New World Notes

Unity's New CEO "Needs to Literally Unify Unity!" -- How the Top 3D Engine Became So Broken, and What the Company Must Do To Recover, Post-Riccitiello (Guest Post by Adam Frisby)

Adam Frisby, CEO of metaverse platform creator Sine Wave Entertainment, has been developing with the Unity 3D engine since 2006. So in the wake of former CEO John Riccitiello's self-defenestration from the company earlier this week, he's one of the best qualified people to explain what the company needs to do, to build back its business.

His main suggestion is to appoint a tech/product-focused person as Unity's new CEO: 

“Look, the CEO job utterly sucks, it's an awful grind, and I get that," he tells me. "As a tech person there's really nothing worse than spending all your time putting out fires. Delegating responsibility to someone else is the easy option."

With Unity, however, "you need someone who understands the product -- who wants to build something customers love -- making the calls."

How Unity Broke Its Own Engine

Back in 2017/2018 Unity basically told their engineers, "build something for everyone!" 

So they broke the engine into pieces, so if you needed X you used X, but if Y was better, you use that instead of X.

As a result, Unity now has three entirely separate 3D renderers, three physics engines, two audio engines with some external engines available, two entity systems, two scripting systems, a half dozen networking systems, four UI systems.

I'm not even exaggerating. They literally have that many.

And the kicker: none of them are compatible in the slightest.

So, if you want to reuse stuff from another project, or license some 3rd party tech, from say the Asset Store -- "Good luck!"

It also means if you need features A and B, and they're on different systems -- "Good luck!"

Now it's a total goddamn mess, and someone needs to literally unify Unity.

That's going to take an empowered product manager who can take the hit, and merge everything back together, or at least provide a common interface to all of these parts.

If they do that, they'll make a lot of people happy.

Because up until 2017, you could build for one version of Unity and publish to a dozen devices and take advantage of what's compatible on each without splitting your product into multiple versions.

Now, if you want to, say, have AAA graphics on PS5 and cheaper ones on say the Nintendo Switch, you have to build two versions of your game, one for the high definition renderer, and another for the universal renderer.

That means new art assets, new materials, etc, but also a whole bunch of code too. Also any shaders you've programmed.

When Unity should really have one material format, and one code interface, and the engine adapts under the hood. Like it used to.

But now even stuff like the units used for light intensity are different between the renderers. HD uses Lux or Lumens, and the others use some custom thing. It's totally broken.

Next: How should Unity should improve its product for virtual world/metaverse developers, game devs in general -- and as a business: 

Tutorial: How to Use Second Life's New LinksetData Feature to Create Roleplay & Quest Games (Guest Post)

LSL LinksetData is a relatively new addition to Second Life scripting that veteran devs say can powerfully transform interactive experiences in Second Life.

To illustrate how, longtime scripter Grace Ling, creator of the popular roleplay app, Really Needy HUD, explains how it's used in her roleplay system -- and how it can be used in a location-finding game.

Read on for her tutorial! 

Richard Bartle, Legendary MMO Designer, Reviews Amazon MMO New World

Pioneering MMO game designer Richard Bartle, author of the monumentally influential book Designing Virtual Worlds, recently started playing the MMO New World. Here's his hands-on review, including design tips for the developers:

 

I've been playing New World for the past couple of months. There was an update yesterday, bringing a whole new 50 hours of content with it, so I took this as an opportunity to uninstall (total time played: 360 hours).

 

On the whole, I rather liked New World. OK, so the quests were truly awful and 100 hours elapsed between my being given the final main-story quest element (a dungeon run) and my being geared up enough to complete it, but the lore was well-constructed and the world was very nicely put-together (except for the towns, which in common with those of every other RPG in existence were confusingly or irritatingly laid-out).

 

What I particularly found refreshing, though, was the way it encouraged players to make their own goals.

For example, in the end game there are areas containing chests guarded by elite mobs, and players self-organise "chest runs" to descend en masse on such areas to lay waste to the guards and loot the chests. There's no formal quest to do this, it's more of a "here's some stuff you might want" challenge thrown down by the designers that the players have accepted.

 

Other such challenges, such as pop-up events ("corruption portals" here — they're FATEs in FFXIV and rifts in Rift) were not so attractive, though, and something of an inconvenience at times if they appeared right where the mobs that you have a quest to kill were roaming.

 

As usual, I knew when I started that I'd be leaving after a couple of months so I didn't join a guild. I couldn't really join one anyway, because the server population was so low. There are three factions in New World, and all members of a guild have to be in the same faction as each other.

 

As is often the case when three-way inter-faction PvP is involved, one faction completely dominates, another just about holds its own and a third is nowhere. I didn't know what the situation was when I signed up to a faction, and happened to plump for the middle one. Its guilds were very PvP focused, because of the hold-their-own requirement, and they weren't looking for people who didn't perhaps enjoy having their heads handed to them on a plate on a daily basis.

 

I think I only ever saw one recruitment ad for my faction, excluding plaintive ones in French, German or Polish that could have been for anything for all I knew.

 

NEXT UP -- combat design, crafting, music, developer notes, and more:

 

Richard Bartle, Top Virtual World Expert, Tries Explaining Core Problems With NFT & Blockchain at a Crypto Conference. It Does Not Go Well.

 

Richard Bartle, the game industry's most respected expert on virtual worlds and the virtual economies in them, was recently invited to speak at a UK cryptocurrency conference about the immense challenges of integrating NFTs and blockchain into a virtual world (to put it diplomatically). He recently posted on social media what happened next, and with permission, I'm republished it here.   

 

 

I was in London yesterday evening to sit on a panel for an informal group called the Crypto Circle. The members are all people who are interested in crypto-currencies, mainly on the investment side (seed fund investors, hedge fund managers, regulatory bodies, banks) but also including tools creators and commentators.

 

The reason I was on the panel was because of the conflation of blockchain, web3 and metaverse concepts. People seemed to be of the opinion that blockchain tech would be a boon for gamers and that this would extend to the metaverse as a whole. I was invited merely to explain why it wasn't all quite as blissfully rosy as they perhaps thought it was.

 

In the end, the panel didn't get much to say; members of the audience started asking each other questions.

 

I did explain some of the issues arising from the use of NFTs and play-to-earn for games, but people either ignored them, brushed them aside or doubled down on them.

 

Guest Post: Why a Longtime Roleplayer Left Second Life For Fortnite Creative

Longtime urban fantasy author Victor Ziblis is -- or rather, was -- a longtime member of the Second Life roleplay community, who first joined the world to promote his novels. 

"[I]t was actually a marketing stunt suggested by my publicist," he tells me, "The advertising stunt went off pretty well, but I found Second Life to be so enjoyable that I stayed for over three years.  I remember Club Caribe/Habitat on Quantum Link, and this gave me the same feel except it was 3D." And so he stayed in Second Life, even becoming entrenched enough in the community that he was promoted director of medical services on a major collection of roleplay sims.

But he recently left Second Life, "because it occurred to me that I was spending a lot of money on a thing that wasn't really returning me with anything but an hour or three of roleplay a week, and mostly was just my character lounging around in front of his home.  I'm not trying to get laid, and clubbing is played out to me so what was the point of sticking around?"

Before completely leaving, however, he posted a long and passionate rant on /SecondLife cheerfully entitled "Fortnite is eating our lunch." And while I don't necessarily agree with it all, it's worth considering by other members of the SL roleplay community -- and for members of Linden Lab itself, as they consider how to better serve that community.

Reprinted with permission (with some editing by the author), here's Victor's rant in full below: 

Second Life Brands: Here’s Why It’s So Hard to Give You Linden Dollars -- Plus Three Ways to Make it Much Easier (Guest Post)

Whiskey Monday is an acclaimed SL artist; follow her on Twitter @Whiskey_Day 

Dear Makers of Amazing Things in Second Life,

Let me start by saying: I LOVE YOU. I would not be in Second Life without you. I could not do what I do without your inventive, beautiful, well-crafted creations. Thank you for all that you do. I enjoy shopping for and collecting the imaginative items you sell. I want to support your work! 

When I can find you. And when I finally find your store, if I can find the item I’m searching for, even better. Because it’s not that simple, is it? Many of you make it tough to shop in your store. 

Please, please, please – I’m begging you – make it easier to give you my money. 

I keep a notebook of cool things I see, and who created them. If I’m wandering a sim and see a nice plant, I don’t want to leave right that moment to go buy it. So, I inspect it, note the creator (for our purposes here, let’s call the item maker SuperStore69), and then carry on exploring. 

Later, after I’ve been abused over the phone by yet another client who thinks the universe revolves around them (off you fuck, Chad), I want some retail therapy. I flip open my SL notebook and see my note about that plant at SuperStore69 and that’s just the ticket! What could make me feel better? Gimme plant.

Second Life Search is shitty, but it’s still where we start. I open Search in my viewer and look up SuperStore69. Nothing. Nada. Zip. But I want the plant. So I open SL Marketplace in my browser, and I type in SuperStore69. In this case, YAY, there they are! But no plant. 

So I click the link for the in-world Store...

Robert Scoble: Facebook Identities on VR Are the Biggest Strategy Tax of All Time (Guest Post)

Robert Scoble has co-authored four books on technology, the latest of which, “The Infinite Retina” lays out why Spatial Computing will reshape seven industries. He grew up in Silicon Valley and has had a front-row seat on the technology industry since he toured Apple Computer back in 1977. Here he takes some time away from his Summer vacation to give us some insights into why Facebook is forcing its users to use their real identities on its VR headsets sold under the Oculus brand name.

I’ve been watching the past few days as the VR industry has been outraged by a Facebook decision to force all its users on its VR headsets to sign up for a Facebook user account. When I worked at Microsoft we called this kind of decision to serve a business purpose, and not immediately improve customers’ lives, “a strategy tax.” This probably is the biggest strategy tax of all time.

I get the outrage, but the industry will get over it quickly. Here’s why.

In my experience consumers won’t pay hundreds of dollars more for competing devices that do less.

In a few weeks I hear Facebook will announce a new device (and maybe more) that will be lower in price than the current Oculus Quest (which is a standalone device that costs $400). There are really no good competitors for a standalone device. The ones that exist cost more and do less (and that gap will get more stark over time due to the billions in R&D Facebook is spending).

What the industry also isn’t getting is that this isn’t really about devices that are out today or coming tomorrow, but are about products that are being developed for 2022-2025 launches. Namely XR glasses that do some combination of augmented and virtual reality.

There are two fronts for why Facebook needs to tie users to real Facebook identities:

1. A pricing war with Apple.
2. A war over social functionality that soon will come.

All of these are about XR glasses. Let’s dig into each.

From Second Life User to Second Life Developer - Dave Kap's Linden Memoir

Dave at Linden Lab (note the nerf guns) - photo by Alexi Kostibas

With a well-known Second Life social media star recently joining Linden Lab as an employee, I reached out to Dave Kap, an indie game developer who began his own career that way, first as an SL user from a small town in upstate New York, to share his own experience. This is his memoir of his time with Linden Lab, starting as a user, then working at Linden Lab as an engine developer,  then in operations, support, management, and finally release engineering -- and what he learned about Second Life "from the inside" along the way.

I was a super old resident in Second Life. I signed up for the beta and got invited in January of 2003, shortly after the beta had launched. It was my first year of college and I was joining any game beta I could in the hopes that, down the line, my experience beta testing for a game company could get me connected to the industry when I graduated. However, upon realizing the power Second Life had as a platform, I quickly became addicted to both the software and the community within. I put work in, made cool stuff, became a popular resident, made friends with many of the amazing creators of the time, and also made friends with the alternate accounts Lindens had, only a fraction of which I knew were Lindens until I was officially hired.  

I eventually moved across the country to work for Linden Lab as an engineer. My first visit (I was flown out to help out with Linden's plans for GDC 2005) was the most impactful.

Next: From growing up in a small town to living and working in San Francisco

Raph Koster on What Social VR Platforms (Plus Twitter & Reddit) Should Learn from MMOs of the Past

Postmortems, a new book by renowned MMO game designer Raph Koster, recounts his many years building classic virtual worlds like Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Metaplace -- his attempt to build the metaverse -- and the lessons they impart to current virtual communities. (3D, VR, or otherwise.) Reprinted with permission of the author, how player killing in Ultima Online relates to Twitter and Facebook, and why Metaplace failed to grow.

As I was working on the book, I was struck repeatedly by how relevant so many of the old lessons were to what’s going on today on the Internet. For example, the many revelations about social media manipulation and the utter ineffectiveness of major operators like Facebook and Twitter to control bad behavior on the part of their users was much on my mind as I wrote about the history of Ultima OnlineUO was notorious for freeform playerkilling, which the market rejected decisively even though the game offered freedoms and fun that simply couldn’t be had in other games. That tension between freedom and griefing continues to play out…

If a player was killed by another player (and wasn’t a criminal at the time, and was of good notoriety, and so on), a window would pop up letting them report the crime. A player could choose to not report it, if they felt it was an accident or the incident was an instance of good roleplaying, but honestly, this just about never happened. People always reported.

Once the killer got too many reports, everything in their bank was instantly confiscated. Any gold they had became a bounty on their head. They instantly became a Dread Lord along with all the penalties that accrued thereto. And their name, description (hair color, skin tone, and so on) went on the local bulletin board, along with the bounty on their head.

Reports could age out, so you could avoid a bounty by spacing out your kills, but bounties never went away. And if you kept getting reported, your bank account would be repeatedly confiscated and the gold added on. Eventually, victims were able to add their own gold to the reward as well.

If a murderer was killed by a player who had less murders than they and who was neutral or better in notoriety, they suffered an immediate loss of 10% of all of their advancement. And their head was chopped off and put in the backpack of their killer. Returning the head to a city guard near wherever the bounty was posted resulted in the reward being given to the bounty hunter.

The update notes cheerfully noted:

Bounties may remain posted in other cities even though the reward has been claimed, but a given bounty can only be claimed once in the world, unless the killer returns to their ways. This will likely result in a killer who has bounties in multiple cities getting killed over and over again by eager reward claimants, for no gain. Our advice is, don't end up with lots of bounties on your head. :)

Ah, frontier justice. And there were indeed high hopes that these penalties, which seemed extravagant at the time, would do the trick.

Spoiler: they didn’t.

Murderers quickly figured out the threshold number of reports and how quickly they aged out, to dance along the line. Then they started making a point of storing all their valuables in their houses instead of in a bank, so that there was no reward or confiscation to worry about. When players started supplying their own money for the rewards, the murderers simply began treating the bounty boards as a twisted form of high score table. They would coordinate with another player who would create a new character with a spotless record, allow the murderer to be slain, swallow the stat loss death penalty, and split the money!

If all of this sounds hilarious, consider that it’s basically the same patterns that are used today on sites like Reddit and Twitter. Only there are no admins who actually answer when you call for help.

Today, with the resurgence of interest in social virtual worlds driven by networked VR, it’s easy to see people incredibly fascinated by the potential. But there are still pretty significant audience hurdles between what we have now (as popular as they may be with those who already “get it”) and the dream of the widely adopted metaverse.

Further, it looks increasingly like we already live in an ambient metaverse of sorts, one without all the heavy barriers of dedicated clients and 3d rendering, much less goggles and headsets.

Up next: The rise fall of Metaplace -- and the rise of the everywhere metaverse:

Jenn Frank Reviews Nightmare in New Orleans, an Amazing Gabriel Knight-Style Adventure Game in Second Life (Guest Post)

Jenn Frank is an acclaimed writer who has reviewed videogames for major media/gaming outlets including the New York Times, the UK Guardian, Slate, Vice, and Kotaku, and won the 2013 Games Journalism Prize. She is "Jennatar Flow" in SL. 

If you're a regular visitor of Second Life, you're probably already familiar with MadPea. For the past ten years, MadPea has been selling adorable knickknacks and running seasonal scavenger hunts. If memory serves, many scavenger hunts occurred in and around the Starlust Motel

Well, those scavenger hunts evidently became more and more detailed and intricate over the years, until they finally turned into—what else?—point-and-click adventure games! (It makes a strange sense: What IS an adventure game, if not a type of scavenger hunt?)

MadPea Production's latest game, Nightmare in New Orleans, launched four entire months ago. I was bound to hear about it eventually, though. After all, I am probably the world's biggest fan of the 1993 point-and-click adventure game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, which, like Nightmare in New Orleans, is a voodoo mystery set in the Big Easy. Be still, my heart!

I don't want to give away too much of Nightmare in New Orleans. But I can tell you that, as in Gabriel Knight, investigations in Nightmare in New Orleans will take you to a cemetery, a hoodoo shop, and historic St. Louis Cathedral. (I feel obligated to point out that Gabriel Knight came much closer to getting the vibe of a New Orleans hoodoo shop right; the shop location in Nightmare in New Orleans has more of a The Craft thing going on.)

If you're already aware of Second Life's array of long-running role-playing sims—which tend to be extremely well-wrought, have narrator text and NPCs, and involve health meters and combat—you might not be quite as dazzled as I was.

But, wow! I was blown away by Nightmare in New Orleans! The intuitive and well-designed UI of the HUD, which also tracks in-game progress! The pop-up map UI, for navigating to new, just-unlocked destinations! The interstitial "loading" screens that conceal the teleportation process! Dialogue trees driven by in-world script menus! Bots playing the roles of NPCs, with actual spoken-out-loud, recorded lines! It was just like a "real" old-school adventure game!

And the puzzles—oh, my goodness, the puzzles. That first puzzle is so deliciously good, it honestly breaks my heart that more adventure-game players might not venture into Second Life to ever see it.

I asked my husband to please log into Second Life and catch up to where I was in Nightmare in New Orleans—I lack confidence in combat scenarios, and I needed someone to cover me during a particular combat-heavy sequence, which I found invigorating but stressful—and HE was blown away by the game. He couldn't stop raving about it. He's a programmer and game developer who currently works in VR, and the technical achievement of Nightmare in New Orleans absolutely rocked his shit.

As I'm sure all readers of NWN realize, Second Life's major strength, for creators, lies in the sheer amount of possibility hidden in its superficially-rudimentary toolkit. But no matter how many in-world art installations I dragged my husband to, nothing quite drove home the value and possibility of Second Life for him, until Nightmare in New Orleans.

Technical achievements aside, Nightmare in New Orleans's greatest strength is surely the richness of its environments, which is MadPea's bread and butter. The amount of detail packed into each location is just over-the-top, and those locations seem to become more and more lush as the game progresses. It's a feat of environmental storytelling. (The sole location that really hiccupped in loading, for me, was the manor. Seriously, the server load for the whole game is just unthinkable.)

There's something truly genius about building a point-and-click adventure game using Second Life as a platform. On the one hand, it's like, huh?? Second Life wasn't BUILT to accommodate the intricacies of an adventure-game narrative. On the other hand, "teleports" function as hyperlinks; on a certain economical level, Second Life offers what are essentially archives of user-made "game assets," meaning a programmer never has to model the items he can just as easily find in Marketplace.

As a former videogame reviewer myself, I can't discuss any amazing achievement without also complaining -- and giving some gameplay tips: