What do we know about Project Sansar?

[GaiaKitten]

Ya'll forgettin SL was not an overnight success nor did it come freshly packaged with everythin handed to you. I remember entering SL like what is going on here, it took me months just to grasp it and years to learn how to develop my own spaces in SL.

 

Of course Sansar is not even in Alpha yet, and they are just testing things right now so they can't tell you what will be available until they get a stable, cohesive build. I believe content creators migrating from SL will have an advantage over people who are new to virtual platforms and maybe SL will become the playground in which you can test things before 'stepping up' to Sansar with its more complex, though I find more appealing, approach to design and packaging what you want to put out into the world.

 

SL is whatever YOU make it into, and it looks like Sansar will also be whatever YOU make it into, just prettier which is fine by me, I can't wait to go there and test it and do stuff and break stuff and learn from my mistakes and evolve my understanding of code and 3D modelling beyond what I'm already comfortable with

 

Gaia Kitten ==

[323starlight]

I agree with you Gaia Kitten. Though with how Project Sansar has been promoted, the whole thing about democratizing the process of making a gaming experience, I kinda thought that ment the content creation system in Project Sansar would be easier to use and understand than it was in Second Life.

At least... When it comes to making the physical appearance of the content. Its the programming part of content creation that will always be difficult.

[Dresden]

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323starlight wrote:

I agree with you Gaia Kitten. Though with how Project Sansar has been promoted, the whole thing about democratizing the process of making a gaming experience, I kinda thought that ment the content creation system in Project Sansar would be easier to use and understand than it was in Second Life.

At least... When it comes to making the physical appearance of the content. Its the programming part of content creation that will always be difficult.

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"democratizing the process of making a gaming experience"  What in hell does that mean?

...Dres

[323starlight]

Just looked it up. It means making the process of making a game a little easier and available for everyone.

[Dresden]

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323starlight wrote:

Just looked it up. It means making the process of making a game a little easier and available for everyone.

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Which means absolutely nothing to the likes of LL.

...Dres

[irihapeti]

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323starlight wrote:

Its the programming part of content creation that will always be difficult.

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is interesting what we each find difficult. For me the scripting/programming part is the easy bit. I can script most things pretty quick. peckity peck peck and done

next easy for me is building with prims. plink plonk plink and link and done as well

painting tho. I cant do

technically I can, but nah! I am forever unhappy. Like I made a prim when I first started. Is perfect in shape and form. Is the most perfect thing I ever made. Except that is not finished yet. bc I cant decide what texture or even what color it should be. Is terrible, I sometimes think I need get counselling about it (:

my inventory has all kinds of unpainted things in it, that I made. plinkity plink peckity peck and nearly done. They still waiting tho for my inner painter to emerge (: 

[323starlight]

Just goes to show how we all have differently strengths and weaknesses

[Medhue Simoni]

Sorry, I haven't been around much in the forums lately. Good to see you around again Darrius.

 

If LL is trying to go in the direction of "pro" creators, then Sansar will fail miserably. I seriously doubt they are going to do this, although their wording does seem to imply this. And, if a Linden is reading this, allow me to ask, Why would I create an "experience" in SL or Sansar, rather than in Unity or Unreal? See, there are many fatal flaws in the "experience" concept. Currently, in SL, you can't even sell an experience. So, the only way to make money on 1 is to run it yourself, and do all the marketing that that entails. If I have to do all that, then why would I make it in SL, and make my customers jump thru all LL's hoops? It's nonsensical.

Even if we are talking about "pros" making all the content in Sansar, it's a crappy idea. First, there will never be enough content. You need thousands of artist to fill the needs of the consumers. Go look at any of the marketplaces with content for games. When you strip out the completely unusable crap, you are left with almost nothing. The vast majority of game content is still made custom for the games. Heck, I wish this were not the case, but it is.

Here's a good example of what I'm talking about. Recently, my client wanted to make a wolf the main focus of 1 mini game for their world. They thought, no big deal, just find a decent wolf online and Medhue can animate him. The CEO and I went on skype going thru all the different wolves he was finding online. There were hundreds, but every single 1 had issues that made them unusable in the game, whether the format, the detail, or completely unusable fur effects. So, I had to make the wolf. Nothing fancy, but it did cost them. They also allow me to sell most of the things I make for them, or I just wouldn't make it, lol.



 

My point is, that if LL is going to limit the content in some way to only allow for "pros", then they won't have very many merchants. Daz3d, Renderosity, Unity, and Unreal, all moderate their content. Selling on all of those marketplaces means weeks of approvals processes and possible fixes, as well as paying them more than 30% in commission. I won't sell on them because of all that, and just sell thru my own marketplace. I have purchased off of all of them and found crap I would never let thru. Things that would cripple your whole scene, whether for video, a game, or just rendering, and it still got thru. They waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on this flawed quality control.

Again, I seriously do not think they are going this road. They have already said that the format will be FBX. I made my wolf with Blender, and I have that wolf working in both Unity, and Unreal, using 2 completely different FBX formats. That wolf is also on a number of other 3D web applications, all which accept FBX. If LL does their FBX importer correctly, and the taxation isn't too high, my wolf will likely import into Sansar easily. LL is only letting select Maya users in now because ............ Well......... IMHO......... they don't understand how powerful Blender is, nor it's community, and that Blender is kind of surpassing Maya in so many ways.

[Darrius Gothly]

*waves back*

I read your entire post Medhue, and I found one section in particular that sums up the points I've been trying to make about LL for some time:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

... they don't understand ...

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[Medhue Simoni]

If LL wants to do "experiences", then they should use the suggestion I made awhile back.

You have to ask where the bottleneck is. There is no shortage of texture artists, or graphic artists in SL. There is no shortable of mesh creators in SL today. You could say there is a shortage of animators, but you can't say there is a shortage of animations. The bottleneck in every single game engine, is competent coders.

LL has coders.......

So, the only way I see "experiences" working, is by LL creating the vast amount of them, and handing them to the community to do crazy things with them. The community could just take that code and run with it. And...... really, there are only so many types of games. LL just creates the core of each type of popular game out there, and the community goes nuts with it. Plus, this then allows anyone to create their own RPG, or FPS game, or puzzle game island, or whatever. To me, this is good for everyone. The coders at LL get to really code games, which is much more fun than VW crap, and the community gets good efficient, workable code to create crazy games with. It's 1 thing to clone Street Fighter in Unity, and a completely other thing to do that in a virtual world gone wild.

 

[Medhue Simoni]

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323starlight wrote:

What else is there that we don't already know?

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Just to answer the OP.....

 

We know nothing that any person with basic 3D knowledge could not have assumed from the start. So, we know nothing about what specifically Sansar is beyond the basics. Seriously, we could have asked any game developer creating a virtual world, and they would have said the exact same thing, almost.

[irihapeti]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

The bottleneck in every single game engine, is competent coders.

...

So, the only way I see "experiences" working, is by LL creating the vast amount of them, and handing them to the community to do crazy things with them. The community could just take that code and run with it. And...... really, there are only so many types of games. LL just creates the core of each type of popular game out there, and the community goes nuts with it. Plus, this then allows anyone to create their own RPG, or FPS game, or puzzle game island, or whatever. To me, this is good for everyone. The coders at LL get to really code games, which is much more fun than VW crap, and the community gets good efficient, workable code to create crazy games with. It's 1 thing to clone Street Fighter in Unity, and a completely other thing to do that in a virtual world gone wild.

 

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if was me designing this then I would use Properties and surface them in the Build Editor

the SL build editor has Properties exposed for static things. Shape, texture, etc. Set this and they are applied to the object. Same as in other types of design-time editors

take this to the next level: automation

examples: texture loop, omega rotation, particles, etc

these are also SL object properties. To apply them in SL we have to use a script. Once applied to the object then the script is redundant. Rather than require a script to set the property, set the values in the Editor at design time and voila. done. No script required to start bringing our objects to life

+

the next level of automation is puppeteering. Meaning the movement of a object

the most complete example of this in SL is vehicles. Again in SL we use scripts to set the parameters/properties of the vehicle. Once applied then it moves. These to can be exposed as design-time properties. Add a Active property for Stop/Start and voila. done

+

taking it down to things like Rotation, MoveToTarget, etc

design-time properties can also be used here. No script needed

Rotation is the main one that slays most people. Things like: swing swings. door opens closes, wheel rotates, etc, can all be done just by setting the Properties of these at design time

+

Sansar is using C#

properties are a inherent part of the design of C#. If Sansar exposes these at design-time as they are exposed in other C# design editors then will be good

basically the design imperative of this approach is to remove scripts from the workflow as much as is possible

is still possible to set all properties with a script. Is just not required. Not requiring this (for most things automation) of artists and creatives is the biggest additive that can be given them 

i would be very surprised if Sansar is not designed liked this. I be quite depressed as well if is not 

+

eta

is the enabling of automation as design-time properties that is the light jump over other game/experience build engines. If Sansar has this then LL will have the jump

 

[Nikkesa]

Oh god if they do nothing but try to clone IMVU and add some vehicle fun then I'm going to laugh and never even look at it.

With instanced worlds though, I'd be surprised if they didn't let people create their own stuff. With more freedom on creating things, I wouldn't be surprised if a whole lot of hobby-developers would be motivated to create cool things (so long as there's lots of freedom...

But yeah, seriously if what I'm reading here is true and they are just aiming to re-create IMVU with the oculus rift and some physics, then they are wasting so much potential it's not even funny. It's too bad the people paying for all of this see something like IMVU and decide that it's the best way to make money This game is going to get destroyed by businessmen.

[Parhelion Palou]

I'm not sure where you came up with the idea that LL might be building anything like IMVU. Sansar is LL's new infrastructure for virtual worlds, but this time LL isn't going to create their own world. They're planning on selling/renting their infrastructure to people & companies who will create their own virtual worlds (which LL is calling experiences).

It will be a couple years before LL manages to release Sansar and for people to create worlds with content. I'm not worrying about it.

 

 

[Nikkesa]

Ah, I was thinking more of the only allowing content to be provided from "approved professionals"...

[Medhue Simoni]

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Nikkesa wrote:

Ah, I was thinking more of the only allowing content to be provided from "approved professionals"...

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Actually, that is not how IMVU works. Anyone can create in IMVU, but only products that get approved by 10 other creators make it to the marketplace. So, it's basically a peer approval process, which is kind of BS. That said, I've never had anything rejected, but I've also not made that much for IMVU. Why? Because IMVU is a scam for creators. IMVU take a HUGE cut too, cause you have to associate your items with 1 of IMVU's default objects. So, if IMVU charges 600 units for their default, then you add your price on top of their's. On top of all that, you can't even cash out in IMVU. You have to use a 3rd party, and they will take about half your money in the process.

To sum it up, IMVU takes about half, or more, when you sell, and then the 3rd party cashout take half again. You are left with basically nothing.

[Sassy Romano]

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Parhelion Palou wrote:

 They're planning on selling/renting their infrastructure to people & companies who will create their own virtual worlds (which LL is calling experiences).

 

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Yes and this is why it's likely to fail not be the outstanding success that someone somewhere thinks it will be.  Other platforms already exist so instead of being a leader, I feel they'll enter as an "also ran" hoping Oculus Rift support will save the day, oh but wait, others support that too.

One of the most difficult aspects of building a business is generating a user base to consume product.

It continues to fascinate that having established a user base, LL continues to treat that userbase as an inconvenience and keeps heading off in different directions.

 

[Celestiall Nightfire]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

It continues to fascinate that having established a user base, LL continues to treat that userbase as an inconvenience and keeps heading off in different directions.

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Exactly.  LL is beyond clueless.  

 

 

 

 

[Darrius Gothly]

Basic Business Math 101: Introductory Lesson

There are 2000 people who reliably pay you $1.00 each, but there might be 1 or 2 people willing to pay you $2,000.00 each, the smart business person will opt to chase the possible big spenders as they will bring their friends too and before long you will be a massive success with people worshipping at your feet.

 

 

Basic Reality 101: Introductory Gut Check

Those 1 or 2 people, IF you can get them to come look, will see that what you've created is not even on par with all their other new shinies and fancy gadgets and leave rapidly. They will come with preconceptions planted by their own desires and the marketing hype you had to spew to get them to come look in the first place.

Once they see what you are really offering, they will tell their friends "don't go there .. it's yucky and old". You might get that first $2,000.00 but you won't see another penny from them ever again. And you will have thrown away the routine $2,000.00 you were getting from your dependable customers too. 

[Darrius Gothly]

Project Sansar is all smoke and mirrors .. so far. It has to be eating money like mad, and the only way to keep the money flowing is to keep telling the investors how great it will be. WILL BE! (maybe)

The complete lack of solid info .. about even its most basic aspects .. tells me it's not a real product ever intended to achieve success. It is instead a honey trap meant to attract and milk people with fat wallets and no experience in the high-tech market.

Real projects with real goals also have real progress and real information. What we see in Project Sansar is nothing even close to that. It's just wishes, best intentions, and magic smoke. It will limp along for however long it takes Ebbe to move on .. and then it will quietly whimper to non-existence.

Of course .. dragging Second Life down with it.

[BlueTrianon]

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

Project Sansar is all smoke and mirrors .. so far. It has to be eating money like mad, and the only way to keep the money flowing is to keep telling the investors how great it will be. WILL BE! (maybe)

The complete lack of solid info .. about even its most basic aspects .. tells me it's not a real product ever intended to achieve success. It is instead a honey trap meant to attract and milk people with fat wallets and no experience in the high-tech market.

Real projects with real goals also have real progress and real information. What we see in Project Sansar is nothing even close to that. It's just wishes, best intentions, and magic smoke. It will limp along for however long it takes Ebbe to move on .. and then it will quietly whimper to non-existence.

Of course .. dragging Second Life down with it.

---

Did you really just accuse both LL and its CEO of fraud on their own website?  Really?

Do you have some "solid info" to back up your claim that LL is essentially promoting vaporware?  If so, I'd be very interested in seeing it.

[Darrius Gothly]

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BlueTrianon wrote:

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

Project Sansar is all smoke and mirrors .. so far. It has to be eating money like mad, and the only way to keep the money flowing is to keep telling the investors how great it will be. WILL BE! (maybe)

The complete lack of solid info .. about even its most basic aspects .. tells me it's not a real product ever intended to achieve success. It is instead a honey trap meant to attract and milk people with fat wallets and no experience in the high-tech market.

Real projects with real goals also have real progress and real information. What we see in Project Sansar is nothing even close to that. It's just wishes, best intentions, and magic smoke. It will limp along for however long it takes Ebbe to move on .. and then it will quietly whimper to non-existence.

Of course .. dragging Second Life down with it.

---

Did you really just accuse both LL and its CEO of fraud on their own website?  Really?

Do you have some "solid info" to back up your claim that LL is essentially promoting vaporware?  If so, I'd be very interested in seeing it.

---

*grins big* Fraud? Hmm .. interesting extrapolation of my post. I can see how you got there, just amazed at the leap it took.

The business environment in today's market is a lot more complex than just "see goal, make goal, make money". The process of opening a new project, especially one as supposedly complex as Sansar, requires lining up a lot of ducks first. How you get those ducks to toe the line, how you get everything laid in place so you can reach successful goal .. that method is open to a million different interpretations.

Fraud implies that Ebbe's pure and sole intent is to spend someone else's money on something he knows to be false or impossible. I never said that. What I have said is that Ebbe's approach to lining up his ducks is prone .. if not guaranteed .. to lead to failure.

The two most visible Theories of Project Development in use today diverge at the centerpiece of the project. One theory is based on creating a "thing" and then using that thing as a means to convince investors to ... invest. The other theory, and one that I think we see in play now, is to develop the Picture of a Thing .. and then use that to open wallets.

Solid proof? No .. nothing even close to what that implies. I have no access to emails, inside info or even a whisper in my ear. What I do have is nearly four decades of involvement in the high-tech industry, a lot of it in the front offices (as the tech department lead) working hand in glove with the people that get ducks lined up.

I have seen both of the above theories in practice many times. I have witnessed the symptoms of both .. from inside and out. And I have racked up a pretty healthy number of painful lessons (and pleasant memories) from both.

Digging a bit deeper: When you are on the first theoretical path, having built a thing and now engaged in showing off that thing to attract money, you are protective but also proud and anxious to have others see it. You find ways to leverage your thing against any other similar things. And you allow tiny gasps of info to escape so as to keep the buzz going.

But when you are working from a picture of a thing, you are more than protective .. you are near paranoid. See, the picture is not only a figment, but it must remain mysterious and inscrutable lest someone discover any real flaws. The picture approach is what you use when you aren't really sure what you CAN do .. in addition to not being sure WHAT do to. The old adage "Contents may differ from those pictured" very much applies.

It's not fraudulent to realize you need to take your company toward new products. It's not fraudulent to face a conundrum that others have faced .. and fallen before. It is not fraud to put all your best decision making skills and experience to work .. and come to the wrong conclusion. But it doesn't make it successful either.

As I said, I've seen this play before. I know what can and cannot be divulged without compromising the "secret sauce" of a project. From where I sit .. this looks to me exactly like a picture plan. And so I said so.

[Perrie Juran]

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

Basic Business Math 101: Introductory Lesson

There are 2000 people who reliably pay you $1.00 each, but there

might

be 1 or 2 people willing to pay you $2,000.00 each, the smart business person will opt to chase the possible big spenders as they will bring their friends too and before long you will be a massive success with people worshipping at your feet.

 

 

Basic Reality 101: Introductory Gut Check

Those 1 or 2 people, IF you can get them to come look, will see that what you've created is not even on par with all their other new shinies and fancy gadgets and leave rapidly. They will come with preconceptions planted by their own desires and the marketing hype you had to spew to get them to come look in the first place.

Once they see what you are really offering, they will tell their friends "don't go there .. it's yucky and old". You

might

get that first $2,000.00 but you won't see another penny from them ever again. And you will have thrown away the routine $2,000.00 you were getting from your dependable customers too. 

---

This reminds me of the Pareto Principle.  I was always amazed when we crunched numbers how much we would see this at work.  It can be dangerous to ignore the 80% who only account for 20% of your income because that 20% can still be a sizeable chunk of change.  

[Darrius Gothly]

Thank you for the link Perrie. Always learning ...

My biggest worry is not so much the loss of the 80% that contribute only 20% of income, but the belief that those 80% are worthless when plans are made.

I watch a TV Show on US Cable called "Gold Rush". In a recent episode, one of the land owners forced a lease holding miner to scrape the dirt one more time. His contention was that "if it's in the dirt, we don't stop till we get it all." (words to that effect anyway)

The miner and his crew had given up already. Their eyes had said "this ground is tapped". But the owner pushed, insisted and finally demanded at the threat of termination of the lease .. so they scraped. Very good clean up, made some pretty decent money too. Money they were prepared to abandon simply because of their lack of experience.

To the miner and his crew it was just worthless dirt. They'd taken everything they felt could be gotten easily and they were prepared to move on to other, untested ground. But the land owner's experience taught him better, and it took him using very drastic threats to get the miner to listen.

We seem to have very much the same situation in Second Life. The positions of power are not owned by anyone we read here on the forums or out in the blogosphere. But the experience sure is! I cannot begin to count the number of highly experienced, formally trained and bloodied in battle business experts that I've met in Second Life. I CAN count on one hand the number of Lindens I've met .. with or without experience. (The ones I have met though .. VERY skilled in their line of work.)

Business as a whole (not just LL) seems intent on breaking the long-proven (and apparently U.N. approved LOL) natural distribution of wealth and resources. They work on the principle that anything less than 100% ownership is failure, and so the company must be whipped into a froth to make it attain that goal. Once the natural dividing line is crossed though, the methods needed to go further also no longer follow common sense rules .. and many times cross moral if not legal lines.

You don't need to do illegal things to drive away your customers though. And once the 20% upper crust realizes they are no longer part of a naturally functioning ecosystem (or financial system) they grow suspicious and flee. It's not safe nor fun living in someone else's dangerous experiment. Since those with resources are the most mobile anyway, they are the first to be ABLE to flee. They may come to the realization slower, but they can vamoose quicker.

We saw that happen when the big names came then promptly went from SL. They saw the natural distribution here .. the one that would have allowed them to grow into their 20% role .. was already being destroyed. They saw that the 80% keeping the bus from bottoming out were also being driven out. They recognized that management was offering "You and only you matter to us" ... and they realized that without "them" (meaning us unwashed bottom huggers) their 20% holdings were worthless.

Project Sansar, with its already clearly stated goal of cranking up "Taxes" and focusing on only high-end build tools, is being designed with a skewed ratio from the start. But I have to keep asking "If you build with lopsided bricks, can you build anything other than a lopsided and unstable building?"

[Anya Ristow]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

This reminds me of the 

Pareto Principle

.  I was always amazed when we crunched numbers how much we would see this at work.  It can be dangerous to ignore the 80% who only account for 20% of your income because that 20% can still be a sizeable chunk of change.  

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At the dawn of the loyalty card era, Kroger (a US grocery chain) decided that it was better to fire the customer than to please everyone. They found that most of their profit was coming from a small number of their customers, and the rest they didn't even want in the store.

As an example, although candy is profitable to sell, the most profitable customers don't buy it. That shelf space could be better used to please more profitable customers, so the space devoted to candy was shrunk.

Even the products that everyone buys, the unprofitable customers aren't willing to pay as much as the profitable ones. Loyalty programs allow them to figure out the price point at which some will stop buying and some will keep buying. It isn't enough to know that as OJ gets more expensive fewer people buy it. It's important to know at what price the loss-leader shoppers will stop buying it and the baby-products shoppers and the paleo-diet shoppers and the organic-prepared-dinners shoppers won't.