Anyone here login into SL and Sansar?

[Selene Gregoire]

1 minute ago, animats said:

"Video unavailable".

Works fine for me.

[animats]

4 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Works fine for me.

Won't play embedded for me, but will play directly on YouTube.

Interesting video. It's an hour in Sansar, with no cuts.

Sansar's main advantage over SL seems to be lighting and shadows. Although some of those may be baked.

Note that the light bulb and the weight do not cast shadows.

Two minute teleports!

Areas in Sansar must have a disco.

Even if a disco makes no sense.

For small houses, a DJ room in the basement meets the disco requirement.

1977 called. It wants its disco floor back.

 

[Okyn Starlight]

Wasting your time people with Sansar wondering if 'maybe' better next year.You are not going to live forever,having hope in a broken system is not going to make it better.And you can have the best graphics,this is not about that, we need communication in order to bring people  and LL is so blind about this.SANSAR fail is here.

[Selene Gregoire]

14 minutes ago, animats said:

1977 called. It wants its disco floor back.

 

I laughed because '77 was the year I graduated high school.

 

I never did care for most disco. Always into acid/psychedelic rock, though.

 

https://www.allmusic.com/style/acid-rock-ma0000012327

Edited July 23, 2019 by Selene Gregoire

[Coffee Pancake]

18 minutes ago, animats said:

Sansar's main advantage over SL seems to be lighting and shadows. Although some of those may be baked.

Yes, this is one of the big gfx boosts Sansar provides, you bake the entire scene as part of the build process. It's all in the lighting.

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Yes, this is one of the big gfx boosts Sansar provides,

I'm not entirely convinced to be honest. Yes, it may be better than SL in some ways but it's no match for what we see created in "cutting edge" game engines like UE4 or Unigine and it's not even up to the best Unity scenes I've seen.

Most Sansar places I've seen have relied heavily on the "candle light effect" (keep the light low and add a bit of yellow - instant beautiful romantic atmosphere). It's hard to evaluate the visual quality of those scenes since the whole purpose of the trick is to hide blemishes.

The ones that don't, suffer either from ridiculously exaggerated shadows (like in the two first screenshots below) or a washed out hazy look (as in the last three). I'm not sure if that's because nobody has figured out how to use Sansar's shaders effectively yet or if it's a built in flaw in t he software but I suspect it's the latter.

 

Edited July 23, 2019 by ChinRey

[Coffee Pancake]

8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

I'm not entirely convinced to be honest. Yes, it may be better than SL in some ways but it's no match for what we see created in "cutting edge" game engines like UE4 or Unigine and it's not even up to the best Unity scenes I've seen.

Most Sansar places I've seen have relied heavily on the "candle light effect" (keep the light low and add a bit of yellow - instant beautiful romantic atmosphere). It's hard to evaluate the visual quality of those scenes since the whole purpose of the trick is to hide blemishes.

The ones that don't, suffer either from ridiculously exaggerated shadows (like in the two first screenshots below) or a washed out hazy look (as in the last three). I'm not sure if that's because nobody has figured out how to use Sansar's shaders effectively yet or if it's a built in flaw in t he software but I suspect it's the latter.

Keep in mind as far as lighting goes, it's amateur hour. In SL .. it's rare to find the lighting we do have well used; we have gotten about as far as 'pick a nice windlight and move the sun'. I suspect Sansar suffers the same, only the default illumination and baking is far superior out of the box. There is no guarantee that anything on display in Sansar is even remotely well lit.

 

[AlexandriaBrangwin]

Sorry, I went through a lot of places that had radio going and YouTube filed no less that 8 copyright claims...so the video being unavailable is the result of the copyright holder denying that work from being aired in your region.

 

Anyway...Linden Labs grossly over-anticipated the demand of VR...Phil Rosedale too.

Everyone mistook it for one of those things where people criticize it and it becomes successful like "they laughed at the Iphone and look what happened".

"Just because we laughed at every genius throughout history, doesn't mean everyone we laugh at is a genius"

[animats]

1 hour ago, AlexandriaBrangwin said:

Anyway...Linden Labs grossly over-anticipated the demand of VR...Phil Rosedale too.

Everyone mistook it for one of those things where people criticize it and it becomes successful like "they laughed at the Iphone and look what happened".

"Just because we laughed at every genius throughout history, doesn't mean everyone we laugh at is a genius"

Many people overestimated the demand for VR, from Zuckerberg on down.

One of the things driving VR was that the consumer electronics industry is desperately looking for the next "must have" product. Desktop PCs and smartphones have peaked. Tablets were less popular than expected. 3D TV flopped so badly it disappeared from the market. Internet of Things for the home didn't work very well and remains a niche. Same thing for 3D printers. Google Glass was a flop. So too many hopes were pinned on VR.

2017 was supposed to be the year of VR. What actually happened was that VRChat peaked at Xmas 2017, at about 5,000 users, and went downhill from there. VR games other than Beat Saber have not been very successful. VR headgear nauseates about 5% - 15% of the population. That's worse than roller coasters.

(There are people who thought augmented reality would be the next big thing. It might be if the price comes down, a lot. I've tried the Microsoft HoloLens, which starts somewhere around $3500. That needs to drop by about a factor of 25 to 50 before it can power Pokemon Go. The over-hyped Magic Leap One, on which over a billion dollars has been spent, is in the same price range and has about the same limitations, including a very narrow field of view.)

(About two years ago, I posted on the Facebook page of a well known "thought leader" that VR headsets were the next 3D TV. He threatened to ban me. I wonder how he's getting along.)

[Richardus Raymaker]

Still waiting for a few important things. One of them really would not take more then 30min to code i think. So, sansar is getting a bit better but still not good.

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Keep in mind as far as lighting goes, it's amateur hour.

Yes maybe but that is more than a little worrying too. Wasn't Sansar supposed to attract professional modellers with game and/or movie experience?

 

[Qie Niangao]

On 7/22/2019 at 7:55 PM, Lucia Nightfire said:

On 7/22/2019 at 1:52 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

Once SL's cloud move is complete and with staff migration to Tilia, it's likely Sansar will end up LL's the biggest project in terms of active staffing.

Ebbe stated in his NWN interview that out of LL's 200 employees, 70 of them are working on Sansar. [...]

Seventy is a lot of people. Maybe it sounds like only 35% of LL's employees, but I guarantee it includes way more developers than are working on SL. For one thing, those 200 LL employees include a bunch of functions common to all LL's properties (and Tilia's too). Also, because SL has actual users it also has a sizable operations staff; Sansar's concurrency is so low the whole platform could run on a couple boxes under somebody's desk on Battery Street.

There must be a reason the money is still gushing out on the floor like this. I used to think it was the sunk cost fallacy. Now I wonder if it's just the gambler down to his last chip figuring he's got nothing to lose. Or some crazy lawyer thing forcing irrational behavior; no hint what that could be, but usually it takes lawyers to generate behavior this irrational.

[Coffee Pancake]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Yes maybe but that is more than a little worrying too. Wasn't Sansar supposed to attract professional modellers with game and/or movie experience?

Sansar isn't even remotely competitive with other tools for stuff like that.

It's been my question since day one. Why Sansar, what's it for?

[Fionalein]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Seventy is a lot of people. Maybe it sounds like only 35% of LL's employees, but I guarantee it includes way more developers than are working on SL.

It is also more than 2 employees per concurrent user,...

Edited July 24, 2019 by Fionalein

[Kurshie Muromachi]

1 hour ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Sansar isn't even remotely competitive with other tools for stuff like that.

It's been my question since day one. Why Sansar, what's it for?

I recall Torley answering a question in a Sansar meeting in regards to why Sansar over other tools like Unreal. The generalized response was something along the lines that Sansar was a more easier tool to adapt to in order to produce VR- and/or non-VR based content and you also gain an easily accessible social aspect with Sansar.

Anyways, I agree that if you're a professional, you're more than likely going to use professional tools like Unreal which has far superior features even if the learning curve is higher. The time to learn in return gains you the tools to do cool things.

[animats]

6 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Seventy is a lot of people. Maybe it sounds like only 35% of LL's employees, but I guarantee it includes way more developers than are working on SL. For one thing, those 200 LL employees include a bunch of functions common to all LL's properties (and Tilia's too). Also, because SL has actual users it also has a sizable operations staff; Sansar's concurrency is so low the whole platform could run on a couple boxes under somebody's desk on Battery Street.

There must be a reason the money is still gushing out on the floor like this. I used to think it was the sunk cost fallacy. Now I wonder if it's just the gambler down to his last chip figuring he's got nothing to lose. Or some crazy lawyer thing forcing irrational behavior; no hint what that could be, but usually it takes lawyers to generate behavior this irrational.

That's puzzled me for some time, too. I thought that Sansar might be investor-driven, but according to Crunchbase, it's not. LL hasn't had a funding round since a series B in 2006, says Crunchbase. Bloomberg doesn't have much on LL. LL seems to be self-funding Sansar from SL income. Worst case is that LL took on debt to fund Sansar, and if Sansar is killed, the debt comes due. But that's pure speculation. Equity usually shows up in Crunchbase, but debt doesn't necessarily show there, especially for privately held companies.

Benchmark Capital and Catamount Ventures each have two board seats, so they are presumably the biggest investors. Neither of those firms is a top investor in VR. So it doesn't look like "we're funding the headsets, we need to fund the content". Headset funding is mostly from Facebook, which owns Oculus,  NTT and DoCoMo, which are the latest big investors in Magic Leap, and Microsoft, HTC and Panasonic, which are big enough to do this on their own. None of those seem to have money in LL.

Sinespace, the most successful player in the "VR game level loader" space (which is them, Sansar, and High Fidelity), claims 10,000 active users spending about US$17 per month, with Sinespace taking 30% of in-world transactions. That's only $600K a year, about a third of the average fast food outlet's revenue. That's who Sansar is chasing. There just doesn't seem to be much revenue in this space. The numbers don't work.

So I don't see why LL keeps pouring money into Sansar. Does anybody see a route to profitability?

 

[Selene Gregoire]

17 minutes ago, animats said:

So I don't see why LL keeps pouring money into Sansar. Does anybody see a route to profitability?

[Lucia Nightfire]

14 hours ago, animats said:

So I don't see why LL keeps pouring money into Sansar. Does anybody see a route to profitability?

Sansar is the CEO's legacy and his son also works on that platform. When investors wake up and no longer tolerate them playing in the sand, maybe we can get some devs pulled back to work on much needed features for the platform 99.9% of the users really care about.

[ChinRey]

21 hours ago, Kurshie Muromachi said:

I recall Torley answering a question in a Sansar meeting in regards to why Sansar over other tools like Unreal. The generalized response was something along the lines that Sansar was a more easier tool to adapt to in order to produce VR- and/or non-VR based content and you also gain an easily accessible social aspect with Sansar.

There's no inherent conflict between that and "cutting edge" 3D quality. Just look at Sinespace, it beats Sansar in both fields.

But yes, we have to accept that Sansar is what it is. The problem is that it isn't what it was intended to be. If you look back to the early Sansar announcements from LL, you'll see that what they intended to make, was a user friendly, professional quality cutting edge VR engine. They barely managed one out of three. That made it unsuitable for the market it was meant for so it became a solution looking for a problem. The only market Sansar has now, is trusty old friends of LL looking for something different from SL. Niches don't come much narrower than that,

Edited July 25, 2019 by ChinRey