This week we discuss if mesh clothing is killing fashion in Second Life, new Linden Lab projects to improve SL, Cloud Party land offerings, RFL and more!
This week’s topics include:
- Follow Up from Last Week (deformer update, new user group)
- Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group – July 3rd, 2012 Meeting
- Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group
- Is mesh clothing killing fashion in Second Life?
- New Second Life projects the Lab is working on
- Hamlet deems it “The War on Lag”
- Cloud Party Now Offering Private Islands
- CP vs SL Land Offerings
- Relay for Life 2012 in SL soon
- 100 Words 100 Stories For RFL
- Charlie Stross’s Halting State
- This is Not a Game
- Botanical
- Gala Phoenix Legal Situation
- Update from Gala
Guests:
Saffia Widdershins is a well known Second Life user, community leader, and blogger. She is best known as Owner and CEO of Prim Perfect Publications, publisher and editor of Prim Perfect Magazine and as a co-host of the Treet.tv show Designing Worlds.
Timothy Jackson (Maxwell Graf) is a 3D artist and content creator who has been blending traditional and digital media since 1983. He is best known in the virtual world for his Rustica SIMs and furniture.
Bernhard Drax (Draxtor Despres) is a musician, new media producer, and machinima journalist.
Thank you to our sponsors, Botgirl’s Identity Circus and Pretty Feet!
I agree with Max… Kriss’ mesh cattails are *bleep* awesome. Lined the canal and bay with them.
And for the record, the Angel Of Death will NOT be on the RFL Telethon, despite his demands for equal time for his Relay For Death.
-ls/cm
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I agree with Max also. In my opinion, is it LL’s indecision and missed steps that causes most of the problems. Mesh does not need to be complicated. LL makes it more complicated than it needs to be, in many areas. Like, why use collada, when OBJ files could have worked for most items. Rigged mesh could have been a whole other download. LL couldn’t even put out rigs for even a couple of programs, which IMHO, is kind of ridiculous for a large company. The community had to do it all ourselves, which added much complexity to the whole process. Just the whole mesh deformer fiasco alone shows that LL is disfunctional. LL could have implemented Qarls original code, and updated it as it progressed, which would have spurred on a massive amount of sales. Instead, we still have people complaining on the forums about mesh not fitting.
Like I keep saying, every one of their policies stifles development and progress. How long are they going to sit there and ponder this issue? I get they want to get it right, but lets be honest here, no matter how it is implemented, there are going to be issues for people, and fixes/adjustments will need to be made to the deformer.
The way they are pondering this is like once it is implemented that is it, no matter how the reaction is, like their original stance of maybe getting around to the project to begin with. What software company works like that? Implement the mesh deformer, watch everyday SL residents have experiences with it, get feedback, further work on mesh deformer to get it right.
Instead its lets spend 2 years debating the issue so we get it right, when we are never ever going to get it completely right, implement it once and wash hands of feature.
It stems from this insane belief or policy that everything is a big secret, do not release the code do not give anyone a varied experience, do not submit code, do not innovate.
Imagine if the company that owned the game that the DayZ mod was developed on said “no don’t do that, its gotta stew with our senior developer for 2 years.”
Imagine if Notch at Minecraft said “no altering the minecraft experience”
Its so sad its funny, but no one ever points to this absurd policy about why Second Life can’t catch on or fix anything or advance any other area of second life except for what these corporate know it alls deem important. If anything is going to be the death of SL, it’s these cavemen like policies. They won’t even let their customers fix their bugs for free. Can someone please justify to me a continued course where these policies come out winning for Second Life? Unless you are going to sit here and tell me they are going to hire 100 new developers with some of their profit, I can’t see it.
Drax, Apple charges 3 times the price for mid range hardware, at best. It’s your choice of computers not really SL. You could get a 400 dollar pc and then spend 200 on a good video card and get near 30 fps.
As I’ve said, Cloud Party is looking better and better. I ran into Max there, lol. CP is actually listening to many suggestions and I can’t wait to see what it is like in a year.
We bought 2 PC’s for “Login2Life” after testing Machinima for over a year. They cost 2k US$ each. Under that price there is no way we could have done the quality of footage you see in the film. Granted – that is a lot better than what is needed to enjoy the world, but my point is based on my experience enthusiastically telling folks about SL and then realizing their computer can’t handle it. I am talking about the average non-geek here that is used to out of the box performance [like an iPhone or any PC game etc]. If SL does not perform like that it truly is doomed. The consumer does not care WHY platforms are different, why a user-generated world is harder to run than a simple game, they want it to work!