Displayed below! Should only take two-three minutes to complete, and the more people who do take it, the clearer picture everyone will have about the virtual world economy. Last week some readers were having trouble scrolling down to see every question, so here's a compact version with the scroll bar on the right:
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SimilarWeb has a new report on traffic and usage of Secondlife.com, so I reached out to the analytics company to know more. Overall, user traffic remains stable (21 million visits in December 2018, somewhat more than July 2018, with 19 million), but the biggest surprise is where the visits are coming from: The United States is not the largest visitor in recent months.
As it turns, an analyst with SimilarWeb Marketing Solutions tells me, the highest traffic in November and December is from Brazil. This is based on comparing traffic from the first half of 2018 (January - June) and the second half of the year (July- December): "The direct traffic between the two time periods increased by 21%, along with significant increases in paid search, social, and referrals. All of these combined, likely increased the brand awareness, driving users to directly seek out the site. Display ads actually saw a 49% decrease between the two time periods." In other words, Brazilian aren't primarily visiting SecondLife.com after clicking on an ad, but going there directly. So it's likely we've seen an organic growth in Brazil users in the last several months.
Now here's SimilarWeb's Top 25 visits to SecondLife.com by country for the whole of 2018, which also contains some surprises:
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As promised last year, here's a survey for SL-based merchants -- eight questions (plus one bonus) on your virtual world business in 2018, and your forecasts for 2019. PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ALL QUESTIONS:
Please share with other merchants -- and, of course, comment below to discuss your answers, and suggest how the next survey can be improved.
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"So in 2018," reports senior statistician Tyche Shepherd, "Second Life grew by 474 regions." Most of that were regions owned by Linden Lab, but in terms of private estates owned by users -- where Linden Lab makes most of its money from SL -- there was positive growth. "First year of growth," Tyche notes, "since 2011." The net change was just +14 regions (0.1% of the total), but this makes 2018 the first year in many years in which private sim ownership did not end in a loss. (It's been declining steadily since at least 2012.)
"It looks like The Lab's changes in Maintenance [fees] managed to significantly halt the steady decline we've been witnessing over previous years," Tyche tells me. But she's not optimistic that this trend will continue into this new year:
Continue reading "2018 Was the 1st Year Second Life Saw Positive Private Sim Growth Since 2011" »
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Above -- human avatar with Maitreya body, polycount total circled
My report earlier this month that some of the top-selling mesh bodies in Second Life -- such as Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK -- are extremely resource heavy, and degrading SL performance for everyone around them, has caused a lot of conversation. Many readers claim the polycounts being reported can't possibly be that much. So here's an easy way to check for yourself:
Download the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, then select Dragon > My Useful Features > Performance Tools > Advanced Complexity Window. As you can see above, the Maitreya body here uses well over 100,000 polygons.
How much is that? By contrast, a character in Red Dead Redemption 2, the latest AAA hit, has polycounts estimated in the 40,000-60,000 polygon range. (Here's a handy site showing character polycounts for other top AAA games with high-end graphics.)
You want to see something insane? Here's a Belleza body with over 500,000 polygons:
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NWN Cassie Middles has a peek at the Cutie Collective's new holiday-themed hunt for bargain shoppers in search of great content -- and as she puts it, aims to help reverse a worrying trend in the Second Life economy:
"Ho Ho Hunt is an amazing hunt to the grid that is bringing events back to the mainstores. There's been a slight epidemic lately where stores really only make profit at major events, making it hard for their other products to be known, making creators constantly only work on deadlines for projects, and feel pressure. I'd love to see more hunts like this that might help people relax, help new people discover stores, including the fact that new SLers can find cheaper items to make their avatars look updated and wonderful."
Click here to directly teleport, and look for this storefront to get started:
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Pictured: NiranV's avatar side-by-side with a SLINK mesh body - click to compare polygon count
If you're using Second Life and you're lagging for no obvious reason, you might want to take a close look at the users around you. Chances are, the problem is literally skin deep. That's because some of 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. NiranV, developer of the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, tells me he's experienced this problem first hand.
"What I see and hear from them, both from friends, personal experience, and their customers when I have to help them with Viewer-related issues, I find more and more reasons every time to absolutely hate them. Those three are the worst ones anyway -- Belleza being at the top, followed by Maitreya and then SLINK."
The problem, he says, is these mesh bodies all have excessive amounts of polygons that the Second Life grid attempts to display to every user in the scene.
"Maitreya starts with 80,000-100,000 — only the base body. Belleza was something like 200,000+ last time I checked. Modern games use roughly 20-40k for an entire character. A few games use more, obviously, but 20-40k is standard today. So with 100-200k you can imagine how much more straining avatars are. And they are just bodies — [not counting] clothes, no hair, nothing."
Even a single avatar wearing one of those bodies can hurt SL framerate performance by up to 5o%, and still more, as more avatars with these bodies enter the same space.
"SL is a complex system, not even super static tests always show the same results. So there's a +/- 10% here and there. But most scenes with single humans, wearing avatars built with either of these bodies, manages to half my framerate, if not make it completely unstable. I can see this behavior every day right in front of my parcel where human [avatars] travel to Firestorm's parcel. Just 1-2 of them are enough to drop me from 80-100 FPS down to 30-40 FPS on average… I’d say you generally see 30-50% reduction in your framerate for the first avatar, subsequently less for more."
Second Life is often faulted for poor graphics, but a key problem is Second Life struggling to display so many user-generated polygons at once:
"Entire scenes in SL consist of up to 20 million polygons. That's many times more than entire levels in modern games come up with. It’s absolutely insane. These bad practices of human mesh creators need to stop. Stop spamming 1024x1024 on everything. Stop spamming ‘subdivide’ on meshes and doubling/tripling/quadrupling their polygons when not necessary."
Other graphics experts have also told me the same thing about mesh bodies like Maitreya, Belleza, and SLINK. The real problem is these bodies are probably worn by hundreds of thousands of active SL users, and in NiranV's eyes, the community has done little to raise the issue:
"Everyone puts Maitreya and Belleza at the top of the list for being the very best and finest," as he puts it. "Every fucking blogger blogs about them, blogs in excitement how good it is, how good more polygons are—not understanding what it means. Everyone just smacks shit on their avatar expecting the viewer to magically do whatever is necessary to produce usable framerates. And yell at Linden when it doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if professional coders were looking at SL from a technical standpoint and wondering how SL can even run still, how it manages to keep all this complex shit piled up and not break apart under the sheer load that everyone puts both the server and client every day, every second they use it."
It's the unlikeliest example of the tragedy of the commons: In a world where everyone is trying to show off their awesome avatar to others, avatar enhancements have become so resource heavy, no one can actually see them. It's probably why Second Life has largely become an offline, solo activity, with people shooting screenshots and video of their avatars posing alone -- because that's the only reliable way to get a decent performance.
But if the SL community has inadvertently caused this tragedy, Niran believes the community can also call for popular skin/mesh body brands to better optimize their products:
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Here's another notable result from that survey of SL merchants we discussed on Tuesday: How much real life money they're making from Second Life content. While 42% of those surveyed say SL is "a full time job and main income source", this question above indicates just how much of that income they're typically earning.
While the majority are making USD $1000 or less (those selecting "1"), about a third of merchants are making between $1000 and $5000 a month (options 2-5). But the results on the other end of the spectrum are even more surprising:
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Among the reasons given for the apparent SL recession that we're currently in, is the high levels of drama and social strife among merchants and consumers. So NWN's Cassie Middles and some of her friends are here to lay down some basic principles of etiquette and best practices -- watch above. Guidelines include:
Most of these principles, discerning readers might have noticed, are equally applicable to real life. Except when it comes to contacting an SL merchant, that's pretty unique and ridiculously counter-intuitive:
Continue reading "Cassie's Clips: Important Etiquette Tips for SL Shoppers & Merchants" »
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Well-Optimized Alternatives to Resource-Heavy Mesh Bodies for SL
Last week's post on the leading mesh bodies for Second Life causing major performance issues has provoked a pretty heated conversation in comments, with some blaming users (get a better computer!), others blaming Linden Lab (if high poly mesh is a problem, the Lindens shouldn't have allowed it!), to blaming big brands like Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK* (they have a monopoly on the market!),. Others helpfully pointed out some mesh body alternatives that are much better optimized than the market leaders. For instance, writes Fred Beckhusen:
SL Marketpage listings here.
Reader Sarali has a whole hosts of suggestions:
Continue reading "Well-Optimized Alternatives to Resource-Heavy Mesh Bodies for SL" »
Posted on Monday, December 10, 2018 at 03:29 PM in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL, SL Mesh | Permalink | Comments (12)
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