Do you think Second Life will ever be close to being as popular as it was in ‘07?

[JPG0809]

So Linden Lab brought up plans to bring SL to the cloud which can potentially increase the quality in which SL runs.

I think this is exciting because one of the biggest draw backs for people to dip their toes into this grid is that their system, no matter how good, have issues running the client without a huge amount of lag.

So, say it did improve performance substantially (Though I’m not holding my breath) and people got into the idea of SL again, do you think it has the potential to spark a second wave of popularity like it did in the past? Reason I say this is because though there are other virtual worlds, none of them compare to SL other than maybe Sansar even though it’s in it’s baby stages.

 

 

[Mollymews]

1 hour ago, JPG0809 said:

So, say it did improve performance substantially (Though I’m not holding my breath) and people got into the idea of SL again, do you think it has the potential to spark a second wave of popularity like it did in the past?

i think SL has stabilised the slow bleed of regions since those days.  The slow incremental but steady reduction in tiers has helped I think. Also mesh body garment and skin/makeup creators have gotten a whole lot better at their craft. Same with mesh home and garden makers. Still a way for some to go, but is quite a lot of experts now at making stuff for mesh SL

the viewer is lots more robust than it has ever been. A personal experience is that I hardly ever crash now when I used to crash quite frequently in the olden days

Belli has been a huge success. I am a returnee to SL on a new account.  Last time I played regularly was back in about 2010. I came back because of Belli initially, even if I never stayed in my home there and went back to old mainland

i think there are a whole lot of people from those days (2004,5,6,7,8,9,10) who could return. I see some of those people inworld now. Some even popping up here on the forums.  Names I recognise from those olden days

there is about 40 million or so accounts from those days who don't log in anymore.  Even if say 1 or 2 million of the oldbies were to come back then it will put Linden in a good place. And us here now as well

I think there is some scope for thinking how to get the oldbies who did love SL back in the day.  Not sure how Linden can make a campaign to  get them back on, but we are trickling back in to the inworld for our own reasons and motivations

 

Edited February 28, 2020 by Mollymews
a lot

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

there is about 40 million or so accounts from those days who don't log in anymore. 

 

i think this is a better pond to fish in than getting more "youth" inworld. Not only for stability, but mostly also from business ($$) perspective.

Edited February 28, 2020 by Alwin Alcott

[Conifer Dada]

I came to SL in late September 2006.  This was probably at the early stage of the surge in popularity.  So I saw the unbelievable surge in land prices, followed by the creation of new continents and then about a year later came the great land price crash when the typical price of the cheapest land halved in a day or two.

I do think SL could regain the popularity of those days, but not in the same boom and bust way.  The key to this is performance.  If people could TP to a fairly busy club and see everything and everybody fully rezzed within a few seconds, with no lag and smooth movement, that would boost the appeal of virtual clubbing, which is a big part of SL.

Improving the system avatar's mesh and adding extra sliders so you could adjust things like knee position (thigh-to-calf ratio) and basic stance (before adding an AO) would be a help.

A good incentive to go Premium would be an initial gift of an LL- approved starter pack of copy/mod mesh clothing and hair.

With a bit of tweaking, SL could become attractive to some corporate organisations again and could become a natural home for architects to create impressions of their projects and for 3D graphic novelists to create their scenes.

 

Edited February 28, 2020 by Conifer Dada

[Linda Reddevil]

Marketing!

Back then you'd find articles about SL in newspapers and magazines. Even TV shows hopped on the wagon and created episodes about SL even if they didn't actually say the name Second Life. If people know about it, via some sort of marketing, they'll at least be curious and log in like I did almost 14 years ago. Whenever I mention SL to anyone now, they give me this blank stare and ask what the hell is SL. This explains why all of the Welcome Areas are empty! 

Edited February 28, 2020 by Linda Reddevil

[cheesecurd]

There is no new audience to get this game to. And for the younger audience there are more desirable options that they’re already involved in because they were way more public, specifically VRChat.

All social games kinda died off 10ish years ago, it was due to a lot of things, rise of mobile devices, social media being more popular, death of the decentralized internet. SecondLife and Habbo and Smallworlds or whatever were no longer appealing to new users since they weren’t really looking for social interaction anymore, with everyone on Facebook and MySpace and all.

Theres no real reversing things like that, maybe one day people will want to play social games again but for now the small audience that does is already in their niche (all of us here) or they’re playing VRChat because it was the most publicized option.

Putting SL in the cloud is pretty vague, technically it’s already in the cloud, we just don’t use that terminology. I highly doubt they mean remote streaming, and linden lab couldn’t afford to run SL on something like amazon servers instead of their own. The only ways to improve performance at this point are extensive engine work or restricting the complexity and detail of user created content, no more 10mb of uncompressed textures and 2 million polygons in a single lawn chair. I don’t care if that lawn chair looks like the face of god, it visibly reduces my framerate.

This games engine is patchwork that’s been built up on for pretty much the games entire existence, it was really impressive when it was new but it was designed for single core processors and video cards coming in at 256mb of video memory on the high end. It’s time for it to go entirely, rebuild from scratch with utilization of modern hardware and maybe even some new features such as automatic LoD limiting so even if Stacy McBlendernoob puts out a lawn chair with the surface detail to rival a scale model of the entire English coastline, I don’t have to be affected by it and it would turn into a regular lawn chair.

There is no drawing in new users, there will always be that trickle, but for right now it’s just not something people are interested in. The game needs some fundamental changes to keep its current users for any length of time and potentially bring back ones that left. 

Edited February 28, 2020 by cheesecurd

[Tolya Ugajin]

2 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

i think this is a better pond to fish in than getting more "youth" inworld. Not only for stability, but mostly also from business ($$) perspective.

Of those 40 million, 39,998,393 are alts of active accounts :p

[Tolya Ugajin]

3 minutes ago, cheesecurd said:

I don’t care if that lawn chair looks like the face of god, it visibly reduces my framerate.

Great, now every time I put my butt on a lawn chair I'm going to hear George Burns telling me not to sit on him.  Thanks a lot.

[Alwin Alcott]

9 minutes ago, Tolya Ugajin said:

Of those 40 million, 39,998,393 are alts of active accounts 😛

thats still a 1607 to gain

[Mahala Roviana]

I hope it doesn't. Sure I want SL to grow and become popular again, but I remember when it reached it's peak of popularity. SLag was horrible. During peak hours, it was nearly impossible to even get in. Second LIfe exploded in population growth but, imho, didn't have the resources in place to support that growth. With proper planning, I think it can grow again, but not without improvements on the back end of things.

[FairreLilette]

8 hours ago, JPG0809 said:

So Linden Lab brought up plans to bring SL to the cloud which can potentially increase the quality in which SL runs.

I think this is exciting because one of the biggest draw backs for people to dip their toes into this grid is that their system, no matter how good, have issues running the client without a huge amount of lag.

So, say it did improve performance substantially (Though I’m not holding my breath) and people got into the idea of SL again, do you think it has the potential to spark a second wave of popularity like it did in the past? Reason I say this is because though there are other virtual worlds, none of them compare to SL other than maybe Sansar even though it’s in it’s baby stages.

 

 

That sounds cool...the performance improvement with the cloud thing.  

Lots of people I know use their cell phone exclusively and have no more desk top nor laptop and don't seem to want a desk top pc nor laptop for anything because they are hooked on pretty much FB and texting.  FB is not anywhere as interesting as SL.  The only reason I visit FB is to catch up with family.   

I do not enjoy the internet at all on a cell phone.  Yet, I have family and friends that will not give up their cell phone life period.  I think they view a desktop/laptop as a dinosaur and I'm not quite sure why.  

Edited February 28, 2020 by FairreLilette

[Janet Voxel]

Why think in terms of what it was? It’s never going back to 2007 and it shouldn’t go back to that either. The world has changed too much, the way media is consumed, games are played, the way people communicate.

Guess what? it’s never going to be like that again. It has to adapt with the times and be forward thinking, not just maintaining 2007.

[FairreLilette]

Another reason my family and friends love their cell phone so much is it's their camera.  Shoot and share....shoot and share.  It's everything in an instant now.  

If Photoshop came out with a super easy way to make a 3D object...that could spark some interest...but it would need to be affordable too.  When the first creative suite from Photoshop came out it was 900 hundred dollars.  No way! 

I don't like Blender...for help..it's almost 10 dollars a month and I have to give them (the Blender people) my bank info.  I didn't want to do that.  

Edited February 28, 2020 by FairreLilette

[cheesecurd]

1 minute ago, FairreLilette said:

Another reason my family and friends love their cell phone so much is it's their camera.  Shoot and share....shoot and share.  It's everything in an instant now.  

If Photoshop came out with a super easy way to make a 3D object...that could spark some interest.  I don't like Blender...for help..it's almost 10 dollars a month and I have to give them (the Blender people) my bank info.  I didn't want to do that.  

You-

you pay money for blender help?

lol?

Anyway, the program you’re looking for is called Autodesk Maya.
https://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/overview

The more organic of 3D modeling and animation suites, Fusion 360 and Inventor can do it, but in the same way you can make a pillow in Solidworks, they’re not really meant for anything non mechanical. Autodesk is the Adobe of 3D, they are the standard, it’s what everyone uses. Just the same as no professional business is photo editing with GIMP, no professional business is modeling with Blender. They’re using Autodesk stuff.

Regular old AutoCAD can do 3D stuff as well but it’s a lot more complicated and if you don’t know what you’re doing, use maya. It’s in the same realm as blender but it’s a lot easier to use, minimal extensions and plugins to get things to work right. Blender is like using a Swiss Army knife to take apart a computer, it’ll do the job, you might end up using some tools the wrong way to get the right results, half of it you won’t use and chances are you’ll take forever doing it.

But Maya is having a tool cabinet with everything you would ever need, specialized in any way, ready at your fingertips in neatly organized drawers.

But while the Swiss Army knife was 10$ on sale at Walmart, the proper tool set came with a bill measuring up similarly to the cost of a decent used car.

[Jackson Redstar]

IMO SL will never be 'fast' or free of lag. Regardless of the coding, it still requires to 'live process' all the graphics, the lighting, shadows, mesh, avatars, textures etc... They 'kinda' figured it out in Sansar pretty much as each new scene (or in SL a sim) was downloaded onto the local client, but I think a user generated virtual world, I really don't think anything can make SL operate like say, any game you might play on your computer

[Sassy Kenin]

27 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

I don't like Blender...for help..it's almost 10 dollars a month and I have to give them (the Blender people) my bank info.  I didn't want to do that.  

For that price your better off getting this https://area.autodesk.com/3ds-max-indie/

[FairreLilette]

10 minutes ago, cheesecurd said:

You-

you pay money for blender help?

lol?

Anyway, the program you’re looking for is called Autodesk Maya.
https://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/overview

The more organic of 3D modeling and animation suites, Fusion 360 and Inventor can do it, but in the same way you can make a pillow in Solidworks, they’re not really meant for anything non mechanical. Autodesk is the Adobe of 3D, they are the standard, it’s what everyone uses. Just the same as no professional business is photo editing with GIMP, no professional business is modeling with Blender. They’re using Autodesk stuff.

Regular old AutoCAD can do 3D stuff as well but it’s a lot more complicated and if you don’t know what you’re doing, use maya. It’s in the same realm as blender but it’s a lot easier to use, minimal extensions and plugins to get things to work right. Blender is like using a Swiss Army knife to take apart a computer, it’ll do the job, you might end up using some tools the wrong way to get the right results, half of it you won’t use and chances are you’ll take forever doing it.

But Maya is having a tool cabinet with everything you would ever need, specialized in any way, ready at your fingertips in neatly organized drawers.

But while the Swiss Army knife was 10$ on sale at Walmart, the proper tool set came with a bill measuring up similarly to the cost of a decent used car.

NO, I don't pay money for Blender help.  I said I didn't want to do that.  The free Blender program kept shutting down, and I couldn't really find any good tutorials on Youtube for Blender.  

But, no...I do not pay 10 dollars a month for Blender help.  I said that is what Blender wants for help...10 dollars a month plus your banking info so they can automatically withdraw the money every month.  

Thank you for the references to the other programs.  I'll check into them.  Any "catch" with those?  Such as money and banking info?  

Of interest, a SL friend who is in Europe told me Photoshop works on subscription in her country now and that is preventing her from wanting to use Photoshop.  She can't just buy a Photoshop disc in her country.  Too many counterfeits of Photoshop could be the problem.  But, with a Photoshop disc you have to have the serial number on your box to run it...so I don't know why she can't have it in her country except by subscription.  

[Sassy Kenin]

3 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

Of interest, a SL friend who is in Europe told me Photoshop works on subscription in her country now and that is preventing her from wanting to use Photoshop.

Paid monthly PS is a rip off!😖  here is a great alternative that does the same things with 1 time fee https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

[Lyssa Greymoon]

8 minutes ago, FairreLilette said:

But, with a Photoshop disc you have to have the serial number on your box to run it...so I don't know why she can't have it in her country except by subscription. 

Adobe Creative Cloud is subscription based now, they don't use serial numbers anymore.

[FairreLilette]

3 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

Adobe Creative Cloud is subscription based now, they don't use serial numbers anymore.

Oh I checked liking your post for the confirmation on the subscription info.  I should have put the sad face.    

Yeah, my friend would really like to use Photoshop.  She's going to try the Gimp program but I cannot offer her any help on Gimp because I have never used Gimp and do not plan to.  She really wants to create and I do not know if Gimp is the right program for her.  

[Amina Sopwith]

1 hour ago, janetosilio said:

Why think in terms of what it was? It’s never going back to 2007 and it shouldn’t go back to that either. The world has changed too much, the way media is consumed, games are played, the way people communicate.

Guess what? it’s never going to be like that again. It has to adapt with the times and be forward thinking, not just maintaining 2007.

You're right, of course, but I really, really, really miss the RP.

[Janet Voxel]

8 minutes ago, Amina Sopwith said:

You're right, of course, but I really, really, really miss the RP.

Good times!

[JPG0809]

4 hours ago, Linda Reddevil said:

Marketing!

Back then you'd find articles about SL in newspapers and magazines. Even TV shows hopped on the wagon and created episodes about SL even if they didn't actually say the name Second Life. If people know about it, via some sort of marketing, they'll at least be curious and log in like I did almost 14 years ago. Whenever I mention SL to anyone now, they give me this blank stare and ask what the hell is SL. This explains why all of the Welcome Areas are empty! 

We’re there ever commercials for television? I remember so many games and other virtual worlds did that and THAT got my attention. 
 

However, this is before I knew I could just google  “virtual worlds” 😅

[JPG0809]

3 hours ago, cheesecurd said:

There is no new audience to get this game to. And for the younger audience there are more desirable options that they’re already involved in because they were way more public, specifically VRChat.

All social games kinda died off 10ish years ago, it was due to a lot of things, rise of mobile devices, social media being more popular, death of the decentralized internet. SecondLife and Habbo and Smallworlds or whatever were no longer appealing to new users since they weren’t really looking for social interaction anymore, with everyone on Facebook and MySpace and all.

This I pondered on because I wonder, “Why do people come into virtual worlds in the first place?” because I also don’t come into them for deep connections or communication.

[Beth Macbain]

6 minutes ago, JPG0809 said:

This I pondered on because I wonder, “Why do people come into virtual worlds in the first place?” because I also don’t come into them for deep connections or communication.

That question opens an entirely different kettle of fish. Everyone comes to SL, or other virtual worlds (are there others?!) for a unique reason.