[Is SL too hard for newbies?]

LL might actually be lurching toward solving the "too hard" problem.

First, there are viewer speedups coming from LL, per the Lindens at the last content creators meeting. Maybe as fast as 2x-3x. Also, on the Firestorm side, automatic quality adjustment to keep the frame rate up is coming. There's interest in doing simplified rendering of distant avatars, or forcing them to impostor mode. This would relieve a pain point for new users. Plus, multi-thread loading of assets is already in test. As is getting the 2D UI out of the main render thread. The overall effect should be to get viewer performance into acceptable gamer range. (All this is independent of the stuff I've been working on in Rust, which is much further away.)

Second, LL seems to be becoming aware that Roblox has solved the clothing layer fit problem and they might have to catch up. That's a tough retrofit for SL; Roblox is adding layered clothing; they didn't have it. But now that somebody did it, we can look at how. Also, it' easier to sell management on catching up with a competitor than doing something new.

Third, the destination guide has been improving. There's more fun stuff listed. This will help new users answer the "what do I do now" question.

Those are the three big new user pain points.

 

[Is SL too hard for newbies?]

2 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Lots of patience, perseverance, and tolerance.

Those are so last-cen.

[What Works Really Well in SL?]

1 hour ago, Bree Giffen said:

SL was able to break through the sexiness barrier without falling into pure smut.

That's a good observation. In the last 20 years entertainment has split strongly between XXX and PG. There's not much R any more. Nor much sexual innuendo. SL has a healthy attitude towards sex, which is refreshing. It's there if you want it and look for it.

SL got this right. But it's hard to explain, because it's out of step with parts of the mainstream.

[What Works Really Well in SL?]

9 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Things LL Got Right, In No Particular Order...

Agree.

I've been looking at all the new "metaverses". They're all worse than SL so far. Notes on the competition:

• PBR and lighting make mediocre builds look a lot better. About 80% of the SL user base has the hardware for that, but LL is reluctant to leave people behind.
• Nobody else does governance well at all. SL is way ahead in the way land ownership and permissions add up to a reasonably workable world. Everybody else is thinking either dictatorship or anarchy. Part of what makes SL work is that SL is big, and space keeps everything from being in the same place. Annoyances are local. SL is the size of Greater London, and griefers can seldom annoy beyond 200  meters or so. This really matters and nobody else quite gets it.
• Roblox is working on the really hard technical problems, with lots of money and a big dev staff. I'm impressed with what they've accomplished. Such as solving the mesh clothing fit problem. Unfortunately, their average user age is 13 and they have 4000 censors plus an AI waiting to pounce on anyone who says a bad word. Holding hands is a no-no in Roblox.
• The NFT worlds get a lot of press but have tiny user counts. Most NFT art is total crap. Stuff that sells on OpenSea for US$10,000 would not sell on SL marketplace at L$100.

But they get the attention? Why? The lure of Make Money Fast.

 

[Attention Linden Marketing - Cleanup on Aisle G]

This is embarrassing. Not just for LL as a company. This makes it embarrassing to be a Second Life user.

LL really needs to work on their loser public image.

[Best sims that have build enabled?]

New Babbage allows rezzing, but what you rez must be in theme and look good. Read the covenant.

[How likely are you to recommend Second Life to a friend or family member]

There's an article by Matthew Ball, VC (Venture Capitalist, not Victoria Cross) in his series of metaverse articles claiming that a big change from the COVID epidemic is that it's no longer embarrassing to use a virtual world.

One side effect of Facebook getting into the metaverse business is that it becomes mainstream. SL marketing should be able to exploit this. "The metaverse is here! Visit today!"

(Has anyone seen any SL marketing efforts in recent months?)

[200 New SSPEs?]

4 hours ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

... at the expense of those living on the mainland, who they seek to purposely influence (through their mainland embassies) into leaving mainland life with all its freedoms and creativity.

If that's the plan, it's not working. Look where people are.

Bellissaria, early sections. Lightly populated, mostly by people all alone. The mainland continents show about the same density this Sunday morning.

 

Zindra. Where people get together!

I have a non-adult business on Zindra, and I get enough walk-in sales to pay tier on it. I have a house on the seashore of Bellssaria, and I never see the neighbors.

 

 

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

From RealClearPolitics:

"On June 23, 2003, Linden Labs unveiled a website called Second Life. It is a website wherein individuals can interact and live a second life as an online character, called an avatar. In 2004, several politicians held virtual press conferences in Second Life. The Maldives and Sweden opened virtual embassies. Second Life is still around, but it's now used primarily by those without social lives."

[Is SL too hard for newbies?]

What I'd be inclined to do to the current interface is make it disappear completely until you bring the mouse pointer to the bottom or top of the window. Much like the way the controls work on YouTube videos.

[Is SL too hard for newbies?]

47 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Good point. There's no reason why the UI can't be customisable as long as the default is new user friendly.

This is a curse of open source programs. Customization just dumps the problem of creating a good user interface on each individual user. No, you have to get a reasonably good design and not allow too much customization. It just confuses things.

Anyone remember Myspace?

With customizable interfaces, tutorials and videos don't line up with what the user sees. Tutorials go out of date rapidly. Blender tutorials are famous for this. The big question in each new release of Blender is "Where did button/menu X move to?"

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

9 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Perhaps us die hards are just not willing to admit that the host is brain dead and on life support and therefore technically dead.

SL definitely seems to be in maintenance mode. There haven't been any significant new features for over a year now. Nothing comparable to animesh or EEP. The team is doing a good job of keeping the systems going, but no more than that.

For LL's real priorities, see their job openings. There seems to be a management fantasy that Tilia is somehow going to take off, despite several years of no new customers.

Someday, there may be a book or a Harvard Business School study, "How Linden Lab built the Metaverse and blew it". Like how Sears blew it in online commerce, how Western Union blew it in data communications, and how Xerox blew it in personal computers. Each was there first, and then their management blew a leading position in the next big industry.

[Making Second Life look like an AAA game]

I'm using WGPU, which is a Rust cross-platform wrapper for Vulkan. On Linux, it's basically a pass through to Vulkan. It can also do that on Windows, where it talks to Vulkan or DX11 or DX12. (You get to pick. Some of the options work.) On Mac, it translates to Apple's Metal, which is comparable to Vulkan, but Apple just had to Think Different and annoy everybody writing graphics software.

WGPU is maybe half complete. Right now it can't do rigged mesh, or some of the fancier shader stuff, or all the targets.

For C++ land, there's something called MoltenVK, which is basically a translation layer from Vulkan to Apple's Metal. LL could conceivably use that. Haven't looked at it in detail.

Unreal Engine works cross platform, but at a higher level than Vulkan. To use that, you basically have to do things their way. Plus pay them 5% of your revenue once you past $1M. Unity has something similar, I think.

This sort of thing is why Mac support for many 3D programs comes later, if at all.

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

9 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

've often thought that the Wild West approach is a really good way to kick things off, and it has to be said that the lack of regulation from above probably had a lot to do with SL's early success. But any culture or society reaches a point of equilibrium and sophistication, where regulation becomes not only desirable but necessary. I'll entirely agree that SL benefited from a libertarian approach for its first decade. I think it's grown beyond that now, and the lingering belief that a lack of regulation is the "special sauce" has, for some time, been holding the platform back.

Belli was a really good move in the right direction; and its success is suggestive. I think more along those lines is what we need now.

I want to think about that one some more. I've argued for slightly tighter mainland zoning. There's potential for innovation in land layout and use. But I don't want armies of oursourced jackbooted thugs on the prowl for anything that might upset somebody. Facebook does. See the infamous Horizon Safety video.

Roblox has an average user age of 13, so they have the "protect the children" problem. They're trying to develop an AI system which can muzzle anyone who says anything bad within a tenth of a second. They're also cracking down on holding hands. Really.

Don't push too hard for authoritarian control. You might get it.

 

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

13 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

is a Millennial-generation English teacher at a public high school

Right.

So far, I've read about a hundred of "My First Metaverse Article". Most are either clueless or awful. Or worse, trying to find suckers to put money into something. The one on PC Gamer (UK) is the best one so far.

[SL map tiles link]

SL map tiles used to be at:

https://secondlife-maps-cdn.akamaized.net/map-NNN-objects.jpg

but no longer are. That got lost some time during "uplift". Is there a new tile location?

[Making Second Life look like an AAA game]

1 hour ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Pedantic correction (sorry!):

Cyberpunk 2077 uses REDengine4, developed in-house by CDProjekt

Oh, that's good to know. Because that does influence how the lighting works.

[Making Second Life look like an AAA game]

Here's a sense of what a modern game looks like.

A walking tour of Cyberpunk 2077's world. There's no gameplay. This is just exploring the 3D world. It's a lot like roaming mainland in SL. So this is a good way to look at renderng and modeling in a current AAA title.

Items of note:

• The handling of light and shadow is very good. That's Unreal Engine at work. The columbarum area, with bright sunlight and dark areas adjacent, is especially well rendered. Watch what happens as the player moves from dark to bright areas. Everything is always clear, yet you get a strong experience of lightness or darkness. SL could improve in that area.
• The reflectivity of water on cement is a nice touch, although what's wet and what isn't doesn't seem to be consistent.
• Night areas with lots of glowing neon look much better than they do in SL. That's physically based rendering at work.
• There's a lot of instancing. The fence made of horizontal metal slats keeps re-appearing, as do the garbage bags, and the pile of garbage bags impostor. SL, with user created content, doesn't have much instancing, which increases download bandwidth needs but reduces the cliche effect of seeing the same thing over and over. In Cyberpunk 2077, you do see the same items over and over, but in action gameplay users don't notice too often.
• Few of the big buildings can be entered. They're just dummies. Same with most of the shops. In SL, it's more like Hangars Liquides than New Babbage in that respect.
• The NPC movement is no better than SLs. This has been criticized in reviews.

It's useful to look at this as a target to shoot for.

[Builder Needed - Futuristic City / Cyberpunk / Space / Technology - Sim Build]

I'd like to see an original futuristic sim. That's hard to do well.

• We've got plenty of Cyberpunk. Cocoon and Hangars Liquides are probably the best examples.
• We've got post-apoc. Tralala's Diner is probably the best example. That's been overdone, if anything.
• We've got space stations built out of snap-together standard parts. Those are easy to build but not too interesting.
• We've got Horizons, which is supposed to be mid-century futurism, but didn't end up that way.

Pictures of futuristic cities tend to have lots of towers, which don't work well in SL because you don't get enough prims to make them useful.

If someone does this, I'd be glad to contribute some moving sidewalks.

[Making Second Life look like an AAA game]

8 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This is built differently from firestorm, it stands a decent chance of meaningfully maxing your PC out. I wouldn't expect this to be a lighter solution on older hardware.

Correct. The target hardware is what Steamcharts says their average user has. Which is an NVidia 1060, five years old, or better.

[Making Second Life look like an AAA game]

17 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

When will we expect a full release and unlike most viewers will this be hardware intensive. I mean Firestorm is pretty hardware intensive and if this one isn't as bad as Firestorm, I may plan to switch to that as my daily driver. 

What I'm doing is a long way off. It's really R&D into how to build the metaverse. I'll have a login, move, and view viewer at some point.

[Making Second Life look like an AAA game]

12 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If there is render code needed to make it work, then yes, it will be poss be user selectable. However from an object perspective its just going to be a couple of additional image maps expanding on the existing materials.

Exactly. Adding more material layers isn't that complicated. They're just images.  Material layers are named items in LLSD, and  having more of them is possible within the existing protocols. Older viewers would just ignore the new layers.

The video I posted is using PBR rendering. The translation from SL specular to PBR roughness and metallicness isn't right yet, though. Shiny will work a lot better in PBR. The SL rendering system can add diffuse and specular and get all the way to full bright, which is why chrome turns white in bright light. In PBR systems, you never get  out more light from a surface than you put in with lights.

Still no mirrors, though; that's a different problem.

Probably the most useful layer to add is subsurface scattering. This is for materials where light goes a little way into the surface, bounces around a few times, and comes back out nearby. Like skin. This is why skin sort of "glows" in real life. Without subsurface scattering, skin rendering is only adjustable along a range from "dead" to "plastic". Second Life avatars are close enough to photorealistic that this matters.

There are about twenty additional PBR layers, but few materials need more than one or two of them.

Blender and Maya already know how to create and render all those layers. Changes would be mostly to the viewer UI and the uploader. Probably the best way to do this is to have the uploader understand GLTF / USD format in addition to COLLADA. Blender speaks GLTF. Maya has a GLTF plugin. Everybody seems to be standardizing on that.

6 hours ago, Beev Fallen said:

LL said couple times they are not interested in SL to be cutting-edge graphics.

Open Simulator, though...

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Son of a gun. I agree with both Animats and Prok, at least to a significant extent.

So now what do I do?

I dunno. I gather that some others have significantly more problems with other residents than I do. My contacts with LL Governance have been along the lines of "at this location, this object is partly blocking a road" or "giant griefing object is taking out 9 sims near me." I sometimes report excessively large, rotating, floating, glowing FOR RENT signs. (The biggest landlords seem to have the smallest signs. That may say something.) That's about it.

I have a moderate sized non-adult business in Zindra, and most of the parcels are open rez with a 20 minute timeout. I don't have much trouble. I have NPCs running around, and they find visitors and say hello. This gives the impression that someone is watching. Under certain circumstances the NPCs will notify me, but that almost never happens. I have a few NPCs at some GTFO hubs, where they perform much the same function. A light touch is effective.

I don't see much need for iron-fisted governance. There are occasional serious problems, and that's what LL's governance unit is for. It's good that they don't get involved with the little stuff.

I'd like to see LL offer to move content off mainland to isolated regions made to proprietors of mainland skyboxes. But this should be done by persuasion and incentives if at all possible, rather than by order.

[Zuckerberg Comes for the Metaverse]

On 11/9/2021 at 8:15 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

So now is the time to work on the governance and economics pieces of it rather than ranting about tech and graphics.

Strawberry Linden should be on the Sunday talk shows explaining how SL governs the Metaverse. Everybody making public pronouncements is assuming that the Metaverse will be very authoritarian and require armies of censors. That's how Roblox and Facebook do it, right? That's not how SL does it, and right now would be a good time to get the word out on that.

SL doesn't need that much governance. The governance team is tiny. Why does this work?

• Space keeps everything from being in the same place. Jerks in SL can only annoy about a hundred meter radius, and SL is the size of Greater London. So it's a hyper-local problem. Just like the real world. Unlike text-type social media, being a jerk in SL doesn't scale. There's no "sharing" or "following" to amplify jerks.
• Property rights. If you own land in Second Life, you can ban people from it or kick them out. Most of the cool places are private, and the owners will ban people if necessary, usually after talking to them first. Just like clubs in real life.
• Yes, SL has sex. So what? So does the real world. There are General areas, which are teen-safe, Moderate areas, where you can do sexual stuff on your own property, and Adult areas, which are quite permissive. Even so, people tend not to overdo it in public in Adult areas, because there are social norms.
• Linden Lab acts like a municipal government. Their job is mostly to keep the infrastructure running. There's even a Linden Department of Public Works. They don't try to micro-manage the world. They don't intervene in resident disputes. This hands-off attitude keeps operating costs down.
• You can't hurt an avatar or damage the property of others. So that's just not a problem. It's possible to litter by leaving objects around in some areas. Those are quickly cleaned up, often automatically.

Second Life really is a virtual world, not a game. It has landlords, tenants, property rights, property taxes, evictions, neighbor problems, noise problems, littering problems, and zoning issues. Just like the real world. They get resolved, more or less. Just like the real world.

It would be good for SL's image to get this out there.

[Making Second Life look like an AAA game]

2 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

@animats There is a Second Life client that has a decent user interface and little scene rendering, and there is your rendering work.  Any way to use them together?

Probably not. My code is all in Rust, and the internal architecture is completely different. The LL viewer is in C++, mostly single-thread, object-oriented, with a homebrew "coroutine" structure, what would be called "async" today. The underlying world object is the prim, with sculpts and meshes bolted on later. My code is 100% Rust, multi-thread, data-oriented, and uses interprocess channels rather than "async". The underlying world object is a mesh, with prims and sculpts translated to meshes early in processing. Trying to make these two incompatible systems connect would be a big job on the C++ side. I talk to the Firestorm and Catzip developers regularly, but we don't see bolting these things together as feasible.

LL tried to do something like what I'm doing with asset loading some years back. It's in a dead project viewer from the "Project Interesting" era. They bolted on a priority queue from Boost, which was the right idea. But they didn't finish the job.  The graphics Lindens would like to go to Vulkan and PBR, but that effort has not been funded. So, much of what I've done has been considered by LL, but not successfully executed.

It's up to LL to set their own priorities and level of effort. As customers, we can judge them by their results.

I'm interested in this partly to find out how to build a good metaverse client, using SL and Open Simulator as testbeds. Both John Carmack (Doom, Oculus) and Tim Sweeny (Epic, Fortnite) have written that this has many unsolved problems. So it's a good project to work on. I'm a computer scientist by training, so I work on unsolved problems.