
Returning to Second Life - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/returning-to-second-life/
======
sdfjkl
Many years ago when Second Life was a small community of incredibly cool and
gifted people (around near the end of beta/beginning of live), I've written
some games there. I've long abandoned SL, but the games still exist in world
(because I have a lifetime account, so my virtual land ownership never
expires).

I've set the games to email me when someone achieves a respectable score in
one. I still occasionally get one of those emails. That's LSL (Linden
Scripting Language) code that was compiled into bitcode years ago and the
source hasn't been touched in any way since, and neither has the bitcode (or
the script would've been reset and lost its memory - all the highscores are
stored only in script memory) - and it still continues to run. This amazes me.
That's the kind of stability many webhosts can only dream of.

Oh, the SLURL is on the bottom of these emails if you want to check out some
really old games:
[http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stillman/65/81/24](http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stillman/65/81/24)

~~~
LaikaF
I used to be on the teengrid, and even some of those guys were insane. I used
to know someone who had built a javascript version of the viewer. There was no
viewing but you could access everything else (inventory, chat, map).

Teen grid also lacked the ability to get items from the main grid so the
average build quality of anything was pretty bad. I wonder how many of those
builders went on to work in 3d animation or something similar. Pretty much
everyone I know who used to play it either ended up in coding or some artistic
career.

~~~
jswrenn
That was Katherine Berry's AjaxLife:
[https://my.secondlife.com/katharine.berry](https://my.secondlife.com/katharine.berry)

She recently wrote about an experience with LindenLabs that caused her to lose
interest in developing within SecondLife:
[http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl-
ui](http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl-ui)

I was on the teen-grid, too. In my time there, I met many really gifted teen
programmers. They partly inspired me to pursue computer science, and, years
later, I've even had the unexpected pleasure of meeting some of them in
person!

~~~
mintplant
> She recently wrote about an experience with LindenLabs that caused her to
> lose interest in developing within SecondLife:
> [http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl-
> ui](http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl-ui)

Augh. As someone who, back in the day, put significant effort into building up
a semi-sane framework for UI construction in my own LSL scripts... that looks
so much nicer than what I had to work with it's painful.

------
simonebrunozzi
Good memories. I built the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Second Life
[0] in 2007. I met Philip Rosedale in August 2007, he saw it and said it was
the most beautiful building ever made in SL.

Then, I found my job at AWS through Second Life. [1]

Years later, the project became secondary to me. Unfortunately, there was no
way to backup my creation, and I didn't want to give 300$/month to Linden
Labs. (unfair artificial constraint, to be honest). I shut it down. They might
still have a backup somewhere, who knows?

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXPVJww9H5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXPVJww9H5c)

[1]: [http://brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-
amazon.com...](http://brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-amazon.com/)

~~~
return0
opensimulator (opensimulator.org) is free and you can run it on your PC if you
can find a way to extract your creations from SL.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
What amazes me about Second Life is that, despite 15 years of technology
improvements, it's still an awful user experience to explore. Low framerates,
janky loading, high latency movement.

~~~
untog
I'm tempted to look at it the other way - it's amazing that it has been a
success for the last 15 years despite low frame rates and janky loading.
Suggests the user base don't care much.

~~~
guiambros
> _Suggests the user base don 't care much._

And that's absolutely the case: users don't care _that_ much, despite the
teraflops inside our GPUs.

While things have changed in the almost 30 years since " _Lessons from
Habitat_ " [1] was written, one of the conclusions is still valid nowadays:
the implementation is relatively unimportant.

The entire paper is a gem; worth checking it out. It has aged wonderfully
well, and I never get tired of re-reading it over the years.

[1]
[http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html](http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html)

------
michaelbuckbee
I really liked SecondLife, and ran an early 3d Printing service for Avatars
out of it called "Fabjectory" \- long since shut down.

Here's how it worked:

1\. I'd have avatars come meet me in my "studio" \- a floating cube with very
basic geometry that was way up in the sky away from other objects.

2\. I'd use an app called OGLE (OpenGL Extractor) that was developed at
Eyebeam to extract the avatar's geometry and textures.

3\. I'd then load up the 3D capture (which would be a mess) and clean it up
and make a bunch of manual modifications to make the 3D design print worthy.

4\. I'd export the resulting image as VRML and then send it to my printing
partner who would print them on "Sandstone" \- plaster infused with color
inkjet and something like superglue.

Here's a picture I found on Google of them:
[https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1102/1236026167_49aae2fc0b_b....](https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1102/1236026167_49aae2fc0b_b.jpg)

~~~
sgtmas2006
People still do such a thing in SL, but it's actually mostly called
copybotting, and is used to steal items sold on the market. Really common as
well. I don't really deal with SL anymore, but a friend of mine was sucked
back into it. There's a large amount of people that are very unique, and
exploitable. People exploit them for humor and profit as well.

------
rm_-rf_slash
Technical challenges aside, I don't think VR will turn Second Life into a
_Snow Crash_ Metaverse anytime soon.

Speaking of 2007, remember how hyped motion controls were? Remember how
excited we got when we saw people "bowling" and "boxing" on Wii Sports?
Remember the thrill of booting up LoZ Twilight Princess for the first time?
Remember that first sword swing that was blocked on screen even as your real-
life arm kept swinging, undaunted but by a pithy vibration?

Even with VR that didn't cost an arm and a leg and ran Second Life at 90fps
without trouble, the simple fact is that without realistic force feedback,
every user will be constantly reminded that they are not _actually_ flying a
spaceship in zero G, they are not _actually_ being double-teamed in a mass
orgy, and they are not _actually_ relaxing in mud bath at a sprawling spa.

True immersion is decades away. Until we have Star Trek holodecks or Metal
Gear nanomachines, we are only fooling ourselves into believing that virtual
reality is completely immersive.

We really ought to have a kind of Turing Test for VR to restrain the hype.

~~~
QAPereo
_Speaking of 2007, remember how hyped motion controls were? Remember how
excited we got when we saw people "bowling" and "boxing" on Wii Sports?
Remember the thrill of booting up LoZ Twilight Princess for the first time?
Remember that first sword swing that was blocked on screen even as your real-
life arm kept swinging, undaunted but by a pithy vibration?_

I remember other people feeling that way yes, but for myself and some others
it felt like a big set a gimmicks. Motion control on the Wii wasn’t really
motion control, it was wiggle control; I remember complaining years ago motion
control would only be really interesting what it was 1:1.

I don’t feel that way about VR this time. Virtual reality is rough and it’s
it’s in its early stages in terms of hardware, software, and the user
experience, but it has so much potential. If anything VR right now reminds me
of games back of the time of Wolfenstein and Doom, and I’m pretty excited.
Having said that I’m not buying first generation VR gear, I put in my time
with early computers. My generation two or three though I expected things are
gonna be pretty damn interesting. I’m not a particularly optimistic person,
but I am genuinely optimistic about this. I don’t think full immersion is
required for VR and especially AR to change the game.

~~~
Nition
Things got a lot more accurate on the Wii with the MotionPlus:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_MotionPlus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_MotionPlus)

~~~
QAPereo
Very true, and now really excellent motion control is standard VR fare.

------
jccalhoun
"According to Peter Grey, Second Life developer Linden Lab’s senior director
of global communications, Second Life’s monthly active user count today totals
“between 800,000 and 900,000.”"

I find this pretty surprising. I wonder who they are. I never got the appeal
of Second Life but if this is accurate then it clearly appeals to a group of
people.

~~~
lithos
Bots play a pretty pivotal role in the game. There are benefits to "faking"
traffic, in order to boost your search result. Likewise bots are the only way
to interact with quite a few APIs, so even when it's silly to use a bot you're
still forced to (bot referring to a modified client to do things like
searching land, getting zone data, and similar).

As for who they are. There is baby boomer after baby boomer when it comes to
real users (at least 8 years ago when I played. The youngest of the boomers).
It's also worth noting that when it comes to the typical MMO, they are really
really bad at providing a social experience. So Second Life as a game that
doesn't have the grind or ways to kill other players, does a really good job
of drawing in lots of the people who will play a game just to talk (since once
you provide ways for The stereotypical Achiever/Grinder or Player killer to
control gameplay they tend to dominate the game). Also very few games offer
the level of expression and modification.

~~~
LaikaF
I played back when the teen grid was still a thing. You forget about the large
collection of people in the midwest who are relatively isolated from other
people. I've always described SL as a chat room with a 3d modeler and a
scripting engine.

------
sixQuarks
I'm surprised the article didn't even mention "High Fidelity", a VR platform
created by the original founder of Second Life.

~~~
Animats
How's that working out? I installed the client once, wandered around a bit,
found it boring, and quit. Here's their promotional video.[1] The graphics are
lame. It's like a video game from about 15 years ago. It looks worse than
Second Life. Why isn't this thing up to AAA title graphics quality? What's the
advantage over Second Life?

High Fidelity starts their world out as a boring flat plane. They should have
started it out as good-looking natural terrain, with trees, shrubs, and grass.
Use SpeedTree to generate a realistic looking world. That would set the
standard for how good things should look. If people buy land and build things,
the good-looking natural features will push them to do better work.

As people move around, they should wear the grass down a bit, and when there's
enough wear, an NPC road-building crew moves in and builds a path. There
should be an automated Department of Public Works which gradually installs
public services.

And if an area is abandoned, grass should grow through cracks in the roads.

Amazon is coming out with a "Snow Crash" show. Somebody should have the Snow
Crash metaverse running before it comes out.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=-ivL1DDwUK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=-ivL1DDwUK4)

~~~
AJ007
I don't know how well user generated content of AAA graphics would work. An
open world makes it even worse because the players have to be exposed to all
of the things that keep performance in check. Those same things break any
illusions of what they are looking at being more than a paper thin movie set.

------
ilaksh
It seems to me that the types of immersive experiences described by sci-fi
authors years ago and branded as the metaverse is currently alive and well in
the form of popular PC games like GTA, ARK and PUBG. Its just not
branded/consumed as VR, i.e. with headsets, and it lacks the open-world
customization and connectivity that was assumed in many of the stories. I
believe that is mainly down to limitations with realistic graphics needing to
be prebaked and networking issues as well as lack of adoption of peer-to-peer
systems like content distribution and payment.

I think that eventually we will move back towards the open-world, user-created
and maximally immersive metaverse in a huge way. A few things will make that
happen. One is peer to peer distributed services, which I believe will
eventually replace most centralized services. It will just become the way we
do distribute code, content, and money. Sure, people have been talking about
this for many years, but while the adoption and applications haven't reached
wide popularity, they continue to grow steadily. This is just as much about
social change as it is about technology. And groups of people change and adapt
slowly.

Another enabling technology will be real-time path tracing or ray tracing etc.
This will probably be enabled by better hardware and/or custom chips designed
for global illumination. If we can combine this effectively with procedural
generation, that can really reduce the bandwidth requirements and make custom,
on-the-fly networked loading of diverse complex realistic environments much
more practical.

Another thing that will move us back towards those old-school metaverse
visions is better VR hardware. When we have widely available inexpensive high
resolution, lightweight, untethered displays and convenient, high-fidelity
input devices, VR will become the default computing mode for large numbers of
people. Within a few years those things will come together.

One last element of the metaverse stories is AI, which is also advancing
quickly. So I think we will see that sci-fi vision fully bloomed within the
next decade at the most.

------
IgorPartola
I wonder. How does SL compare to Minecraft? I went through a phase of playing
quite a bit of Minecraft with strangers on a random server I picked. I was
about double the age of most people there, the youngest one them being around
10 years old. It was a really great experience: from finding someone’s creepy
abandoned and boobytrapped temple, to saving Colin the chicken from running
away, to cliff diving, to exchanging holiday gifts.

But how does it compare to something like SL where it seems you can create
much more interesting scenarios?

~~~
ajmurmann
I haven't touched SL in a long time, but it's quite different. Money plays a
very real role in SL. It also lends itself very well to role playing, since
you can make your character look however you want. There used to be lots of
adult stuff as well. From Playboy mansion, over brothels to kinky, furry
stuff. The modeling tools in general are so much stronger as well. I've
randomly discovered a strange, Japanese inspirited palace where people dress
up as horses and pull others around in wagons. I've watched Hollywood movies
in in-game cinemas. It's very different from Minecraft.

------
nikolay
When I saw VR/AR coming back for whatever strange reasons as I am a VR
pessimist, the first thing I wondered is why Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or
Apple don't buy LindenLabs...

~~~
Zelphyr
As the article noted, VR and SL aren't compatible so from that perspective,
there's nothing of value to buy.

The real value in buying Linden Lab used to be, in my opinion, the in-world
currency called the Linden (or L$). For a long time, I thought that Linden Lab
should've made the L$ available as an Internet-wide currency but now
cryptocurrencies appear to be a better alternative.

~~~
nikolay
I disagree - it's not compatible now, but it could be made so.

------
arisAlexis
Check out decentraland, its going to be revolutionary

------
mediaman_
Organic community building is everything

