DISQUS

Merlot Congrejo · 1 year ago

Phrrrrt.....Do you think it is a bad sign that i now spend more time reading sl blogs than i do in-world? At the moment the constant mind numbing lag, random crashes, inventory losses and tp failures, to name just a few, are making it really hard to stay positive.

Sometimes I just simply can't be bothered

Alex Barth · 1 year ago

Thanks for this post, Lowell. You are doing a great job keeping us informed--keep up the good work!

I saw one blogger post to Philip Linden's blog "it takes failure to appreciate success" and I completely agree with this. LL has some serious challenges ahead of it but still--look how far they have come!

Alan · 1 year ago

'We get it' is not enough. Lindens are always getting it, What's needed is something concrete that shows LL is about to change its ways.

LL's root problem is that the code base is a small number of large undifferentiated blocks. It is poorly documented. Small changes in one segment of the code base can cascade into poor performance in a completely separate segment, because the code is cross-linked in ways that went out of use in about 1981. Tweak the UI and you find you're exploding subroutines in the asset server. LL needs a group whose task is documenting the code base in more detail. In the longer term, the degree of modularity in the code base needs to increase drastically. Waiting a little and thinking about documentation and design issues can be the mark of a great designer.

This unhappy state is a direct result of initial decisions to follow the get it running approach. It is cause for embarrassment, not the proclamation of triumph.

A monthly blog post is not a communications strategy. That's especially true when the Lindens continue to close comments after a fixed number ad so rarely respond to comments the way a normal blogger does. The way to cure the communications gap is to, um, engage with people and that means answering comments, not posting a rah rah statement and waiting for the arbitrary comment limit to kick in.

Sl is wonderful and SL is rubbish. Getting SL up and running was wonderful, but it happened a little time ago now and there's a point where 'But we were great in 2004' begins to sound a little stale. Philip could cure the problem immediately by announcing some actual improvements to the user experience.

One thing that springs to mind is the limit on groups. 25 was great when SL first rolled, 255 inventory items was equally great when SL first rolled. I don't know abut you but my inventory is a tad larger than 255 items these days, and I constantly juggle myself in and out of groups trying to keep track of the stuff that interests me. I'd be really surprised if raising the number of groups you can join would have any adverse consequences and it would give everyone a much better sense that SL is paying attention to the soft world, people's interactions, as well as the hard world, coding improvements.

In the longer term a way must be found to allow real crowds at least on some sims. When Philip addressed a group of companies recently he was asked a lot of questions about return on investment a company can expect from SL. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic played to less than 90 avatars, although they seem to think they were communicating with 9 million. Until ROI is better, the level of outworld engagement is not going to improve. And that means we need crowds.