New World Notes

Great Ebbe Altberg Tributes by a Reader & Longtime Staffer Kona Linden

Reader Soda Sullivan posted this comment last week as a tribute to the late Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg:

What a guy.

I do not think it is an overstatement to say that Altberg was Linden Lab's best CEO and Second Life's best "leader' since its creator. As I read this news about his ongoing battle with illness, I keep thinking to myself, "He was this sick and he could have easily been doing ANYTHING else but he chose to stick around and put up with us lunatics." We are so lucky he did and we should all be eternally grateful.

Ebbe certainly did a lot to repair bridges between users and Linden Lab, and he did it with a sort of paternalistic view of the virtual world. Clearly, it meant A LOT to him. We were very lucky to have him lead us and he will be impossible to replace and truly missed. Let's all send our most positive thoughts to his family and his friends.

I believe Ebbe made an in-world appearance a few months ago, and helping with customer service on Twitter last April (see below) which speaks to his dedication to the community --both SL users and Linden Lab employees -- until the very end.

Speaking of which, longtime Linden Lab support team manager Kona Gurion sent me his tribute to Ebbe last week:

Second Life Search & Shopping Has Been Broken for Years (Comments of the Week)

Great comment thread on Whiskey Monday's excellent and helpful rant last week, on all the frustrations customers take on when trying to shop in Second Life. Some of these, such as allowing content creators to use non-standard symbols in their store listings, even though that utterly frustrates SL's search function, could have been fixed years ago. 

"What's sad is that these problems have been an issue for YEARS, ever since I joined SL and probably from before too," as longtime reader CronoCloud Creeggan put it. "I generally give up at the 'item is a gacha' point."

Some of the problems with SL shopping could be addressed the store owners' themselves. Speaking of which, reader Mondy has a gripe around brand offers for their groups:

Any Open Metaverse Will Require an Opt-In Click (Comments of the Weeks)

Good conversation by readers around last week's post about a universal metaverse protocol, and whether we really need it. One reader was skeptical when I described Steam as basically "[A] metaverse portal, taking you from VRChat to Rec Room and beyond with a few clicks and several minutes of wait time", asking:

Are you serious when you're suggesting to readers of this post that we should be content with "a few clicks and several minutes of wait time" for hopping between destinations in the "worlds-wide meta-metaverse"... rather than striving for the simplicity (and instant transportation) of links between websites? 

As broadband improves, I suspect we'll get to several seconds of wait time by this decade. But it's hard to see the clicks going away. Metaverse or not, we'll probably always need to go through some opt-in steps when going from one experience/IP realm to the next. Or as reader Adeon Writer puts it:

VRChat requires you opt-in to visiting any world it has not greenlit - so the idea of going from one experiences to [another] without clicks is a pipe dream. Even websites warn you when you are about to leave.

This points to a fundamental challenge to the Metaverse ideal, which typically describes a seamless immersive experience that is also open like the web:

Second Life's Terms of Service Allow Users to Sell Screenshots of Others' SL Creations (I.E., In Theory, As An NFT) - But Would It Hold Up in Court?

Important comment/update to last week's post, when I cautioned against creating NFT from Second Life images. When the EFF lawyer I quoted referred to the "dark interesting mysteries" around IP ownership of user-created content in SL, Linden Lab had not addressed derivative works in its Terms of Service. Since then (in 2017, it looks like), the company has:

2.5 You also grant Linden Lab and other users of the Service a license to use your Content in snapshots and machinima that is displayed in publicly accessible areas of the Service.

You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers for display in any publicly accessible area of the Service, you hereby grant other users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to photograph, capture an image of, film, and record a video of the Content, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the resulting photograph, image, film, or video in any current or future media as provided in and subject to the restrictions and requirements of an applicable Product Policy or other policy.  

Reader irihapeti noted this clause, which effectively requires content creators to opt out from people using their content in an SL screenshot for commercial or other purposes:

"The" Metaverse Isn't Happening (Comment of the Week #2)

Good points from reader "Kyz", reflecting on Core's mission to build a "multiverse" versus Epic's mission to build "the metaverse":

There isn't going to be a metaverse or multiverse in the sense that fiction foretold. That global environment we think of as the metaverse already happened. It's called the Internet. Within it are worlds and nearly endless content.

But one global 3D platform? Not happening. If it was going to happen it would have already. The market doesn't want it any more than it wanted VR on a global scale.

I think this thing with Core is just wordplay. They're close to Epic because they're built on Epic tech, but other than that, they're basically a dumbed down way to create games. If you want better games, you'll use the Unreal Engine itself.

Personally I find Core far too limiting compared to using the Unreal Engine directly and I don't see them overcoming the big problems like delivering the customers and buying power. The more customers, the more games and the more people trying to grab enough foot traffic to make a small bit of money before it becomes so saturated no one is making anything.

At any rate, it's still a good time to be a creator and you go wherever your skill level and determination gravitates you to. But if any entities are the metaverse tools? It's the game engines, few people are writing all this from scratch these days like SL did.

That sounds right. There's multiple popular web browsers and multiple smartphone devices running iOS or Android, so it's hard to see anything like a singular Metaverse dominating. It might not even be a matter of competing game engines (i.e. Unreal vs. Unity), so much as many metaverses for non-competing demographics:

SL At the End of Major Innovations After Uplift? (Comment of the Week)

My post on Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's long-ignored C#-in-Second Life integration provoked many "Oh what could have been" responses, both here and across social media. (Especially poignant to read posts by other former Lindens, remembering this project fondly, if bittersweetly.) For example, this comment from reader Pulsar, who not only bemoans the loss of this C# feature, but who also sees it as a sign of Linden Lab's waning interest in innovation:

I can imagine what SL could have been with C# and many other things.

Second Life instead has been a story of poor decisions, missed opportunities, half-baked new features, that also introduce new serious, user-experience hampering, bugs... that get fixed after ages if never.

Now Linden Lab can't even fix the world map, broken since several months ago. Preview grid (Aditi) inventory can no longer be synchronized since November 2020. Screenshots still tend to fail to upload to my.secondlife, teleport failures, objects not showing up in the viewer until you right click and so on. All stuff that shouldn't have passed any serious QA check in first place.

"It kind of works and it doesn't explode entirely" seems the way to go for Linden Lab.

It would be great having C# in SL, but, yeah, VRChat allows that indirectly. I don't expect anything competitive coming out from Linden Lab anymore. Other virtual worlds are implementing anything that Linden Lab should have done, never did and probably will never do. People used to SL would be amazed to try out any other virtual world and see that it just works without falling apart. None of those can fully replace SL for now (in general, while subjectively it depends on what you do), but the strong points are getting fewer and fewer, while SL is being surpassed in so many other areas.

My strong sense is Second Life is now basically in maintenance mode, and that the user base shouldn't expect any major innovations that might drastically impact the existing ecosystem or hurt the world's steady profit, now that it's going directly into the hands of a massive holding company.

Anyway, the ironic thing about all these recent technical shortfalls is that they're happening after the completion of moving SL to the Amazon web cloud, dubbed "Uplift" -- perhaps the last major innovation to the platform.  As reader Sally Crofton notes:

Watch: Scripting in Second Life with C#, a Feature Once on Linden Lab's Roadmap But Apparently Forgotten

My post on UdonSharp, the user-made C# compiler for VRChat, inspired me to reach out to Jim "Babbage" Purbrick. Because when he worked for Linden Lab, he was aiming to make it possible to script in Second Life with C#. Sad to say that didn't come to pass, and he left the Lindens in 2010. As he wrote on his blog then:

Alas, tomorrow is my last day at Linden Lab and Babbage Linden will never get to see C# scripts running in the wild in Second Life, but I very much hope that I do. I hope that C# support is eventually added to Second Life and that I don’t have to wait 170 years to turn the handle. As another Babbage said when he failed to build the Difference Engine: “Another age must be the judge”.

Watch Jim's demo above to see how cool that could have been, with more background on his blog.

"Supporting C# and other modern languages was always the end goal with the work on Mono and we implemented the Mono scripting engine to be language-independent," he tells me now. "Although in production we only ran LSL scripts compiled to CIL we had development builds which would run C# compiled to CIL with normal C# compilers and then processed to inject microthreading support with the same tools that processed the assemblies produced by the Linden Script Language compiler in production."

Bringing C# to Second Life, as he explains, would be an enormous modernizing leap for the platform:

If Virtual Worlds Like Decentraland and Second Life Were Cities, Which Would They Be? (Comment of the Week)

Fun comment from Joey1058, reflecting on the NFT art gold rush, which has led to some NFT art galleries in blockchain-based worlds like Cryptovoxels and Decentraland:

In terms of broader community, I'm starting to see virtual worlds aligning into classifications. Cryptovoxels and Decentraland are similar to the richer cosmopolises, like New York. Here is where you'll find arts and culture. Museums, theaters, gardens, zoos and other venues. All based on an NFT foundation. Places like IMVU, Sinespace, and Second Life are the equivalent of "working man's" towns. Still cultured, but with an everyday foundation in "getting your hands dirty and doing it yourself". AltspaceVR is a corporate lifeline. And VRChat is pure relaxed social freestyle.

I get where Joey's going with the New York analogy, though as I noted in the post, both Cryptovoxels and Decentraland have very small resident user populations and seem to be focused more on financial speculation, than the arts. Maybe a better comparison is Dubai? (Then again, New York is also heavy with speculators.)

Any suggestions for "working man's towns" to compare IMVU, Sinespace, and Second Life?

More Tips on Running Second Life on an Oculus Quest 2

Reader David Cheney recently tried out these detailed instructions for running Second Life on an Oculus Quest 2 via Firestorm ("This is a lot of fun and works pretty well!"), and added some further tips in Comments:

On my cabled Quest 2 I had to take a couple of steps I found at the VR Firestorm viewer page:

- To fix a black HMD display I created a profile for the viewer in your graphic card settings and enable FXAA. Other types of Anti-aliasing can be disabled.
- To get the stereo images to align I followed these directions using F5, F6, and F7: Set IPD to 0 (zero), adjust Texture Shift until image is sharp and focused (I ended up with 15.0 on a 4k display and 30.0 on a 1k display); adjust IPD to get a good 3D effect.
- On a 4k display the visuals are gorgeous but the mouse/hand controller/pointers are not aligned and so operation is really tough; on a 1k display the visuals are lower rez and aliased but the mouse/hand controller/pointers are aligned and operation is practical.

Kudos to the developers!

Kudos indeed. I'd love to see more VR videos of Second Life beyond the one I posted above(from Redditor "IDontUseAnimeAvatars", who helped get the VR/SL ball rolling)--if you've seen any or are shooting some of your own, please post links in Comments below!

Catwa Head Mob Crush Perfectly Encapsulates Current State of Second Life (Comments of the Week)

Photo of Catwa sale mob crush by SL blogger Kirsten Corleone; large version is not worksafe.

The L$1 sale of Catwa avatar heads caused the Marketplace website to crash due to heavy demand, provoking Linden Lab to remove the item from the store, and instead, make it available in-world on several sims... which also overloaded with head-hungry shoppers (see pic at right). All this happened while Linden Lab advertised a search for an engineer who could help craft the virtual world's future -- and that irony was not lost on some New World Notes readers:

Crashing Marketplace over a L$1 Mesh head is cause to weep for all of the [SL users] who have taken over Your World, Your Imagination. Not having that mesh head is the first step in having a head of your own. Stop the madness.

-- Clara Seller 

I think Clara's arguing as others have, that mesh has made Second Life a consumer-focused world. To be sure, there have always been sim-crashing shopping crazes, but in older times, there would also be massively popular arts and culture events across the virtual world at the same time -- but now those are far and few.

The laggy in-world mob crash also shows the limits of the Amazon cloud migration's ability to improve performance (though it definitely has improved) and points to the fundamental problems with legacy code: