New World Notes

Survey of 16 Popular Mesh Bodies for Second Life: Nearly All Are Poorly Optimized -- Even the Bakes on Mesh Models

Pictured: Total graphics detail of a leading SL mesh body brand models. Note: Well under 50,000 triangles total (including hands and feet) is optimal.

SL YouTuber Cassie Middles just did some amazing work analyzing 16 of the leading Second Life mesh bodies, and documented their graphics detail in this huge Google Spreadsheet.

The results, as you might have expected, are appallingly bad in terms of being extremely resource heavy and poorly optimized -- with some exceptions.

Take a look and keep in mind the following metrics for a well-optimized mesh body:

• 20,000-30,000 triangles for a body is good
• 2,000-5,000 for hands and feet is good

These figures come from Black Dragon viewer developer NiranV, a passionate advocate of a better optimized Second Life. And as you'll see, many of these bodies are nowhere near that number, but instead, well into the mid-six figures of triangles. These bodies are so poorly optimized that (as a Linden Lab engineer once put it), "[Wearing them] is effectively like launching a DDOS attack on other players."

By NiranV's lights, only 3 bodies on this list of 16 qualify as well-optimized:

Caja's Daily Flickr Pick: Pepsi Sheen Creates Gorgeous, Whimsical Composites from Second Life Screenshots

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Pepsi Sheen’s photostream is fun and lively. “今夜出て！” or “Get Out Tonight” according to Google Translate, is a bright, vivid example of her stream. The intrepid Pepsi waits for her opportunity to finish crossing the very busy street. It’s a great photo incorporating first and Second life photos into a successful composite, however, if I were her I would be looking at oncoming traffic rather than the street.

Why Do Volunteer Second Life Software Developers Do So Much Unpaid Labor to Support Nearly All of Linden Lab's Customers? Firestorm's Project Head Explains

It's probably the strangest symbiotic relationship in Silicon Valley: Linden Lab, the startup that's highly profitable from Second Life, open sourced its SL viewer software 12 years ago, and over time, various open source viewers have increased in popularity, among Second Life's user base. Firestorm, updated and debugged by dedicated team of volunteer SL users --  has become the most popular.

How popular? Far more popular than the official SL viewer put out by Linden Lab the company. So popular, in fact, that any update Linden Lab makes to its platform is effectively irrelevant unless it's supported by Firestorm.

Two years ago, project head Jessica Lyon tells me, "Firestorm was carrying somewhere around 72% of SL users. I've no idea what that metric is like today but I suspect it's higher now as many third party viewers around back then have dissolved." By a conservative estimate, 80-90% of SL users now use Firestorm.

In other words, an unpaid volunteer development team is providing the software for nearly the entire userbase of a highly profitable company. Which like I said, is pretty unprecedented.

"It's a rather unique situation for sure," Jessica agrees. "But is a matter of perspective how one looks at it. We see ourselves providing a better experience for 80-90% of the user population, rather than supporting a for-profit company without gains."

Firestorm hasn't even attempted to monetize its efforts, she adds:

Caja's SL Flickr Pick: The Monstrous Beauty of Adra Braeden

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

It is October and suddenly Flicker is full of monsters, but for Adra Braeden, there are monsters all year long. “When the Dead Awake” is one of his more ambitious photos, what with the crowd of walking dead chasing the two. Adra uses depth of field to bring the fleeing humans into sharp focus while those who are chasing them are out of focus. While it is not a black and white, it is desaturated so the colors are barely there. 

Social VR Stats: Closer Look at Usage Trends for Sansar, Rec Room, VRChat

Good points by "Pulsar" in this comment on our social VR infographic, which suggests that Sansar is in third place, in terms of peak concurrency on Steam:

[T]he "concurrency that averaged" gives a better idea of the platform than a rare peak inflated by a special event; like High Fidelity did, reaching over 300 during events, when usually there was just a handful of people online outside those events. Sansar is doing the same.

And this was another of the biased and deceiving answers that Linden Lab staff gave in the previous AMA on Reddit, as well as when they answered the adult content in SL is "under 5%". While they make events in Sansar that reach those peaks, it remains true that normally there are only few people online.

I don't know if it's fair to say it's "deceiving" to report peak concurrency, as that's a reflection of how many people have installed the program and used it at least once -- it helps show us the total reach of the platform. But to Pulsar's point, average concurrency is also important to know. Here's why (as he explains):

Firestorm's Bakes on Mesh Reportedly Confusing Many, So Here's a Tutorial

Here's a valuable tutorial from Novata for using Bakes on Mesh with the Firestorm viewer. The volunteer Firestorm team recently released a version that's compatible with BOM, which optimizes mesh-based attachments in Second Life. According to reader Mondy, the update's left a lot of SLers confused:

Top 7 Posts from Last Week, Including: Raph Koster's New MMO, SL's Chouchou Saved & The State of Social VR on Steam

• Firestorm, SL's Most Popular Viewer By Far, Adds Bakes On Mesh Support
• Donald Trump: The Japanese Dating Sim!
• Raph Koster Creating New Hybrid MMO That Fosters Online Communities
• AR/VR Pioneer Co-Creating Piano Playing Instructional App For Magic Leap
• Infographic: Social VR's Current Size On Steam (September 2019)
• Chouchou's Legendary Second Life Sims Saved By Linden Lab; "The Babel", The Band's Interactive Music Sim Gone From SL In 2013, To Be Restored
• Jeri Ellsworth's Tilt 5 Kickstarter Sells 1500+ AR Units In Under A Week

Sinespace's Weekly Challenge: Submit Cool Content for Chance to Win $500

Starting tomorrow (October 5), NWN partner Sinespace is opening up its second weekly content creation challenge, awarding $500 to the user who creates the best item or scene and submits it to Sinespace's developer server next week, i.e., between October 5 to October 11.  (The challenge page dates are currently displayed EU style, by day-week-year.)

The entry with the most usefulness, creativity, originality, interactivity and effective use of Sinespace components wins the $500 cash prize. And yes: Pre-existing, mesh-based content you created for other virtual worlds, games, and platforms like Second Life are also eligible for this competition -- as long as you port and submit it to Sinespace in time (instructions below the break).

New to Sinespace and want to learn how to create content on the platform? Dig into the wiki for everything you need to know to get started, and check out the “Masterclass” videos on Sinespace’s YouTube page. Post questions to the Sinespace team in Comments below or talk live with them and fellow creators on the official Discord. 

VirtualCast: Social VR for Streamers With Avatar & Room Customization, Audience Interaction, Increased Brain Juice

VirtualCast is a free, new-ish social VR app on Steam from a Japanese company but it comes with rudimentary (and inadvertently comical) English localization. To judge by the trailer, it comes with avatar and room customization (including importable, user-created objects), enables socialization with several avatars, and helps increase "brain juice". Yes.

Unlike other social VR apps, it's targeted specifically at game streamers, since it outputs live video from a user's room to the web, where viewers can interact with him/her. That includes a nifty feature: Viewers can send text comments to the VirtualCast user -- and those words show up in their room as 3D objects.

I probably should have added VirtualCast to this week's infographic on social VR, because it's actually more popular than some of the more well known platforms:

Firestorm, SL's Most Popular Viewer by Far, Adds Bakes on Mesh Support

Linden Lab, the highly profitable for-profit company, released Bakes on Mesh, a feature which optimizes mesh-based attachments in Second Life, back in August. It hasn't generated much excitement from the community since then, but it now likely will: Because The Phoenix Firestorm Project Inc., a non-profit corporation comprised of volunteer developers, just released an update to their Firestorm viewer with Bakes on Mesh Support:

The Bakes on Mesh release from Firestorm has been long awaited; apologies for that. This should be considered by all in SL a MAJOR UPDATE, and it is important that all our SL users upgrade to it. This update contains a lot of rendering-related changes from Linden Lab, without which you WILL be running into avatars that look badly broken to you.

The Firestorm viewer is by far the most popular among  active SL users. Which is to say any new Second Life feature created by Linden Lab the for-profit company is essentially unusable unless it's supported by the efforts of a volunteer non-profit. Which is a keen irony worth discussing further! But that's for next week. Meantime, go here for all the updates for the new version of Firestorm.