Oz points out that the NexGen idea for Second Life was formed and initiated before Ebbe’s arrival. The progress on the project has accelerated since Ebbe’s arrival. One of the significant things Ebbe focused on for the project was asking hard questions. One being who is Second Life’s primary customer? Ebbe and staff have come to the conclusion that it is content creators. Thus it is that group they will be catering to in design of the new platform and future enhancements for SL 1.0. That doesn’t mean users that are not creators are going to get ignored or stepped on. They are still considered. But as a primary focus, it will be creators.
As Latif pointed out, Blue Mars developed a platform that required professionals to build content for it. We saw how that did not work. So, I expect content creation to be very much like it is in SL, ranging from simple prim based building to complex Blender, Maya, 3D Max, and AutoCad oriented. I expect how the building interface works to change. Hopefully to be easier to learn how to use.
Ebbe says that late in the year they will be opening a CLOSED NDA Beta.
Summary
As Oz points out the new platform is NOT eminent and they are still making significant changes to Second Life. I’ll remind that the two platforms are going to run in parallel until the users decide one is all that is needed by users.
This changes much of how we think about SL. It also explains why we have heard so little about what is being developed for SL. The Experience Tools may be a last big change. But, Oz says group chat is still an active project and they will be doing work on group chat.
However, the SL team is in the process of selecting new things to do for Second Life. So, we will see new capabilities coming to content creators and users. Oz tells changing Mono scripting to C# is not going to happen. That will be for the platform.
But, there is a proposal in by a third party for a new way to do avatars. If the proposal is accepted, it will be a third party project like the Materials System.
But… this new platform is big news.
Analysis
So… what do we do and what do we plan for?
From my perspective, very little changes. As Oz points out, SL is a money making deal. The Lab is not giving it up. While the development team is smaller, I understand only a little smaller, the Lab plans to continue to develop SL. Oz says they plan to add the things that will make lots of diverse groups happy with the changes.
Ebbe says smaller than they have had for the past couple of years. He never says how much smaller. Nor has Oz. Bloggers are implying there are like a couple of guys or just a skeleton crew left… which is apparently not the case. Peter Gray in his email wrote:
If we had one message to share with Second Life users about this new project at this point, it would be: don’t panic, get excited! Again, Second Life isn’t going away, nor are we ceasing our work to improve it. But, we’re also working on something that we think will truly fulfill the promise of virtual worlds that few people understand as well as Second Life users.
Oz does point out that anything they do is approved of by one group and disapproved of by another larger or smaller group. So, his belief after 4 years of experience is they cannot satisfy the majority of users with any new feature. But, the current list contains lots of new features and stability improvements they hope will touch various groups of users in a good way.
My thinking is the science that is learned in SL will be transferring to the new platform. I think that is true for the engineers and the content creators and users. I can’t image that building in the world, new or old, will drastically change. We will have shapes, templates, and textures along with materials. The user interfaces will hopefully be better and easier to learn. But, we, existing users, are past those learning curves. So, any changes will be easy for us basically being user interfaces changes. I suppose there might be some paradigm changes. But, haven’t seen any significant paradigm changes in 3D modeling from some time.
As we learn to build mesh things, clothes and objects, those skills will be transferable to the new world. Just as those skills are transferable from SL to Unreal to Unity. So, there is no reason for users to stop learning in SL.
For the SL engineers learning to solve group chat issues is a science that will be needed y the new platform too. From much of what is said, I take it that considerable data is being produced in SL and analyzed for deciding how to handle bottleneck that the new world will have to deal with too.
I feel my learning and tutorials made now will probably not go out of date any faster with the new platform coming than they do now. So, for me little changes. Well, things do get a bit more exciting…
“As Latif pointed out, Blue Mars developed a platform that required professionals to build content for it. We saw how that did not work.”
That’s quite a misleading statement… Blue Mars failed because of the developers kept changing their mind about what they want to do with their platform. The biggest cause was changing it toward mobile platform instead of PC. This killed a lot of profession and interests. People were leaving and canceling their estates, developer reacted too late by reverting back their plan and try doing both platform. The damage was done.
If they hadn’t dramatically changed their plan. They would have gotten more professionals and agency pouring in their work to make this happen. In fact, BlueMars DID had quite few top and famous professionals hooked on. There are few I can’t name because of PR & NDA stuff… but I can say that I’ve met Syd Mead. The man is a legend in artist’s world… He and his Warner-Brothers staff wanted to have few Sci-fi locations from few movies. I was almost hired to do some work with them. It was my highlight moment I’ve had on BlueMars. Well now it’s dead.
Dev’s way of changing their plans scared everyone away. Not because there was few creators. There’s a lot of jobs demand riding on CryEngine skills these days. Even hobbyists would’ve love to try fleshing out their skills on BlueMars to get better work experience and better work views.
So to make a point here… No, just don’t dumb-down the tools or you won’t get anything better than what SL has already. If you want a good looking platform, ditch the children’s art-box. Creators will only go where there’s money to be made.
I disagree. BM was more complex to build for than it needed to be. Thus limiting content creation to professionals, which has historically proven to be a significant limit on participation.
I agree changing direction did not help. But, BM was suffering from low participation rates well before the change toward mobile. The change sped up the collapse.
CP and SL’s simple parametric building tools seems to have led to far more people creating content. Minecraft’s highly simplified building attracted even more users. I expect some highly simplified building tools for use by new users for the SL 2.0. Those tools will have enough power for the more advanced builders coming from SL. Professionals will most likely use Blender, Maya, 3D Max, etc. But, there are just too few professionals that are willing to build for VR. Without hobbyists and novice creators, there will never be enough people creating.
Pingback: Second Life News 2014-25 #2 | Nalates' Things & Stuff
Pingback: Second Life User Groups | Nalates' Things & Stuff
I agree, it is better when anyone can be creative in your virtual world. But I’d like they introduce better rules to promote better optimization. While a professional will create an item with the proper texture size and possibly a single texture for the whole object, what I see in Second Life are novices that may still attain a good look, but their items have the largest possible textures, even if the object is tiny as a ring, and even worse, one per each object face. So, even if the item looks ok at first glance, it creates a number of issues within SL: things become slower to load, the viewer slows down when texture loads, the graphic memory is filled quickly and textures discarded and blurred and so on. Then people gets angry with Second Life. But it is like being angry with WordPress or Blogger when you open a SL blog with many pictures and the page is so slow, because the blogger didn’t discover jpeg images yet and uploaded anything as png (and guess what? Many SL blogs are like that). These people make even the Internet \laggy\, guess with SL. But if there are good rules to discourage these behaviors (e.g. you pay more L$ to upload bigger stuff, the Land Impact depends on the textures too etc), it is less likely that SL 2.0 (or how it will be called) will sustain this burden.