The Irish Times has an article by Marie Boran, Virtual reality is giving Second Life a second lease of life. (4/13) Marie was a participant in Second Life™ in 2010. In the first few words she reports the Trump-Swastikas at a Bernie Sanders meetup. That mention should clue people to the possibility of the reporting being shallow. I’ll try to push the Sansar news deeper and provide some perspective on Second Life..
The Blarneystone in Dublin, SL – 2017
Marie moves on to point out that while there is an ‘underbelly’ to SL, that is often reported on, there is also a surprising number of ‘ordinary’ folks in SL. The real world is pretty much that way… so…
Next Marie says her 2010 outfit and skin had expired… I went back and tried some of my 2008 outfits, well, we didn’t have “Outfits” in 2008. So, I had to find some stuff from then and make an outfit to see if things still worked. They did. I looked horrible. We can’t be sure what happened to Marie. I’ll take this as being another nail in ‘shallow’. But…
She went to ‘Japan’ and found no one understood her and there was only an empty bowling alley. I’ll point out that Ireland is 9 hours ahead of SLT and Japan is 4 hours behind SLT, making Japan and Ireland out of sync by 13 hours. Depending on when in her day Marie made her visit, most Japanese players would have been asleep.
The minimum use of SL is about 3AM SLT. As the majority of SL users are in the Americas, we can assume that in general people are logged off at 3AM local time… think about it.
Since people apparently weren’t speaking English… and Marie only could find an empty bowling alley…. I went to look for what she may have found and couldn’t find a ‘Japan’ location with a bowling alley. So, did Marie use and old LM? Possibly. But, not being able to find things is a newbie thing. However, it was 1 AM local time when I visited Japan so, the places were empty, as I would expect.
Marie made a comment we often hear, SL is not easy terrain for the new. True enough. Marie dismisses SL as apparently too complex for her and moves on to Sansar.
She quotes Ebbe Altberg, “We would be as happy as clams if we have two successful products. We believe Sansar will attract a new and different audience that may not get what they want from Second Life.” (we eat clams… why do we think they are happy?)
Marie explains the draw to Sansar will be VR immersiveness, exploring, creating 3D objects, and building. Gosh, Marie thinks it will be like Minecraft, but more realistic… (I need to find a good SL animation that rolls my eyes.)
Beyond VR Marie points out Ebbe is trying to eliminate those things that kept Second Life growing past a couple of million users. She quotes Ebbe as saying several of the things that held SL back have been eliminated or otherwise been remedied in Sansar. No itemized mention of what those things might be.
Next page link below…
“”ve all been in sharded worlds, where 50 to 100 players are on a server and the next 100 on another and so on. Those on one shard cannot see those on another shard. This seems to be the Sansar model. Is this a tech limit or an effort to keep Sansar simple to use?””
And i think here people still go complete wrong with reading the information Instances not need to mean that it’s really different worlds. I read the way the mean instances more like if one server cannot handle it we switch another server online and spread the load over all the instances. And i think people still can see and chat with each other on different instances on the same experience. I cannot believe the would implement it like your on complete different website. I think this really still wrong information.
“”There are a number of paces in SL where my viewer maintains 90+ FPS now.””
This is still something whee people get so tricked into fake numbers. You get on empoty places easy 90fps yes. on full places it drops dramatical to a 20-25fps what is way to low in desktop mode. especially on gameinig monitor set to 144hz. But you can get 90fps in the viewer. but the Secondlife server cannot generate more then 45fps
Se SIM FPS and PHYSICS FPS if you press ctrl-shift-1
So in my eyes, secondlife can never generate more then 45FPS. everything above the 45FPS is generated and not real good.
Secondlfie runs on my GF980 pretty bad , compared with high fidelity and a VR headset that runs pretty good this days. Put people try to move arguments that SL run bad still under the carpet.
“”Marie points out that Sansar will go Open Alpha this summer””
Hmm, i think marie uses old date. because on the official sansar.com website. The say “Opening to the public in 2017.”
And yes, secondlfie is complete useless for me. Expensive, bad framerate, difficult non standard mesh support, Some hardware is not supported. And no first person mode. (no mouselook is not the same, you still need to switch regulair out of it)
But, important question still will be what is sansar going to cost. and then what looks and feels better sansar or high fidelity that i work with for years. If Linden Lab not delay the opening we know it in around 2 months max. 🙂
I’m not sure the majority of readers will understand what I wrote about shards and instances the way you did, I hope not.
It isn’t just empty places where my viewer runs 90+ FPS. I have a relatively low-end gaming machine. There are some with high powered machines running 160+ FPS and over 100 FPS most of the time. Avatars are still a heavy load for most machines. But, the Lindens are working on better ACI calc’s that will likely push developers to better content yet. So, the avatar render load is likely to continue coming down.
My laptop with HD Graphics at medium settings makes 10 to 20 FPS in the same places my main computer makes 90 to 150. So, old home systems are at a disadvantage.
The viewer can generate more than 45 FPS. The servers never do. So, a viewer making 90 FPS will be generating two images from the exact same server provided information. At 135 FPS the viewer is using the same information for 3 frames. But, the viewer can change the camera position for each of those frames and render the scene without additional server help.
The viewer also calculates where the avatar should be for any given frame. At some point, it checks its calculated position against the server’s position. Rubber banding is the effect of the two disagreeing on where the avatar is. The server wins and we see our avatar snap to a new position.
The servers don’t lock the viewer FPS to their FPS. You can that by opening Viewer Stats and watching the Viewer and Server Physics FPS change independently. When the server slows to 10 or 20 FPS the viewer can still be generating 90 or whatever FPS.
Plus, the viewer and server are generating different information in each frame. All the video render happens on the viewer client side and that load determines the viewer FPS. The region server is figuring out where things are, what scripts are doing, and sending us that information. Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U to see the viewer display the updates from the server.
For now, an advantage to generating more than 45 FPS is having the time to render higher quality images. In combat games there is the advantage of keystroke events and how fast they can be sent to the server. Those with faster computers have some advantages in SL based combat games, which often have horrible lag and low server frame rates.
Having more render power to get more done in a given frame time is what is needed for VR. So, for VR we would be generating 180+ FPS for smooth camera motion. That requirement is mostly for client side power.
The rest of your points are valid.
I do suspect you 980 could do a decent job of running SL. Several in SL run 980’s and love them. I suspect you are getting into your personal preferences when saying ‘pretty bad’.