New World Notes

Cassie's Clips: How to Improve Your SL Performance Despite Heavy Mesh

As we've been discussing, Second Life mesh, especially the most popular avatar bodies, tend to be extremely resource heavy, causing you (and everyone around you) low FPS, unrezzed graphics, or what's colloquially called LAG. Unless and until Linden Lab starts curbing this excess, watch this great tutorial by NWN's Cassie Middles, who explains some tips on improving your SL performance. Top tips include:

Let's Watch VRChat's New Trailer to See How VRChat Represents Itself

Official trailers are a good way to see how a company (VRChat, in this case) sees its market -- and the market it wants. I think it's fair to say the general gamer perception of VRChat is something like, "It's a bunch of neko anime girls hanging out", and the trailer shows... a lot of neko anime girls hanging out. Along with a wide variety of other avatars, some impressive 3D scenes, and some scripted mini-games, including a shooter, and emphasis on the Unity-based building tools. And flying pizzas!  It's actually pretty impressive. 

Though if you really want to be impressed, here's a bird in VRChat named Kevin Costner with 7 foot tall legs talking about being homeless in real life. Yes, really:

All the Cool Virtual Kids Hang Out in New World Notes' Discord Channel

So you really should join us there too. Now closing in on 200 members, with channels for talking about anything virtual, from worlds to reality to games to actual real life. (Which as we all know is a virtual world simulation anyway.) There's even a tip channel where I wind up getting ideas to cover on NWN. See you there!

"You'll Fly Too": The Unseen Second Life Installation of the Acclaimed Artist Known as AM Radio

AM Radio, one of the most beloved and acclaimed artists to use Second Life as a medium, just shared with me some stunning prototype images for an SL installation he missed the chance to bring into the virtual world, after his real life duties as designer and developer Jeff Berg called him away.

"One of the more successful interactions I had experimented within Second Life was creating landscapes that included animation of avatars and static poses which made the avatar integral to he build itself, as a compositional element," he tells me by way of background. "Unexpectedly the interaction included the users compositional contribution. Seeing a Kool-Aid man avatar take a pose designed to evoke the sublime was not something I had expected. But these types of juxtapositions were surprisingly evocative. Something else was happening that hinted about our selves and the ways we interact with spaces. The unplanned collaboration and input from users allowed the works to explore themselves, to take on lives of their own with their own relationships with visitors."

AM Radio being AM Radio (or Jeff Berg being Jeff Berg), he not only shared a couple Photoshop sketches for a work he called "You'll Fly Too", but some beautiful insights on our experience in the digital realm, and the real world experiences we bring to it, which inspired this work.

If you want to see what might have been, click on:

Watch: Sansar As Experienced By a YouTube Gamer

Sansar's publication to Steam hasn't grown the userbase much so far, but it is starting to bring in some curious visitors outside the metaverse/core Second Life/VR market. Here's a "Let's Play" video from gaming YouTuber Yorkie, whose usual focus is more on games like Sims 4 and Red Dead Redemption, rather than open platform virtual worlds. But if Sansar does attract users, they'll likely come more from the consumer gamer side of the market that he and his followers are in. So it's notable that Yorkie seems most impressed by Sansar's dynamically adjustable clothing ("I've near seen this in a game before!"). His mid-sized fanbase of gamers also seem impressed:

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Choice Of The Day: Christian Carter Touching the Sky

Cajsa Lilliehook on today's great image from Flickr's vibrant community of Second Life screenshot artists: "Christian Carter's photo is called 'Spread your wings and learn how to fly. Do what it takes till you touch the sky.' and I kind of wish it was untitled because we don't need words to understand his message. It's funny how the series of the man leaping and flying is perceived as a slow transformation, but is really just the man in different positions until we come to the bird, but our mind's eye perceives his shift in position as transformation. Carter's photostream if filled with interesting and evocative photos including photo shot upwards through a window that is simply arresting."

See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter or on her blog. 

Why Fortnite's Most Unexpected Predecessor is... Second Life

I was recently observing that Fortnite, the world's biggest multiplayer game, had just evolved into the world's most popular virtual world. As it turns out, Fortnite has always been a successor to virtual worlds -- specifically, to Second Life.

Yes: Cory Ondrejka, who co-founded SL with Philip Rosedale as Linden Lab's first CTO, just posted this recollection to his Facebook, tying together many games and game developer together: 

The connected web of game development is pretty awesome. In early 2001, we’d test the prototype of Second Life - then still called Linden World -- by battling each other in a hybrid FPS/building game. [See video below]

Soon after, we expanded scripting, building, and avatars came along and the modern version of Second Life was born, focused on letting people create. We had some pretty fun chats with Epic Games' Tim  Sweeney about blending engine, tools, and game into one experience right as Unreal Engine was exploring the same space from a different direction.

A decade later, Epic Games' Mark Rein let me play a prototype of Fortnite that blended ideas from various Epic Games, SL, and Minecraft into a really different game. Playerunknown: Battlegrounds came along and converted Arma 3 grognard-heaven into something totally new: Battle Royale.Soon after, Epic released a new gameplay mode for Fortnite and the world showed up to play.

Now Fortnite has opened up building and islands to enable players to build using their incredible tools. I wouldn’t have thought to build into a virtual world from a non-persistent game — though John Carmack, who’s often smarter than the rest of us, was musing on that idea back in the day — so it’s friggen cool to see them exploring this corner of design space.

And some years after leaving Linden Lab, Cory went on to join Facebook, where he helped drive the company's acquisition of Oculus, where Carmack is now CTO.  All this might be surprising to Fortnite players who assume Second Life to be a quirky Sims-type social game, let alone to current Second Life users, who tend to be more in the social gamer vein. But in its first few years (2003-2005), Second Life had a few major free fire locations (called the Outlands), which were all about Fortnite-type gameplay, combining building and combat. (Which even led to a in-game culture war.)  

Anyway, take a look at the Linden World product demo Cory mentioned, shot in 2001:

Watch: Text-to-Speech App for Voice-Free Communicating in High Fidelity

Recent virtual worlds and social VR platforms tend to give more centrality to VOIP over in-world text chat -- a serious design mistake, in my view*. If you use High Fidelity, however, here's a solution: Text to Speech v1.0, now in the HiFi store.

Created by High Fidelity developer Zach Fox, it was inspired, he tells me, "by our desire to give a communication option to users who can't or prefer not to speak in VR. TTS is also a fun communication option to experiment with when hanging out with friends!"

If you watched (and listened to) Thomas Dolby's recent performance in High Fidelity, you know the world has some impressive audio capabilities; here's how Zach made use of them for this app:

With Slow Sales, VR Headset Market Still Not Having Meaningful "Rebound"

IDC, an analyst firm which was once so bullish about virtual reality, the company predicted (as recently as 2016) that VR headset adoption rates would be as fast the iPhone -- yes, seriously -- is now touting a "rebound" of sales:

The VR headset market returned to growth in 3Q18 after four consecutive quarters of decline and now makes up 97% of the combined [AR/VR] market. Global shipments for VR headsets reached 1.9 million units in the quarter, up 8.2% from 3Q17, as extensive discounts on existing products and interest in new ones led to shipment gains in both the consumer and commercial markets. "The VR market is finally starting to come into its own," said Jitesh Ubrani senior research analyst for IDC Mobile Device Trackers. "On the consumer front, the combination of lower prices and increased content is beginning to resonate with users. Meanwhile, commercial adoption is also on the rise for a range of use cases, including training, design, and showcasing."

If there's commercial adoption, why are there so few palpable VR hits besides Beat Saber (still a modest hit at best, in terms of the overall market) while even the once-viral VRChat has seen a usage decline? But the real problem with this analysis is that "shipments " are not the same as sales or usage  -- and more key, 8.2% growth in shipments isn't much of a "rebound" when you compare the growth to other competing platforms. For instance:

Sansar's Appearance on Steam Adds a Few Hundred New Users or So

Now that Linden Lab's Sansar is on Steam as of last week, we can track concurrent users of the social VR platform, and compare it against other social VR products. (See screengrab via SteamDB.) So far, the usage is pretty negligible, with daily concurrency rates between 45 and 75.  Add that to the 15-25 peak concurrency of people already using Sansar, and maximum daily usage is about 100, with roughly (by my generous estimate) about 200-500 total daily users. Then again, that means Sansar is more popular on Steam than High Fidelity, or Microsoft's Altspace VR.

On the other end of the spectrum, VRChat remains the current generation's leader, with peak daily concurrency in the high four figures. Then again, that's far off from VRChat's peak of 20,000 concurrent users last December, Whatever VR headset owners are doing with their rigs (more on that later), most of them are not using their equipment to socialize.