Is Sansar Just A More Modern IMVU?

[Codex Alpha]

The Sansar 'experience', vs an IMVU 'chat room', both which are user/pro-created, and have similar ability to limit who can come in, how they conduct themselves, the topic of chat and such are very similar.

Unlike SL, my understanding that in both cases, in order to participate in either, you must enter/teleport to each in order to see what is up. Sansar will not have islands, sims, or mainland that you can fly around in, crossing over borders relatively seamlessly. They will be separate from each other, operating more like traditional chat rooms, than how we use SL today.

IMVU: "There are thousands of public rooms based on various themes -- vampire castles, dance clubs, hospitals and anything else in between -- including accompanying furniture, decorations and sounds. These rooms usually have a capacity of no more than 10 avatars at a time. Because they're user-created, there are often stipulations on who can enter the room and what kinds of actions can take place in it" - How IMVU Works 

Sansar: “In the future we will (all be able to) create spaces and experiences and invite people into those experiences… It’s not going to be something that necessarily someone created for you, just like we have our own homes and our way of dressing, the future in virtual reality is going to allow us to have that level of control over the environment and how we express ourselves.” - Is there a future for user-created content in Linden Lab’s new world?

"Linden Lab is thinking less about having Sansar having a map like Second Life. They’re looking more at making individual creators make scalable and monetisable experiences and bring their audiences into it."

"Sansar – the target is the creator as the primary customer" - Linden Lab Chat Summary About Sansar

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

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entity0x wrote:

The Sansar 'experience', vs an IMVU 'chat room', both which are user/pro-created, and have similar ability to limit who can come in, how they conduct themselves, the topic of chat and such are very similar.

Unlike SL, my understanding that in both cases, in order to participate in either, you must enter/teleport to each in order to see what is up. Sansar will not have islands, sims, or mainland that you can fly around in, crossing over borders relatively seamlessly. They will be separate from each other, operating more like traditional chat rooms, than how we use SL today.

IMVU

:

"

There are thousands of public rooms based on various themes

-- vampire castles, dance clubs, hospitals and anything else in between -- including accompanying furniture, decorations and sounds. These rooms usually have a capacity of no more than 10 avatars at a time. Because they're user-created, there are often stipulations on who can enter the room and what kinds of actions can take place in it"

- How IMVU Works 

Sansar

:

“In the future

we will

(all be able to)

create spaces and experiences and invite people into those experiences

… It’s not going to be something that necessarily someone created for you, just like we have our own homes and our way of dressing, the future in virtual reality is going to allow us to have that level of control over the environment and how we express ourselves.”

- Is there a future for user-created content in Linden Lab’s new world?

"Linden Lab is thinking less about having Sansar having a map like Second Life. They’re looking more at making

individual creators make scalable and monetisable experiences and bring their audiences into it

."

"Sansar – the target is the creator as the primary customer"

- Linden Lab Chat Summary About Sansar

 

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Realistically, that's what Second LIfe already is. You can't directly travel from one private, separately owned island to another and never could unless specific arrangements are made (i.e. the United Sailing Sims). "Crossing borders" means that arbitrary borders exist in Second Life, and they do only so because of the weakness of the physics engine.

Meanwhile, IMVU rooms are room-sized and I don't believe you can even move freely inside them, while a Sansar experience is supposed to be measurable in multiple kilometers on a side and can be the size of dozens of Second Life regions.

 

[ChinRey]

As Theresa said, a more modern IMVU is pretty much what SL became when the focus shifted from continuos "continents" to isolated sims. Come to think of it, that shift happened shortly after IMVU was launched, I wonder if there was some connection there.

The way I understand it, Sansar is more like Unity and Unreal Engine except that it comes in a complete package including not only the software but also hosting and quite a bit of basic infrastructure. I think that's where the real risk lies. LL is taking on the Big Guys in virtual reality there and the package solution which is the only thing that really sets them apart from the others, may well be a two edged sword since the inevitable vendor lock may be hard for many potential customers to accept.

[Chic Aeon]

Even at the very beginning when Sansar was announced Ebbe stated that items made for the then just underway platform would go through a process (I am guessing this is now called publishing ) which would make the mesh item unusable on other platforms -- hence lower theft issues. While some things planned at the beginning (we know know money won't be  transferable between platforms) have been lost along the way (understandably) this seems to be in keeping with the original intent. 

It is going to be interesting to see who goes and who stays in the content creator arena as it appears that the learning curve is kinda in that professional area and those professionals can likely make more money elsewear.  It also appears from the latest videos that the "repetition" factor is in play as it was in Cloud Party. I am thinking of the grand ballroom which was a myriad of identical pieces repeated and the roses in an earlier video. In Cloud Party, once something was in the system and in use on that "experience", it was basically free. So you could have one tree or a hundred trees -- the tree being in a viewer's cache. 

 

This is all supposition on my part. I am obviously not there being a Blender gal. 

[Codex Alpha]

Yeah, I'm trying to make sense of it, especially after they were talking as though the Sansar 'experiences' were literally 'baked in', like pre-rendered game levels, which reminded me of IMVU.

In that context that's why I wouldn't look to SL as being the same as an improved IMVU, since SL is rendering 'real-time'.

I get the points though.

It seems more locked in fo sho.

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Chic Aeon wrote:

Even at the very beginning when Sansar was announced Ebbe stated that items made for the then just underway platform would go through a process (I am guessing this is now called publishing

) which would make the mesh item unusable on other platforms -- hence lower theft issues. While some things planned at the beginning (we know know money won't be  transferable between platforms) have been lost along the way (understandably) this seems to be in keeping with the original intent. 

It is going to be interesting to see who goes and who stays in the content creator arena as it appears that the learning curve is kinda in that professional area and those professionals can likely make more money elsewear.  It also appears from the latest videos that the "repetition" factor is in play as it was in Cloud Party. I am thinking of the grand ballroom which was a myriad of identical pieces repeated and the roses in an earlier video. In Cloud Party, once something was in the system and in use on that "experience", it was basically free. So you could have one tree or a hundred trees -- the tree being in a viewer's cache. 

 

This is all supposition on my part. I am obviously not there being a Blender gal. 

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And since Blender is not considered an 'industry tool', I wonder what support would be for it anyway in Sansar.

I hate Maya so much, I refuse to use it. LIke I said before, maybe it's just better to focus on selling game assets in general, and let people buy them from freelancers to put into Sansar.. rather than entering into some crummy agreement for pennies on the dollar.

I found out that Sansar may be using C# and Javascript as the languages. THis is something I have looked for, as proprietary languages is a waste of time, when they'r enot transferable, and all the time is wasted learning its nuances.

I might just move on to working with my own projects in Unreal/Unity in the future anyway. I can create my own 'experience' and market it that way - in the form of a game or app.

[Chic Aeon]

It was stated officiall years ago that Maya would be the software they would be working with and "eventually" there would be support for other 3D programs. It will be very telling if that doesn't happen before they open. But perhaps that is what they want and I guess if people REALLY want to create for Sansar they can always learn Maya and pay the monthly fee.  I won't be doing that though. I create for fun and learning another program after four years in Blender isn't going to work for me --- not even thinking about the all in one interface toolset thing ^^.

 

But there is visiting. Always good to have a place to visit. 

[ChinRey]

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Chic Aeon wrote:

It is going to be interesting to see who goes and who stays in the content creator arena as it appears that the learning curve is kinda in that professional area and those professionals can likely make more money elsewear.

---

There are quite a few skiled content creators who do good business with quality meshes elsewhere and still sell horribly poor uploads of the same meshes in SL. The reason they do that is - and I'm actually quoting one of them here - "People in SL buy anyway." Spending time and effort optimizing builds for SL when you could have invested it on a more lucrative market simply isn't cost effective. Some do it anyway because they can't bring themselves to present half-baked works, but many won't and some evn can't afford to do it. I mentioned in another thread that the SL version of the Grand Hall is such a bodged job and I have to make absolutely clear: that is not the creator's fault. He's just being prudent, taking the logical consequence of working within a system that tends to punish rather than reward quality improvements.

This is something that'll have to be different in Sansar of course.

 

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Chic Aeon wrote:

It also appears from the latest videos that the "repetition" factor is in play as it was in Cloud Party.

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Oh yes. I think object instancing is mandatory for any new virtualreality and has been so for a while. We do have "asset instancing" in SL of course, it's one of the most important tricks for good builders who want to keep the lag down. That helps a lot but it'll never be as effective as object instancing.

 

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Chic Aeon wrote:

So you could have one tree or a hundred trees -- the tree being in a viewer's cache.

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I never saw Cloud Party. Did they use SpeedTree or just some similar system?

[ChinRey]

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entity0x wrote:

I found out that Sansar may be using C# and Javascript as the languages. THis is something I have looked for, as proprietary languages is a waste of time, when they'r enot transferable, and all the time is wasted learning its nuances.

---

C# actually. It's High Fidelity that uses Javascript.

C# is often mispresented as an object-oriented programming language but that's mainly because object-oriented is such a buzzword these days. What it really is, is a kind of Jack of all trades that can do a decent job under just about any programming paradigm you can think of.

Unity supports both C# and Javascript but C# seems to be the most popular choice and it's likely many scripts from there can be adapted for Sansar.

[Codex Alpha]

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ChinRey wrote:

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entity0x wrote:

I found out that Sansar may be using C# and Javascript as the languages. THis is something I have looked for, as proprietary languages is a waste of time, when they'r enot transferable, and all the time is wasted learning its nuances.

---

C# actually. It's High Fidelity that uses Javascript.

C# is often mispresented as an object-oriented programming language but that's mainly because object-oriented is such a buzzword these days. What it really is, is a kind of Jack of all trades that can do a decent job under just about any programming paradigm you can think of.

Unity supports both C# and Javascript but C# seems to be the most popular choice and it's likely many scripts from there can be adapted for Sansar.

---

 

[Codex Alpha]

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Chic Aeon wrote:

It was stated officiall years ago that Maya would be the software they would be working with and "eventually" there would be support for other 3D programs. It will be very telling if that doesn't happen before they open. But perhaps that is what they want and I guess if people REALLY want to create for Sansar they can always learn Maya and pay the monthly fee.  I won't be doing that though. I create for fun

and learning another program after four years in Blender isn't going to work for me --- not even thinking about the all in one interface toolset thing ^^.

 

But there is visiting. Always good to have a place to visit. 

---

It wouldnt be the software in question anyway, rather the format of the files required. If they needed FBX, and made it so that other software like Blender didn't provide the proper FBX format (cuz proprietary), then yes, people willl be forced to use the 'industry standard' to participate.

At least with SL, even if Blender can be a learning curve, at least the barrier of entry is lowered compared to if only 'industry standard' tools could be used, so at least we have that.

We'll see what happens in the future though, as plans include uploading to asset sites, and what they require as files will dictate in the end the format and software needed.

[Bobbie Faulds]

Sansar isn't going to be like IMVU. I'd say it was more like the Paleoworld experience in SL or what Bryn Oh does on her Immersiva sim. If she does installations on Sansar, that would be just about my only reason to go there. 

[ChinRey]

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entity0x wrote:

...

but C# is heavily MS-centric, (through .Net, though tolerable and workable through Mono)  and Javascript is doable, and transferable from/to existing web experience. Yet at least with C#, we have a close match with Unity, Sansar and 'Mono' in SL (though I am unclear how SL uses Mono or how deep - Documentation!)

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C# is also very similar to Java. Bill Joy from Sun Microsystem once described C# as "sort of Java with reliability, productivity and security deleted." Sun once sued Microsoft for their incomplete implementation of Java 1.1 and C# was launched while that lawsuit was going on. Although I doubt anybody's ever going to admit it, I suspect that "incomplete implementation" is the true origin of C#.

Whether I'm right or wrong there I think the way Java is used all over the interweb illustrates what we can expect from C#. It's a "minute to learn, a lifetime to master" kind of language. There are some brilliant Java applets made by very skilled programmers but also some very shoddy ones made by people who have spent a minute to learn.

The multi-paradigm concept may be a key factor here. As I mentioned earlier, Object-Oriented Programming is a buzzword these days and it also happens to be very suitable for the kind of applications we are discussing here so there's going to be quite a lot of pressure for programmers and scripters to write object-oriented code. In programming there are few things quite as bad as object-oriented code written by people not familiar with the basic principles of OOP. It doesn't matter how good the programmers are, if they don't understand the paradigm they have to work with, they can't write good code. The Marketplace is of course a prime example of this.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Chic Aeon wrote:

It is going to be interesting to see who goes and who stays in the content creator arena as it appears that the learning curve is kinda in that professional area and those professionals can likely make more money elsewear.

---

There are quite a few skiled content creators who do good business with quality meshes elsewhere and still sell horribly poor uploads of the same meshes in SL. The reason they do that is - and I'm actually quoting one of them here - "People in SL buy anyway." Spending time and effort optimizing builds for SL when you could have invested it on a more lucrative market simply isn't cost effective. Some do it anyway because they can't bring themselves to present half-baked works, but many won't and some evn can't afford to do it. I mentioned in another thread that the SL version of the Grand Hall is such a bodged job and I have to make absolutely clear: that is not the creator's fault. He's just being prudent, taking the logical consequence of working within a system that tends to punish rather than reward quality improvements.

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I do my best to ducate people in SL about things like avatar complexity, how to tell a rezzed mesh is not optimized, and so on.

But people just get mad when I tell them how they can make their own SL experience faster, smoother, and less laggy - and improve the experience of others around them.

There are a LOT of people that are uninformed and remain they way because they view education as a personal attack...

 

Oh and saying it's not the creator's fault (Grand Hall exampls) because he isn't properly rewarded for taking good ethical action is flawed. Good conduct should not be done because one is rewarded for it, but simply to be better.

If someone does wrong by others, we should not make excuses for them. Maybe sometimes it's good to have people mad at you - if the people getting mad are doing harm.

 

 

[Derek Torvalar]

Perhaps it is because your best is insufficient.

People do not look kindly on being 'edumacated' by those who demonstrate their incompetence so blatantly.

[ChinRey]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

Oh and saying it's not the creator's fault (Grand Hall exampls) because he isn't properly rewarded for taking good ethical action is flawed. Good conduct should not be done because one is rewarded for it, but simply to be better.

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Personally I absolutely share your sentiment there. Yes, it is cynical to take advantage of ignorant customers and a system that favors mediocrity over excellence. But no, I do not want to blame the people who do it, I blame it on the conditions that allow them to.

The chandeliers of the Grand Hall are a good example what I mean with a system favoring mediocrity btw. The rest of the hall is very simple, no signifcant modelling challenges at all. But the chandeliers are very detailed and require a lot of polys. They could have been uploaded at good quality and they wouldn't even have to be very laggy if they were. But they would have had a higher land impact and since people in SL tend to be so obsessed with LI that would really hurt sales. (And since that particular builder doesn't seem to have an organisation to back him up, SL sales is likely to be marginal anyway.) As I said in another thread, I'm not sure if I could have made those chandeliers with a sellable LI and if I can't, nobody can. My solution is not to do something like that unless I can figure out a way to do it properly. Others see it differently and I think we just have to agree to disagree.

When the increased prim limit was launched, Patch Linden said that LL hoped people would use some of that extra LI to improve the content quality. That's a lovely thought but a forlorn hope is not enough encouragement to make any difference and so far it seems that's all LL has to offer.

[Chic Aeon]

Regarding Cloud Party

 

The "tree" was just an example. Once you had added an "asset" to your build beit a chair or a tree or a pillow, it was reusable at no cost. They had a VERY differente way of controling the amount of information on  -- well let's call it a sim though it was more like a 2x2 var in SL.     

 

There were only so many items that could have long LODs and you got to choose. Usually that would be things like houses. 

I thought it was very smart programing although you did have to be VERY careful with your texture uploads as they counted mightily.  

[Chic Aeon]

I don't thing the format thing is the only reason to limit. In Cloud Party they had added support for various 3D programs (I was there toward the end) and while I was there they added support for Sketchup. Each new 3D program, even though it produced a DAE file had different things that had to be accomplished on the server AND the support team (which was GREAT) also needed to understand the 3D programs supported in order to help.

So I personally don't have any issue with using Maya as the first software supported, I just hope that they encompass others as they said they would. 

[Chic Aeon]

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ChinRey wrote:

When the increased prim limit was launched, Patch Linden said that LL hoped people would use some of that extra LI to improve the content quality. That's a lovely thought but a forlorn hope is not enough encouragement to make any difference and so far it seems that's all LL has to offer.

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I have noticed even though I wasn't dedicating any particular effort to the process, that in many cases I am opting for slightly higher land impacts with see accross the sim distances (this at 2 and I tested at 1 also).   That doesn't mean I think this ALWAYS needs to happen, but with houses especially -- and I recently made some giant boulders for "buffers" on mainland -- it is a good practice. 

 

So SOME folks are working towards Patch's wish.   .   

[ChinRey]

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Chic Aeon wrote:

The "tree" was just an example.

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Oh yes, I understood that. Object instancing can be used for all kinds of things of course. Download once, use several times - saves a lot of bandwidth. Also saves quite a bit of rendering time since the render engine can reuse data.

I mentioned SpeedTree in my reply here - and the Valley Becnhmark in the vanished discussion - because they are so eminent examples of what can be achieved with object instancing and it's just a coincidence that they both use it mainly for vegetation. SL doesn't have object instancing. I take it for granted that Sansar does, if not it would be like a car manufacturer forgetting to add wheels to their latest model.

[ChinRey]

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Chic Aeon wrote:

I don't thing the format thing is the only reason to limit.

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Yes, it makes perfect sense to focus on one 3D modelling program at first to reduce the number of variables at the beta stage.

[ChinRey]

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Chic Aeon wrote:

So SOME folks are working towards Patch's wish.  

.   

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Means you're one of the exclusive few

[Chic Aeon]

I always like being special *wink*.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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ChinRey wrote:

 

The chandeliers of the Grand Hall are a good example what I mean with a system favoring mediocrity btw. The rest of the hall is very simple, no signifcant modelling challenges at all. But the chandeliers are very detailed and require a lot of polys. They could have been uploaded at good quality and they wouldn't even have to be very laggy if they were. But they would have had a higher land impact and since people in SL tend to be so obsessed with LI that would really hurt sales. (And since that particular builder doesn't seem to have an organisation to back him up, SL sales is likely to be marginal anyway.) As I said in another thread, I'm not sure if I could have made those chandeliers with a sellable LI and if I can't, nobody can. My solution is not to do something like that unless I can figure out a way to do it properly. Others see it differently and I think we just have to agree to disagree.

When the increased prim limit was launched, Patch Linden said that LL hoped people would use some of that extra LI to improve the content quality. That's a lovely thought but a forlorn hope is not enough encouragement to make any difference and so far it seems that's all LL has to offer.

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If I understand you correctly, then I disagree.

SL is basically a real-time-3d-gaming platform. Graphics need to always be optimized for quick fast rendering.

So if the builder made something to be ultra-low-land impact at the expense of graphical complexity... that was the right choice. Keeping that land impact low, usually means optimizing for real-time 3D animation. Or said the other way around: optimizing for real-time-3D-animation tends to result in the same choices that also lead to lower land impact: so as a consumer even with more land impact available on my land, I still look things that use up less as an easy guage of what is "likely" to have less impact on rendering-speed, and the FPS I get moving around with it in my presence.

 

That said, when people follow suit with a unethical system and make unethical choice - I do not give them a pass for that. Bad ethics is bad ethics, regardless. It's generally a position of privilege that allows people to make excuses that say "well, the system is just this way... so I'm just being part of that system."

- And that remains true in 'small things' like design choices in art, and big things like predatory criminal conduct. The scale and nature doesn't matter - being ethical is simply doing the right thing, regardless.

 

[ChinRey]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

So if the builder made something to be ultra-low-land impact at the expense of graphical complexity... that was the right choice. Keeping that land impact low, usually means optimizing for real-time 3D animation.

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You didn't understand me correctly then. What I was talking about was quick-and-dirty uploads that weren't in any way optimized for low lag. Besides, when the builder reduces the LoD so much that even with LoD factor 4 (which really, really adds to the lag) they still don't render properly at a realistic viewing distance, what's the point?

But you still have a very important point because an item's land impact is not a good measurement of the amount of lag it generates. The land impact formula exlucdes some of the biggest lag inducing factors and it also very obviously miscalculates some of the factors that are included. This is what I meant by a system that favors mediocrity over excellence.

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

so as a consumer even with more land impact available on my land, I still look things that use up less as an easy guage of what is "likely" to have less impact on rendering-speed, and the FPS I get moving around with it in my presence.

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Land impact does not in any way indicate an item's rendering speed, it does not attempt to do so and it does not pretend to do so. For what it's worth, it's all about server side load. That is, there is some correlation between download weight and render speed but it's very very vague and inexact. Render speed is mainly about textures and sometimes animations (that is anything that moves) and those are factors not included in the LI calculation.

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

It's generally a position of privilege that allows people to make excuses that say "well, the system is just this way... so I'm just being part of that system."

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Unless it's been changed recently, there is one sim that is notable for being filled with particularly poor mesh. High LI, high lag, poor LoD, faulty physics - you name it, it has it. It is run by Linden Lab themselves and advertised as "the Home of the Moles".

At least one of the worst mesh fakers was recently promoted through a certain Everybody-But-Drax-Knows-It's-Official-LL video blog as a "World Maker". Not entirely without justification because he used to be a very good sculpt maker, but even so...

These are the signals Linden Lab sends out and they are unambigious. To the regular user they say: "This is what counts as high quality in SL". To the content creators they say: "This is what we want, no need to waste time doing it better."

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

The scale and nature doesn't matter - being ethical is simply doing the right thing, regardless.

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Of course but in this case that often means you have the supreme rulers of this virtual world actively working against you and I really don't think it's fair to expect everybody to handle that pressure.

[mikka Luik]

Well. Just a simple maker of stuff here who is still learning. SL has given me that. As always, I bow (never kneel) before those who know more.

I am sorry I am mediocre except - thrrrp The only ways is up. Now thats a tune will stick...

Your point on signals is interesting. It is the 'external' to SL that actually generates those signals. The Lab makes tools =^^= and sometimes they need sharpening.

Following a bit OT

But to quote your quote (as I have no idea how)  'a position of privilege' applies - in what way? In this virtual place of ours where the very fact you can use it sets a base line from which anything within this is possible.