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.

One of my favorite prim-only builds is an Elemental Air/Land/Sea vehicle - it uses the same prims for all three main forms, but changes prim parameters to form a boat, plane, blimp, hovercraft or car etc. you can't do that with sculpties or mesh. Granted it's very simple and minimalist, but it dates from an era where vehicles were rarely made of anything more than 31 prims due to physics and LI counting methods of the time. And it was free! One of my favorite mainly-sculpty builds is a hairdo from Curio obscura that also serves as a cake delivery system, with swaps between sculptmaps and textures to change toppings and frostings. You can't do that as easily in mesh without some severely heavy polygonal overloads, and prims wouldn't be able to simulate some fruit shapes. You can have a hybrid approach to using mesh, sculpties and prims. Each of those building blocks comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, so a wise builder would not immediately discount anything that isn't mesh but examine what they require of the build and choose accordingly. Some of the strongest builds in SL are the ones where the creator has chosen to play up to the strengths of each kind of asset and not make mistakes like using one kind of asset to do a job that can be better done by another.

What I would give for a full implementation of CSG prims instead of the dumb "addition-only" approach we now have. carving holes in prims that are more unusual that the standard cylindrical/triangular/square holes, or making strange new shapes that are the intersection of two different prims. We also lost the ability to define connections between specific prims in a linkset very early in the Second Life beta. bring that back - imagine actual working windchimes banging away in the breeze? or even easier definitions of rotations between joints in a prim-based sculpture. There are a lot of possibilities in a prim-based approach - if only LL had continued banging down that door hard. Even if you needed a final publish to get it out into the world as a mesh everyone could see (booleans can get expensive very fast in realtime), perhaps you could have a mixed object format where the original prims are preserved, but the baked mesh resulting from all those operations is what makes it into the world. such a shame. still, at least it's still open to being used for prototyping and roughing stuff out inworld, prims.

You've seen Bernie Sanders' Mittens. Now, behold... Bernie Sanders' Kittens! https://flic.kr/p/2kuMFDZ

Dreams can run on PS5 in backwards compatibility mode, and the game is coded in such a way that it can take advantage somewhat of the PS5's increased capabilities to run more detailed Dreams. MM is working out how to take fuller advantage of the PS5 without breaking the game too much for PS4 players (e.g. allowing players to create PS5-only Dreams or author Dreams that contain optional additions that trigger only on PS5)

We may have erred in underestimating the true strength of these terrors. Time to correct our mistakes.

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.