New World Notes

Watch: This Bento-Based Hoverboard With Sick Maneuvers is Seriously The Coolest Item I've Seen in Second Life for Some Time

Maybe I'm jaded or more recently out of the loop, but this hoverboard by Val'More using the latest Bento-based avatar skeleton tech is among the most eye-popping pieces of Second Life content I've seen in some time. I reached out to Val'More about how they created it and its amazing flip tricks, and haven't heard back. But if you want to check it out first-hand now, it's on sale in the Engine Room, a steampunk-themed shopping bazaar that's about as impressive: Click here to teleport.

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:

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:

Top Second Life Creator is Importing His Avatars into VRChat -- And Successfully Selling Them for 10x the SL Price

What you’re looking at above may be the first sign of a larger trend: This furry avatar for VRChat is now selling on Gumroad for $40. That’s not surprising, given VRChat’s fast-growing userbase. 

What is perhaps surprising is that the very same avatar is selling in Second Life for a tenth of the price. That’s because “Krample”, who has been an SL creator for years (listed in the SL Marketplace as Orange Nova Avatars), is now finding far more success selling his avatar content to the VRChat market.

“I've been making content in Second Life for the past decade or so,” Krample told me last month, “but it's increasingly brutal to be working in an engine that's just so... old. Especially ever since I got a day job working in Unreal, because then I get to have a daily reminder about how much better things could be!”

He declines to discuss his specific day job for the record, but suffice it to say that if you've watched the Super Bowl recently, you've probably seen the visual effects he helped create. 

“So I've just started to port my avatars over to VRChat, as it's a much more modern engine,” he continued. “It helps a lot that people in VRC seem to be willing to pay far more reasonable amounts for the same product, the VRC version of the same avatar costs about ten times as much. Which may sound obscene, but I am just following market rates.”

As evidence of that, he shows me a recent screengrab of other VRChat avatars on Gumroad (below) priced roughly the same.

OK, but how are his VRChat sales doing?

Black Friday Sales in Second Life: All Dutchie Adult Items 20% Off!

Update, 11/30: Black Friday offer now over!

If you're planning your virtual world shopping trips for this Friday, famed SL housewares brand Dutchie (who we're honored to call a sponsoring partner here at New World Notes) will have a Black Friday sale -- 20% off all Adult-rated items. 

 This is actually Dutchie's very first Black Friday sale in SL. "I know a lot of people have less money to spend this year," Dutchie tells me, "so this might give people a chance to buy that adult toy they have had their eye on for a long time. Starting Friday the 27th everything in my adult department inworld is 20% off, even the newest designs, and the sale will last until Sunday."

All sales at her in-world store -- click here to start browsing, and to be first in line with the Friday sales start!

Does the SL Community Care Enough to Clamor for Well-Optimized Mesh?

Pictured: Slink Redux body bundle, a rare example of popular SL mesh avatar content that's also well-optimized

Last Friday I wrote about the new Black Dragon viewer update which checks whether a mesh avatar is well-optimized or not. Reader "Down With Underboob" (LOL) tried it out in SL over the weekend, to see how much mesh content was poorly optimized, and came away shocked:

So I took Black Dragon out for a spin at a fairly busy club. There's only one avatar in the place who is "decently optimized" per the report. This guy is wearing a system avi and system clothes... I like what BD offers, but please get real. Nobody wants to go back to looking like an avatar from 2008. Photographers like to use BD's capabilities, but again, they're not going to use system avatars to pass these complexity tests.

Show me some mesh bodies, heads, and clothes that pass these tests and don't look like they're from 2008, and I'll consider trying them. Does he think we're all going to run around bald? I don't want Warcraft hair in SL. Until then, I'll stick with what I have. I'm satisfied with the 15-20 fps I get at this club and I can get upwards of 100 FPS when I'm hanging out on my platform at home in Bellisseria.

I'd also point out that he's tilting at windmills if he thinks designers are going to start posting complexity/triangle counts in their vendor ads.

I'd say it's the responsibility of the many SL bloggers and YouTubers to report on the complexity/triangle counts of the content they feature, warning them that high poly items will likely cause lag. Failing to do so would be like a real life fashion reporter failing to mention the clothing items they're recommending are made of toxic materials.

As to her request for optimized mesh to try out, Slink is among the few mesh body creators well-known for optimization.

But is there a market for good optimization in general? Reader "Seph" thinks not so:

Seraphim Secrets: How a Second Life Fashion Blog Earned 60 Million+ Views

Seraphim, the massive Second Life shopping blog, recently opened a Cuban-themed shopping sim in SL itself -- click here to visit.  This virtual island is a long time coming since the web site launched in 2011, going on to become the largest user-run SL blog by far. Raking in nearly 61 million reported pageviews since then, currently on track to exceed over 12 million in just this year alone, Seraphim is, as I've noted before, more popular than many professionally run MMO news sites. (New World Notes, for instance, has only attracted a distant ~15 million views!) With pageviews like this, it's likely that well over half of Second Life's ~600,000 active user base visits Seraphim on a regular basis.

Or to make another comparison: Seraphim SL gets about as many visits as Fashionista, a top real life fashion blog.

Despite this wild popularity, Seraphim founders and co-owners Kess Crystal and Awylder1 still hold full-time jobs in real life -- in the healthcare sector, Kess tells me. "So 2020 has been particularly challenging for us," she notes, "both managing Seraphim and dealing with the ramifications of COVID... we have an amazing management team in place and we simply could not do it without them."

But if you think those millions of pageviews translate into millions of dollars in profit, you may be mistaken: 

"We're often amused by the wildly optimistic assumptions we've read on social media and our reaction is often 'I WISH!'," as Kess puts it, when I ask her about Seraphim's revenue. "We are a cost heavy business in terms of payroll and the amount we have to pay for hosting such a resource heavy site is not insignificant either. As business owners, we reinvest monthly into a fund for new services, scripting, innovation and then draw a salary from the remaining profit."

Kess shares some Seraphim secrets to becoming so big, and future plans with the sim, after the break:

This Halo Lights Up If a Second Life Region You Visit Has Migrated To The Amazon Cloud -- Or Makes a Womp-Womp Sad Trombone Sound If It's Not

Second Life is finally, gradually being migrated to the Amazon cloud, region by region -- but is your region part of that "Uplift"? Now available in the SL Marketplace, the free Fourmilab Cloud Halo cleverly comes to the rescue:

To use the Cloud Halo, simply add it to your outfit. It is an attachment, worn on the head, which has the form of a halo floating above it. The halo is not normally visible. When you arrive in a cloud region, a glowing gold halo will appear above your head, sparkling for a moment, and an ethereal harp will play a few notes. When you arrive back in a non-cloud region, a dull grey halo will appear and a “Sad Trombone” will play. 

This is a seriously fun way of checking for cloud deployment across the virtual world grid, even turning it into a game. For server geeks, here's how the back-end works:

Second Life Registrations Down in 2020 Despite COVID Concurrency Bump

Recent SL sign-up stats via Tyche Shepherd's Grid Survey - click to embiggenate

Talking to Second Life data expert Tyche Shepherd about the Carmen King bump brought up another set of data points that aren't as fun. While it's true, as Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg said back in March, that "[w]e are seeing an increase in new registrations and returning residents during this [COVID] outbreak," that increase didn't last last very long. 

"Trend in signups is down," as Tyche tells me, sharing the chart above. "There was a boost in late March-April but these have been declining since May and there is no significant change in September... Overall this implies that any growth in concurrency is more likely explained by more frequent usage by existing accounts (either lapsed returning or longer online times by active users or a combination of both) rather than new users."

Also the decline in registrations is part of a longer trend: "It also looks like signups have been significantly lower than last year," Tyche adds.

And while SL concurrency did see a COVID bump, that didn't last long: