New World Notes

Linden Lab Confirms SL Sim Crossing Improved -- Due to Code, Not Cloud

Linden Lab has a blog post that almost seems like a direct response to the one New World Notes posted yesterday, wondering whether the improvements to SL sim crossings in the test grid were a temporary, unintentional side effect. But as April Linden writes, they are real, and a result of changing some code in order to optimize how SL worked once it's deployed to the Amazon cloud:

Friday Fashion Blog: SL Fantasy Style from Devin Vaughn’s Bishie Style

Devin Vaughn’s blog is called Bishie Style and is rich in story and creativity. His most recent post is Mainframe: The Shipping Drones.The post made me laugh as it lightly touched on current events in an oblique way. 

STORYLINE: The Wasp Virus was raging in the Mainframe. Highly developed Cyborgs were locked in hibernation mode. How would the mail get through? Enter an unexpected hero… an old series Solares Cargo Drone. It would be up to little drones to keep things running until the contagion could be purged from the system.

 When the mail service in the United States is being eaten away from within, with massive delays in delivery of prescriptions and other mail. I have not even received junk mail since last Friday. But it is good to get a little satirical commentary with a very light touch. Most everything is at the Mainframe event, so the shopping will be easy. 

On him, Shipping Drone Hydra:

• Helmet: LANEVO HYDRA MASK fatpack [mesh](Mainframe)(780L)
• Waist: Wicca's Originals Cryo Chest Maitreya [mesh](Mainframe)(599L)
• Powerchip: Astara Chip-n0Mix Power Chip, gacha [mesh](Mainframe)(25L)
• Necklace: L'Emporio&PL Bionic Necklace Male [mesh](Mainframe)(350L)
• Armbands: A&Y Cyber Bunke Arm Booster Male[mesh](390L)
• Muffler: KROVA Muffler [mesh](150L)
• Body, skin: TheShops [BODY] Athletic Meshbody (Legacy)(m) (1.0) [mesh](5000L)

Setting:

• Pod: Cerridwens Cauldron [CC] XB Pod White/Low Res Textures [mesh](Mainframe)(250L)
• Cargo Drone & Crates: Solares Cargo Drone, Crates animated [mesh](Mainframe)(409L)

Location:

• Horizons - stage 5

And for an adventure under the sea, click below:

As Apple Bans Fortnite, Tim Sweeney's Recent Words "Apple has outlawed the metaverse" Seem Prophetic -- And a Call to Action

Epic posted this Fortnite-made machinima inspired by Apple's 1984 ad very soon after Apple banned Fortnite from the App Store

This may be surprising news to some except it was definitely not a surprise to Epic Games' Tim Sweeney:

In an announcement this morning, Epic Games implemented permanent discounts on Fortnite's in-game V-Bucks currency across all platforms -- if users paid using direct payment...

"Apple has gone crazy," wrote Epic CEO Tim Sweeney in a tweet in late July. "If colleges hold virtual classes through an iPhone app, Apple could demand 30% of the tuition. Truly, Apple has no right to take any percent of any company's revenue just because they made the phone people use to access the stuff.

Speaking of Tweets From Tim, he made these just last week, in response to the news that Apple had also banned cloud streaming apps:

Launching Today in VRChat: "The Devouring", a Horror Survival Game Made From Scratch (Including Music!) By a 4 Person Team

VRChat's creative community continues to impress. This is the trailer to a new survival horror game in VRChat that was co-developed by Lakuza, who also created a VRChat game with bullet-time effects earlier this year.

“It’s a 5-6 hour horror game essentially and we've modelled everything from scratch, including the music,” he tells me.

While the game is technically launching tomorrow, the lobby area is open now. They're even going to have a Hollywood-style launch party at 8pm PT today. If you already have VRChat installed, click the link here to join the fun. 

"The Devouring" was created over the course of nearly a year by a four member team, who collaborated together in VRChat from around the world. (Lakuza doesn't remember exactly where in the real world his team is located.)

Finally opening to the public, Lakuza’s main feeling is “a massive relief”.

“At some points it felt like it was stuck in the ‘1 more month’ phase," as he puts it to me, "and definitely had stressful/burnout points throughout, since it’s a world we all worked on in our spare time after our real life jobs.” (So basically it sounds like crunchtime at an actual game studio, except without that little "getting paid to work" part.)

Developing it was no easy task -- and some potential game spoilers ahead:

Is SL's Move to the Amazon Cloud Really Improving Sim Crossing, Or Is It Just a Temporary, Unintentional Side Effect?

Update, 8/14: Linden Lab confirms some recent code changes have improved sim crossing.

Virtual world explorer Luca is the latest to stress test the new deployment of Second Life running on the Amazon Web Services cloud, which seems to make region crossing near seamless. Though as you'll see above, region crossing delays vary by vehicle, being near-instantaneous with a World War II-era fighter, but being pretty muddy via, say, submarine.

"Maybe it depends on the amount of linksets now more than ever (the sub and steamboat have a lot of them)," Luca theorizes, "but I might need to do further testing to verify that!"

Luca adds that he got pretty good performance with more than one vehicle too: "I was able to do some sort of formation flying around Bay City with my friend earlier in our planes, which would've been a lot more difficult with the old crossing performance." I'm curious if performance would remain decent with many more vehicles.

But is this performance improvement real, and lasting? Reddit's /SecondLife co-host "0xc0ffea" makes a very good case that it's not:

SL Flickr Pick: Verona Lauria Creates Both Dramatic & Delightful Pics

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

If you spend any serious time in Minnesota you will hear the ubiquitous “Oh, for cute.” This is not pronounced as though it is three separate words, though. “Oh, for” is pronounced as gopher without the g. “Cute” on the other hand has a long tripthong, as in kew-yew-oot. Any other pronunciation is wrong. And the moment I saw this untitled photo from Verona Lauria, I said “opher kew-yew-oot.”  I love how they mirror each other and how their pairing is offset by the owl. I love the lush sky and the willows in silhouette with the field of wildflowers. I just love it all. 

The reign of kew-yew-oot continues.

Watch: Light Show in Virtual Club Synced to Light Show in Real Life Club

This is a crazy cool project that links up the lighting system in a real life venue (San Francisco's venerable DNA Lounge, in this case) to the lighting system in a virtual world. As creator James Baicoianu explains:

Controlling lights in a WebXR night club using Chamsys MagicQ, a professional lighting control suite. This lets us configure a full digital twin of the real-life night club, where the light show running in the virtual world is driven by the same controller as [the real world club], and thus synced.

It's the brainchild of James Baicoianu, formerly lead engineer for the late-lamented WebXR metaverse startup called Janus VR, who tells me the system can probably work with non-WebXR worlds. As James explains to me:

SL Flickr Pick: Gustavo Fredrickson, Virtual Nature Photographer

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

“Fields of Gold” by Gus (Gustavo Fredrickson) is a beautiful landscape. I love the color story, blue and yellow are complementary and look so good together. I like how he frames it with wheat and the brightness of the sun through the trees setting the wheat fields ablaze. 

More beautiful Second Life simscapes ahead.

This Artist Uses Depth-of-Field & Lighting to Turn Second Life Screenshots Into Mysterious, Cinematic Stories

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

Oram Solis’ “Kindly Brutal” is an epic illustration of the dramatic story-telling power of depth-of-field. Usually, the subject, the person, is the focus in sharp detail and the rest is obscured, but in this picture, the gas pump is in detail and the person is blurred as they enter the store, presumably to pay. But why is he blurred? We could be seeing from the point of view of a getaway car driver as their accomplice goes in to rob the store, and the blurred vision represents the anxiety of not knowing what will happen in the next few minutes. Perhaps we see with a passenger’s eyes while their friend goes in just before something happens that they will not witness, we see their ineffective testimony. We don’t know what is going to happen, but the change in focus evokes many more ideas than if the focus was on the avatar. 

More from Oram’s stream of mysteries after the cut.

The Metaverse Needs a Unique User Identifier (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: Jeff "AM Radio" Berg's famed Second Life art recreated by his son in Fortnite

Good conversation responding to Tim Sweeney's belief that there should be many competing metaverses rather than just one world that's The Metaverse. My response to that was calling for shared standards for 3D content that enable virtual goods and other creations to freely move from one metaverse to another.

Reader "irihapeti" argues otherwise, calling for a unique identifier across metaverses as the more important first step:

Does Second Life Have Way More Player Drama Than Traditional MMOs?

Bugs in Second Life may be less annoying than they are in structured, standard MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online, but here's something that does bug some SLers -- the open-ended virtual world seems to have way more player-to-player drama. 

At least reader Alicia, a veteran of both MMOs and SL, makes that case: 

There is drama in every MMO, no questions about that one. Drama can be created from the devs not fixing bugs that should've been fixed, the players' own whining that the game is too difficult, and so on.

Now, where it pertains to SL, the drama is amplified a thousand fold as people can become "keyboard warriors" or even spread rumors to ruin a person. Just like RL, right?

So, is SL a way to escape RL?

That really depends, Alicia argues:

Top 6 Posts Last Week, Including A Virtual Food Blog & A VR Rift In Reality

• Weekend Read: Real Life Black People Reflect On Being In Second Life & Experiencing Virtual Racism
• Watch, Discuss: Strawberry Linden Interviews Philip Rosedale! UPDATE: Added Questions Covered In Her Chat
• SL Spoon: A Whole Blog Devoted To Virtual Food & Cooking (Really!)
• Rosie's Rift Rips A Rift Into Reality
• Tim Sweeney: More 3D Engines Means Multiple Metaverses -- But Interoperability Might Still Be Possible
• Why Elder Scrolls Online's Bugs Are More Enraging Than Bugs In... Second Life

Weekend Read: Real Life Black People Reflect on Being in Second Life & Experiencing Virtual Racism

This is an epic, thought provoking new article in the latest SL-focused ECLIPSE magazine on real life Black people in the virtual world, reflecting on Black Lives Matter and their experiences in SL. It's written by New World Notes contributor Cajsa Lilliehook. She interviews many Black SLers, who discuss racism in SL -- everything from avatar skin color discrimination, to coming across people roleplaying in a plantation.

Read an excerpt below:

Watch, Discuss: Strawberry Linden Interviews Philip Rosedale! UPDATE: Added Questions Covered In Her Chat

Update, August 7: Bumped up for viewing and discussion. Post title changed accordingly!

Update 2 , August 7: Courtesy Strawberry, here's the main questions she asked Philip:

• Do you still log in to Second Life? If so, what communities and experiences do you enjoy exploring?
• Are you surprised that Second Life is still around 20 years after founding Linden Lab?
• Your avatar look has become very well known and perhaps even iconic - can you tell us a bit about what inspired you to create your unique look in Second Life?
• Let’s go back to the beginning of Linden Lab and Second Life: Can you share some stories about the origins of Second Life?
• Tell us what inspired you to create Linden Lab and eventually Second Life? There are rumors that you originally were focusing on virtual reality with a prototype hardware device called “The Rig” - is that true? If so, what happened to “The Rig”?
• What were the early days like at Linden Lab? Some in the community may not be familiar with this, but you led some corporate innovations that helped to shape and inform the culture at Linden Lab - such as the Love Machine. You also published the Tao of Linden. Can you speak a bit about both of those.
• If you could do one thing differently when creating Second Life, what would it be and why?
• As you know, Linden Lab recently announced that an agreement was signed for it to be acquired by an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager. While I know that you aren’t in a position to say anything specific about the terms of the deal, I wonder if you can share any thoughts about what you think it means for the future of Second Life as I know that you have known Brad personally and professionally for many years.
• Your career spans much more than just Second Life, of course. Prior to Linden Lab, you were a key executive at RealNetworks - a pioneer in audio and video streaming. Can you tell us a bit about your work there and how that might have helped to influence your decision to form Linden Lab?
• About a decade or so ago, you left Linden Lab to explore other entrepreneurial efforts - can you tell us why you chose to move on at that time?
• You are now involved with High Fidelity - can you share a bit about what High Fidelity is and how we can check it out?
• What’s next for High Fidelity?
• Do you have any other entrepreneurial endeavors that you want to share?
• The concept of a social virtual world was so ahead of its time -- and it feels like the pandemic has caused new respect and recognition for the value and utility of shared virtual world and VR platforms. That must be so affirming! Has the pandemic caused you to have any shift in your vision for the future of virtual social networks?

SL Spoon: A Whole Blog Devoted to Virtual Food & Cooking (Really!)

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

Mac Massimo’s The SL Spoon is a virtual cooking blog, featuring the best of SL foodstuffs and cuisine. As a food blogger myself, this really appealed to me. I particularly loved “How to Make the Best Mediterranean Wild-Caught Fish on the Grid” as it contains a recipe along with fabulous food photos like the one above. 

• DRD – Hunters Retreat – Bench LI:4
• DRD – Hunters Retreat – Hearty Meal A LI:2
• DRD – Hunters Retreat – Table LI:1
• DRD – Hunters Retreat – Tin Cup Empty LI:1

In the next post, Mac introduces us into a whole new genre of Second Life.

Rosie's Rift Rips a Rift Into Reality

Rosie Summers recently wandered into a neighborhood park, and casually dropped this black hole into the grass.

"Soon as I saw its colossal size in an area of familiarity," she wryly notes, "the fear set in."

This rip of existence was made possible through several pieces of technology, and her own artistry:

Génesis Rodriguez Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Profound Art

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

Génesis Rodriguez’ “Your Name Makes Me Think of Good Memories” is a beautiful and emotional resonant composite photo, overlaying a photo of a “memory” with a headshot. I love how the memory is in color while the person remembering is not. It shows us how memories can bring things and people to life long after they are gone.” 

Rodriguez has a light touch, even with the macabre as in the next picture.

Tim Sweeney: More 3D Engines Means Multiple Metaverses -- But Interoperability Might Still Be Possible

Here's a really interesting "Economy of the Metaverse" conversation with Epic's Tim Sweeney and game exec Joseph Kim. A lot of its focus, of course, is on how Epic's Fortnite might be a future model for the metaverse. But much of it is actually about the current platform ecosystem (Apple's App Store, Google Play, Amazon, etc.), which Sweeney finds too closed and prohibitive to birth the metaverse:

I think the most plausible way the Metaverse is going to rise isn’t from one company even Epic building this thing and forcing everybody to use it. It’s going to be from more and more companies and brands connecting their products and services until you have a much, much more open thing that everybody participates in... I think interconnecting systems is a great way to to to move forward with this. I think, you know, a lot of the big game companies and even many of the ecosystem companies have come to the realization that they’re never going to be the one monopoly that dominates the whole thing. And so it’s in everybody’s interest to really interconnect and standardize over time. And to build this more connected world and to all benefit from it side by side with no one company dominating. 

Which is a great vision, but while reading this interview (actually a transcript, video the actual video below), I kept thinking about the biggest barrier to building THE Metaverse -- a coming competition between the 3D engines required to build it. Sweeney more or less alludes to this:

Is Patreon-Powered NeosVR the Best Social VR Platform Now Out There?

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Here's the latest update from NeosVR, an impressive indie social VR metaverse project backed by Patreon funders that we featured last year: Customizable UI, so Neos users can create a user interface that's ideal for whatever they do most in the social VR world. (For instance: Content creation, socialization, gaming,  and -- to judge by everyone in this video -- multiple furry avatar quick changes.)

Really, though, I'm posting this because NeosVR seriously seems like the most graphically robust and feature-rich social VR platform on the market. (And I'm not sure NeosVR counts as being "on the market" since it's not an actual company. but three developers splitting $7328 a month in Patreon donations.)  But you look at the graphics with dynamic lighting, the responsiveness of the avatars -- especially integrated to a full VR rig -- not to mention the content creation tools and so on, and it certainly seems many years ahead of, say, VRChat.

Will be keeping closer tabs on them. Meantime, here's NeosVR's latest Creator Community Showcase, featuring 2 hours of user-made geeky coolness:

SL Flickr Pick: Dramatically Powerful Avatar Portraits by Geyer Schnyder

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

Geyer Schnyder’s “Just a Nightmare…” is well named. A nightmarish picture of a desperate man with a serious looking military knife. The background lighting suggests a car is off to the left but without certainty. This captures how when you are frightened your vision narrows to the essential, how everything else just disappears. 

Schnyder enjoys illustrating the gritty side of life. More below.

Watch: Sansar's Pivot as Enterprise Platform for Live Music Seems Complete

As far as I can tell, this is the first official platform demo on YouTube for Sansar since it was taken over by Wookey, and it's pretty striking: Where once Sansar was promised to be a successor to Second Life and a WordPress for virtual worlds, it's now positioned as a "turnkey virtual venue platform" for "record labels, artists, festivals, creative agencies, and brands" (their words). 

Not a criticism! It's a smart move to target the live music/concert market in the COVID age. And I do like a lot of the functionality they are showing off in the video, especially avatar-to-avatar VR meet-and-greets for artists.

SL's Top User-Run Shopping Site Larger Than Many MMO News Sites

Estimated visits to Seraphimsl.com via analytics site Similar Web

While Second Life might be smaller than many other virtual worlds, do not underestimate how passionate and engaged its core userbase is. As an example of that, consider SeraphimSL, one of many hundreds of user-run sites and blogs advertising SL fashions and housewares. (And Seraphim is probably the very largest, at least in the English-fluent Internet.)

According to SimilarWeb, Seraphim rakes in over half a million pageviews a month. As I was telling someone else in the SL business recently, that's more than enough eyeballs to make a six figure income in real dollars, via advertising.

In terms of unique eyeballs every month, 500K+ probably translates to roughly 100,000 actual people. (Way back in the day, unsurprisingly, metaverse expert Gwyneth Llewellyn estimated 100,000 as the approximate number of SL's most engaged community members.)

The number is pretty impressive even when you pull outside the userbase of Second Life: Seraphim's page views are larger than many news sites about virtual worlds/MMOs, like this one. It's even about as large or on par with some fairly well known tech news sites and blogs.

What's this mean?

SL Flickr Pick: Avatar Headshots With Amazing Personality by Linda Ronstadt

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

"Linda Ronstadt" sure looks a lot younger than when I saw her in concert in college. “I hope you get all that you want cause I didn’t.” is a cleverly titled self-portrait that is arresting. I love how her eyes capture the viewer with a challenge. You can see how depth-of-field is used to make her eyes the center focus, as though anything else could be. 

I love how she can create such different characters, see below.

Sinespace New Feature Launch Party With the Virtual World’s Founders, August 5 at 9am PT -- RSVP for Exclusive Access!

Click here for exclusive access to a new Sinespace feature launch party for Sinespace community members and all other virtual world explorers/creators. The event opens August 5 at 8:30am PT, then starts at 9am PT. You don’t need a Sinespace account to attend, but it will be held in a secret virtual world location, so you must RSVP here for access. 

As a media partner to Sinespace, I’m highly biased, but I think what the development team has created is pretty amazing, and if you’re a regular New World Notes reader, you’ll want to join the fun. 

Adam Frisby and the other founders of Sinespace will host the event, and talk about what this new feature means for the future of the virtual world. If you’re lucky, you’ll also get the first glimpse of some other impressive features about to go live very soon.

This launch comes after a period of relative quiet for the Sinespace development team, as they’ve been deep in the launch of Breakroom, and perfecting this feature they’re about to unveil. As Adam puts it to me:

Why Elder Scrolls Online's Bugs Are More Enraging Than Bugs in... Second Life (Comment of the Week)

Lots of conversation last week around what it would take to upgrade 17 year old Second Life, with an intriguing point of comparison made by longtime virtual world user Jumpman Lane, who contrasts SL's performance with that of a 6 year old virtual world:

I just recently returned to Second Life after 3 years of playing The Elder Scrolls Online (fun game). I'll say this about the performance of SL vs that of ESO:

I really don't mind SL's issues, lag, whatever.

In ESO I [played] player vs player and it was a highly competitive environment. Death is frowned upon to say the very least. Killing someone involved tbagging, hours of arguing, 1v1's, and feuds that lasted YEARS.

But that's not why he's taking a break from Elder Scrolls Online for SL. Here's why: