New World Notes

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:

Philip Rosedale Supports Andrew Yang for President, Suggests Ways to Implement Yang's Freedom Dividend

Second Life/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale just published a really interesting blog post that brings his long experience with virtual economies and virtual currencies to the very real idea of a Universal Basic Income -- or what Presidential candidate Andrew Yang calls the Freedom Dividend.

"I think Yang is great and I'd love to see him get elected," Philip tells me. So his post delves into the challenges of putting Yang's plan to give $1000 to every American adult per month into practice. Rosedale's key idea -- eliminate the fiscal middle man of banks: 

Most people (who aren’t economists) naturally assume that [the Freedom Dividend] would be very hard because… who would cover the bill to give away all this money? It has to come from somewhere, right? The actual answer is more complicated: when an economy is growing (meaning people are making and selling more and more valuable goods and services over time), the government actually needs to print more money, so that the value of the dollar remains stable.

But where does this newly printed money go? Mostly in the USA it gets loaned to Big Banks, and is more generally a tool that governments can use to to their own advantage. But a more direct (and democratic) approach would be to simply give newly printed money out equally to all citizens, which can very substantially offset the cost of basic income.

"As US President," Philip expands to me in e-mail, "I'd work with the Federal Reserve to change monetary policy to redirect funds to citizens that were originally going to be loaned to banks... That alone is something like $1 trillion per year. Plus, any gains in real GDP can also go back directly to everyone in the same way. "

Philip's latest virtual world, High Fidelity, uses its own cryptocurrency, and Second Life with its Linden Dollars (exchangeable for real dollars) continues to maintain a thriving virtual economy -- so thriving, the grassroots content creators on the platform make as much money as the actual company. So as you'd expect, Philip's blog post has suggestions for implementing cryptocurrency to manage the Freedom Divided -- and points to Second Life's own use of a Universal Basic Income (so to speak) as a potential proof point:

Posts Critical of Second Life On Blogger Network OK, Says Linden Lab

From "Fighting the Front", New World Notes' story on a Second Life battle between real world fascists and anti-fascists

After announcing the official Second Life Blogger Network, Linden Lab posted an FAQ that attempts to address some questions SL bloggers have raised about it -- including mine, regarding this specific criterion on what user blog posts the company plans to promote:

"The blog post highlights a positive implementation of the Second Life experience, with well-written text and high-quality imagery."

Does this mean blog posts about non-positive uses of Second Life don't qualify for promotion? The FAQ says, "we’ll still consider posts from blogs that are often critical of Second Life". But would that include posts that report on bad or controversial community behavior -- for example, a blog post reporting on racist behavior or content in SL?

Judging By My Inventory, "5% of Second Life Content is Adult" Sounds About Right -- Comment of the Week

Pictured: Cassie Middles' Inventory Management Tutorial

Lots of readers guffawed at a Linden Lab staffer's claim that just 5% of its Second Life revenue comes from Adult-rated content, but reader "irihapeti" took a look at her inventory, and...

5% would probably be about right overall content-wise.

I have 18,884 items in my Inventory.

Of which 12 are NFSW devices. Clothes, hair, shoes, bodies, jewelry and appliers accounts for about 4,300 of which maybe 10 outfits could be considered NSFW in the real world.

And 18,884 is on the low side, for a typical Second Life user! In any case, here's the what the rest of her inventory looks like (and this is probably similar for most other SLers):

Yes, Many Top SL Fashion Brands Are Likely Outsourcing Content Creation to the Developing World

Deep discussion around last week's post about the oligopolies of Second Life raised a point from "SoManyPrims" that deserves a follow-up. Responding to the suggestion that many big SL brands are "using cheap mesh labor in India to do 80% of the work:", the reader asked:

Are there any supporting sources for the "cheap mesh labor in India" type comments? Not really aware of how the large brands operate but have always been curious and would like to learn more.

My friend is also convinced that none of the big designers spend any time in SL and have never been part of the community. Some of the negative sentiment seems to be exacerbated by lack of insight.

The second point is probably true for many major designers, who tend to not be less involved in Second Life as users, partly because they can no longer participate in-world without being swamped by customer requests/complaints. (It's difficult to even keep their alternate accounts anonymous.)

Far as the question about India, I don't know of any specific SL fashion brands doing this, but it's quite plausible. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't doing any outsourcing. After all, major content creators have been outsourcing Second Life work to the developing world for nearly 15 years:

How Much of Second Life's Economy Is an Oligopoly?

"It's interesting to see you use the term 'oligopoly'," writes "Bart", responding to last week's post debating how far (if at all) Second Life has fallen away from its original "Your World, Your Imagination" vision. "People have been saying this for years in SL and it's nice to hear you coming around to understanding its hindrance to diversity and uniqueness."

For the record, I referred to "the oligopoly of mesh avatar makers", as it's fair to assert that that particular market is dominated by a handful of brands. But that's just one of Second Life's largest industries (so to speak), and I don't know if others are also under oligopolic control. Bart, however, believes that's the case:

Bakes on Mesh Will Greatly Improve Second Life Performance -- If SLers, Viewers & Mesh Brands Adopt It

Left and right: Bakes on mesh when using the updated SL viewer... and a current 3rd party viewer (photos by Rhonda Huntress via this thread) 

Linden Lab just announced the official release of Bakes on Mesh [aka BOM], which aims to optimize mesh-based attachments. (Lack of mesh optimization has utterly crippled Second Life performance in recent years.) And while actual SL users are struggling to get it to work with their existing mesh and current viewers (see above), it does have great promise. NiranV, creator of the Black Dragon SL viewer and Second Life's sharpest critic of poor performance, is cautiously optimistic. 

"Bakes on Mesh idea is nice and it's a much needed thing, especially with onion layers," as he puts it to me. "This could potentially reduce texture memory usage by up to 75%, and polygon counts too." He's planning to merge BOM to his own viewer soon, and Firestorm, Second LIfe's most popular viewer, is already doing so.

One key challenge, however, is BOM's compatibility with existing mesh-based avatar content. It remains to be seen if the leading brands will update existing content for their customers -- or require them to buy new BOM-based mesh.

Linden Lab Should Show More Interest in Optimized SL Content... and Less Favoritism to Resource-Heavy Creation (Comment of the Week)

Massive discussion over last week's post about Linden Lab promoting Catwa, culminating in this rant by Soda Sullivan.

First, shame on you Wagner for simply dismissing in your lead paragraph the fact that Linden Lab though it was okay to put its finger on the scales of the market and promote a single creator of mesh heads over all the others.

The irony that they chose one of the baddest actors in polygon resource designs is ironic. It is basically a nice kick in the teeth for any content creator trying to make a less resource heavy product and get into the market.

For the record, I didn't "dismiss" that fact, but instead wrote "that's a very worthwhile debate for another time".  And by all means, I'm totally happy if "another time" is now!

Soda goes on to dismiss SLers who resist comparing Second Life to AAA games, which have better graphics and much better optimized mesh content -- and spares her chief ire for Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg:

Linden Lab Officially Promoting Resource-Heavy Second Life Content That Drastically Hurts SL User Experience

The official Second Life Facebook page recently featured this post promoting a user-made video tutorial for the Catwa Bento Mesh head, one of the most popular and bestselling user brands in Second Life. Some SLers have called this company favoritism and free promotion for content that has competition in the virtual world, and that's a very worthwhile debate for another time.

Perhaps even more notable, however, is this question: Why is Linden Lab promoting mesh-based content that is so resource-heavy, it substantially degrades the user experience for nearly every Second Life user? As reported last year, the top-selling mesh bodies in Second Life -- Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK -- are extremely resource-heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies.

They're so resource-heavy, in fact, a former Linden Lab engineer once told me that using them is effectively like launching a DDOS attack inside Second Life. And now, Linden Lab is effectively promoting those attacks.

But wait, this is just a Facebook post about the Catwa head, not a whole body -- just the head can't be that bad, can it? I asked SL graphics expert NiranV, developer of the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, to take a look in the Catwa shop. This is what he found:

 

Linden Lab Hit By Wrongful Termination Lawsuit Alleging Discrimination & Retaliation for Raising Concerns About Its New Payment Service, Tilia

Kavya Pearlman, an award-winning cybersecurity expert, just went public about a wrongful termination lawsuit she filed yesterday against Linden Lab, where she worked last year. A Muslim-American woman of color, Ms. Pearlman alleges the company discriminated against her, and retaliated against her after she raised security concerns related to Tilia, the company's new payment service which all Second Life users are required to register with by tomorrow.

Ms. Pearlman shared the full text of her legal complaint with me, and it contains a number of highly serious allegations. For instance this passage, summarizing the red flags related to Tilia that she claims she brought up with senior staff: 

In the last year of her employment with Linden Lab serving as the Director of Information Security, Kavya Pearlman raised concerns on multiple occasions to her supervisors, top company executives regarding security risks and possible violations of important laws she observed in Linden’s Second Life and Tilia currency program which prohibit money laundering, child pornography, pedophilia, compromise financial and data security, and other related laws.

She goes on to allege that the company did not respond to these issues, but went ahead with Tilia's launch as scheduled: