Linden Lab's Sansar Should Follow Cloud Party Model for Optimized 3D UGC (Comment of the Day)

Last week's post on Linden Lab's challenge with "sub-optimal" 3D user-generated content in Sansar brought up this interesting point from reader Ezra:

Cloud Party had this issue sorted, and Lindens like Philip and Kelly came around to experience it. If Linden Lab was smart, they'd use it.

The system was basically:

1. Have a real material system where normal maps were first class and always on for everyone (as opposed to SL where anyone can, and a lot of people do turn off Basic Shader), and then creators wouldn't be compelled to use vertices for small details.

2. Give the default and any custom avatar skeletons a resource budget, analog to regions in Second Life having a resource budget in the form of Land Impact.

With Cloud Party, creators of skeletons could create "attachment points" and budget out how many triangles could occupy the point.

Combined with similar budgeting for the island/sim itself, and control of how many avatars could be in the island/sim, there was a hard cap on how many triangles would ever be in the scene, not unlike a single player game.

A proper material and rendering system along with resource capping at avatar and sim level is all that's necessary.

Cloud Party was purchased by Yahoo! last year, which brings up another interesting possibility:

We may see a version of Cloud Party launched by Yahoo! as the company's VR world (Cloud Party was the first Oculus-compatible virtual world on the market.) And so we may see this model of UGC appear on the market, whether Linden Lab adopts it or not.

Please share this post:

Tweet

 

Comments

[melponeme_k]

Cloud Party was a failure. Which is why it was sold off to the first possible buyer.

I find it baffling that people want it to emulated. What was there to emulate? It was emtpy and ugly looking. It had one of the worst avatars with no customization that a user could tweak on his/her own.

Awful Please do not copy it. Nor Blue Mars. Why copy failures?

[Pathfinder]

Lots to learn from Cloud Party. Lots of potential in that platform.

But in the end, Cloud Party was a resume.

To be acquired-hired was most likely their primary goal from day one, IMHO.

[Issa Heckroth]

melponeme_k - Throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?

This touches on something I said in a recent thread on SLU. PE/LI as it stands is a horrible borked system, that takes no account of texture data (which is often more significant than geometry).

Plus there is no PE/LI for avatar attachments, meaning a single avatar can wear an entire sims worth of triangles and probably not even be aware they are doing something bad.

If this had been properly thought out from the beginning, we would all be having a better SL now. So far I would say the above system is the best I have heard of so far. Just because the concept comes from cloud party means less than nothing.

[zz bottom]

To ignore the desire of having visual appealing avatars is a no go.

[Babbage]

You also need to a way to manage script resources to avoid a similar tragedy of the commons caused by custom behaviours.