New World Notes

Educator: Second Life as a Teaching Tool Would Never Work on "Woke" College Campuses of Today (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: Gorean roleplay, one of Second Life's most popular roleplay subcultures

There's a very interesting reader thread on the recent Electronic Gaming Monthly article on Second Life as told through its old guidebooks. including this thought from "Iggy", who some ten years go, when SL had hundreds of "virtual campuses" owned by real life colleges and universities (up to and including Harvard!) was once among the most passionate educators advocating for the use of Second Life as a teaching tool in colleges:

SLers Furiously Debate Whether They Should Pay to Change Their SL Names

Last chance to take this survey on whether you want to pay for the chance to change your SL name; I'll post the results tomorrow. In any case, it's definitely provoked a passionate conversation among readers. Here's some highlights:

I love having the limited selection as long as it's long enough, like in the old days. I can hardly wait to see the list of names and to see avatars that aren't stuck with "Resident." Currently I'm happy with my avatar names, so there's no reason to pay for new ones. I just wish that all those stuck with "Resident" could, without charge, add a last name from the list. So much nicer.

-- Acacia Merlin

Please do not make us choose from a list of names. I doubt we will get what we want that way! Custom name is worth a fee, otherwise. Unless you have my last name I want, I'll keep the old one!

-- kedvenc ivanovic 

Sorry we took all those profits we collected from your $300.00 imaginary lands and used them to make a gigantic VR bonfire and dissed you in the process.

Luckily, in the ashes, we finally hear your pleas. Our little elves are working like mad to make a doohickey that will take us back in time to the days when we knew how to give people names. You'll need to pay a fee to pay a fee to get this amazing regifted fruitcake. Happy Holidays!

"Names" was on my 2011 Christmas List. In 2019, I want justice.

-- Jenny8675309 Resident

Several more after the break!

Roblox Version of Second Life Sim Translates Well (Comment of the Week)

Remember "1867", the Second Life roleplay community which moved to Sansar and then set up a presence in Roblox? Longtime reader and SLer Pulsar, who's familiar with both the original SL version and the Sansar variation, visited this new version in Roblox, and came away pretty impressed:

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.

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.

Click here to visit yourself in Roblox. I know among virtual world fans, there's often an "it's just for kids" bias against Roblox (I can be guilty of it too). But as Pulsar adds, citing this analysis from HackerNoon, Roblox and to a certain extent Fortnite, are not just virtual worlds, but essential social spaces for a new generation as they come of age:

Second Life Really Needs to Switch to a New 3D Engine (Rant of the Week)

Left and right: From August, bakes on mesh when using the updated SL viewer... and a 3rd party viewer at the time (as featured here, photos by Rhonda Huntress via this thread) 

Great discussion last week verging on a rant in this post about the gradual, imperfect efforts by Linden Lab and the community to adapt Bakes on Mesh to Second Life content. An anonymous reader suggests the fundamental problem is far larger that that patch:

This really always comes down to Linden not doing its job, just trying to push its work on others.

New engine
New engine
New engine

If their current employees can't do it, then... get people who can or lease an engine that works the best with your files. It's 2019 and you're trying to constantly stitch together a 2003 engine time and time again. I'm pretty sure when the engine was made in '03 they couldn't even think of ray tracing,GPU Power, virtual reality, peer to peer, or even blockchain. All we can keep doing is fighting 'cause the company is lazy, and keeps saying downgrade downgrade back to '03.

There is no incentive for mesh body creators and clothes makers to update in Second Life. They don't get monthly payments from their customers , so it's really just you don't like it, "thanks for the fish" mentality. It's said in the Slink group chat everyday.

BOM won't be truly a WTF moment till the next Bento update comes up and they have to update their bodies to "BOM versions that are downgrades" and they say, oh yeah we stopped supporting your body that you paid for and liked for system avatar 2.0.

There's definitely a sense where upgrades like Bakes on Mesh and Bento feel like welding Ferrari chassis parts on a car with a Model T motor. In any case, another reader argues that Anonymous' points "don't appreciate the difficulty of upgrading a system that has been in almost non-stop operation for sixteen years and where upgrades need to get it right on first or second bounce as rollbacks may cause bigger problems than they solve." Which is also true, but here's Anon's reply:

Virtual Recreation of Huntington Beach Evokes Real Nostalgia in Visitor

Pic by Terry Worthington from the official Rigs of Huntington Flickr page

The beautifully detailed Second Life recreation of old Huntington Beach inspired this apparently real, very 60s-flavored revery* by reader Luther Weymann:

Wow. 424 12st Street, Huntington Beach. 1967. Climbing on the rocking horse oil pumps and riding them like the bulls in the bar while on acid. Good times. Traded a quart of reds for a bag of weed window to window while driving on the 405 with no one we knew. Doing a joint in the back of Mystic Arts World in Laguna then going next door to Taco Bell. Yumm. And the surf at the pier? All my buds had buds in bags on our boards. Angelo answered the knock at the open front screen door while I was breaking down a key into baggies on the living room floor and he turns his head and says this officer won't arrest us if we'll give him some buds. Cost me 4 bags and some rolling papers to get out of that mess... And yeah there was a three day round trip drive to Monterey Pop in the VW van.

I'm telling you youth is wasted. Oh there is the "on the young part" but I'll just leave it at "youth is wasted".

Memories of Huntington. Thanks.

Notably, the Rigs of Huntington was created by a Frenchwoman (Jade Koltai) who has never visited the beach in real life, working only from archival photos. But the virtual world recreation of a real historical location was still vivid enough to inspire genuine nostalgia for a place long since changed.

Why It Will Take Awhile for Bakes on Mesh to Make a Difference in SL

Commenting on Cassie's video comparing SL mesh bodies, and her note that Bakes on Mesh doesn't seem to improve performance [Ed. Not exactly, see update below], Patchouli W provides this analysis:

BoM's true value contribution will only surface once onion-skin geometry is stripped away from BoM-optimized versions of the same body and people stop wearing more than one copy of the body geometry because of the removal of said onion-skins. The other optimization that will need to happen - and this is trickier because of limitations on how BoM works currently as well as so many legacy mesh clothing items being reliant on them - is the removal of legacy alpha cutting in favor of a BoM model that can handle 'cuts' made by using system layer alphas - this would reduce the amount of duplicated geometry required to fake smooth transitions between disparate pieces of geometry as well.

Only when these two changes are pushed through in full will the full value of BoM in cutting the impact of mesh bodies on the SL grid be fully realized. Then there's the issue of trying to port this work over to cope with normal and specular/env channels baking, which is an entirely new kettle of fish since the way normals are blended is a little different compared to diffuse and specular texture layering.

This may be true or not true, but what's striking to me is all the 3D graphics technical jargon one must know to understand the state of Second Life mesh. Or as it was expressed in the immortal line from The Limey:

Linden Lab Couldn't Take Over Firestorm Without Killing Firestorm

The third party Firestorm viewer is used by about 90% of the regular Second Life user base, making any update to Second Life basically irrelevant until it's compatible with Firestorm. So that means Linden Lab should just hire the all-volunteer Firestorm team, right? Wrong, argues Bavid Dailey in Comments:

If Linden Lab were to take over the Firestorm viewer, they'd break it. Corporations do things differently to how volunteer groups do. Nothing kills developer enthusiasm better than meetings. I have no direct knowledge of how the Firestorm team works, but I hazard a guess that there are a minimal number of meetings. Also, Firestorm volunteers know that they are focused on a clear objective. Corporations tend to have other agendas, and upper management tends to change agendas without consultation, right of appeal - or much logic in many cases. Don't kill the goose that lays golden eggs. Perhaps toss them some gold filings from time to time....

This sounds right, which would mean that we are stuck in our current state: Highly profitable Linden Lab being totally dependent on non-profit volunteers. But yes, agree with the "gold filings" point. When is Linden Lab going to throw the Firestorm team an all-expenses-paid Thank You party at Linden's HQ in San Francisco?

Firestorm Developer: I Want to Work for Linden Lab -- But Would Linden Lab Really Want Me or Firestorm?

Interesting conversation over last week's post about the paradox of the for-profit Linden Lab being utterly dependent on the free labor of the non-profit Firestorm team -- including this comment by Firestorm developer Tonya Souther:

Disclaimer: I'm speaking only for myself, not the Firestorm team.

Personally, I'd love to be hired by Linden Lab. I've even applied a couple of times. But I'm not the tiniest bit interested in living in either California or Massachusetts, and while they are now open once more to hiring remote employees (they weren't for several years), they do not as yet hire in Minnesota where I live. I think it would be a great place to work, even if I would have to give up my connection with the Firestorm team.

For the record, Linden Lab also has offices in Seattle, Charlottesville, and (this is new to me, but they're currently hiring at this satellite) Peachtree Corners, Georgia. (Which looks lovely!) 

In any case, Tonya goes on, most of the Firestorm team isn't even in the US. And then there's the question of whether Linden Lab would really want to take over the Firestorm codebase (another frequently raised suggestion), as it includes some rather kinky upgrades:

Social VR Stats: Closer Look at Usage Trends for Sansar, Rec Room, VRChat

Good points by "Pulsar" in this comment on our social VR infographic, which suggests that Sansar is in third place, in terms of peak concurrency on Steam:

[T]he "concurrency that averaged" gives a better idea of the platform than a rare peak inflated by a special event; like High Fidelity did, reaching over 300 during events, when usually there was just a handful of people online outside those events. Sansar is doing the same.

And this was another of the biased and deceiving answers that Linden Lab staff gave in the previous AMA on Reddit, as well as when they answered the adult content in SL is "under 5%". While they make events in Sansar that reach those peaks, it remains true that normally there are only few people online.

I don't know if it's fair to say it's "deceiving" to report peak concurrency, as that's a reflection of how many people have installed the program and used it at least once -- it helps show us the total reach of the platform. But to Pulsar's point, average concurrency is also important to know. Here's why (as he explains):

Firestorm's Bakes on Mesh Reportedly Confusing Many, So Here's a Tutorial

Here's a valuable tutorial from Novata for using Bakes on Mesh with the Firestorm viewer. The volunteer Firestorm team recently released a version that's compatible with BOM, which optimizes mesh-based attachments in Second Life. According to reader Mondy, the update's left a lot of SLers confused: