New World Notes

Nylon Pinkney Is Online: Looking for Love in Second Life's Forgotten Lands

Sinespace's First-Person Shooter Construction Tutorial Featured on Unity Blog

Unity's official blog has an in-depth tutorial for creating and publishing and FPS on Sinespace (an NWN media partner) using its open source Build Kill Repeat combat system. Sinespace is also hosting a BKR level design contest, with $5000 awarded to the most creative map — winner selected by game developer veteran Erik Wolpaw (Half-Life 2, Portal 1 & 2, Team Fortress 2).

Questions about the post or video? Put them in Comments below or join Sinespace's official Discord server! 

Lupita Nyong'o in Us Re-Imagined by Afrofuturist Artist & Deep Dream AI

Love these two images by Afrofuturist artist Nettrice Gaskins, who uses her technique of creating Black artist portraiture through the collaboration of Google's Deep Dream neural network on stills featuring Lupita Nyong'o from Us, Jordan Peele's new acclaimed mega-hit.

"I use images with abstract textures and them composite the results -- sometimes [with] Photoshop and sometimes Microsoft Word (true story)," Dr. Gaskins tells me. "My work in Deep Dream is similar to my collage work using traditional artist materials. The process I use to draw and paint is what I'm using in Deep Dream." More specifically:

Company Roaming Planet to 3D Scan Whole Ecosystems to Incorporate Into Unreal-Based Virtual Worlds

When you watch this jaw-dropping video, keep in mind that none of the elements from nature are actually from the real world -- though at one point, most of them were. This is made possible by a company called Quixel, which has been roaming reality for a long time, 3D scanning whatever they saw from the material world they considered worth incorporating into virtual ones:

On our global scanning expeditions, we scan entire biomes and ecoregions to capture everything contained within them. From the smallest blade of grass to the largest cliff, every element is scanned and made fully modular, enabling you to create the most detailed worlds imaginable.

So almost like a 19th century naturalist expedition, except all the samples aren't sent back to museums, but to 3D rendering studios. More on how they made this specific video from the Unreal blog:

Cajsa’s Flickr Pick: Skinny Nilla Exquisitely Colored & Composed SL Imagery

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Skinny Nilla’s photostream is chock full of wonderful photos, but “Bryn Oh’s Jane and Eloise” is extraordinary. While not quite as impressionistic, it feels like an homage to Georges Seurat in the quality of the light and composition. It captures that Belle Époque sensibility beautifully and is composed using leading lines to draw us in.

Watch "Insilico Defender": Cool & Clever Mix of Virtual Fashion Show, Cyberpunk Machinima

"Insilico Defender" cleverly combines two things Second Life is abundant with -- cyberpunk settings and shopping -- into a unlikely but cool and flashy action short. The fashion and houseware items are from the annual equal10 event.

"I wanted to make something special for Equal10," its creator and co-star, Novata, tells me. "This round we got cool designs by several creators, most of them inspired by Japanese style and cosplay (like the outfit I'm wearing from Ghoul). So, I wanted to make a fight scene like in Kill Bill from Quentin Tarantino." 

Mild spoiler after the break, so be sure to watch before proceeding:

At 4.2M, PSVR Now Has About 2X Install Base as Vive & Premium Oculus

Sony just announced that its PSVR rig "sold-through more than 4.2 million PS VR systems worldwide as of March 3, 2019", suggesting a big leap in sales over the 2018 holiday season, powered in great part by Beat Saber. So matching that number with previous sales projections, the install base for leading premium VR rigs, the total install base as of now looks something like this:

• PSVR: 4.2 million
• Vive: 1.3 million
• Oculus: 1.2 million

Sources here and also here , combining SuperData's sell-through estimates from 2016-2018, rounding up a bit to account for Q1 2019, and excluding Oculus Go, which is generally considered sub-premium, as is Gear VR. Huge caveat: Since Vive and Oculus aren't officially reporting total sales, these are definitely rough numbers. In any case,  it's indisputable that PSVR is way ahead -- and arguably, has nearly twice the market as its leading competitors.

Cajsa’s Daily Flickr Pick: The Nine Minimalist Masterpieces of Yuya Jinx

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

You can see Yuya Jinx’s entire photostream of Second Life images in a moment. This photo is called “...” which implies a continuation which surely works with a ship at sea, but then she uses ellipses for other pictures. I love how the clouds reflect on the water, the brilliance of the sun and the birds following the boat which is placed using the Golden Mean. It is exquisite.

Watch: Improbable VP Says There's Little Interest in Massive Single-Shard MMOs in the West -- But Their Platform Can Support 20,000 Concurrent Players in a Continuous, Seamless Virtual World

You'll probably have to turn up your volume and put on headphones, but here's my GDC 2019 interview with Paul Thomas, VP of Product at Improbable, a well-funded startup that launched in 2012 with a mission to enable the creation of "worlds which can be run in real time, simulating the behaviors and interactions of millions of entities." 

In the short term, however, as Thomas explains, the main goal is to support "all kinds of games", as opposed to single-shard MMOs. In fact, the only single-shard MMO that's been announced for Improbable's Spatial OS cloud platform is Seed, the planet-colonizing game.

Why? For the most part, there's just not as much market interest in single-shard MMOs in the EU and North America -- or as he puts it: "In the Eastern regions, massive interest there, but in the Western regions, yeah, it tends to be more session-based type games."

Then again, we are still seeing interesting uses of the platform -- for instance, Thomas mentions Mavericks, a 1000 player battle royale with persistent, virtual world-type elements.

And yes, I asked Paul if Second Life could be deployed on Spatial OS, and his answer was more or less: Maybe, but it would be very difficult. 

At one point, he mentions that they recently tested a single-shard MMO and achieved high simulated user concurrency, but then had to check with his team on the exact numbers. A rep came back with this statement:

Cajsa’s Daily Flickr Pick: Essyit Turns Devil May Cry 5 Screenshots Into Art

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I love this “Devil May Cry 5” screenshot from Essyit. There is a story that we are left to complete. Why is she looking out the car window? What is she smiling at down on the ground? Is it a puppy or a cat? Or maybe she’s smiling because she’s handily vanquished a foe whose corpse lies next to her car. After all, it is a game. She’s definitely smiling and the light is bright and cheery, so probably a pet, right?