Having followed Cyan Worlds, makers of Myst, I am well aware that their having made the most popular game prior to the SIM’s did not lead them on to block buster follow ups. Until the Lindens know they have a sure thing, I feel they will maintain a high interest in SL.

Linden Lab would not threaten its own cash cow for so long as it is the cash cow. That being said, the development of new products that have nothing to do with the flagship product of Second Life is a clear indication they are building things which will appeal to an audience that Second Life does not – being the casual gamer with slightly more complexity. This, in itself is not a direct threat, but still remains as a long term threat because the demographic the new products are targeting are a much wider range than Second Life, and so are targeting the very idea that a much larger user base on the new products will develop into the new cash cow to supersede Second Life and eventually erode the importance of the current flagship product offering.

From my point of view, it stands to reason that the expansion into other products is an executive based decision to find a product to increase revenue streams, and ultimate create a transitory phase into a new line of services and products since Second Life is seen as a niche audience. I would imagine Rodvik is charged with increasing the revenue streams and thus income of the company, and he’s not likely to do that with just Second Life, or even with Second Life as a product offering. Whenever a company sees their flagship as reaching the pinnacle of what they can get it to be, they immediately start looking for the replacement flagship while supporting the current flagship as not to spook the current cash cow in the process.

Take this as you will – over the next few years, the shear number of people in the target demographic for the new products will outnumber by far the demographic niche of Second Life, and thus will become the new cash cow. It’s the long term planning approach.

I have a small number of “base” outfits. They only have the biggies in them: shape, skin, hair, tattoos, ao. Things that if I ever wanted to change, I’d only want to do 4 times, not 50 times.

When I build a new outfit, I wear everything and get it all looking just the way I want it. I save it as an outfit, but only temporarily. In my inventory, I have a folder named #outfits. I create a new sub-folder and copy over the items that aren’t in the base outfit (shoes, pants, watches, etc.). Then, I delete the outfit.

When I want to change outfits, first I decide on which hair style and tattoos (if any) I want to start with (the actual Outfit, in viewer terminology). Then, I go to my #outfits folder, find my outfit and right-click, Add to current…

It seems like a lot of hassle, but it becomes quite easy to manage with repetition. The advantage is that I don’t have multiple copies of the same outfit where the only difference is hair style and if I ever switch something big, like AO, I only have to update 4 outfits.

How would you rework the viewer to separate the current system into something where body and clothing work independent of one another? I don’t know, but …

I used the outfit feature for a while, but I find the CTS wardrobe more convenient, so I’ve switched to that entirely. It’s been wonderful for me

I basically have a nude avatar that is my base like you . However, I don’t change my hair as much, so that’s in my base avatar.

Then I add or remove my various outfit folders, which include shoes (and for skirts — I put in skirtshapes as well). Also I have separate folders for set of shoes and accessories.

The best thing about the wardrobe is that if gives you a place to have pictures of all your outfits. (I don’t want to have my pics on my computer, I tend to throw stuff out, and if they were in SL they would take forever to load). And the second best thing is having a search feature that makes it easier to find (and remember) different features.

They also have a pretty nice support group

Well, v1.26.3 also got multi-layered clothing support now…The Cool VL Viewer is the only v1 UI viewer to support it…

“The Cool VL requires one to have the Snowglobe Viewer installed”

This is not entirely true: without the Snowglobe archive to extract the proprietary components from, the Cool VL Viewer would lack voice and the faster texture decoder, but it would still work.

“I can’t find the Force Mesh Deformer except in Debug Settings”

It’s there, in “Advanced” -> “Rendering” (“Force Mesh Deformer” option), at the very bottom of the menu (it’s greyed out till you check the option “Enable Mesh Deformer” above it).

“I can’t get the Mesh uploader to open”

Alas, under Windows, mesh upload doesn’t work because of a bug in the VS2005 compiler. This is anticipated to be fixed after I will have migrated to VS2010. Under Linux (and MacOS-X) mesh upload works just fine.