just about every item made by humans in history. Now, replace the poor old outdated system vegetation with a modern procedural system for organic shapes - something like what SpeedTree and Unigine have.
Done correctly we'd end up with an inworld buiding system as flexible as but less resource heavy than polylist meshes and with entry level at least as low as prims.

It's not going to happen of course. Even if LL didn't have other priorities, they simply wouldn't be up tot he task these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle their current developers and progammers. They are doing some serious good craftsmanship now and they're getting better every day. It's just that out-of-the-box thinking is not their thing. We'd need Lindens like Avi, Cory and Eric for this and they are all long gone.

I guess they are seeing the new lands of Bellessaria as a success, as people are clamouring for more, but the significant advantage of double prims and an actual garden space cannot be underestimated.

A quick factual correction: Bellisseria does not have double prim quotas.

PS I'm personally very sorry to see Nyx go, as I worked with him on Linden Realms and he seemed far more intelligent and grounded than most of the Lindens I had contact with. I hope he finds somewhere which appreciates him better.

That's my impression of him too and yes, I do hope he's found a good new job. It's still a loss for Linden Lab though. They do have other developers with similar qualities - Oz and Vir are two names that spring to mind - but they need more of them, not fewer.

Soft, or so I am told, never left SL. He did work on Sansar but never formally transferred to that project.

Oh, I was wrong then. He was the one who did the Q&A in the What is Sansar group when the oen beta was launched so I assumed that was what he was working on.

 

[Wesleytron]

When it was finally finished, that stuff made its way in some third party viewers, but LL was not happy with that piece of code because they had preferred some different solutions en detail. So LL scrapped that deformer, and started developing their own solution which became known as fit mesh in 2014.

I thought both competed with each other for a while.

The thing we now know as 'Fitmesh' was already around well before it became a thing, but was more commonly referred to as 'liquid mesh' (the infamous WowMeh mesh body began life as 'liquid mesh' and so was ahead of everybody when Fitmesh was launched). The 'collision bones' on which liquid mesh and Fitmesh are built have always been around, just never truly or officially utilised for what they were originally intended.

I recall there was definitely discussions about which was best - liquid mesh or the deformer. My memory of those times is that both were competing ideas as technological solutions for a while until LL settled on the former rather than the latter, presumably because the basic infrastructure was already there (or didn't want to pay/credit a third party developer for their work!), and I guess had decided 'collision bones' were never going to be used for what they were originally intended.

LL just tweaked it and added a few extra bones and launched it as 'Fitted Mesh'.

 

[Khamon]

The most obvious solution for Second Life would of course be to build on what they already have. Very few people realise that the prim system we know is a hevaily simplified variant of Avi Bar-Zeev's original concept. He had to nerf it because computers still weren't powerful enough to handle what he wanted them to. Un-nerf it, add some functions Bar-Zeev didn't even dare think of back then, add some more advanced culling algorhithms and give the assets database the upgrade it should have had years ago. That should cover just about every item made by humans in history. Now, replace the poor old outdated system vegetation with a modern procedural system for organic shapes - something like what SpeedTree and Unigine have.
Done correctly we'd end up with an inworld buiding system as flexible as but less resource heavy than polylist meshes and with entry level at least as low as prims.

 

[Caliandris]

A quick factual correction: Bellisseria does not have double prim quotas.

Erm... well I have 175 in Feverfew (old Linden Tahoe home)...the houses in Belliseria have 351. I don't know what you call that, but I call it double prims?

 

[Anya Ristow]

Developers don't have any authority over management in a typical corporate investment structure. Management at Linden Lab is centered around developers telling the managers what they will and won't do. Leadership has been unable to move the platform in a useful direction, since the beginning, because the developers have called the shots.

This may be a Philip thing. The SL concept is said to have come from the novel Snow Crash, in which programmers are rockstars and ordinary people admire them. The company ran like that, at the start. Among many problems that culture created, it's why LL never met a bot they didn't like. They admire the cleverness and the automation more than they disapprove of the damage it does to their platform. The open source, hands-off approach to managing their platform, and the code-focused solutions to unconstructive user behavior, is a developer-centric thing. But at some point I think management must have stepped in and started saying no. For one, we never got an open source server. Anyone know the story behind that?

 

[Wesleytron]

Erm... well I have 175 in Feverfew (old Linden Tahoe home)...the houses in Belliseria have 351. I don't know what you call that, but I call it double prims?

That's because the Bellliseria plots are double the size - they're 1024 sqm, whereas the old LL plots are 512 sqm, so you have to use twice as much of your tier to live on Belliseria than you do for the older Linden homes. You're still getting the same primmage per square metre.

 

[Cristiano]

That's because the Bellliseria plots are double the size - they're 1024 sqm, whereas the old LL plots are 512 sqm, so you have to use twice as much of your tier to live on Belliseria than you do for the older Linden homes. You're still getting the same primmage per square metre.

Do you have to tier up to use them? I thought they were included in the base premium that used to include only 512m..

 

[Caliandris]

That's because the Bellliseria plots are double the size - they're 1024 sqm, whereas the old LL plots are 512 sqm, so you have to use twice as much of your tier to live on Belliseria than you do for the older Linden homes. You're still getting the same primmage per square metre.

Is that so? I have a friend who swapped her Tahoe sim Linden Home for a Bellisseria one... she didn't mention that she needed to increase her tier. If I catch her online, I'll ask.

 

[Sid]

Premium comes with 1024m free of tier these days.
I just checked, I could apply for a camper on Belliseria and that would be a 512m plot with 175 prims.
The others are not available ATM, but my guess is, if it has 350 LI it will indeed be a 1024m plot.

 

[Caliandris]

Nope - they pay the same as the people on the old 512 Linden Homes. "Your premium membership fee entitles you to an automatic waiver of the monthly land fees for up to 1024 sq m of land anywhere on the mainland. You are free to use that waiver to pay the land fees for parcels that you own or you may use them for a Linden Home. " Which means that the effect of the new sims is to give them twice the land and twice the prims for the same premium cost... unless I'm going dippy. Edited to add... it is a choice, as it is possible to get a new home if you abandon your old Linden Home and then sit around trying to buy any homes on the new continent which are abandoned... but you can only own one Linden Home, and most people are stuck with the old 512 plot homes. The new ones when released seem to go in minutes. Which is what I was saying - of course they do when they are twice the size with twice the prims.

 

[Chin Rey]

Erm... well I have 175 in Feverfew (old Linden Tahoe home)...the houses in Belliseria have 351. I don't know what you call that, but I call it double prims?

I call it twice as much land.

 

[Cristiano]

Side note, I'm not elligible for a Linden Home because I have a lifetime account However, I am comforted with the 4096m I get for free.

 

[Qie Niangao]

I call it twice as much land.

Indeed.

In the olden days (like a year or so ago) a Premium membership would only cover one 512 Linden Homes parcel or 512 regular Mainland. After the big upgrade to Premium it can now cover both, or one 1024 Bellisseria Linden Home or one 1024 regular Mainland.

Of course, there's such a thing as double-prim Mainland. And Linden Homes (Bellisseria or otherwise) come with an in-theme structure that doesn't count against the parcel's land impact limit. And unlike Linden Homes, regular Mainland can be group-deeded to get a further 10% boost in tier allowance.

Anyway, the expansion of Premium bonus tier to 1024 came before Bellisseria was ready, and during that interval there was a little buying frenzy on Mainland as folks found a way to spend their doubled Premium tier. Even today, Mainland remains noticeably less barren than it was back in the days of only 512 Premium tier.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The most obvious solution for Second Life would of course be to build on what they already have. Very few people realise that the prim system we know is a hevaily simplified variant of Avi Bar-Zeev's original concept. He had to nerf it because computers still weren't powerful enough to handle what he wanted them to. Un-nerf it, add some functions Bar-Zeev didn't even dare think of back then, add some more advanced culling algorhithms and give the assets database the upgrade it should have had years ago. That should cover just about every item made by humans in history.

But it would also pretty much be "Blender Lite, but inside SL", and the problem with that is that someone who struggles with and can't stand using Blender is going to have at least as much trouble using an in-world mesh-creating tool, if it's capable of doing the same things like manipulating shapes at the vertex level, extruding, and subdividing.

And unfortunately, even such a system will struggle to compete, in terms of visual quality, with externally-made mesh, because of how game-optimized 3D creation works.

Even the most advanced triple-A games designed to be played on cutting-edge consumer computers still realize the need to use simplified meshes with normal maps or bump maps on them that provide the real "detail". The way that whole system works is, you first need to build a fantastically dense and complex but -completely unusable for purpose- mesh model, which exists solely to make a normal map out of for you to apply to a second, much simpler mesh model which is the only one of the two models you can actually put into your game (i.e., upload to SL).

If you provide a tool inside SL which would be capable of creating those dense, unusable normal-map-source meshes, the immediate problem is that users - deliberate trolls, people who are too lazy to care, and new users who innocently have no idea what they're doing - will completely ignore that second half of the process where you bake a normal map out of it to use with an actually optimized mesh, and will just use the original super-dense meshes instead, and this will destroy Second Life's usability for everyone as even the most advanced video cards strain under the load of rendering Brazillions of polygons. Obviously to prevent that problem, LL would have to design a hard limit on complexity of mesh made with the inworld-tool, leaving it gimped and still unable to ever reach the detail-level of externally-made and uploaded mesh models that use a normal/bump map.

Then there's the UV thing. For SL's prim system, the UV's are fixed for each prim shape and users don't even have to think about them. But custom mesh needs custom UVs that people will have to learn how to make well. Heck, even a large number of external mesh creators today have never really learned how to make proper UV layouts which already bogs down the system as it is.

It's just....it's not simple. SL's prim-building tools made 3D creation seem deceptively simple. To get beyond the limitations of that system, whether the new system is inside SL or an external dedicated program, either way you're going to have to learn to use skills and an interface that you are going to hate with glowing passion and get tired of using quickly unless you have a serious passion for making 3D stuff. I don't think there's a way, or any possible system, that makes it easy to learn mesh-making just by idly tinkering like you could with SL's prims.

 

[Cristiano]

I've always thought that Sims 4 style home building tools would be wonderful in SL. I'm not sure how doable it would be, but it seems like it would open up a lot of new possibilities, including third parties being able to make parts that would work with the system and be added to the user's library of available things to build with.

 

[Fionalein]

I can't see how Sansar can have any potential in that field but maybe LL has a different view.

you can always sell it as vitual wall visualizer to the current US adminitration....

jokes aside - you can sell pretty almost any crap to the US military if you can make them believe they will benefit from it - I would not be surprised if there are miltary uses of Sansar LL does not tell us about (drone piloting simulations - whatever ...)

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

But it would also pretty much be "Blender Lite, but inside SL",

... also "but without Blender's horrid user interface, but with plenty of starter mesh objects, plus a path to learning by modifying your mesh house/furniture/avatar, plus immediate in-world feedback".

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

... also "but without Blender's horrid user interface,

HAHAHA you think so? Well we're talking about an imaginary SL feature that never existed here so I guess I can't really prove you're wrong about that. I will simply point out that both Second Life's and Sansar's user interfaces have never been upheld as shining examples of UI design, not as long as I've been a user at least.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Is that so? I have a friend who swapped her Tahoe sim Linden Home for a Bellisseria one... she didn't mention that she needed to increase her tier. If I catch her online, I'll ask.

She will, I think, have had first to abandon her Tahoe Linden Home before getting a Bellisseria one, since you can have only one Linden Home per accountt.

She could buy a 512 Mainland parcel and either get a 512 trailer parcel on Bellisseria, or tier up and get a 1024 traditional house or a houseboat, or keep her Tahoe and buy a 512 parcel, but she can't have a Tahoe and somewhere on Bellisseria simultaneously. She needs a premium alt and a landgroup for that.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

Edit: As for someone's comment about having to use painting tools for textures, 2d editing is WAY easier to learn than 3d.

If you are 2d oriented, sure - I'm not. Even in traditional art, I have a much harder time thinking in 2d, which is why my major was sculpture. So learning 3d editing is much easier for me.

----

Also, Blender 2.8 would be a lot easier for someone not used to older versions to learn.