Why I am unlikely to return to SL in any way apart from a few minor activities

[ordinal]

I was talking to a friend earlier on the subject.

me: You can't hang about waiting for things to get better. If it's not working, you have to do something else or die.
me: Once your natural reaction to ideas stops being "hey I wonder how that could be done in SL"... well.
them: its over
me: And it's very hard to go back.

It isn't really a choice. One needs a medium to create in. That has been Second Life, but when that stops, when SL stops feeling the right place to go, it isn't as if one just stops thinking. The instinct to express one's ideas in SL has to be - painfully - redirected towards something else... prose, watercolours, interactive fiction, HTML5 games, something. And dragging it back to SL is just as painful a process as moving it away. I don't want to put myself through that again.

Comments

[emceeaich]

While I'm sorry to see you leave the platform, I understand.

It's hard to build capability in new tech while building things on new platforms.

This, however, is interesting to hear.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/09/23/second-life-inventors-expanding-gaming-universe/

[ordinal]

To be honest I don't really know quite what that means - I'm familiar with text IF systems and interpreters but am not up on the latest news.

Easily the best system around at the moment is Inform. Nothing else comes remotely close; it has the best natural language interpreter of any language ever, and I don't say that lightly, and also generates z-code and blorbs which are easily run by assorted open-source clients (at the moment, on iOS, Frotz is the major one). Inform shocks me with how good it is.

If LL is going to fund and promote Inform and Inform client software that is terrific. I have no idea what if anything it would have to do with SL, but it is still terrific. On the other hand, it could mean nothing like that.

[emceeaich]

I've heard of Inform and have Frotz on my iPad, but as HTML+JavaScript becomes the lingua franca of client side development (using Phonegap to make them into native apps on iOS and Android) I think there's an opening for a JavaScript platform here. http://gnusto.mozdev.org/ is the only port I found, but that codebase has languished since 2004.

See also: http://www.choiceofgames.com/ and http://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescript-intro/

Oh damn... it's on GitHub and written in JavaScript!!!!!!!

[ordinal]

To be fair, the z-code format hasn't changed for a decade or so and never will, so if it worked back then it will continue to.

[emceeaich]

Well Rod Humble's said that the post is just speculation, but LL is in a position to leverage serving people's creations and know how to do currencies.