Ask the CEO

[Danger Linden]

Initially, SL residents will be able to create Sansar personas (under a master account) using their Second Life user names. (There may be some esoteric restrictions on Sansar names that I don't know about). At some point in time that offer will expire and all untaken Sansar names will be available to the general population.

Don't worry; there will be plenty of notice.

 

[Danger Linden]

> How long is Sansar going to run paralel with Second Life and when will the current userbase be requested to set up new camp? (When SL remains open we oldies won't leave)

We agree that many Second Life residents will prefer to stay in Second Life because of the reasons that you've stated. Many residents will visit both virtual worlds on an ongoing basis because of the different experiences that they will offer. We expect SL to remain viable for years to come. We have no plans to boot you over to Sansar.

> Will Sansar run on low-end computers (that run Second Life) and be compatible with Second Life that way? (so we don't have to leave any of our friends behind)

Sansar will require higher specs than SL, especially when using VR HMDs. At some point, someone's going to create a workable streaming solution, which will allow low-end systems to run experiences like Sansar. OnLive delivered the tech, but the business didn't work.

> Why not export mainland and our current holdings there to Sansar?

Sansar will be capable of so much more than Second Life, so we would prefer creators to think in terms of re-imagining their Second Life experiences for Sansar, instead of porting the experiences.

 

[Phoebe Avro]

Let me try and answer the question about harwdware^^

Most hobbies are expensive be it fishing, hunting or patchwork to name a few! and whilst i know the RL economy is 'crap' better requires better hardware but saying that by the time 'SL2' goes live a second hand graphics card on an auction site will be much cheaper than one today, you can't expect a virtual world or any game to run on a pc that was designed to read emails and browse the internet to run some thing like SL simple as that, people spend thousands on pc's to play games such as the witcher 3 or the latest battlefield game.

[Cain Maven]

Which processes, if any, do you have in place to ensure that you are developing the "right" features for Sansar?

To give you a (possibly trivial) example, we lack the ability to control the presence or absence of water in SL. Among other things, this means that if you add a basement to your home, you will also automatically have an indoor pool -- whether you want one or not.

Water has always been a thorn in the side of realism in SL. While the sea water looks good, we don't have many options for other forms, such as waterfalls, tubs, sinks, and pools (unless they are at sea level.)

This is of course only one area where I believe you could benefit from gathering information and insight into what the current pain points are -- from seasoned creators and regular residents alike.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Sadly people expect LL to meet all demands for just them when it comes to their system that was build in 2007.   just for me to be here in SL. I've had to build a new system every couple of years, there is no choice in the matter if I want to keep being here.    sansar as they will learn,  will be a stepping stone that they will not get into without a massive upgrade to everything they have.  basically they will need to buy all new equipment if they want to be apart of it.   (this is what I'm gathering here)

 

 

ok question time

 

Currently you offer promotions on premium, but the promotions do not offer more then typically a month off.   I've been wanting to be premium for 8 years now. but currently at the price it's at, that's about impossible.   I've been wanting, even asked on twitter for 50% off for a year.  then I would buy it.   even if that did not include the stipend.   long as the 512m was still with it.   

[Rufferta]

---

Danger Linden wrote:

Sansar and Second Life have fundamentally different approaches to a lot of Virtual World features, so, as Pete Linden said, there's not a direct analog to the Mainland in Sansar.

We are curious about what specifically residents like about the Mainland? Provided infrastructure? Large contiguous areas? A sense of community? Neighbors with common interests? Affordability? The catchy name?

---

I like the Mainland because:

Re: "Provided infrastructure" - I love the public roads, railways, airways, and waterways, and the fact that I can travel along a public route without running into banlines or boot-bots. I love the many constructions and parks made by the Moles, or by private individuals, that provide a sense of continuity. The varied terrain also makes it more interesting. Admittedly, even on the Mainland there are a good number of people living in skyboxes and not 'touching ground' very often, but at least they know the land is there if they want it.

Consider subdivisions: Don't most of them put in streets and public areas before offering land for sale? 

Re: "Large Contiguous areas": As above, without having areas set aside for common use beforehand, good highways and sailing areas are hard to put in place afterwards. Some of the larger Second-Life off-Mainland communities have got excellent systems in place, but I believe they had central authorities who planned things out beforehand.  I recently read a post on one of the other virtual world's forums where someone was trying to get individual owners to contribute land so they could build roads, and it didn't seem to create much interest. 

Re: "A Sense of Community" & "Neighbors with Common Interests." - Yes, people like to hang around people with the same interests. As for me, I live in Hermitland.

"Affordability": Yes, I'd like to be able to afford a whole continent for the same amount I pay for my small parcel on the Mainland, but not if I'm isolated from everyone else.  I like being able to have a free Linden Home or a 512 with my premium membership, but perhaps some people can't even afford that.

"The Catchy Name": I know I looked for land in Balance, so that I could say "I live in Balance", but I'm not sure how important names of places are to people.

Other things I like about the Mainland. 

Stability

(such as it is)

.

Many of the off-Mainland areas seem to come and go pretty quickly, but if you own a little piece of the Mainland you know it will be there as long as Linden Labs supports it.

Tradition

: In twelve years things have changed tremendously and we've accumulated a lot of history. Someone who first came to Second Life when they were twenty is now an ancient 32-year-old who can say "I remember when all we had to build with was prims, and you couldn't teleport directly - you had to go through your region's telehub - none of this sissy stuff for us - Yup, those were the good old days."

I realize that I am someone who doesn't like change, and I come from a long line of late-adapters (My grandparents came West in a wagontrain of Model T's.), but I just wanted to chime in.

Thanks for asking!

 

[Buttacwup Float]

Thanks for all these continued responses. On Second Life, I think that the changes over the last several years have been fantastic and I look forward to the new things which have been mentioned. I dont know that there is much more to say other than to continue to do the best you can with the platform. I have a couple of questions on Sansar though.

1)  Will the land/terrain system be sufficiently advanced to allow for the creation of caves? 

2)  Will there be better tools for managing and visualizing inventory? One of the biggest challenges in SL today is effectivly organzing an inventory you cannot quickly see. I would love to see transaction data fed into a web based inventory management system when purchases can be visualized, sorted and tagged.

In the idea of Mainland, while I can apprciate the ideas behind mainland and thing that the community and especially the vehicle aspects are exceedingly important, as a landowner I simply don't want to compete with LL. I think that mainland type communities should be enabled, and that different landowners should continue to feel free to connect distributed regions into a larger whole. I would prefer to see this done without the direct invovlement of land payments to LL. Priced right, with sufficicient size I can see small groups coming together to create realms like the Blake Sea. In fact, I can envision the new regions being modern enough to allow for vast amounts of sailable/flyable water without greatly increasing the processing power needed.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer these...and hope I am not to late.

[Balthazar Almendros]

Judging by the replies I received I think there was a misunderstanding in what I was asking. Optimizing a game would go a long way for the overall experience. When i was referring to specs I wasn't necessarily meaning old hardware. I've at times replaced new hardware because despite what the minimum hardware requirements state; machines that I had that had well above the recommended still managed to be worked hard by SL where as they would be as cool as a cucumber when running the latest games at the various times this occured. 

One thing that would go a long way in SL not just sansar is a ruleset that forces content creators who work in mesh to make creations high detailed but low poly. I see so many amazing avatars but they are created with excessively high rendering costs due to not being "game" orientated. I know a virtual world is not a game in a traditional sense but the mechanics are and this would be one way to do two things

1.) make a smoother better experience for all as not everyone runs an NVIDIA GTX TITAN whilst connected directly to the grid via a CAT 5 cable.

2.) it would cut down in some ways those "creators" who are just buying models online who don't know anything about modelling and can't "tidy up" the model before importing it if it has a too high poly count.

 

This is of course one example of optimizing as i'm sure the engineers know of other things that can be done. Just because something is brand spanking new it doesn't mean it has to run uneconomically when using computer resources.

[Phoebe Avro]

This is so true :- I see so many amazing avatars but they are created with excessively high rendering costs,

Mesh avs on the whole are realy crap and lag everyone who can see them, i am old school and use an old retro sl av ^^

 

[Balthazar Almendros]

Something else I am curious about is, Lets say in Sansar a few land owners got together and created an experience that involved something much like the Blake Sea in SL a large open space for sailing and flying. If those land owners then got their various bits of seperate land and had them joined up would there be similar effects to "sim border crossings" when moving a vehicle or just the avatar from one land area to another when they are visually contiguous? or would Sansar treat such instances as though they are part of one large area?

[Cerise Sorbet]

I've got the impression that the whole idea of region crossings would be alien to this new platform.

That is probably where some of the anxiety about a mainland kind of experience comes from. While seamless crossings have obviously been too problematic to try again any time soon, some kind of way to smooth over the edges, something like a fog or tunnel you can walk (or riode a vehicle) through to get between experiences that want to allow that, might go some way toward keeping that kind of imersion alive.

Will Sansar be able to suport something like that?

[shug Maitland]

 Why I like the mainland
1- I can own as much land as I want with no setup fees!
2- There is a sense of shared community, unstructured, anarchistic, sometimes contentious, but it is us, and we are it.
3- There is no middleman, I pay my tier to LL and don't worry about a landlord changing the rules or quitting SL
4- There are Mountains!!!.
 Brocade (92,149,191)

[Jo Yardley]

I'm trying to imagine what 1920s Berlin will look like in Sansar.

So we'll get more, cheaper land, but what will it look like?

Will we get a blob of land surrounded by sea or by other people's land?

Will the water be fluid?

So for instance, the land is dry, and I can dig as deep as I want and there won't be any water, unless I dig a channel to the sea and link it to the hole.

Or if you choose a water source to start at the top of a mountain, it will automatically flow down to the lowest point in the sim.

If we get that we can have so much fun building rivers, waterfalls, dikes and then cleaning up after we accidentally delete part of a levy and flood the city.

 

[Jo Yardley]

I know LL is thinking about changning the region options in SL, wanting to offer more different kinds of region to buy in stead of just one giant one.

I would like to know if you're thinking about lowering or removing the setup fees for regions and homesteads.

I know 1000 bucks is a lot of money to let users keep but I am sure it would also encourage more people to buy (new) regions.

[Jo Yardley]

Will the windlight in Sansar setup be comparable to SL?

Choose a light setting for your land, manipulate it and make your own options?

Or will it be better and have more options, for instance, will there be system build weather?

If we are able to make it rain and snow, I'll scream.

It would mean we could get rid of complicated primmy and often laggy weather systems that are generally prims with water pictures or emitters.

But I guess it will be complicated to make rain that automatically doesn't rain inside buildings.

Either way, what will the weather be like in Sansar?

And will there be 24 hour day cycles?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[Josephine Carissa]

Greetings Lindens,

as you have answered the question of "sl avitar names".

my questions are:

1. will "companies" or "businesses" have the same time frame to transfer or set up their names and business in the new world.

2. as of now will there be "any" items in our current inventories that will be able to transfer to the new world.

3. when it becomes time for "alpha" and "beta", will LL be picking the residents ? or will there be open oppertunities for residents to apply for the oppertunity to try out the new format ?

Thank you.

Best Regards,

Josephine

[ChinRey]

---

Ebbe Linden wrote:

Sansar will have a new marketplace with new tech and user experience. 

---

That of course brings up the question what will happen to the Second Life Marketplace. Are there any plans to upgrade it to modern standards with better search listing ranking, grouped listings, a more user friendly merchant interface, autmatic removal of expired listings, and better protection against illegal, TOS violating and unethical wares and marketing practices?

 

---

Ebbe Linden wrote:

Yes, we have support for physically based materials with spec, smoothness, "metalness" and normal maps. 

---

Will there be support for displacement maps?

When the plans for Sansar were first made public, there was quite a lot of talk about voxels. Have these plans been abandoned?

 

---

Jo Yardley wrote:

When will we get the 24 hour day cycles?

Sorry, couldn't resist

 

---

Oh no, we don't want that! With four hour days we get six times as many of them so we all get six times as much done! Ummm... or... am I getting something wrong here?

[Vick Forcella]

---

Danger Linden wrote:

We are curious about what specifically residents like about the Mainland? Provided infrastructure? Large contiguous areas? A sense of community? Neighbors with common interests? Affordability? The catchy name?

 

---

Ultimate shared experience. Content has been created by LL, the moles and millions of users. It is very diverse.

Size. Combined with the above it makes travel and exploring fun, a micro vacation. In RL vacations the path I take is more fun as the end points.

[Daniel Regenbogen]

While Sansar sounds to be quite interesting, my main interest right now is still in SL (as it is for many who I talk to every day). It is good to know that there is no plan for closing its doors. For me, though, that is not enough. I would like to see some old problems worked on, the biggest being the badly shaped land product portfolio. Are there any plans for that in the near future? The grid is still suffering from the Homestead Debacle (just look at the declining grid size, losing more than 20 percent of regions since the high time). I'm not even speaking about a lower price in general, just that a region with a quarter of prims available should cost in the range of a quarter of a full region. That would allow to add something like a "half region" at around half the price of a full one. A different approach would be to raise the prim count for all region types.

 

Is there any chance for long lasting bugs to be taken care of? Like the possibility for attackers to circumvent estate bans (not with new accounts, but people on the ban list still being able to come back).

 

Could something be done about items that can do huge damage (like region crashers) sold on the marketplace? For a while I flagged them regulary - just to see them being sold without any reaction from LL instead of a fast removal.

 

And finally: thank you for this thread! One of the biggest problems in all my SL experience since 2006 is communication or rather the missing of it.

[Qie Niangao]

---

Daniel Regenbogen wrote:

And finally: thank you for this thread! One of the biggest problems in all my SL experience since 2006 is communication or rather the missing of it.

---

I want to second that: recently increased communications from LL are most welcome, and the best we've seen since Robin Harper left the Lab.

Despite many good responses, I fear the appeal of Mainland remains ineffable -- I don't think I can do better, but it would be easy to come away with the idea that  Next-gen Anshe can build an acceptable substitute, or that Mainlanders simply want a big space in which to play a kind of crappy version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Or that blind portals between disjoint spaces will be "close enough" for immersion.

But maybe it doesn't matter. If Sansar technology can't support a Mainland experience, maybe somebody else's platform will, before SL's Mainland empties out and shuts down. Sansar must appeal to some envisioned mass market, and maybe current technology cannot support Mainland's appeal on that same platform.

Or maybe Mainland is just another bit of lost technology with which nostalgic old farts will bore the brave new Sansarians, just as pre-Mesh SLers remember shared building and fully-functional avatar editing.

I do have a question, though, completely unrelated: We've heard for many months that the scripting language will be C#. That's nice and all, but it doesn't actually tell us much. Somebody (not me) who actually cares about languages might ask about third party library support, but I want to ask specifically about the library of Sansar-specific functions: How will these differ from what's available in Second Life? I'm not asking about calling conventions (although pass-by-reference will sure be nice) but rather stuff such as:

• Permissions: Will these be similar, and handled similarly to SL runtime permissions?
• Resource management: Will memory, simulation time, etc. be "quota'd" in some way? and/or traded on a market? and/or throttled to some threshold(s)?
• Range of function: What can Sansar scripts do to objects? (e.g., deform mesh? animate material maps independently of each other?) ... to avatars? (e.g., turn them around? seat them under program control?) ... to the environment? (e.g., change projected texture light sources? precisely terraform land?)

There are literally hundreds of similar questions -- in fact, a whole jira database full of them -- so more than specific answers, at this point it would be good just to start hearing about the design process that's informed Sansar's scripting environment, at a level deeper than choice of language binding.

[ChinRey]

---

Danger Linden wrote:

We are curious about what specifically residents like about the Mainland? Provided infrastructure? Large contiguous areas? A sense of community? Neighbors with common interests? Affordability? The catchy name?

---

Hard to put into words actually but Mainland is a world, or at least the closest you can get to a world anywhere in virtual reality. Teleporting between isolated pockets simply isn't the same as being able to walk, drive or sail from place to place. That continuity adds a lot to the immersion factor and no matter how we look at it, immersion is vital for any virtual environment. It's not just about size but also the variety. Mainland is always a little bit unpredictable, it's always full of surprises - often unpleasant ones of course but also lots of really nice ones. That makes it feel far more real than the isolated, often thightly controlled pocket universes you find elsewhere in Second Life and in other virtual realities.

Variety doesn't mean everything shuold be mixed together at random though. If you look around in SL, it's easy to see that the areas that work the best are the ones where owners and tenants across several neighbouring sims follow a single theme and where each and everyone contributes with their interpretation of that theme. (Bay City, Blake Sea, the grandfather sims, New Caledon, the northern part of the Hidden Lake District and most of Heterocera are good examples how well this concept can work.) There should be a place for everything in Second Life but that doesn't mean everything should be placed on top of each other. Each theme needs the space it needs - and many enough individual creative minds to give it variety within its frame.

Mainland is also the most noticeable of the four truly unique things Second Life has to offer.

[JPG0809]

I would also like to know what the lab has to say about this.

 

I do agree that it's expecting too much for an older system to run SL/PS with effortlessly, but if you're expecting your user base to all have "gaming" computers, you're going to cut down on your number of users a lot which is, what I believe, is a big reason why people don't stick around in SL. I had plenty of people say they were interested and gave it a try but just simply couldn't run it even if their laptops had a pretty decent graphics card.

[Vick Forcella]

---

Danger Linden wrote:

We are curious about what specifically residents like about the Mainland? Provided infrastructure? Large contiguous areas? A sense of community? Neighbors with common interests? Affordability? The catchy name?

 

---

ETA. In my vision, as I have written once somewhere, Sansar is mainland without private islands. Each that has a *space* also has a presence on a continent. That presence on the continent provides access to the *spaces* in the form of an optional Teleport.

Example: My friend Marianne has a house in BayCity, I can find that on the map. I go to her house and there I find a teleport to her *space*. I won't have to search for some obscure landmark in my messy inventory. I use the map.

The content of the Sansar continents is user created, the infra structure made by our friends the moles. Strict rules apply on the Sansar continents, most enforced by software and building borders. No buildings in the sky will be the most interesting rule, as those have to go in our *spaces*. 

On the mainland we can meet random people. Something that is harder on private islands as they have to find it first.

The number of green dots on the map represents interesting places with many visitors, places we must visit too. Those green dots can be on the continent or can be in a *space*.

[Vick Forcella]

---

Danger Linden wrote:

We are curious about what specifically residents like about the Mainland? Provided infrastructure? Large contiguous areas? A sense of community? Neighbors with common interests? Affordability? The catchy name?

 

---

ETA2. OpenSim alternatives are great places to be alone, completely alone. Spaces on Sansar, without continent's, will be great places to be alone, completely alone.

[JPG0809]

Thank you for starting and answering in this thread!

 

-Has the lab thought about prepaid cards?

 

If I remember correctly, I believe LL decided on accepting teen users. Though I do believe some may have credit cards, I don't think many do and the those that do would'nt be comfortable giving their info out. I remember for certain MMOs, instead of using my credit card, I would pay $10 or $25 on a prepaid card for a certain game company and on the back of the card was a code you would type in on their site to redeem in-game credit. Though I don't think the traditional way of buying currency with a credit card is a bad idea, I do think that maybe buying Lindens this way may help those who would like an alternative though I'm not sure if Sansar will even have the same currency or a fluctuating economy and how that would all work.

 

 

-Will Sansar support wireless more efficiently rather than relying heavily on a wired set-up for Internet connection?