Here's NWN video correspondent Cassie Middles with a helpful and very necessary tutorial for unboxing items in Second Life. It's necessary, because even though fashion and virtual shopping is essential to the Second Life economy, Linden Lab has allowed its user interface for owning and using items to remain incredibly counter-intuitive and user-unfriendly. Which is not only hurting the economy, it's frustrating newer users. As Cassie points out, many bad reviews in the SL Marketplace are actually about this confusion with the user interface:
Lots of interesting conversation about the heavy download times required by Linden Lab's Sansar, most notably Harvest 114, a kind of suburban neighborhood experience which is often promoted by the company and is somehow 24 gigabytes (i.e. much larger than the entire world of Skyrim). "BlueBell", one of Harvest 114's developers, recently posted a defense of the experience, writing:
When we started in Sansar we had no clue to what was acceptable or what would work. That was not lack of knowledge on the side of the creators, there was just no documentation. It did not come with a full manual, we had to test what the limits were. We did not know how objects were decimate or optimized by the engine, we had no info on things like Level of Detail. Not even a recommended texture size. We all had to learn the hard way, trail and error.
I am on a notebook, 2 years old, 18GB ram. My specs do not even meet the requirements for a VR set. I do meet the specs that Linden Lab advises. I can get in [Harvest 114] fine, I can get into edit mode and work on very, very heavy scenes... Harvest is not the fastest loading scene, I am aware. But there are experiences that are on the same level.
May I remind you Harvest is made by creators that are Sansar residents. Not by some game design studio, like many other heavy experiences, but by people that may know Sansar better then any design studio ever could. Why? because they work closely as a group, closely with Linden Lab support, and they are working on it every single day. Working to make it faster, better and populated. If you ask me, that is succeeding. It is the most alive experience on the Atlas...
BlueBell claims Harvest 114 is the most popular experience on Sansar, and says they are working to optimize it:
Unity just dropped this jaw-dropping video demonstrating its Entity Component System, featuring "4.5 million Mesh renderers, 200,000 unique objects per building, 100,000 individual audio sources, 5000 dynamic vehicles", all running at 60 frames per second. More from the company blog:
Create massive game worlds with ECS: Our Entity Component System (ECS) team has teamed up with two artists from the FPS Sample team and in just two months they have produced a futuristic cityscape showcasing our current progress on the ECS foundation and Burst. The demo was built using 2018.3 with some modification and the plan is to ship this demo to the public with full source and assets sometime in 2019. It heavily relies on the new Nested Prefab workflow also available in 2018.3, as well as newly developed features that enhance the experience of working with very large sets of GameObjects. It demos asynchronous scene streaming, a new ECS culling system, C# audio system, and HLOD among many improvements to ECS tooling and debugging features.
That's a lot of 3D graphic geekspeak, so I turned to Adam Frisby, my local Unity 3D expert, to explain what this means for developers:
"Technically ECS is already available in current Unity releases -- its real benefit is in swarm management; there are occasional cases where you might want to have hundreds of thousands or millions of 'something' (be it enemies in a game, or buildings, or particle effects, etc). ECS lets you squeeze the last drop of performance out in managing them with minimal overhead."
However, don't always expect the kind of performance that you're seeing in this demo: "[T]hey've clearly pushed instancing to new levels to get 4.5 million objects in a single scene, even on mobile. However it is important to note that this is just rendering and audio - once you add physics back into the mix the overall practical limit might be lower."
Also, this cautionary point: "Most developers - particularly new ones - probably wouldn't, and shouldn't, be touching this. It's very much a specialized system intended for specific applications; it will increase your workflow requirements using it -- but if you're doing something specialized and need raw performance, it's great."
Adam's analysis of the back-end code changes, and why they're important:
Metaverse blogger Ryan Schultz just published this epic chart above comparing this generation's top social VR platforms -- incredibly valuable yeoman's work on behalf of an ever-changing industry. Quite smartly, it's is a consumer-facing chart, as he explains:
I also did not dwell on technical details, such as the underlying game engine, user creation tools, etc. Instead, I focused on the three things of most interest to consumers:
How you can access the platform?
What options do you have for your avatar?
And whether you can go shopping!
Those are among the top 3 questions most consumers are likely to ask, so it's interesting many platforms don't seem to prioritize them. Anyway, if you do want to delve into a technical comparison, there's this infographic I helped put together earlier this year with a former analyst who has worked with Deloitte and Forrester and who's now with Sinespace (a media partner with NWN):
Interesting dynamic going on with Linden Lab's Sansar in contrast with High Fidelity, founded by Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale: According to SimilarWeb, Sansar's website is drawing roughly twice as much traffic (285K monthly visits, versus High Fidelity's 148K). This is notable, because High Fidelity seems to be seeing more actual usage, at least during its monthly stress tests, which attract hundreds of concurrent user over a period of several hours. However, Sansar has announced more high profile partnerships with major eSports brands, the Smithsonian, and so on, which will tend to drive interest via web traffic. However, due to large download requirements and other reasons, few people who hit the Sansar website actually log in:
When I wrote about the impressive Stranger Things tribute in Second Life last week, I should have been more precise about its "admission fee" of L$1000. It's not actually a fee to access The Upside Down, but a membership fee to join the private SL group Elysion (Flickr page here). I've since corrected the original posts, and in the process, found out there's an even more interesting story here. Elysion is a gargantuan group: As of last week, group founder and manager Syn Beresford tells me, it counts over 18,000 members, amassed since its founding in 2013.
That size, and the Elysion membership fee, does much to cover the costs of its Second Life sims, and the complex, temporary experiences they create, such as the Stranger tribute:
"My fee has increased over the years as more and more things have been added to Elysion," Syn tells me. "However, it is not a public sim; never has been, never will be. I do this because it affords the people who join a level of privacy (setting my land to group access). Land like everything else in SL in my view is not a entitlement. Most of that member base has grown simply because people come, they enjoy the sim, and they bring their friends, which to me speaks volumes." (She doesn't advertise her sims beyond her Flickr account and within the group message boards, she tells me.)
Perhaps thanks to that exclusivity, the Elysion community has thrived, and now owns six regions, with weekly DJs and live singers, performance art, a residential sim, and a diverse community, albeit with a decided gothic edge:
Isotopium is a game on Kickstarter that has a pretty nifty twist to multiplayer games/MMOs: The "world" is a 200 square yard scale real world model of a city, and the player avatars are actual drones made up to look like tanks, controlled via the Internet. It's not quite virtual reality, it's...
"REMOTE REALITY" is a new concept that incorporates remote-controlled robot technology. We created a gaming platform that allows a player to control real robots over the Internet in real time. Video streaming comes without delays from robot cameras. Game takes place in arenas that can be located anywhere in the world. All arenas are linked together. Players can switch from one arena to another in just one click and play in multiplayers mode.
This specific game is more or less like the World of Tanks MMO set in the real world, but it's easy to see how this approach could be applied to other real world settings using other kinds of remote-controlled drones. For instance, an MMO for flying drones that takes place in a sky city. Or a new kind of mixed reality game that incorporates drones and actual people. For instance, a futuristic prison escape game set in an abandoned warehouse/shipyard/utility company where the human players must escape through a maze, while prison guard "drones" try to spot and tag them with fricking lasers.
6 months ago I was pretty much enjoying being able to log in and enjoy pretty much the whole of Sansar in desktop mode, I don't have a VR setup. I could join in with the activities, engage with people on voice or via text. They even set it up so that people in VR could view text chat while using VR. At one time they couldn't even do that, so unless you used voice things were pretty much one sided. Several updates later, despite the minimum requirements not changing a lot of experiences can no longer be reached, places like Draxtor's 114 Harvest experience which so many activities seem to revolve around take up to 24 gigabytes to download.
To put that 24 gigs in context, the file size for the classic game Skyrim -- the entire virtual world and everything in it -- is less than 15 gigs. I confirmed this with a Sansar developer, who also noted that 24 gigs is on the high side, because most Sansar experiences are relatively smaller... 5-8 gigabytes. Which is also still quite massive: Even people with extremely high-end broadband would need 15-30 minutes to download 5-8 gigs, an aeon for a casual social VR experience.
Mondy says some in Sansar's user community have been pretty dismissive of these technical hurdles when they're raised:
Iribe is leaving Facebook following some internal shake-ups at the company’s virtual reality arm last week that saw the cancellation of the company’s next generation “Rift 2” PC-powered virtual reality headset, which he had been leading development of, a source close to the matter told TechCrunch. Iribe and the Facebook executive team had “fundamentally different views on the future of Oculus that grew deeper over time” and Iribe wasn’t interested in a “race to the bottom” in terms of performance, we are told.
By "bottom" he's presumably referencing the standalone Oculus Go and the recently-announced $399 Oculus Quest standalone headset. The irony is, the only way there's any real chance of achieving an MMO where hundreds of thousands of people (let alone a billion) can be together in VR is through low-priced standalone headsets. But maybe he's hoping to work for/found a new company that's more specifically designed to deploy such an MMO?
Upload VR's Ian Hamilton wonders if the next Oculus shoe to drop is the departure of its CTO John Carmack:
Sansar User Growth Slowed by Massive Experience Downloads Up to TWENTY-FOUR Gigabytes (Comment of the Week)
A virtual hangout as huge as Skyrim?
"I can give you another reason why Sansar interest is starting to tail off, from my own perspective," writes reader Mondy, commenting on the social VR world's slow user growth:
To put that 24 gigs in context, the file size for the classic game Skyrim -- the entire virtual world and everything in it -- is less than 15 gigs. I confirmed this with a Sansar developer, who also noted that 24 gigs is on the high side, because most Sansar experiences are relatively smaller... 5-8 gigabytes. Which is also still quite massive: Even people with extremely high-end broadband would need 15-30 minutes to download 5-8 gigs, an aeon for a casual social VR experience.
Mondy says some in Sansar's user community have been pretty dismissive of these technical hurdles when they're raised:
Continue reading "Sansar User Growth Slowed by Massive Experience Downloads Up to TWENTY-FOUR Gigabytes (Comment of the Week)" »
Posted on Monday, October 22, 2018 at 03:44 PM in Comment of the Week, Sansar | Permalink | Comments (17)
|
|