Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Yet another must-read from Gwyneth Llewelyn

In "No More Limits," Ms. Llewelyn lists some constraints on SL that are purely artificial, or that had some justification in the past that no longer makes sense. In particular, after her description of LSL, I'm amazed that anything gets done in SL at all, and have even more respect for those who write scripts. (The characterization "a triumph of engineering over design" seems appropriate in this context.)

Read the whole thing, including the comments. If you're not pissed off, as the saying goes, you're not paying attention... and I have to wonder how long it will be before, say, OpenSim starts to get rid of some of the artificial limitations.

1 comment:

Gwyneth Llewelyn said...

Aww just saw your article today... thanks for the link, and please call me "Gwyn" like everybody else does ;)

Indeed OpenSim lifts almost all restrictions (you can compile scripts in other languages besides LSL — C#, JavaScript, or VisualBasic are already supported, and compilers are external plugins, you just launch the one for the language you like best), or, perhaps to be more honest, those restrictions are configurable — meaning that you're allowed to tweak the settings of OpenSim so that you can do what you wish with it, within the limits of your hardware and available bandwidth.

For instance, you can have as many prims per region as you wish (default starts at 45,000 :) ). Setting at a million is fun, but very likely, you won't have enough bandwidth to support all the textures required for that... but the point is, that's an option for you, the region's owner and manager, not a hard-coded limit.

Linden Lab is introducing their new Class 6 servers "soon" — we can only wait and wonder if they're considering doing some changes on those limits, or at least allow us to play a bit with the settings. We'll see!