SL = Video Game

[Phorumities]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

I didn't think I'd bother with this thread since its such a regular topic here. But I've nothing better to do right now so...

Whilst SL may be a game in some people's minds, it isn't actually a game, because, in itself, it has nothing of what a game actually has. A game has objectives and game rules. SL doesn't have either of those. Board games are games. Football and other field games are games. There are card games as well as many other types of game, including little games that people invent on the spot for themselves, but SL, in itself, isn't even remotely similar to any of them in terms of objectives and rules on how to play it, simply because it doesn't have any. SL is an online 3D place to be. And that's all it is. The only similarity SL has to some actual games is that it's a 3D world. But that's it. Nothing more.

Imagine SL as a brand new creation and open for the very first time. As chance would have it, you are the very first person to log in. What would you find? You'd probably look around and to learn how to play this game, but you wouldn't find anything, because there isn't anything, except move around the place. There's nothing to actually do. You wouldn't find an objective to achieve, so you wouldn't find any rules about achieving it. Perhaps you'd think that it needs more than one player, so you wait until some more people log in, and you discuss what you need to be doing to play this game, but you come up with nothing, because there isn't anything. SL is a place, and that's all it is. Nothing more and nothing less. It's just a place.

Some people do make games for themselves within SL, but that's just people being creative. It's not SL itself. In a similar way, people could invent little games for themselves in a closed RL room, perhaps with a coin, just to pass the time. Some people think of SL as a game, because it looks a lot like some games they know, but that's just the way some people choose to think. It doesn't turn SL into a game.

SL is nothing more than an online 3D place in which to be. And that's all it is. What people make of it is entirely up to them. It allows people create things, including games, and some people do that. Even LL did that (sort of) in more recent times. It allows people to run businesses, and some people do that. It allows people to race and fly, and all sorts of things, and some people do those. And so on. All of that is extra to SL itself, which remains nothing more than an online 3D place in which to be. It's people who come up with things to do in the SL place. It isn't SL itself.

Imagine coming into SL for the very first time, and you ask people, "How do I play this game?" or "What do I have to do here?" or "Are there levels I have to achieve?" and so on. Simply imagining asking those and similar questions, will show that SL is not an actual game.

Does anyone ever think, "I'm going to play SL now"? I doubt it. Instead we think, "I'm going to log in to SL now", or "I'm going to play <some game> in SL now", which are quite different.

I've always said, if SL is a game, then so is RL. For some reason people can't wrap their minds around the fact that SL is a world, an extension in fact of the real world, and you live in it and make what you can of it, and you'll either love it or hate it, and if you hate it you'll leave, and no amount of fixes will change that.

LL has already created lots of silly games to play, but the only game worth playing in here is called life. 

Edited August 3, 2018 by Phorumities
changed a word

[Sukubia Scarmon]

Hrm, I think RL can be viewed as a game, I'd categorize it as particulary difficult sandbox game!
 

How about calling SL a framework? No? Worth a try!

[Sammy Huntsman]

4 hours ago, ThorinII said:

I don't know. I've tried quite a few games since I created my first account in SL - and found all of them boring. Everything about them was like "meh" after a while: the pre-set routes you could go, the pre-set goals you had to meet, the pre-built content, the lack of actual interaction within the game (except with other players via Teamspeak): Not a single one of these games could fascinate me enough to even finish it.

Do I consider myself a gamer? No way. I'm a roleplayer, a resident, sometimes even a content creator within SL. But not a gamer. Some of my RL-friends who actually are gamers would buy a new game every month, while I spend my money on virtual land.  Them and me - we just live in different worlds of interest. There's nothing considered better or worse between us.

SL also has prebuilt items too. Also there are any games, that are not like that in the least, pre set routes and stuff, that and pre set goals, they don't really exist in the games I play. As I can also create a character,  and roleplay out an epic story. 

[Klytyna]

15 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

I believe what Gadget is saying is that we, you and I and others here on the forum, may realize these things but if Linden Lab realizes it then they have not shown it in the past 15 years. I know that, in the past at least, there has been a strong resistance to ideas and technologies not created within LL itself. They have seemed intent on reinventing the wheel, often without the experience necessary to do it. Based on SL's announcements in the past year or so I would like to believe this attitude has shifted but we'll need to see LL actually deliver on what they're promising for the future.

All too true, sadly, Project Stupid was a classic "hire cheap coder school graduates and have them reinvent the wheel" dev-team failure...

But part of the argument here is people like like the OP and a certain well known Messiah Noob, going on and on and on about how LL urgently need to "fix" SL, and their plan to fix SL, when you actually examine it logically boils down to...

1. Ban 99% of the userbase for not having shiny "leet gamerz of 2019" hardware.

2. Delete 99.99999% of the asset database

3. Close SL for a planned 6 months (actual system down time with wheel reinventing, 3 years) while it's rewritten in "Ubiquitous Engine 4.x" as an MMO First Person Shooter, with clients for the SonTendSoft PlayCube One, and the iSpend Dumbphone.

This is almost the design process that's given us Project Stupid...

...

And they don't even realise that the reason so many "AAA Titles" are done in Ubiquitous Engine 4 is because it's a bloody "pay the licence fee and fill in the blanks" quick and dirty shortcut for low talent dev teams who don't have the skill to create their own engine from scratch. It allows the less talented and smaller teams to punt out an "AAA Title" in months rather than years.

But everybody using that engine limits everybody to making games that engine suits, and other genres are branded "not what people today want" because it's easier than having to develop a whole new engine the hard way.

...

Take something as simple as image file formats. JPEG 2000 it's NOT the best choice, but, realistically, switching to a better format, is almost impossible. You'd have to stop all texture uploads and snapshots, take the system down for a day (or several), run batch format conversions on the ENTIRE asset database (1000 plus TB of data) AND convince EVERY single user to download and install a NEW viewer, that's set up to use the new file format (assuming you can get all the TPV's to complete major merge code changes in time.

It would be a bloody nightmare.

Can you imagine what for example, switching from lsl to javascript would entail if somebody decided that lsl was "holding us back from being an AAA title"?

You can't just wave the "Leet Gamer Fairy God-Coder Magic Wand (tm)" and *poof*, 15 plus years of almost irreversable legacy decisions will just go away.

 

Edited August 3, 2018 by Klytyna

[Sammy Huntsman]

They kinda already did that, when they switched from their old inventory database, to now that inventory is run through HTML.

[Klytyna]

Just now, halebore Aeon said:

They kinda already did that, when they switched from their old inventory database, to now that inventory is run through HTML.

That was just changing HOW the assets are delivered, and that it's self was a major project. That isn't even close to reformatting the actual assets themselves. not by a mile, not by a thousand miles.
 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Second Life is absolutely a game. It's not your typical "do X achieve Y" game, but it's a sanbox game.

Those of you who haven't played it, look up Garry's Mod or "Gmod." It's almost exactly like SL, minus the persistent inventory/avatar. The base game has no goal, you just boot up a server/map and spawn in with an inventory full of random assets which you can add to and put down / apply scripts to.

It's still pretty popular and there are many different kinds of game modes and environments people have created that add goals like in SL, including RP servers, combat, hide-and-seek, obstacle courses, racing, etc.

The idea that a game has to have inherent goals to be a game is an outdated one. Definitions change over time with new ideas and concepts. 

Edited August 3, 2018 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Sammy Huntsman]

19 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

That was just changing HOW the assets are delivered, and that it's self was a major project. That isn't even close to reformatting the actual assets themselves. not by a mile, not by a thousand miles.
 

How assets are delivered or not, that is still a major update, and major changes. That being said, I do believe that SL needs many game changing updates. Such as security, and even a graphics overhaul, and even how the viewer deals with memory. As it can be a real memory stealer, and I for one, would love to see those changes made. 

[Sammy Huntsman]

2 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Second Life is absolutely a game. It's not your typical "do X achieve Y" game, but it's a sanbox game.

Those of you who haven't played it, look up Garry's Mod or "Gmod." It's almost exactly like SL, minus the persistent inventory/avatar. The base game has no goal, you just boot up a server/map and spawn in with an inventory full of random assets which you can add to and put down / apply scripts to.

It's still pretty popular and there are many different kinds of game modes and environments people have created that add goals like in SL, including RP servers, combat, hide-and-seek, obstacle courses, racing, etc.

I actually used minecraft, pre end, and all Steam Early Access games. Heck even with Minecraft, there are really no set objections. You are just placed in a world, and basically given the free will to do anything.

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

6 minutes ago, halebore Aeon said:

I actually used minecraft, pre end, and all Steam Early Access games. Heck even with Minecraft, there are really no set objections. You are just placed in a world, and basically given the free will to do anything.

Minecraft has way more distinct goals than Garry's Mod, even besides "survive," even if they are not made obvious. (Although the achievement system very strongly guides you through most of the game by giving you progressive challenges.)

Garry's Mod literally has no goals in the base game, like SL, unlike Minecraft. 

Edited August 3, 2018 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Amanda Crisp]

How about this;

”SL is a *communications platform* with supplemental graphic rendering that can also be used as a gaming, education or artistic tool?”

[Sammy Huntsman]

Still its your choice not to follow it, and do what you want. Basically like SL, you are thrown into a new world, full surprises and basically told to make it what you want.

[Sammy Huntsman]

1 minute ago, AmandaKeen said:

How about this;

”SL is a *communications platform* with supplemental graphic rendering that can also be used as a gaming, education or artistic tool?”

Um, its not really a communications platform anymore really. It may have been at one time, but it's so much more now. Like before you had Linden Realms, and Experiences, I would have to agree with you. But its a Sandbox game, with an emotional component. 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 minute ago, halebore Aeon said:

Still its your choice not to follow it, and do what you want. Basically like SL, you are thrown into a new world, full surprises and basically told to make it what you want.

Choosing to do something other than what the game tells you does not make those goals not exist. 

[Sammy Huntsman]

I get that, but Minecraft, and many other steam early access games, are open world, sandbox games. Take for example, Stranded deep, or even subnautica. There were no goals, in really early access, they had not even fleshed out a quest, and the Aurora was just a placeholder.

[Paul Hexem]

40 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

All too true, sadly, Project Stupid was a classic "hire cheap coder school graduates and have them reinvent the wheel" dev-team failure...

But part of the argument here is people like like the OP and a certain well known Messiah Noob, going on and on and on about how LL urgently need to "fix" SL, and their plan to fix SL, when you actually examine it logically boils down to...

1. Ban 99% of the userbase for not having shiny "leet gamerz of 2019" hardware.

2. Delete 99.99999% of the asset database

3. Close SL for a planned 6 months (actual system down time with wheel reinventing, 3 years) while it's rewritten in "Ubiquitous Engine 4.x" as an MMO First Person Shooter, with clients for the SonTendSoft PlayCube One, and the iSpend Dumbphone.

This is almost the design process that's given us Project Stupid...

...

And they don't even realise that the reason so many "AAA Titles" are done in Ubiquitous Engine 4 is because it's a bloody "pay the licence fee and fill in the blanks" quick and dirty shortcut for low talent dev teams who don't have the skill to create their own engine from scratch. It allows the less talented and smaller teams to punt out an "AAA Title" in months rather than years.

But everybody using that engine limits everybody to making games that engine suits, and other genres are branded "not what people today want" because it's easier than having to develop a whole new engine the hard way.

...

Take something as simple as image file formats. JPEG 2000 it's NOT the best choice, but, realistically, switching to a better format, is almost impossible. You'd have to stop all texture uploads and snapshots, take the system down for a day (or several), run batch format conversions on the ENTIRE asset database (1000 plus TB of data) AND convince EVERY single user to download and install a NEW viewer, that's set up to use the new file format (assuming you can get all the TPV's to complete major merge code changes in time.

It would be a bloody nightmare.

Can you imagine what for example, switching from lsl to javascript would entail if somebody decided that lsl was "holding us back from being an AAA title"?

You can't just wave the "Leet Gamer Fairy God-Coder Magic Wand (tm)" and *poof*, 15 plus years of almost irreversable legacy decisions will just go away.

 

… Yep, it just wouldn't be a Klytyna post if it weren't an exaggeration and overreaction.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Just now, halebore Aeon said:

I get that, but Minecraft, and many other steam early access games, are open world, sandbox games. Take for example, Stranded deep, or even subnautica. There were no goals, in really early access, they had not even fleshed out a quest, and the Aurora was just a placeholder.

You're comparing unfinished games with clear plans to bring in goals to a 15 year old platform. That doesn't make any sense. All survival games have at least one goal by definition, and it's in the label. 

[Amanda Crisp]

2 minutes ago, halebore Aeon said:

Um, its not really a communications platform anymore really. It may have been at one time, but it's so much more now. Like before you had Linden Realms, and Experiences, I would have to agree with you. But its a Sandbox game, with an emotional component. 

Of itself SL requires communications to function;

-Data communications with the Mothership to perform any and all activity affecting the world.

-Communications with LL staff to resolve issues

All SL uses are reliant upon electronic and other communication, even just sitting in a sandbox building.

SL remains a communications platform :-)

[Sammy Huntsman]

I am comparing them, due to the one fact that they all drop you in a world, and basically give you the freedom to do what you want.

[Sammy Huntsman]

1 minute ago, AmandaKeen said:

Of itself SL requires communications to function;

-Data communications with the Mothership to perform any and all activity affecting the world.

-Communications with LL staff to resolve issues

All SL uses are reliant upon electronic and other communication, even just sitting in a sandbox building.

SL remains a communications platform :-)

But backend server communication, has nothing to do with us as clients inworld. Yes you chat with LL staff, and even others. But who talks to LL staff on a day to day basis, like every hour, upon every second? Those two are pretty poor examples, to hit your point home. Do we chat with the server, as if its an old friend? No we don't, and I wouldn't really call servers communicating with each other, as actual communication. They are literally relaying code, and commands, that they were programmed to communicate. Communications, takes a bit of intelligence, between people. Servers and Computers are dumb, and only do as they are told. 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, AmandaKeen said:

Of itself SL requires communications to function;

-Data communications with the Mothership to perform any and all activity affecting the world.

-Communications with LL staff to resolve issues

All SL uses are reliant upon electronic and other communication, even just sitting in a sandbox building.

SL remains a communications platform :-)

So all online games/platforms are "communications platforms?" Your definition is extremely broad.

Guys. The reason why this debate never resolves is because everybody is trying to come up with a single definition for SL or a single box to put SL in.

I've called SL a game and a platform, but which is it? ...It's both. SL is very general, so it fits in a lot of different things without being specifically any of those things.

Likewise the game Garry's Mod is a platform for user generated content, while it's still also a game. 

Edited August 3, 2018 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Coffee Pancake]

19 hours ago, animats said:

They're not that bad. I just sent Coffee one of our bikes. Coffee, take it out on some long Linden roads and ride it until you can stay in 3rd or 4th gear and stay in lane. Don't worry about sim crossings; that's handled. Most people can ride that bike well with 10 minutes of practice.

I have criticisms of SL's vehicle system, but for comparison, download Unreal Engine and build the default vehicle demo. The physics is better but the driveability is worse.

(What I, and most of the aviation people, would really like is access to joystick input. You can hook a joystick to SL, and get some proportional control over avatars, but you can't read the joystick from LSL.)

I will have a play thanks, my point is really that physics is the bedrock that everything else is built upon. 

11 hours ago, Klytyna said:

That was just changing HOW the assets are delivered, and that it's self was a major project. That isn't even close to reformatting the actual assets themselves. not by a mile, not by a thousand miles.
 

Neither of us has any idea of how assets are handled on the backend. I would say that as the system works there is no need to fix it.

[animats]

11 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Neither of us has any idea of how assets are handled on the backend. I would say that as the system works there is no need to fix it.

How assets are handled on the back end is well understood, because the asset servers are now just web servers. The sim program sends the viewer a "capability" allowing it to get an asset. That's just a URL, and if you get one of those URLs out of the viewer log, you can download it with a web browser.  Textures are usually JPEG 2000 files, without the "jp2" suffix. Any graphics program that can read JPEG 2000 can open them.

LL has said that they're using Amazon AWS for asset storage and Akamai's content delivery network for caching. Many big web sites use the same system, so how it works is public knowledge. The content delivery network gets the request from the viewer and downloads the asset from AWS, if it's not already in cache. If it's in cache, it's returned very fast.

The viewers could probably open more asset server connections than they do now. In the early days of SL, the sim servers doubled as the asset servers, and LL didn't want to overload them. Now that assets come from a completely different place with huge server capacity, loading could be more aggressive. When you teleport to a new area, it takes about a minute for all the assets to come in, and after the first 10 seconds or so, the data traffic download rate drops well below what's available. The viewer would have to back off on this if ping time started to creep up; that indicates the user's network download capacity has been reached. But if you have a big pipe to your house, SL could make better use of it.

At the viewer end, texture download, decompression, and caching is done by threads separate from the viewer thread, so if you have multiple CPUs, they can go to work on the incoming textures without slowing the main thread.  Running out of disk bandwidth on the user's machine may be a problem, and SSD for the fast cache file could help there.

I agree, though, that this system works and there's not much need to fix it. It's well designed and implemented in the viewer (although the code documentation is terrible), and standard technology on the server side. It could use a tune-up; the decision-making about how much to load, and in what order, predates the AWS/Akami system, and the policy control could be improved. If you're standing in front of a sign in world, the sign fills most of the screen, and you can't read it because the high-res texture isn't in yet, that's an indication that the texture loading priority system needs tweaking. The viewer knows what you're looking at. In general, I think that texture handling is not too bad, but mesh level of detail handling is terrible.

(I spent a few days finding a bug in this area that was crashing self-compiled Firestorm, so I had to figure out how this part of the viewer works.)

[Klytyna]

On 03 August 2018 at 9:52 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

Neither of us has any idea of how assets are handled on the backend. I would say that as the system works there is no need to fix it.

Do try to keep up...

We're not talking about changing the way content is delivered, which, in fact is well understood by a great many prople. 

The exchange was me saying how difficult it would be to CONVERT ALL of SL's jpeg2k's to a different and hopefully better image file format AND update every viewer, assuming that was a suggested "fix for SL", at the same time without substantial costs and system downtime, as an example of "15 year old legacy problems" that are, in practice, unfixable. 

To which somebody replied suggesting that since they switched from "direct from asset server to client" to "asset servers to CDN servers to client" that reformatting all the images wouldn't be hard.

To which I replied stating that the switch to CDN was it's self a major project and that it wouldn't be remotely comparable to the difficulty of changing the formats used by ALL SL servers, and ALL SL clients AT THE SAME TIME.

On 03 August 2018 at 10:31 PM, animats said:

In the early days of SL, the sim servers doubled as the asset servers

The sim servers SINGLED as sim servers, and the ASSET servers SINGLED as asset servers...

On 03 August 2018 at 10:31 PM, animats said:

city, loading could be more aggressive. When you teleport to a new area, it takes about a minute for all the assets to come in, and after the first 10 seconds or so, the data traffic download rate drops well below what's available

We can tell you a) have fast interweb and b) live east of the Pacific and west of the Atlantic, haha.

You know that often quoted ping time that Muricans say is the limit for using SL...

"If your ping is over 200..."

That's where many people in Australasia, Europe and the UK, START, and goes up from there.

On 03 August 2018 at 10:31 PM, animats said:

that's an indication that the texture loading priority system needs tweaking. The viewer knows what you're looking at

Generally, the viewer knows what it THINKS you are looking at, from a list of things the sim server tells it about and the direction your camera is pointing. It tends to be "draw everything in the tapered rectilinear box defined by viewer FoV and Draw Distance, in the order the sim server told you about it.

That's why the large 'prim' (more than 10m a side) used for the far wall of the house next door, rezzes before the vendor board in front of your face

It's been tweaked more than once,, changes to the sim servers ordering priority for telling the client whats there to see, and thus load textures for.

One tweak left your hair, non system clothing (prim or mesh) attachments, the floor under your feet and the avatars around you invisible while drawing half a house half a sim away. That was fortunately confined to the RC channels, so only about 10-30 % of SL suffered for a month or two.

Maybe its time for a simpler system, closest first... Seeing the vendor board on the wall you are about to walk into is more important than seeing the ruins of the Philip Linden Memorial Sports Arena 2 sims away.