Most Virtual Worlds "Going Backwards" from Second Life's Original Single Sharded Vision (Comment of the Week)

Second Life mainland map created by "Icarus Fallen" in 2011

Last week's post on Dual Universe and the quest to build the metaverse has inspired a very impressive comment thread which I'll be highlighting this week and possibly next. First up, here's longtime reader "Pulsar", who argues that most of the latest social VR/virtual worlds are much less ambitious than their predecessor:

Among the virtual worlds I know, Second Life is still the closest to a single instanced and contiguous world. Other platforms are closer to a 3D chatroom instead, where at most you would teleport from a "room" to another one ([whether] they are called "rooms", "experiences", "spaces", "worlds" or whatever). In SL, instead of teleporting, you can travel, you can explore the world by driving a car, flying a copter or on a train or sailing... for hours. In Second Life, there are even organized grid flights, social cruises, drives, with dozen of people traveling together. Sometimes you can also meet someone and make a new friend while you are traveling by yourself. Thanks to the progressive loading and some client-side interpolation between regions, traveling in SL feels like a single experience, apart only the infamous region crossings disturbing it. However, sailing on the Blake Sea with an optimized boat, you would barely see it.

Pulsar does see a glimmer of this single shard vision in High Fidelity, founded by SL co-founder Philip Rosedale -- but not in Linden Lab's official follow-up to SL, Sansar:

Above, me, stupidly trying to motorcycle across the SL mainland

Unlike Sansar, HiFi reduces the loading waits somewhat by showing the world progressively too, before everything has been loaded; SL seems to do it better. In HiFi you still have small waits, but it's already better than its competitors.

But if you disable the interpolation in SL, so that it stops at region crossings, usually people call it an experience breaker, even if the stop lasts for just a couple of seconds. What many hoped for -- in the aviation, sailing and other vehicle communities in SL -- was a world without region crossings. No, not even just that couple of seconds, interpolated or not.

Now it's true that we are going backward: not only these new ones don't offer that -- they make you wait from several seconds to several minutes, up to an half hour, to change place - they don't even offer this somewhat contiguous world and kind of continuous experience made with regions. You only change rooms, whatever [size] is it, to an entirely different place. Indeed back to the '90s, and you can still visit Active Worlds today and see that it's kind of the same old approach.

This is all valid, but I do want to add three complicating points:

• While the SL mainland is contiguous, the vast majority of land and experiences are on separate islands which break off the single world immersion with a loading screen.
• Despite the fact that the SL mainland is contiguous, Second Life as a whole is often dismissed by outsiders as "a 3D chatroom" -- because despite the ability to travel and explore, chat is exactly what most users largely do.
• 70% of SL users don't explore when they log in, but stay in the exact same place they were before they last logged out.

All of which points to a deeper question: If most consumers don't actually want a contiguous, single shard world, is it still worth building for the minority who do? 

Comments

[Chic Aeon]

Just a couple of comments:

SL

SLers staying put and logging into the same place they logged out of? I do that too.

I always come HOME (in my case it is actually a workpad above LEA6 not a house of any kind :D) before I log off. I do go out to venues, for photo shoots, to set up, to "window shop" and check out new events etc., but I inevitably come back to my pad before logging out. So, if that statistic is based on not changing login and log out locations, I doubt it has any real relevance. It is a habit of most folks that I know in SL.

That contiguous content thing ---

I really like mainland for a variety of reasons, some nostalgic. But of course mainland isn't "mainland" all that much these days -- not like it was a decade ago. The new SSP continent will likely be sort of contiguous, at least as a continent, but the abundance of docking areas for boats leads me to believe it will connect to SOME sort of sailing waters to attract folks to this new upscale lifestyle.

Indeed while I missed Oz's comment at the Town Hall on what SSP stands for, it "could" be something like Second Sailing Parcels. Who knows? The parcels are large and most likely will be pricey. The land will undoubtedly bring in some cash flow linden dollars; good for the bottom line but not so much for existing mainland. Will be interesting to watch.

SANSAR

I have been working over in Sansar for almost two months now. I love parts (atmosphere, tech and how much better things look there ^^ (including my uploads of course - LOL - vanity) but it is obviously still in development and mostly filled with adventurous builders -- or at least those are the only folks that "I" know there.

That 30 minute download complaint was the biggest one I heard in the years before I ventured over. I was VERY aware of the issue and also fairly worried. But happily my first experience loads for most people in about the same time that a teleport takes. So that IS possible! . With one experience completed and two more publishing this week, I am learning what you can do and how nicely things can look AND load very quickly.

That doesn't mean all scenes load that fast of course; there are many that I haven't visited simply because I got tired of waiting. But many nowadays load in under two minutes on my 20mbps connection. So I have hopes that the trend for faster loading sights will continue.

One thing fun about Sansar is that monthly or so updates feel like Christmas with presents as new abilities and perks show up. True, many are everyday things in SL, but some are very very impressive and NEW.

******************************

I do agree that the preponderance of islands negate some of the global village feel of the old days when people actually FLEW from one sim to another exploring and shopping and visiting. Pluses and minus == they go hand in hand.

[JohnC]

What is this obsession with linking endless worlds. This is not how I experience the real world. Of course I know in my head that the real world is like this, but I do not really experience it this way. If I am in one town and I wish to visit the next, unless I have some obsession with experiencing the countryside between them, I get some form of transport. And this transport cuts me off somehow from the environment around me. But I do not mind, because my objective is not the space between my social events, but the events themselves. If teleports existed in RL would not the majority of people use them? The only real use for contiguous worlds is in games that require large uninterrupted play areas. An intensely social metaverse does not require that I am able to travel for hours on end to meet my friends or my partner. Even if I wished to explore some natural virtual external environment I am sure that an island of no more than 4 SL sims connected would be ample for me and friends to wander through without the need to just walk endlessly seeing the same repeating trees grass and rocks into infinity. Sure, there is a nice feeling of being able to see a mountain in the distance and imagine you can go visit. But how many times do you virtually wish to repeat that journey. In the real world we live mostly in small spaces,we create small spaces like the little animals we are. Surly the only use for virtual worlds, beyond games playing, is social interaction, and by far the majority of the most beautiful sensual experiences you can have socially take place in the smallest of spaces. And if you truly wished to experience wandering endlessly in a beautiful environment then try the real world, it beats the hell out of any virtual world you will ever find.
Now having said that, I am quite clear in my mind that the virtual is far more interesting than the real. But not because it can be huge and endless, that is just some tech challenge that the big virtual players want to beat at the moment. But because it allows me to connect with thousands of other people who I would otherwise, because of time, distance and social barriers, never meet.
Even if I were rich enough to build the vast virtual city I have always dreamed of building in some virtual world, I would most likely consider breaking it down into smaller virtual chunks.
I learned very early in my virtual building career that the vast majority of people have no desire at all to travel even shortest distances to their desired destinations. And the first thing you have to install in any good virtual environment is a good teleport system.
I was a huge admirer of the Witcher 3 game, it truly did have some beautiful landscapes to explore, but did I explore them? No way, why would I do that, they are in the end virtual imitations of the real world and as beautiful as they are, and as great a technical and artistic achievement they are, they can only ever be a sad imitation of the real world. And I would feel rather stupid wandering in them admiring them when I know in my heart that it would be far better to save my pennies and go visit such places in reality. So I very soon made use of the games essential teleport system between adventures.
Time is an important factor here. In the real world we have to find ways of getting to our destinations faster so we have more time to spend with those we intend to meet. This is even more important in virtual worlds where most people only have a few hours a week to invest. What use is it to them to have to spend ages travelling to their destinations. In a user created metaverse, where each environment is created by individuals with totally different ideas on how that meteverse should look and feel, what would be the point in being able to walk from one “experience" to another. There would be no feeling of a continuous world anyway, just a load of separate experiences stitched together that you pass through. So why bother with the huge tech challenges involved in linking these worlds. As I said at the start, this is something that only Game developers of huge battle scenarios are concerned with. The rest of us already have the kind of world we want, we just wish it functioned better.

[Zed Zorn]

Well... Considering that a High Fidelity domain is 32 X 32 X 32 km, I think this is still a considerable space. This is 128 X 128 SL region size without any cross sim effect.

[Philipp Lenssen]

We did a single, infinite universe in Manyland, a 2D sandbox world (where everything you see is drawn by people within). For instance, one thing newcomers sometimes do is walk endlessly upwards to see how fast they can go, to discover new, empty territory, or just see the "end of the world" (though there is none).

It is a super interesting experience, yet we also faced challenges. For instance, one person built a great Orc Town over a period of time. Not long after, just the distance of a ladder downwards, someone else then built an Amsterdam red light district. As you can imagine, this did not help the spirit of the whole shared universe concept.

Still, it makes for super interesting community projects. For instance, a shared appartment complex came about, and there are many tools in Manyland to organize and maintain order (flag reporting, undo dust left after removing something, certain blocks being blocked for editing by newcomers, a giant inner universe area only being reachable at a later level, community votes to both uprank or ban, etc.).

Such a single universe also has other issues, like finding people. In Manyland, we provide arrows pointing to your friends. You would still manually travel (walk, fly, swim) the distance, though... unless you arrived at the destination, thereby uncovering it on the map, meaning next time you can teleport there. Still, for the next friend to find you there, they'd still have to travel (the no-teleporting-to-undiscovered-territory rule could be independently added or removed though, it's not ingrained to a single shard).

After some time, we introduced the concept of separate creatable areas. This brought a lot of cohesiveness to areas as they didn't need to worry too much about what their neighbors are up to. In-between them, there's something we call minfinity -- basically, an area so large it can never be traveled (for all practical purposes, infinity, but with a bit of realism added as far as the universe goes).

For 3d VR sandbox universe Anyland, we went straight for creatable, separate areas only, with settable editor right by the owner. This saved a lot of the ranking and voting and undo dust type of details, and gives most of what people want as far as socializing or having cohesive locations goes. Transporting to such areas, or organizing community events, also becomes easier now.

We do still like the one-shard vision, though, and if it were to come for free maintenance and development time wise, we'd probably also have it in Anyland as an option -- a single, everyone-can-build area!

[Pulsar]

Those three points are valid too.
Indeed you could also meet someone who remained over a decade inside an infohub, never looking around.
And detached regions make sense for a number of reasons. That's typical of roleplay regions, for example, when you want a world apart, withe entire different settins. In Second Life, there are whole mini-continents dedicated to a specific purpose or roleplay.
Now, you see, SL regions are just 256x256 meters (OpenSim regions can be larger), but you can add as many regions as you want, each one holding numerous buildings and items. The visitors won't be affected if you add extra regions, because visitors keep loading only the surroundings while they move around. They don't have to download the whole continent before to start. So it's easier to scale up. Solutions like those in Dual Universe or others could work even better in future.

So in Second Life you can have that chatroom experience too, if you want, but you can have more than just that. Someone just don't know and then they are amazed when you show them airports, trains, regattas, horses and so on. Then you travel, there is that serendipity, you reach an airport and you meet other people there, you take an airplane with them, you see other people sailing beneath you, then you sail and you meet a mermaid, or there is a party or you find clubs, temples and so on.
Then it feels more like a share and interconnected world. If you aim at making a world like that, then the room model and/or instances doesn't go in that direction so much. It's different thing anyway. That world isn't like a VR Youtube (or Destination Guide, Atlas, whatever), where you choose something to see from the home page, then you go back to the home page and you choose something else or you follow a link. It's not just a flight simulator, then a separated sailing simulator, then a chat somewhere, ... but all this as a whole, happening together, shared, interconnected. In Second Life there is a bit of this even with all the limits and nuisances that old platform has. Maybe it will come a new one that will do that much better.

[Todd Adams]

There.com still exists and in There, you could walk, ride, drive or fly all around the entire world and return back where you started.

[Adeon Writer]

The “contiguous” bit was never important to me. If anything, it’s annoying and inconvenient. Makes neighbors where none need be and deniedpurely fleshed out worlds when other people lay claim to part of your visual real estate

Pass