Linden Launches Monster-Dodging Game for Premium Users UPDATE: Rod Humble Explains -- It Was Made With New Tools Coming Soon for SL Game Developers

Alicia Chenaux got an early look at a new game area that Linden Lab apparently just introduced and is rolling out to select Premium subscribers of Second Life: "I think it's pretty much in the alpha stages right now," reports Alicia, "but it's kind of fun! You're fitted with a HUD when you go in, and then it tells you what to do. Basically all I did was run around collecting crystals and trying to avoid rock monsters. Oh yes. Rock monsters." Read more of Ms. Chenaux's take here. This looks like the new game feature that insiders told me about last week, which I mentioned is part of SL's Will Wright era; I'm checking with the Lindens to get more details now (if any.)

Meantime, if you have a Premium account, you may be able to check this out for yourself: Click here for a direct teleport.

Update, 11:45AM: In Comments, Linden CEO Rod Humble explains what this is: "Just FYI this whole game was built by us so we could go through the process of creating the tools to pass on to our content creators. After we get the experience scaling and solid then we will pass on the tools and creators will hopefully enjoy making stuff far better than we ever could."

Update 2, 1:15PM: Ehrman Digfoot took a much more representative (and impressive!) photo of the new game area, which I just excerpted and added above.

Comments

[Rod Humble]

Thanks. Just FYI this whole game was built by us so we could go through the process of creating the tools to pass on to our content creators.

After we get the experience scaling and solid then we will pass on the tools and creators will hopefully enjoy making stuff far better than we ever could.

[qarl]

> Just FYI this whole game was built by us so we could go through the process of creating the tools to pass on to our content creators.

you sir are a genius. kudos. this is the most promising news i've seen re:SL in six years.

[Seymore Steamweaver]

Serious. Automatic HUD with NON-blue box pop ups for actual in-world game play is excellent. Really opens up SL as a development platform - Don't just choose your own adventure, build that bitch from scratch.

[Ezra]

Glad to hear Rod! I look forward to whatever valuable features you come up with while making this getting exposed to content creators.

[Damien Fate]

This is fantastic. The fact that you're looking at how to fix and develop SL from WITHIN is a huge difference to looking at it from the outside.

[Adeon Writer]

And now I am a premium account. (To be fair I started 2 weeks ago)

This is awesome. Will be trying this out tonight; can't wait to get ahold of pathfinding by the way. :)

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Okay...stop the presses. This is potentially wonderful news.

Had this sort of technology been available a year ago, we'd never have moved our simulation of House of Usher to an OpenSim grid. I'd have been on bended knee at my uni to ask them to keep our island going. Beats the heck out of notecards and blue drop-down boxes.

Give us good tools and we'll get back to that "your world, your imagination" feeling again.

[Ehrman Digfoot]

I just signed up for a premium account five minutes ago and was taken directly to the game area. It looks amazing with shadows, great environmental SFX, no lag.

Very impressed.

[Marianne McCann]

...and its fun, too. Been playing with it the last couple days, even beyond the couple of complete-able quests. :-)

[shockwave yareach]

Here is my hoping that it will help. I build because I'm a madboy and like to make things, RL and SL. This could be a lot of fun.

But it won't increase land sales unless you cut the tier by 1/3. Ferraris are fun too, but most folks can't afford one while most people can afford a Chevy. Which has more sales and more money in the bank? Here's a hint: it's not Ferrari.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Eeek - next year we will have ghosts chasing us and witches zapping us with spells. Halloween will be even more scary in SL!

The recent work on the FUI showed a decent level of design ability - I'll look forward to seeing the new creation tools.

[Ehrman Digfoot]

Here's a fully rendered image of the new landing point after you sign up for a Premium account and receive the gift. You can walk through a teleport gate and automatically go to the game area. Not the awkward click, select and teleport,just a flash and you're there.

I think it will be important to illustrate these new areas with fully rendered images and videos. It will really show off what SL is capable of. Many depictions of SL, including the article image, make it seem graphically primitive to nonplayers.

http://twitter.com/#!/EhrmanDigfoot/status/132545908003971073/photo/1/large

[Hamlet Au]

Thanks Ehrman! Adding to this post if that's OK!

[Ehrman Digfoot]

Absolutely! Thanks Hamlet!

[Arcadia Codesmith]

This looks like a perfect first step towards the sort of features I was cheerleading several months ago. Well done!

[Mathieu Basiat]

The no-fuss instant HUDs, very cool.

Instant death....bad.

[qarl]

while these improvements are nice - what's more important here is that LL is creating a process whereby they will "eat their own dogfood" and develop (even rudimentary) content in SL. this will give them direct experience at the in-world creation process - and will give them direct insight into what needs to be fixed/developed (and more importantly: why.)

IMHO - this is EXACTLY what LL needs (and has needed for quite a while.)

[Salazar Jack]

That's a striking photo, Ehrman. Beautiful shot!

[Ciaran Laval]

I went there via the portal, found folk who hadn't read about it before but found the portal, got stuck, im'd Rodvik, realised he was too busy, asked the other people around what we're supposed to do, social fun! This is a winner!

[lilly]

You guys suck. Do you realize that most of the people who help you stuff your pockets and get the new BMW of the year while collecting the older ones are NON premium users, right?

Elitists!

[Wilhelmina Hinchcliffe]

Okay here's something that I hope isn't just happening to me because it's late and the area is empty. I've been running around dodging and weaving, and crossing sim line without being aware of it. No sinking into the ground, no rubber banding, no flying off into spaaaace. I must have moved in and out between sims four or five times before I started to get suspicious that it was happening, it's that smooth.

Well played LL :)

[Ciaran Laval]

@lilly the beta period is for premium members, everyone will be able to access the areas once beta is over.

[Jeroentje Jansma]

... Marvelous! But when will LL finaly fix the grid? Like sim crossings? And overall performance of sims? Sailing, flying etc.. is a nightmare at the moment! And that is not something of the past few days!! LL, FIX IT! Instead of wasting your time to new things, that nobody is waiting for..

[Adeon Writer]

@Jeroentje Did you read Wilhelmina's comment? I am having the same experience.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Is there any sense of a sim crossing at all? Or do you think they are using megasims that are simply reporting as individual sims?

[Johnny alt]

Marvelous to see better game development tools in SL but efforts like this are lost and fall on stoney ground when tier costs are so high.

There are countless brilliant and creative game devs who can not afford the current tier costs so literally 1000's of SL game projects will NOT BE DONE. The tier cost is prohibitively high.

Until the game killing tier costs are addressed we'll see no real growth in the platform, games or otherwise.

This is a terrible thing as Secondlife is absolutely awesome but it is priced wrong.

[Ehrman Digfoot]

Hitomi, I would say they are individual sims and not a megasim, if only because, as absolutely smooth as the sim crossings now are, there is still a tiny little hiccup in the audio when you cross.

Megasims or Openspace sims that can share the main sim's supported avatar limit, even if prim count is not increased, would be great though for building these types of immersive environments. The sense of scale that you get in this game is so much fun.

[Uccello]

Anyone else get mega-deja vu moment or two while playing? There were several moments that I felt I had played a particular part before or had been in a certain landscape section before.

It's kinda fun despite the really odd things it does to AOs. I guess that is beta for you. It's amusing to leave the game area and still get bounced around upon teleport, especially if the HUD fails to detach upon exit.

[Dizzy Banjo]

This project looks really interesting! It seems like a great way to really expand the possibilities of interactive design in SL. Another option for a way SL could be used.

Checking out project LR , wandering around the funky mesh environment, I felt a significant experiential difference and reduction of 'clunkiness' in the user experience. It still felt like a game with very poor responsiveness, but it was a big improvement.

Look forward to exploring what this could mean for designing unusual interactive experiences using SL.

[Nexii Malthus]

The responsiveness issues are mostly issues with the lack of feedback in their design. I guess that is because it is a beta.

There's lots of little tricks to improve responsiveness, such as 0.1sec button down animations on the HUD, etc. Little blips, beeps and pop sounds for all user interactions, etc.

[Elwe Ewing]

No sim crossing = they're using megasim technology (from OpenSim since 2009).

I really have to double-quote Quarl: LLs just have to go inworld to see. Better they should try it from outside their VPN (better again: from outside USA) to see how really SL sucks especially in sim-crossing.

[DMC Jurassic]

It's nice to see Linden Research try a new revenue model! Looking forward to checking the tools out :)

[Orca Flotta]

Adeon had the nerve to ask this:
@Jeroentje Did you read Wilhelmina's comment? I am having the same experience.

Did YOU read her comment, Adeon?
Wilhelmina was walking, and she crossed 4 - 5 borders. That's not an indicator for a fixed grid. The normal vehicle operator crosses 20 - 80 sims sitting on/in a more or less fast moving object. In case of sailors and powerboaters the sims in question are of the weakest and most underutilized homestead sort, no brandnew gaming servers. Also they are part of LL's chessboard strategy of server rollouts, so you always enter a different server version.

And Jeroentje is right when he says nobody was waiting for LL giving us some silly game. Games are content. And content creation is to be done by the residents. It was like that from day one and was one of the most crucial basics of SL for a long time, and will hopefully stay that way. They give us the infrastructure, we do the rest.

[Nexii Malthus]

I was exploring the regions and I am pretty sure there isn't any such megasim tech. Unless it's a very laggy megasim tech.

I had an attachment that was reporting sim crossing at the time as well, so I could easily identify lag in movement and when a sim cross was complete -- which felt like your normal sim crossing for sims that are running very healthily.

The regions are..
- Fresh, no history and clutter to them.
- Low loads
- Likely have close RL proximity (need to check hostnames to verify)
- Full Sims, not homesteads?
- Three game instance "continents". The portals load-balance avatars across them.
- With a game system that was created by Linden devs who know the sims better and are actual employed professionals compared to User Generated Content.

[elizabeth (16)]

the comments not accept the "you are at"

anyways

LR 1 2 3 4 5 10 11 and 12 are at 216-82-12-34
LR 6 7 8 are at 216-82-12-25. LR 7 is base camp
LR 9 is at 216-82-12-39. LR 9 is shattered canyon. is lots of collisions on that one bc of falling rocks

[elizabeth (16)]

oops

forgot to say server version

Second Life RC LR 11-10-21-243634

[Arbit Delacroix]

This is excellent news. I'm really curious to see what the new tools will be but anything will be welcome. Thanks LL!

I know this probably isn't what they have in mind but I've always thought it would be really fun to restrict an avatar's movement from turning left or right and then swing their camera offset ninety degrees over to the side so you could replicate a classic side-scrolling platform game. That would bring me endless amusement.

[Fier]

Thanks for this Post! I made a Youtube vid in your Honor! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytvMAzQs0zU&feature=channel_video_title about the dodging game!

[Fire]

Thanks for this Post! I made a Youtube vid in your Honor! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytvMAzQs0zU&feature=channel_video_title about the dodging game!

@fire

[i'm bad english]

Future second life in Ipad/phone

the games look like sims social by Ea

mini games for Ipad/phone

look SL for webrowser and SL V2

the future SL app