Inara Pey’s blog post regarding the article in The Register about Second Life being a failed technology, raises some really interesting points in the comments. I’ll pick up on some of them with a blog or two. A good starting place is a comment from Ezra, who feels that in many ways Second Life has failed:
Features roll out half-ass (mesh without deformer, shared media 2 years before everyone has a viewer that can see it). Some square peg in round hole features gain little traction at all (who needs pathfinding and quasi-AI without riggable NPCs? Only so much willingness to swap sculpt maps to fake it.)
Good points, I don’t see these points as equating failure, but they are points worthy of further discussion. Mesh did seem to be rolled out with buildings and props in mind, it largely works well in those areas, but it does seem short sighted not think people would want Mesh clothing. Hence this oversight started to give birth to Qarl’s Mesh Deformer Project and it’s still in labour from what I’ve seen! However this is a feature for which residents raised funds to bring to Second Life. although it is of course a project in co-operation with Linden Lab, the oversight is one that makes people feel that Linden Lab don’t see the big picture.
Then we come to pathfinding and here again, we have a project that in some ways is putting the horse before the cart. The lack of riggable NPC’s is not the be all and end all of pathfinding, but the main thing I want to do with pathfinding is NPC’s and without riggable skeletons, it’s a bit of a damp squib for me. There are workarounds, they’re a bit cumbersome. However what I see as a decent use case for pathfinding isn’t what someone else will see as a decent use case and that’s both the beauty and the beast of Second Life.
The thing is, even if Linden Lab cross every t and dot every i before rolling out a project, someone will cite a use case they’ve missed. Should Linden Lab have waited until they had a Mesh deformer for clothing and riggable skeletons for pathfinding? I have to say no because the likelihood is, these projects would never have seen the light of the day.
There’s another useful project in the works, which Linden Lab announced back in August and that’s the materials project in collaboration with the Exodus viewer team, in particular Geenz. Linden Lab have started to get the code onto their servers, not in the wild yet, but they’re getting there. This should improve graphic rendering. Will it be perfect? Probably not, but it’s progress.
Getting the right balance when introducing new features is tricky, to say the least. The softly softly approach is probably the right one, but the big fear is that progress will stall leaving us with what some perceive as a half assed solution, if that happens then people will forget about the feature and not develop with it much. These things need time to evolve, but some communications about progress, wouldn’t go amiss.