Tuesday, September 25, 2012

SecondLife : Mesh Clothing : Path Finding and Steam : What They Have In Common : And The Great Hail Mary Pass ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    So what could all three of these subjects possibly have in common ? They are all bombing out, failures for the most part, or at least that's the way it seems so far. Let's start off with the first item mentioned in the title of this post " Mesh Clothing " Yesterday I was attending Oz Linden's Monday morning meeting, approximately 45 minutes of which was taken up with a discussion about Mesh Clothing, and that I found to be rather odd, but never the less quite a few idea's were expressed as to why the current lack of support from the Lab so far. My personal opinion and the same of a few other people attending was and is the simple fact that the majority of Fashion Designer's have not exactly flocked like wild geese to a fresh water pond in the middle of a drought stricken landscape yet. And with good reason, designing with mesh requires an entirely new mind set, different tool's and a steep learning curve. Common sense will tell you, it's gonna take a while before things settle down in this area of SL development. Accordingly the Lab has decided to place the Mesh Deformer Project on the back burner for now.

    Next on the list is Path Finding, don't even get me started on this one. The subject took up the last 15 minutes of the meeting, according to Oz this is a Server Team issue, and out of his realm of control. It is however a High Priority issue, and once it has had all of the kink's worked out some very cool new things will be introduced immediately following, or shortly afterwards. He could not elaborate because most of the cool new stuff is still under wraps right now, but he seemed very confident that it will be worth the wait.

    Now we come to the controversy of putting SL on Valve's the Steam game distribution channel, this is either going to Work, or Bomb Out Big Time and sink like a Lead Balloon. Why do I have this opinion ? I'll tell ya why, there are several reasons. #1 The majority of games available on the Stem network are either FPS - PvP -MMO's and MMORPG's, with graphics that are vastly superior to what is currently capable in SL.  #2 Professionally developed and designed story line's, game play and very active user groups along with very well developed forums, none of which SL currently has.

    All one has to do is take a look around the current SL landscape. The place is literally ( slowly ) turning into a ghost town. There is so much land for sale it's crazy, abandoned property litter's the landscape, entire long time well established groups are just up and leaving, migrating to various Open Sim based grids. With greatly reduced tier pricing, and now that Hyper Grid is entering phase 2 later this year, ( phase 2 will sport much better IP protection capabilities ) entire new and larger worlds with greater possibilities will eventually become available.

    I think the Steam move by LL is kinda like the last few seconds of a NFL football game where the Coach and Quarterback decide to go for the Long Bomb Hail Mary Pass, and hope for the best.

JayR Cela

7 comments:

Eddi Haskell said...

JayR, I am in agreement. If only Second Life were to invest in and support good content development and community support inworld instead of these bizarre new technologies that play havoc with viewer performance----. If only. But did you ever have more of a bang your head against the wall feeling with anything than you do with this? At this point, I am just happy that Second Life still exists.

JayR Cela said...

Hi there Eddie

Yeah the current state of SL is starting to look rather pathetic, I was attending Andrew Lindens SL Server meeting yesterday, working on a post for that today.

Thanks for your comment *bigg huggs*

JayR :_)

Unknown said...

Hope you don't mind but I linked to this excellent post from mine!
I have found mesh and pathfinding have ruined my viewer performance so much that I am finding myself logging into SL less and less and realized a few days ago that I don't care if i even log onto SL anymore with all the issues going on daily, the elastic banding, the new lag, the horrific sim crossings which have gotten worse etc etc.
I love SL but when daily bullshit causes me this much stress I am finding yself giving up on SL and just watching Youtube videos and FB most of the time rather than log on to either attend a ghost town of a party or sit alone on my sim doing nothing!
Remember 2008ish when things seemed flourishing?

Unknown said...

I hope you don't mind but I linked to your excellent blog from mine because I agree 100%
I find myself not wanting to log on to SL anymore due to the constant frustration level.
I am beeing more drawn to Youtube and Facebook.
Second Life is a ghost town lately and only a fool can't see this!

JayR Cela said...

Hi there Ziggy

Long time no see.

It is very expensive to run a server farm, but I do think that LL needs to reduce the price they charge.

That's just my opinion

JayR Cela :_)

JayR Cela said...

Oh yeah by the way Ziggy, if you are using the LL viewer, you might want to consider switching to one of the TPV's

JayR

JayR Cela said...

Hi there Ziggy, I'm not experiencing that problem with FS. FPS is not the thing you should be concerned with, it's your Ping Sim time as measured in milliseconds / it ideally should be around 100ms or so.

Unfortunately getting your router settings adjusted can be a real pain in the ass.

I have tried to address this issue with a post that actually makes some sense, so far no luck :(

JayR