New World Notes

Comment of the Week: Don't Be Optimistic Just Because the Loss of Private Sims in Second Life Has Slowed

Last week when I pointed out that the constant loss of private sim estates in Second Life (Linden Lab's main revenue source) has been slowing, reader "Granger" wasn't having any of that:

Optimism is useful when warranted... misleading when it's not based on reality. It is difficult to look at the trendline of that graph and find anything of positive validity. SL dropping "only" 2% as compared with a prior 4+% is putting icing on a mud cake. The reality is it is still dropping.

When we drop the optimism, a more productive and realistic route is to try to figure out WHY it is still dropping. That trendline is still significantly downward and all the optimism in the world isn't going to change that. So we do well to address the issues rather than say, "Well, it's not as bad as it could be..."

The key reasons for the continued loss of private sims, as Granger sees it:

Second Life Fashion Bloggers Don't Care About Optimized Products Because They're Mostly Used in Solo Fashion Shoots

Good point from reader "Seph", responding to my suggestion last week that Second Life's many fashion bloggers should point out when an item has poorly textured mesh or other problems, because performance is just as key a selling point as the way a product looks. Not so, Seph argues:

This is out of touch.

A Second Life product is much more likely to be bought for a blog post, a Flickr photograph or just to lounge around with at 10 FPS chatting or roleplaying than it is to have any use at 30-60+ FPS.

Second Life designers don't build towards the same use cases as videogame designers. Stop assuming ignorance where a much more obvious explanation exists. Designers don't build towards the debug panels they build for the THOUSANDS of blog posts and photos shared every week, not for the few situations where 60 FPS would be nice.

Now that Seph puts it that way, this sounds largely correct. The vast majority of SL-based images on social media seem to be fashion pics with a single avatar, usually taken in a virtual studio, sometimes with a RL backdrop (as above, randomly pulled from Flickr), and often with heavy post-processing. In other words, most avatar accessories don't really require optimization, because they're not typically used in contexts where optimization matters all that much.

Even if that's correct, however, I'd still say SL bloggers should point out bad optimization:

Second Life Consumers Should Demand Products With Optimized Graphics

Responding to Penny Patton's point that most SL creators do not optimize the graphics of their products, Chic Aeon makes a good argument:

CONSUMERS have part of the responsibility. They need to TEST. Get the demo. Go to the store. Test the LODs and physics settings (the new Firestorm Tools in the Build menu help a LOT with this).

People come to the forums all the time complaining. Yes, the builds were bad. Yes the mesh was too heavy, but NO they didn't bother to see the item before they bought it.

IF consumers would stop buying the very pretty but OH SO LAGGY items that are out there on the market, the market would readjust and creators that "simply don't care" would need to start making game asset mesh.

And, for the non-mesh makers here. It takes NO LONGER to make low poly, long distance LOD items with reasonable texture loads than it does to make dense mesh items that disappear when you cam out a few meters and take forever to load. So that argument really has little merit. As creators, we have choices to make; as consumers there are also choices.

In my opinion it is a fifty fifty deal.

To that, Penny notes, "You simply cannot expect every SL content creator, or even most SL content creators, to have the skill and knowledge of an experienced videogame design artist. And you certainly cannot expect the average consumer to know more than the content creators themselves."

This is true, but from my point of view, there's a middle ground:

Is Second Life Not Growing Because Its Most Dedicated Users Keep Dying Off? (Comments of the Week)

Pictured at right: SL demographics as reported by Linden Lab in 2008

Why does Second Life keep getting hundreds of thousands of new user sign-ups, while it's monthly userbase refuses to grow? Longtime SLer David Cartier makes a point I hadn't quite considered:

I've been seeing a fairly large number of new accounts, lately, where the driver clearly doesn't have a fricking clue what they are doing, so we are seeing at least SOME new people. I've also known quite a lot of people who've simply died over the years. That has to be affecting the numbers just as much as getting tired of receiving the friendly - and yet dreaded - "Wow you're really OLD!!!" IMs. Given the generally older user base I'm guessing that is going to trend upwards in the future.

That is true. The last time Linden Lab reported SL user demographics in 2008, 15% of the population were over 45, and 23% were between 35-44 in age. (See chart above.) Ten years later, any of those users who are still in Second Life are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, even 70s and 80s. And the reality is, a small but significant percentage are, sadly, going to pass away every year. (Including pioneers like Lumiere Noir.)

Chic Aeon makes a related point from her perspective, starting out in Second Life over a decade ago as a student at an Ivy League school:

Watch: This Jaw-Dropping Demo of Unity 3D's Latest Rendering Technology

Click and watch in as high definition as possible and careful your jaw doesn't get bruised when it hits the floor. Released by Unity 3D a few months ago, it was meant to show off Unity's scriptable render pipeline:

Book of the Dead demonstrates what is possible when using Unity 2018’s new Scriptable Render Pipeline, which provides enhanced customizability of Unity’s rendering architecture, putting more control in the hands of the developers... All of the natural environment assets in the demo are photogrammetry-scanned real-world objects and textures. The majority of them come from Quixel Megascans, a publicly available library of high-quality scanned assets, which is used widely by high-end game production and film VFX professionals alike.

Video via longtime virtual world developer Adam Frisby, who in a heavily geek-tastic comment, explains the challenge of bringing older 3D graphics such as those in Second Life on par with Unity 3D:

Second Life Graphics Could Be AAA Quality if Linden Lab Added Custom Skeletons & Shaders (Comment of the Week)

Global illumination in Unity 3D

The passionate conversation over Second Life graphics quality continues, with master SL builder Adeon Writer (more on him soon) arguing that SL could have AAA game quality if Linden Lab addressed two gaping holes:

The problem is, SL content creators are not pros, and that's why it doesn't look as good, right?

No. If you hired an expert game artist to make SL content, it still wouldn't look good, for the following reasons:

1.) The avatar skeleton is pre-defined and you can only make animations for that specific skeleton. Modern games use a skeleton with many more bones, to make it look much more natural.

2.) SL's shaders are bad. You can take the best model in the world, but it will look very bad with SL's shaders. At one point, SL had top level shaders ("Global Illumination" is what the feature was called) but they pulled it out and never put it back. It would have looked wonderful today now that we have normalmaps, but sadly we never got to have both at the same time. So we're back to flat shading.

If Linden improved these two things -- 1.) Let us have custom skeleton models and 2.) Give us custom shaders -- then yes, if you hired an expert game art designer, you SL could look just like a AAA game. These really are the only two things holding SL back graphically.

And no, Adeon doesn't think Second Life's new Bento skeleton doesn't improve things enough:

Is There No Way to Impress Young Gamers With Second Life Graphics?

The controversy over Adult-rated content in Second Life last week brought up an equally interesting comment in a totally different direction. The original point of the risque SL machinima, as its 3D visuals creator put it, was to show how great Second Life graphics can be. ("SL takes so much flak for having bad graphics when that is rubbish," as he put it.)

But a reader calling themselves "Gosh-Darned Millenial" (LOL) had a totally different reaction to that:

What struck me about the previous article on this video wasn't so much the sexual content, but the idea expressed that this is the sort of thing that one could show to gamers, other tech-savvy young people, to show off how cool and not-ugly Second Life is. To be absolutely clear, I mean no disrespect to the hard work or the artistic vision of the creators of this video. But I don't think the people expressing how good the machinima looks really understand just how dated and limited Second Life appears. When the model's hair waved in the wind at about four frames per second, and when she did that stiff run with a fixed dead-eye stare, I cringed a little. Second Life just doesn't look that great, especially in comparison with modern video games. If I showed my gamer friends this, they would laugh at the robotic movements, dull lighting and blurry textures.

Again, I understand that this video is a great technical achievement for SL. I can see the artistry that went into it. But I know a lot of people wonder why younger, tech-savvy people and gamers aren't so interested in SL, and I think part of the reason is this gap between the technical expectations of the SL userbase and this demographic. "Good for something from SL" is damning with faint praise. I repeat, I am not trying to denigrate the machinima makers, or the thousands of artists who create for the platform. I am simply saying that there are limitations which will be very obvious to anyone into modern gaming, limitations which highlight just how old and creaky the platform is.

This is all very valid, and is probably why Second Life looks its best in screenshots -- see Cajsa's column for voluminous examples -- while SL's graphics engine quickly shows its age when it comes to animation. (Unless the video is captured with an extremely high end desktop PC running a third party viewer optimized for graphics, like Black Dragon, and the 3D models are all mesh and properly textured, etc. etc.)

As a counterpoint, however, it's not actually true that gamers demand the best, latest graphics:

Does Sexual Content Enforce a Negative Stereotype of Second Life? (Comments of the Week)

Interesting conversation over the SL machinima I posted last week, which I warned readers ahead of time: "While it has no graphic nudity, it's very male gazey throughout and gets decidedly porny toward the end." For the record, I asked the creators if they had a less porny version, but failing that, decided the visual quality was so good, and showed how great SL content can look, it deserved an audience here.  Reader Taylor had a terse reply to that:

...wants to show that SL isn't what people think it is
...turns into softcore porn

Stereotype affirmed!

Reader JohnC  pointed out a larger issue of branding:

This is a great problem that Second Life has. This sim and all others, are personal experiences created within the platform called second life. It is up to anyone who creates there to create whatever they desire. This freedom is what makes SL special, far more special than the restrictive RL world of games. If someone creates a porn game with Unreal Engine people do not label Epic with a porn label. SL is a free space for anyone to create what they will...

That's a pretty good analogy. However, Unreal, Unity, and other 3D engines are better able to distance themselves from sexual content created with their tools, since after all, unlike Second Life, that content isn't hosted on their company-owned servers.

Reader Madeline Blackbart points out how this has hurt SL's reputation in the public eye:

Founding Linden Lab Engineer Explains Why Last Names for Second Life Avatars Were Removed

Responding to the news that Linden Lab is returning last names to Second Life after a 7 year absence, reader Dartagan Shepherd recalls a Linden staffer telling him that they were removed because "they were losing a massive amount of signups at the point where people had to choose a last name." Founding Linden engineer James Cook also stopped by comments to confirm just that:

One of the last features I worked on before leaving Linden Lab was the removal of last names. Dartagan Shepherd is right -- whenever you have a registration flow for any service you lose signups for each additional step. Picking a last name from a list is unusual for an online service. Potential new users were pretty confused: "Why can't I just use the username I use everywhere else?" and/or "Why can't I just use my real name?". Of course, I worked at Linden when we added last names (dunno who actually wrote that code). So we've come full full full circle. 

I think the real problem is that the original naming system didn't include an option to change the last name at least once, and onscreen text explaining that during set-up: "Choose your last name to start -- you can change this later." This would have nudged new users to think about their avatar identity as something unique and special, and create the name in relation with the existing SL community. People asking, "Why can't I just use the username I use everywhere else?", is exactly why so many new users wound up typing in their AOL handle or other inappropriate username into the first name option, leading to thousands of avatars named "Bobbie_Joe_73 Midnight" and suchlike -- who were then treated as clueless noobs by the established community. 

By the way, when I say James Cook is a "founding Linden engineer",  I mean that -- he started at Linden Lab when the startup was still on Linden Street in San Francisco, and helped create (and did the voiceover) for this early, early, early demo from 2001 of what eventually became Second Life:

Why Do So Many People in Second Life Decline to Have Much of One? (Comment of the Week)

Interesting conversation over this post about how some men roleplay as female avatars in order to befriend a woman in hopes of revealing their actual gender and starting a real life heterosexual relationship. To which phenomenon, "JohnC" observes:

As interesting as this conversation is, and I have lived it from both sides for many years, I often wonder why we have it at all. We go to a place called Second Life where, as I understand it from the name, the idea is to live a virtual life of your choice, whatever that may be, and to live it if you wish totally disconnected from your RL. For many it is an escape from RL in fact. And that does not always mean you are having a bad first life, you just have other parts of yourself that maybe cannot be expressed openly in your otherwise fine RL.

But all around in SL you find people who just don't get it at all. People who have a chance to be something else, anything they wish, and they just create an avatar that looks exactly like them in RL. Or people who are all for creating a new self but, “Hang on I didn't mean being weird and pretending to be a woman”.

To me that seems a bit like being granted three wishes for anything you desire and asking for a Big Mac, fries and a Coke. Of course it is up to anyone in SL to play it the way they wish. Just seems a bit of a waste of opportunity.

Which inspires JohnC to think about an odd user interface that's been part of Second Life from its inception, that seems to contradict its branding -- which, he argues, then distorts our expectations when it comes to avatar-based relationships: