New World Notes

Play Scavengers, Ambitious Sandbox Game With a Senior Designer Who Got His Start Creating Shooters in Second Life

Scavengers is a new free-to-play multiplayer hardcore game with some serious face-punching action and hybrid gameplay (sandbox, PVE, PVP, etc). And while it might not seem so on the surface, it's something of a second cousin to Second Life. For one thing, it runs on Spatial OS, Improbable's platform for deploying massive single shard MMOs, and I'm told at least one of Improbable's top execs was a dedicated SLer back in the day.

Even more pertinent, a senior designer of Scavengers is Ben Batstone, a longtime Linden Lab veteran who got his start as a Second Life user known as Buhbuhcuh Fairchild. And he credits his work in SL for his design approach to Scavengers:

"I made my first shooter games in SL - those watermelon guns that griefers would use were using my scripts. Being able to iterate quickly and get instant community feedback was amazing as a novice designer.

"As far as what I am doing with [Scavenger developer] Midwinter, a lot of my efforts are around long term player engagement. I think I could view that very narrowly with a 'game designer' role: just game features, content and mechanics, but my time as a Linden made my belief that the stickiest content is other people, and the more we can get players interacting in positive ways, the more those players will return. So I'm pushing hard for driving social features and strong community programs, and trying to integrate that with gameplay. We're less than a week into Early Access so a lot of that is still in the foundational steps, but we've got some cool stuff on the way."

Their vision seems to be a game that makes a conceptual leap up hits like Fortnite and League of Legends, while incorporating virtual world-ish, persistent action:

Watch Me Chat, Dance, and Flirt With Mr. Bones, an Animesh Skeleton Using Really Useful’s Chatbot Script for Highly Customizable NPCs in Second Life

Verbose, sassy, and surprisingly spry, Mr. Bones is an animesh skeleton on the Marketplace here from The Really Useful Scripts Corner (a proud sponsoring partner to this blog) powered by the Corner’s unique chatbot system.  (Click here to chat with Mr. Bones in SL -- touch the pumpkin to rezz him.)

As you can see from the video above and my dialog below, Mr. Bones himself makes for a friendly virtual companion in SL (he can even follow you on command!), but he’s also meant to show off Really Useful Script Corner’s feature set for customizable NPCs (Non-Player Characters). 

“My basic chatbot has two functions - Chat and Responses,” lead developer Grace7 Ling explains, “Chat includes the bot being able to greet visitors and greet its owner. The bot can also remember who it has met before as well.” Her chatbot can also spout random things as a way of encouraging nearby SLers to reply.

As for responses, Grace means more than simple text-based replies. Responses include “doing something in response to a keyword or key phrase it hears, like giving a landmark or SLurl, or playing a sound or animation.” 

Ms. Ling’s more advanced chatbot comes with a third feature: Chatter, which enables owners to specify multiple possible answers to a statement, with different probabilities for each. You can even expand your bot’s phrase recognition range by adding “brain-files” (i.e. notecards) to its database.

While Mr. Bones comes with the new Animesh Pro Edition chatbot script, Grace’s chatbot series includes a mesh human, a French bulldog, a parrot, and a mirror. 

Her customers, she tells me, are already using them for a wide variety of NPCs in their own projects:

Shopping for SL Male Fashion? Look Inside Taylor Belmont's Dirty Mind

The Dirty Mind blog is by Taker Belmont. I got a kick out of post #41 with the banana swing. The banana outfit is such a clever choice. It has a sort of mod meets camp feeling. The gold pillars are too much which makes them perfectly campy. 

• 055 SumBoss  - [ GUILTY ] Man Cave (exclusive)
• Banana Swing & Tree Light Set - CROWDED ROOM Marketplace

And now for something completely different, click here:

Second Life's Terms of Service Allow Users to Sell Screenshots of Others' SL Creations (I.E., In Theory, As An NFT) - But Would It Hold Up in Court?

Important comment/update to last week's post, when I cautioned against creating NFT from Second Life images. When the EFF lawyer I quoted referred to the "dark interesting mysteries" around IP ownership of user-created content in SL, Linden Lab had not addressed derivative works in its Terms of Service. Since then (in 2017, it looks like), the company has:

2.5 You also grant Linden Lab and other users of the Service a license to use your Content in snapshots and machinima that is displayed in publicly accessible areas of the Service.

You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers for display in any publicly accessible area of the Service, you hereby grant other users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to photograph, capture an image of, film, and record a video of the Content, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the resulting photograph, image, film, or video in any current or future media as provided in and subject to the restrictions and requirements of an applicable Product Policy or other policy.  

Reader irihapeti noted this clause, which effectively requires content creators to opt out from people using their content in an SL screenshot for commercial or other purposes:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Sharp Male Fashion Imagery from Alfred Wessex

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I love “To the Moon” from Alfred Wessex. I love how he shows the avatars’ love for each other in such a simple way, how she leans into him, how he rests his arm on her leg. It shows a couple attuned to each other in an ordinary moment enjoying the night sky. I also like the subtle light that illuminates some of the grass but fades quickly outside their magic circle.

Wessex does great fashion shoots; for more, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2021年4月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します。

Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

 

Watch: Doggface Video Recreated in VRChat to Promote Upcoming Inline Skating World

Just vibing and grinding in Shibuya Terminal ☺️

Having a little too much fun making the #jsrf world in #vrchat 😆

(tribute to Doggface208's amazing vid last year 😁 ) pic.twitter.com/a31pSnLvat

— Lakuza (@LakuzaVR) April 27, 2021

This is a fun VRChat-based tribute to the beloved Doggface Fleetwood Mac skating video. Which would be great in itself, but VRChat being VRChat, it’s also a video promoting an upcoming VRChat world with physics-enabled skating:

“The world itself is based on Jet Set Radio Future, a game released back in 2002,” explains Lakuza, who created and stars in the video, and is a developer of this world:.

”It’s inline skating with a heavy emphasis on grinding across objects… it'll be the first VRChat world to allow for grinding in this manner.” He’s being modest: It’s probably the first VR-enabled skating game in any virtual world that’s not specifically engineered for skating. Anyway, follow him on Twitter for launch updates.

The skating was developed by @squiddingme, the skating system was created via the Udon Sharp compiler:

“I’m not clever enough to understand how it works,” says Lakuza, “but he's basically created a system of movement options that allows double-jumping, wall-running, grinding as well as being able to control acceleration speed over time.” 

As for bringing the Doggface vibe into VRChat, he’s actually using the platform VR mouth tracking technology:

Here's a Metaverse Protocol Proposal Linking Virtual Worlds - If We Need One?

Metaverse technologist Kim Nevelsteen, who created that quite cool project which seamlessly connects different Minecraft servers to each other, has written an epic manifesto proposing Metaverse connectivity between a wide variety of virtual worlds, including WebVR,  VRChat, Minecraft and beyond:

• Part 1 is here.
• Part 2 is here.

"People are searching for a standardized Metaverse protocol," Kim says, summarizing his purpose. "Even if that's achieved, the overhead of updating the integrated systems will impair a Metaverse. An architecture with dynamic evolution is required and currently IPSME is the only one that satisfies all criteria, as far as I know." (That stands for Idempotent Publish/Subscribe Messaging Environment, on which he co-authored this academic paper published by Cornell.)

This is all admirably ambitious, but with self-described metaverses like ROBLOX and VRChat already quite massive, I'm starting to wonder if we need a single Metaverse protocol connecting them:

This Artist Uses Second Life Wireframe & Layering to Create Amazing Images

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

“The Magician” seems so perfect for a 1970’s roch concept album. I love the psychedelic exuberance of the picture with the mirror-like shards exploding outward from the epicenter where the Magician has materialized from some hole in the stage before some dramatic opening riff during which the rest of the band arrives. This is one of the many creative and exciting pictures by Hermes Kondor. 

Hermes is an experimenter, for more, click here:

Reddit's /SecondLife Gains 10,000 Subscribers; Great Community & Resource

/SecondLife, the largest SL-related subreddit, recently grew past 10,000 subscribers. Over the years (it had only 2,000 subscribers back in 2015), it's evolved into a solid go-to hug for interesting and informative SL/virtual world-related content and conversation. Since it's on Reddit, the participants tend to skews towards SL veterans, especially developers and scripters, and unlike most (all?) social media hangouts for SLers, isn't an unceasing cascade of fashion pics and shopping announcements. (Though there's still a lot of that!)

Some recent stand-out threads:

• Robin (Sojourner) Wood has passed away, after an extended struggle with cancer (phyllodes tumors)
• Through fire, Iron becomes Legend
• Has Second Life improved? 2008/2009 - 2020/2021
• Metaverse - Our Existence, Our Reality, a Second Life Existential Machinima
• Explore 10 tranquil and artistic Second Life destinations!

Much more here. And thanks to u/TrinityDejavu, u/zebragrrl, and u/0xc0ffea for their moderating skills!

This Artist Elevates Virtual World Screenshots With Unexpected Angles

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I like pictures that confound me. “Snapshot 45” is confounding. She’s standing on a wall for a house that looks like it’s built on a dock and there are fish swimming by. It makes no sense which is perfect because I can imagine the fish are actually taxis swimming from fare to fare or the house is underwater and people have gills. On the side of being underwater, there is the seagrass and the sandy bottom. On the side of being aboveground, there is the electric pole with the isolators. Is it both? In Second Life it can be anything. 

I love her way with angles, for more, click here:

Why Bill Maher's Snarky Takedown of Cryptocurrency Isn't Snarky Enough

Setting aside Bill Maher's usual "Old Man Yells at Woke Millenial Cloud" tone, this is a pretty good and funny takedown of cryptocurrency hype, mostly hitting the right targets, such as its Ponzi scheme nature, for instance, and the absurdity of Tesla CEO Elon Musk promoting Bitcoin despite the fact that its environmental costs utterly undermines any green advantages achieved by Tesla the company.

Maher's rant, however, fails when he notes that major companies like Microsoft, Etsy, and Starbucks accept Bitcoin as a currency... without noting that hardly anyone uses Bitcoin to buy goods and services. As I wrote in 2015:

According to Linden Lab stats, Second Life has about 1 million monthly users, and about 125K+ hardcore users (i.e. in SL over an hour a day). Insiders tell me about 400,000 users regularly spend Linden Dollars. So with all that activity in mind, it's safe to estimate 100K Linden Dollar individual users a day. (Conducting a lot more total transactions.) Contrast with Bitcoin: The much-hyped currency -- lauded weekly in the tech and mainstream press for the last 4-5 years, with over $400 million invested in Bitcoin-related startups since 2012 -- is still used only about 100K times a day. (Which means unique users are significantly less than 100,000.)

The wild thing is, Bitcoin's daily transaction rates have not grown that much since then, fluctuating between 200,000 and 400,000. In another words, a daily transaction rate of a small city, and still less than Linden Dollar transactions in Second Life.

As usual, fellow HBO comedian John Oliver had a better take on the topic, back in 2018:

According to Linden Lab stats, Second Life has about 1 million monthly users, and about 125K+ hardcore users (i.e. in SL over an hour a day). Insiders tell me about 400,000 users regularly spend Linden Dollars. So with all that activity in mind, it's safe to estimate 100K Linden Dollar individual users a day. (Conducting a lot more total transactions.) Contrast with Bitcoin: The much-hyped currency -- lauded weekly in the tech and mainstream press for the last 4-5 years, with over $400 million invested in Bitcoin-related startups since 2012 -- is still used only about 100K times a day. (Which means unique users are significantly less than 100,000.)

Top 5 Posts Last Week Including VRChat Passes the Virtual World Godfather, and Oculus Quest 2's Install Base Reaches 3-4 Million

• Binge Watch: A Second Life Machinima Team Not Only Produced A Full-Length, Tarantino-Esque Detective Series, It's Now On Its Third Season!
• Oculus Quest 2 Install Base Now Likely 3-4 Million, According To Facebook's Coy Earnings Reports
• Life Screenshot As NFT Art? Probably, But Beware Second Life's "Gray Interesting Mysteries" Around User IP Rights
• A Beautifully Illustrated Travel Guide On Flickr To Wonderful Second Life Locations -- Teleport Links In Every Description
• Milestone: VRChat Peak Concurrent User Numbers Start Surpassing Second Life's

Binge Watch: A Second Life Machinima Team Not Only Produced a Full-Length, Tarantino-esque Detective Series, It's Now On Its Third Season!

With its arresting visuals, sardonic dialog, and music like the ironic Sinatra throwback heard above, the LANG series is something Quentin Tarantino* might make, if he was in the mood to make a comedic neo-noir machinima in Second Life. Created by Zatch Ixchel and company, I wrote about LANG last January, and it's not only kept up its solid pace, but is now teasing Season 3 as coming soon. 

"At this point, I’m inspired by the characters themselves, the world we’ve built here," Zach tells me, when I ask how he keeps inspired to keep creating episodes. "I want to know what happens to these people. I want to know why Lang is the way he is. I want to know if Sadie will ever be satisfied."

Watch Season 1 and Season 2 below so you're all caught up before S3 drops:

SL Fashion Friday: Two Stylish Looks from Two Shopping Events

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Chic at Phil’s Place has been keeping us informed of the best in fashion since 2008. As one of the old guard, she has kept going while many others have taken long sabbaticals (ahem, me!) or quit altogether. I love how she focuses on one item in Unseelie, the fabulous foot jewelry from Lassitude & Ennui. 

Lassitude & Ennui’s Unseelie foot jewels are at the Chronicles and Legends event -- click here to teleport. 

For a mod look, click here:

Oculus Quest 2 Install Base Now Likely 3-4 Million, According to Facebook's Coy Earnings Reports

Original chart via UploadVR, annotated with Quest 2 sales estimates by me

Facebook's latest earnings report is once again playing the coy game of referring to Oculus device and software sales "as non-advertising revenue" without giving any specifics, so we must continue the coyly make install base estimates. And based on some rough but reasonable assumptions*, Facebook probably sold 1.4 million to 1.9 million Quest 2 units in the first quarter of 2021, a slight decrease in the estimated 1.5 million to 2 million Quest 2 units sold in the first quarter of its launch, in Q4 2020.

Or to put it another way: The Quest 2 probably has a total install base somewhere between 3 million and 4 million. Which isn't bad! That still trails PSVR's install base in absolute numbers, but then again the Quest 2 has been on the market for far less time. The next test is whether this revenue remains steady; if it does, by end of 2021 it'll hit the 10 million install base that Mark Zuckerberg arbitrarily set as the target for mainstream adoption. (10 million is still far smaller than leading game consoles, but that's another topic for another time.)

Can You Sell a Second Life Screenshot as NFT Art? Probably, But Beware Second Life's "Gray Interesting Mysteries" Around User IP Rights

UPDATE, May 7: Linden Lab relatively recently updated its TOS to address the issues discussed below -- read this follow-up post.

With hype over NFT digital art still hyping, Second Life users are asking the next inevitable question:

Is it possible for an SL photographer to sell their digital photos as NFTs? Lately, selling NFTs is a hot topic. We see digital art selling at marketplaces like Nifty Gateway for obscene amounts. Obviously, that's rare. Still a number of photographers have come to me lately asking if photos taken in Second Life are saleable as an NFT for a profit -- even a small profit -- on marketplaces like Nifty Gateway or Rarible. The TOS is so confusing. 

The short answer is Yes, but the actual answer is much, much more complicated. That's because Linden Lab the company allows users to retain ownership to anything they make on the Second Life platform, which has led to game companies, book publishers, TV networks, movie studios, even fashion brands, creating and profiting from content that was originally made in SL -- all totally permissible, from Linden Lab's point of view.

However, the very fact that SL users retain the IP rights to anything that they make in the virtual world leads to many "gray interesting mysteries" -- in the words of Fred von Lohmann, who said them when he was staff attorney for the Electric Frontier Foundation:

A Beautifully Illustrated Travel Guide on Flickr to Wonderful Second Life Locations -- Teleport Links in Every Description

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Second Life has hundreds of sims so a travel guide is a useful person to know or at least to follow. Anthony Gartner is just such a person. Posting single snaps as he travels from sim to sim, he gives you an idea of what you will see and he kindly provides a SLURL to each location. I love this picture from A Little Bit of Soul. (Click here to teleport.) I think he does a great job of capturing the essence of the place. 

For an out of this world experience, click here:

Anonymous Artist Made Amazing Virtual World Images Like These Then Mysteriously Disappeared from Flickr

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Update, 6:00pm SLT: While Ms. Shilova is no active on the featured Flickr account, SLer Vince JB Striker points out that she won an SL-based competition earlier this year. I've changed the title to reflect this. (WJA)

Catchafire Shilova is no longer active on Flickr, but I only discovered her today, so she is still new to me. Her pictures are so original and surreal, it would be a shame not to highlight them just because they are old. In “Scarcity Generation” we have Mickey and Minnie figures in punk tartans and safety pins. There’s blood on her hands and feet, she’s holding a knife, has Shilova killed Minnie? Is the answer in the linked song “There Will Be No Next Time?”

Can cats do the mambo? To find out, click here:

Milestone: VRChat Peak Concurrent User Numbers Start Surpassing Second Life's

Source: This user-made VRChat concurrency tracker by @OhNoItsFusl

It's been building for many months, and last weekend, it finally happened: Social VR/virtual world VRChat surpassed Second Life's concurrent user rates, probably for the first time: When 40,540 people were logged into SL, VRChat counted 42,513 online users.

This news via longtime virtual world explorer Adeon Writer, who's been tracking VRChat-versus-Second Life CCU numbers for quite some time. (Second Life's current usage rates are published via this API.)

What's striking, as Adeon tells me, is that there wasn't any particularly special event in VRChat happening last weekend that drove up user log-ins :

"Just your average Saturday peak in VRChat," as he puts it. "It's just growing, I think. I just thought it was interesting as I've never seen VRC's online count be higher than SL's at any given time."

Me too. For the longest time -- i.e. well over 15 years -- Second Life has attracted daily peak CCU rates in the 40K+ range, often approaching 80K at its apex of concurrent activity, around 2007-2008.

Now, a much younger virtual world (VRChat was launched in 2017) is finally starting to attract those usage numbers too.

This isn't to say VRChat's CCU is always higher than SL, because Second Life's 40K+ CCU happens at a very steady rate:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: The Incredibly Detail-Rich Pics of Teej Timaaj

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I love the abundance in this picture by Teej. While generally people recommend not placing your subject in the middle of a picture, rules do not apply to goddesses. Moreover, Teej does not make the mistake of centering everything. Notice the flowers are much closer and bigger on the right, giving perspective and dimension to the picture. I love that she uses flowers the same color as her skin, making the subject blend into the picture. While many seem to stand out with contrasting colors, one way to get people to look closely is with an avatar that stands out by blending in - like a chameleon. 

No goddesses in the next picture:

This Week's Featured Banner: The Mass Effect-Inspired World Created in SL

This week's banner above was featured in my recent post on BluShock, a group of dedicated Mass Effect roleplay fans who have created an entire experience in Second Life inspired by their favorite game. Sample:

“It's our largest and most ambitious/compact base of operations yet,” BluShock leader Fazzy Constantine (above) tells me. “We have over 25 rooms and multiple elevators with 8 levels each, a huge arboretum dome, which is inspired to look like the Presidium Commons, on the Citadel, from the Mass Effect games, which our roleplay group has been inspired by, since 2010.”

But the base is only the beginning:

“The asteroid will be our base of operations in our fictional star system. Vanaheim, which is set in the Milky Way galaxy, in what would be known as the Beta Quadrant, if you were into Star Trek. We have three more main worlds we'll be creating, over the course of 6 to 9 months.”

Teleport link to start exploring yourself, but be sure not to interrupt any Mass Effect roleplay already in progress.

Submit your own favorite virtual world locations here or in Comments below:

Top Posts Last Week Including: An Oddly Real Homepage for a Virtual World

• Second Life Unveils Strange New Homepage Featuring Real Life Model, Other Odd Non-Second Life Marketing
• SL At The End Of Major Innovations After Uplift? (Comment Of The Week)
• "The" Metaverse Isn't Happening (Comment Of The Week #2)
• Twitter Usage Back Up To 2020 Levels Despite (Because Of?) Trump Ban

SL Fashion Friday: Stylish Shopping Tips from Ara Voxel

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Ara Voxel is the rare blogger who does a fair amount of black and white pictures. Most people shoot in color, but sometimes the form of the design is most important and black and white keeps us from being distracted by the color. Black and white is often more dramatic. You can see that in her blog post Look #953.

• BOOD'UPOSES  Bring me Peace bento pack poses ( butterfly included ) @MIIX EVENT
• Sweater, joggers and sneakers by RKKN
• Hair Katy by DOUX
• Scene :  [My Roof Top Life]  by SOY

For another casual look, click here:

Really Useful Aquarium Features Mesh Fish That Feed, Low Land Impact, Multiple Customization & Sizing Options (NWN Partner News)

The Really Useful Aquarium is a cool product from New World Notes media partner Really Useful Scripts Corner -- lead developer Grace7 Ling gracefully demonstrates its many features in the video above. Available in her Really Useful Scripts Corner on the Marketplace and at her SL store (click here to teleport), Grace’s fish tank is fairly unique among other virtual world aquariums:

“Many of the older aquariums are using flat textures of fish that cycle around in a fixed way,” Grace notes. “The Really Useful Aquarium has mesh fish which swim randomly around the tank. The swim speed and turning speed of each fish can actually be customized if you know how. Secondly, if you are not using the display shelf, the tank is actually quite versatile and can be resized to rather surprising dimensions, and the fish will adjust automatically to the new dimensions of the tank.” (Watch below.)

On top of that, aquarium owners or their guests can feed the fish: