Seems Linden Lab® is ramping up marketing of Sansar™. Linden Lab’s Peter Gray is active on Reddit/r/sansar/. He announced that more people will be invited into Sansar this summer. Summer starts June 21… When that opens you won’t need and invite (really?) nor have to fill out a form. Just open an account.
Yodai points out that we haven’t been hearing much about Sansar. Also, that some have purchased VR headsets just for Sansar. I know I got my Gear VR in part to be able to check out Sansar. Mostly to experience VR for me.
Peter in response agreed to answer questions. Some of his answers are interesting. For details read the Reddit. For a summary, read on.
The summer Sansar will work on Vive, Oculus, and PC’s. No word on Macs. Unofficially some are saying Sansar works in Bootcamp. There is no minimum system requirement yet. Informally they are saying basic Windows VR requirements. Since they say Oculus, I think/hope that includes Gear VR.
Peter says they are expecting some to love Sansar and immediately see the potential. Others will be disappointed it doesn’t meet their expectations.
Answering questions in the SL Forum I know people expect SL to be perfect and they wonder why long time computer tech problems haven’t already been solved by the Lab, think griefer issues. It doesn’t matter that no one has ever solved the problems of hacking and griefing.
So, it is realistic to expect many will be disappointed that Sansar is not 100% complete this summer and a fully populated world just like Second Life™. No matter how often it has been said that isn’t going to be the case.
Peter points out some current invitees are disappointed that many of the important features of SL are not in Sansar. The point is those features are NOT YET in Sansar. Sansar will not be a finished polished product this summer and I suspect probably not this year.
Peter says that this summer’s Sansar Creator’s Beta is just that and there is way more to be added.
I find it interesting that Peter’s favorite VR experiences have been made by people from Second Life. While I am just starting to play in VR, I have noticed that much of Second Life is a better use of virtual space than what I am seeing in VR so far. Much of VR is at the Pong stage of gaming. So, SL peeps may be the only game creators with real virtual space experience.
Sex… you know the question had to be asked. Will there be sex in Sansar? No. The reason given is starting out the Lab is going to avoid allowing the Sansar media to be stereotyped to a single genre of content. Sex is so all consuming and entertainment-news worthy that single subject would suck up all the air.
If you think about the WordPress analogy the Lab has been using you may get an idea of how sex will work in Sansar. At the WordPress development sites, there is no porn. However, WP is used by others to develop porn sites. They are separate from the official WP sites run by the WP developers. I expect something similar will be going on with Sansar.
Content can be uploaded. 3D models in .fbx format can be imported directly to Sansar, as can skybox images in .exr, and audio files in .wav. Scripting uses C#. Unfortunately, Peter did not say anything about animation.
As to cost, land will be cheaper than in SL. But, no solid information. Also, there WILL NOT be regions…
In response to why a year from the Creator’s Alpha to the Creator’s Beta… cause developing Sansar is a lot of work. They are rolling the Lab’s 14 years of experience into Sansar and building from scratch. There is an interesting debate in there…
Some that have been in Sansar are commenting in general terms. Those that comment on the graphics quality describe it as ‘stunning’.
There is a question of whether those banned from SL will be banned from Sansar. Interesting question. Might happen. But, no official answer.
I suppose with the possibility to have a single account with Linden dollars for use in Sansar and SL, it might be an obvious account connection… We’ll see.
No Mac? When that is a big part of the big spending and creating crowd in SL?
That worked well for Blue Mars.
my bad – it was not possible until just now — macs weren’t ready
I prefer to wait-and-see. Let others do initial beta, and learn from their expensive experiences.
-ls/cm