Second Life on Steam?

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

Would anyone care to weigh in and confirm for Luna the meaning of Beta?

from wikipedia

Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. Software in the beta stage is also known as betaware.^[3] Beta phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs.

Note the words feature complete

Do we really need to get into a semantical argument? I don't care what they call it (they even have some new category on Steam to denote it's not ready for prime time).

The fact is that everybody knows really complex scripting is still being developed. Yes the framework is there so you can build a world, but you can't do much in that world.

Edited December 15, 2018 by Luna Bliss

[KanryDrago]

Just now, Luna Bliss said:

Why would there be evidence of it at this point? Are you privy to some time-frame the rest of us don't have access to?

Well some might say if it was a solution to anything just maybe that since the end of July someone would have said "Wow Sansar is just what we need" and developed something

[KanryDrago]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

Do we really need to get into a semantical argument? I don't care what they call it (they even have some new category on Steam to denote it's not ready for prime time).

The fact is that everybody knows really complex scripting is still being developed. Yes the framework is there so you can build a world, but you can't do much in that world.

It is not a semantic argument, Beta has a very precise meaning in software development

[Luna Bliss]

5 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

Well some might say if it was a solution to anything just maybe that since the end of July someone would have said "Wow Sansar is just what we need" and developed something

I think you need to take a look @ the Sansar Atlas.

[KanryDrago]

Just now, Luna Bliss said:

I think you need to take a look @ the Sansar Atlas.

Whatever for its an atlas of failed dreams and broken hopes, desolate places which see less traffic that places deep in the remotest deserts of the world

[Luna Bliss]

3 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

4 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I think you need to take a look @ the Sansar Atlas.

Whatever for its an atlas of failed dreams and broken hopes, desolate places which see less traffic that places deep in the remotest deserts of the world

Well I'm willing to give Sansar some more time before judging it. I guess you're not. Only time will tell. It's just a pet peeve of mine...I get upset at those who judge/condemn things or people unfairly.  I like justice.

[KanryDrago]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

Well I'm willing to give Sansar some more time before judging it. I guess you're not. Only time will tell. It's just a pet peeve of mine...I get upset at those who judge/condemn things or people unfairly.  I like justice.

shrugs when Sansar is shut down, and most companies would have pulled the plug by now, then I will be the first to say "told you so". I was enthused to Sansar then I went there. Why you expect it to be a competitor is beyond me but if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy I will leave you to delude yourself

[Qie Niangao]

12 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

shrugs when Sansar is shut down, and most companies would have pulled the plug by now, then I will be the first to say "told you so".

quelle surprise

Anyway... it's not that there are no Sansar adopters. They just don't show much hope of becoming profitable. As I mentioned above, Sansar's main attraction seems to be a whole lotta space for free -- sorta OpenSim for head-mounted displays. The economy is supposed to work by folks buying lots of stuff and the Lab taking a cut much larger than in SL. That's a good model -- as long as there are folks buying lots of stuff. But if it's principally populated by non-profits, hard-luck cases, and a few hundred cross-subsidizing Atlas creators, there's just not going to be enough of that buying stuff to keep it afloat. That's not a criticism of the business model, per se, it's more about which adopters it seems likely to attract.

Sure, maybe a miracle will happen and something will catch fire. Whatever that miracle is, it's clearly not the "lightning strikes twice" that made SL take off* -- and that's not a bad thing: it guarantees Sansar will never compete with nor supplant SL, even if it makes it big.

But until that miracle... The opportunity cost. 'Tis to weep.

_____________
*Just sayin': The Lab has always focused on the wonders of User Generated Content. They get the verb tense wrong. It's Users Generating Content that made Second Life take off. It's been coasting ever since. (And experience-building is curation not creation -- the difference between sorting a playlist and playing an instrument.)

[Selene Gregoire]

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

If we're talking about the viability of Sansar I don't think it really matters if SL'rs don't like Sansar.

I think you are spot on there but it seems to me LL held on to the idea of recruiting users from SL for too long and they still can't really let go of it. Many of Sansar's flaws seem to be results of (failed) attempts to attract SL users at the cost of its appeal to other people.

 

5 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

If we're talking about the viability of Sansar I don't think it really matters if SL'rs don't like Sansar.

Think about a furniture store that needs a link on their website to a virtual reality displaying their wares, where their customer can walk around the furniture and view it from all angles.
Or a museum that puts a link on their website to their virtual reality world that enhances their museum or provides more information.
Or a business that needs to train their employees in certain aspects that would best be learned if one felt they were really there, and links to the virtual training areas are provided to employees.
Perhaps a musician who wants to enhance their created experience visually, and so has a link on their website to the Experience.
Or a fan of a certain time period that wants to create it in 3D, maybe have a community or homes for other fans of that time period.
NONE of the above Experiences require high concurrency to fit the needs of the businesses, but they are there to enhance it when needed. And, a platform such as Sansar could provide this service cheaper and easier than other companies could. Of course you have to believe that VR will be a big part of our online future, and there's every indication that it will be.

Those are definitely very interesting uses for virtual reality in the future and they don't depend on VR headsets either - they are just as interesting for traditional screen viewing. But there are a number of requirements:

• Low hardware requirements. Businesses and institutions don't want to promote their services/products only to the few game/tech/graphics enthusiasts, they want the mass market.
• Cross platform compatibility. For the same reason as above.
• Fast load time. 20 seconds is pushing the limit of potential customers' patience. a minute is way too long.
• No special software. A special browser plugin might be acceptable but anything beyond that - forget it.
• Open access. No need to register an account to join.

Those are absolute requirements and a service that can't meet them all, doesn't chance a chance in this market.

 

3 hours ago, KanryDrago said:

Would anyone care to weigh in and confirm for Luna the meaning of Beta?

You can well argue that a word is defined by how people generally understands it rather than by dictionaries.

But even so, I have to agree that even by the looser "common" definition of the word, Sansar is hardly in beta at this point and it certainly wasn't when it opened to the public.

Edited December 15, 2018 by ChinRey
Whole lotta typos going on

[Klytyna]

6 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Those are definitely very interesting uses for virtual reality in the future and they don't depend on VR headsets either - they are just as interesting for traditional screen viewing. But there are a number of requirements:

• Low hardware requirements. Businesses and institutions don't want to promote their services/products only to the few game/tech/graphics enthusiasts, they want the mass market.
• Cross platform compatibility. For the same reason as above.
• Fast load time. 20 seconds is pushing the limit of potential customers' patience. a minute is way too long.
• No special software. A special browser plugin might be acceptable but anything beyond that - forget it.
• Open access. No need to register an account to join.

Those are absolute requirements and a service that can't meet them all, doesn't chance a chance in this market.

Which is why "webgl" has defecated from a great height all over the pathetic dream that Project Stupid will become "THE place to see NEXT year's Mercedes Coupe THIS year"

It's why it won't suceed as an "educational platform" because something like Britain's "open university" tv broadcasts in the middle of the night, can be accessed by a much larger customer base at much lower cost and hardware requirements. Telling people they can have "education" only if they have a few thousand $ to waste on a over spec Vom-cam setup, won't work. Schools on tight budgets for the most part, won't spend that kind of cash (assuming they even could) on vom-cam classrooms on Project Stupid.

12 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

You can well argue that a word is defined by how people generally understands it rather than by dictionaries.

But even so, I have to agree that even by the looser "common" definition of the word, Sansar is hardly in beta at this point and it certainly wasn't when it opened to the public.

I'd rate it as a "dev team only" late Alpha or early beta, and thus, comparing "apples to apples" as Luna insists is "justice", that makes Stupid about 3 years behind schedule, and obsolete before it's even ready for the public beta, let alone a Release Candidate.

 

[ChinRey]

16 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

I'd rate it as a "dev team only" late Alpha or early beta, and thus, comparing "apples to apples" as Luna insists is "justice", that makes Stupid about 3 years behind schedule, and obsolete before it's even ready for the public beta, let alone a Release Candidate.

I wonder how many of the Sansar enthusiasts have tried Sinespace. For good or bad, from what I can see, I'd say what Sansar is trying to become - and may become in a few years - is what Sinespace is today.

That's another perspective on Sansar's viability of course. If we forget about the SL comparasion and stipulate that the basic idea behind it is sound, there is still not a single thing Sansar can do that Sinespace can't do better, LL has yet to announce a single upgrade to Sansar that Sinespace hasn't already implemented and Sinespace has quite a few rather important features LL doesn't seem to have even noticed yet.

Edited December 15, 2018 by ChinRey

[ErikaKotov]

All this talk about potential businesses joining Sansar just reminds me of the 90s mentality to Virtual Worlds. This is the future people are going to view products in 3D and not on a web page. There was a good reason it didn't catch on it was too niche. Look at active worlds and worlds.com or even look at Second Life big boom in 2006.

[ChinRey]

2 minutes ago, ErikaKotov said:

All this talk about potential businesses joining Sansar just reminds me of the 90s mentality to Virtual Worlds. This is the future people are going to view products in 3D and not on a web page. There was a good reason it didn't catch on it was too niche. Look at active worlds and worlds.com or even look at Second Life big boom in 2006.

I think there could be a market for it if somebody could come up with a solution that met all of the requirements I listed (plus a few I forgot to mention). But nobody has yet.

[Klytyna]

15 minutes ago, ErikaKotov said:

This is the future people are going to view products in 3D and not on a web page.

You need to pay attention...

There was a thread here on the forums some while back, from a PRO-Vom-Cammer, informing us that Amazon had dabbled in the vom-cam waters with a system that allows you to use your low budget economy Vom-Goggles to view products in 3D via their web page, without having to drop $2000 for a high end "Leet Gamerz of Vom Magic 90" tower case, or downloading and installing a huge client, and certainly without waiting 10-20 mins for an experience to load.

Claiming that Project Stupid, is the future of RL shopping is like that 1930's movie that predicted that by 1980, gentlemen who were "something in the City" would commute between the stock exchange and their suburban houses by private autogyro, while the wife made dinner in an atomic powered radar oven...
 

[ErikaKotov]

Now you're just taking it out of context I being sarcastic.

[Callum Meriman]

29 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I think there could be a market for it if somebody could come up with a solution that met all of the requirements I listed (plus a few I forgot to mention). But nobody has yet.

The market will be a client on a mobile phone. Most people simply don't have $2000 for a VR headset and $4000 for a PC to run it. But they do have mobile phones, and those phone now have AR capabilites, VR capabilities and flatscreen capabilities.

Sansar, by it's fundamental design choice doesn't run on a phone, only on the computers of gamers who've spent $6K on equipment.

(This thread is about SL on steam, the argument about sansar should be done in that thread)

[KanryDrago]

37 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

The market will be a client on a mobile phone. Most people simply don't have $2000 for a VR headset and $4000 for a PC to run it. But they do have mobile phones, and those phone now have AR capabilites, VR capabilities and flatscreen capabilities.

Sansar, by it's fundamental design choice doesn't run on a phone, only on the computers of gamers who've spent $6K on equipment.

(This thread is about SL on steam, the argument about sansar should be done in that thread)

just to dispel a myth here as an aside, it costs nothing like 6000 to get a perfectly good vr setup. The total for my rig including the headset was a total of 1500$ and runs things like skyrim just fine. The oculus rift retails now for just over 300$ and any i5 or better with a gtx 980 or better will give adequate power

[Klytyna]

1 minute ago, KanryDrago said:

just to dispel a myth here as an aside, it costs nothing like 6000

Please remember that Callum is one of the "upside down people who live in the land of 11 hours ago tomorrow" and thus, his dollars are not as other peoples dollars, add 40-50 % to Murican prices for conversion, then add different sales taxes and import taxes for the products, etc.

47 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

(This thread is about SL on steam, the argument about sansar should be done in that thread)

They stealth merged the "[something] on Steam" threads during the week...
 

[KanryDrago]

1 minute ago, Klytyna said:

Please remember that Callum is one of the "upside down people who live in the land of 11 hours ago tomorrow" and thus, his dollars are not as other peoples dollars, add 40-50 % to Murican prices for conversion, then add different sales taxes and import taxes for the products, etc.

They stealth merged the "[something] on Steam" threads during the week...
 

well Australia I am told is always rip off city for pc stuff but in the rest of the world where prices are saner....

[Callum Meriman]

16 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

well Australia I am told is always rip off city for pc stuff but in the rest of the world where prices are saner....

Yes, a bit of a rip. The Vive is $1200, a 1070 is $700, the 2070 $899. I7 is $400, Motherboard is $300, Ram is $400.... and so on.

I forgot 'Muricans get it cheaper - until the tarrifs go in. Sorry.

Edit:> although I am curious, if computers are so cheap, why are so many SL people using potatoes?

Edited December 15, 2018 by Callum Meriman

[mikka Luik]

2 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

 

I forgot 'Muricans get it cheaper

Edit:> although I am curious, if computers are so cheap, why are so many SL people using potatoes?

Cos we ain't all 'Muricans =^^=

[KanryDrago]

3 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

Yes, a bit of a rip. The Vive is $1200, a 1070 is $700, the 2070 $899. I7 is $400, Motherboard is $300, Ram is $400.... and so on.

I forgot 'Muricans get it cheaper - until the tarrifs go in. Sorry.

Edit:> although I am curious, if computers are so cheap, why are so many SL people using potatoes?

most sl users arent gamers as such would be my guess, they merely sl on the same machine they use for email, web browsing etc and a potato is adequate for that

[Callum Meriman]

6 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

most sl users arent gamers as such would be my guess, they merely sl on the same machine they use for email, web browsing etc and a potato is adequate for that

Mmm, and SL users are not the audience for Sansar.

Creators are, but they won't use a product if it's weak in features compared to the competition, like Unity. We do know that the Lab think that Sansar can be the Geocities of VR, and that creatives will use it for their "homepage". And these creatives won't have much of an audience to expose their art to.

That's a weak and small market. Doomed for failure. Institutions won't use Sansar, professionals won't use Sansar.

All this money should be put into SL, we might even have 80% of the things Ebbe promised us this year if it were.

Edited December 15, 2018 by Callum Meriman

[KanryDrago]

1 minute ago, Callum Meriman said:

Mmm, and SL users are not the audience for Sansar.

Creators are, but they won't use a product if it's weak in features compared to the competition, like Unity. We do know that the Lab think that Sansar can be the Geocities of VR, and that creatives will use it for their "homepage". And these creatives won't have much of an audience to expose their art to.

That's a weak and small market. Doomed for failure. Institutions won't use Sansar, professionals won't use Sansar.

All this money should be put into SL, we might even have 80% of the things Ebbe promised us this year if it were.

Couldnt agree more, and we should remember why geocities websites were avoided by discerning users