New World Notes

Why Fortnite's Most Unexpected Predecessor is... Second Life

I was recently observing that Fortnite, the world's biggest multiplayer game, had just evolved into the world's most popular virtual world. As it turns out, Fortnite has always been a successor to virtual worlds -- specifically, to Second Life.

Yes: Cory Ondrejka, who co-founded SL with Philip Rosedale as Linden Lab's first CTO, just posted this recollection to his Facebook, tying together many games and game developer together: 

The connected web of game development is pretty awesome. In early 2001, we’d test the prototype of Second Life - then still called Linden World -- by battling each other in a hybrid FPS/building game. [See video below]

Soon after, we expanded scripting, building, and avatars came along and the modern version of Second Life was born, focused on letting people create. We had some pretty fun chats with Epic Games' Tim  Sweeney about blending engine, tools, and game into one experience right as Unreal Engine was exploring the same space from a different direction.

A decade later, Epic Games' Mark Rein let me play a prototype of Fortnite that blended ideas from various Epic Games, SL, and Minecraft into a really different game. Playerunknown: Battlegrounds came along and converted Arma 3 grognard-heaven into something totally new: Battle Royale.Soon after, Epic released a new gameplay mode for Fortnite and the world showed up to play.

Now Fortnite has opened up building and islands to enable players to build using their incredible tools. I wouldn’t have thought to build into a virtual world from a non-persistent game — though John Carmack, who’s often smarter than the rest of us, was musing on that idea back in the day — so it’s friggen cool to see them exploring this corner of design space.

And some years after leaving Linden Lab, Cory went on to join Facebook, where he helped drive the company's acquisition of Oculus, where Carmack is now CTO.  All this might be surprising to Fortnite players who assume Second Life to be a quirky Sims-type social game, let alone to current Second Life users, who tend to be more in the social gamer vein. But in its first few years (2003-2005), Second Life had a few major free fire locations (called the Outlands), which were all about Fortnite-type gameplay, combining building and combat. (Which even led to a in-game culture war.)  

Anyway, take a look at the Linden World product demo Cory mentioned, shot in 2001:

Watch: Text-to-Speech App for Voice-Free Communicating in High Fidelity

Recent virtual worlds and social VR platforms tend to give more centrality to VOIP over in-world text chat -- a serious design mistake, in my view*. If you use High Fidelity, however, here's a solution: Text to Speech v1.0, now in the HiFi store.

Created by High Fidelity developer Zach Fox, it was inspired, he tells me, "by our desire to give a communication option to users who can't or prefer not to speak in VR. TTS is also a fun communication option to experiment with when hanging out with friends!"

If you watched (and listened to) Thomas Dolby's recent performance in High Fidelity, you know the world has some impressive audio capabilities; here's how Zach made use of them for this app:

With Slow Sales, VR Headset Market Still Not Having Meaningful "Rebound"

IDC, an analyst firm which was once so bullish about virtual reality, the company predicted (as recently as 2016) that VR headset adoption rates would be as fast the iPhone -- yes, seriously -- is now touting a "rebound" of sales:

The VR headset market returned to growth in 3Q18 after four consecutive quarters of decline and now makes up 97% of the combined [AR/VR] market. Global shipments for VR headsets reached 1.9 million units in the quarter, up 8.2% from 3Q17, as extensive discounts on existing products and interest in new ones led to shipment gains in both the consumer and commercial markets. "The VR market is finally starting to come into its own," said Jitesh Ubrani senior research analyst for IDC Mobile Device Trackers. "On the consumer front, the combination of lower prices and increased content is beginning to resonate with users. Meanwhile, commercial adoption is also on the rise for a range of use cases, including training, design, and showcasing."

If there's commercial adoption, why are there so few palpable VR hits besides Beat Saber (still a modest hit at best, in terms of the overall market) while even the once-viral VRChat has seen a usage decline? But the real problem with this analysis is that "shipments " are not the same as sales or usage  -- and more key, 8.2% growth in shipments isn't much of a "rebound" when you compare the growth to other competing platforms. For instance:

Sansar's Appearance on Steam Adds a Few Hundred New Users or So

Now that Linden Lab's Sansar is on Steam as of last week, we can track concurrent users of the social VR platform, and compare it against other social VR products. (See screengrab via SteamDB.) So far, the usage is pretty negligible, with daily concurrency rates between 45 and 75.  Add that to the 15-25 peak concurrency of people already using Sansar, and maximum daily usage is about 100, with roughly (by my generous estimate) about 200-500 total daily users. Then again, that means Sansar is more popular on Steam than High Fidelity, or Microsoft's Altspace VR.

On the other end of the spectrum, VRChat remains the current generation's leader, with peak daily concurrency in the high four figures. Then again, that's far off from VRChat's peak of 20,000 concurrent users last December, Whatever VR headset owners are doing with their rigs (more on that later), most of them are not using their equipment to socialize. 

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Choice Of The Day: Luz DeGas' Dali-Esque "Music Box"

Yes, this utterly amazing image ("Music Box" by Luz DeGas) was originally created in Second Life, NWN Flickr correspondent Cajsa Lilliehook reports:

"Luz DeGas, who was profiled in 2017 as Kimeu Kong  produces the kind of art Salvador Dalí would be producing if he were still alive and working in Second Life. 'The Musical Box' is his work that seems most Daliesque, with the multiplicity of incongruous objects that come together and make sense because he makes it so. While you're visiting the picture, be sure to check out the rest of his timeline which is the kind that makes you wonder how conceives his ideas and how he carries them to fruition.

"Zig Ziglar famously said, 'If you can dream it, you can achieve it.' Isn't the rarest part of that equation, the dreaming? DeGas dreams things no one else does, and the world is richer for it."

Yes. Every single image on Luz's Flickr is great, so here's another recent one:

Well-Optimized Alternatives to Resource-Heavy Mesh Bodies for SL

Last week's post on the leading mesh bodies for Second Life causing major performance issues has provoked a pretty heated conversation in comments, with some blaming users (get a better computer!), others blaming Linden Lab (if high poly mesh is a problem, the Lindens shouldn't have allowed it!), to blaming big brands like Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK* (they have a monopoly on the market!),. Others helpfully pointed out some mesh body alternatives that are much better optimized than the market leaders. For instance, writes Fred Beckhusen:

We now have the free Bento Ruth [pictured above] and Roth avatars. They have far fewer polys, and are very good looking, with body, nail and skin HUDSs. Both are free and Open Source with extremely permissive AGPL licensing. Avatars use only two levels of details. For Ruth, these are:
Level of Detail Settings (LOD)
High - Triangles: 11444 Vertices: 8442
Medium - Triangles: 5563 Vertices: 4960

For more details, see this Github page.

SL Marketpage listings here.

Reader Sarali has a whole hosts of suggestions:

Open Source VR Viewer for OpenSim in Development -- Low Cost Alternative for Social VR Projects?

Interesting project now in development within the community of OpenSim, the open source/reverse engineered version of Second Life:

OpenSimulator core developer Melanie Thielker — also known as Melanie Milland in-world — announced that she is releasing her virtual reality OpenSim viewer to the open source community, available here via GitHub. The new viewer uses the Unreal Engine to display OpenSim regions, such as areas from the grid Thielker founded, Avination.

While OpenSim never took off as a consumer-facing project, it counts thousands of developers and dedicated members, many within the education community, and counts thousands of regions/3D experiences. So this could potentially be a good, low budget/low frills alternative for indie social VR projects. Though the technical effort to make this possible seem fairly daunting -- porting OpenSim content into the Unreal engine:

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Choice Of The Day: Rawnie Lane's "Winter Blues"

"Winter Blues by Rawnie Lane jumped out at me because it makes me think of those old woodcuts or linocuts. This would make an excellent Christmas card," Cajsa tells me. She also admires its proportions of white to blue: "We often thing of the Golden Ratio in terms of the spiral, the nautilus shell being the perfect example, but it also applies to lines as in this case. We use the rule of thirds because it's easier math, but the rule of thirds is just a way to approximate the even more organic recognition of Pi."

We reached out to Rawnie to find out how she managed to make a screenshot look like a woodcut, but no response at press time. Cajsa has an educated guess:

Top 6 NWN Posts Last Week: How Heavy Mesh Bodies Hurt Second Life, Why Fortnite is Now a Virtual World, And Much More

• Top-Selling Mesh Avatar Bodies Drastically Hurting Overall Second Life Performance, Says 3D Graphics Expert
• Will Steam's Hardcore Gamers Try Playing Sansar Now That It's In The Store?
• Fortnite Officially Becomes Full-Fledged Virtual World With Private Islands & Content Creation Tools
• Explore A Randomly-Generated Maze Of Mental Anguish -- Coming Soon From Bryn Oh In Second Life
• Watch: NVIDIA System Converts Real Life Into A Virtual World -- But Probably Won't Replace Actual Virtual Worlds
• Tumblr Algorithm Tagging Virtual Lesbian Images As "NSFW" -- But Virtual Female Nipples Apparently OK

Contest: Create a Winter-Themed Region in Unity 3D for Sinespace, Win Prizes -- And Sell Your Entry in the Store!

Sinespace photo by RAMB0 Joel

 New contest for Unity 3D-savvy designers and artists from NWN partner Sinespace:

Create a Winter Region and enter the Winter Wonderland Contest

• Create a region in Unity to pass the Sinespace Review process
• Should have some of your own models or textures (more substantial originality for selling as a template)**
• Judging will be on the balance of the following criteria: Overall look, download weight, ease of movement, and expression of winter beauty
• Deadline to enter the contest: December 20th
• Deadline to upload your region and open it to the public: December 29.
• We will be touring and judging beginning Sunday, December 30.
• Two winners! First Prize: 2500 Gold; Second Prize; 1500 Gold

More details here. In Sinespace, whole regions can be sold as templates in the in-world store, so even if you don't win the contest, you can still sell what you created. For inspiration, here's some other Winter scenes that are already in Sinespace:

What to Expect from a Well-Made Mesh Body for SL: Learn from Furries!

Yesterday's post about mesh bodies causing major performance problems in Second Life has unsurprisingly provoked a pretty heated debate in the comments. One question that frequently comes up in this conservation is, "How are average SL consumers supposed to tell a mesh body is well-made?"

One possible answer: Learn from the furries of Second Life. Graphics expert NiranV, who pointed out how resource heavy the top human mesh bodies of Second Life are, has a post on his own blog looking at a humanoid snake avatar that's extremely detailed, somewhat NSFW in that adorably bizarre way only furries can capture, and incredibly well-optimized:

Its full triangle count is mere 27676 triangles. Next-gen games use 20.000 - 40.000 average, this avatar is on the bottom line of the next gen default which speaks for its well thought out mesh and quality as well as its small performance impact compared to other avatars. As comparison, the Maitreya body without hands, feet and head has 125,000 triangles. Belleza has even more.  

"I don't understand why so many furry content creators had this figured out immediately when meshes came around," Niran tells me. "[F]urry avatars turned into much more optimized avatars while humans turned from simple avatars into super massive clusterfucks of polygons." One reason:

Quiz: How Many Virtual Humans Can You Correctly Identify?

Click here to find out, and please report your score in Comments. The quiz uses virtual human faces generated from an automated process called GANS, created by nVidia, then seeds them among photos of actual people. I rolled my eyes before taking this quiz, expecting the avatars to be obvious... but then only guessed 3 out of 6 correctly. This handy guide for picking out the virtual from the real human was helpful, and helped me raise my hit count to... 4 out of 6. 

Here's one non-obvious "tell" for virtual people:

Top-Selling Mesh Avatar Bodies Drastically Hurting Overall Second Life Performance, Says 3D Graphics Expert -- Calls for Boycott of Poorly Optimized Products

Pictured: NiranV's avatar side-by-side with a SLINK mesh body - click to compare polygon count

If you're using Second Life and you're lagging for no obvious reason, you might want to take a close look at the users around you. Chances are, the problem is literally skin deep. That's because some of the top-selling mesh bodies in Second Life -- Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK -- are extremely resource heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies. NiranV, developer of the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, tells me he's experienced this problem first hand.

"What I see and hear from them, both from friends, personal experience, and their customers when I have to help them with Viewer-related issues, I find more and more reasons every time to absolutely hate them. Those three are the worst ones anyway -- Belleza being at the top, followed by Maitreya and then SLINK."

The problem, he says, is these mesh bodies all have excessive amounts of polygons that the Second Life grid attempts to display to every user in the scene.

"Maitreya starts with 80,000-100,000 — only the base body. Belleza was something like 200,000+ last time I checked. Modern games use roughly 20-40k for an entire character. A few games use more, obviously, but 20-40k is standard today. So with 100-200k you can imagine how much more straining avatars are. And they are just bodies — [not counting]  clothes, no hair, nothing."

Even a single avatar wearing one of those bodies can hurt SL framerate performance by up to 5o%, and still more, as more avatars with these bodies enter the same space.

"SL is a complex system, not even super static tests always show the same results. So there's a +/- 10% here and there. But most scenes with single humans, wearing avatars built with either of these bodies, manages to half my framerate, if not make it completely unstable. I can see this behavior every day right in front of my parcel where human [avatars] travel to Firestorm's parcel. Just 1-2 of them are enough to drop me from 80-100 FPS down to 30-40 FPS on average… I’d say you generally see 30-50% reduction in your framerate for the first avatar, subsequently less for more."

Second Life is often faulted for poor graphics, but a key problem is Second Life struggling to display so many user-generated polygons at once:

"Entire scenes in SL consist of up to 20 million polygons. That's many times more than entire levels in modern games come up with. It’s absolutely insane. These bad practices of human mesh creators need to stop. Stop spamming 1024x1024 on everything. Stop spamming ‘subdivide’ on meshes and doubling/tripling/quadrupling their polygons when not necessary."

Other graphics experts have also told me the same thing about mesh bodies like Maitreya, Belleza, and SLINK. The real problem is these bodies are probably worn by hundreds of thousands of active SL users, and in NiranV's eyes, the community has done little to raise the issue:

"Everyone puts Maitreya and Belleza at the top of the list for being the very best and finest," as he puts it. "Every fucking blogger blogs about them, blogs in excitement how good it is, how good more polygons are—not understanding what it means. Everyone just smacks shit on their avatar expecting the viewer to magically do whatever is necessary to produce usable framerates. And yell at Linden when it doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if professional coders were looking at SL from a technical standpoint and wondering how SL can even run still, how it manages to keep all this complex shit piled up and not break apart under the sheer load that everyone puts both the server and client every day, every second they use it."

It's the unlikeliest example of the tragedy of the commons: In a world where everyone is trying to show off their awesome avatar to others, avatar enhancements have become so resource heavy, no one can actually see them. It's probably why Second Life has largely become an offline, solo activity, with people shooting screenshots and video of their avatars posing alone -- because that's the only reliable way to get a decent performance.

But if the SL community has inadvertently caused this tragedy, Niran believes the community can also call for popular skin/mesh body brands to better optimize their products:

Will Steam's Hardcore Gamers Try Playing Sansar Now That It's in the Store?

Steam is by far the largest game platform for hardcore gamers on PC, Mac, and VR -- which is why many competitors have launched would-be Steam Killers in recent months  -- and so it's notable that Linden Lab just published its social VR platform to Steam. The way the Lindens categorize Sansar ("Genre: Casual, Free to Play, Massively Multiplayer) and describe it to this gamer audience is interesting:

Welcome to Sansar - the best place to hang out with friends, play games, and stay connected with your favorite communities! Host and attend virtual events: concerts, watch parties, meet-and-greets, and more. Create and share virtual spaces with your friends, and explore the thousands of experiences our users have already created. Cheer for your favorite players and teams WHILE playing any number of fun virtual mini-games: cornhole, shuffleboard, pong, bowling, and more. Shop for new items and sell what you create on the Sansar Store.

No mention, for instance, of Sansar's branded experiences for education, NASA, Ready Player One, or even its hardcore gamer e-sports partnerships. Compare the description with its likeliest competitors on Steam. Here's how Rec Room describes itself:

Fortnite Officially Becomes Full-Fledged Virtual World With Private Islands & Content Creation Tools

Fortnite! It's the most popular multi-user game in the world, and while it has always had some virtual world-esque aspects, the new Fortnite Creative mode makes it very much a persistent virtual world:

It’s a brand new way to experience the world of Fortnite, available on December 6. Design games, race around the island, battle your friends in new ways and build your dream Fortnite. It’s all happening on your own private island where everything you make is saved.

Also notable that the video above emphasizes Fortnite's potential as a machinima platform. And while a private island in Second Life costs you some $250 a month, the cost of your own private island in Fortnite is... (drum roll please):

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Choice Of The Day: Macabre Imagery Challenge

"Sooner or Later God Will Cut You Down" by Bob Kristopher Noah Lee

New World Notes' SL Flickr correspondent Cajsa Lilliehook alerts me to this dark and dazzling Flickr collection of Second Life-based images curated by Lawrence D. Price, who also curated a great collection of black and white avatar portraits earlier this year.

"While this is technically a Halloween challenge," she tells me, "these are not costumes, these pictures are explorations of the macabre. These pictures also challenge our ideas of what can be done in Second Life. Some of the pictures are unsettling and are definitely not for the faint of heart, but they all speak to our atavistic fear instincts. The thing about our primal fears, they are there 365 days a year, not just on All Hallow's Eve."

See the whole collection here, or embedded after the break:

Rec Room Social VR Planning to Support Non-VR Devices, Including Mobile

Rec Room is probably the second largest social VR space in terms of popularity (after VRChat, of course), with a daily peak concurrency in the low to mid-three figures. Unlike VRChat, which has a popular PC client, it's fair to say Rec Room's focus is on VR rigs. (Its PC version is less full-featured than its VR client.) 

Last month, however, the developers at Against Gravity posted a survey in the official Reddit group asking their users, "Would you like to play Rec Room on Android, iPhone, Switch, or something else? Vote in our Platform Survey! Feel free to share with friends/family too." So clearly the devs are planning to make social VR less virtual reality-centric. 

Unsurprisingly, this has provoked some consternation and/or resignation among its VR-heavy fanbase, with the most currently popular thread in its Reddit being, "Rec Room and VR no longer being a priority":

Explore a Randomly-Generated Maze of Mental Anguish -- Coming Soon from Bryn Oh in Second Life

Bryn Oh is an acclaimed artist who's used Second Life as her canvas for many years, even earning a grant to do that from the Canadian government and patronage from master filmmaker Peter Greenaway. "Eloise and Jane", her next Second Life-based installation -- expected to launch this Saturday -- is featured in this sneak preview above. 

"Jane and Eloise was inspired by the medium really," Bryn tells me. "I wanted to tell a story in a very SL way.  In real life, you stand in a gallery and look at things on a wall while rarely interacting with them.  In fact, if you do, a security guard will give you stink eye if not worse.  So you are a passive observer to the art.  Separate. 

"In Second Life we can be active participants to art and so I wanted to make something that stretched the idea of what art can be.  So this is a hybrid between an environment, narrative and a game.  The story itself is quite dark, but should you find the exit then you get an alternate ending which is happy."

As that suggests, the installation is a maze which, she explains, "symbolizes the mental anguish and survivor's guilt of the sister named Eloise, who must preserve herself at the expense of her sister Jane, after a storm sinks their canoe.  The maze and its monsters represent the terrible thoughts that plague a person in bed at 3am, eyes open in the dark staring at the ceiling.  The work is meant to be conceptual yet also something that can be fun to do with friends."

Dark and fun! The maze itself is also quite cool in concept, generated randomly each time through complex scripting:

Watch: NVIDIA System Converts Real Life Into a Virtual World -- But Probably Won't Replace Actual Virtual Worlds

Using a complex system of algorithms which marketers insist on calling "AI" (making my teeth grind in the process), engineers at NVIDIA have made it possible to convert real world video into a 3D virtual world:

The network operates on high-level descriptions of a scene, for example: segmentation maps or edge maps, that describe where objects are and their general characteristics, such as whether a particular part of the image contains a car or a building, or where the edges of an object are. The network then fills in the details based on what it learned from real life videos. The demo allows attendees to navigate a virtual urban environment that is being rendered by this neural network. The network was trained on videos of real-life urban environments. The conditional generative neural network learned to approximate the visual dynamics of the world such as lighting, and materials. Since the output is synthetically generated, a scene can be easily edited to remove, modify, or add objects.

My first thought was, "Hundreds of level and map designers are soon gonna be out of a job." My second thought was: Don't be dense. 

Tumblr Algorithm Tagging Virtual Lesbian Images as "NSFW" -- But Virtual Female Nipples Apparently OK

When NWN correspondent Cassie Middles got word that Tumblr is planning to censor pornographic and nude images as of December 17th, she dusted off her old Tumblr account to see which of her images had already been flagged. (As The Verge reports, "Tumblr is emailing users who have posted adult content flagged by algorithms and notifying them that their content will soon be hidden from view.")

Oddly enough, she found what you see above -- a Second Life-based image of two non-nude women avatars embracing was tagged as NSFW... while a screenshot of a nude avatar with a "female-presenting nipple" (as Tumblr's widely-derided wording puts it) was left untagged. The double standard seems so blatant, it leaves you to wonder if Tumblr's algorithm is biased against gay imagery. (Would the same image of similarly clothed, embracing male and female avatars get hit?)

That's certainly possible, but the likeliest answer is this is just the latest example of a general rule: Despite much marketing hype about "machine learning" and "AI", computer-driven algorithms are pretty stupid.

Citing Burnout & Low Profile, Linden Endowment for the Arts Goes on Hiatus

Disappointing but not surprising announcement from The Linden Endowment of the Arts, a user-run arts community of metaverse artists, dedicated to awarding massive plots of virtual land donated by Linden Lab to various Second Life-based arts projects.

Come January 1st 2019, the Linden Endowment for the Arts, known as the LEA, will be temporarily closing its Artists in Residence regions (LEA 10 - 29) to allow for a major restructuring... The nine Core regions (which include the Theatre, the Sandbox and Photohunt) will remain for the present, and short-term grants will still be available in these regions for community-inspired arts projects. Applications for Core regions can be made here.

"The Committee felt it was time we paused, took stock of where we are, and looked at ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better," Committee member Saffia Widdershins tells me, relating to me the general consensus of the group. Then went into some specifics:

Top 5 NWN Posts from Last Week: Virtual Recession vs. $100K+ Virtual Earners, AR in VR, and Much More

• How Many Second Life Communities Will Follow Pfaffenthal 1867 To Sansar?
• 1 In 10 Second Life Merchants Surveyed Earn USD $100,000+ A Year From Selling Virtual Goods
• Virtual World Recession? Over One-Third Of Second Life Content Creators Report Recent Sales Down 15-30% -- But Only 2% Are Creating Content For Sansar (Survey)
• Watch: Augmented Reality App Created For Virtual Reality Headset
• Second Life Grid Continues To Grow In Wake Of Tier Discounts (But Slowly)

Cassie's Clips: Walkthrough of Blogotex, the Online Management System for Second Life Fashionistas

Courtesy NWN YouTube correspondent Cassie Middles, here's a hands-on walkthrough of Blogotex, the quirky name of a cool and useful web service for SL fashionistas, especially bloggers:

"Blogotex is a good alternative to blogger groups if you're ever low on group space in Second Life," as Cassie explains. "Even with a Premium subscription, I used to run out of room and would have to leave one group to join another. Aside from event groups, this is where most of my blogger items come from now. They list all new releases and normally what events they're for, or Flickr links. You can grab a limited amount and blog them, post your blog posts there to be able to grab more. You can also get redeliveries of items if needed." The delivery system, which deposits items directly into a user's SL inventory, is a particularly cool feature. There's also some new-ish features which expand on the platform's power:

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Choice Of The Day: "Well Seasoned" by Syn Beresford

New World Notes' SL Flickr correspondent Cajsa Lilliehook loves this holiday image from Syn Beresford as much for what it doesn't show, as what it does: "When the wreaths go up is when my mind turns to Christmas. This picture is so much more interesting because it captures only a portion of the wreath and much of it is out of focus engaging our mind in completing the picture because we just can't help ourselves." (Which is good composition advice in general.) Click here to embiggen.

Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter or on her blog.

Join SL's Peace on Earth Hunt for Globes, Free Ample Avi Avatars

Starting tomorrow, NWN partner Ample Avi is participating in the Peace on Earth Hunt (POE 11 for short, since it's now in its eleventh year running), billed as the longest-running grid-wide hunt in Second Life. (Ample Avi has participated in the POE Hunt every year since its beginning.)

"This is a L$0 hunt, and hunters will be looking for a small globe of the Earth," Ample's Xme Xme tells me. "There are no decoy globes, and designers are required to hide their globes within a reasonable distance of the landing point.  A hint for hunters is provided at the landing point." 

For the Hunt, Ample is also offering a Winter-themed gift in partnership  with Junior Avi, for creating family scenes like this one:"Bringing the Tree Home". The avatars depicted here are available for free via these SLurls:

• Go here for the Junior Avi. 
• Go here for Ample Avi.

Looks like much fun for hunt fans. This one runs from December 1st to December 31. More about POE 11 on the official site.