"space" is the Place: Second Life & OpenSim Pioneer Launches New Virtual World With Special NWN Discount!

space, as the name suggests, is a new virtual world created in Unity 3D just launching today for the web, PC/Mac, iOS/Android and beyond. New World Notes readers may very well want to check it out this weekend. For one thing, it's created by a longtime Second Life/OpenSim developer and entrepreneur named Adam Zaius/Frisby (you likely know him, you likely love him), who gave us a glimpse last year. For another thing, he's giving NWN readers a special discount (below). And for perhaps yet another thing, he tells me it's markedly different from Second Life successors Sansar and High Fidelity in ways that may appeal:

"I'd say the basic difference between us is we're focused on being a virtual world first," says Adam. "We're not chasing VR until it's consumer ready - we've got some experimental support, but it's not our priority. Our priority is making tools which let creators make stuff that just looks amazing. also expanding the boundaries of what you can do in a virtual world too -- we've just added recently our quest system (so creators can make MMO-style quests - something we think Roleplaying groups will like), before that we added our new 'Costume' system allowing completely replaced avatars." 

So for instance, here's an avatar spider in space:

So our discount code: It's NWNREADER2016. 

"It's good until December for a 30% lifetime discount," says Adam. "Although, I will add that isn't the focus for us just yet - we're really happy if people just come in and play at the free level, there's a lot you can do with it."

Get in, get around, and get commenting! And maybe punch up the Sun Ra while you're playing:

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Comments

[JohnC]

I think this demonstrates the huge problem that exists. This is a perfectly good attempt to create something to rival SL. But why on earth would any SL user transfer there in order to start all over again in a project that may or may not succeed, you just get the Blue Mars label thrown at you. Besides, you need to be able to use Unity to really make the best of this, and if you are that good with unity you could most likely have a go at the whole project yourself, or at least make a decent game without the unnecessary front end viewer.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, except it is competing in a market that already has perfectly good functioning tried and tested Virtual world, SL, plus a totally free version which uses exactly the same tools and viewer, Open Sim. SL users are the virtual world equivalent of hard core gamers in the outside world. You kind of need a few of them to get your world on it's feet.
And this also illustrates why Sansar and Hi fidelity are pushing their products as VR headset platforms, because they know they cannot compete with SL on a none headset level. This is not a criticism, just a comment on the huge mountain anyone wishing to compete in the none headset world, has to climb.

[Captain James T. Kirk]

Space: the final frontier
These are the voyages of the star ship Enterprise
It's five year mission:
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilization
To boldly go where no man has gone before!

[JohnC]

Hashtag, beam me up Spock, has anyone tweeted that yet in USA :)

[Carlos Loff]

WOWWWWWW, this is just amazing - It will probably solve most of the crowding problems - It looks like it works straight on the browser, I got really excited and even willing to spend some cash on it, BUT... There is always a BUT... After the whole registrations and questions answering process, when I clicked to enter, I keep getting this issue, no matter what I do to update my Java, witch I did but it stills coming up with this - https://a248.e.akamai.net/secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/7/8/0/highres_455974688.jpeg - I hope this can be fixed because being able to call friends from Facebook with just a click and enter MAKES A WHOLE HUGE DIFFERENCE to attract new users and quickly grow Virtual Worlds

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Another Unity based thing? Well now this one is more interesting since it's more general purpose, but it is still yet another "unity-based" thing which have a general sameness to them. And unity avatars are NOT as nice as SL ones kitted out with the latest stuff. See "Big City Stories" and "Four Kings Casino" for examples.

That said, using Unity makes it easier to go cross-platform. Mobile is coming soon and console is TBA.

What is interesting is their pricing, Your first region is free, if you want a second it's 4.95....but it only supports 20 users at once. If you want more users and or world that's a larger download for users, you have to spend more, for example, 14.95 gets you 3 regions that support 30 users each with 512MB download size. If you pay $75, you get 10 regions that support 100 each with 2GB download size. You can't just get ONE region that supports a hundred and 2GB IMHO their pricing really should be more granular.

[Carlos Loff]

It works very fluid and very fast with Firefox browser, but some regions need the viewer download, although they say it will all be in browser soon - It is a great plus to be able to bring in friends from Facebook, etc, with just a link and no viewer, using only the browser, this will help grown Virtual Worlds astronomically - But the Unity learning curve must be heavily considered

[JohnC]

Moses have gone a bit quiet with the OS Browser viewer. Now that would change everything.

[JohnC]

You have to be careful with the region pricing, These regions are not SL or OS sim size, the free region is huge. Quote "Even with the free account you can create massive landscapes in Space. There is no official limit; we have tested successfully regions at 16 kilometers x 16 kilometers" I have to say, after giving this a little more time to sink in it is very impressive. You have to realize that it has AAA game graphics, apparently you can transfer clothing made in other games, I guess that means SL OS and fit them to their skeletons. There is a built in market place, money system, Vehicle work straight out of the box, there isa built in quest system if you want it, and as has already been said, you can link to your space from a web page on any platform. Of course there is still the big mountain to climb with attracting people there. But if it had a large user base it would be easily far more impressive than SL or OS which are hugely out of date on just about every level.

[A dose of reality]

What developers of new virtual worlds fail to realize is that SL and the paradigm it represents is a niche market. There are no new players waiting to populate a new online world, they're all in second life. It has been embellished many times in the past with fancy bells and whistles, but nobody goes. Second life happened in a very organic way. The limits placed on content creators created micro economies; think heads, hands & feet, etc.

Linden lab are well placed to take this into the next generation because they own the customer base, and have loyal fans.

At the end of the day moving worlds isn't really an enticing proposition. This is especially so if a content developer. The best meshes in the world with AAA graphics means nothing if there's nobody there to buy your stuff.

[Cindy Bolero]

Keep in mind that Space is in BETA. You're not seeing what's going on with the ambitious userdevs and their creations and products in the works. Currently the signup avatar and its controller are interim, many of the regions are work in progress. Every day a vehicle script improves or other interactive features come to light.

And perhaps some of SL doesn't get it. Its not all about you. There are many industries needing the upcoming features of this platform that SL and OS could not provide. Sure SL inspired many uses, but in general many of those uses could not operate in SL easily without distraction, high risk, and exposure to adult content. Your K-12 education projects, corporate clients, and other special interest can now be on private servers, whitelisted with private branding, and safe from the general public.

I am delighted I can take advantage of Space for socializing, adventures and fantasy, learning, and business, without having to blend them into one world. I’ve tried developing in several other Unity-based user-generated content MMOs in production, but the Space team, with their decade of experience, really knows what is needed for us to serve more and better.

If you are a content creator and interested in trying Unity3D, there's a friendly and helpful community there to welcome you and get you started! https://sine.space/signup/refer/MjEwNjM3NA==

[Better then Ezra]

Opensim Virtual G+ Group has now banned anyone from talking about Space! funny since the founder helped create Os. If this space makes the freaks in Os defensive then i must try it!

Sadly my PC is to old but will try it after buying a newer PC NEXT YEAR look for an Avatar named Harry Bawls jiggling around your space.

[JohnC]

It is a huge task to attract users and creators to a new virtual world, that is very true, as I have already said. But this is not so true as it once was, even for creators, since the arrival of mesh in SL. In fact Sansar will rely on this adaptability of creators, as it will itself be a totally new platform. Just the other day there were a bunch of people on one of these posts saying how they used both SL and OS, well why not Space as well.
What Cindy said about it not being all about SL users is very true. Right at this moment if I were a company looking to invest in an online presence with no knowledge of Virtual worlds and was offered SL or Space I would choose space any day. SL has a terrible reputation in the real world. And the way content creators are described above sounds more like they are trapped in SL than they are there by choice "well where else can we go, who else will buy our stuff if not SL or OS users" LL could do with a good hard Kick in the finances, it's long over due. They have become lazy and arrogant , and as mentioned above, believe that they have a captive audience, so they only need to do just enough to keep them. I don't know if Space can climb that user base mountain, but I would love to see them do it. Even at this Beta stage it has a far brighter and open outlook for the future than either SL or OS, which are closed communities feeding of each other.

[sometimes reader]

Just tried to join, and am told both my perfectly good normal mail and also a Gmail I regularly use are invalid.
Yeah, sorry, not going to register and handle yet another mail for yet another account. If it already starts that way, it's SL and Sansar then for me. At least they are fine with either of my emails.

[Adam]

Hey there (some great comments in here - we are reading them!)

Just on that last comment: As far as I (we're) aware, we shouldn't be filtering any email addresses. If we are, that's a bug and I'm sorry! But I'd be happy to take a personal look into that, can I get you to email me - [email protected] - with the email address[es] you're trying to register with? If you tried one of our earlier virtual worlds in the past, you may have an account already using that address.

Thanks!

[JohnC]

"At least they are fine with either of my emails"
But do they take a blind bit of notice of anything you have to say about their product anymore? And Do you really think the transition from SL to Sansar will be free of problems. I doubt it. There will be comments just like yours about Sansar as sure as night follows day, "I tried to log in to Sansar, but it rejected my Email. That's Sansar finished for me. I am sticking to SL, OS etc, etc"

[Mary Moore]

Tried it.
friends tried it.
really liking it
will go back.
great avatar options.
space is great hopefully it gains traction.
as for sansar speaking just for myself VR Headsets are not for me and linden lab only wanted elite creators for beta.

space is like secondlife done right and better.

[JohnC]

This headset thing. I see a review of A PS4 VR Racing game. The Guy says, "I get motion sickness and nausea. When I first played this game I felt sick after a few minutes. This disorientation and general sickness lasted for 2 days. But then I tried less intense experiences and gradually worked my way up to the more intense ones until I could tolerate them". Ok. If this guy was talking about some serious life enhancing process, some new drug on the market , that was designed to prolong his life or something, this statement might make sense. But he is building up this visual tolerance level, that was devestated on first contact, in order to experience a racing game! or maybe Resident Evil 200, whatever. How f..ked can we become, in the pursuit of entertainment force fed us by profit vultures.

[Bughunter Sullivan]

After nine long year's in SL, this might be worth a try for myself & partner.

[Bughunter Sullivan]

JohnC
Good Point on VR eyewear, my adopted son tried them on for about an hour, then a epileptic seizure overcame him, forcing a scary frantic call to 911 by my rl partner.

we thought we lost him. NEVER AGAIN!

[JohnC]

I guess us epileptic, motion sickness, nausea, bad eyesight victims are in the minority. But even so, the sales tactic at the moment seems from your story alone to be, well give it a go, and if it kills anyone or damages their retina irreparably for life, let us know and we will re think it all. Us live guinea pigs are rearing to go. Apologies for drifting off topic. Back to Space, a great alternative to visual and mental deteriation in the name of entertainment.

[Violet]

I wish Space great success and I hope that the competitive pressure pushes Linden into a new pricing model- The current 256x256 Regions from 195- to 295 a month is prohibitive to many users-

[Tizzy Canucci]

Appearance wise it has a smoothness I like, and it is a quite different visual experience from SL. It's interesting.
However, Firefox throws an error: The browser could not allocate enough memory for the WebGL content. If you are the developer of this content, try allocating less memory to your WebGL build in the WebGL player settings. I have plenty enough memory - I need to be told if I need to allocate more.
I've tried it on the standalone. Moving from region to region was painfully slow on 6mb broadband. I bailed on the program as it was going up percentage point by percentage point.

[voyance serieuse rapide]

I am really pleased with reading your blog!!! Excellent content wrote, thanks

[Annon]

Not supported with Chrome? Too bad, looked interesting for a minute.

[JohnC]

I ran it through Chrome no problems at all.