The consensus so far actually seems positive. I like Sansar, too. It's simple, unique, meaningful.

I signed up the other day and though I had some trouble actually finding SL in the Onlive Mac Desktop app (even after you purchase a subscription, SL is hidden under three submenus) I've been impressed with it so far. My only complaint is that being limited to the 720p resolution you really are making a tradeoff. My older mac can now handle shadows and AO pretty nicely even though it's stuck using OpenGL 2.0, but with Onlive I can extend the draw distance to 512 and still have a high framerate without putting any strain on my hardware. Even if they cannot fully open the debug settings for use, it would also be nice if they increased the RenderVolumeLOD factor for the viewer.

@Adeon, I agree, and I think we should always build with the default viewer in mind, emphasizing deficiencies in TPV's. The default viewer has worked so well over the past year or so and especially well this past month. I'm generally acquainted with alpha-blending issues, the distinction between 1 bit and 8 bit masks, and the problem with gradients, nevertheless I could not understand most of the observations Malaprop was making in her blog post. Hopefully we can write a clearer introduction to these new features and add it to the wiki eventually. In any case, I'm excited to finally try my hand at mesh foliage.

Can't wait!

This changes everything. SL will explode on Steam with Normal and Spec maps. Look at the sucess of Team Fortress with it's USG and free to play model. People spend hours on that platform just on the chance that one of their 3D models will be approved. I predict boom times are ahead. This is a very good day for all of us who have invested in SL, especially the content creators and land barons. And the Exodus viewer team was behind some of this? Thank you LL and whoever else made this happen.

Hamlet's post was pretty motivating, and I felt momentarily inspired reading it. Then I read the comments and remembered what a pessimistic bunch many of us SL users are. What a drag!

I'm so surprised people think that common SL problems are somewhere hidden in the code. Each sculpted prim has 1024 polygons and people use them for everything. If you want to solve lag, ban sculpted prims on every new reduced-rate sim sold. Make people pay for script use and lower per-sim prim counts. Sculpted prims never should have been created to begin with. Giving builders better tools will not only attract the thousands of hobbyists out there, but it will help us build a more efficient and stable world. Specifically, we need Normal and Spec Maps ASAP.

There are so many young people who have taken up 3D modeling as a hobby and participate daily creating things in Blender forums, vimeo and other sharing sites. It's what photoshop was for people in the aughties. SL is just perfect for these people. SL is already advertising heavily in Blender forums, but it would be great to see some attractive features implemented quickly, even if in a buggy state. Specifically Normal Maps, Spec Maps and maybe custom skeletons. These features could attract hard core users quickly. SL already has everything else nicely developed, it just needs these features.

Famous SL designer Maxwell Graf also has a large island visible as a skull on the horizon of Aristide's. In the past week most of my friends have moved to CP too, and to top it off my CP neighbour is a Linden! I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, especially the Facebook logins, but it would seem a migration is certainly taking place.

Argh, in haste I changed my display name not realizing it would still connect with my FB picture and account. Now I'm stuck with my FB picture and account and my SL name, an even worse position than before.

Normally I dismiss most of the privacy concerns people raise with Facebook, but I'm with PussyCat 100 percent on this one. VW's that want to build a 3D asset marketplace like Cloud Party and SL need to attract mature and professional 3D hobbyists, not only the type of people who play Zynga games every day. Farmville is a ridiculous and quite possibly the lowest comparison one could make when we consider the type of community I think most of us would like to build. I can remember the day I deleted all my games from Facebook. I never went back. Everything I do on FB has professional repercussions, more than LinkedIn or any other platform. No amount of privacy options will ever lessen that anxiety. As comfortable and excited as I am by CloudParty, I'm staying away for now.

I wrote a long response, but I can't for the life of me get this blog to post it, in short the website above is wrong, the main website is under the first planet partner title.

For the last two years I have been watching Entropia closely as they introduced the Cryengine, converted game assets, and introduced the planet partner system to encourage third-party content creators. I'm fascinated by the system they've developed but never enough to actually spend much time inworld. I suspect you're probably right about the reported earnings being exaggerated.

Signed and shared. Let's give this everything we've got!

As much as I would like to see everyone adopt mesh viewers, I don't think taking options away from SL users is ever the answer. The solution to raise mesh adoption should always be to create more mesh content that people would like to see. If the neo-Luddites see me as a disembodied head, it's their problem. I agree with biffingbiff, I'd like to see the mainland revamped with consistent low resource builds like those in the Linden residential land reserves ( http://youtu.be/FasibEZik24 ), they can even make them vampire themed if they like. I also like the idea of the extra animations and am surprised a dedicated viewer-side AO in the main viewer wasn't mentioned with better default animations. Adeon, I googled MOAP but still have no idea what you're talking about . . . mobile oriented applications platform?

I haven't had any problems at all in the past month, and I've been shopping like crazy. Let's hope that they implement direct delivery soon!

$10 per month, preferably with Onlive, the Gaikai experiment was buggy and I don't think they have the resources to pull it off.

This may be a silly suggestion at this point, but I would like to see a check box next to the "shininess" and "bumpiness" preferences in the prim editor, that allows the settings to be limited to dynamic lighting. In other words, if the box is checked the "shininess" and "bumpiness" settings would not be seen by viewers who do not have dynamic lighting enabled. It's hard to explain, if you haven't seen some of the new bump mapping features that have been implemented, but a builder can only build with these features if the shininess setting is on. The effect is amazing if the viewer has dynamic lighting enabled, but if you don't the shininess setting ruins the build for everyone else and completely obscures any non-dynamic effects like baked specularity and AO. So, I and I'm sure many future builders will be hesitant to use it at all knowing that their builds will look terrible to those without advanced lighting.

Well I love the new graphic design on the site and in the individual advertisements. The Linden Realms ad looks polished, and though I find the typography in the title a bit cheesy I can identify it immediately with the sort that appeals to fantasy rpg gamers. This video on the other hand is completely embarrassing. I appreciate that they were able to enlist the help of real SL celebs like Renn Yifu, but that segway-looking hovercraft looks awful. What is worse, they chose some of the most annoying music. I would never share, post or even like this video on any social network. A proper ad should include catchy music that people would actually want to listen to, that prevents them from ending a video prematurely, not bottom of the barrel public domain stuff.

I agree with Adeon's comments. I had never been to a welcome area until yesterday when I visited Linden Realms. For the full duration of my stay (20 minutes) two young men from Iceland were belching and making racial slurs on the voice channel. There were also 8 obscenely ugly and tacky avatars just standing there, deliberately created to represent cultural stereotypes in the crudest fashion. Someone should have been there to at least teleport them away from the welcome area.

I'm down with the 3rd party API, and love Qarl's suggestion for making the rezz process more Tron like. These type of visual metaphors go a long way to communicate what's going on at a technical level. I think the dedicated downloads should happen invisibly though, maybe just make the cache system smarter.

When the old Blue Mars client used the individual downloads for each environment I always had to second guess the commitment and usually logged off instead. What would improve immersion for me would be creating a more dynamic draw distance system. So that you can set the draw distance extremely far and not have such a massive decrease in performance. In game design on Unity for instance there is a fade in and out from dynamic to baked rendering based on the distance you are from an object. Hypothetically, given that mesh objects can use completely different meshes for each LOD, you could hide the baked rendering in textures on a piece of geometry that only appears at a specific LOD. Similarly you can collapse interior geometry at a more distant LOD, replacing it with 2D textures, thereby reproducing the economic use of system resources we see in professional development environments like Unity. If you designed an entire sim or set of sims in SL in this manner you may be able to create environments that appear as massive and majestic as Skyrim. The mechanics are there, we just need good design and (unfortunately) a significant amount of money to even experiment with these things at a sim level.

It's a beautiful environment, but I agree with Orca and Yordie. I wish there were real people in that environment and meaningful creative tasks that could be accomplished. No matter how large or dynamic these sandbox style games become, I still feel unbearably lonely playing them. More importantly, I feel like I'm wasting my time. People who spend their time in front of a computer are often accused of shutting out the real world—accused of a certain solipsism by those who prefer the wild raging fleshy parts of life. I've never been able to respond to this criticism with satisfaction, even as their worlds often prove in time far more ephemeral than ours. I think though, that if I were to try again, I'd tell them that there exists a real choice even as we sit staring at the screen . . . a choice between the real world and one inside our heads.