New World Notes

"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:

VRChat's Mirrors Help Enhance the World's Crucial First-Person Only Perspective (Comment of the Week)

Very good point by Adeon on the importance of mirrors in VRChat, jumping off from Strasz's video, where he notes, "While vision is key, where that vision emanates from [in VRChat] is even more important. We need to believe that it comes from our own eyes, and that the body parts we see are in a place that makes sense."

A longtime explorer and creator in VRChat and before that Second Life, Adeon notes how important the first-person-only perspective is for VRChat, and how mirrors help enforce and enhance that design choice:

When someone decides to check out VRChat for the first time, they usually won't have VR. One of the first questions they ask is, "How do I enter third person view?"

Of course, the second question they ask is "Ok... so why doesn't this game have a third person view?"

And to VRChat's credit, they know exactly what they're doing. Forcing first person is absolutely critical to everything that's special about VRChat. Mirrors are the one way, the natural way, to get everything you lose by not looking at yourself in third person -- without everything that you lose from having third person.

The devs understand that even the personal option for third person would take away that mutual understanding of shared space and connection.

This sounds exactly right; VRChat is one of the rare virtual worlds/MMOs without a 3rd person POV option; unsurprisingly, regular VRChat users report a strong and deep association with their avatar, probably much moreso that worlds with a 3rd person option.

Speaking of which, other readers wonder why Second Life (where the default is 3rd person) doesn't have an easy-to-use mirror option, and Adeon replies with this video:

Linden Lab Bought the Web-Based Marketplace for Second Life Because Actually Shopping in SL is Such a Laggy Mess (Comment of the Week)

Good conversation on the SL Marketplace and the argument that it helped "kill" Second Life by becoming an Amazon-like web giant that crushed in-world stores -- including this comment from oldbie insider Flipper PA:

Disclaimer: I was the founder and coder of SLBoutique.com, one of the original web-based SL marketplaces. I eventually sold it to an in-world company, that in turn, sold it to Linden Lab to become part of the current SL Marketplace.

Some of the impetus behind the original marketplaces (SLExchange, SecondServer, and SLBoutique) was to counteract the "scourge" of in-world malls. There were many complaints in the early days of SL about in-world shopping areas (and clubs) creating massive lag, being eye sores, and generally not being aesthetically pleasing. Resources were especially precious back then, and malls with every box set to be a light source with scripts in them could bring a sim to a crawl. Someone with a 512 square meter plot could tank and entire sim - and not maliciously, just with a badly built shop.

I also wasn't aware that anything had "killed" SL. I haven't been an active resident in years, but it still seems to be quite a vibrant world to me, unlike Multiverse, Blue Mars, and Entropia. Second Life has succeeded where very few have: Second Life is coming up on being operational for TWO DECADES. That's pretty incredible.

To his last point, it is pretty incredible that Second Life has been operational for nearly 20 years, and "killed" is fairly hyperbolic. (Unless we more narrowly mean killed as in "killed any prospect at substantially growing the userbase".)

As for the in-world shopping experience being laggy and an eyesore (which is usually the case), I think that also points to serious design/community management failures on Linden Lab's part:

Second Life's Web-Based Marketplace Hurt Second Life's Community Like Amazon Hurt Small Town Stores (Comment of the Week)

What went wrong with Second Life? Bryan Ogden has an intriguing take in that post of the same name last week:

The thing that killed SL IMHO wasn't a specific technical feature... It was web-based shopping for stuff. And point-to-point teleportation. It was an attempt to make SL convenient and consumer friendly.

Why? When I first got to SL it was mostly new adopters and mall-based shopping - in order to find new content you had to move an avatar in the world.

I built a theme-based store and a community formed around the items I sold. For a time I was in the top sales categories. I advertised using the in-world ad system.

But then the entire ecosystem and economics changed from immersive in-world participation -- to buying stuff on the web devoid of community, or an engagement with creators.

Bryan relates what happened next to what's happened when small local businesses in the real world were forced to compete with Internet-based retail giants:

Where Did Linden Lab Go Wrong With Second Life? (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: Official 2009 commercial for Second Life which very briefly shows the in-world creation tools in the background only once -- and doesn't mention them at all in the captions

Reader "Pulsar" posted a comment last week that touches on one of Silicon Valley's greatest mysteries that fascinates me to this day: How did Second Life, which received massive mainstream media coverage from 2006-2008, even showing up in several popular TV shows and movies, still steadfastly refuse to grow much beyond its existing userbase of some 600,000? Pulsar's answer: