Originally posted by paulscott

Originally posted by Faxxer

Originally posted by paulscott

Originally posted by Relentless02

Im not surprised, the game seems really sandbox from what I can tell, and who doesen't enjoy sandbox lol.

 

There's a differeance between second life and what most sandboxers want.    people expect to be able to travel about the world and be under one unified game: game mechanics, lore, and whatever else.   When you can't even take a weapon  from one SIM and use it in another that you frequent.

 

This is true about boundaries in game...

But really, don't you think it's just a matter of time until the slscript matures enough to let mmo style gaming in sims?  I know they "THINK" they have that now, but not like an MMO ...well let's compare it to AoC or SWG...  But it's getting closer and closer.

 

While I know from personal real programming experiance and experiance with LSL scripting.   I can say that LSL is massivly abused in ways it shouldn't be(causing lots of script lag), and in other cases current functions under utilized(meaning lots of dynamic things that could be there aren't).

 

However you will never ever see a MMO made on the main grid and with LSL, you'll see nothing other than a bunch of disjointed DMs+lands.   LSL is just not a real programming language and never will be able to be one.  

I would add..  "for now..." 

Even BASIC evolved into C++ no?  (I know, a bit of a stretch, but you get my point)

You can't say never, it's just not going to be limited to our perception of things....and there is always someone out there that will do it just to prove them wrong.

like a few posters above said, the difference between SL sandbox and a MMO sandbox is the continuity. yes you can be anything do anything create anything... but... one minute you can walk in a desert environment and into a funhouse the next and then into a club, and sometimes you can see all those things (if you set your visibility far enough. (this is on mainland) and then you have the lagfests prim clutter advertisement galore section that due to the intense bad scripting you cant move  a finger an dyou have to teleport out.

if you go on private sims, its small compared to a real MMO and usually the owners will be paying enormous amounts of money to keep them up. Some last a long time but most close withing a year or 2.

unification is the key word. when all players follow the same mechanics rule set. where the fundamentals are equal all over the place. when you fall, you receive X damage period. (unless assisted by specific items or skills that might do x-y=new damage. in SL you might be in a sim where dmg = x and the sim beside dmg = 1000+x. and the one beside  1000x=dmg.

Originally posted by Faxxer

When I started SL, you were lucky to see 25k ppl online on the weekends during peak hours...

 

RIGHT NOW... over 52k people are ONLINE IN THE GRID.  on a thursday at 10am....

 

There is a movie coming out about SL suppedly, though puts it in a negative light.

 

oh ya.... No instances either.  ALL Together.     MMO's should learn from this.

For sure, there are things MMO's can learn from SL.  

One of the best is the customizing of the avatars.  You can make, buy or build anything, and as a result, have your toon be ANYTHING you want.  Not only be anything you want, but actually look GOOD doing it to.  Sure, the base SL avi's suck, but the modded ones rule, and what MMO couldn't benefit from better looking and more variety of toons?

SL's inventory.  Man, everytime I run out of slots in an MMO, I flash back to SL.  In WoW, you get a starting pack of 16 items, and you can get bigger bags, but even the most decked out raider with a whole guild bank given to him self pales compared to SL.  My current SL Avi is at 20,000 items and many of my friends have over 100,000 items...my WoW toons get , at most, including the bank, 200.

In addition to the number of items, SL items are vastly more complex.  In WoW, for instance, folks go "ooh and aah" over a glow sword with a spinning thing on it.   Big deal.  Try hair with 500 independent moving strands, clothing that flows, gear that fully deploys and so on.  I have a neclace where every link shines, and rotates and is comprised of 140 parts.  The cool thing, all SL itmes count as ONE object in your inventory, so the my 20,000 items is more likely 250,000 (Prims) items on a typical MMO.

Behavior and effect scripting in SL could add depth to MMO's be allowing players to create scenarios, quests, mobs and much more.  Likewise, the ability to build from scratch would be cool (as it is in SL).

All this said, SL is not really a "true" MMO in the way most folks see one, even though SL is far more true to the terms "MMORPG" and "Sandbox" than any game out there.  In fact, the only dispute there is, would be if SL is a game or not; for it is online, massive, has more RP than any MMO I have ever seen, and is so Sandbox that it lacks consistancy from place to place (as a poster noted above) due to the sheer stupendous amount of variety of each land (There are thousands of lands).

So yes, MMO's can learn from the better aspects of the SL, and even from the not so good parts too... like the bugs and lag... as in how to avoid those.

And yes, SL... love it or hate it... is growing.

Originally posted by paulscott

 

 

While I know from personal real programming experiance and experiance with LSL scripting.   I can say that LSL is massivly abused in ways it shouldn't be(causing lots of script lag), and in other cases current functions under utilized(meaning lots of dynamic things that could be there aren't).

 

However you will never ever see a MMO made on the main grid and with LSL, you'll see nothing other than a bunch of disjointed DMs+lands.   LSL is just not a real programming language and never will be able to be one.  

depends on how you define MMO.  there's something i think called Dark Life, that is a small land that has like a mini dungeon and an outdoor area and you have the same dice rolling RPG mechanic based combat with very simplistic and unanimated (or poorly animated) mobs.

while LSL does suck and lacks many things of a "real" language, there are usually workarounds that would let you do almost anything.  anything the API allows.

but they DO have plans to add  C# as an alternative to LSL eventually.  they've implemented a MONO virtual machine as a precursor to that already.

Originally posted by corpusc

Originally posted by paulscott

 

 

While I know from personal real programming experiance and experiance with LSL scripting.   I can say that LSL is massivly abused in ways it shouldn't be(causing lots of script lag), and in other cases current functions under utilized(meaning lots of dynamic things that could be there aren't).

 

However you will never ever see a MMO made on the main grid and with LSL, you'll see nothing other than a bunch of disjointed DMs+lands.   LSL is just not a real programming language and never will be able to be one.  

 

depends on how you define MMO.  there's something i think called Dark Life, that is a small land that has like a mini dungeon and an outdoor area and you have the same dice rolling RPG mechanic based combat with very simplistic and unanimated (or poorly animated) mobs.

while LSL does suck and lacks many things of a "real" language, there are usually workarounds that would let you do almost anything.  anything the API allows.

 

but they DO have plans to add  C# as an alternative to LSL eventually.  they've implemented a MONO virtual machine as a precursor to that already.

That's rather fascinating!   I can't imagine what kind of business boost a REAL programming language supported in SL would bring... 

Imagine going to college for 2+ years just to be an SL scripter for a living!!!!   it could happen in that instance, and we're talking about REAL clams here.

an SL scripter used to charge 3500Lindens per hour to create for someone, and anyone deep into SL knows how AMAZING some of these crafted items can be (I'm reminded of some of the complex games that used to be online before gambling was ganked)

My favorite items of course:

My VERY LARGE working Enterprise 1701-A that I fly and shoot with full sound effects and torpedoes, my weather making machine that has twisters and thunderstorms with lightning (lol love that one cause it makes snow too)   Love my perfect looking Storm Trooper suit for my avatar. I have several versions of R2D2 that can patrol, chirp, and animate as I see fit,  and the best, i know it's the simplest one too....  I can dance like a real pro in SL in the clubs whereas in real life i have 2 left feet.  booya!  makes me into a stud. :P

I might go jump back into Second Life been 2 years since I last played

Theres something in Secondlife for everyone. For some though the newbie shock just is too much. My advise to anyone trying second life is to talk to people, and get help. There are tons of freindly people willing to help, for that mater shoot me a tell my name in SL is the same as here Arra Jinx.

Originally posted by talismen351

 Also there is only one server...for the entire world...so in most any game it wouldn't be that much of a streach to have 52k accounts logged on.

If you are creative minded, this is a great place to build n create. But be honest...majority are there for the sexual creativity.

Old post, I know, but still relevent and I'd like to make some points.

It is blatantly false that there is only one server for the whole world. Each sim is run on one pc core within a virtual server, each physical server runs quad core processors so there are 4 sims per physical server, with the exception of the openspace sims which run 4 per core.. 16 per server. I don't know the exact number of sims online atm, but the last hard number I saw was over 13k. It's pretty easy to see that there are thousands of servers that make up the land cluster, and this is not including other utility server clusters such as the asset server and backup server.

In short, for all intents and purposes you are being handed off from one server to another any time you cross a sim border. This is why there are sometimes (lol) problems with border crossing or teleportation.

Other games such as WoW use many different server setups as well. It's not just 1 server per realm. Each realm is a cluster of clusters, and some clusters are a part of/interact with multiple realms, such as the battlegroup battlegrounds instance servers and again there are utility server clusters such as the login server.

I do understand what you meant though. You are talking about having one contiguous space with no loading screens. I think we've not really figured out all the scaling issues that come with that.. in the context of using it in a game. Yes, SL does it. SL is not a game in a very real and technical sense. SL limits the amount of people who can be in one place at once via sim controls and also any event is usually known about and appealing to a very small portion of the population. Default is, I believe, 40 avatars per sim. Depending on how they are "dressed" (yeah I'm looking at you in the 500 prim 2 pc hair that I "felt" as a lag wave as soon as you landed) you can have decent performance (no prim attachments, no AO) or you can absolutely tank the server (blingtards). If you know what you're doing, and can control your visitors well enough I have seen 120 people at once on a private sim during an event. This is very much the exception, and crashes were expected, contingency plans in place. Now consider this in a real game environment if you had 50k+ people in game concurrent and an event was going on. Many more people would be involved as they are all playing the "same" game and interested in doing anything new. I can give a direct example. Entropia Universe uses contiguous space in just this way. No shards, everyone shares.... the lag. The evil, aweful, terrible lag that happens any time there is an event and everybody tries to crowd into the same spot. The game darn near grinds to a halt, or crashes altogether. It's just a bad idea until a solution is found... and this is why games with a substantial number of people (with the potential for many to be in one area) are sharded. The network scaling just isn't there yet.
 

I've been in SL since the time when you would only see 5k online concurrently. I do remember the day when 1 million accounts was hit (yeah, it was a big deal.. they put 1 million up on the sun for everybody to see). I've seen many milestones so I've been around the block more than once with SL. I know a bit about the tech. I've created, taught, bought and sold. Just so you understand that I have a deep understanding of all there is to do in SL. With all this said, I have never felt the need to partake in any of the sex play that goes on there. This is not to say I don't recognize that the people who created the things neccessary for people to do this have chosen a popular market heh. More to point out that it is possible to have a "full second life" without that playing any part whatsoever.