brinda Allen (she has a nice blog btw) commented on the iliveisl blog post about what a membership is worth and brought up an interesting perspective. it's probably obvious to many, but it was a different thought to me. basically (i think) what brinda was saying is that you can't gauge what Linden Lab is working on as far as performance goes. oh sure, viewer releases do address specific bugs and introduce new features, like the internet on a prim thing, but what about other areas?
as i said before, i don't see a big diff in performance today compared to three years ago
sim crossings still suck hard
i much prefer the way they work in Reaction Grid . you hit the sim border and bump against it till you can cross over. so you don't end up way far away and i have yet to ever fail at a sim crossing (now it's hard to judge because subQuark has 16 private sims and there are only 5 of us working on it and it's not loaded with scripts)
i did see some nice changes in SL like being able to link further prims together, but i have not seen any performance gains in three years that made me go “wow” . or even any significant changes that made me notice much. i am sure that zillions of little bugs have been fixed, but those were bugs
i know that it's all still pretty new and all you have to do is look at OpenSim which is still in Beta
MA. . . Linden Lab has like 300 paid employees to work on the overall experience (i know it's not all developers, but still, 300 is a lot!). when i think of that and then that there are only 3 people running Reaction Grid, suddenly it seems that SL is severely lacking in being that much better
now Second Life is better in many ways over OpenSim, but when you take into account 300 versus 3 employees and $295 versus $25 for a sim, well the diff in performance and features is not directly proportional. second life is good, but it's not 100 times or even 10 times better. and remember that OpenSim is mainly worked on by volunteers and that anything OpenSim does can be used by Linden Lab (personally, i think the performance in reaction grid is better and i don't care about no in-world money and i like that it can be used by little kids in school) =)
the internet on a prim has been in the works in both for a while now and OpenSim already has some of the things working that LL has talked about, like facebook login into a grid. and Kyle at Reaction Grid should have a very nice mobile client out this year
so back to what brinda was saying – you can't really tell what LL is doing as far as behind-the-scenes hardware and so on (thus the phrase behind-the-scenes!). when LL was ramping up to launch Second Life, the cash expenditure must have been huge! buying hundreds of servers, setting up all the logistical parts, hiring new employees, and so on (is that called burn rate? the spending rate of the $$$)
since LL is private, they don't need to disclose this info
non-adult Ener
so are they still investing at a similar rate into the things that will improve performance? or are they doing things that are highly visible, like the website redesign, which has no impact on existing residents and in-world performance? (and evidently, they think only white women are the worthwhile demographic!)
during this past year, it's easy to justify trying to survive and LL has been expending money on the website redesign and in buying XStreetSOL
(i am so sophomoric! SOL!!!) =p
doing the Linden Homes seems like a lateral type thing. it doesn't help in-world performance and since i can't seem to ever hit my home sim, i am kind of assuming that the overall experience may be pretty sketchy (read: FAIL)
oh, and it cost LL some serious paper when they put the Adult policy in place. what a support nightmare that must have been in moving all those people!
Cristopher Lefavre 4:02 il 18 marzo 2010 Permalink
Sembra grande, almeno per quanto visto sul mio cellulare / me seduto con il piccolo schermo in faccia - in attesa di visitare il luogo, quando torna a casa a un internett praticabile (che è inferiore al 100% la perdita di pacchetti lol).
7:07 iliveisl am on 18 marzo 2010 Permalink
grazie! eh su un cellulare? Oh, il post sul blog o siete in grado di ottenere nel mondo? =)