SecondLife : More On Linden Realms : Will It Save SL ? : What I would Like To See

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Last night I did a post on my first adventure into the new Linden Realms gaming environment. As I said yesterday, I believe the potential for a huge success here is tremendous, providing that it is handled correctly by the Lab.

    Case in point is the catastrophic disaster and major flop that was the Viewer2 User Interface, and the enormous amount of time that the Lab took twiddling its thumb's, absolutely and downright refusing to budge, or even admit that the UI was a complete failure. It took Kirsten, and later the FireStorm Viewer teams to first start addressing the issues that the majority of long time users were complaining about, to eliminate that horrible Side Bar design. Thank the heavens that bastard idea has finally been put to out to pasture, May It R.I.P.

    The new UI for V3.2.x is a vast improvement, but do we really need descriptive words next to the icon's ? I say no ! Most people today are used to an Icons only approach when using their Smart Phone's UI. Hover tips are the most logical solution to this problem, and that is exactly what FireStorm and NiranV have done with there TPV offerings. The rest of the Third Party Viewer Developers hopefully will soon follow suite as well.

    So back to what I feel LL needs to do, in order for Linden Realms and SecondLife to flourish, and do it soon. We need to have these tools Rodvick has promised for LR developers, put into the proper hands of qualified individuals and or proven current in world Game Sim development teams, with the possibility of outside TPGD's afterwards to expand on the original concept. Next a much larger grid, similar to the adult themed Zinda Adult continent. Allow the Dev's to let there imaginations loose. After an approval of course by a dedicated separate internal gaming department within LL.

    We will need more diverse quests, obstacles, foes, monsters, and most defiantly a continuation of the rewards based concept, hunting for crystals just ain't gonna get it. Kill a monster an earn some redeemable L$ points is a perfect solution to prevent boredom. And most importantly, completely seamless inter sim border crossings. This last obstacle, has long been  a major pain in the ass, it needs to be solved, and needs to be solved now ! Once and for all ! The Lab needs to get off of their collective butt's and fix this problem. If that means cleaning house in the server team department, then so be it. It's a matter of load balancing the antiquated multiple server architecture. Or perhaps moving the entire operation into the Cloud, Amazons EC2 or something similar would seem to be a logical choice. We need better scale-ability, 40 or so avatars on a sim without introducing massive amounts of lag is just not going to cut the mustard. Next thing up is fire everyone on or in the advertising department. That is if there even is an advertising department.

    All of these issues in my opinion are not options, they need to be put on the fast track ! I'm gonna say this right now, if Linden Lab does not wake up, and wake up real soon, they will be left in the dust by Open Sim and its off shoot's by the year 2015.

    We also need Inter-Op between multiple grids. Hyper Grid as it is currently being implemented in Open Simulator still needs a lot of work, but hell ! Linden Lab together with IBM invented the dam concept, and proved that it worked ! So what's the problem ? The problem is DRM and putting a uniform set of standards in place that will properly protect Intellectual Property Rights.

    Hey LL you are still the leader of the pact, but how much longer do you think you can hang on to the crown with out showing some gut's and leadership again ?

    In closing, my opinion is that, the Third Party Developers are the only thing that is going to save second life from a painfully slow and agonizing death.

JayR Cela