Why second life failed

I quit SL a few years ago, because it just wasn't doing it for me, but even while I was still there, there were actually quite a few interesting communities with good design and some immersive role-play going on.

You did have to look around and filter out a lot of crap to find things that were at all interesting, I grant that. But your assessment seems overly harsh. I have about the same amount of experience with Second Life as you do. My take at the time: Second Life might be better if the real estate were at least ten times more expensive. Lots of ugly buildings, each in the center of a giant empty lot, with no real attempt to relate one building to the next -- why bother, when land was so cheap?

And no people that I could find. I wandered around, even did a little flying, and then I finally found another avatar A very poorly programmed sexbot. Jd on May 23, parent prev next [—]. What is the original vision? As far as I can tell it was chatting with avatars that resembled real people. What does that get you? A few underpopulated pretty environments, lots of chat, and people having virtual sex with their virtual bodies most likely because their RL bodies are not quite as appealing.

Basically, there is no compelling storyline beyond "present yourself as better looking as you are in real life. I never got into Second Life, but a coworker proposed crazy idea - Second Life is basically an editor! At the time we had to support Radiant for our games I still do, a bit pain in the ass. So I installed just for the fun of it, played 15 minutes or so. But multi-player games never appealed to me one exception is Heroes of Might and Magic hot-seat - it's real social multiplayer as people do take turns - especially fun when this goes for more than 24 hours, and everyone is pretty much drunk, smelly, some very tired, some can't stop laughing.

I didn't feel up to putting enough time for something that probably only hardcore nerds would like though, so I didn't pursue it. As mentioned by others, SL isn't a game, so of course it won't compare well with games. Linden Lab the makers of the Second Life platform is a profitable company with about employees. Because there's an internal economy where content creators retain the IP rights in all content created for SL , there's a competitive market for quality content.

Top-quality content has improved greatly over the years. Of course, the characters in SL aren't simulations, they are real people except for a handful of bots , so they're interesting in all the ways people are interesting. As for user numbers, nobody says "Facebook has million active people, but San Francisco has less than a million, therefore SF is a failure.

The active user base of SL is about the same as the population of SF. Since this article is only about the technical side, let's add to this. Another game has the same issue with loading times and general performance: The Sims series, until the 3rd. The Sims 2 was excruciatingly slow when you had lot of elements on screen, even of fast computers. The reason? It's a game in which people make their own "levels", by adding items, which can even be of external source.

So it's hard to really scale for it like for other video games. The Sims 3 is faster, improved performance a lot, mostly because it is streaming as much as it can, now. Most of the time you will see dirty loading polygons, blurry textures, before it loads.

Because that's the only way to deal with a level on which you have no control. The issue is the same with SL, with the increased fact that people can really create anything, import meshes, make objects from thousands of polygons. And they can run scripts in each of these polygons, potentially able to launch scans of the whole area several times per second. I'm not saying that this is as optimized as it can get.

But it's far from being a "laziness" issue. The basic problem doesn't really have an "easy solution". Second life failed, in the sense that it never gained mass popularity in the same way that social networking did, for a variety of reasons. There are no friend suggestions or other mechanisms to encourage network effects.

If you want to do anything of significance, such as build a virtual house, you have to pay real money up front - and often not insignificant amounts either. This might seem like a minor point, but I bet many new users have turned away from SL because of this. The initial experience is typically not very enticing. I can attest to this personally. Recent version have improved, but SL still needs someone to redesign the UI to make it easier and more intuitive to use.

I used to work on few streaming games Spiderman 2, Ultimate Spiderman for example. But what he talks is balooney. Now I wasn't directly involved with how the levels were made they were in segments, I believe kind of like hexagonal, more likely brick style layout, with a big strip every one in a while.

Every such brick or strip would get asynchronously loaded. Okay, now how to get that fast on console? Well first, your data has to be precooked, at minimum only pointers should be fixed up. Then the biggest pain is that on burn media you get one results, while on GOLD discs another.

Mainly because of how CRC checksums are put - I believe it was for every 32 sectors or 16 , while on the burn was a bit different. Then you might experience problems, where the japanese PS2 version of the console just reads badly, hopefully your devkit has the same problem, so you know you would run in to.

And not forget - check which mode would work better for you - constant angular velocity, or constant speed. So my problem with the article? He's not even talking about the simple things I explained. Believe it's that's only the scratch in making streaming game Look what Naughty Dog did, when they could not load the level in time - the character would trip and hop - now that's very good solution, but really tied with your gameplay.

In our case, we had testers banging out what Spidey's maximum speed could be, so we can adjust the levels - some of the levels he had to do some quick missions, and pop-ups were never allowed it was considered bug. All those considerations you mention are true and I remember them fondly , but I think the problem here is that whatever budgets are imposed on player-creators are not adequate.

As I think the author implies, the problems are authoring guidelines and asset design. I don't even know if there are texture, vertex or other budgets imposed in Second Life, but I can tell you for sure that they were a big part of art creation in True Crime. The areas like Hollywood Boulevard with lots of recognizable buildings were really taxing on those budgets, but they made them work. Without those guidelines, even experienced artists can overshoot the mark.

Ideally, within Second Life, these creative limitations can be integrated into the game, so that it gets increasingly expensive to claim a large amount of an area's graphical resources. Hi Zach! I miss the luxoflux bunch I had to help briefly on the first True Crime with the xbox audio, and we pretty much stole all the QA from you guys for Spiderman, which I think is what killed TC:LA not enough testing I really don't know when comes to creative decisions I'm very bad at that.

At the end of the day I can only say we can stream this much and this much say max 1 stereo stream for music, mono voices occasionally, and rest for streaming geometry,t exture. So part of all this was adjusting, testing to get it right. This is what the author misses - user provided content would never get the same amount of testing, as there is simply no money behind that. For that reason they should limit themselves as much as possible. I think we met, or at least said Hi couple of times, when walking by!

I'm still at Treyarch. Oh yeah, Malkia! I'm sorry I didn't recognize you, big guy. Jeff Lander was so thankful you came in, he wanted to kidnap you to keep you at Luxo! You were great! Yeah, we had some crazy QA requirements for True Crime.

It blows me away that there were parts of the map maybe only driven through a few times we didn't have the resources to do that many complete drivethroughs - square miles is just so big. We have so many "glitch videos" on YouTube I think it autocompletes the word glitch after our game's name! But that's very true - the iteration was a huge part of the process and of setting those limits.

I couldn't imagine us not being able to go back to an artist and tell them it was chugging. I know some other studios did this thing where anytime the frame rate dropped below 30fps they put a bright red border up! We did fine with just a graphical meter and some really talented environmental artists.

That's another thing - the folks who made our environments got increasingly better at delivering stuff under our budgets, because they were constantly getting feedback about it. Without that, you just can't get the best quality. Bud on May 23, prev next [—]. This is a pretty lame comment. All he talks about is flying around randomly through the game with a very very large draw distance set. Um, yeah, of course that maximizes issues with loading textures.

It's also not remotely close to the average game-playing experience in SL. It's not representative. ChuckMcM on May 23, prev next [—]. As others have pointed out, the article's title is linkbait. The actual article says: 1 Second life lets people design levels. Thirdly the big draw for second life seems to be weird sex acts which are probably mostly mental anyway. It is one of the few attempts at creating a Metaverse. As the author points out there is a tremendous asset management problem if you try to stream everything from the server.

It could be improved. Given modern disk drives I'm sure you could cache locally pretty much everywhere you went with some lookaside cache code to invalidate local copies when meta-data indicated an update. The author alludes to something like that by asking for a better architecture. Now it would have been a bit more interesting if it was written from the perspective of "this is what it does well, this is what doesn't work for me" and then go on to speculate or do the math on how one might improve it.

It could work although everyones view of the world would only converge, not instantly be the same. You could use something like MongoDB, it would be read-mostly for geometry.

Back when I designed a castle building MMO never shipped sadly the textures were fixed all clients had them but you could paint them on different geometries. It reduced the bandwidth requirements to sending around vertices and a texture vector id, origin, u and v vectors. It would be fun to code something up like that with the Unreal engine. The whole virtual reality idea has been completely destroyed for me by a couple things. The simplest of these is: why impose a 3D real-world access model on an N-dimensional random access memory system?

I mean, that's what the web is. The whole idea is wonky and bizarre when you really think about it. If you want 3D with an excellent frame rate, go for a walk. One line one slider move fix for him -- reduce drawing distance to less than m. This is also suggested as the first comment to his blog.

He basically cranked up the drawing distance until everything is grinding to a halt and decided to complain about how everything is grinding to a halt. I guess there could just be a simple fix for this, benchmark the PC and the connection and don't let users crank up the distance to unplayable levels.

JoachimSchipper on May 23, prev next [—]. One possible solution would be server-side rendering that is, sending rendered images to the client instead of assets : I still think it sounds completely insane, but there are lots of companies that claim to make it work.

Since second life is not exactly top of the line, this ought to work. Joakal on May 23, prev next [—]. I always found the appeal of Second Life pretty low until I went to a workshop last year on post secondary teaching, and was at a session on preparing people for the workplace as well as different forms of training mental health care was one of the main examples.

They used Second Life quite heavily in simulations for their learning programs, and it really looked like a fantastic tool. You have lied with statistics! Edward Tufte frowns , sir! The author here: I know, I know! The graphs are auto-scaled by windows task manager, since they're designed to be a UI element, not to be compared between sessions like I did.

In this case I have lied with graphs in a way that benefits the victim, since, in the context of the article it implies that SL can use much more bandwidth than it actually does, which is a good thing! The Bureau Of Statistical Chicanery And Related Ballyhoo has reviewed your appeal and, based on the extenuating circumstances you described, has chosen not to revoke your blogging license Second Life is not a game, just like the Web isn't a game.

It's an early version of the Matrix. Code representing werewolves and vampires will be reused in subsequent iterations.

Doesn't SL do any p2p transfers? This is a really disappointing take on Second Life. I don't know that it's more or less accurate than the truth, but I hope the author is wrong. I hope that the technology simply isn't there or that the infrastructure is simply lacking. Duff on May 23, prev [—]. Perhaps if Second Life found a way to incorporate Bitcoin, they could attract some press again.

Hacker News new past comments ask show jobs submit. In theory and with a better physics engine, SL had that potential. Such environments could, for instance, replace current social networking. There are advantages to embodiment online, since we are wired as biological entities to react to other people in certain ways one does not see in the 2D world of a teleconference. As one browsed, reviews could be checked with a click to invoke a virtual copy, fellow customers chatted up real-time about their picks, and more.

Second Life would be about selling the experience of buying books, not just making a fake version of a bookshop rezz online. That would indeed be different from what companies like American Apparel tried in SL. In fact, with augmented reality and new projection devices, in-world objects might be projected into the actual living space. Back to actual a. Will we ever get a 3D Web? Unlike routine vacations to lunar hotels, where the incentive may exist, the costs are not prohibitive and the infrastructure exists.

If not, other nations with more enlightened policies may build the next Internet. Like the Interstate system, it will transform daily life and not in always wonderful ways. Whoever builds a 3D Web, I doubt that Linden Lab will be more than an historical footnote in e-texts about the next era of information technology.

The hour is past for them. All went well with lag, rezzing, scripts, etc. When I mentioned that our campus has left SL, however, I got a telling reply from one senior technologist. This article reprinted with permission from Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable. Privacy Policy Designed using Hoot Du. Powered by WordPress. On: February 8, In: Columns. With: 3 Comments. Am I being premature? Second Life has outlived its many obituaries.

Image courtesy Joe Essid. These guys should hire more humanities types, ya think? Author Recent Posts. Joe Essid. He writes for Prim Perfect about grids beyond SL. He has published several articles about pedagogically effective ways to teach with technology in writing-intensive classrooms.

He also publishes short work about gardening, history of technology, and sustainability. Ever a geek, Joe designs and plays old paper-and-dice roleplaying games.

His at-times snarky blog, "In a Strange Land," combines these interests from Joe's perspective as neo-luddite who rides a bike, refuses to use a cell phone, works on a farm, yet thinks avatars provide an ecologically sustainable way of communicating and building immersive simulations.

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