A Farewell to Qarl

...and possibly to improvements in the appearance of Second Life, too.

Qarl Linden is the main person responsible for sculpted prims, which have revolutionized the appearance of Second Life. More recently, he's been similarly responsible for work to bring meshes to Second Life, which made it to closed beta, but may not make it any further than that, because Linden Lab has laid Qarl off.

This is a guy who helped with visual effects on some movies you just might have seen: 300 and two of the Matrix movies. He is highly enthusiastic about Second Life, as one can tell from his blog: "...i really do love second life. SL is the coolest thing on the planet - the world we’ve all built is literally incredible - beyond belief."

...and LL laid him off.

I fear this means we can kiss meshes goodbye. Incredibly, I've seen an assertion that this is a good thing, that you should be denied the improvements that meshes make possible so that some SL builders can continue to sell their stuff without actually having to like, you know, learn something. Mind-numbingly stupid, as was the decision to lay off Qarl Linden in the first place.

So... I will be doing a few things:

• Burning my sculpties in protest
• Closely following the ModRex project in OpenSim
  

You'll recall that Miriel Enfield closed her store and stopped making things in Second Life. In her words, "...I quit because I was frustrated with a lot of things, especially SL's artistic limitations, my own inability to work around those to my satisfaction, and my belief that LL is not going to ever give me the features I want." How long will it be until the really good content creators similarly give up on SL? Having features like mesh dangled before them and then snatched away is only going to hasten the flight.