animats

Today's Sansar usage numbers are still very low. The all time high remains at 72. High for the last 24 hours, 66. Percentage of Steam users using Sansar: 0.002% Needed to break into the top 100: 3,500, to beat Farming Simulator 17. Farming Simulator 17. The 100th most popular game on Steam. This is how good it has to be today to make the top 100.

Yes. SL should have something like that. Think of SketchUp or Archimatrix integration into an SL viewer. The builder sees SketchUp drawn in-world. Other users see a cloud or dust, like a rezzing avatar, to indicate construction. When the builder saves, the built object appears in-world.

Try Cocoon, a Japanese cyberpunk roleplay sim. I've seen some very good outfits there. Someone in the lobby Streetwear

Oh, nice. Is the add-on API settled yet?

Almost all of the positive reviews of Sansar on Steam are from people who were using it before Steam. Sansar is "OK, seen Aech's Garage, seen the Star Wars prop museum, been to the beach. That was fun. Game completed!". Unless somebody comes up with a really compelling repeat destination, or you're a creator, it's a one quick visit system. Especially on Steam, where it's really easy to try a game.

Yes, but SL is big enough that there's a good range of male clothing. You just have to look harder. Just like a mall in RL.

Sansar usage statistics so far. Still hasn't passed the record number of concurrent users, 72, from the first day. Steam has about 4.4 million people playing some game right now. Sansar needs 3500 users to break into the top 100. 45,000 to break into the top 10. In the game industry, success usually comes early or not at all. Red Dead Redemption 2 made US$750 million in the first 3 days. Most game sales are in the first 3 weeks. Sansar is in "early access", but what can they add that will get 100x or 1000x more users? For comparison, VRchat. Closest thing on Steam to a direct Sansar competitor. VRChat peaked in the 2017-2018 holiday season at about 10,000 users. Then it leveled off around 5000, where it's been for most of 2018.

Nice. This should help creators to get proper physics models.

Screenshot by a Steam user of Sansar. LL wanted Sansar to be less racy than SL, but this is ridiculous. Who put the extreme religious right in charge of clothing options? (And what's with the water being so clear? Even SL does that better.)

When I looked yesterday, there was only one negative review. Today, there are seven. Users with long Steam histories are now commenting. "Peak concurrent users" is still stuck at 72. Some Sansar users complain of a troll problem. Great comparison with SL: "lol yea, in SL basically trolls got nothing and the vast majority are gone, they became fodder, not only can they easily be banned by the Lab or even just property owner, for doing stupid stuff, they can be silenced, disarmed, and crunched into a little ball, if they're on someone else's land that has the tools lol..." Incidentally, LL also has their Blocksworld (sort of like Minecraft) on Steam. It has 11 users.

We can see Steam's statistics for Sansar. Right now, 53 users. Peak in the last month, 72. For a sense of the size of the competition, Steam has about 12 million users logged in right now. To get into the top 100, you need about 3,300 concurrent users, to beat 100th place "Farming Simulator 17". Second Life would rank in about 10th to 12th place on Steam, right around Grand Theft Auto V.

Is K. still an active SL user, in world?

Skyboxes are a thing in SL only because the land pricing is so bad. Sansar doesn't have, or need, skyboxes. SineSpace doesn't have, or need, skyboxes. High Fidelity doesn't have, or need, skyboxes.

Comment on Steam about Sansar: "The developers are generally very attentive and responsive to user needs. You'll often find the CEO himself and other staffers hanging out in-world, which is really cool. I've been a part of online communities where the developers didn't even bother to use the software themselves, but that isn't the case here. It shows that they have a lot of confidence in the platform." Compare with SL, where it's "File a JIRA" and bugs are ignored for years.

Here's my shopping list on basic tool fixes for creators. This is from the perspective of someone who's not doing clothing. Clothing creators have different problems. These are all relatively simple. Mesh uploader Better mesh reduction in the mesh uploader. Take the open source code from Blender's Decimate or MeshLab's quartic mesh reduction with texture preservation. Both are open source. I've been trying various mesh reduction algorithms, and Blender's Decimate is pretty good. I thought MeshLab's would be better, but it doesn't seem to be. The current built-in one is terrible. The uploader's decimator should not force models below 20 or so triangles, unless that can be done without creating holes or significant errors at the outer edges. You should never get those awful see-through models. The upload cost algorithm should always allow you 20-30 triangles at lowest LOD for 1 LI. There's no real win to reducing below 20-30 polys per draw call. A thousand objects with 30 triangles are more useful than one object with 30,000 triangles. (An SL scene can have about a million triangles before the frame rate chokes. More if you have a high end GPU and a lot of RAM. Visual quality is about using that million-triangle budget effectively.) Get the uploader to accept multi-layer Collada files, so all the LODs can be in one file. If you're uploading multiple models that way, assume they all have the same origin and scale; don't align and stretch bounding boxes to make them fit. This will get more precise alignment of LODs. Fix the bug which prevents textures being uploaded via a Collada file, so you can see a useful preview of what you're uploading. Sometimes you may want to upload the textures separately, for "fat packs" and such, but single-file upload should work. Faster development cycle. Bigger preview window! (Beq Janus is putting this in Firestorm.) The uploader should handle the issues of having to have exactly the same material list for each LOD, whether needed or not. Having to put dummy triangles on a mesh to force a reference to a material is silly. Blender tools Get Blender to put layer info in Collada files, so you can upload one big file with all the levels of detail. (This is an accepted request and may be in Blender 2.8, which also has named layers.) This helps with getting the levels of detail and the physics model precisely aligned.