As a sign of Linden Lab's continued focus on its new mobile app, the company is hiring an engineering manager to grow the offering:
We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to help bring Second Life to mobile devices. This is a technical lead role, reporting to Second Life's Viewer & Server Director of Engineering. In this highly collaborative position, you will write software, architect new systems, mentor staff and manage a small team responsible for bringing the mobile Second Life viewer to life.
Pretty good salary range too, paying $140,500—$223,000/year where you're able to (mostly) work remotely. Job requirements include building "strong relationships between internal and external teams, working closely with our mobile development partner, Sine Wave". By which they mean Sine Wave Entertainment. whose CEO Adam Frisby recently gave us a long, detailed breakdown of the app's evolution. So if you're thinking about applying for this role, maybe read that first.
Speaking of which, a couple points Adam made are worth repeating -- how the SL community can better support improvements to the mobile app, and how SL user creators can prepare to sell content for mobile users:
Advice for creators:
I'd much rather SL creators do what they like, and we figure out how we can make that work as best we can.
That said, let me provide some tips for those who do want to follow them: microtriangles (see also) are difficult for us to handle and result in lots of overdraw, atlasing textures also does help keep draw counts down - but focus on keeping the total texture count low (and re-using), versus preferencing atlasing, if you have a choice.
Migrate to BOM and use alphas, the older solutions don’t play as nice (in theory) on mobile as the modern ones do. The other one is a big ask, but would make our lives a lot easier - please include real LODs, or let SL calculate them, when you upload meshes. Each LOD level should be ~50% of the polycount of the next; if you just stuff the same mesh into each LOD level, we can’t use them, and have to start doing our own thing; that said, if even one of the LOD meshes is appropriate, we’ll use it - so if you must, inject just a “real low detail version” into the lowest LOD level. We’d much prefer to render a real avatar than an outline, but that comes down to memory and rendering budgets; and giving us options lets us make better choices.
Advice for SL mobile users:
The best way to help is to continue sending in feedback and bug reports. We've been reading every single comment, criticism, bug report and bit of feedback out there (the feedback site, forums, Reddit -- you name it) -- we know there's still a lot to do, but it helps us guide our priorities.
The other thing that really helps us is sending bug reports using the in app bug reporter, it doesn't seem like much, but it gives us a lot of technical information besides your comment -- and we can use that to reproduce faults more quickly and accurately; we invested a lot of time into that tooling and it really does help out. [Option in pic above -- WJA]
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LINDEN Labs says they are hiring but Don't actually hire qualified candidates. Hints why they continue to see failure with this app. Over qualified individuals like myself have offered assistance too be ignored or denied totally.
Posted by: The VR President | Tuesday, August 20, 2024 at 03:46 PM