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So the Mainland Goes Away Completely with Project Sansar


Prokofy Neva
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I never see this being discussed, and I wonder if people realize.

There is not going to be any Mainland -- any giant Linden estate divided up into sims and parcels with numerous individual or group owners -- on geographically contiguous land and sea.

In fact, geographical contiguity as we know it is being dropped for Sansara. It will only exist if a land baron buys multiple islands and links them together, i.e. like Caledon.

But there will be no huge contiguous area of 5000 plus Linden and resident-owned sims with wild variety -- which is both a good and bad thing but people may come to value it more when it is gone.

The reasons for this are several:

o The Lindens never really solved the problem of crossing sims, they hate it, and are tired of banging their heads on it. They think without vehicular travel across sims, it makes no sense to have.

o That it doesn't matter to most mainlanders because they are not trying to drive across sim seams all the time, they are just LOOKING across or WALKING across them slowly never registers.

o There can't be geographical contiguity in a system where there are "sims on demand" as in Kitely or other platforms -- because then it would leave holes in the scenes.

In his most recent interview, Ebbe Linden speaks of shutting down sims "while you're gone" to save on CPU and costs of running servers. If you want to keep running your sim "hot," as he put it, i.e. "always on," you'll pay more. Who will want to do this? Few people. I imagine there will be various exploits that might try to work around this but there it is.

o Many people don't like the Mainland, or don't even know what it is. It's audience is small and the Lindens don't have to care about small audiences when they don't include favored (and heeded) content creators which is their main focus -- and who will be invited to the beta, unlike large land owners.

I think as it dawns on people that they will be stuck on sims -- even linked sims - that reflect only one owner or one land baron's taste and notions, they may wish they did have a mainland. One reason some people still keep mainland stores is because of serendipity -- happenstance, accident.

How can you meet people? Only at a laggy club or event or infohub. But if you are in a neighborhood of multiple owners especially in themed areas, you meet people outside the club dimensions and that's important for some people.

The question is what happens to Second Life (which is getting a name close) when Project Sansar opens. While there might not be an immediately rush, I bet that just as people drained out of There and the Sims Online into Second Life, and those two previous worlds closed ultimately with lack of customers, the same will be true of Sansar and the old SL.

For one, there's the issue of large island owners. The Lindens will likely cut some deal with them to get the equivalent in the new world. It's really obtuse of them NOT to include such large island owners (and that would not be me) in the beta and only focus on their beloved content creators because if you don't have land, you can't show content and have no reason to buy it -- especially in a world with no Mainland and no hangout infohub type public areas!!! Have they thought of that?!

So there will have to be large barons of the 50 or 100 or 500 sim type who will come in and create large communities where everyone will have to go (and they won't mind because most of them do that now anyway). They'll have to have a system to watch customers log on and off or they'll have to pay the "hot" fees for "always on." They'll have to have some always-on landing areas or recreation areas.

Now, will they be taxed? Right now, Linden wants to take the huge money-maker that they already have -- land tier -- and covert this away to sales taxes on the purchase of goods. Again, no one will buy anything if they have no play to display it for themselves and others. So they need land, and the "sales tax" that Lindens will not want to make too high on content so as not to lose customers will be shifted to those who want to rent out land -- both on their end, as middle-men between Linden and its direct customers (direct island and homestead owners) and on their customers end -- or perhaps only on their end.

The ban on purchase of homesteads without first purchasing a full sim will go away as the Lindens will look for ways to have direct customers who directly buy their "land" on servers, high-capacity or not.

Quite a few people loathe the land baron class even as they use their services, but Linden has encouraged them because they take  on customer orientation and care so that they don't have to and give people "something to do" in the form of events or concerts or clubs or whatever.

It's funny, at first when Ebbe began talking about Sansar he never mentioned the plans for land as a component of the in-world economy, he only spoke of it in terms of his own economy as a corporation and the need to make the tier less to have more people buy it. Then gradually when people like me kept asking about it in terms of the in-world economy, he talked about how the sims would be much larger and whole more prims/land impact and also confirmed (when I met him last year) that there would be no contiguous land at all, no Mainland. He was vague on the land business as such.

Recently, I see him reference sims as still a revenue stream for his own business which means he may realize that taxing content alone will not work.

So  likely what I foresee is the taxation of rental agents. That just has to happen to make him money he lost in tier, and it will be justified by the notion that these rental agents will in theory now have less expense.  Will they? No, not after initial set-up fee (if that system is continued) because the margins in the business are extremely risky.

In other words, if you have a grandfathered sim you charge less and new sim you charge more -- you charge a little more than what you have to pay as an owner in tier to LL. If that cost comes down then accordingly your rents come down, but your  margins will still stay the same as you cannot charge too much more or the customer just goes and gets an island himself (set-up fees might be one area where Linden in fact makes land MORE expensive initially, even if they drop tier.)

 

 

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I think more people value mainland than Linden labs realise. They may not be sailing or flying every day, but having that sort of thing there as an option is something that makes second life special and somewhere people want to be and stay. Without that it will take me a long time to move over to the new platform, because even if it has better graphics it will be missing one of its most important features.

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actually i would be kind of happy  why? because   linden lab lags like crazy. most times it is griefed  also   you got people lagging out all the lands around them because   of so much clutter   in the sky and on the land.. it is nice to see some linden land owners who actualy build nice and   such  but those people are a bit rare.. your can't restart linden land either if   griefers come  or bugs happen that a restart would fix

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Alwin Alcott wrote:

mainland is nog going away, it stays on SL as it was before, now and in the future.

 

Your post is about something that is apart of SL, it might be more usefull to create a new section for that.

Please reread his post.. He is talking about Project Sansar not having mainland like SL does.

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Sure, that's the cover story, but few aren't really buying it. We have the experience of both There and The Sims On Line behind us. Both of those separate virtual worlds emptied out as people fled to Second Life, especially after SL got over its growing pains in the first and second years. By 2005, TSO was dying no matter what the owners did to try to keep it going, even introducing user-made paid content.

 

It's absolutely reasonable to assume the same dynamics will apply to the new SL. Already, the gulf between prim-based avatars and their prim-based economies and the mesh-based avatars and their new economies is widening and the former will disappear except for the very rich and very poor, the former who have the space for old-style prim homes and antique furniture and the latter who will continue to live in cheap prim boxes.

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  • 1 year later...

This is what i have read on the interent by staff at linden labs.

1) land will be 10's of dollars not hundreds like it is is in second Life

2) If you want to have as big as all the land in second life you can

3) You will be able to take your account with you. (Can use the same account for both worlds)

4) You will be able to create things like you do in Sl  but with mesh  not prims or sculpties.

5) Your inventory will not be able to transer to Sansar. (possile mesh item can)

 

That all i have been able to glean from the internet.

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Just in passing, you're replying to a thread that's been dormant for over a year. Nothing against that, just observing.


1) land will be 10's of dollars not hundreds like it is is in second Life

Yeah, this is one of the reasons I doubt Sansar will last long, because the only way it can be profitable is if a very steep fee is placed on all content transfers. It might work, financially, but if it does, the economy will be very different from SL.


2) If you want to have as big as all the land in second life you can

Maximum size is on the order of 4 x 4 km, so maybe about the size of the Shermerville sim cluster. You can have multiple of them with some means of poofing between them, but it's going to be a bit claustrophobic, as on some Estate clusters.


3) You will be able to take your account with you. (Can use the same account for both worlds)

Yes, but not your L$s. It will have some other currency.


4) You will be able to create things like you do in Sl  but with mesh  not prims or sculpties.

The prospect of in-world content creation of any kind has been pretty murky, publicly. They made noises about eventual Voxel manipulation of terrain, at least, and some minimal manipulation of pre-made mesh (blob-instance translation, rotation, and scaling, one supposes), but the ability to create new geometry doesn't seem to be planned, and apparently all new content is introduced in an off-line environment where it is optimized or "compiled" before it can be seen by others. (I don't think they've said what all must be "optimized" like this. Will we have to go offline merely to move or scale objects in a scene? There are people who know this, obviously, but apparently they're the type willing to sign NDAs for a video game.)


5) Your inventory will not be able to transer to Sansar. (possile mesh item can)

Right. Well, you'll be able to convert and re-upload mesh geometry, textures, etc. I don't think they plan any porting of existing SL mesh. (And here's hoping that's a good thing: They totally whiffed the definition of mesh assets in SL, such that the model is strictly embedded in an instance of the model. I sure hope they got that nonsense out of their heads when representing Sansar assets.)

 

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Jumping in late here since Qie already has given good replies to all your points. There are a few details to add however:

 


Roche Runo wrote:

This is what i have read on the interent by staff at linden labs.

Yes but as you've probably figured out from Qie's reply, much of what you've read is outdated. There's quite a bit of difference between what LL thought they could do at first and what they've eventually ended up with. ;)

 


Roche Runo wrote:

1) land will be 10's of dollars not hundreds like it is is in second Life

We'll see. As Qie said, that means they'll have to charge for content rather than land and it's an open question how they are going to do that. They'll either have to find a way to force all transactions to go through an official LL run broker system or they have to charge a hefty upload fee.

 


Roche Runo wrote:

2) If you want to have as big as all the land in second life you can

That's what Ebbe said early in the process yes but they've run into serious technical problems since then. Even the 4x4 km size Qie mentioned may be too much. Here's what Ebbe told Jo Yardley in Lab Chat #2:


Ebbe Linden and Jo Yardley said:

JY: When you say multiple kilometres, are we talking one or twenty or ..?

EL: Well, one is not multiple.

JY: That’s true. So we’re talking two square kilometres at least.

EL: Or twice that …


 (Source: https://modemworld.me/lab-chat-2-ebbe-altberg-additional-questions/)

 


Roche Runo wrote:

3) You will be able to take your account with you. (Can use the same account for both worlds)

Same username, same password but apparently that's about it.

 


Roche Runo wrote:

4) You will be able to create things like you do in Sl  but with mesh  not prims or sculpties.

Not really. In this interview and others Ebbe says that it may eventually be possible for users to create their own artwork inworld but they obviously gave up on implementing building as we know in SL long ago.  You can of course create your meshes with an external program but you still won't be able to uplaod and use them directly. Content in Sansar is very much based on complete baked scenes, not assemblies of unrelated objects like we have in Second Life.

 


Roche Runo wrote:

5) Your inventory will not be able to transer to Sansar. (possile mesh item can)

Converting sculpts and prims to mesh is trivial. But as mentioned above you probably won't be able to upload individual objects to Sansar. This limitation is necessary unfortunately. There simply is no way to achieve the performance level Sansar need without using complete baked scenes where every single detail is optimised to work with everything else.

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Hey there. Wondering if you can document where this was revealed? (see below)

 

"Content in Sansar is very much based on complete baked scenes, not assemblies of unrelated objects like we have in Second Life."

 

Ebbe in many talks (some pretty recent) has mentioned the home decorating scenario where people pick a chair and a painting etc and put together their look. While this COULD be possible if all creators used the same lighting permeters it seems kinda odd that this is part of his often given talk.

 

Thanks a bunch.

 

Gotta run. Company. Hope this is clear.

 

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Chic Aeon wrote:

Hey there. Wondering if you can document where this was revealed? (see below)

There's a link to an interview with Ebbe earlier in that paragraph. I think he's mentioned it several other times too: content can't be directly uploaded to Sansar, LL will have to run everything through an optimisation process first.

It goes without saying, really. Sansar is supposed to work with VR headsets and they require an fps of at least 90 - and that is with graphics features far more advanced than Second Life and with data transfer across the whole of internet. That's quite a challenge even for the most highly optimised computer game and way outside what is possible with SL style building. If Linden Lab had come up with some new revolutionary miracle cure for gpu lag, we would have heard about it by now and even seen some evidence of it in SL.

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ChinRey wrote:


Chic Aeon wrote:

Hey there. Wondering if you can document where this was revealed? (see below)

There's a link to an interview with Ebbe earlier in that paragraph. I think he's mentioned it several other times too: content can't be directly uploaded to Sansar, LL will have to run everything through an optimisation process first.

It goes without saying, really. Sansar is supposed to work with VR headsets and they require an fps of at least 90 - and that is with graphics features far more advanced than Second Life and with data transfer across the whole of internet. That's quite a challenge even for the most highly optimised computer game and way outside what is possible with SL style building. If Linden Lab had come up with some new revolutionary miracle cure for gpu lag, we would have heard about it by now and even seen some evidence of it in SL.

There'd be nothing to prevent someone from placing and moving furniture to their heart's content in a viewer environment and then baking their changes all at once to send the server and calculate physics. That's the way setting pathfinding attributes works now.

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