I’m still alive, and still working on SL stuff as time permits, but I have to admit that lately I’ve become addicted to real 3D and haven’t put quite so much time into Second Life as perhaps I should.
After playing around with Shack Dougall’s PrimComposer long enough to build several things in Max that I was relatively happy with, I had gotten pretty stoked to build a new weapon or two, and resumed working on one that I’ve had ‘in the works’ for over a year now. Unfortunately, within a very short period of time, I had once again run out of steam due to the intense frustration of being limited by Second Life’s poor excuse for 3D, and the thrill of using a much better building tool/environment than what SL provides had already started to lose it’s luster.
Even sculpted prims, as big an improvement as they were for creating exciting new shapes, have so many quirks and limitations that a quick Google search will return hundreds of articles from people trying to squeeze the maximum precision out of something that Linden Lab freely states were never meant to be in any way precise. And in any case sculpted prims need, with very real few exceptions, to be created in a 3D modeling program, which kind of flies in the face of the oft-bandied argument on the forums that regular people are too unintelligent to learn how to use such programs.
You can argue all day long whether the existing in-world building tools are more beginner-friendly, more ‘network-efficient’, or more ‘fair’ or whatever, but the simple fact of the matter is that when it comes to quality and flexibility, they are unarguably substandard. I don’t think I would be exaggerating even the slightest to say that I can probably show hundreds of examples of Second Life builds that would be far more efficient in terms of client-side rendering, network transmission, and texture usage if they had been done by even a moderately skilled 3D modeler.
All of which is completely beside the point, of course, since it’s simply not an option within Second Life, and any arguments made about the benefits of allowing so-called true mesh import are more likely than not to fall on deaf ears. And therein lies my problem: I’ve simply grown very fond of being able to do *real* 3D modeling and use the results of such in games. It’s as fun, addictive, and rewarding as Second Life used to be for me when I was but a wee newb.
So I’ve been working once again on game development, something which had been my primary off-work pastime before I found Second Life, and quite frankly I’ve been having a blast. What once was an endeavor requiring ninja-level C++ skills, the mental strength of a polymath, and a deep understanding of the arcane intricacies of hardware design has now become somewhat easier with C#, XNA, and ‘teh Google’ as powerful resources freely available to anyone. Combine all of that with some of the low-cost and fully-featured game engines targeting the indie game developer, and it’s simply too hard to pass up.
I do have many things I still want to accomplish in Second Life, and I still enjoy it quite a bit. I’m not in any way giving up on it or whatever, I’m just having lots of some fun outside of SL for now. And from the sound of things, the grid is having way the hell to many problems to be missing me right now anyway 
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Not just mesh importation. (I think collada would be awesome!)
Bump/Normal Mapping, Parallax mapping, and ability to write your own shaders would greatly improve the experience of SL without grinding peoples machines THAT much. (it’s just a texture basically if you can’t handle it won’t matter.)
Been working with a game engine called Unity3d and it’s not only fairly easy, things actually work when you tell it to do something.
http://www.unity3d.com Mac only development though.
Just a pesonal update btw: I’m super swamped right now with classes and stuff. More than I expected to be..so sorry been gone so much. Archs working on C:SI stuff still, not dead yet as well.
Almost done for the year. @.@
It’s good to hear from you guys. Even though the C:SI community is really what the players make it, I think many of us can agree that we feel you devs are still the heart of the system. There is the obvious sense that we wish to know that in case the game is borked, there remains some hope for fixes. But also that the devs are oldbies too, and friends. But we realize too, that RL is RL. We all need to find balances between responsibilities and playtime (although for you guys I’m sure it’s more like worktime and worktime). Hope to see you in-world soon.
Yeah, whatever man! I’m jealous
I’ve been wanting to use Unity3D since it came out, but I just don’t have the money to get a Mac. Everything I hear from people using Unity3D seems very positive, and the feature set rocks. And it’s not even expensive as game engines go.
I keep hearing rumors that they’re working on a Windows dev environment. I hope those rumors are true
In the meantime, I’m stuck with a game engine that was cheap and has a lot of features, but really isn’t very good and a lot of stuff is broken. It’s better than having to write my own engine entirely from scratch, though, and I hope I never have to do that kind of thing again, haha.
Yeah, real bump mapping or normal mapping would help with the visual appeal of SL tremendously!!! Unfortunately, it would kind of add to the whole texture-saturation problem in the near term, but one would hope that ‘teh Lab’ has plans for improving that situation in the long term.
Speaking of grinding people’s machines, it’s not like SL is legacy-friendly now, haha. It already has a reputation for not running well on older machines, and with the introduction of real-time shadows LL has already explicitly specified that some features simply won’t be supported (or enabled) on older hardware, which I should think is likely to become more common as SL evolves.
Yeah, the community by and large doesn’t really need us, haha. It’s actually a pretty cool feeling that the community is so large and active that, except for some uncommon problems, I’m pretty much kind of ‘hands-off’.
Even when I’m not in-world, everyone should feel free to send me an IM or notecard if there’s an issue. I will always try to make time to take care of any problems that arise.
I will hopefully see you in-world soon!