The Techies and their Axes vs. the Shoppers and fashionistas, maybe we can work together.

[Penny Patton]

Yes, though leaving it mod would still make it easier.

It's probably something obvious that I'm overlooking, but how would leaving an object mod make it easier to see who made the parts?

 

[EmpressOfCommunism]

It's probably something obvious that I'm overlooking, but how would leaving an object mod make it easier to see who made the parts?

Depending on viewer, I find it easier to manually select linked parts to see things then other methods or special huds. Very often no info is available when an item is no mod but made of linked parts from various people.

 

[Myficals]

Depending on viewer, I find it easier to manually select linked parts to see things then other methods or special huds. Very often no info is available when an item is no mod but made of linked parts from various people.

You can still use "edit linked parts" on a no mod object and see the creator details of individual prims and meshes. No special huds required, no need for third party viewers.

 

[Vaelissa Cortes]

Several viewers, such as Firestorm, have an option to let you right click anything > Object > Inspect, and you see a full list of everything in the linkset along with its creator, regardless of perms.

 

[EmpressOfCommunism]

I am aware! I still personally find it easier doing it the other way , but this is good info for people in general

 

[Khamon]

Khamon is scaled around 5' which makes him almost tiny in SL. His camera angle is head height, over the right shoulder, and typically zoomed two-to-eight feet behind depending. My only issue arises when he walks through a doorway or arch, especially meshed, causing the camera to wobble and zoom erratically. It makes me dizzy and ruins my immersion. Call me Lordfly.

 

[Chin Rey]

We've all seen them, nerds/techies with axes against parts of the "SL as it is now" Whether it's avatar heights and camera angles, or resource usage by mesh body parts.
They've got some good points....but they don't seem to be able to get the actual shoppers on their side.

I don't like the "nerd/techie" or "fashionista" labels because I think they both are rather misleading. The way I see it, it's more a question of what perspective people have on a virtual world. There are two important and conflicting ones:

• World focused: The avatar is your gateway into a large, rich virtual reality.
• Avatar focused: The virtual reality is the backdrop for your avatar.

(There's also the private sphere focus which is essentially an extension of avatar focus into the closest surroundings, hidden inside a skybox or behind privacy walls or such. But I leave that out for now because in principle it's not that different from avatar focus.)

This is an oversimplification of course and everybody are somewhere on a scale between the two extreme views, but I think it still illustrates the situation well enough.

Both those views are right in different ways. The world focused view is right in the sense that it better represents what SL originally was presented as and how it has been marketed over the years. The avatar focused view is right in the sense that it's more in line with what SL actually has become.

With a world focus you want to enjoy large, complex and contextual scenes. That means you need careful resource management to make room for all those details, you need a conistent scale because inconsistency there is one of the biggest context breakers, you need a closeup camera position to make it easier to immerse yourself into the world and you need a strong social aspect because this is far too big for a single person to handle on their own.

With an avatar focus you want - well, the name says it all. That means you want to spend as litttle resources as possible on the surroundings, conistent scale doesn't matter, you want the camera a bit away so you can see your avatar better and you want a strong solipsistic aspect because you don't want to share the resources with others.

There are lots of conflicting interests here and it's made even worse that so many people don't realize this and take it for granted that they can both have their cake and eat it.

(Edit: Woops, seems I may have accidentally brought the discussion back to the original topic all the way out on page 3. Sorry, I didn' mean to.)

 

[Penny Patton]

Depending on viewer, I find it easier to manually select linked parts to see things then other methods or special huds. Very often no info is available when an item is no mod but made of linked parts from various people.

I have always been able to see the creator info on linked objects, regardless of whether or not the item had mod perms enabled. I don't think Vaelissa is suggesting another way of getting that information, just pointing out that an object being no-mod doesn't prevent anyone from seeing that information exactly how you describe finding it yourself.

I have at times seen objects where the creator information was missing, but it had nothing to do with the perms.

 

[Penny Patton]

Both those views are right in different ways.

HARD disagree. The problem isn't that some people want more resources spent on their avatars and less on their surroundings, while others feel the opposite. Largely the problems come from most SL users simply not knowing how SL works. This is why you see them consistently citing misinformation when it comes to how 3D rendering works, and the entire concept of optimization.

Someone walking around with an avatar using half a gigabyte worth of textures while looking no better than an avatar using 150MB of textures is not doing so because they are avatar focused. If they were, then their avatar would look every bit that extra 350MB. But they never do.

Saying "both are right in their way" is like saying the same of climate scientists versus climate change deniers.

 

[Penny Patton]

To clarify, I do believe that many of those you'd define as "avatar focused" do honestly think of it in the terms you lay out, but that's because when they hear things like "content creators need to optimize more" in their mind that becomes "avatars need to look worse". And while you can convince some of them that this isn't the case, there will always be a very vocal group of conspiracy theorists who steadfastly believe that you're coming to take their avatars away. And while LL remains infuriatingly silent on the issue, these people will fill up the forums with enough misinformation to convince others that they're right, and muddy the conversation for a good deal more people.

 

[Chin Rey]

And while LL remains infuriatingly silent on the issue, these people will fill up the forums with enough misinformation to convince others that they're right, and muddy the conversation for a good deal more people.

Yes, and the lack of information from LL's side is very frustrating. I think part of the explanation (or at least part of their excuse) is that they don't want to influence people's decisions how to use SL and they fail to realize that by witholding vital info, influencing people is exactly what they do.

Optimisation is not about saving resources, it's about making the most out of them. We can discuss what we want to make out of them - more realistic scenes? more outrageously alien scenes? fancier avatars? Whatever. But I think everybody who cares for SL at all will agree that we don't want to waste resources, we want to use them for whatever we find useful.

I should mention, I'm in a bit of a bit of a special mood in this right now because I've just finished watching the first episode of Time Signs (the predecessor to Time Team). I sooo want to recreate a landscape like that in virtual reality (especially since the original is now under water). I want to build all those lovely old houses, fill the surroundings with all that lovely vegetation and add all those lovely traces of past and present people. And of course, I want to add all the people too. But it's not possible. If computers became a thousand times as powerful and internet connections a thousand times as fast, it would still not be possible. Instead we have to try our best to do what all great artists have always done: combine superior technical skills with an excellent artistic sense to extract the essence of what we want to create. (Btw, technical skills and artistic sense must always be together - one without the other is worthless.)

I wrote a post for my blog about a week ago. I was going to call it "The Seven Deadly Sins Of Texturing" but I ended up with fifteen and stll counting. Here's a link: Second Life (and Hypergrid) Builders' Manual: Deadly Sins of Texturing
These are some of the parasites of Second Life, things that drain a considerable amount of our computer power and bandwidth yet gives nothing whatsoever in return for anybody (except lag of course). The only reason they exist at all, is ignorance. We could of course make similar lists of Deadly Mesh Making Sins, Deadly Prim Builder Sins and so on but I think this is enough to illustrate what optimisation really as about.