Second Life and other virtual worlds - a relic of the past, or a key to the future?

[Gopi Passiflora]

Sometimes when I mention Second Life on other parts of the Internet, they make remarks that are related to its age. "Second Life? You still play that? Next thing you know you'll be saying you still play Everquest," is what they would say. I suppose they have a point, Second Life started all the way back in 2003, which is pretty much ancient history now for most people.

But I didn't start using Second Life and other virtual worlds  regularly until about four years ago. When I started using Second Life and IMVU, new possibilities opened up to me that I couldn't do beforehand. I could explore playing as different identities, for example. I could explore a huge world built in part by others' creativity. I could find new ways to socialize and exchange ideas.

Yes, Second Life has shown its age  - a relic of the past - but I think this platform is a technology that has changed my life at least. I think it could be a key to the future that opens up new possibilities.

I apologize if I couldn't word it better.

[Mudbug227]

 I didn't start until last week... it's sad to see so much creativity not being used. Without people it's a relic of the past. But I hope there will be a resurgence - I agree with you and hope that it opens up new possibilities for more new blood like mine to learn from what's been built so far.

 

[Fritigern Gothly]

25 minutes ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

Sometimes when I mention Second Life on other parts of the Internet, they make remarks that are related to its age. "Second Life? You still play that? Next thing you know you'll be saying you still play Everquest," is what they would say. 

 

Show those jokers videos like these:

 

[simplemint]

In terms of its appeal to the younger generation, it does seem that Second Life and other virtual worlds are a relic of the past. In my short time on SL, I have always thought of the user base as being a bit older than the other gaming communities that I am part of - which is not a bad thing at all, but it could become a problem in the future if SL sticks around in terms of attracting new users. IMVU is the only virtual world I can think of that seems to have a larger cohort of young people playing it, and even IMVU isn't really considered 'in' anymore. SL and virtual worlds in general can't have a future if it can't continually attract new players. 

If you consider MMOs and MMORPGs as virtual worlds, I think the future of virtual worlds brightens up given that there are plenty of people still interested in games like World of Warcraft or The Elder Scrolls Online, which still attract millions of users, but I think those are a different 'category' of virtual worlds because they are games in a more traditional sense whereas many people in SL do not consider SL to be a game. 

There are a wealth of games, outside of MMOs and MMORPGS, out there which enable people to play as different identities, that allow people to explore worlds in part built by other's creativity, and which enable people to socialize and exchange ideas. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which was huge this summer (selling 26 million units as of September, second-best selling game of all time in Japan, best selling game of 2020) is only one example of a game with a vibrant community wth many younger players which does all of those things. Fortnite  (350+ million plus players) arguably also has the same features because of the character customization it offers and with sandbox features in Fortnite Creative. 

Whether a lack of interest in SL or other virtual worlds like it is due to marketing, the interests of people in my generation, and/or preferences regarding graphic and gameplay, I'm not sure. I think it is in part to SL being limited to computers only whereas many popular platforms like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite allow play on consoles and/or mobile as well, which is where I think gaming is moving towards. 

Edited December 14, 2020 by simplemint

[Fritigern Gothly]

45 minutes ago, simplemint said:

In terms of its appeal to the younger generation, it does seem that Second Life and other virtual worlds are a relic of the past.

The average young person appears to favor fast paced games and SL is anything but that. It takes time to even so much as get started. You sign up, go through the tutorial (unless you skip it) and then you find yourself with an avatar which looks inferior to that of most others, so you will want to improve that, but how do we do that? With money! (1) How do we get money? We get a job! (2) How do we get a job? By looking in the right places and asking the right people. However, finding out where those places are and who the people are also takes time.
And by the time this aforementioned average young person even gets close to deciding to look for a job, the interest has waned because of the lack of instant payoff.

Of course, there are young people that do enjoy SL, that do not meet the above description. I am not talking about that demographic.  

(1) Yes, I know there are freebies galore, but finding those also take time. 
(2) Because most people are reluctant to buy L$, especially when they are new, and/or young.

[Sassy Kenin]

Your world, your imagination. 

[animats]

11 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

The average young person appears to favor fast paced games and SL is anything but that.

Yes. I consider that a bug. SL feels too sluggish, which is a technical problem. I've written on that previously.

I have a topic on these forums, "The Metaverse and All That", where I post news items about big virtual worlds. There's interest and money. Almost a hundred have been built. Ryan Schultz has a list on his blog. We're still a long way from Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

Metaverses come in several flavors. First, there's VR or not VR. Right now, to get the frame rate for VR on affordable headgear, you have to bring the content down to low-rez cartoon level and keep the scene size small. So VR worlds are kind of limited. VRchat is probably the best. Facebook keeps trying to get a hit in this space, but Facebook Spaces was a flop and Facebook Horizon does not seem to be catching on.

Then there's the question of how much building the system allows users. The biggest open world systems are voxel-based, like Legos. Roblox, after over a decade, has become huge. Dual Universe is an interplanetary scale voxel based system. Luca, who's well known on SL, went over there and live-streamed two months of work. It's a grinding game. She started out collecting rocks to get materials. After two months of hard work, many hours a day, she was up to "Fur Admiral Luca", with a fleet of carriers filled with small craft, bases, and large mining operations. Then the Dual Universe management changed the rules and the users are screaming.

Then there are the "Make Money Fast" systems - Decentraland and Sominium Space. These are tied to the Etherium blockchain and are really cryptocurrency speculation schemes with a virtual world attached to make their token a "utility token" to evade SEC oversight. It's possible to go in world with both systems, but few people do.

There are the game level loaders - you build a game level offline, upload it, and people can go visit. Sansar, High Fidelity, and Sinespace are in this category. Mostly, they're boring.  You visit once, see what's there, and don't return. Sansar had a Star Wars prop museum and a Ready Player One prop museum. Visit once and you're done. Fortnite has something similar, allowing people to add Fortnite levels, but it's not a major part of the game.

For a while, it looked like the Spatial OS system from Improbable was going to make big open-world games easier to make. But it turns out that system is too expensive to run. You have to host on Google and pay for every object and action. Three fairly good indy games shut down because the operating cost was too high. You can't afford to host free to play that way.

Sweeney, of Epic, keeps making Metaverse noises, but so far all that's come out are some modest add-ons to Fortnite. Fortnite is sharded; thousands of copies of a little world, not one big one.

SL is actually in good shape. Based on average concurrent users, it ranks about even with GTA V Online, which hovers around 12th place on Steam. But GTA V Online gets all the publicity.

SL's big onboarding problems are well known. 1) the new user experience sucks, 2) it's too sluggish, 3) "What do I do now?" 4) fear and censorship of a world that has sex. It's up to LL marketing to overcome those. Not seeing much happening.

[Janet Voxel]

I wouldn't say it doesn't attract younger users. A lot of them "graduate" from IMVU and they already have creative knowhow. I see them around all the time, and they have that same wonder I had when I started at 20.

I guess it's all where you hang out and whether you can spot them in an environment where everybody is perpetually 25-30 in appearance, but younger users are definitely here.

[ChinRey]

9 hours ago, animats said:

SL's big onboarding problems are well known. 1) the new user experience sucks, 2) it's too sluggish, 3) "What do I do now?" 4) fear and censorship of a world that has sex. It's up to LL marketing to overcome those. Not seeing much happening.

There's also its narrow cultural/regional focus, as I've pointed out in another thread, and its lack of RL relevance.

Second Life is certainly not a key to the future for all of these reasons and probably a few more too. It's very much a niche product with little or no relevance outside its little market segment and no realistic hope of ever expanding. They've tried lots of times, they tried to go international with the Sahreta Osumai Linden Homes theme and the Corsica, Jaegeot and Satori continents, they tried to break into the educational market, they tried to get a foothold in the corporate market... And they always failed because they didn't understand these markets and what they needed. It's too late now.

But I wouldn't call it a relic of the past either because it is very strong within its little niche. It's a fixture on the internet and, as I've said before, it's not going anywhere in both senses of the phrase.

Whether virtual worlds in general is an important part of the future is a much bigger and more complicated question.

 

9 hours ago, animats said:

Metaverses come in several flavors. First, there's VR or not VR. Right now, to get the frame rate for VR on affordable headgear, you have to bring the content down to low-rez cartoon level and keep the scene size small. So VR worlds are kind of limited.

I strongly disagee with you there and I think I've demonstrated my point on several occasions. Here's one of my latest: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/462249-what-second-life-could-have-been/?tab=comments#comment-2195223

That build was made for opensim, without access to any resource saving features more modern engines are supposed to have, there was nothing cartoonish about the build and it would certainly have been more than light enough to work with VR. (For reference: the render load wasn't much higehr than an empty sandbox and it used only 2% of the server resources asigned to a region.) If Facebook can't match that with Spaces or Horizon it's because their developers or content creators or possibly both are no good.

Edited December 15, 2020 by ChinRey

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

What? Are people still using 'computers'? 

[animats]

17 hours ago, ChinRey said:

That build was made for opensim, without access to any resource saving features more modern engines are supposed to have, there was nothing cartoonish about the build and it would certainly have been more than light enough to work with VR.

That's a nice build.  We need more big outdoor builds like that in SL. We have plenty of empty ocean, but not much sparsely built land. I'd like to see SL have some large areas of small town sims surrounded by open-space sims with vegetation and roads, but not much else.

A forest area has a big edge in performance because it's mostly duplicate instances of a small number of different objects. Instances are cheap, and in more advanced systems, such as the UE5 demo, really cheap. There's one copy of the mesh and one copy of the texture in the GPU for all the instances of the same object. The GPU can then draw large numbers of the same object without much CPU intervention.

Most games use instancing heavily, partly for performance and partly to reduce artist costs. Second Life tends not to do that. Your house might have a few identical chairs, but most items will only appear once. The house next door probably has very little content in common with yours. Neither textures nor meshes are re-used much between different creators. This results in a big loading cost and a need for more GPU memory.

(How much GPU to require is a difficult problem for SL. But that's a different topic.)

[FairreLilette]

On 12/13/2020 at 4:57 PM, Gopi Passiflora said:

Yes, Second Life has shown its age  - a relic of the past - but I think this platform is a technology that has changed my life at least. I think it could be a key to the future that opens up new possibilities.

I've stated before as far as I can think, I think Second Life's key to the future may lie in full legalized chance gambling 'if' that ever happens.  It could happen in a post coronavirus world.  People may want to chance gamble on the internet rather than take flights, rent costly hotels, be in germy casinos.  If our society does become more stay at home more than usual post coronavirus, perhaps internet chance gambling could make Second Life an enormous over-night success and be the "king" of the Adult metaverse.  But, if internet chance gambling ever happens, it may be regulated to those with a license who would have to register with LL here.  Who knows...I'm just thinking out loud.  

There need to be classes for avatar making that are easy to find should that happen though with chance gaming on the internet becoming legal.  Otherwise, other sites will just give people a starter mesh avatar for example.  

[Jennifer Boyle]

On 12/13/2020 at 7:07 PM, Mudbug227 said:

Without people it's a relic of the past. 

It has always been almost empty. People were writing about that in 2007 when I opened my account. 

[FairreLilette]

6 minutes ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

It has always been almost empty. People were writing about that in 2007 when I opened my account. 

You know I've heard this but I've always had an actively social SL but I've always grouped and stayed active with my groups.  You get to know people that way by grouping...so it's really not empty.   Many people don't even know how to use the DESTINATION GUIDE either...lots of people and hang outs to find there.  SL is just like rl in that way - you have to make your social circle happen by putting in the time and energy.  

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

On 12/14/2020 at 2:07 AM, Mudbug227 said:

it's sad to see so much creativity not being used.

That's kinda like saying, after being dropped off on a random spot on planet Earth, "How sad, this planet is too wet."

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, animats said:

Most games use instancing heavily, partly for performance and partly to reduce artist costs. Second Life tends not to do that.

Second Life doesn't strictly speaking support instancing at all. As far as I know it doesn't even consolidate draw calls (@Beq Janus, can you confirm this?) But recycling assets still helps a lot since each only have to be downloaded once and there's only one copy of it stored in the VRAM.

You are partly right in assuming this is one of the secrets of my forest. I didn't re-use the meshes very much since I don't like identical twin trees but the entire forest, the size16 SL regions, only used 23 512x512 textures at the time I took those pictures.

Edited December 15, 2020 by ChinRey

[Milo Darkheart]

I would say a relic of the past since second life does need to do more to get more people in, i dont really see it as a future thing since there will be better options in the future

[Rowan Amore]

On 12/14/2020 at 1:21 PM, animats said:

Yes. I consider that a bug. SL feels too sluggish, which is a technical problem. I've written on that previously

Not slow in the technical sense but slow as in, not running around on a mission..something to do.  There is no mission or objective which equates to slow.

Also,  a lot of younger people are in the "I want it now" mindset.  SL takes.time and effort to learn.  It's fairly easy to jump into a game.  They all seem to be similarly set up.  Pick your player, enter, run around, shoot stuff, level up.  They come to SL and have no idea what to do since there is no directive.  It just is.

[Drayke Newall]

1 hour ago, RowanMinx said:

Not slow in the technical sense but slow as in, not running around on a mission..something to do.  There is no mission or objective which equates to slow.

Also,  a lot of younger people are in the "I want it now" mindset.  SL takes.time and effort to learn.  It's fairly easy to jump into a game.  They all seem to be similarly set up.  Pick your player, enter, run around, shoot stuff, level up.  They come to SL and have no idea what to do since there is no directive.  It just is.

This as always falls back on LL not knowing how to appeal to certain markets as ChinRey has mentioned. It has been the bane of SL in all cases, as with LL not being able to substantiate any good reason for their backward decisions and therefore they tend to do more harm than good. What also goes against them is their insanely slow update and release times. A AAA gaming company can make multiple games with the same amount of staff LL have and support an existing game with updates with far less.

Whilst sure SL was founded on the mantra of 'your world, your imagination', that slogan and the realisation of it does not necessarily mean that LL cannot provide builds and systems that run harmoniously with the users creations. Linden Realms as well as Linden Homes are a prime example of this. Why cant the vast swathes of empty mainland be converted into a nature forest park (created and run by LL) such as what ChinRey demonstrated in her post. Why cant they make a train system etc. Show people what can be done.

LL really need to look at the new user experience and develop a system whereby the time and effort to learn is reduced not by limiting that time and effort but by disguising it in a system that not only is fun but also appealing to certain generations. Make the experience a game, give them a backstory, give them those objectives they desire.

Take experiences, we are still waiting for region wide experience tools. We are still waiting for Linden Lab's proclaimed Pokémon style hunt experience they touted as being region wide. Second life in the first order for a new user is to build their avatar to a certain quality, learn the skills (minor in most cases) needed to use SL and then from there most new users want to explore. Taking LL simple Pokémon style hunt experience we are still waiting for, not only provides an objective for people to explore SL but also engages them in an objective based system that they desire whilst giving them the chance to explore SL, meet people, learn things. Why not do something like that.

It also comes down to their lack of feature and script implementation as well as region cost which limits the ability for creators to give new users of the younger or even older generation something they want.

If you think of ready player one, it was a hub of all things. That is where SL needs to progress to, being a hub for games, art work, museums, virtual shopping etc. A place where the younger generation can come in and find multiple games within a game. There is no reason why a game like World of Warcraft cant be in second life. This issue simply comes down to lack of programming features within SL as well as cost which are two things LL have failed time and time again to resolve.

Until such things are done Second life will continue to be treated as a relic of the past whilst other similar systems progressively take it over.

[ChinRey]

13 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Why cant the vast swathes of empty mainland be converted into a nature forest park (created and run by LL) such as what ChinRey demonstrated in her post.

Well optimised vegetation like the trees I made for that forest wouldn't even have added much server side load or bandwidth worth speaking of and if the landscaping is done with a little bit of care, it can even reduce the client side lag a tiny little bit since the plants can often function as natural looking screens hiding laggier content further away.

Another thing that could be done is partition off 12 1024 m2 or 6 2048 m2 or 3 4096 m2 parcels (or a combination of those) with plenty of space between them. Set the region as a homestead and use the prim quota multiplier to give each parcel the same prim quota as they would have had in a full region. Then use the remaining prims to fill up the rest of the land with vegetation and such and maybe also give the residents access to "free" houses and garden fatures if that's what they want. You may or may not include roads to connect the houses to each other and the rest of the continent and you may or may not assign a specific theme to the region. Three or four such regions would require about the same amount of server side resources and bandwidth as a single Bellisseria style region but have room for at least twice as many parcels, offer more privacy and be much, much lower on client side lag. Ideally you want to do this conversion on empty regions of course but sometimes it should even be possible to do it even if there are a few occupied parcels there. That's what my forest build really was made for. I filled it up with trees for the demo but it had assigned spots for 1024 m2 parcels all along the roads. All that needed to be done to convert it into a residental region was to remove some trees and add some intersections for the driveways. This isn't the first time I've mentioned this idea and I still haven't heard any reason why it couldn't or shouldn't be done. Come to think of it, this can be done on private sims as well so if any sim owner is interested, my price is L$ 30,000 per unique region.

[Maryanne Solo]

SL was, for a long time, my only online subscription. (financial obligation).
I guess I have always subconsciously approved of paying for my own, (semi private), online space.
 I do control & pay for my own fully private business domain nowadays but you know...

SL allows you to play geeky, innovate, e-commerce legend long -> BEFORE<- you actually achieve it in RL ❤️
And that's priceless AFAIK. 
If young-uns 😂 are too stupid to realise SL's worth? the jokes on them 😋

  

[Fauve Aeon]

I think they are just a little pocket on the side of time, neither past or yet to fulfill their ‘usefulness’, depending on what you use them for.* I always describe what I’m doing, then mention I’m doing it in SL or Kitely as a secondary point if it comes up. That always puts the correct emphasis on them as the platforms I’m using the same way as saying ‘I’m working on a digital painting’ highlights the work better than saying ‘Oh, I work in photoshop’. 
 

*edit: I also think they can be an amazing creative or business or social tool or a completely useless time-suck and become a bad habit depending on what they are used for. 

Edited December 16, 2020 by Fauve Aeon

[rasterscan]

I have to say despite the painful learning curve, BOM EEP and mesh have kept this 'game' right up to date. Creators and builders can make it more like real life than rl lols !

Mind blowingly realistic at times. I love it !

[Prokofy Neva]

I was just talking to a med student who spent 9 hours -- 9 hours! -- on Zoom and was going crazy from it.

And the answer to this is Second Life, in some form. When it becomes easier to use and works better.

You don't get tired from Second Life because you are able to interact with the environment, move around, see new scenes, build them yourself etc.

To be sure, the animations for speech still seem strange and there is the great ramp-in difficulties. But generally I think something like this will be more than likely, and the option of covering your face with goggles is not going to take off and become widespread.

Also I was talking about this with my daughter who works in a hospital. We had hoped COVID would force much-needed reforms in healthcare. And by that I don't mean "Medicare for all" and things that can't be paid for, but more sanity, more common sense, more logic, less expense, i.e. like having two different departments of the same hospital on different record-keeping and billing systems so that they can't talk to each other, and you have to sneaker net a letter from a doctor to get something done like a blood test, because paper prescriptions have now been abolished. This then has to be double checked in person. 

Hospitals are run by people with degrees in hotel management, we've discovered. I'm not saying doctors would make better managers; I believe they are like journalists in that respect and should stay in their lane. But there has to be a better way. For example, the whole mask shortage crisis was in part induced by poor management, as administrators had doctors who sat isolated in offices not even seeing patients get awarded scarce masks, and people who ran vials of blood to labs or screen patients not getting masks. 

The only thing that seems to have emerged from COVID is that telemedicine is now more firmly established, and some doctors who had a terrible aversion to ever using the phone or email to actual talk to a patient now have overcome this barrier as they realize it saves everyone time and in fact does not run them ragged with incessant patient contact. It is now more acceptable to have Zoom doctor visits although of course for many things they aren't good enough. 

Edited December 16, 2020 by Prokofy Neva

[Drayke Newall]

14 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

And the answer to this is Second Life, in some form. When it becomes easier to use and works better.

I agree, however in this case their slow updating and lack of foresight has now created the situation where another program has stepped in when SL could have. LL have missed their opportunity once again.

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Well optimised vegetation like the trees I made for that forest wouldn't even have added much server side load or bandwidth worth speaking of and if the landscaping is done with a little bit of care, it can even reduce the client side lag a tiny little bit since the plants can often function as natural looking screens hiding laggier content further away.

That is the key as it not only helps improvement but if done correctly and managed by Linden Lab can be used as an example of how to optimise. Unfortunately my visits to Bellisseria have completely removed any faith I had (didn't have much) in LL in providing any form of optimisation. Whilst I understand and am grateful for the effort Moles put into things on LL's behalf, they really need to go do a lesson on optimisation.

For example, their trailer homes are the same LI cost as their larger homes despite being 1 room and go so far away from optimisation with detailing in mesh every screw and crevice. Both being unneeded details that can be covered by textures and normal mapping.

Additionally whilst I agree that the trees can screen from leggier content LL occlusion culling methods are just not up to par to make that possible in any measurable way.