Watch: Now in Beta, Second Life's Animesh Feature Promises to Transform Virtual World With High Quality NPCs, AIs and Beyond

Animesh, an upcoming Second Life feature that enables developers to script SL objects with rigged mesh and animations, is now available in Beta, and so you should watch this video above right now. Because saying "script SL objects with rigged mesh and animations" doesn't quite convey how powerful this feature really is. As opposed to, say, watching Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin dance to "Gangnam Style" alongside pedobear, a land shark, various anime waifus and such and then realize that they're all NPCs causing minimal lag. (At around minute 7 of this great demo video by SL mesh expert Medhue.)

Metaverse evangelist James T. Reichert (whose day job is Senior Creative Technologist at Microsoft), sent me this video last night bubbling over with excitement:

This makes possible, he told me, "The ability to wire AIs up to lightweight systems like this rather than full-on avatars... The ability to populate a region with artificial life. To make environments more dynamic and realistic... [and] solve the 'why is the metaverse so lonely?' issue."

That's just the start: We're talking about full-featured MMOs and combat games in Second Life with convincing NPCs and MOBs, we're talking SL cities with populations of AIs going about their day, we're talking all that and more. (And yes, we're also talking about 3D bot farms and roaming, automated trolls.) As Medhue puts it in the comments of his video:

Animesh is much better than any kind of Bot system, using normal avatars. Within the Avatar system, there are many things that the user needs for their avatar to have. This bogs down the Avatars, and why we can't have hundreds of people in 1 spot. With Animesh creatures, all that extra stuff that comes along with the avatar is stripped out, making the Animesh things way more efficient than user avatars.

I've written "this new feature may just give Second Life a second life" many times before, but I'm not so skeptical to say this: Animesh may actually do just that.

Comments

[D'eandra Simmons]

This , like navmesh , is a totally pointless feature. Let's fix the foundation before we go adding things to the top of the building ffs. SL needs a new ceo in the wheelhouse at this point. It's just mind boggling .