This week new features coming to Second Life and if they really matter in the big picture, Qarl updates us on the mesh clothing deformer project and more!
This week’s topics include:
- Marketplace Leads to Less In-world Shopping?
- What Happened to the Sandbox (SL Newsletter)?
- Second Life Still Can’t Compete With Game Engines? Can It Ever? Does It Need To?
- The Big Picture/Solving The Big Issue
- Last Names for SL Avatars Returning
- Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (bicycle-shed example)
- “Your World. Your Imagination” Slogan Returns
- The Quality of Second Life Promotional Ads/Videos
- Mesh Clothing Deformer Update
- Virtual Faux Fox Fur
- Frank Ambrose Leaves Linden Lab
- Social-Sharing Trends
- OnLive Cloud Streaming Coming to Tablets & Smartphones
Guests:
William Reed Seal-Foss (Reed Steamroller) is a 3D artist and virtual world content creator for Sand Castle Studios, LLC.
Bernhard Drax (Draxtor Despres) is a musician, new media producer, and machinima journalist.
Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden) is visual effects artist, software developer, and interactive designer extraordinaire.
Marketplace is not why less are shopping inworld. Funny how non merchants analyze things. Let me spell it out for non merchants. I was ranked in search for animation in the top 10-20 for over 3 years. I never saw any significant drop in sales, as I was always climbing. As soon as they changed the inworld search, everything changed, and has never been the same. If you look at any significant graph of the SL economy, you will see pretty clearly that SL’s decline started the day the new inworld search was implemented. Every1 wants to complicate the decline of SL, but when you can’t even find anything good inworld, then all the magic of SL is completely lost. Right now, there are dozens and dozens of 512 parcels ranked ahead of me in a search for animation. My store, covers over 11,000 meters and has over 5k animations, 20+ AOs, 20+ couples walks, a fully motion capture animated fighting system.
Hmm, lag, all you have to do is look as your average avatar to know why there is so much lag. Hopefully, mesh will help this but I fear that most mesh creators will probably just go way overboard, which I’m already seeing. For years, we have been told that it was scripts that cause all the lag, but it is obvious to me that most creators just make everything so inefficiently. 200 prim shoes is commonplace.
Graphics is almost comparable to most games, granted not with everything, but it does have most of the main features that almost any game. The huge difference has more to do with the content, than the engine. Mesh brings us up to par. On my sim, where I control the magority of content, I get 30 fps without dynamic shadows.
Fuax fur, omg, I really hope those haters don’t see what I have planned, lol. Hunting animals, eating their meat, wearing, trading and selling the rigged furs. They would be all over my ass, lol. Bring it on! If they do, I’ll add skinning to the mix. Maybe we should arrest all the animals for eating each other. I’m waiting for Qarl’s deformer before I do the fur clothing. So stop slacking off, Qarl, lol.
So hey, lets talk about graphics. Qarl kinda expresses a similar frustration I have with SecondLife as well. Should it be able to do these things? Yes it should.
Visually Secondlife’s viewer has the ability to render content at a level that Unity3d can for sure. Heck unity doesn’t have emissive glow support unless you use a kinda buggy camera filter. I mean there is depth and edge detection used in SSAO and Depth of Field right now. (FFXA anyone?) Secondlife can do normal and parralax mapping, you can see this with the advanced lighting turned on w/ bump enabled and the mesh. Upload isn’t bad in terms of polygons. Nathaniel Drake from Uncharted is like 10k tris, and I uploaded like 15k tries the other day and it was under 40 prims. So what’s the big deal in bridging the gap to the 7 year old capabilities of consoles? Shaders and talent.
If would be great if we could define our own shaders and materials. I mean that stuff is there, you see it in the surface shine, the glows, the alphas, that’s all shader properties. (Correct me if I am wrong Qarl?) I want to be able to use my alpha for specular gloss (shine) or displacement instead of transparency, or have a seperate texture for the normal bump, we can’t do that right now.
Why not? Because a whole system that manages those things needs to be built, and it seems like LL doesn’t want to partially implement even simple version of these types of things. They want to design a whole system, which I’m not sure has even been started yet because mesh is behind/not being adopted quickly. I know it’s been said that it has been the intent of LL to build one eventually, but then we can think back to things like physical avatar, and the ages it took to implement new version of Havok. Am I going to wait several more years for SL to get to a level of Unity3d which I can develop on right now? How outdated will it be then? It feels like SL is constantly playing a half decade catch up. Give the development team the resources to build this stuff.
So hey, after mesh we *might* get some development into a material system. I personally waited years for mesh, and then it’s like “Oh hey I can make stuff on the level of World of Warcraft, yippee.” Meanwhile I have this nice Unity3D engine,UDK, or CryEngine I can import my game art into for FREE and it looks worlds better by utilizing normal bakes from high poly work. Heck it’s probably more efficient because I can rely less on geometry.
It is not graphics alone that made SecondLife successful against Blue Mars but as far as competing with game engines and (functionality and visualy) SecondLife is the pits. You may argue that SL doesn’t compete with game engines, but it does in terms of talent choosing to spend their time making assets/content in those engines over SL.
It’s not just about art but also programming. A former scripter I worked with asked me the other day if SL had improved it’s control scripting, which I had to inform him hadn’t changed at all in the last 8 years. His reply was “Secondlife makes me sad.” Even though I know many people that would like him to come back and make content again. LindenRealms is a cool step torwards that….but it’s still kinda weak to be honest.
Truth is I probably wouldn’t be in the type of work I am in now if it weren’t for SL, but now I’m working with triangles instead of prims and working with engines instead of SL. I’ve tried coming back to SL but then everything felt stagnant and most of all still ugly. I can’t achieve the visually quality I want with the skills I’ve been developing over the years. Skills SL had inspired me to pursue and grow.
It’s been 7 years and the thing is….I’ve grown SL. Why won’t you?
My last weeks comments failed to come through here, so i’ll try this week:
– people love to bitch about everything, marketplace, stores, creators, mesh, viewers. SL was created for a massive bitchfest don’t you know
– amazingly, fair organisers still have the laggiest builds in SL. Probably because a decent build will actually cost money, so go with the cheap and nasty instead.
– The Sandbox newsletter editor probably got laid off
– just as an aside, why is LL advertising so much XXX rated stuff in search? I bet it’s drax’s fault
– Reed is using a dodgy viewer. I get up to 80+ fps at times. Good viewer though, makes a big difference
– too many people are happy to plod along on their laggy V1 viewer with circa 2001 graphics cards and cheapo monitors and overly scripted junk hanging off them. I paid over $500 for a graphics card early this year, so to upgrade your SL experience you need to really invest. Same as anything really. I wonder why we don’t all drive 1950s cars?
– SL has always been, and probably always will be, elitist. Mostly because of the hardware required. Simple as that. It helps to keep the kmart trash pc owners out though, and thats a good thing. Also heavily restricts the number of people from ‘emerging’ economies logging in as well.
– nothing will beat SL until they can create mass appeal without people having to invest real money. Not going to happen
– last names – ho hum, who cares. Oh of course, the ones who bitched about it so much. Obviously it was a quiet week around the world. It really is a shame to see a backwards step, which is what this is. Kim, people don’t want to think about really important issues, all they have to do is check FB or twitter to be told how they should think about ‘real’ issues
– once Karl has finished with the mesh deformer, can he please make mesh upload code that is actually decent and useful. Too many other people have made empty promises based upon lies.
– I think she actually skinned a furry to make that fox stole. Excellent idea, IMO
– FB is number 1 because it is the dumbed down version of being human. You have to wonder why. Its turned into a perfect medium for mass spreading of gross misinformation, along with twitter. Scary. And you’re worried about SOPA??
– oh, did you know Newt Gingrich has an SL presence? maybe you could get him on next week’s podcast…
@Esprite – Well, I kinda think you are missing something tho with comparing SL to Unity or the CryEngine, which I’ve played extensively with both. On those platforms, the actual character is extremely limited. The animation system is limited, the control of your avatar is limited. In SL, your avatar is only limited to how long the creator felt like working on it. I’m almost done with my first mesh SL avatar, a Lycan(werewolf). Even with my limited avatar creation skills, he will still be 1 of the best werewolves in any game, anywhere, ever made. This is not because I’m some awesome avatar maker. It is because SL’s avatars are not limited to any set system, and the animation tools far surpass anything ever made on any platform. Those other platforms were just not made with this kind of avatar creation in mind. Oh, I’m sure people can create decent plug ins to do the same things, but those other platforms are never going to be complexed virtual worlds like SL.
SL’s avatars use a very basic skeleton that follows the same naming conventions as an older poser skeleton. They would work just fine in any game engine and the way it’s handled is not complex. SL’s avatars are just rigged meshes just like any other rigged meshes. Loading the animation onto the skeleton in an 3d app such as 3dsmax and exporting it as an FBX would let you run the animation in Unity3d for example.
So yes those other game engines would work fine with SL type avatars in terms of animation. You can also manipulate bones using scripting in those engines for procedural animations as well.
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The problem is not that MP kills inworld shopping and this hurts merchants. NO.
The problem is that it helps merchants too much… It divorces them from needing to be in SL.
This is only bad because merchants are the primary support means of landowners.
And landowners provide all the entertainment venues we go to in SL.
If landowners have no means of revenue, once merchants no longer need to rent from them, then we lose all of our places to visit in SL.