– Ready Player One and how LL could improve SL –

So i just watched Ready Player one and it was a pretty fun movie, Its about this huge virtual reality MMO game like SL mixed with SAO and this generic main protagonist looking dude and his wacky friends trying to solve puzzles and get 3 keys to unlock some shit and win the ownership of the game world itself. While the evil EA corporation is throwing money into focus groups trying to solve the puzzle themselves to gain control of the game and shit it up with their loot boxes and micro transactions.
I dont get why nerds hate this movie so much because this movie is like every nerd’s wet dream, like i understand there were some really cringy geek out moments that felt really forced like that part where they were talking about golden eye on nintendo64. But its still a very enjoyable and surprisingly solid movie.
What kinda disappointed was that there were a bunch of big missed opportunity moments, like they could have made the main chick turn out to be a dude IRL, you know just like girl avatars are in real videogames. I think they kinda sort of wanted to do that but it would have offended all the good god loving christian folks in american and their dumb sensibilities, because in american folklore, the hero has to get the girl and all that cheesy shit and if there is no girl to get or the hero gets the guy, you will have a bunch of pissed off old people going all HURR MUH FAMILY VALUES HAVE BEEN SHATTERED BY THIS MOVIE!!!, so instead *spoilers* they made that big cyborg dude turn out to be an ugly fat chick IRL because that wont offend anyone.*spoilers*
As for the main girl, when she said “you wont like me irl, im ugly” i expected her to be, i dunno, at least chubby or something, but no she looks just as hot irl as her avatar, its really lame how safe they are trying to play even in places where they dont need to, no one would have minded her actually turning out not looking like a supermodel IRL.
Now for avatars themselves, it didnt lack variety in that department, there were all kinds of avatars, robots, elfs, orcs, pizza wizards and even fucking furriers, but not a single anime girl anywhere, have they not heard about VR chat? You can literally be anything you want in that game, but anime is off the table, so fuck you. Which is even more strange considering they had a gundam and the bike from akira and all that anime stuff in it.
Another missed opportunity is by nintendo itself for not licensing their characters to the movie, there was no iconic nintendo characters like mario with his blue and red overalls, red hat and mustache or metroid in his yellow armor with big round shoulders and green arm cannon or zelda with his pointy ears and green hat and sword or a single pokemen reference. Nintendo, if you want to still be relevant in the future, you should jump on opportunities like this nerd wankfest of a movie, you are a huge part of nerd culture and you have probably shaped the history of gaming more than anything else they showed in it, yet other than that cringy goldeneye reference, its like you never even existed, they could at least made the main hero wear the powerglove or something, but well i guess its true what they say, genesis does what nintendont. It was also strange to not see any storm troopers or darth vaders, although they did throw in a shit ton of verbal references to star trek like the millennium falcon and captain spock’s famous phrase “may the force be with you”  so i guess thats ok.

Its kind of ironic how all thsoe copyrighted characters in the movie mirror all the copyright infringment and game model rips on second life.
Oh yeah there were also some inconsistency with the time line by like 20 years, when JD Halliday played atari as a kid, we already had playstations by then.

Anyway, this movie is like second life and sword art online had a baby, It was a very fun and filled with fun pop corn munching action and, pop cullture references and tracer’s ass. I recomend seeing it, just dont watch it in 3D cuz it just makes it as hard to watch and recognize all the characters as a crappy low quality cam rip on the web

– Mesh bakes, reduced sim costs and my idea for SL –

Now speaking of swords art online and second life having a baby, you probably already heard the news but Linden labs are rolling out a bunch of new changes to SL. One of them is a new mesh feature that will allow loading LL avatar textures onto mesh objects, this is a big thing because now you will no longer need deal with tons of confusing applier systems just to load your skins or clothing layers onto your normie mesh bodies, you will be able to wear your LL skins, tattoos, alphas, on your mesh bodies straight from your inventory. How exactly it will work i do not yet know but if you are wondering if im going to implement that into any of my stuff, the answer is very yes!.

Another somewhat great news is that they are lowering the sim costs on mainalnd and moving the grid into a cloud based network, witch i think is a step in to the right direction that they should have taken ages ago. I say somehwat because lets face it, the 10% cost reduction is meaningless when sims still cost hundreads of dollars a month, no ones going to flock to mainland because its still way out of reach financially for most normal people, especially when you compare it to the monthly cost of running a game server witch is 40$. But i do hope that moving to the cloud will help them cut the costs enough for them to be able to lower the sim prices even more.

But if was LL, heres what i would have done in the first place:
Instead of throwing all my money and resources into dead end projects like desura, patterns and sansar, i would instead direct those resources into making SL a streamlined MMO game platform. Redo systems like character movement, vehicle system, combat, IK, pathfinding and AI, make it all work like in a real videogame.
Next step would be redoing the sim software to allow sim scalability so that you wouldnt be confined to 250×250 cube ion the middle of the sea, and price land based on scale.
Lets say a small island sized as 1/4 of our current sim sizes would cost you 15$ or whatever subscription fee premium users pay in MMO games.
Bigger plot of land for commercial purposes like shopping malls or small indie game projects would go from 40$ to 100$
And than we would have huge plots of land for big game companies to create their own MMO titles with a huge open worlds the size of games like skyrim or farcry, building their MMO experiences on top of the infrastructure provided by LL, it would go from 300$ to 1000$ or even more if the game is as massive as WOW.

So yeah that’s all.

– Second Life 2.0 (for real this time) –

So i assume you all have probably heard about Second Life 2.0 by now. People often ask me what is my view on this, so imma give my 2 cents on this matter as well (and generate some copypasta for the next time someone asks :D).

Ok so SL 2.0, is it a good thing, is it bad, do we need a new sl? well I personally would wish that instead of spending all that time, money and effort on building a new game, they would concentrate it all on fixing this current one. On the other hand, this game is so fucked up beyond repair, that a fresh start might be the only way to fix it.

Theres some pants on head retarded rumours going around about how LL is going to pull the plug on SL after SL 2.0 is out. I wish people would stop listening to rumours and look for real information from real sources, like the linden labs blog that clearly states that they wont be killing or even phasing out SL any time soon or ever, if no one stops playing it.
Also shutting down the old SL would be a commercial suicide to LL, especially when SL2 is in its infancy. They need to have a safe harbor that they can return to in case shit doesnt go the way they planed it.

So ummm, LL hasn’t disclosed any specific information about how the game will work and what technology will it employ so its kinda early to say how eager i am to move to SL 2.0.

I would however be all for SL 2.0 if it had the following things in it:

Clothing and hair simulation.
IK targets (for stuff like holding guns right, no matter what shape you have, or your legs interacting with the surface you are walking on)
Custom bone structures (like ability to have finger bones or a tail or extra arms and all that stuff)
Morphs and joint morph targets (for adjusting the avatar’s shape and face, face expressions, hand positions, nice joint deformations and so on)(fuck fitted mesh)
A proper material editor maybe.
More useful script commands and no technical limitations like one particle system per script and so on.
A more informative compiler.
Special built in functionality in the client/server itself, for handling things like vehicles, weapons, sword combat, combat interactions with avatars(like punching someone would actually make the hit connect and move their avatar), scoring and other gameplay elements, to make games on SL perform like real games and not some disjointed laggy wtfisgoingon shit. Having this functionality built into the client/server instead of having to write complicated 54651531351 lines of script to do such seemingly simple tasks, that are impossible to do smoothly anyway because of all the fucking sim lag.
Proper key mapping in scripts, so you would be able to bind any keyboard key you want to a script without having to use gestures.
CUSTOMIZABLE CONTROLLS!
Creation tools that let you create meshes ingame.
User owned sims.
Bring back old sl features lost over time like water simulation, mirror surfaces destruction physics and rain.
A proper optimized client with a customizable UI and features.
Disallow third party clients.
A FUCKING LOG OUT BUTTON FOR FUCK SAKE!

But yeah, all of this is just wishful thinking, we would be lucky if even 1 or 2 things from this list would be implemented into the new game. And in general im a bit skeptical about SL 2.0, do you really expect someone as incompetent as LL, who takes 3 years to fix a bug, breaks 10 other things with their lazy fix and cant even do something as simple as adding a button to the UI. On top of that, a company that doesnt even understand its own product or its own userbase, ignores feedback, keeps fixing whats not broken, implementing shit that no one asked for, and keeps on making other pants on head retarded decisions, like shitting all over their front page and user dashboard with malware containing ADs, and keeps trying to take the game to directions that no one wants to go to.

And finally, remember this?how well did that work out?

Now there is a rumor that SL 2.0 is just a codename because secretly LL has been funding Philip linden who is working on his own project called high fidelity. But i do not see high fidelity as a proper replacement for SL because 1. Philip linden is a childish visionary that is still hyped up with early 90s concepts of virtual reality and doesn’t understand that no one really cares about that stupid shit anymore. 2. His project is all about live expressive interactions between players through their their avatars, using expensive motion capture and virtual reality equipment that no one in their right mind would consider buying. His game is all based on recreating that real life face to face communication (I dont think he ever heard about skype video calls) and is not really in tune with what the current SL is about. In fact, Philip left LL because SL wasnt in tune with how he envisioned SL to be when he created it. I just dont see how this would interest all the socially awkward shut ins that are playing SL. Also his game looks like ass in its current state.

– Infinite scroll –

As you all may have noticed by now, there has been a new trend going on the internet, that like all the other shit that breaks web site usability, most likely originated from the the pants on head retarded “web 2.0” scene(web 2.0 deserves a whole separate blog post by itself). It’s infinite scrolling, an idea that i can understand why it would look cool on paper, but in reality, it hasnt been thought through completely and just doesnt fucking work.

Positioning problem and hidden web site navigation and other elements.

Web pages that use infinite scrolling are particularly annoying to browse, it never says how many items there are and how many you have scrolled through already, its impossible to jump pages or skip to the middle or end or know how close to the end you even are. a lot of sites implement it in a really stupid way too, not having a side bar for navigation or any options regarding the scrolling itself. Not To mention that the scroll bar itself is made useless.

Crippling performance issues and limited access to website contents

Perhaps the biggest problem is, apart from effectively cutting you off from most of the website’s content, it doesn’t work on a technological level. The more you scroll down, the more items get loaded into the memory allocated to your web browser, and none of it unloads unless you close the tab, effectively turning it into a massive memory leek. The more items you load, the more your your web browser starts to crawl and choke on it till crashes. I do not understand why such an important detail as unloading is being overlooked like that, its impossible to browse the entire content because you will just crash and will never reach the end. I have a top of the line PC and even it cant handle this shit, i can only imagine how people’s browsing experience on older computers must be. And if your browser crashes, you have to scroll through all that shit over again to get back to where you crashed, because people seem to be too retarded to use the URL by adding parameters like ids and classes to it, to make it possible for people to go back to where they last were.

Websites that do get it right

Some websites arent as annoying and have a load next 50 items or whatever button but it still doesnt make it any less of a problem. Now there are websites that arent ran by complete morons and do it right, like the sankaku complex image archive thing, it uses infinite scrolling but it also tells you how many pages there are, you have the left side navigation at all time AND you even have the option to how you wanna browse, you can choose the old numbered page navigation instead, why cant anyone else have enough brain to do that on their sites?

Conclusion

Whoever thought of this infinite scroll idea, deserves to be shot in the dick with an air riffle every time someone crashes or just in general has to go through the inconveniences of infinite scroll. This cancer has spread out so wide already, that even websites like wordpress, flickr, youtube, image search engines, deviant art and so on have implement this shit. My blog has it too and i have no idea where the option to turn it off is, although its not that bad since you have navigation by date on the right side of the page.

 

-How to Contact a Second Life Content Creator-

Here’s a little something my friend came across, that i think everyone playing this shitty game should read (some, a few times even, till they manage to comprehend what is written here). well not really everyone cuz i know a few people understands these basic common sense principals but still.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/01/how-to-contact-content-creators.html

Pass this around.