I have been saying for quite some time, this is not a game, but a media.

staying tuned

SL right now is a powerful tool for personal re-invention. Most avatars have nothing in their first life tab; they are born into SL with no personal history, no baggage of family or coworkers, but an adult’s life experience. What an opportunity to explore! What a chance to finally become that ‘nice guy’ you always thought you were, to remake your body image, to try to start a business without your family laughing at you! To meet people without them pitying your physical handicap! To lose yourself in a fantasy where you are beautiful, where $50 makes you rich!

This ability to lose one’s current self is what has lured residents away from their televisions into SL, night after night.

LL thinks our current SL culture can co-exist with members who are after a strictly augmentationist 3D experience, who will use SL to shop in 3D or play simultaneously in a 3D band with musicians all over the globe or who attend conferences. Where everyone may be beautiful but the really cool AVs look like their typists, where RL info is always on your linked *social network of choice* profile. They may be right.

But I think the current SL culture is a very delicate thing, and will evaporate when a flood of new RL-oriented residents begins to shun those who do not expose their RL identities. After all, those anonymous players could be anyone … they could be scam artists, sex criminals … I think any avatar that does not expose their RL identity will come to be regarded with suspicion.

So, all those anonymous avatars who have nothing particular to hide except that they wanted to escape themselves will quietly melt away, and SL will have lost the one thing that made people put down their remote controls.

And then, I suppose, LL employees will finally be comfortable within SL. LL’s executives may then have to accept a fire sale merger with Facebook or IBM, and they may never understand what went wrong.

In Second Life we can sell items in world and so it’s possible for somebody who doesn’t actually hang out in SL (pro content creator) to be unaware that Jimmy333 Monkeynuts has been selling copies like hotcakes while the creator’s items listed on XStreet haven’t sold at all.

and yep, I’m aware of mesh compression techniques and I’m also aware of how sensitive 3D models can be to compression. Even the lightest compression methods can turn a 3D model and its normal maps into a fugly mess.

But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see..

Thanks the info though. It’s nice to know mesh support is done and that LL is considering other storage methods.

As well, it will translate mesh into a certain number of vertices…as I understand it, vertex limits is how they manage the network issues.

Textures will be moved into the cloud over time. This is already supported in Snowglobe and the SL Map function – so, object textures will eventually be pulled from external Web sources rather than the Lab’s asset servers. This could help reduce load times on the texture side of things although right now it doesn’t support progressive texture loading.

Finally, if they really are able to pull off what they say they’re working on, which is more intelligent caching of content, you can also reduce loads for sims you’ve been to before, and I understand that they’re trying to push the assets closer to the simulator.

For those outside SL, I’m not sure copybot is the big issue. They’re used to Turbosquid and things like that or Google Warehouse. This will be like an added revenue stream for those already selling in Content Paradise where you have the risk of purchased objects being swapped and sold anyways. At least in SL you’ve ported your stuff into something with a known IP and enforcement regime.

On animations – not sure, but really good question.

Cube – yup, history repeats itself, I suppose it’s just better to be on the right side of the next wave.

A concern I have is whether llNet can deliver meshes fast enough. Mesh storage sizes are quite large, especially when you add things like normal maps. And in this day and age normal maps will be essential if LL wants to attract pro modelers. But it remains to be seen whether LL is going to support user created normal maps. The youtube mesh preview says not..

LL may have already decided that their network can’t handle meshes and so now they’re now waiting for their engineers to fix things. Mesh support may be fully coded and waiting..

For me it’s not so much mesh support in itself that is going to bring Second Life up to date, but rather it’s the animation that can eventually be added to meshes. It’ll mean no more silly things like animals with absurd looking prim legs.

But again, animation just adds further to the bandwidth requirements of meshes.

Maybe a streaming 3D world just isn’t suitable for mesh support?.

none of this will attract large media corporations or pro content developers…

they all make a “living ” off of content ownership and its value…

Why would SONY, FOX, ORANGE, AOL, or CBS come back?
HBO?…

whats changed.. ah.. 1.0 is now called 2.0-REVOLUTION!

well that should be enough….;)

Theyll hope that noone remebers the Unlicensed use of AVATAR banners FROM LL in 6 months.
and pay others like wallace and hamlet to keep calling it Sl 2.0 D in press releases and those media giants like AOl, CBS, HBO, ORange, SONY and FOX will all return to pay for maya built office buildings and empty islands of old music videos ?.

This all sound much better than them making flash games or AR trinkets and hireing there own bloggers to call them “virtual worlds” and to link them to facebook pages……..

They be back in SL with millions of new users because we moved some interface buttons around, and allowed for mass google warehouse ip import violations of content they most likely own….

well maybe thats exactly what will happen since in a year, all all failures and un tractionalble efforts will never have happened and everthing will be shiny and meta new again..

and toplisted on google and wikis.

If mesh is an additional tool–just as sculpties were when they were introduced–this would be a huge improvement for SL.

Of course, none of this matters if LL can’t improve the first-hour (and second- and third) experience for new users. Hopefully the so-called 2.0 viewer will help with that anyway.