1867 is an interesting game experience on Roblox with an intriguing backstory. It started out as a Second Life-based community called Pfaffenthal 1867, associated with a real life museum in Luxembourg City. But as I wrote last year, community leader Hauptmann "Cyberpiper" Weyder moved it to Sansar. Yesterday (completely separate from the news of Sansar's recent woes), Cyberpiper posted an update in Comments to that old post, reflecting on his experience -- and his surprising new move:
I miss what we had in SL. But the problem lies in the rather volatile nature of the SL community. You do something new, nice, interesting, and folks will come. In order to keep it up though you have to put in a bug work load, mainly organizing one event after another. But despite our best efforts, traffic waned. Gosh we offered free housing to our 1867 community!! Rare in SL! The contract with the [RL] museum came to an end, and frankly we could not afford to pay 7000.-€ tier to LL a year out of our own pocket!
Sansar has been a disappointment. We managed to do a whole street eventually, but had to start over because of too much lag, trying to figure out ways of more efficient texturing or building. Also Sansar had promised mobile development, which was then taken off the roadmap, a big disappointment for us. And... we all know it... no traffic in Sansar... for now...
So we have put Sansar development on the backburner, and decided to develop our own MMORPG, starting off by developing a ‘childrens version’ on ROBLOX.... check it out.
Yes, Roblox -- where it's getting way more visits than what it got in Sansar or possibly even Second Life: Nearly 3,500, since its launch last April. (Not a complete surprise, as Roblox has 100 million monthly users.)
"One thing to say is that we are not completely giving up on Sansar," Cyberpiper tells me now by e-mail. "We still like the philosophy behind it, and might continue building there at a later stage, when it is more developed."
Until then, here's how Cyberpiper compares Roblox's building tools and features, to Second Life's and Sansar's own:
"The internal building tools in Roblox are much more primitive than those in Second Life. So we mostly import meshes.
Roblox looks cool, but doesn't have Linux client...
Posted by: Timo Gufler | Wednesday, November 06, 2019 at 11:16 AM
Very interesting. It even rains! 1867 was fascinating in SL, even if the traffic wasn't high. In Sansar it felt kind of bare to me. I understand the disappointment too. With Roblox you can visit 1867 on your iPad too (or other mobile devices) and it works well. The Roblox version strongly reminds the previous iterations aesthetically. It's still a work in progress, but it looks like it's going to be fun and interactive.
Despite its age, Roblox is surely a good example of a successful creative social platform to create your own games (someone made hangout spaces too).
https://hackernoon.com/fortnite-and-roblox-are-changing-social-media-as-we-know-it-joc531pl
Posted by: Pulsar | Wednesday, November 06, 2019 at 12:03 PM
Timo Gufler said: "doesn't have Linux client..."
Well, how dare they? For me Roblox is ded! Even more dederer than Sansar which is also sans Linux support. :( I mean, for realzies now, compared to Sansar and Roblox Linux is pretty much established as the best server- and desktop operating system and has just the sort of users new worlds like Sansar and Roblox would need so badly.
Windows users are mostly clueless and useless assholes that serve no purpose but awesome Linux wonderpeople are what those new worlds need!
Posted by: Orca Flotta | Wednesday, November 13, 2019 at 04:09 AM