New World Notes

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.

How Many Second Life Communities Will Follow Pfaffenthal 1867 to Sansar?

Linden Lab has created Sansar partnerships with a Hollywood movie, e-sports groups, and YouTube/Twitch personalities (including the just-announced comedian Steve Hofstetter), but little has been reported about any outreach with the many communities and brands in Linden Lab's Second Life. One possible exception is Pfaffenthal 1867, a sub-community built around roleplay in a detailed recreation of a Luxembourg City district from the 19th century. But last week, Pfaffenthal 1867's leader, Hauptmann Weydert, announced the roleplay sims would be closed, so the project could move to Sansar:

The moment has finally arrived, for the 1867 project to move on to SANSAR, were land is free, where we can have better graphics,VR headsets and real physical interactivity. Note that Sansar works very well on a normal PC [Editor: Some would argue otherwise] for desktop mode you do NOT need a gamer PC. IMPORTANT! All the 1867 sims in second life will be shut down next Monday, on the 26th of November. Please pack all your stuff by then.

The sudden move is surprising, so I asked Hauptmann Weydert donations were running short to cover tier.

"No," he told me via SL IM, "it was arranged that the museum paid until that date and after this we were to move to Sansar."

The passive voice of his answer was a bit ambiguous, so I asked him if (as many have speculated) that Linden Lab was helping the community make this move. No answer at press time, but I'll update this post if I get a reply. Until then, and until Pfaffenthal emerges in Sansar, here's a lovely tribute by Pepe Cometa to what the community created in Second Life:

1 in 10 Second Life Merchants Surveyed Earn USD $100,000+ a Year From Selling Virtual Goods

Here's another notable result from that survey of SL merchants we discussed on Tuesday: How much real life money they're making from Second Life content. While 42% of those surveyed say SL is "a full time job and main income source", this question above indicates just how much of that income they're typically earning.

While the majority are making USD $1000 or less (those selecting "1"), about a third of merchants are making between $1000 and $5000 a month (options 2-5). But the results on the other end of the spectrum are even more surprising:

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Choice of the Day: Cataleya's AFK in Second Life

"I like this photo from Cataleya because who has not fallen asleep working away on a blog post, their Second Life open. I love how she is illuminated by the laptop and the naturalism of the light, the lap in the corner giving depth to the room." And I love how it's an image of being AFK in Second Life created with a Second Life image.

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

Cassie's Clips: Important Etiquette Tips for SL Shoppers & Merchants

Among the reasons given for the apparent SL recession that we're currently in, is the high levels of drama and social strife among merchants and consumers. So NWN's Cassie Middles and some of her friends are here to lay down some basic principles of etiquette and best practices -- watch above. Guidelines include:

• Treat others how you wish to be treated
• Customers and designers are people too.
• Check merchants profiles and see who to contact [with questions]. "The designer might not answer because they have a person who would.
• Say Please and Thank You. "I cannot emphasize this enough."
• Please try to contact a designer first before writing a bad review. They might be very happy to help fix the issue [you're complaining about].
• Don't jump straight to anger. "Be polite, kind, and considerate. You'll get much better results than anger ever would."

Most of these principles, discerning readers might have noticed, are equally applicable to real life. Except when it comes to contacting an SL merchant, that's pretty unique and ridiculously counter-intuitive:

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)

Here's the results of the survey I mentioned last week, and they're worth a close look. Key points are probably these:

• 39% of merchants say sales are down this month, compared to recent months -- this despite a typical upturn during the Holidays.
• 42% of those surveyed say SL is "a full time job and main income source" -- so this downturn is actually a threat to many of their real life livelihoods.
• Less than 2% are actively creating content for Sansar, while 37% have a wait and see attitude to Linden Lab's new platform -- and 52% say they'll remain merchants in Second Life "til the end of the world".

This downward trend reflects frequent reports from SL content creators I've received over the last few months. While SL private estates are still slowly growing, SL consumers seem to be buying less, overall. For instance, as Chic Aeon puts it in Comments:

November is looking very average (over the last year) for me. October was one of my lowest months for a long time. I can confirm that EACH and EVERY SL creator I talked to has noticed a sharp downturn (most from summer and continuing ; I had a very good summer - who knows why). Also events are really hurting -- pretty much across the board including the top ones. 

If there is a general downturn, what's the prime cause? According to Grid Survey, peak daily concurrency continues to slowly trend downwards, from about 55,000 in November 2017, to about 52,000 this November. That, and a waning of in-world events in general, which diminishes reasons for buying new virtual fashion (the major shopping category), is definitely a contributing factor.

SL merchants, of course, have a closer perspective on the problem -- here's some of the reasons for the downtown that they anonymously gave in the survey:

Watch: Augmented Reality App Created for Virtual Reality Headset

Last week we were speculating on Philip Rosedale's comment that VR is preferable to AR, since after all, you can use the video camera capabilities of many virtual reality headsets to create an augmented reality experience within VR. And then a guy named TonyVT Skarredghost came by to comment that he'd done exactly that: 

I already do AR with the Focus. (At the link you can also find an opensource plugin for that that I made for Unity) and also mixed reality.  And I can guarantee you that is pretty awesome. And it has the potential of showing a modified view of the world... so not only virtual objects added to the world.

Read about it on his blog post cleverly entitled, "How to create an Augmented Reality app for the Vive Focus in Unity". Tony gets pretty deep into the technical weeds of making AR possible on a VR platform. For instance, it involves hacking the Vive Focus' camera streams:

Second Life Grid Continues to Grow in Wake of Tier Discounts (But Slowly)

Likely missed by many during Thanksgiving week, here's the latest Second Life economic report from Tyche Shepherd, a top statistician for a major multinational whose quirky hobby is tracking the evolution of virtual world land ownership on Grid Survey.  (Follow her on Twitter here.) Continuing a trend noted last month, Second Life is still seeing positive (if tiny) growth of private SL sims, Linden Lab's top revenue source, a trend which started last July after tier discounts were announced:

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 23819 ( 16144 private estates & 7675 Linden owned). 32 new regions were added and 10 returned to the grid, with 40 regions removed (14 were renamed and 0 came and went since last report) Adult regions were up in number by 9 to 5932 (24.9% of the grid). While the number of general rated fell by 5 to 2934 (12.3%). Year to date net Private Estate growth stands at 38 regions (0.2% growth).

At this rate, it's likely that overall growth for Second Life private regions in 2018 will be net positive by a whisker. But as Tyche told me last month:

Top 3 New World Notes Posts from Last Week: Why Second Life Should Have a Minecraft-ish Option, Why Social VR May Be Live Music's Feature, and Why Philip Rosedale Thinks VR is Better Than AR

• Watch Thomas Dolby Performing In High Fidelity And Decide If Social VR Is The Future Of Live Online Music
• How Linden Lab Could Create A Minecraft-Style Game Mode In Second Life
• Philip Rosedale: Why Virtual Reality Offers A Better Consumer Experience Over AR Devices Like HoloLens & Magic Leap

Sinespace Black Friday Offers: 30% Off Gold & 33% Off Annual Subscriptions

NWN partner Sinespace has some special Black Friday discount specials for virtual world shoppers: From now until next Tuesday, a discount on an annual subscription, normally costing $119.40, discounted to $79.95. Annual subscribers get these bonuses over twelve months:

• 150 Gold in your account every Wednesday.
• A bigger home region with 512mb space and 25 concurrent users.
• Unique Title and Achievement.
• Premium support.
• Name tag colors.
• Special launch discount.

And there's another Black Friday Sinespace offer:  A 30% discount on all Gold purchases of USD $20. To get it, be sure to download the latest viewer (2018.11.b2), click the "+" button on the top bar, which brings up a Gold purchasing window -- scroll down for the 30% offer. 

Questions about these offers or anything else Sinespace related? Post in Comments for Adam and his team below!