Are there contingencies in place?

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Riodan said:

Ironically, it was but it fell flat on it's face. I think this is probably attributed to the fact that you couldn't bring over your assets from SL, and it was a little too unfamiliar for most Second Life users. 

Sansar probably failed because it didn't allow adult content.  Sex sells.  Regardless of whether you, yourself, are involved in that aspect, it probably contributes to a vast percentage of sales inworld and on the MP.    

[Love Zhaoying]

47 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

. land prices are at an all time low, and the steady trend of lower pricing may as well continue as LL shifts its income elsewhere.

People have very short memories (or are too new to know how prices have changed).

 

[Love Zhaoying]

32 minutes ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

People have been saying "SL is dying" for three decades now, yet here we still are...

+1

[MBeatrix]

1 hour ago, Extrude Ragu said:

[...] Many residents are so old that the platform changing to get with the times just isn't appealing to them because they're so invested in how SL works now.

Exactly. Also, who has the time and patience to wait for years to have a new virtual world working more or less as it should?

SL evolves slowly enough for us, users, to keep up with the changes. And how it has changed since I joined, back in 2011!

Comparing SL to any game is a a mistake. Although it can be seen as a game, it is not. It's all about building your identity and shaping how your virtual life is.

[Katherine Heartsong]

I honestly don't see any other virtual world, existing, shown in demo, or even in planning that captures the permissions we have here.

We are the creators, we bring things into the world and no amount of effort I can imagine would have a new virtual world with even a tiny fraction of all of the amazing (and weird) custom content available to SL residents. Unless it's a totally open world that allows us to bring what we like, and then also provide a MP to sell it, I just can't see it. That's point one.

Point two is related. Part of the appeal of SL is it's openness. Other corporate entities severely restrict the people, what they can do etc. We self police as well, making sure the most egregious and potentially illegal stuff is removed and monitored while allowing for a huge range of activities otherwise that most corp entities will shudder at. Without that, again, I can't see an alternative.

Last. Related to the above two. Sex. In all it's messy, weird, edgy, taboo, sensual, vanilla, and [insert your own kink/fetish here] glory. Without letting people be people, and that involves physical intimate fun, other platforms would struggle to survive this long. It can not be especially realistic here at time with regards to SLex, but the range of what you can get up to would not at all be tolerated by 99.9% of corporations. I don't need to point out some of the more taboo stuff and "right on the edge of permissible" that goes on (all usually self policed again) but I can't imagine anyone else taking the apparent risks that happen in SL.

Anyone entering this field to create a new SL has a very very hard mountain to climb. Most will simply give up before making it work.

Plus, who are you building this for? I don't think the social and online habits of many gamers aged 18–30 are really into why SL is what it is. I was going to say "attention span" but that smacks of ageism and how darn stubborn and old I am.

I'd love to see it happen, though, but good luck.

Edited February 2 by Katherine Heartsong

[Qie Niangao]

32 minutes ago, MBeatrix said:

SL evolves slowly enough for us, users, to keep up with the changes. And how it has changed since I joined, back in 2011!

Yes. But also, as much as we users may keep up, the accumulated platform "evolutions" have made it just crazy complicated for new users even when the changes themselves are simplifications. Eventually they'll need to know what "BOM" means and why it's a thing, and which appearance sliders work and which don't, and why there are heads and bodies and *system* heads and bodies, and alpha masks and alpha slices and hair and hairbases (some system and some EvoX) and shoes as footwear and shoes as height adjusters… and bumpmaps and normalmaps and PBR glTF normalmaps and and and.

No idea what to do about it but an ever growing learning curve is a barrier. 

[MBeatrix]

12 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Yes. But also, as much as we users may keep up, the accumulated platform "evolutions" have made it just crazy complicated for new users even when the changes themselves are simplifications. Eventually they'll need to know what "BOM" means and why it's a thing, and which appearance sliders work and which don't, and why there are heads and bodies and *system* heads and bodies, and alpha masks and alpha slices and hair and hairbases (some system and some EvoX) and shoes as footwear and shoes as height adjusters… and bumpmaps and normalmaps and PBR glTF normalmaps and and and.

No idea what to do about it but an ever growing learning curve is a barrier. 

Ha! Ha!

That is partially true. And it's only partially because there are loads of good, attractive content that is ready to use without needing to know all those details. Details will come with time, if the new users stick around.

Anyway, that's one of the reasons why communities are important: they provide help.

[animats]

4 hours ago, Riodan said:

Ultimately, I ask these questions because I happen to do a good bit of development in Unreal Engine, and I know of several places with solid prototypes for virtual worlds already in development.  Before it gets asked, no I can't tell you who, or give you any details on what I do know, it would be ethically wrong as I've known a few people in the industry for years and won't betray the trust they've given me as a professional courtesy.   

I know of a few, too. But it's a difficult niche to crack, both technically and as a business. SL's real asset is its user base, not its technology. Sansar made that very, very clear.

Second Life is a "cash machine", one of the owners has said publicly. That's good; it will stick around. Most of the other metaverse players are losing money. Meta's Horizon lost billions. Improbable's system costs too much to operate and the indy games that used it all went broke. Roblox is huge but losing money; they went for growth after the IPO and overexpanded. They are still stuck in the 13 year old demographic. (During their glory years, they developed some nice technology. They have a solution to making layered clothing fit.) The NFT crowd has produced little, if anything, that anybody wants to visit. Go visit Decentraland; it's free to visit. It's worth an hour. You won't need to go back.

So who else is there? Dual Universe? RP1? M2?

There's a cost problem. If you require a gamer-grade GPU, which Sansar did, you're restricting the market to serious gamers. That's a big niche; there are 90 million active Steam users, and their average GPU is above a 6GB NVidia 1080. But it's not the Walmart $99 laptop, and it's not a phone. This is a big problem in the post-desktop era. Most laptop GPUs are too weak.

If you allow user-created content, there's a penalty, but it's not speed. It's GPU memory. You need about 3x the GPU memory, because there's not much instancing. SL has over 50,000 different chairs on Marketplace. The entry-level NVidia desktop GPU is now 8GB, which is enough to overcome that problem. Laptops, even "gamer laptops", rarely have that much GPU memory, and everybody is on a laptop now.

Unreal Engine probably won't help. Unreal Engine relies on extensive preprocessing of content in Unreal Engine's editor. Creating Nanite meshes (multiple LODs in one mesh, in a cleverly packed way) is done in the editor. The editor does automatic LOD creation. In a dynamic world, much of that has to be done on servers somewhere. That's not impossible. Back before Epic started layoffs, I was expecting Unreal Engine 6, Metaverse in a Box, to do all that, with all that preprocessing available on servers. Sweeney' public statements in 2022 indicated that was his direction for Epic. Not hearing that any more.

You can do more server side. There's "cloud gaming", where you rent a GPU in a data center. Most of the cloud gaming companies went out of business, because you have to charge about $30-$50 a month. Google gave up on Stadia. NVidia is still running GeForce Now, but they have increased the price several times, and they make GPUs. Amazon and Sony cloud gaming is limited to games that don't need a serious GPU. That seems to be a non-starter until cheap GPUs start shipping from China.

Those are the current constraints.

SL's performance problems are mostly viewer side. The server side problems are mostly known bugs. The main server side performance problems involve freezes when avatars enter a region. The mere presence of a large number of avatars isn't a serious problem server side.

There's a lot of headroom for improving things viewer side, which is why I keep plugging away at my Sharpview viewer.

[Love Zhaoying]

"I know a guy" who said we should be worried.

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

38 minutes ago, animats said:

SL's real asset is its user base

And its existing contents, created by the said user base. The amount of assets in SL is enormous (even if half of it is crap), and no other virtual world can compete with that any more...

The drawback is that each time LL wants to improve SL, they must take into account legacy contents to avoid breaking it at all price (and I wish they had been more careful with PBR before pushing the latter to release: it still does not render legacy contents properly, for now). This of course ”holds back” SL quite a bit and causes added complexity to the render engine, database, scripting engine, etc...

But like you said, starting from scratch with state of the art renderer and contents, like LL tried to do with Sansar, is bound to failure: it would be a bottomless money sink for the company before it would even reach a tenth of what SL is today.

[animats]

8 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

It would be a bottomless money sink for the company before it would even reach a tenth of what SL is today.

As Meta Horizon demonstrated, by expending somewhere in the US$20 billion range to produce a dud metaverse.

10 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

The drawback is that each time LL wants to improve SL, they must take into account legacy contents to avoid breaking it at all price

Yes. That's non-trivial. I wonder how the LL mobile viewer team is getting along. In Sharpview, my curved prims are still slightly off in length. There are some bugs in SL sculpt rendering which were exploited by sculpt creators to get more triangles, and my emulation of those bugs fails in a few cases. I know of about four sculpt objects in world that I can't quite get right - a flying submarine in Clockhaven, a glare shield in a railroad control tower in Cretopia, some sculpted railroad ties in Lexicolo... And for some strange reason, there's one gas station sign in NTBI that Sharpview renders upside down. Just that one sign. LL has a collection of troublesome sculpts at Bug Island, and I've got all those right. All the prims at the Ivory Tower of Prims are fine. But that last 0.1% of cleverly constructed objects are tough.

LL has run into similar problems. Once they changed the physics engine, and some breedables had trouble reaching their food and died. Some residents were very upset.

This applies very strongly to avatars and clothing. That badly needs a redesign, with automatic layering and removal of triangles hidden by clothing, so "alphas", alpha HUDs, and dividing everything into a huge number of faces becomes unnecessary. But making legacy avatar content work with a new system would be really tough. What we have now is three systems - classic avatars, mesh avatars, and animesh. Animesh are the most efficient; they're close to game models. If we could automatically bake avatars down to animesh type models when a resident changed outfits, and generate levels of detail at that time, avatars would look the same but render much faster. It's probably possible to make such baking work well for 90%+ of avatar content, but there will be people screaming "you broke my best dress". (And strippers complaining that when they take something off, there's a delay of several seconds for re-baking.)

 

[Gabriele Graves]

I'm finding more and more that SL specialises in a variety of Hobson's Choices.  The one about legacy content holding us back is another one of those.

On one hand we have the path that preserves as much content as possible going forward at the expense of being able to do many types of performance enhancements and upgrades:

Residents who've literally spent many thousands of USD on content and think it's unreasonable if that content stops working as updates come in.  Sure, it can be seen as nobody should expect content to last forever but what about people who've just bought a load of said content about to break?  It's a perfectly reasonable expectation that it not break immediately.  What will and will not break from update to update is not a predictable thing in SL currently and there is little or no messaging to purchasers to stop buying about to be broken content.

On the other hand, we have the other path that people don't become as invested:

Many residents could well take the view that there is no point buying stuff because it breaks all the time as updates keep coming.  However, that could well mean that the spending also drops off significantly, perhaps even disastrously so.

Which is the better path?

 

Edited February 1 by Gabriele Graves

[Flea Yatsenko]

SL's strong point is the content available and it always will be. It doesn't matter how out dated everything is, if you want the craziest stuff or some niche hobby or whatever you are going to find it in SL. That's why people will pay those crazy prices for land and they won't pay it for other services. The land thing is working just fine for LL. I would love for things to be cheaper and to have an entire sim for my store. But there are enough people willing to pay LL's crazy land prices because there's usually 30k to 50k people online at any given time and there's boatloads of content.

LL and SL fought off the metaverse thing from the likes of Facebook, Decentraland, Google, Amazon. Most of those solutions were more advanced, some were really bad. But look at the content Zuck turned out for his metaverse. You can sit here and talk about how bad the user content is for SL and nit pick optimizations and how they aren't game ready assets half the time, but that infamous and terrible post of Zuck showing off his avatar after having a tech team the size of Meta/Facebook behind it is hilarious.

If you are disappointed in the viewer's performance, you have to remember it was developed before there were any major game engines. LL basically had to create their own game engine that streamed unoptimized content from the internet, and allowed the scene to be changed by anyone at anytime. For reference, when there was an initial release of SL in 2003, we had Unreal Engine 2. And game engines back then weren't like they are now, so readily available.

LL is making a brand new viewer using the Unity engine. It's only for Android and iOS right now but with some porting work it can run on all sorts of stuff, Windows, OSX, Linux, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, etc. And it's probably a far more modern code base.

You could understand land prices if you started your own opensim, loaded it with your own content, and then tried to get people to join it.

As for the steady decline in concurrency, you are proposing it's because SL is outdated. I know correlation does not equal causation, but the shipments of PCs have been in steady decline

And now you are thinking, what about people who build their own computers? We can look at discrete graphic card sales for that

See how it has been trending down? I am proposing SL's numbers are dropping because the platform it is on is slowly becoming irrelevant, not because SL is outdated. Which is why I have a lot of faith in the mobile viewer. But with PC slowly declining in popularity and SL concurrency slowly declining I think SL's biggest problem is the platforms it's available on. I do not think SL is dying. It is staying pretty close in lock step with hardware trends.

That said, explicitly answering your question

1. P2P will be an intellectual property minefield with user content. You want to kill the SL economy and get rid of content creators? Give their creations away for free via P2P without centralized servers.

2. Mobile viewer hopefully being good and blossoming into something that spans more than mobile is your best bet for an SL 2.0 at the moment.

I know land is expensive. It almost feels insulting when you can buy a VPS for $10/mo and run openSim. But you are paying for access to SL's content and the active userbase. It's the same exact reason why Super Mario Maker has been such a successful series yet rom hacking and making your own levels has never really gone anywhere beyond a niche hobby. It's why people will spend money on Twitter as opposed to starting their own mastadon instance. LL land is expensive because you are paying for the users, usually 40k online at a time, and millions of pieces of content. Something doesn't need to be the most advanced or up to date thing to be successful. Nintendo Switch hardware is laughable yet it sells over 100 million units yet something vastly superior spec wise doesn't come close. It's because of the content.

[Rowan Amore]

https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/pc-building/the-pc-market-is-finally-growing-again-with-2024-projected-to-see-an-8-uptick-in-shipments

[Zalificent Corvinus]

22 hours ago, Riodan said:

1. Are there any plans on P2P functionality regarding personally hosted and owned dedicated servers?

Almost certainly no.

 

22 hours ago, Riodan said:

2. Is there a Second Life 2.0 in development? And if so, what engine is being considered?

There WAS, and it used the "re-invent the wheel from scratch" engine, it took 6 years to open, and was an instant massive failure, then they sold it. It's still a massive failure.

 

22 hours ago, Riodan said:

Ultimately, I ask these questions because I happen to do a good bit of development in Unreal Engine

LL have apparently nailed their colours to the mast for the Unity engine for the MobileLife Fail-viewer.

 

22 hours ago, Riodan said:

If for whatever reason, Second Life gets sunset what are the chances that people like myself will have the opportunity to host a dedicated server and manage their own grids?

Host your SL region, and all the multi petabyte of content? None whatsoever.

Start again from scratch with nothing on opensim grid, yes, but you start with NOTHING from Sl.

 

21 hours ago, Riodan said:

hardware needs replaced,

They SCRAPPED all their hardware, SL is on AWS Cloud.

 

21 hours ago, Riodan said:

developers need to be paid

They don't have that many, compared to a typical "Useless Engine Built A First Person Shooter Kit" game, the dev team is tiny.

 

21 hours ago, Riodan said:

I just can't fathom how they expect to keep making a residual profit off Second Life

You DO know they have a turnover in excess of a HALF BILLION USD a year right?

 

21 hours ago, Riodan said:

or they need to start a fresh and newer virtual world

They tried that, it was a massive failure that directly contributed to SL's lack of "improvements" because it was bleeding SL dry to cover its insane waste of money, with shoddy rendering, dreadful load times, ugly avatars, and the whole "bring nothing with you" put people off, as did the initial claim that it would be VR only. The CEO at the time publicly stating that SL was "full of geeks" and that the new platform would be "geek free" didn't help either, especially as the new platform was 1000% Geek only.

 

21 hours ago, Riodan said:

at some point they really need to either pump resources into updating everything

Yeah, bit of a problem there.

See, SL was the victim of a "leveraged buyout", the current owners basically borrowed money to buy the place, and now part of the profits go to servicing that loan, and the rest go to the pockets of the new owner, leaving sod all for "massive updates of everything.

SL being a "cash making machine" is part of the problem, it makes enough money to be an attractive victim for this sort of buy-out.

You pick a company that makes a healthy profit as your victim, borrow enough to buy it, dump the debt on the victim company, and stuff whatever profit is left in your pocket, secure in the knowledge that if the victim company goes under, it takes the debt with it and you are in the clear, and that meanwhile you can line your pockets.

These sorts of buy-outs don't really leave much room for "massive improvements", at best, you give it a coat of fresh paint to help with selling it on before it fails.

 

Edited February 2 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Love Zhaoying]

13 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Almost certainly no.

 

There WAS, and it used the "re-invent the wheel from scratch" engine, it took 6 years to open, and was an instant massive failure, then they sold it. It's still a massive failure.

 

LL have apparently nailed their colours to the mast for the Unity engine for the MobileLife Fail-viewer.

 

Host your SL region, and all the multi petabyte of content? None whatsoever.

Start again from scratch with nothing on opensim grid, yes, but you start with NOTHING from Sl.

 

They SCRAPPED all their hardware, SL is on AWS Cloud.

 

They don't have that many, compared to a typical "Useless Engine Built A First Person Shooter Kit" game, the dev team is tiny.

 

You DO know they have a turnover in excess of a HALF BILLION USD a year right?

 

They tried that, it was a massive failure that directly contributed to SL's lack of "improvements" because it was bleeding SL dry to cover its insane waste of money, with shoddy rendering, dreadful load times, ugly avatars, and the whole "bring nothing with you" put people off, as did the initial claim that it would be VR only. The CEO at the time publicly stating that SL was "full of geeks" and that the new platform would be "geek free" didn't help either, especially as the new platform was 1000% Geek only.

 

Yeah, bit of a problem there.

See, SL was the victim of a "leveraged buyout", the current owners basically borrowed money to buy the place, and now part of the profits go to servicing that loan, and the rest go to the pockets of the new owner, leaving sod all for "massive updates of everything.

SL being a "cash making machine" is part of the problem, it makes enough money to be an attractive victim for this sort of buy-out.

You pick a company that makes a healthy profit as your victim, borrow enough to buy it, dump the debt on the victim company, and stuff whatever profit is left in your pocket, secure in the knowledge that if the victim company goes under, it takes the debt with it and you are in the clear, and that meanwhile you can line your pockets.

These sorts of buy-outs don't really leave much room for "massive improvements", at best, you give it a coat of fresh paint to help with selling it on before it fails.

 

Almost none of that sounds true. Weird!

[Zalificent Corvinus]

29 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Almost none of that sounds true. Weird!

All of it is true.

Sansar went back to 2014 or late 2013, they deliberately didn't use any of the "standard commercial game engines" and they didn't use anything from Sl. It lasted 6 years and still wasn't "finished" looked like crap, loaded slow, had almost no users, concurrency figures of 40, that's LESS than the number of staff on the Sansar team.

And they sold it, and its STILL a massive failure, with pathetic concurrency.

SL is on the cloud, I'm sure you noticed that, they scrapped the data centre in Arizona some years back.

They stated publicly they had a turnover of 640 million USD, and that about 80 million was being cashed out by merchants and landlords.

What part of reality sounds not true to you ?

 

 

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

^ Sansar's name plaque was still on LL's Battery Street building in 2022.  I wonder if it's still there now?

[AmeliaJ08]

18 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

you have to remember it was developed before there were any major game engines

I mean...

Not really true. I would agree it was developed in the infancy of commercial 3D game engines but... idtech? I'm pretty sure John Carmack would have a big issue with that statement given they were at the forefront of 3D engine development and had offered theirs up commercially since 1996.

Renderware is the other obvious giant example of how that isn't true.

Not to say that any of the idtech engines or Renderware would be a good fit for Second Life but in engine terms SL was extremely primitive even for 2003. It was custom built and that is very cool since Second Life is utterly unique in what it needs from its engine and I love the freedom it offers but in technological terms it isn't even close to what was available commercially at the time.

 

 

 

Edited February 2 by AmeliaJ08

[animats]

On 2/1/2024 at 11:36 AM, Katherine Heartsong said:

We are the creators, we bring things into the world and no amount of effort I can imagine would have a new virtual world with even a tiny fraction of all of the amazing (and weird) custom content available to SL residents. Unless it's a totally open world that allows us to bring what we like, and then also provide a MP to sell it, I just can't see it. That's point one.

Point two is related. Part of the appeal of SL is it's openness. Other corporate entities severely restrict the people, what they can do etc. We self police as well, making sure the most egregious and potentially illegal stuff is removed and monitored while allowing for a huge range of activities otherwise that most corp entities will shudder at. Without that, again, I can't see an alternative.

Last. Related to the above two. Sex. In all it's messy, weird, edgy, taboo, sensual, vanilla, and [insert your own kink/fetish here] glory. Without letting people be people, and that involves physical intimate fun, other platforms would struggle to survive this long. It can not be especially realistic here at time with regards to SLex, but the range of what you can get up to would not at all be tolerated by 99.9% of corporations. I don't need to point out some of the more taboo stuff and "right on the edge of permissible" that goes on (all usually self policed again) but I can't imagine anyone else taking the apparent risks that happen in SL.

Yes. This is a point I've made before. I even submitted a GDC paper  on it, but it was rejected when the "metaverse" track was dropped.

SL got metaverse governance right. LL acts like a municipal government. They handle streets and roads, zoning, land ownership records, and miscellaneous public works. LL runs a small governance department to deal with stuff at the level cops deal with in the real world, plus little stuff like land encroachment issues. In RL, you'd  talk to your city hall about such things. Everybody else in social seems to need an army of outsourced minimum-wage moderators armed with ban hammers. This has everybody living in fear of inept low-level goons.

The reason this works:

• Land owners have enough power to deal with most problems. Club bouncers, not LL, deal with jerks.
• The world is the size of LA, and it's hard to be annoying beyond 100 meters, the "shout" distance. Somewhere in SL, someone is probably being a jerk right now. Either they'll give up because nobody is paying attention, or they will eventually become visibly annoying enough that someone will complain to Governance and they will be dealt with.
• There's no broadcast medium. There is no way in SL to get the attention of everyone in world. Even if you try to spam, your audience is limited by distance and interest.
• There's a sizable adult continent and many private adult estates. Doing adult stuff in other areas will get someone told by other users to take it to an adult area. This is an accepted social convention in SL. Rarely does LL have to intervene.
• SL is not ad-supported. So nobody cares what "brands" want.

This is a real achievement. It's a system with both freedom and stability. It is, however, somewhat niche.

Nobody else gets this, because the other metaverse wannabees are trying to add 3D to Facebook-type social media, not emulate the real world.

Edited February 3 by animats

[Flea Yatsenko]

On 2/2/2024 at 6:13 PM, animats said:

Yes. This is a point I've made before. I even submitted a GDC paper  on it, but it was rejected when the "metaverse" track was dropped.

SL got metaverse governance right. LL acts like a municipal government. They handle streets and roads, zoning, land ownership records, and miscellaneous public works. LL runs a small governance department to deal with stuff at the level cops deal with in the real world, plus little stuff like land encroachment issues. In RL, you'd  talk to your city hall about such things. Everybody else in social seems to need an army of outsourced minimum-wage moderators armed with ban hammers. This has everybody living in fear of inept low-level goons.

The reason this works:

• Land owners have enough power to deal with most problems. Club bouncers, not LL, deal with jerks.
• The world is the size of LA, and it's hard to be annoying beyond 100 meters, the "shout" distance. Somewhere in SL, someone is probably being a jerk right now. Either they'll give up because nobody is paying attention, or they will eventually become visibly annoying enough that someone will complain to Governance and they will be dealt with.
• There's no broadcast medium. There is no way in SL to get the attention of everyone in world. Even if you try to spam, your audience is limited by distance and interest.
• There's a sizable adult continent and many private adult estates. Doing adult stuff in other areas will get someone told by other users to take it to an adult area. This is an accepted social convention in SL. Rarely does LL have to intervene.
• SL is not ad-supported. So nobody cares what "brands" want.

This is a real achievement. It's a system with both freedom and stability. It is, however, somewhat niche.

Nobody else gets this, because the other metaverse wannabees are trying to add 3D to Facebook-type social media, not emulate the real world.

One of the first experiences you see when joining another metaverse is a huge wall of text about how saying or doing the wrong thing can get you banned. Then there's usually a code of conduct. That's your first impression of the platform. It's a major turn off. It gives the impression mods are always watching you, waiting for you to make what they think is a mistake or something they don't like so they can take your account away.

SL is wild west. Maybe you see codes of conduct and stuff in SL, but it's the person who runs the land you're on and not LL. LL governs it right and I highly doubt in this political climate any major company would just let anyone sign up, make whatever they want, and not threaten them about saying the wrong words to the wrong person, getting reported because you offended someone, and then getting banned. With all the ban crazy social media sites and stuff going on, I never see anyone worried about dropping money in SL and losing it because LL will get their account banned unless they're doing one of the few big taboos I won't name. But when you go somewhere else and the first thing you see is "Use the report button to report anyone you don't like, offending anyone will result in a ban and is not tolerated on our platform" it tells you that any time you put into that platform is at risk of being taken away. And it doesn't even have to be anything crazy. Anyone with a normal sized avatar has been threatened with bans and stuff for not being a certain height or not having facial hair or whatever. If SL was ran like other metaverses, all it would take is a few reports of "this person is a child and acting inappropriately sexually" when your AV is an adult that's 5 foot 9 to get banned.

That's the kind of stuff that can get you banned from those other platforms. Because I know some of you are reading this and thinking I'm defending people who are going online and trolling and saying all sorts of abrasive things. I mean there is definitely some stuff that two consenting people do in SL that would result in an instant ban on other places just because of the politics of it. I'm sure you can think of lots of them too.

[elleevelyn]

On 2/2/2024 at 11:33 AM, Flea Yatsenko said:

LL is making a brand new viewer using the Unity engine. It's only for Android and iOS right now but with some porting work it can run on all sorts of stuff, Windows, OSX, Linux, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, etc. And it's probably a far more modern code base.

this viewer could come to be seen as SL 2.0

I think also that this SL 2.0 view of the inworld could be subscription-only equivalent to Premium Plus (approx. 10/12USD month) with all the current PP benefits (land, stipend, uploads, etc)

I assume/speculate/guess this as the Alpha invite was to existing Premium Plus accounts which is interesting. Interesting, given that there are also any number of other account type holders who would otherwise be very invested in this mobile version

 

Edited February 4 by elleevelyn
otherwise

[Aishagain]

Let's not call whatever you are talking of as SL 2.0.  That designation was given, right or wrong, to LL's abortive Sansar project which failed for many well-discussed/chewed over reasons.

A mobile version of SL may appeal to younger adopters but for me it would not and could never "feel" like SL.

I am not part of the new vanguard that wants everything on a hand-held device, no matter how advanced.  I just cannot believe it would have sufficient "prescence" to interest me.

[Flea Yatsenko]

Old SL on a computer isn't going anywhere. LL does a really good job of not abandoning old stuff, even though they don't always do it. Most companies would probably throw out PC/Mac and look at Android/iOS marketshare and think the desk/laptop versions are a waste of time and money and go pure mobile. Of course that would fail. I think most people think it's time to "have a contingency" or future plans that involve leaving the old stuff behind and moving to something new. But LL doesn't really do that (only rarely like with PBR and even then all the legacy content is fine). And it's a large part why SL is still going while so many others have come and gone.

Surely people remember Blue Mars and stuff like that? From a technical standpoint it seemed like it would blow SL out of the water. But SL is still here only slowly declining while Blue Mars seems dead since you can only download the client with a password.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

23 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Most companies would probably throw out PC/Mac and look at Android/iOS marketshare and think the desk/laptop versions are a waste of time and money and go pure mobile.

Can you name a few examples?