Lindal Kidd posted about this article: FLASH! Sansar Makes the News. This is an article on Tom’s Hardware. This is a site I often visit to find out which video card or motherboard is best for a particular use. I am happy to see they took time to write about Sansar. I checked it out to see if there was anything new in the article. There was!

~ Sunburned Bridges ~

Quoting from  :

Linden Lab is creating its own proprietary rendering engine to make this happen. I asked why the company took this direction rather than use existing options, and was told that the problems the company has run into over the years with Second Life made it clear that the company needed an engine designed from the ground up for this platform.

The company needed the ability to make the creator tools simple to use, a task for which the current available engines are not suitable. Project Sansar offers a whole package, including the underlying multi-user functionality, hosting, assets and tools. Additionally, Linden Lab is designing Project Sansar to be accessible through several different media.

For me this is news. Previously I think most of us thought the Lab was building on top of another game engine, Unreal, Cry, Unity… something. But, here we find out the Lab is building its own game engine. Wow.

Another point we gained more information about is VR and mobile support. Ebbe has told us previously that Sansar is not initially going to support mobile, but that capability is in the plan. Ebbe is paraphrased, “Although Altberg acknowledged that the majority of people will have experience only with mobile VR, the performance concerns of such a setup prohibit the ability to support it.”

Sansar like Second Life will be a virtual world rendered in real time. That takes some computer power to do. Mobile devices currently don’t have the needed power to render at the speed needed to avoid simulator sickness. But, computer power doubles every 18 months…

The author Kevin Carbotte tells us the Lab has invited ‘a half dozen creators’ to work with them. Also, we get a bit more of a defined schedule for the beta: …a semi-open beta should take place in the first half of next year, and a full access beta is tentatively planned for the third quarter. An open public beta should take place before the end of 2016.

That last part makes it sound to me like the release schedule is sliding back a little. We have been seeing that with most of the VR stuff. So, while I am a bit disappointed, I am not surprised.

This may be a case of Ebbe realizing that VR hardware is not arriving as fast as people expected. Adoption by users is probably going to be slowed by a shortage of headsets, which usually means high prices. All that will follow the normal new hardware cycle, few and expensive then plentiful and cheap. How long the cycle will take seems to be lost in the fog.

Ebbe may be taking advantage of that to get more features into Sansar by pushing completion dates back. BUT, since we have never been given really hard time lines… who knows?