New World Notes

Second Life's Virtual World Unable to Grow Further, For Now -- Pandemic & Cloud Migration to Blame, Says Linden Lab

SL land grid circa 2018, photo by Daniel Voyager

There once was a virtual world that kept growing and growing (and often shrinking along the way), with dozens of new islands and continents suddenly emerging, seemingly from the digital ocean, every month. But then in the real world, a global pandemic caused many to seriously reconsider how they spent their leisure time, and return their attention to that aging virtual world. Which in the meantime, was moving away from the old way of existing, on a network of thousands of connected servers, and go instead into the cloud.  And then those two factors coming together at once caused a major interruption, and stopped the world from growing. (For now.)

Or as Linden Lab just put it:

Second Life is in the process of migrating from our existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. That migration has already moved a number of the most important services and databases, but we are not quite ready to host simulators in the cloud. We have a crack team working on that and are making lots of progress, but there are significant changes needed to make sure that we can provide the performance, stability, and security required. When that process is complete we will have a nearly unlimited region capacity, but until then we are constrained by the size of our existing server fleet.

While our migration project has been underway for some time, even our most optimistic business projections did not anticipate a surge of the magnitude we have seen in recent weeks for additional regions. While we planned for growth driven by improvements to Second Life and other factors, we didn't expect demand to be created by a global pandemic.

As a result, we are in the unfortunate position of hitting the maximum capacity of our “old” servers until the “new” cloud servers are fully operational.

And so if you want new land, Linden Lab recommends renting it from an SL land baron -- or renting mainland territory from Linden Lab itself.  In any case, it is an unfortunate hiccup for Second Life's prospects, which was starting to see more usage and land ownership in the wake of the pandemic:

The Problem With a 12,000 x 12,000 Second Life Display -- And With Asking for It From an Unpaid Third Party Viewer Developer (Comment of the Week)

Last week's most popular post by far is this one about how the Black Dragon viewer now has a setting to take 12,000 by 12,000 images of Second Life. So clearly many were interested in that option. However, this also provoked reader comments like "4K is generally good enough for screenshots" and, of course, "Why?" (The obvious answer to the latter being, of course, Why the hell not?)

Black Dragon creator NiranV posted a comment going deep into his own sense of Why:

I did it because people wanted it and it was literally a 10 second number change that doesn't impact the Viewer in any way and doesn't add any bloat and fits into what the Viewer is aimed at.

I told people that it's quite pointless but some peeps were like, "but more pixels!"

But what do you need to pixels for?

"More pixels!"

Yea well that's fine and all but what for, 4K + FXAA is perfectly fine.

"But i already run the Viewer at 4K natively, it looks like trash."

NiranV proceeds to unleash a hilarious rant that's also an insight into a day in the life of a third party viewer developer attempting to serve the needs of their user community

Top 5 Posts Last Week, Including: Philip Rosedale's New Audio-Based Virtual World & VRChat's Growing Insularity During the Pandemic

• VRChat More Active But Also More Insular During Pandemic Says Syrmor, VRChat's Embedded Reporter
• Black Dragon Viewer Now Lets You Take Second Life Screenshots In 12,000K -- If Your Hardware Can Handle It!
• Unreal Engine Updated Royalty Agreement To Transform Indie & VR Games
• Philip Rosedale Launches Limited Early-Access To 3D Audio/2D World Experience For Massive Live Events On Any Device
• Profit Probably Wasn't Alyx's Point -- But VR Won't Be Profitable Until It's Cheap

Mind Carlberg Wins Our #NoAvatarSocialDistance Challenge With This Beautiful Tribute to a Chance Encounter in a Virtual Bar

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

Congratulations to Mind Carlberg for winning our #NoAvatarSocialDistance Contest! After Hamlet and I picked out our top three, readers were invited to vote, and it was close. By a nose, Mind edged out the competition with this fabulous photo of a man and woman at a club. 

I asked Mind about his inspiration and how he created his image:

VRChat More Active But Also More Insular During Pandemic Says Syrmor, VRChat's Embedded Reporter

We haven't checked in lately with Syrmor, VRChat's beloved embedded journalist and videographer -- the Errol Morris of VRChat, basically -- so here's a video he just uploaded, an in-depth interview with a slightly drunken hamster which smells like mayonnaise. (Actually Meowriza, a famous trans bodybuilder and cosplayer in real life.)

"I took a break for a while at the start of the year but I'm starting to upload again recently," Syrmor tells me. "There is an influx of new players on VRChat because of quarantine, so lots of cool new people to talk with! I'm now mixing my interviews with strangers and with different types of Internet personalities."

But has the culture of VRChat changed since the pandemic?

Nylon Pinkney Made This Amazing Hand-Drawn Marie Antoinette Dress While "Nylon Pinkney is Online" is on Hiatus

Multi-talented artist Nylon Pinkney is taking a brief hiatus from her weekly comic for New World Notes*, but that doesn't mean you'll miss her creativity in the interim. For instance, here's a spectacular dress she created featuring her hand-drawn portraits of Marie Antoinette -- now available in Second Life's epic Collabor88 shopping extravaganza. This year's Collabor88 theme being "Let Them Eat Cake", Nylon made this dress perfectly fit to be guillotined in. Note also Nylon's nails -- close-up here.

Raph Koster's Secretive New Sandbox MMO Hiring for Multiple Roles

Some good (and intriguing!) news during this era of pandemic-impelled joblessness: Raph Koster, veteran game designer and virtual world wise man, is hiring like crazy for Playable Worlds, his new MMO startup that's still under wraps but has been described as a sandbox MMO heavy on user-generated content and user community features. Among the most notable job openings is an entry level role as Prototyper/Designer: 

We are looking for a person with both design and programming chops to help us build game system prototypes, rapidly and iteratively, to prove out and refine some of our core gameplay systems before we plunge into full-bore development... We want someone who can help solve our current problems and grow to become a core part of the design team. We hope that sounds exciting rather than a daunting prospect.

How about daunting and exciting? And as that description suggests, the Prototyper/Designer will be using whatever creation tools Playable Worlds is building over there in San Marcos (in San Diego county):

Second Life User Creates Virtual Scenes Inspired by Lyrics from Artists Like Falling In Reverse, Apashe, and TERRORBYTE

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

Potato’s photostream is rich in color but even richer in emotional content. This picture of four friends watching TV is typical of her work. It is untitled and links to the song “Good News” by Apashe. I love that all four of them are lost in their own little world while watching TV. We keep seeing PSAs telling us that we are “Alone Together” but this picture seems to say they are together alone with the TV on or as the song lyric says, “I can never break something that ain't wrong,”

Some of her pictures can get a bit macabre, like the one right below the cut.

Black Dragon Viewer Now Lets You Take Second Life Screenshots in 12,000K -- If Your Hardware Can Handle It!

The Black Dragon viewer for Second Life is beloved for making the ancient and venerable virtual world look like a modern AAA game, but the latest update, "Enhancing Dragon" takes that to an entirely ridiculous level. As creator NiranV explains on his blog:

Finally because some people have been nagging about this i've raised the maximum snapshot resolution to 12K. Yes. 12K. 12000x12000. This is mostly for GTX 10XX cards and I doubt that you'll get too many shots in with lower cards before the Viewer decides to poop its render pants and explode in a giant mess. 

Click the pic on the post if you don't believe me. (Though clicking might also cause your browser to poop its pants.) 

Also, only try this if you have an excellent GPU. As NiranV warns:

Unreal Engine Updated Royalty Agreement To Transform Indie & VR Games

While everyone in games and 3D graphics are enthusing over the new tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 (see below), it's probably the fine print that's more important today. Specifically, its updated royalty agreement:

"You may have missed it in all of the #UE5 excitement," as Epic evangelist Alan Noon puts it, "but my fellow #gamedev people might want to take note of the new licensing terms: Royalties are waived on your first $1 million in gross revenue."

"This is a really cool move by Epic Games for small teams and people just getting started," as indie game dev Chet Faliszek puts it. While it won't matter to major developers and publishers for whom $1 million is a pittance, it will mean everything for tiny studios-- especially for those focused on VR, where a $1 million gross tends to be toward the high end for a hit game going after the VR-0nly market.