WTF More layoffs at LL - Kona gone

[Caliandris]

It's apparently been a long time since Linden Lab even encouraged workers to spend time in world.


Windlight.

They've never used SL the way the users use SL and that's one of the problems. There's a serious disconnect between the way that ordinary residents use it and the way that LL do, in all sorts of ways. They seem to get a lot of the feedback for the way the SL browser works by recruiting people off the street and getting them to do it, rather than talking to people who use it - that's how it seems to me, anyway.

It frustrated me terribly that they used to encourage and provide rewards for the Lindens who produce NEW! Shiny! stuff to short deadlines instead of rewarding the poor saps who tried to fix the stuff which had gone wrong. I don't really know if that system has changed. It still frustrates me that they don't follow their own rules about how to optimize stuff by reducing texture sizes. I've got bored with dragging all their premium gifts out of the inventory to find they're wall-to-wall 1024x1024 textures, often multiples in the same object and three variations provided all with their own version of all the textures. It's crazy.

How on earth they expect to get commercial creators to care about texture sizes when all they want is to sell the best looking objects (with no investment in SL being workable) when they don't do this themselves, I don't know. Maybe someone will come along with a magic wand to fix the things that make it essential to try to keep the number and size of textures down in order to keep a sim workable with more than twenty people in it, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Beebo Brink]

LL never hyped Sansar to be SL 2.0. That was 100% SL users making it up, setting themselves up for disappointment despite LL saying over and over again that they should not be thinking about Sansar in those terms.

That conceptual transition would have been much easier if we'd ever figured out what Sansar was supposed to be on its own merits.

I was bored of SL by the time Sansar started, and I was very much in the mood to be impressed with and excited by something new. Show me what you've got!

Still waiting.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

They've never used SL the way the users use SL and that's one of the problems.

Some of them did, back in 2005 or so. More what I was getting at, though, is that they don't seem to use SL at *all* now.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Some of them did, back in 2005 or so. More what I was getting at, though, is that they don't seem to use SL at *all* now.

AFAIK there was a specific LL CEO that's responsible for that. I forget which one it was - a short-lived one who came from some other online game company. The way I heard it, he pretty much forbid Lindens from being SL users, and from casually interacting with SL users in-world, adopting a sort of "Lindens are purely GMs" philosophy. He basically made all of the Lindens delete their own in-world builds and abandon the land, and that's how Linden Village ended up as a bunch of flat, empty parcels, and it's also when all of the Linden office-hours as they used to exist were cancelled.

When that guy was replaced I believe the next CEO reversed the Linden in-world ban, but the damage was done and only a couple of the older Lindens have bothered to put up new builds, so far as I'm aware. Not in the old Linden Village though, it's still a ghost town and the only Linden builds left there are ones that weren't deleted because they're Governor builds or the particular Lindens who built them were gone already before the ban hit.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Yeh, that rings a bell.

 

[eku zhong]

AFAIK there was a specific LL CEO that's responsible for that. I forget which one it was - a short-lived one who came from some other online game company. The way I heard it, he pretty much forbid Lindens from being SL users, and from casually interacting with SL users in-world, adopting a sort of "Lindens are purely GMs" philosophy. He basically made all of the Lindens delete their own in-world builds and abandon the land, and that's how Linden Village ended up as a bunch of flat, empty parcels, and it's also when all of the Linden office-hours as they used to exist were cancelled.

When that guy was replaced I believe the next CEO reversed the Linden in-world ban, but the damage was done and only a couple of the older Lindens have bothered to put up new builds, so far as I'm aware. Not in the old Linden Village though, it's still a ghost town and the only Linden builds left there are ones that weren't deleted because they're Governor builds or the particular Lindens who built them were gone already before the ban hit.

'M' Linden

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Some of them did, back in 2005 or so. More what I was getting at, though, is that they don't seem to use SL at *all* now.

I've witnessed recently an in world marriage ceremony, where Patch Linden attended. Even more so he played the role of the priest and held the wedding ceremony in voice. I don't know how they were able to get a Linden to do the ceremony, but they did. Footage below.

 

[Chalice Yao]

Anybody please correct me but I've never heard of any long-running MMO completely replacing its rendering engine, or renovating the game engine in such a way that a single-thread game becomes multi-threaded.

Windlight.

Black Desert Online,

It always had pretty graphics to a degree. Then the devs went 'Let's make it the prettiest damn MMORPG there ever was.'. And so they did, pushing it leaps and bounds forward.

 

[Fionalein]

Maybe someone will come along with a magic wand to fix the things that make it essential to try to keep the number and size of textures down in order to keep a sim workable with more than twenty people in it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Needs more like a magic mallet. I think fs has the option to compress all textures to 512s but I could be wrong on that.

 

[Qie Niangao]

I visited Sansar once or twice a long time ago. It was interesting to see, with impressive graphics, but locations took ages to load and it was difficult to see what one could do in Sansar that couldn't be done in SL. Looking at snapshots of Sansar on Google now, they don't look any better than a well made SL environment.
I just hope LL has some tech 'take-away' from the Sansar experiment that can be used to improve SL.

Thanks for that. I thought I was the only one who saw nothing all that impressive about Sansar graphics compared to well done, modern SL content.

One thing SL might be able to borrow from Sansar is clothing, albeit with a some effort and maybe some insurmountable TPV licensing issues. I'm given to understand Sansar got a lot right about clothing that behaves itself. I'm no expert, though, certainly not about avatars and what hangs from them.

In general, SL could use a completely new, mobile-first viewer with an all new rendering pipeline. It's probably easier than trying to salvage what's accreted to the code base of the monolithic desktop viewer -- and this is coming from an inveterate skeptic of any project that gives up a complicated code base and starts from scratch. (Why so skeptical? Because buried in that ugly code is a bunch of hard-won complexity inherent to the application, the origins now long forgotten. Never underestimate the value hidden in a big bowl of spaghetti code.)

 

[Clara D.]

Needs more like a magic mallet. I think fs has the option to compress all textures to 512s but I could be wrong on that.

64 bit does.

 

[Fionalein]

64 bit does.

Wait, 32 bit doesn't? Does that mean the folks who would benefit the most don't even get the option to use it?

 

[Clara D.]

Wait, 32 bit doesn't? Does that mean the folks who would benefit the most don't even get the option to use it?

I just looked, and yes, it's only in the 64-bit version. I'm running 64 and still benefit from it, my ThinkPad is weaksauce graphics-wise (only 1G of vRam).

To sound elitist for a moment, if someone is still running a 32-bit OS in 2020, they have more hurdles to overcome with SL than just cutting back on vRam use.

 

[Fionalein]

To sound elitist for a moment, if someone is still running a 32-bit OS in 2020, they have more hurdles to overcome with SL than just cutting back on vRam use.

Tell that LL. The official Linux viewer never was 64 bit and finally got dumped shortly before animesh.
So my only viewer with HAVOC support for mesh uploads is? tada: 5.09 32 bit (and yes, as they never did no newer one it is not blocked and running fine.)

If I want to run Windoofus versions through Wine I also am better staying with the 32 ones as Wine 64 is a mess.