This for some reason looks like a trash bin on fire on a boat on fire on a river on fire. it is a TBOFOBOFOROFMMORPG.

The tighter limits imposed after these attacks can be either looked upon as a hindrance or an encouragement to better ways of working. Having to precache your rezzes in advance rather than forcing a massive storm of rezzes in a hurry means having to be more methodical about planning your use of assets and the timing of said rezzes, as well as give viewers more time to cache them prior to viewing. Having to limit your text comms use means learning to be more concise in what you pass to the user and to objects, resulting in less heavy data use from wall texts. This also has follow-on benefits when doing comms between scripted objects and the outside of the grid. Being unable to truly create new assets directly in world without a bot in the line means you plan your scripts and object design more carefully to gain the variety you need. A wall is sometimes just something you prop a ladder against in order to climb higher.

You know what the good thing about taking small profits as you go along rather than repeatedly soaking up the costs for a big payout is? You can reinvest the profit immediately in your ecosystem and you get an earlier warning when what you're doing isn't working out and your losses can be cut earlier.

This is unfortunately where bigger VR companies like Facebook-backed Oculus may win the day - all they need to do is to work on the capability to self-destruct VR headsets, continue to seek reductions in the cost of producing their gear, and push a massive effort to get their gear into the hands of potentially interested parties on something akin to a 'shareware' basis: provide a taster of the most popular apps on their platform, on a limited timer, say two weeks to a month after initial bootup, after which users will need to pay the full price of the headset to continue its use or wind up with a brick that does nothing. Charge a small amount on each trial, sufficient to cover postage and acceptable wear and post-return sanitization/recycling. This will sadly mean a major spend into the hole for many companies initially as VR headsets, even the cheaper WindowsMR-kind rather than the premium I/O offered by Oculus Quest or SteamVR-native headsets, aren't cheap. Expect further losses as less-honorable parties attempt to hack their way through the bricking of the headset or even break apart expired headsets for the components in them. The hope here is that the people who do try and like the concept enough to pay the full price after the trial will number sufficiently that things break even (at this point, this is all any business not directly involved in coping with the pandemic can hope for - profit of any sort is a dream) This would also be limited to VR solutions that can be set up by a layman right out of the box. Anything more complicated - multi-axis treadmilling, room-scale VR that isn't just "stick a bunch of doodads in the corners of the room", any form of glove-area haptics etc. - is out and will require a trip to a showroom or physical exhibition that isn't happening anytime soon. Ironically, any VR platform that has a decent access method that uses only mobile or plain old keyboard and mouse will probably do better at least till the pandemic is under control (it is not, not right now). Not everybody has a VR headset, but penetration of access to keyboard or mobile is very high in so many places, the only upset right now is the fact that cryptomining has become popular again in recent weeks - which may put a strain on the availability of GPUs for use in higer-graphical VR systems in coming months as well...

The "Marginal Cost" I am referring to in the original comment is the extra cost needed to pump out one more unit of the same product. I already referenced the costs that would be incurred regardless of how much of the product is sold - the R&D, the modelling and scripting, tier for inworld shop space, marketing, ensuring bloggers get their paws on free product (Blogotex costs money to maintain) - but once all that is past, when you buy a dress in SL inworld, the merchant incurs basically nothing in the way of extra costs for most products unless they require some form of service external to the LL-provided grid's servers (e.g. Smartbots bot script execution, networked fishing game systems) . The only way marginal costs for a product could fall to less than zero is if LL paid creators a subsidy on every unit sold, a situation that is really impossible.

After the initial costs of tier, tooling, marketing, blogotex access, customer support, and hours worked, the marginal cost of these products is close to zero on the merchant's side if the sale is done purely inworld. Merchants on FLF and Secret Sale Sunday and other similar "ridiculous price hour/day" schemes do them because they're betting the volume they get in return on the product as well as the eyeballs on other normally priced items will pay off. And it probably does, because this is a tendency that has long had legs.

*sits down on a plywood prim with a blocky cigarbox banjo* I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can, so I can bed Taylor Swift inside the Oculus Rift... *blinks blankly* *coughs* Boy, mixing Father Misty and Corey Hart is NOT doing it for me.

In this comic, Nylon Pinkney points out that the new version of Last Names Linden Lab is now offering is basically about asking too much for too little. #TLDR Seriously, the offer needs a rethink.

Would be interested in this session being recorded as well, as the times mentioned only cover half the globe and neglect people on either side of Europe and the Americas. As pedagogy-at-home becomes more common, more educators may be interested in this system especially in light of how messed up Zoom can be at times.

Extra points for the original hack using the classic pre-Internet parody ad for "Big Bill Hell's" *goes back to practising their challenge pissing to try getting no downpayments*

That's not how this works! That's not what it means! xD

This coming weekend promises to exacerbate the problem(?) of coronavirus failing to push an uptick in social VR: on 20th March they'll be releasing a new Animal Crossing game and a new Doom FPS that have been hotly anticipated for weeks (to the point where their entirely disparate fandoms have started posting love odes to each other, a peculiar data point in a gaming scene where opinions on what is good and what is terrible have generally been polarised heavily.). Several major musical acts around the world have been (2d video) livestreaming their performances such as Dropkick Murphys and the Melbourne Orchestra, with all indications that they will certainly not be the last.

I so badly need to go to this event. Also: Alexandra - there's always something disagreeable to someone happening in SL all the time. Unless it touches on a major universal no-go like pedophilia or Naziism, I can't see any point in being outraged rather than merely unsurprised and disappointed with some folks.

Adeon: given LL's recent refocus on Second Life, and the epic messup that the EEP project has become, Ebbe may not be averse to putting him in a position where he can work this into the main branch of the viewer AND get paid. We are in damn the torpedoes mode here - the only thing keeping LL afloat atm is Second Life, in the absence of any major signings of other VWs or MMORPGs with Tilia as a payment RWC-to-gamecash gateway. Perhaps it's time to make a few brash moves rather than be eternally cautious.

Black Dragon is a viewer with a niche appeal, but it is a surprisingly wide niche. Consider dropping a dollar a month in the tin if you can!

a niche concept aimed solely at a niche IO peripheral was never going to work out. We'll still need screens and keyboard/mice for a while longer.

A mistake was made. The mistake was costly. Hopefully going forward, Linden Lab can make decisions about Second Life's future that help to mitigate or even obviate the losses of Sansar entirely. Because consider the alternative is SL following Sansar into ignominy, rather than gracefully flapping its wings occasionally with new features in a controlled glide like a well-kept legacy platform with still much creativity and community running rampant in its fields.

How about Second Life, Sinespace and There on Stadia and NVidia, Sony? Most of the content on these services is streaming rather than time-critical, so the latency hit that would be the deathblow of twitch games would become relatively inconsequential so long as it's kept to within 2 or three seconds in total per input-output loop. Obviously the less latency the better, but we can put up with a bit more.

$50 a year, I meant. that's $5 a month, not a big ask. Made a mistake in my original msg.

$50 a month to keep the lights on at Flickr, as well as a reasonably bottomless storage bin for photos (not just the ones that are publicly published), a reasonably termed photoshare system, a relatively basic social interaction system... plus discounts on photoprints and Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom CC. I've paid for this every year after the first year in 2013 I was gifted Pro. I think it's not such a big ask to put the cost of a frappucino down every month towards supporting a good tool.

Requiring Residents to comply with real-world tax requirements while not providing proper access to transaction records required to fulfill that request strikes me as a form of neglect.

Yeesh! With viewer comments like those, who needs impostor syndrome?!

@NiranV: Propose altering the viewer so that users can either file abuse reports alleging offensive/bannable poses, or use the Poser, but not both at the same time (i.e. if the Report Abuse panel is brought up the Poser temporarily disables all client-side posing, allowing only inworld animations to play during the screencap as collected by the Report Abuse panel, until the report is fully delivered to LL. But I would say that it would be better if this too was done on the down-low - there's no pleasing some people.)

This may be a bit problematic, but the product is not available for sale at Hextraordinary atm. Perhaps the proprietor could look into it to take advantage of the good publicity.

NiranV: am aware of the constraints you are innovating under. Appreciate you're trying your best to get us what you and other folks would appreciate in a graphics-specced viewer. Hopefully one day those responsible for saying no to potential improvements to the viewer simply because it means a little more upfront work are replaced mentally or totally by people who are actually capable of saying yes in early-era wonderment instead of no in conservative fear.