[b]Second Life / There / MUSHes / The Well:[/b] "We wrote The Torment Nexus as a precautionary tale. Please do not build the Torment Nexus." [b]2020s metaverse wannabes:[/b] [i]sticks exactly the worst possible appendages into the "Torment Nexus: GomJabbar Edition" from Meta[/i]

LL needs to look into temporary suspensions of fees for Russians as much as it did for Ukrainians. The people of both countries are united in terms of being massively hindered by the situation, albeit for different reasons. Driving people who never asked for this out with monetary pressures strikes me as a bad move, even if LL has its hands tied on the movement of money to Russian CCs.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. What are the chances Meta will listen to Gwyneth when they won't even listen to first-party veterans they hired from the field?

You were warned. You were warned by someone informed by past experiences and scholarly observations in the matter. You ignored it. Meta, this is why the news that was already bad when it occurred on a smaller less-watched virtual world blew up twice as hard on yours - you didn't think to work on blocking/reporting or permissions tools. Now, suffer. Also: Pool Closed Due to COVID-19.

It also doesn't help that Second Life avatars regularly push far more triangles in total than VRChat. Even allowing for the use of some triangles to mitigate limitations in Second Life (e.g. parts swapping due to lack of user morphs, shelling for multiple-layered textures), SL users regularly push far more triangles per avatar than VRChat reasonably allows, allowing for models closer to render-quality at the cost of terrible realtime performance especially in busier areas without mitigations like jellydolling of excessively loaded avatars. VRChat also imposes lots of additional limits that many SL creators take for granted or don't have to deal with such as limits on simultaneous noise playback, polygonal usage on particle systems, or even flexible volumes that can be interacted with by other users in unpredictable ways. SL's avatar approach is muscle-car. VRChat's avatar systems are more finely tuned for performance across the board. Which one is better depends on what sort of look you were aiming for and what you wanted to do with it.

Medhue: " At a 62% commission rate, it's impossible to have an economy" ROBLOX: *laughs in 70% commision rate plus minimum 1000 USD cashout* (granted, ROBLOX's economy is not going to last in its current state, especially once people figure fully what a gyp it is)

The Idolmaker is an atheist, for he knows what the gods are made of.

This is how you give ROBLOX problems: get the content creators unionised and demanding a bigger cut of the pie or they all purge their content and walk.

Well, until you get your actual mitts on access to Horizons Worlds, any feelings you have are personal and they can be as biased as you want - and frankly, you're not the first person to find it a little janky coming from Second Life. Summer: Horizon Worlds is targeted to a standalone Quest 2. unfortunately that limits what shaders and geometry are allowed. if SL had been forced into the same limits from day 1 it would have potentially looked closer to this than it does to the renders we see all the time.

We've had our share of highly priced items for a world with few people in SL?. Remember Eshi Otawara's fishhook dress? The OOAK Dominic Shadow made and auctioned for charity? it seems not a year goes by without a charity auction of some really inexplicably priced item somewhere. And I suppose the value of it is whatever the buyer percieves it to be, even if the majority of us disagree or are unaware of it.

Put it this way: in the real world, we all each live in some different and separate part of the Earth. You can take a trip on various transport methods to shift your location to some extent if you desire. But the thing is, not everyone will necessarily want or need to make a larger shift than that accomplished by a short car/bus trip or a walk or bike ride. The same thing applies to the Metaverse: even if you offer interoperability, there's always going to be a group everywhere who is mostly content hanging around a small part of the metaverse rather than having to experience every single major bit of it. There will be travelers, and there will be homebodies. Doesn't devalue the existence of a world any more or less that the latter exists. They're content with what they have access to, and it's in no way demeaning that they decide not to go wild all over it.

A good search engine should be initially streamlined, but offer plenty of additional ways to hang your query in specific ways. This version goes pretty far in that regard, but don't expect anything fancy like Boolean searches (like anybody younger even remembers what those are anymore.)

They're going to force the 29 different takes on the Haunted House in SL to shutter in favor of their proprietary blend served up in their own metaversal theme park. Betcha on that. It would be wise for Theme park owners in SL to start planning and designing their own unique properties instead of adapting EPCOT or Disneyland, however stage-accurate those adaptations are.

Facebook has the technology to track people as anonymous holes filled with various data points rather than actual identities, based on FB API scripts tracking people across various sites who haven't logged into Facebook in any way. Once Facebook gets over its hangups and obsessions with realworld identities and falls back on this tech instead despite its reduced accuracy, they will have a seat at the table. Until then, it's more likely the chair will be pulled out from under them by any number of firms that understand experimentation with identity is metaverse 101.

And Second Life has two decades of user-generated inertia behind it. Let's not discount the very silent whale in the room.

That agreement is no longer tenable with the new ban as it locks away a tonne of products produced with a lot of work. It is up to the organizers of gacha events to issue a blanket waiver allowing normal resale to the people they've previously worked with, and it would make for one last bit of goodwill before they go down, even if they're not obliged to allow folks to break those terms. And as you've shown, it's also up to creators to decide whether to convert their items to normal sale, or let them fade away quietly into the past.

The loss of sims as a result of gacha being taken away from the allowed sales methods will depend to some extent on how much space a sim has dedicated to gacha sales or resales. Once the gacha machines are totally gone, the supply of resale gacha will become actually finite as no further new gachas go onto the shelves. Once the gacha are gone, the sims that specialise heavily in this stuff will have to pivot to other uses or go the same way as Ozimal bunny resale fairs. if simowners are to keep their holdings sustainable post-gacha, perhaps they should consider sponsoring up-and-coming content creators or working on new sale fairs or other niches. There is always a demand for something unusual, and people need to look for these demands to fill.

Where Lumiya stopped would have been a better start. Still, this is a good start as long as progress continues.

I wonder if they would be open to hiring anyone who's prepared to move to one of these states or San Francisco as a condition of employment.

You can come back, and you don't have to leave if you don't want to. That's it, that's all there is to returning to a forum or world you came back to.

In fact, the Fox Entertainment Channel has regularly broadcast shows that mock Fox News, and on some occasions even itself with minimal repercussions for the creatives involved.

Twitter is recovering. Trumpism was a tumor. Now we just need to keep the chemo going until it's all gone.

This was a fun April 1 joke, but it ironically also exposes some glaring weaknesses in how LI is managed in SL based on land acreage rather than volume occupied as well, making multi-storey communal home builds like this generally a failure unless all residents are prepared to respect a shared covenant that covers this LI sharing strictly. Still, it was nice to briefly dream about owning a home like this for real in SL.

Given the current state of SL's shader engine, optimization is often a murder victim when flexibility is desired in any build. This needs fixing or this issue will persist with all mesh builds, not just heads. (Disclosure: I have never bought into any of the standard mesh heads - I do have most of Utilizator Mode's work in this regard, and I don't regret one moment how different I look to others as a result, even though this complicates skin matching. The lack of polygons really helps drop my render costs slightly even as I stick to conventional mesh bodies and fashions.)

Conspiracy theorists are the same everywhere. Crackpots even on the rare occasion that they get it right, which I certainly doubt this is one of those cases. Regardless, I wish Oz Linden a happy retirement and hope he doesn't become a stranger. Drop in every now and then, okay? SL isn't going away anytime soon.