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Second Life Hype vs. Anti-Hype
The new GigaGamez site, part of the OM network, has a look today at the hype fight over Second Life. It's the new darling of media companies, but is increasingly attracting negative feedback by people who know a thing or two about the industry. James Wagner Au tries to sort out who is saying what, and provide a little context for the discussion. From the article: "Can they really build a fully streamed world comprised of tens of thousands of servers? That's way above my paygrade, but I'll guess that task fits under the rubric of Fricking Hard. Can they fix a profoundly unfriendly user interface and thoroughly disorienting first hour user experience, which are aggressively, almost intentionally unwelcoming to the vast majority of interested users? Both shortcomings are at the heart of Second Life's poor retention rates, but neither have significantly changed in the three years since its commercial release. You have to wonder, whatever their stated intentions, if Linden's tech-centric corporate culture simply puts their improvement at a low priority."
Clicking on the Article I get "Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here." Guess that means that one of the sides gave up eh?
(Watch, someone will tell me to RTA)
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
is there for a reason, folks!
Don't we wail about Newbies everywhere else? There could be a side benefit that only certain people "get it" and stay. Anyone who doesn't ... "doesn't deserve to be there".
External world communities are rampant with unspoken restrictions. Some call you a Greenhorn for five years after you move there.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
My guess is that a fully relational database with foreign key checks would speed things up MIGHTILY, easily scalable to past 30k machines. Don't worry about adding more RAM to the system, a raid 1+0 system should be fine for speed.
Can they really build a fully streamed world comprised of tens of thousands of servers? That's way above my paygrade, but I'll guess that task fits under the rubric of Fricking Hard.
I don't want this to sound like a blanket indictment, because some studios get this right, but a lot of the unreliability, and failure to execute on difficult tasks in the gaming industry is due to the moronic staffing decisions of many game development companies. I haven't played Second Life, so for all I know (and from the sounds of it) maybe they got it right. A fully streamed world comprised of thens of thousands of servers? Sounds like some work, but it sounds completely feasible. When you're only willing to hire people who want to work in games so badly that they're drooling all over themselves at the opportunity and thus are willing to work at well below industry average pay level, what do you think you are going to get?
There are people out there who have built massive clusters and have decades of experience solving these problems... But they usually don't work in games, because they can make five times as much in other industries. When a company comes along and runs a game studio like a real software company, people who are stuck in the more traditional 'you should thank your lucky stars you are working in games' mindset shouldn't be too surprised when that company actually succeeds at problems that were considered too hard in the past.
Sorry to any big fans here but my experience sucked. The user interface is incredibly unfriendly and unresponsive, the graphics are appalling, the animation shocking and the sound lamentable.
After playing WoW for a few months and seeing how fluid, beautiful and easy to use a virtual world can be, Second Life was a shocking kick in the nether regions. It reminded me of very early 3D games with no collision detection and collosal clipping issues.
Yes I know it's streamed and if that's the primary cause of it's issues then it shouldn't be.
Additionally, for my first hour I wandered around trying to find something to do but was profoundly ignored by my fellow "2nd lifers", presumably because I looked like a newb.
If the developers could at least sort out the shocking camera and other control issues I may consider retrying it. I spend about 10 minutes of my first hour working out how to unzoom the camera which was permanently stuck 50 yards behind my guy.
...all the furries. That's enough to scare anyone off.
...(3.5 years and counting), I've seen it explode from scarcely 50 people online at a time to now more than 20,000.
:)
Since it began it's always had a hard time keeping new users. I think the way it's setup (completely user-created content, so there's less of a "wow" factor to people who just want to consume) means that you either "get it" and stay there, or you don't and leave immediately. The 10% churn rate cited in the article soudns about right; I've introduced something like two dozen people to SL, only one (my gf) stayed on, and that's probably only because I'm such a big fan of it.
SL needs a more compelling new user experience (professionally done content, some sort of direction, quests, whatever) if they want to keep people there for more than five minutes. PRoblem is, no matter how much professional content you throw at the newbie, once the newbie experience is done, you're still thrown in the middle of the content quagmire of SL; cube houses, poorly textured sex clubs, and rigged casinos.
For someone who just wants to experience things, unless you're incredibly social, you won't last in SL. For the creative types there's more of a stick.
Generally speaking, though, if you have to ask "what's the point of this place", you dont' get it.
hookers and grits.
I tried Second Life. I guess I didn't make my character "beautiful" enough, because I got constant "yells" of "How dare you sign on looking like that" etc. Must've been the pot belly. As far as I could tell it was just a bunch of sex rooms with pixelated choppy (but meticulously dressed) characters awkwardly flirting and touching each other. It was rather entertaining when I told my character to "disco dance" over to them naked, and they ran away. The interface is horrible too, as many people have noted. Real Life is much better, to be honest.
Adventures in Shaanxi
What's the feeling out there about There? I've been in on it since it was in beta in 2003 and I've had a lot of fun with it. Some things work better than others as far as what the designers intended.
Being able to put something up an auction does not a liquid asset make. Having a viable market makes an asset liquid.
That being said; Anshe controls thousands of sims - and typically only a dozen (non-Anshe) or so sims are up for sale at any given time. Equally typically - it's one of a dozen or so 'mid market' land barons who end up buying the sims at auction. This suggests to me that Anshe indeed isn't liquid, as it's extremely unlikely that she could find full price buyers for more than a minority of her sims.
I tried it, it was boring so I ran around and and bothered people because there was NOTHING to do. I actually made the police blotter on the second life page. THAT was an accomplishment.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
was that it is a magnet for every sick and twisted loser the trolls around on the Internet. This article, and the articles it links to, should be enough for anyone to understand exactly what kind of person likes second life.
was that it is a magnet for every sick and twisted loser the trolls around on the Internet. This article, and the articles it links to, should be enough for anyone to understand exactly what kind of person likes second life
Wow, because I thought that the main 'magnet for every sick and twisted loser the trolls around on the Internet' was actually somethingawful.com, the site you link to. Hows that for ironic?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Another article explaining the new user experience less than G-rated: http://www.gameguidesonline.com/guides/articles/se cond_life_article.asp
Some of us get on SecondLife to learn the technology, and the felxibility it offers us. (Live, on-demand music from a user's webcam and line-input on their soundcard? Live concert, WHAT?!?!? Yes, I've done it.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You've not gone in as a furry *!* in most rooms. (Even the default ringtail will get you virtua-laid, and the detail that goes into that.. well, I'll let you discover the surprise for yourself!) *!* I am a furry. Just as an FYI.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I tried Second Life and found it extremely sloppy. The frame rate was horibble, presenting Quake3 quality graphics. Everything seemed to need load time down to simple primitives, and my hard drive sounded like it was cooking popcord. The. Entire. Time. There was just too much being downloaded and it NEVER stopped.
The biggest problem is just that. If they had put file size limits on textures, object count limits, or anything to keep the amount of raw data being needlessly hurled at you to a managable degree, I might have enjoyed it more.
My roomate actually purchased an entire other machine just to play second life. I'm not talking about a doorstop either. Core-Duo, Brand spankin new graphics card, dual 10000 RPM hard drives... (I imagine that this is the kind of person SL appeals to: Bored super-teens with too much computer for their own good.)
It still looks horrible. Huge bitmaps of a rainbow, sent to his machine then shrunk to the size of a postage stamp without any aliasing. Animals with tails like melted ping pong balls. Endless fields of blotchy grass.
My other roomate and I take turns screaming at him when he kills all the bandwidth in the house so he can have a conversation with a talking bird while wearing a spacesuit. Something to the effect of, "Is using your imagination over AIM not cool anymore or something?"
Note for anyone reading this, my previous post was not 'flamebait', it's true, the software sucks for the reasons I've outlined. I have nothing against Linden Labs or Second Life or any other online 'virtual worlds' vendors and it's fair to point out they almost all suck for largely the same reasons, but suck they do.
None of the 3D engines you talk about could handle the job. All of them precompute and cache things to speed up the display.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can easily have a scripting engine, set item box boundries and define levels of interactivity (and even do animations) all in real time using mostly pre-rendered objects (e.g. in the case of animations even making an 'object', such as a beach buggy, out of say 5 objects tied together (i.e. a chassis object and four wheel objects)).
Second Life cannot do that because absolutely everything in the world is dynamic.
Not so, which you'd realise if you'd put a little thought into it.
Now, perhaps, the engine could do with optimising more... but you cannot compare it with Quake/Unreal etc etc. It does MUCH more work per frame.
There is no perhaps about it, even for what it is doing in real time it should be a lot faster, they have do be doing something deserving of The Daily WTF for it to be running as badly as it does, truly. The developers of the major physics engines, such as Havoc, have real time demo code that puts the poor performance of SL's engine into prespective (demos which do a lot more with a large number of primitive objects and with really good collition detection on them).
I am quite aware of the (obvious) differences between the SL engine and say the Unreal, Quake or Battlfield series engines (with their pre-rendered worlds and objects). The whole idea behind having pre-built models is that it would solve a lot of the problems that SL developers have not been able to resolve.
None of that precludes it from still from having fully interactable pre-built models that can be downloaded on the fly (in fact, IIRC, the Quake series has had the option for players to have their own models that can be sent out to clients only the fly during a match since Quake 2 / 3, which must be like ~ 8 years ago now - and that was when most players at the time where 56k - a simple example, but proves the point somewhat).
A more relevant example might be Soldner - while it is infamous for a myriad of other reasons (it was abandoned commercially before being finished, has broken netcode and was quite unstable and JoWooD, the production company behind it, are widely disliked) the actual 3D performs well and looks reasonable, has fully deformable terrain that streches for miles, and is highly interactable (with scriptable pre-rendered objects - e.g. buildings with walls that can be demolished by tank shells, destructable doors and windows).
It's not a huge leap to think of how you'd then add the dynamic downloading of pre-built (scripted) objects.
They are when the content is as dynamic as it is in Second Life... as you would realise, had you put a little thought into it.
Regarding "is as dynamic as it is in Second Life" it is of course worth me pointing out that most objects in SL you'd expect to be dynamic (cars, jet packs, robot suits, etc.) have little or no actual animation going on. If you are lucky you'll get some (annoying) scripted sound and a single short and simple animation (for example, a door might open and close on someone's house).
From an end user perspective functionally it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the level of interactivity of objects were pre-built once the creator was ready to publish them. You could still have doors that open when you click the handle, windows that can be rolled down on a car, wheels that spin, lights that flash or wing mirrors that could be moved. You could still have buildings with revolving doors, escalators and be able to place other objects in them if you wanted.
I don't know why you don't get that. If you still disagree, try giving me an example of an interactive object that you couldn't do with a pre-rendered model (bearing in mind my previous comment about objects being able to be made of objects and support for scripting and dynamic boundary boxes). Two or three would be good, some nice practical examples, a sentence each should be fine unless you'd like to expand on them.
If you actually knew a little bit about 3D engines
I'm a developer for a living, and I've written, for fun, 3D software starting with QuickDraw 3D (going back a decade) and moving to OpenGL. I don't do anything as interesting as games development for a living but I do know quite a bit about existing engines, model design, level design and event scripting in modern 3D software. I'm not about to write an engine any time soon, but I'm comfortable with OpenGL, and discussing features of modern engines (parallax mapping, GLSL, volumetric shadows vs. shadow mapping - and other neat stuff SL's graphics engine doesn't have).
The developers of Havoc would say THE SAME THINGS AS I AM... their demo is not actually dynamic, most of the textures etc are precalculated. It is demonstrating the physics, not showing off the 3d card.
I disagree. I certainly think the Havok developers would make a robust co-hereat argument either way. I tend to think they would disagree with your apparent assertion that writing your own graphics engine (such as it is) rather than just licensing one (like SL licensed their physics engine) would be the best way to go.
Actually, I was thinking of one of the completely straight up texture-less demo's from Havok, as it happens. I did laugh at the line 'textures etc are precalulated' -(e.g. Do you think SL uses procedural textures? What do you actually think 'etc' might include? How would you imagine that line of argument makes SL look better, rather than worse (given the straight up Havok demo's are real physics and animation time too)?
As mentioned, SL uses the Havok engine as does Halo and - most relevant of all here - Half Life 2, it just doesn't preform as well, and that's even though it's level of sophistication when it comes to object interaction is not nearly as impressive as HL2. Not that it needs to, but it could at least try and come close enough to not be the sort of nightmare users have described try to use here. The excesses possible in Garry's mod for HL2 (with scriptable objects, AI, rag dolls and real time physics) are a good example of what SL could be be like, if it was any good.
Now I wouldn't use the HL2 engine because it's not really up to handling very large terrain (unlike the Unreal engine, or the ID's new engine for Quake Wars, or even Soldner's terrain engine - personally that's my favourite part of it, I think it's technically kick ass) but is no reason in the world why you couldn't add dynamically downloaded pre-built scripted objects (take something like the car from HL2) to an engine like Unrea