New World Notes

Linden Lab Needs to Punish Poorly Optimized Mesh -- Or Reward Well-Made Mesh (Comments of the Week)

Good reader thread responding to my somewhat tossed off remark that, "While you should definitely encourage users to customize their avatars, you also want to impose optimization restrictions so avatars don't become a bloated lag-inducing disaster like they have in SL."

The problem, as Alicia observes, is the company behind Second Life has enabled (encouraged?) poor optimization:

Linden Lab has set the maximum for textures at 1024x1024, and most creators end up making their textures too damn big (any texture size over 1024x1024 max), which then will be forced to the max of 1024x1024; but, remember that LL never set limits on how many verts/faces a mesh item should have. The textures issues, on the other hand, can easily be fixed if people simply went with the allotted sizes (64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512 and the 1024x1024 max) SL can manage.

Also, knowing how to keep the MB down on the textures also helps if the person knows what their doing in GIMP, PhotoShop, or any other photo manipulation program. When it comes to mesh, you still have mesh hair that shoots an avi's complexity near or past 100k, and the same thing can happen with jewelry, clothing, etc. Verts/faces counts also increase/decrease when you resize any mesh object (trees, shrubs, etc.) All of these individual issues ultimately becomes a huge problem that never gets handled as LL only wants to continue working as is...

Everyone knows that LL will never impose restrictions on how maximum number of verts a mesh item can have.

Pulsar argues that Linden Lab should set out rewards and/or restrictions around mesh:

SL's Top User-Run Shopping Site Larger Than Many MMO News Sites

Estimated visits to Seraphimsl.com via analytics site Similar Web

While Second Life might be smaller than many other virtual worlds, do not underestimate how passionate and engaged its core userbase is. As an example of that, consider SeraphimSL, one of many hundreds of user-run sites and blogs advertising SL fashions and housewares. (And Seraphim is probably the very largest, at least in the English-fluent Internet.)

According to SimilarWeb, Seraphim rakes in over half a million pageviews a month. As I was telling someone else in the SL business recently, that's more than enough eyeballs to make a six figure income in real dollars, via advertising.

In terms of unique eyeballs every month, 500K+ probably translates to roughly 100,000 actual people. (Way back in the day, unsurprisingly, metaverse expert Gwyneth Llewellyn estimated 100,000 as the approximate number of SL's most engaged community members.)

The number is pretty impressive even when you pull outside the userbase of Second Life: Seraphim's page views are larger than many news sites about virtual worlds/MMOs, like this one. It's even about as large or on par with some fairly well known tech news sites and blogs.

What's this mean?

Want to Understand What Linden Lab's Acquisition Means for Second Life? Ask the Owner of a Top SL Virtual Content Brand

Above: Mishi IRL and her Blueberry brand on Facebook

While the SL community's opinion over the world's new corporate owners is decidedly mixed, I put a lot of stock in the analysis of Gizem McDuff, owner and founder of Blueberry -- which has been, since its founding in 2012, one of the most successful and popular virtual style brands in SL. As such, Mishi has some of the best insights on SL's economic operations and Linden Lab's relationship to it:

I see a lot of speculation and fear over Linden Lab's acquisition.

First, Lindens want you to know that nobody is even considering touching the adult content on SL. The new future board members are very aware that SL comes with adult content and they are just fine with it. They do not want to mess with anything that's working. That includes adult content. It would be cool to give them a warm welcome when they are officially on the board.

Let me explore two chief concerns with y'all.

1: SL will be dismantled and shut down.

2: SL will be milked for what it's worth and shut down.

Mishi goes on to break down these scenarios in-depth:

Fifty Linden Fridays This Weekend: Ice Cream Fans from Astralia & Other Adorable, Sexy, Stylish SL Offers -- Click Here to Shop, Teleport, and BUY

Linden Lab's future may now be up in the air, but the legendary and miraculously sustainable Fifty Linden Fridays for Second Life shoppers goes on. Here's this weekend's offers, starting with this face-punchingly adorable item above: Ice cream fans for the blistering Summer from Astralia -- click here to get them at the store.

Not cute enough for you? Then how about these holdable plushie with a complimentary crown:

This pair from Cosmic Dust: Click here to teleport and shop.

Many more FLF fashion, housewares, and other random coolness offerings below, with teleports to take your consumerist avatar ass there:

The Economics of Fifty Linden Fridays -- Or, Why Dozens of SL Merchants Willingly Sell Items for the L$ Equivalent of Twenty Cents

The legendary Fifty Linden Fridays shopping extravaganza, in which top SL brands offer select items for a mere L$50 (i.e. about 20 cents), has been running since 2009.  But it only just occurred to me recently: How the hell does this even make any economic sense?

Or as regular reader Patchouli Woolhara recently commented:

After the initial costs of tier, tooling, marketing, blogotex access, customer support, and hours worked, the marginal cost of these products is close to zero on the merchant's side if the sale is done purely in-world. 

Probably a lot less than zero, actually -- surely most merchants must lose money from FLF?

Not exactly, according to FLF creator and manager OMGWTF Barbecue (whose avatar name I just goddamn adore).

"Partly, FLF brings people to their mainstores," she tells me via Discord. "People might be discovering their store for the first time, and checking out their other products, which is super valuable! On top of that, it's a little special treat for people who are already your customers, something to look forward to. The creator might reduce the price to L$50, but it's likely they'll be able to sell more based on the co-op nature of the event."

She's talking about the power of cross-promotion across brands:

Fifty Linden Fridays: Coolest Deals & Teleports for Shopping This Weekend!

Here's some select items from this week's legendary Fifty Linden Fridays shopping extravaganza, in which top SL brands offer select items for a mere L$50 (i.e. about 20 cents). Above is a seriously cool working bubble gun from BALACLAVA!! -- click here to teleport there to buy.

A couple more cool featured items and the other FLF store links below:

Second Life Usage Now Higher Than Its 2007 Hype Level Period?

Interesting comment from Amanda Dallin, reflecting on SL's recently reported "pandemic boost": 

If the definition of a monthly active user has remained the same then the comparison to the peak in 2007 is valid. Actually there were likely more than 350,000 new registered users a month in 2007 when SL hit the peak of 1.1 million MAU so the number of returning users could be about the same or higher than in 2007 using your math and logic.

This sounds right. 2007 saw a lot more churn due to massively promoted events like a cross-over experience for the television show CSI, mostly from people who were unable to install the program or get past the orientation. However, the definition of a monthly active user has definitely changed since 2007 -- back then, Linden Lab would mainly refer to "Total Residents", i.e. anyone who signed up for an account, whether or not they even installed the program and went in-world.

The definition that hasn't changed is the amount of concurrent users, and that is indisputably much larger now than it was in 2007:

"Pandemic Boost" Reverses Decline of Second Life Monthly Active Users

Interesting tweet from NBC Senior Business Reporter Ben Popken, citing Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg: Since the pandemic, Second Life has seen monthly active users (or MAU) grow from 700,000 to now 900,000. That's good news for the SL community - but how good depends on the definition of a monthly active user:

"MAU represents all unique users who log in to Second Life in a given month," company spokesman Brett Linden tells me. "This includes newly registered, returning, or reengaged users. Newly registered users who do not log in are not included in our MAU calculation."

 

The surprising thing to me is this: Second Life MAU was at 800,000 in 2017 (also according to Linden Lab), so since then, usage has continued to fall, to beneath 700,000 before the pandemic hit.

 

Also, Second Life has reported attracting 350,000 monthly registrations on average, so that too must be factored into this MAU number:

Now in Sinespace: Adjust Clothing Tint in Real Time With Color Wheel Feature -- Plus Creator Tips from Gaby of PrettyDeceased

The Eris Bodycon is a new strapless leather dress in the shop of Sinespace (an NWN media partner) which includes a new-ish feature -- the ability to adjust the tint of a clothing item in real time to a near infinite degree, using a color wheel user interface. (See above.)

Created by Gaby, owner of the PrettyDeceased brand, the color wheel feature has actually been part of Sinespace for some time.

 “But current clothing isn’t taking advantage of that,” she tells me, “so I decided to make an outfit that is properly set up to fully use the material tinting option.”

She even wrote this tutorial here for other creators to incorporate the existing color wheel option into their own items.

Gaby also sells clothing on the Second Life marketplace under her PrettyDeceased brand, so has some insight on the color change differences from world to world.

“Sinespace does it in a more in-depth way and not just like a surface tinting, as in SL. In SL, you have a texture for your item and the tinting option; now if you try to make it black you will just cover the texture and lose details like shadow etc… 

“If you have a correctly set up item in Sinespace that has a normal map and an ambient occlusion map; the game will respect each map no matter the color. As a matter of fact, except for the pattern options, the tintable dress doesn’t have a texture at all. The final texture, or what you see, it’s brought to you live directly there.”

Gaby started creating content for Sinespace earlier this year, and has tips and insights for other SL content creators who might want to try their hand on the Unity-based platform:

Racist Slurs Being Used as Search Tags by Some SL Marketplace Vendors; Linden Lab Investigating

New World Notes contributor Cajsa Lilliehook just pointed me to this Second Life forum thread of users complaining that the SL Marketplace allows racist slurs to be used as product tags -- and that some vendors are taking advantage of that to advertise virtual world content promoting racial stereotypes. I've been able to confirm this is indeed happening; an extremely unpleasant thing to research, especially now. (Screengrab below the break, with obvious content warnings.)

This should not be the case, as original poster Aemeth Lysette puts it:

Little by little, SL has changed for the better, but I still see racist slurs used as tags on Marketplace for various products. This should be stated in the TOS as being disallowed, so we can report items that return when you search these tags. Second Life should not be a place that operates on any facet of hate. Not even for the sake of "free speech". This isn't a country--it's a virtual world run by a corporation.

She wrote that last Sunday. Just a few hours ago, a Linden Lab staffer responded in the same thread: