Second Life's Embarrassing Start to 2013 And More Predictions...

If it wasn't for the fact Linden Lab is headed by a game's industry heavy weight like Robvik Humble I think they could be forgiven for marketing Second Life as a game package on Amazon recently when everyone that knows the beleaguered virtual world and has experienced it would, in the majority, be inclined to say it is not a video game. The general consensus around the blog sphere seems to be that the Lab has embarrassed themselves once again with this move. And yet there are those bloggers that want to forgive Linden Lab for this action on the premise it could work to bring in more people at least. Pretty much all bloggers, however,  have expressed a loud sigh of general disbelief regardless.

Second Life offered free on Amazon. It turned up un-announced and has since been pulled off probably because existing residents noticed the free 1000 Linden dollar. Perhaps the Lab will try it on eBay next.

As we start the year 2013 I will be making a few predictions further on but, given that I had something to say about Second Life last year and the Lab continues to make blunders I ought to look back on it see if I got anything right which I will come to. But I can't let go of the present gaff I noted above without taking a closer look. It does seem a bit incredible that, despite having Rod as CEO, the brass at the Lab didn't consider that marketing SL on Amazon as a video game might be an embarrassing mistake that bloggers were sure to pick up on. On the other hand one might consider it was all thought out and quite deliberate given that Rod Humble has already released a bunch of video games under the Linden Label in the past year and announced Second Life will be marketed on the Steam video gaming site. It does seem Rod makes little or no distinction between his concept of "Shared Creative Spaces" and a video game so why would they not market SL as a game? This appears to be squarely what the Lab is focused on these days.

When Rod joined Linden Lab he told us he was trying to get to know Second Life and now he has got to know it he has decided it is, as mentioned above, a shared creative space which, unsurprisingly, it is a another way of calling it a video game! The users or Residents of Second Life I think view their virtual world differently though. I would say, as a long time resident myself that Second Life is, to all intents and purposes, an endless social-economic soap opera where people can get creative. It has no end goal like a video game has and yet there can be goals set by the residents themselves with either commercial or none-profit motives in mind. It can be viewed as an adult playground if anything where grown-up's play out all kinds of fantasies and express themselves in many ways. The residents or users make their virtual world. It's a labour of endless possibilities that grow out of the collective imagination of the residents. It appears doubtful if Linden Lab executives understands this or if they do they certainly don't treat the residents as partners and yet, in my view and by everything they do, I think residents do demonstrate they are partners by being serious contributors. Linden Lab owns Second Life of course and can do what they please but the product is nothing without the residents who spend money, build the sims and make the content. In fact, the residents who interact with each other breathe life into the product and become an essential part of it. That is the part the company dose NOT own. That is where the partnership comes in and Linden Labs have never looked upon their residents as partners - just paying customers. And paying customers buy video games, right?


PREDICTIONS OF 2012...

Last year I said I wouldn't get carried away with my predictions but I'm rather pleased with myself that the first one actually turned out sort of on the mark. I said Linden Lab would pull out all the stops to try and get Second Life growing again and I could say they did by releasing four new video games. Well, those games were not exactly Second Life applications but clearly the Lab is working on trying to save their shirts. Trouble is Second Life itself is not seeing much of the effort unless you consider Linden realms and Pathfinding tools are a big deal. It appears that the residents are not exactly falling over themselves with excitement though. In any event, if the measure of success is region count then it's been a disastrous year with the net loss of regions rising to 2863 which represents a 12% loss. Even more telling is that user login's have declined too and there are a large number of sims for sale nobody wants as well as rentals with no takers. People are not buying and even the strongest fashion stores are struggling to keep afloat.

Turning now to the open Metaverse the situation is not all a bed of roses there either. OSgrid has seen a sharp decline in recent months after sustained growth through the summer months. Avination too has continued to decline while InWorldz is holding out but not growing. On the other hand new grids are still popping up so, while region counts may be down the number of grids is up - double the number since last year in fact! So, for every new grid that means at the very least a few more people are contributing to the growth of the free Metaverse. I some cases the new comers may even represent a sizable little community even. 

Finding the growing number of grids to choose from as the free Metaverse expands is going to require better support with search and other features suited to the growing market. Above I am showing my test version of a search page that can link grids to the main viewer for login which makes it easy for new users to find grids to visit.

The latest trend amongst grid operators seems to be the offering of free plots on commercial grids to get users in rather than making the low cost sims they offer as the main the sales pitch. However, as usual there is plenty of rivalry between grids with flame wars breaking out from time to time. Generally, though, the Opensim platform code continues to improve although Hypergrid 2 has not materialized yet but, that aside, it is looking likely we will see both the core and forks rolling out better physics engines in the new year which is the good news.

I predicted we would get a viewer with grid search in 2012 and that V1 viewers might be disabled in Second Life. Well, we did get some experiments with new grid management but nothing serious yet. On the other hand Linden Lab did pull the plug on V1 and instructed the TPV developers to drop support for Opensim if they wanted to include the client-side Havoc physics. This led to some dropping V1 viewer support and others like Firestorm saying they would release two versions, one for Second Life and one for Opensim. According to the developers it has become increasingly difficult to include the code changes LL are making to the viewer which includes Pathfinding and server-side rebaking to work all this code into the older V1 model. And yet, there are developers that insist it can be done so some of the viewers with a V1 UI are likely to still get support. These include Singularity and a forked development of Phoenix while the Firestorm team have stated they, themselves, will lay Phoenix to rest.


MY PREDICTIONS FOR 2013...

First up I would predict that InWorldz will become the must see grid of 2013 once they get PhysiX fully working. I say this because the team have already rebuilt the scripting engine making it faster and more efficient. One of the key drawbacks to Opensim has been physics, incomplete scripting functions and problems with border crossings. The InWorldz team look like they have solved all the main issues and are on track to launch seriously improved services in the new year. This I would expect will help get the grid growing again.

 

Demo of PhysX at InWorldz race track

Not to be out done my second predictions is that Kitely will become the top grid in 2013 and will even knock OSgrid from it's present position as HUB of the Hypergrid if HG 2.0 or 2.5 actually , finally, gets the export perm and Kitely actually adopts it and becomes HG enabled. If they don't then I don't expect them to grow that much. I do expect them to grow considerably, regardless simply because they have built a great product that gives value and they have a pretty good track record of contributing to core. They have a good reputation and a very competitive pricing structure.

My third prediction is that competition will hot up between Opensim grids in 2013 and we are already seeing this in the form a Free Land offers which will encourage users to login more often and spend time on the host grids and start to build community. This, in turn, will encourage content sellers to open stores and make sales provided the web front doesn't take customers away like has happened in Second Life with the web Market Place. But, anyway, I do expect more commercial grids to come online during the year and I think free land offers could even be tied to paid premium accounts as an alternative to charging tier. However, I think Kitely already has the edge on this approach and smaller commercial grids will find it extremely difficult to compete unless they have a really dedicated core team to make visitors welcome and, of course, provide some form of regular entertainment, gambling, adult stuff, gaming or get a bunch of role players to bring their theme to the grid.

 

Demo of Bulletsim supports large numbers of objects seen here

My number four prediction is that Opensim core will get a decent version of Bullet physics working but I don't think it will be ready that soon from what I have seen and tried. I am absolutely sure it is going to happen but there is still work to do yet.

In previous years I predicted that a web application to stream Opensim to a web page was likely to happen soon but, apart from the patented version, that SpotON 3D brought out so only they can use it all we have seen is the webGL Cloud Party and something similar that I haven't fully checked out yet called Meshmoon. All the others are basically Unity3D web viewers which, of course, are not likely to ever be able to connect with Opensim girds. In deed, it remains a fact that only Opensim has the technology to build independent but interconnected worlds via Hypergrid at the moment.

Finally, I predict Second Life will continue to slide during 2013. The region loss will continue and with education grants coming up for review and the stagnant state of the real world economy I would not be surprised to see some quite heavy losses in the early year but, like I said last year, the summer months should see a leveling out both for Second Life and Opensim before further heavy losses again for SL at least in the Fall.

Here's wishing all my readers and fellow travelers a Happy New Year.

P.S. If you are looking for textures you can use on Opensim grids then check my top links or click here to visit my Textures page for a list of vendors that allow their textures to be used in both Second Life and Opensim.

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Second Life: Upgrade or leave, your call...

The title of this post is a quote from The Tigress's Second Den by Tonya Souther, Firestorm developer who, in a plain talking arrogant tone, tells us where to go if we don't upgrade to the new V3 based viewers when Linden Labs rolls out code for the upcoming server side baking changes which will leave V1 viewers seeing gray avatars or clouds. She dismisses any chance that the V1 viewers can be upgraded and confirms Phoenix definitely won't be upgraded anyway.

For some Second Life folks, the more fanatical and geekish perhaps, this is good news and Toyya has certainly fueled their reaction with her views. However, Siana Gearz, developer of Singularity viewer, is on record saying there is no problem, quote "For Singularity codebase, it just keeps getting simpler, not harder to keep up." and another TPV developer, Latif Khalifa adds, "All of the LL's plans she outlines are correct, but there is nothing stopping developers of Cool VL Viewer or Singularity to adopt those changes. At this point much of their code is V3 anyway so merging in those changes is no more difficult than merging then into Firestorm. V1 viewers will as long as there are people willing to keep them up to date, and not a minute sooner, no matter what protocol changes Linden Lab introduces.". He also said "Tonya comes with a prediction of doom for V1 viewers on regular basis. She's been wrong every single time including this." in comments here form last July.

Personally, I am not a great fan of Firestorm/Phoenix anyway. I have always found these viewers to be bloated and suffer memory problems the longer I have them open. I personally prefer Singularity and Imprudence or, of the V3 based viewers only Teapot is light enough for me. But, it's horses for courses really. What one person wants from a viewer is different from another. I would only say to this that Second Life will never pull in more users with complex viewers like this. I think the current decline of Second Life has as much to do with the increasing viewer complexity as with the excessive costs and the current direction Rod Humble is taking it in. It can't help when a viewer developers tells residents to upgrade or leave either.

Perhaps that's why so many have left and of the 10k+ daily signup's only a tiny fraction stay. Second Life has become a geek's paradise with a bewildering array of complicated viewers the new comers can't understand. Minecraft is far simpler and far more successful so there is something to be said for the lowest common denominator when it comes to getting the masses on board.

Teapot V3 viewer for Opensim worlds which are built on open source with more options and choices, less cost and no over baring corporate dictatorship.

Second Life has proved incapable of serving a mass audience. V1 viewers handled more people in the past than V2/3 viewers do now and there were a lot more happy people willing to pay Linden Lab's high charges. The grid is declining steadily (over 2600 regions so far this year) and the traffic is dropping too. Sadly, the excessive charges, the  geekish attitudes of the Lindens and a very vocal bunch of viewer fanatics is, IMHO, causing the decline of Second Life.

I think the vast majority of residents don't give a hoot for all the tinkering when in the past what they had worked well enough for their needs. It's been a roller coaster ride of upgrades and disruption these past few years for the loyal users to endure and all that is promised is more of the same. And all the stuff people bought in the past is likely to become obsolete into the bargain. However, it is unfortunate that a Tonya Souther takes such a blatant attitude and is so sketchy with the truth because it doesn't instill much confidence the Firestorm team have a strong commitment to Opensim in spite of a commitment they recently made. Other viewer developers, like the Singularity team appear far more committed and that's the good news.

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Opensim Virtual. A New Google+ Community

Today I did the unthinkable and set up an Google+ community!

Opensim Virtual
"First there was Second Life then there was Freedom"

Well, I did notice G+ had launched this thing and I was curious as to how it worked. I am already a big Twitter fan but, as cool and useful as Twitter is, those tweets are pretty short. It would be good, I often thought, if they could be expanded into a longer posts. Well, with G+ that is exactly how it works and I can add images too. Okay, so it sits there with a load of other stuff too and stupid G+ bosses have a name fetish issue which must be born out of some primitive instinct thing about recognizing one dinosaur from another. Yeah, yeah, they need to figure out what is the best crappy spam to sling at you where ever ye wander.

However. Yes, well, what use is it and why bother?

Well now, I did think it could be useful to promote my role play game or this blog but then I heard that someone setup a G+ community for Second Life and I was prompted to do similar for Opensim. I had already joined a new working thingy called Grid Cache which, again, is a lot like Twitter and includes file sharing and images but the tweets, if I can call them that, on the Wire don't expand like G+. I also looked at Vanish Firecaster's new messaging system for Opensim Creations, OS Chateau and it is cool, and much like Grid Cache. However, sorry but none have the look and feel of G+. Also, G+ is likely to be a better promotional tool since it can be found by a much wider audience.

Anyway, this is an experiment basically and anyone who enjoys the Opensim Metaverse is welcome to join it and simply post comments and pictures of your sims and creations. Its a party promotion so feel free to make use of it. It costs me nothing and we who enjoy playing around and grid hopping to meet up can do with it what we will.

I added some categories already so if you have new fashion items to show us, post images to Virtual Products or Virtual Fashion. If you have a role play sim to promote then tell us all about it on the Virtual Role Play section. I will add more sections if peeps want them.

So guys, see you on G+ @ Opensim Virtual

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Kitely Roll Out New Opensim Asset System

Kitely has rolled out a new cloud-based asset system which promises to offer significantly better performance than the regular OpenSim inventory service. Acording to Kitely the new inventory service provides...

•     Avatars enter worlds faster, and experience less lag while inside.

•     Avatars that are already in a world experience less lag when someone else enters    the world.

•     Opening large inventory folders is much faster.

This sounds like a great advancement because inventory is proving somewhat of a problem on OSgrid which is probably down to the huge storage requirement given they have the most registered avatars and regions. Clearly, Kitely are meeting this problem early on in their development and that is a big plus for using their service.

I think more grids could push their databases to cloud and I always thought how useful it would be if a company like Kitely, or even Second Life, offered cloud based inventory data storage to other grids where Kitely or SL could, in effect, shield content from copy thieves since no grid owner using the service would be able to look at the data and change permissions. A service like that could help to make Hypergrid more secure and instill confidence in more content creators who want to sell stuff in the open Metaverse without the risks. I agree it would probably have to be on offer with a proprietary server package but even that would be worthwhile since the majority of us don't tinker with the server code anyway so never need access to it.

Linden Labs are not likely to do anything like that even though they are well placed both financially and with a huge store of content but I wont say never for I keep hearing rumors.

Kitely, on the other hand, could boost their business by developing a Metavers-wide asset server and proprietary Opensim server in the cloud for distribution where content could flow securely across the whole market. I would certainly be willing to pay for a service like that on top of the cost for a presence on the Kitely grid. I hesitate though to simply accept Kitely as a Metaverse in it's own right for that would be falling back into the kind of monopoly that is Second Life and wannabe's like SpotON3D.

It's food for thought but really any one could set up a cloud MySQL to serve their regions but a mass storage under the management of a reputable company could serve many securely and that is the point.

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SecondLife & OpenSim Don't Need Client-side Havok Physics!

According to Firestorm TPV developers you don't need the new generation of viewers with client-side Havok physics to access Second Life or OpenSim grids. In comments on an Hypergrid Business post authored by Maria Korolov, a Firestorm team member, Lette Ponnier answered me when I asked why the viewer could not use different modes to switch between Havok and standard configuration in order to keep the grid manager and enable the viewer to be used for OpenSim grids as before. My point was they would not have to develop two viewers as they said they would in order to comply with Linden Lab's new rules on TPV's. Mode switching would simply change the configuration to switch off the Havok code and all neatly wrapped in a single viewer. Lette Ponnier replied, saying...

"The other point I wanted to clarify concerned Gaga's comments here:

    The OpenSim version of Firestorm WILL be able to connect to Second Life. Users will only need to use both if they want to use tools that require Havok while they're in SL. These will include things like pathfinding capabilities and improvements to rigged mesh upload. If they don't need those, then they will be able to install only the OpenSim version of Firestorm and use it to connect to both Second Life and their other grids. Due to Havok's licensing policies, it is not possible to have both Havok and OpenSim accessibility within the same build. Trust me, the team would have MUCH preferred to do it that way. It wouldn't just be easier on users, it would be easier on the entire team.

        Just to be a lil' more accurate, I should have written *full* pathfinding capabilities above. The current and OpenSim versions of Firestorm have most of them, but there are a few that will need Havok, like viewing navmesh.

        - Lette, of the Phoenix Firestorm Project support team."

Gaga visits Firestorm/Phoenix office in OSgrid which was kindly donated by Walter Balazic of Littlefield regions.

So there you have it, the new viewers are meant for handling Havok and therefore the new video games and tools which is a completely new development and has little or nothing to do with the virtual world of Second Life as we have known it. Indeed, it is probable that most residents will never play the games anyway so will never need client-side Havok. The people who will be most interested, of course, will be low budget and garage video game developers who are looking to make money on their creations. Second Life tools are relatively easy to learn and there is a wealth of content to call on for building, props, vehicles and avatar clothing so getting a game from concept to the market wont take a massive team or too long to achieve. But, with Linden Labs promising to list games on the Steam video games site it would appear they intend to allow content, ie. the video games, to be marketed under their own label and downloadable via Steam which begs the question; what will the owners of Steam be getting out of it?

Well, it is clear enough now where Linden Labs is headed and they will be sure to monetize their new tools and probably even rake a percentage off the sales revenue too. Users are already modifying games in Steam using Garry's Mod application and selling their own mockups which yields a whapping 75% for Steam and 25% for the Modder - as they are known. One assumes then the creators of SL video games will gain even less if Linden Lab wants a cut too and Steam still takes their huge rake. Anyway, be that as it may, the real problem for us dedicated to preserving our virtual worlds is how much more damage will be done to Second Life in the process and will they get their new projected revenue stream into the big numbers before they run out of money and SL sales totally collapse. Well, it is a strong possibility for already traffic numbers are falling and sims are closing at the average rate of a 100 a week now so the outlook is not exactly good.

It does all seem rather incredible though that no matter how many people voice their love of Second Life as it is or was and urge Linden Lab to leave it be and just fix the bugs and lag they are intent on surging ahead at any price and taking the old platform with them. One wonders just how much of SL will still be around in two or three years from now or maybe LL are just quietly letting to old cash cow die as they strive to get out of the virtual worlds business and into the lucrative video games market.

Yeah But, Nooo But!

Rod Humble seems relatively unfazed by the decline of Second Life and recently hinted at something big for their virtual worlds on the horizon so are we looking at a case of great expectations or a smoke screen to reassure those residents thinking of packing their bags? Well, perhaps it's not a smoke screen for I have heard a few things on the grape vine that intrigue me. Rod has made a few noises about "investing in virtual worlds" which has lead to some loose speculation that he could be planning a new pricing model possibly using cloud technology and there was mention of expanded regions which has to be borrowed from Opensim and AuroraSim. Anyway, the jury is still out I guess but whatever Rod does he had better get a move on and do something to stop the increasing rate of decline for the gate has been left open and the sheep are already bolting!

Humble's Bundle

Others have already blogged heavily about the new video games from LL but for the sake of readers that don't know anything about them I will wiz briefly through them. Yes! the good news is that Rod Humble has finally started to show us what he has been keeping up his sleeve since he joined Linden Lab and that includes three new "Virtual Spaces" games (as Rod choose to call his new brand of Metaverse) including a Minecraft clone with physics no less and some kind of authoring game. The titles are Paterns which is the Minecraft look-alike and is in early development. Next up is Creatorverse, which is destined to release on iPad. This one is a 2D sandbox game in which players create shapes that are brought to life with physics. The idea behind Creatoverse is that whatever you make, mazes, puzzles, etc, can be uploaded to a cloud and downloaded by others to edited or play as they are found. Third up is Dio, which is a room creator where players can construct an adventure or develop an interactive wedding album perhaps. Finally, there is Versu which has been developed by the LittleTextPeople studio that was bought up by Linden Lab earlier this year. Interactive fiction author, Emily Short and The Sims AI designer, Richard Evans are the people behind Versu which is basically a set of storytelling tools where players assign motivations to characters. These characters then respond to players actions. If murder mystery, tales of romance and dating games are your cup of tea then this will surely be one for you.

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Second Life the Video Game According to Iron Man, Rodvik

They say that even a brick will fly if it moves fast enough and the same might be said of Minecraft's meteoric rise given the way their blocky graphics have caught on with a younger generation brought up playing with Lego. Minecraft came long after Second Life and quickly overtook it in the traffic stakes which can't have gone un-noticed by the Linden Lab bosses who have been struggling for a long time with customer retention issues. Second Life attracts in excess of 10,000 signup's a day, so I have read, but has proved incapable of keeping any more than a fraction of them. If that wasn't bad enough we are now witnessing a steady drop in regions too and that has serious financial consequences when the major part of the Lab's cash flow is from hosting. But, whatever, the Lab has a savour!

The Steam video gaming community web site

Enter Rodvik Humble who came from Electronic Arts where he was vice president and led the EA Play label. I am calling Rod the Savour but others are more inclined to call him the Grim Reaper or the Iron Man sent to see that the dismantling of the virtual trappings of Second Life are handsomely replaced by the functionality of video gaming. However, I would say, on the whole, Rod got a fairly good, if guarded, reception from the Second Life community when he arrived and the hope was he would get stuff fixed and the horrible lag reduced if nothing else but, while there were some improvements amid continuing disruption to the service, it gradually began to dawn on the community that something else was afoot that would amount to a big departure from the traditional focus of Second Life, which is basically a social, economic and role playing culture with no specific aims or goals other than what might be in the mind of the user. The change has come gradually starting with Mesh and some simple quest games on the new Linden Realms. Then came their faltering attempts to roll out Pathfinder tools, and now they announce the Lab's intention to get listed on Steam, albeit very quietly.

Yes, it's full Steam ahead actually but you wouldn't think it for the low key way in which it was announced. Linden Lab's still worries about negative reaction I suppose but they can't gloss over the plan any longer and, in my humble opinion, it seems rather cowardly and rather unfair on paying customers to not be open and clear about things that might effect the many businesses and interests that have been encouraged to build in Second Life at considerable expense to the users over the years.

With hindsight it's not really that surprising though given Rod's background and expertise in video gaming that there is now a clear intent to break into that market especially as it commands tens of millions of potential customers. This was always the problem and it is clear to me that Rosedale had made the decision to break out of the virtual world's recruitment dilemma a long time ago. Even before he rather ungraciously belittled his customers and called them  "broken" people he had sacked a full third of the Second Life work force and dumped one of Mark Kingdom's acquisitions, Avatars United. Three weeks after that Mark resigned and Rosedale took over. He went on to close the teen grid and stop education discounts which some saw as a bid to make SL more profitable for investors - I remember at the time speculation was rife that Linden Labs was being prepared to be sold off. It wasn't of course but at that time no one had any idea what was coming and, on the face of it, things looked much the same. That is, more blunders and U-turns and apparent bewilderment all round following Mark Kingdom's departure.

It can't be denied though that Mark Kingdom failed to do anything that might help maintain the growth the grid had experienced in 2006-7 while the mainstream media were fascinated by Second Life. The news stories usually dwelt on clever young people making money by creating content which attracted many more who might have stumbled at the gate in confusion had they not bought into the vision (Your World, Your Imagination) and saw the potential. Making money was at the heart of the system and a powerful incentive to explore the platform, read stuff and learn how it works. Video gamers, on the other hand, don't generally have any interest in the inner workings of the environment in which they play other than what type of game it is and what the means are to achieve the game's end goal. They hear about a game from their friends or see it promoted on the Steam web site perhaps and with little ado they want in and will spend a little money while it holds their attention. First impressions count a lot and the first impression a video gamer gets of Second Life is, like, what the f*** is this all about?

Video gamers want challenges and goals and are seduced by impressive graphics. Virtual worlds citizens want challenges too but they also want experiences which play on and fire their imagination. Video gamers will move from one game to the next most readily when they complete the levels and achieve it's end goal while virtual citizens will more likely settle into an open ended experience like role playing. Virtual citizens tend on the whole to be very creative as well and many will try to run businesses or none-profit arts and entertainment venues. Education too has been shown to make good use of virtual worlds but Linden Labs has obviously sacrificed that market in favor of gamers they want to court by cutting the discounts. However, it would be wrong to say video gamers wont spend time in virtual worlds at all or that virtual citizens wont play video games ever but not the teaming millions which is what Linden Labs has their sight's on. Bringing in Rodvik Humble to master mind this change of focus might seem a smart move and potentially profitable for Linden Labs in the long term but it could back fire badly because it's uncharted territory really. When did a virtual world platform ever become a video gaming platform before? Mores the point, how do you marry two markedly different cultures unless the intention is to gently let one die off in favor of the newer, and hopefully more profitable one?

Here is where the Grim Reaper jib comes in. I read some time ago that Rodvik Humble had a reputation at EA for being the tough guy and was involved in putting the "Sims" game to rest. This was recently brought up in a post by WADE1 jyr in a SL Forum post and picked up by Darrius Gothly who posted in a blog article, I’m Quite Frankly Befuddled And Wrong...

Rod’s involvement in the Sims at Electronic Arts was as the 'End Game Manager' (Darrius' words), carefully shepherding the very popular title into the history books.

Darrius was blogging about the recent closure of SL Jira for bug reporting which he feels is a mistake and, in fact, all part of Rodvik's grand plan. Closing Jira where residents not only reported bugs - many of which have been on it for years with no resolution in sight - but also tended to rant about the problems. Darrius felt it's value, despite the rants, indeed, because of the ranting, actually served as a gauge for the importance that should be attached to any particular issue by Linden Labs. I agree and would also mention another recent decision to order TPV developers to remove the grid manager from the viewers ostensibly for Havok licensing reasons but dose all seem rather obvious Rod is attempting to blot out all connection with Opensim and as far as the SL Jira is concerned one would imagine he don't want all that ranting seen by the Steam community.

Drone Wars. a Second Life 1st person shooter video game by Sergio Delacruz

Getting back to Mark Kingdom's tenure as CEO of Linden Labs, Mark's focus was to tap into the Facebook millions by dressing up Second Life more as a social network platform, on-line profiles and all that stuff. It was hoped no doubt it might present a more acceptable face to the Facebook minions but it didn't actually go down that well with the Second Life community and got slatted really quite badly. I believe now that Mark had some very good ideas and, while I didn't think the Facebook focus was very smart and I would find it hard to forgive him for the Open Spaces fiasco, I would have to say I supported the release of the viewer code into the open source community which lead to the development of Open Simulator. Mark Kingdom presided over other important ideas as well. In fact, there was a time back when Mark was in charge that they employed people that were actively pursuing interoperability and the ideas we now associate with an open Metaverse. In particular Hypergrid travel grew out of those early attempts to enable teleports between Second Life and an Opensim grid. How this would have benefited Second Life is not clear but if they had made a proprietary version of Second Life server available for sale or on subscription where content was controlled by Linden Labs on central asset servers then SL would have been at the center of the open Metaverse today and probably much more loved than it is. They probably would have kept on growing too.

Well, that is all so much water under the bridge now and the vision of people like Mark Kingdom was taken up by Opensim supporters anyway. The Open Metaverse exist today or, at least, Opensim is the only platform offering the nearest thing to a Metaverse of independent grids and standalone worlds where they may all connect via Hypergrid travel and move content from one place to another. Rod's drive to turn Second Life into a video gamer's platform could well be the straw that broke the camel's back and lead to more SL citizens deciding to cross the divide and explore what Opensim grids have to offer. The fact is they wont be disappointed if they arrive with an open mind and don't worry over the apparent lack of traffic. Much of the Metaverse is by it's very nature hidden anyway. There are some 200 grids with over 100 of them Hypergrid enabled and presently the viewers don't make it easy to find them. We think there may well be more grids and certainly there are education grids behind firewall's and not allowing general public access. The kids though are learning Opensim fast due to that exposure. For ex-Second Lifers Opensim has a huge amount to offer and there is no Linden TOS or video game moguls pushing the video gaming envelope. In deed, there just aren't any mega corp's involved at the world level even if companies like IBM and Intel have contributed server code.

For Second Life role players the Opensim platform can easily match what SL is capable of and do it on a bigger scale at a fraction of the price. RPG's like Gor would easily fit into an Opensim world where enterprising leaders and Ubars could easily set up their own Hypergrid city state as part of the world of Gor. Hypergrid travel makes it easy to travel the Metaverse in search of other Gorean grids and standalones to raid. This would apply equally to many other game themes currently suffering the high cost and the lag of SL. Yes, there is traffic in SL but once a few Gorean or other role play sims establish regions in the open Metaverse more will follow and, anyway, what's to stop anyone expanding into Opensim while keeping regions in SL. This is what I have done and it is giving me time to make themed content and learn all I need to know for the future.

In any event if Rodvik has his way, and he surly will, the regulars of Second Life are going to have to live with an influx of young people who are first and foremost video gamers and probably wont know much about the culture of the existing community or their conventions and tastes. Mores the point they probably wont be adding much to the culture of SL and few will be role players in the sense we know it (the In Character descriptive word and para). I mean, God knows there has always been tension in role play circles when people fail to play by the rules - both the written sim rules and the un-written rules that players generally adhere to. Young video gamers wont buy all that. We have seen it already! Maybe, though, the video gamers wont show too much interest in the rest of Second Life after all although I'm sure some will out of curiosity if nothing else. When they do explore one wonders how they will behave and, in deed, what their expectations will be. I'm pretty sure there will be an increase in tensions and the established citizens might well see any foolishness on their part as griefing.

A lot will depend on the video games being developed with SL tools. I have seen a Doom first person shooter clone which is ok but definitely old school. The lab will undoubtedly develop more games of their own anyway and they have a wealth of royalty free content to work with (The TOS has been changed to read that way. Surprise, surprise!). It could be the Lab is either hoping some individuals will create the next super game on the lines of Sim City or even World of Warcraft mayhem right inside the Second Life grid which then raises the specter of Gold Farming Sweatshops coming to SL. Gold Farming is big business in the video gaming world with actual businesses set up to exploit workers in third worlds countries who spend hours on end gold farming or power leveling avatars for Western clients. It's a business netting hundreds of millions of dollars annually and possibly in the billions world-wide. However, game sweatshops can seriously affect a game's economy by causing inflation and Second Life's economy would almost certainly be highly vulnerable and the virtual experience would surly degrade for everyone.

Rodvik Humble and the Linden Lab directors are taking a huge risk that may pay off but it could go the other way too and be the death of the company. For the past nine years a lot of people have put their heart, soul and money into Second Life and, while the investors would loose money on such a failure, the residents who made the content and did all the creative work will loose a big part of their lives not to mention many small businesses and the community that has grown up around the company. Whatever happens to Second Life I, personally, am not prepared to leave all my eggs in one basket given the huge risks being taken so I am grateful to the developers of Opensim helping us build something far bigger and far stronger than any one company can make. The open Metaverse is our life boat and, as far as I am concerned, the future for virtual worlds.

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3Di Launch Cloud Based Unity for Web Pages

3Di, the Tokyo based company that has been developing solutions to place virtual world's spaces on web pages has launched a paid cloud service that promises to make it easy even for none-programmers to set it up for commercial or private use.

Presently, anyone can get an html code snippet and paste it to a web page that gives immediate access to 3Di's own world known as Teddy town but now customers can download the 3Di web kit (30 day trial valid until September 30th 2012) and make ready their own 3D rooms for the web. Charges announced in the last few days are a personal use version at 1year advance payment of 9,800 yen (about 817 yen/month) and a professional commercial version at 3 months advance payment of 29,800 yen (approximately 9,934 yen/month).

See an example of the working application on the Resources link of this blog.

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Previously the company had worked on version that used Opensim for back end but the results proved unsatisfactory and they switched to using Unity 3D. Unlike Opensim or Second Life the Unity server doesn't offer in-world tools for creating content and requires templates and avatar files developed in 3D modeling software that supports export of FBX or COLLADA files. Unity is a Mesh based world but 3Di has gone to great pains to make it as easy as possible to use. None the less, while they handle the server end in cloud technology there is still a steep learning curve to develop the Mesh models so customizing one's own world is not as easy as getting the world online.

However, according to 3Di they will be providing some basic templates and avatars to get a world up and running quickly. The api kit is aimed at content creators and has been developed as an extension module on top of the multi-platform 3D game development environment Unity. It supports smartphone platforms such as Android and iPhone. The development kit focuses on ease of use through simple drag-and-drop of sample scripts. With some programming experience you can do much more.

For some time now virtual world's owners have expressed a desire to have a browser based window into their world to make it easy for casual visitors to look round without commitment or a heavy download. Having a 1st Look option is thought might encourage people from the web to eventually download a viewer in order to do more. Ideally thought, the Opensim owners wanted a portal to an Opensim world directly and a solution for that was developed some years ago by In Duality which still requires a download and launches a viewer in a web page. This solution was placed in the open source community after In Duality failed to find a market for it at the time but it is not considered ideal anyway even though it dose still enable in-world building tools. However, the In Duality version has now been re-developed by SpotON3D who have taken a patent on their code so no one can use it without a licence from them.

Another company, Tipodean, worked on a browser based Unity solution to view Opensim in a web page some time ago but gave up on it after running into problems similar to the problems 3Di had. Tipodean offers a service now to do conversions of Opensim regions. They can create templates for Unity if you can't do it yourself. A lot still has to be done to get your own unique world up and running using Unity but 3Di have at least taken some of the work out of it with the web Kit.

Another web portal that requires no plugin, Cloud Party is the latest solution that is gaining considerable interest from Second Life residents. The  application is also browser based and uses webGL which presently only works in Chrome and Firefox.  However the Cloud Party developers are updating and launching new features very quickly with an eye on capturing as much of the browser based and smart phone market as they can before more solutions become available. They have now launched their own market place and they have token coinage.