Chalice Yao

A simple solution would be to dedicate whole sims to the telehubs (i.e. not allowing privately owned land in the same sim), and making the telehub buildings larger and more interesting. You know, like proper fancy teleport train stations ;P

I agree that the architecture should allow for an easy flight out during rez tho. The telehub scaling issue could be lessened in severity by -not- making everybody rez in at the same coordinates

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"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin

Argent Stonecutter

They tried that (Ahern/Morris and to a lesser degree Waterhead, for example). So the avatar traps moved to the edge of the nearest adjacent sims.

That's why land near telehubs was so expensive.

I got to see much more mainland once they got rid of telehubs. Before then all the mainland I saw was the track between the telehub and a handful of places I knew well enough to get to. And I rarely paid attention to it, because I was outflying any object rezzing and in some cases even terrain rezzing trying to waste as little time as possible reaching that red beam.

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Argent Stonecutter -- Skyhook Station -- Coonspiracy Store

"And now I'm going to show you something really cool."


The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

Atashi Yue

I haven't visited your area yet Daniel, but the other day I was in Beach City. No map, no teleport, no fly. I'm supposed to walk slowly around to find the new stores.

Same with Caledon, but at least there the stores were closer.

Atashi Yue

What's wrong with giving the customer/visitor the choice? If they want to walk and be "immersed" they can. If they don't have that much time, let 'em fly or teleport.

Immersion gets old fast when you visit often and have to walk the same route all the time.

Hypatia Callisto

The city dev needs to be given the choice, actually. Not all cities are going to be based on the SL model - some folks are building game worlds, which would function quite a bit differently, and may in fact need the ability to restrict these things. That's ok, if you are making a golf game out of your city. But you won't need a TELEHUB in a city like that, anyway!

But, an open world SL type city needs to be possible, too. It will just add to the many possibilities that you can muster. VSE was in fact smart to install their flycam in New Venice, and my prediction will be that cities with flycams are going to be hotter places to rent, just like sims without telehubs were hotter places to rent.

The only folks who mourned the loss of telehubs were the people who were profitting off them. They were truly dreadful for users, and it was wonderful to see them GO in Second Life. I in fact love that I can just put in the coordinates in Viewer 2 and go anywhere I want in a sim. It's a powerful feature, and I do like it.

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"To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"

"I suppose so," said Alice.

"Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."

"I call it purring, not growling," said Alice.

"Call it what you like," said the Cat.

Hypatia Callisto

Most people do not get the sense of distance, so if you only market to those who do, you're limiting who you are going to appeal to.

I see this all the time with folks, even in SL. Especially the social users. SL is great in that it's helped TRAIN these folks to perceive distance and navigate in a 3d way a lot better. I would argue that it got BETTER with the loss of the telehub, which limited how these folks could experience the 3d world - trapping them in commercial districts, sometimes unable to ever get to the place they actually wanted to go.

Distance, to our puny little brains, is a really difficult thing to grasp. It takes someone who has spent time LEARNING distance, so people like me - who has some training in the arts - gets it quicker in a virtual world than others, and some people never quite get it ever - my RL partner is one of those, who just never quite perceived what was cool about 3d, ever, and being in one actually makes him feel motionsick. What I am saying, the horrible truth, is that there are biological obstacles to mass acceptance of a virtual world, that far far transcends any "porn scandal".

And this is the power of Google Earth, which lets you truly explore the virtual Earth without being hindered by biological realities.

It's a fact of our biology, the way our eyes work, and how the brain makes sense of that information in a 2.5 way, that makes many people prefer the 2.5 d world.

People are really happy in a 2.5 d world - as Habbo Hotel and Farmville happily point out. It's going to be a hard hurdle to cross if you want mass appeal in a 3d world.

Beebo Brink

Add to that the time constraints of leisure.

In a rare afternoon I had enough time to basically try to run around the periphery of Caledonia. It was a wonderful adventure, one I still find memorable, but one I'm also unlikely to repeat because I simply don't have time to stroll through a virtual world every time I visit there. Hell, I don't have enough time to stroll in RL instead of driving, despite the health benefits and sensory enjoyment.

For all our talk of immersion, there are any number of concessions that we make or demand to fit this entertainment into the framework of our RL. Frankly, I don't find flying and TPing nearly as disruptive to my immersion as impatience. If I have 20mins to get inworld before dinner starts, I don't want to spend 5 of them just getting somewhere.

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Noob: "okay.... im in a house with cages and people in gags and the door just locked and i cant get out :c"

DanielRavenNest

You were not looking hard enough then. The map and teleport are on the bus kiosk that is right in front of where you arrive (spawn point). Although there are a lot of buildings in Beach City, the only active shops are right around the spawn point.

The AR Staff, who built Beach City, are horrible shopkeepers. The stores there are too closed in, you cannot see the items for sale until you are right up against them, and the shops were completely unmarked until we yelled at them. I think us other developers are doing better on those issues.

Free Xue

Ahem.

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"We're not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people."
~U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan

Desmond Shang

I do want people to log back in where they had last logged out (as an option), and/or their home and central spawn point.

There's quite a number of features coming, and in fact, I have big plans for the skies.

Towering moving clouds that people can barnstorm through, play in, or possibly crash into a mountain in, if they aren't paying attention... the ground visible in patches, far down below...

...huge banks of fog at sea, functional lighthouses (ignore them at your peril), whirlpools, you name it.

Can't wait to make animated mesh... it will do wonders for lava, and I need that kind of light clinkety sound of a moving lava flow (not sure how many of you are familiar with that, here's a taste of it):

Atashi Yue

Never saw it.
Why on earth would I go look around the bus stop??

Argent Stonecutter

You're role-playing waiting for the bus!

Free Xue

Just look for this guy, and you'll be all set.

Atashi Yue

You can see, in his pic in the upper right, a bit of an OPEN sign. When you "spawn" in that city, you don't spawn in the bus station. I saw the OPEN signs, and started waaaaaaaaalking that way.

Guess I'm an idiot.

Angela Talamasca

Wow, how rude.

As for beach city? Nice architecture, major shopping suckage.

They advertise 75 shops (were advertising 275 at one point) but there only appears to be a couple of places that actually have items. While you, Daniel, (for some reason) feel the need to protect them and claim that the 75 shops is actually referring to shelves, I find it incomprehensible that they, as the designers and owners of their platform ... who came up with the terms, shelves and shops, are so verbally challenged that they can't get their advert right.

That said, the lack of window dressing and the 10M draw distance before the items even rez is a big turn-off. Now, perhaps some will be happy having to walk into every single empty looking shop in beach city in hopes of finding content for sale. I for one however found it to be a royal waste of time. Though, I did like their escalators! lol

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Argent Stonecutter

Angela Talamasca

I think giving people options is important. Even so, imo, it will be up to each city dev to plan out and execute their navigation models. And some of their decisions will be driven by whatever it is they're attempting to implement. So, for example, if I were creating an FPS, I might not allow fly & camera panning unless someone reached a specific experience level. And even then, I still might not. It would really depend upon my game design. If otoh, I am attempting to create a sort of virtual social ecosphere, I could very well be interested in giving my visitors a variety of choices to include everything from flying to teleporting, etc.

Argent Stonecutter

Hey, I would certainly accept not being able to fly in a FPS "city".

I'd also stay the hell out of it. My skill level at these games qualifies me for a rating between "target" and "too easy to be worth shooting".

But for socializing and casual role play?

DanielRavenNest

OK, I guess "bus stop as transport hub" isn't an obvious thing. But then lots of newbies never see the "?" on the toolbar either (which opens a help page when you click on it). I hang around the welcome area a lot, and many people ask the same things:

"How do I move" (the ? icon tells you that)
"What is there to do here" (the big sign with the twitter feed tells you that)

One of the other designers is making a tee shirt with movement controls printed on it for that reason.

@ Argent - There are two kinds of draw distance in Blue Mars. Global, which is really high (1000-8000m), and per item, which can be adjusted individually. For some reason the shop shelf defaults to "10m", which by the way is "view diameter", so it's even worse than Angela said. I have to go and edit my display.xml file after its created to raise it to something reasonable for a store.

@ Angela - I wasn't trying to be rude, I just could not understand how someone could miss the map when its right in front of them when they arrive. I should have remembered people don't notice everything in front of them. I fully agree Beach City is poorly set up for shopping.

I'm not trying to protect them, I was explaining that they have their own quirky meaning for shops as used in their software, which does not align with everyone else's meaning on the planet. They did have 75 "one shelf shop entities", each containing one display case, and one item for sale. Everyone else besides them would call it 4 shops, now 6 with the addition of Estelle and Arzach's stores upstairs.

Options for city setup are a good thing in my personal opinion also. It lets us make cities that are *different*, rather than masses of more or less the same stuff over and over. But those options should not require arcane programming to set up. Preferably its check boxes within the city editor, or at worst entries in the level.cfg file, and they ought to give us some documentation how to set that up.

Argent Stonecutter

Seriously, though, how could a 10m diameter, or even radius, for *anything* make sense.

I'm not sure that doing it "per item" even makes sense. Base it on object size or screen area. Use a decluttering algorithm. Don't make people think about it, it's something computers do well and people don't.

Brenda Archer

THIS x 1000.

Not only are many users not computer literate, quite a few of them are barely literate, period. I spend a lot of time working with average users and most of them, unless they are office workers of some type, treat the computer like a toaster - you push a button and the toast pops up, and if it doesn't, it's broken.

The office workers are slightly better; they can tell that if I tell them to click on something, I meant left-click, and they know the difference between a file and a folder. Usually.

Another thing us nerds do not understand is that most people's eyes do not scan the entire screen. So here I am on the phone telling people to click on something that is at the top of the page at 11 o'clock... it can still be a minute or more before they find it. For a lot of people, reading consists of slowly moving across the page until you find what you were looking for, and that's confusing enough that people will call me only to find they were on the same page as what they were looking for. I suspect this is why the Google mainpage is as simple as it is.

Now add to the mix unfamiliarity with the conventions of virtual worlds or even of gaming, and you have confusion.

And this is for people with average eyesight and an average grasp of English. If I expected people to navigate only with complex signs in English I would be excluding more than a few.

Angela Talamasca

Okay, so they've made up their own definition. I see the whole thing as extremely misleading. The phrase, truth in advertising comes to mind. And this is not just for shoppers but for retailers as well.

For example, say I have one of those wild-hair days I am wont to have and decide I'm gonna rent out shops... erm... blocks. So, I set up a block with two shops and 10 shelves per shop. Or something like that. Am just pulling numbers out of the air based upon the limits that have been discussed. Anyway, Joe content creator approaches me to rent. He thinks he's getting actual shelves (you know, those things you can put multiple items on?) and real shops (you know, those things we sometimes call buildings with walls, floors, ceilings, doors, windows, to put "shelves" in).

Now, let's say I've quoted Joe a rate of, say blu$5K/month (i.e, the monthly minimum rent AR snuck into their last release notes, though, that actually applies to residential blocks & not retail blocks), and he's like, kewl! I'll set up one shop for sports wear and the other for some outdoorsy stuff, like tents, etc. So, you deliver the block file so he can get to work. And, to his dismay, he can only put 10 items in each store. So, he does his math and realizes he's gonna have to rent 5 blocks in order to display all of his items. So, now, instead of looking @ blu$5K/month, he's now looking @ blue$125K/month. And worse, he can't cash-out yet and AR has yet to tell us how long it will be before they have that avail.

Do you see the problem here? It seems blatantly clear to me.

Atashi Yue

Ugh.

Angela Talamasca

People are coming there to engage. Not to read a twitter feed or click help buttons. I mean, sure, they can pop in and spend the first several minutes clicking this and reading that. However, a simple, "How do I..." or "what is there to do" can be great conversation starters for someone who might not know others in the welcome area (or other cities, for that matter).

Really, Daniel. This is sociology 101. People may ask "so-called" stupid questions as an ice breaker. And, if the response is patient, and importantly, welcoming, then said chit-chat can move from an uncomfortable newb situation to an engaging, "wow, the people here are really nice, I'm def coming back!" situation.

DanielRavenNest

It doesn't make sense to anyone who has shop space, cause it does not even reach across the width of an average shop. For most items, it *does* default to a reasonable number (about 1 angular degree, or 70 times the largest dimension), but you have the ability to adjust that per item if you want to for special purposes, anywhere from very close to "always draw no matter how far". Choosing the latter can lead to bad performance, as the engine will try to draw to many objects per frame.

In my own city, I adjusted the view distance on the 3d grass (which has individual blades), and the trees, cause they contribute a lot to the triangle count per frame, and I added occluders around some items to cut the drawing load, but most objects I leave at the default values. I like having the choice to tweak performance vs looks.

I never took sociology in college, maybe that's why I don't understand people that well. Physics (my major) is comparatively easy, cause you apply some forces, and the same thing will happen each time. People are complicated, you can say the same things, and get a different result with each person you talk to.

On your Joe content creator example, since I do in fact rent shop space, and when people ask, I send lease info, that includes an explanation that "shelves" are single item vending units, and all the other stuff they need to know (like where to put the block file when they get it). And I tell them if they have questions, to ask, and I will be happy to explain things. Customer support is part of being a city owner in Blue Mars, otherwise you will have unhappy tenants that won't stay around long.

If you are gonna talk about "truth in advertising", how long has SL advertised "Buy Land", which both words have common meanings used in real life which everyone understands, but you actually don't "buy" anything?