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