Friday, May 2, 2008

LL Declares War on Content

With this post LL declares war on Content, and says that avatars are just filler for all those lovely screen shots. Now I can understand this, they are selling Second Life now to corporations, and corporations want to see hardware because they are run by... well you know.

That means to pack more avatars into that screen shot that the corporation is paying so much for, they need a way to keep the cost per avatar down. Now I admit, Lillie can be a cow. Jewelry, dress, hair. I can be oh, 1000 prims on an ordinary day.

This is why people are going to have to realize that Second Life is changing. There are going to be player areas, and there are going to be corporate areas. Corporate areas are going to be packed with 15,000 prims in 100 meters of vertical space. Avatars? Wear a couple of pieces of clothing and the simplest hair please. It should also be noted that they really hate bling in their ratings.

SL is changing, you can bet this is a corporate "pack more bodies on the sim" request, and that's fine for what it is there for. However, people are also going to have to realize that they need to spread out, rather than rushing like sheep to crowded places. People flock to lag, because what they want most is to meet other people.

But just as LL is about to start trying to pound everyone back to 2004, so too is there now enough space and creativity to build spaces that are avatar friendly, as much as LL wants us to build avs that are space friendly.

This isn't about teaching us how to make good 3D content, it is about the realization that processor is limited, and since the warped market of Ll doesn't charge for it yet, it gets over used. And the corporatocracy wants to give people only as much processor as is needed to see the lovely screenshot build that they paid 100,000 or more for.

This means that there is "their" SL, and "our" SL, and residents need to reject this attempt to make everything into "their SL." Especially when LL burns up processor as if gasoline covered it.

3 comments:

  1. Lillie - the figures shown are for client-side rendering costs, that is the amount of resource on your PC rendering requires, not the amount of resource on LLs servers. The *only* one the will have an impact on LLs servers is keeping track of the number of the position of prims in attachments - although as attachment prims have lower overheads than otherwise this isn't as significant as you might think unless you have vast numbers. Flex, transparency, particles, texture mapping etc all only impact on the users PC - and of course this can easily be reduced by using faster and more capable PCs, particularly the graphics card capabilities - although I seem to recall you were complaining a week or so back about having to upgrade that. Can't have it both ways hun :-)

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  2. When I see similiar tool for 'object rendering cost' I will trust words about it's for residents and not corps more.

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  3. let's face it, we are starting to have a large lag footprint. regardless if the difficulty is in server side or user side, it is about time we tone down a bit or patronize shops that makes efficient use of prims...:)

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