we are broadcasting the premiere of a new show on this show to simply show that sl is vr and sl culture is alive and well.
enjoy and congrats to jo, saffia and ebbe for an engaging conversation:
and if you want to get your questions in for the next show, keep watching the forums, read on the official lab chat blog, like the show on fb and follow on twitter.
below a few snaps made during the broadcast [ebbe looks good in his new av!]:
the drax files radio hour [with jo yardley] is a weekly production of basicdrax entertainment.
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Reblogged this on Jo Yardley's Second Life and commented:
A Drax Files Radio Hour show about our first Lab Chat episode!
Missed it? Hear it here.
Reblogged this on ZZ Bottom misadventures in Virtual Worlds!.
WTF! June? Ebbe, do you realize that is almost a full year with only your isolated group of creators? With all of them using the same software, how can you even think for a minute you will be ready for what is to come? Be ready for many confused and irate creators. Who is going to make Sansar tutorials for other creators? There are currently ZERO maya users making tutorials to create content for SL. Well, actually there is 1, and she is Cathy Foil. So, LL plans on working with their isolated group of Maya users, none of which have ever created a tutorial, and then opening Sansar up to public beta. At the same time, LL wants to be catering to creators, most of which use Blender? Whatever LL. Keep sitting in your little bubble and you’ll see how it turns out.
Maxwell Graf asked a very good question, and I’ll address it here. Again, LL is starting off terribly by only allowing Maya users in. The real bulk of creators that will populate Sansar won’t even get a chance to see anything until it’s all set in stone. To me, it’s obvious that LL will lose a whole lot of creators. I’m already deep into all the other 3D markets, and this is because LL has faltered over the past many years. We don’t even have custom skeletons in SL yet. Currently, I sell products for the Daz/Poser infrastructure, IMVU, Unity, and now Unreal Engine. With LL planning on taxing our products more, LL will have no advantage in the market. Plus, all the other marketplaces charge more than LL now because they all moderate the content that is released on those marketplaces. The cost of checking every product, no matter how badly they do it, is enormous, and exactly why they all charge more. LL, on the other hand, won’t be curating at all, so it makes no sense to pay them more for doing nothing. I’ve also pointed out, that I don’t actually sell on those marketplaces because I don’t feel the need to share my profits with them. I sell my products on my own marketplace. Their marketplaces charging a high commission actually helps me, because I can sell for far cheaper than anyone on their marketplace, and still make more than their merchants. If LL thinks they can just arbitrarily charge more, I think they are in for a rude awakening, depending on how high they go. If I want to sell full perm items for other creators to sell in Sansar, I don’t need to use LL’s services to do that.
As I have pointed out before, the best way to get me, or anyone like me, to creator for your platform is to give me a better service, or services. If I’m making money on your platform, I will GLADLY pay for more service to make my life easier, or for marketing. In all the years SL has been around, it has never had a decent marketing system. Ebbe, go back and look at how much LL used to make on the classifieds in the SL inworld search. Back in the day, the inworld search wasn’t all bad, and 70% of my customers found me thru the inworld search. LL has since ruined inworld search, trying to be more “fair”, and now there is little to no reason to advertise in the inworld classifieds. My point is, if you give us, the people who are supposedly making bank in SL, a good marketing system, we’ll beg to give you money.
Calm your tits, maya is just one tool to make models.
Duh!
I promise I will create some amazing content for Sansar, IF they provide a Linux version. Nobody likes Windows anymore since they violate users privacy with their new Windows 10.
by saying you are looking for people who can bring in large numbers of listeners, you’ve just announced your demise..if that is your only reason for doing this show , good luck…..
First of all, congrats to Saffia and Jo for a great hosting job!
Ebbe sprung few huge Sansar surprises, but there is one recurring theme that is starting to worry me slightly: the strong focus on user-created experiences as a tool for driving traffic.
I do realize that this is an important piece of the user acquisition and retention puzzle, and I think it is a great way of directing users directly to their areas of interest.
However, I think it’s vital that this is not the sole focus and that we will not lose the open-ended approach in which users create their own motivations and purposes that is so central to SL.
If the end result is that creation becomes the sole domain of professional vendors of game-like experiences, I believe much will be lost.
Listen to minute 30. Altberg clearly states the idea is to get people to go from Second Life to Sansar without forcing them. So it is the idea to have Second Life shut down so they can collect high taxes on creators in Sansar.
That is the only reason they do not update Second Life. It is all about them being able to grab more money from everybody that spends a dime.
Linden Lab is now trying to sell grandfathered regions asking 600 US$ transfer fee when their sneaky purpose is to have Second Life shut down anyway.
Listen at minute 30:40
Jo Yardley: So Ebbe what if Second Life suffers and goes down the drain because people leave to Sansar?
Ebbe Altberg: Well the cannibalisation effect, hmmm, well all I have to say is that it is better that it is us than somebody else destroying Second Life
Euh Altberg bud, you should have your head checked. You just told everyone you absolutely don’t give a crap about Second Life still you try to sell current customers grandfathered sims for exceptional high tier rates.
I call it project Scamsar because that is what it is.
“That is the only reason they do not update Second Life. It is all about them being able to grab more money from everybody that spends a dime.”
Do not update Second Life? ROFL.
Since 2011 and Rod Humble’s tenure at the Lab, the company has been investing very heavily in Second Life from infrastructure right through to user-facing updates and improvements such as:
– Hardware and network infrastructure improvements
– The overhaul of many of the platform’s core services (“Project Shining”), representing over 18 months of simulator and viewer updates aimed at improving the user experience
– Significant investment in 3rd CDN services aimed at both improving service delivery to users, and in removing the weight of content delivery from the simulator software to further improve simulator performance and the user experience
– Major efforts in refactoring code code within the group chat services to resolve many long standing issues there
– Major (and ongoing) work to refactor inventory and asset handling (server and viewer) to both improve performance and reduce issues of inventory loss
– A complete overhaul of the viewer build process to position it to better keep pace with evolving tools
– Major (and ongoing) refactoring of the simulator / viewer underpinning communications mechanisms to improve their reliability and by extension, (again) the user experience.
At the same time, new features and capabilities have been added to the platform – many as a direct result of requests from users or to help with issues users on older systems find problematic. These various include materials processing, experiences keys, fitted mesh, the upcoming avatar complexity controls and graphics presets.
Right now there are several projects in hand which are intended to bring further enhancements and improvements to Second Life.(and doubtless consternation and upset in the process – such is the nature of the beast). The viewer itself continues to go through overhaul and improvement in order to ensure it can be better maintained and enhanced in the future.
Obviously, this hasn’t solved every problem SL faces technically, and there still are issues that cause frustration and upset. nor have the Lab been free from missteps along the way, or at times not getting it right.
But to proclaim the Lab “do not update” Second Life or otherwise wilfully ignore it is a gross misrepresentation of the reality of the last several years, both under Ebbe Altberg’s tenure as CEO and prior to him, Rod Humble.
Ow look it is propaganda machine Inara Pey Linden
First Inara Pey Linden does block people from commenting on her own blog if they are not praising her Linden friends into heaven. Once she blocks the commenters on her blog she goes to other blogs to sing Linden their praises and defending them.
How much are you getting paid to do this Inara Pey Linden?
An update would be a complete new deployment of the avatar creation system.
An update would be a more realistic version and HD version of the windlight system
An update would be seamless connected ocean with physical waves
An update would be open airspace and all sims connected in world by open ocean
That would be updates. Not them tweaking their current code a bit each week so they can collect their paychecks
No updates for 6 years and a staff of 200 people.
Funny how those who present an alternative view point based on what has actually been going on are denigrated as “propaganda machines” mis-labelled with uncalled for “Linden” last names, dismissed at “paid”, etc. .etc.
I guess that’s to be expected when clouding your misconceptions with facts 😉
Don’t listen to that jerk, Inara. You are the best source for SL information out there. Without you, Drax/Jo or Nalates, we wouldn’t know anything that is going on at the Lab. Thank you so much for your amazing work. And I say that without being a Linden fan girl. They basically lost me when they messed up and cancelt the Linux viewer.
Your arguments would carry a lot more weight if you stuck to the facts and refrained from ad hominem attacks.
The Lab has indeed been updating SL, but it’s fairly obvious that there are limits to what you can reasonably do with a code base that’s over a decade old and has a lot of assumptions built in. The types of features you list would be great to have, but in order to get there you have to free yourself of existing limitations and dependencies.
So the Lab drew the right conclusion and started over. I’m sure they will make mistakes along the way, but at least this approach offers opportunities that they would not otherwise have.
You can criticize Sansar when it arrives, but to attack the decision to start afresh rather than endlessly fiddle with stale code is a rather unconvincing line of reasoning.
Age of codebase.
Well why don’t we go a little deeper into that shall we?
Old codebase, well you know what also has/had an old codebase. It is named the Cryengine. Some quick research indicates the Cryengine exists since 2003 and must be in development since 2000 most likely as it does take several years to write such an engine from scratch. By coincidence that is just about the same time since Linden Lab started to code Second Life.
Now here is the big difference, Cryengine did it right and Linden Lab did fail. Cryengine did build 1,2,3,4,5. Did Cryengine or Unreal engine at any point said to the game companies that did use their software:
“Hey guys, we feel like our current codebase is a complete mess so in order to not make ourselves tired we are going to build the Smileengine. The Smileengine will have all kinds of eye candy and fancy graphics so you can all start to rebuild your game products on the smile engine in the future. We still have 3 coders working on the Cryengine to do some basic maintenance, so feel free if you wish to keep using the Cryengine”
What do you think would have happened to Unreal or Crytek if they pulled such a stunt? Game development companies would have lost lots of money and Crytek would be hated in the industry.
Same applies to Linden Lab period.
From a technical point it is perfectly possible for a software company to even do a complete new overhaul of the current software product if needed.
Linden could just completely rewrite Second Life from the ground up, instead they build a competitor and do not care for the slightest what happens to their customer base or the thousands of businesses active in Second Life. Businesses they invited to come to their platform because they needed them.
All the content creators in here, if you think this will not affect you or your sales think again. When the average resident in Second Life will start to figure out the impact of Sansar and Linden their shenanigans they will start to scream and become recluctant to spend money on your goods.
The gentlemen (if they are worth calling that, I call them scum) at Linden Lab are taking advantage of their customer base in an attempt to stay in business and try to survive in the future.
If Linden Lab would have done their work properly in the past they would not be in this situation now.
Do you see Unreal engine or Crytek panic about Oculus Rift or HTML5 and Webgl?
No you do not and here is why.
These companies their code is well written and has been updated over the years properly. These companies did not fuck around like Linden Lab has done and can now adapt and migrate easy towards this new tech.
There is no panic for them or their customers. They just adjust to the new tech and neither them or their customers are bothered by it.
Once Altberg gets liquidated and Linden makes panic moves to cut costs you will know and understand the reason why I complain.
As for Inara Pey Linden
The woman is a propaganda machine who constantly places facts, twists words on every blunder Linden Lab causes, to make them look good.
The woman does not write in an objective manner and is a fan girl to the bones.
Altberg is a problem, nobody will get better from his actions.
Not the creators who will be confronted with a frustrated, panicking and angry customer base recultant to spend money on virtual goods.
Not the estates who will have to start again from scratch or will not care anymore after seeing their decade old businesses getting destroyed by Linden
Not the Second Life customers who will see some of their friends depart, watch their communities and group members erode because half is attracted to the new shiny or gets pissed and leaves.
Nobody will get better from all this, as for Altberg, did you hear him say he is firm to have Sansar open by the end of 2016. His only reason for that is because his contract is up by then and most likely he will want to cash his bonus for doing his term and then leave.
Now you are going to make me defend LL, dangit! Even under your own criteria, there has been improvements. Pathfinding was a pretty big endeavor, and works pretty dang good. To bad we don’t have proper skeletons to animate npcs, but that is another story. Materials was also a pretty big improvement. There were a number of backend improvements that were badly needed. I’m not saying your criticism is without any merit, as the argument could be made that they are consistently working on stuff that doesn’t amount to much, or redoing things over and over. Just look at chat. It’s a constant back and forth. Arguably, many things LL has changes were actually better 6 years ago. The Pie menu comes to mind.
All these conspiracies tho, that the Lab is doing this and that, and people are going to be screwed, all comes from pure ignorance. Why would the Lab do these things? A new backend is sorely needed. What scares me is this reluctance by the Lab to open up and just show people what is going on. The old days of keeping everything secret and making some big announcement is over, especially for a platform supposedly made for creators. For systems like this, that are constantly in beta, everyday is a marketing opportunity. Go to the Unite Conference. There are no real big anouncements. Go to a Blender Conference. The same applies, and the conferences are the time for that big announcement. Yeah, they happen, but they rarely totally surprise everyone. Everyone knows what’s going on under the hood tho. With LL, we, the creators, know nothing at all about what the Lab does.
Improvements.
Second Life does work a bit more smooth compared to 7 years ago. There are a bit less crashes yes. I still crash every day several times on a very fast PC with a good graphics card.
The head programmer of Linden Lab says:
“We have an incredible high crash ratio which would be completely unacceptable for any software company out there. Still our customer base tends to accept this”
Euh…. bud ?
Linden Lab did update search. They fucked up search so much it caused many, and I say many businesses ceasing to exist. Remember all the screaming about search not working?
Linden Lab did introduce mesh, first nobody used mesh because of land impact needed and they did not wanted to pay to have mesh objects on their land. Then creators figured out that wearing these fancy mesh objects did not cost a thing so they started to make clothes and avatar gadgets instead. Then creators found ways to reduce polygons making stuff such as a 1 prim bed. This made it so that residents can now have a complete furnished house for 80 prims and they live in a dirt cheap skybox on the mainland. This results in loads of vacant land reducing Linden their income on a massive scale. Another score for Linden
I can keep writing but I am sure you get the picture.
I am not a hater towards software products, I use Microsoft products for a long time and am perfectly content. I am also positive towards firms like Crytek, Blizzard who keep improving their product and listen to their customer base.
When I see how game companies that run an MMO interact with their customer base it is day and night difference with what these Lindens are doing.
When Linden Lab would have announced they are rewriting the Second Life engine I would be perfectly fine with that. Instead they are building something to plunder Second Life and erase their own mistakes from the past.
You do not have to believe what I am writing or agree, go on being a fanboy or fangirl, observe for yourself what takes place with sim numbers and concurrency as that is the only thing that matters.
Me? A fanboy? Hardly. You obviously don’t know who you are talking to.
Here’s the thing. It will take many YEARS for Sansar to become what SL is today. Yeah, it will have new shiny tech, but that doesn’t make up for thousands of hours of coding time to mimic what you can do in SL today. Just pick any system in SL, and you are talking months and months of coding and testing. There are hundreds of these systems in SL. Given the ridiculously slow nature of LL’s development process, it’s hard to believe Sansar will be anything even resembling SL for quite a long time.
You can’t really compare SL to the CryEngine or Unreal in the way that you are. They aren’t dealing with keeping a persistent world online for over a decade. You can compare systems, like the animation systems, or physics, or coding languages. Way back in 2007, when I was just starting out in SL, I had a Linden walk into my store. It was the first and last time I ever had decent conversation with Linden. This person told me back then that SL’s biggest problem was an outdated infrastructure.
Of course, I’m no coder, but I have and do run development teams. When thinking about redoing SL, it starts to get really crazy pretty quickly. You’d have to support it all. Sculpties! The Legacy prim system! Legacy clothing layers! Legacy permission systems. This goes on and on and on, when you look deeply at SL. Starting over is the ONLY way to do it.
Compare Linden Lab to the Unity developers.
Linden Lab puts up a blog when they fixed 2 bugs. Unity developers send out a mail with information about the new version of their engine which includes
400 + bugs patched
New feature 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
and to add more Unity basic version is FREE and not 295$ a month with 1000 US$ setup fee.
Inara Pey Linden you can twist your words as much as you like. If Linden Lab would indeed be that great they would be selling sims and in world concurrency would be larger and growing.
This is not the case, so stop singing praises. You would sing praises if Ebbe changed his pink boxershorts into red ones. However with Ebbe his background in the phonesex industry I think he is more the g-string type.
Ah, these hohohoho887 guy is the brain-damaged phonesex writer from the New World Notes comments. Now he has decided to make a fool himself on other websites. The comedy never ends. 🙂
You name yourself after an underage teen manga character you run around with in Second Life to satisfy your kinks. It makes sense for you trying to defend Phonesex Ebbe.
There was one subject about Sansar that startled me and has me wanting more clarification. Ebbe mentioned that users entering an experience will take on an appearance appropriate to that experience. Does that mean users don’t have an overall avatar appearance, that each time we enter a new experience we will look different like quantum leap? I can understand why this would be the case, but it’s still a shock that the much championed idea of expressing ones self via your avatar is possibly not going to happen in Sansar?
This one subject in the LabChat just lead me to a billion other questions, will users even have an inventory or an ability to collect items if they are not creators? is everyone going to be a creator wether they have built an experience or not?
I love everything i’ve heard about Sansar thats different from Second Life so far, except this. I really REALLY hope Linden Lab do have a system in place for people to create their own specific expressive avatars. Perhaps give creators a switch on their experiences to choose wether to allow users the choice to use their own or one supplied by the experience. There has to be choice!
We the users of Second Life have this connection with one another because we see the whole of Second Life as hour home that hour SL personas travel, explore and communicate with each other. I can’t see this happening in Sansar. I don’t yet see anything that would create a sense of belonging to something in Sansar.
I too have concerns about how Sansar will strike the balance between the “open world” of SL and the game-like approach of prepackaged experiences (see my comment above.)
If I’m to take the optimistic view, I’ll assume that the freedom to create that more or less defines SL will be carried forward to Sansar as well. No matter how great Sansar turns out to be, the Lab will need to leverage the current user base in order to reach critical mass — at least initially. And I believe a lot of SL’ers will pass if they’re not afforded the same opportunities to express themselves as the have today. Sansar is after all supposed to be “in the spirit of Second Life,” to quote a certain CEO.
Another point: if Sansar were to be limited to prepackaged experiences, that would limit the world to regions (which may not be the right term for Sansar) where someone has created such an experience. I believe the Lab needs and wants the ability to sell land to everyone — and lots of it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make much sense to adopt the policy of lower land cost but higher sales tax.
Which, as an aside, raises another question of mine: how are they going to avoid taxing gifts and still allow in-world purchases?
@cainmaven
Sansar will most likely be html5 webgl pages. High Fidelity runs on this technology. My main reason for assuming this is the mention of low cost by Linden Lab
It is the only option Linden Lab has available these days that works smooth on pc, mobile, tablets and so on. HTML5 does have plenty of power and is dirt cheap. It is basically html code for 3D objects.
So when you buy or lease such a game level or world from Linden Lab what you will be getting is a simple webgl html5 webpage that costs them 50 dollar cent per month or less to host.
Linden will of course charge you 30 US$ for this page or more.
High Fidelity uses this tech so you can check this yourself. Plenty of documentation can be found about webgl worlds.
Unity games can also export as html5 these days to run native in the browser so nothing special about this.
So that is all the hoopla Altberg tries to spin in front of your eyes with his creative experiences which you can create on the creative experiences platform of Sansar yada yada yada….
What you will be getting is basic game engine creator tool like you have with Second Life where you will be able to upload your scene you make in blender or Maya by using a converter Linden Lab wrote.
That is why current alpha testers for Linden Lab use Maya to develop because there already exist such a plugin that allows to export a scene directly from Maya to HTML5 format.
So you make a scene, export, upload to sansar on Linden their server for which you need to pay Linden. Then you can set some protocols for your world such as forcing an avatar appearance and that is it.
If you want a small and basic preview of this tech check out Beloola. Beloola is very basic but it runs on the same principal of what I suspect sansar to become.
For all i read, i keep the feeling, Sansar is not for me i fear and if they will try to end Sl in roder to fill it, ill be moving to open sim.
I agree! I can’t see myself even trying Sansar as it’s being described. I also fear the lab will try to force me to Sansar because they have gutted SL. I know the lab keep claiming they won’t gut SL but a decade of watching the lab tells me that that claim means nothing.
A few months ago I took a hard look at open sim and it is not a good substitute for SL right now. We can hope in a few years it will improve.
More scaring is this.
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/11/second-life-versus-sansar.html
Both Ebbe, and NWN are making 1 very HUGE assumption. That is that Sansar will be better than SL, or even competitive with it. For any of this to even be remotely possible, we are talking years. Probably half a decade. This will all be obvious in a year or so when everyone gets to see Sansar. Seriously, we are talking about a company that has not done 1 thing right in almost a decade, and gone thru 4 CEOs in that short time. Despite all this, people think Sansar will be a players? I’ll believe it when I see it. I have yet to see or hear 1 thing about Sansar that impresses me.
Check out Ebbe Altberg and Ingenio on Ripoffreport.com. It is filled with complaints against CEO Altberg and his phonesex software line he used to run. Altberg is going to become the one that killed Second Life and Linden Lab
Medhue, I agree Ebbe is now assuming Sansar will be better than SL. But is doesn’t seem to me that NWN is saying that.
It seems to me when Sansar first began to be talked about that Ebbe was convinced that Sansar needed to be a completely new software development rather that building on SL. So for a period of time SL and Sansar were separate
.
But NOW Ebbe seems to be seeing Sansar as a replacement for SL. From what I have seen of the Sansar plans it is a crippled version of SL that is being designed to compete with the other VR products coming online.
I think that is sad since the lab could have developed a technically improved version SL and started out with the 900,000 users currently in SL and built from there.
Now my opinion is that in the approximately a year from now when Sansar is generally available it will just be another VR application among the many.
Personally, I think everyone saying that Sansar will replace SL, are totally wrong. It’s not really possible. It’s like saying someone can replicate me. Even if they tried, LL could never create anything that comes close. I would ask people to think of it like this. Image you went back in time with the goal not to change the future. You simply being there will change the future all by itself. The smallest change technically, can means big changes down the line.
If Sansar is better, it will likely be completely by accident, kind of like SL.
Medhue, Sorry this reply is out of thread order. Somehow WordPress wouldn’t let me reply to your message so I’m putting your comments in quotes.
“Personally, I think everyone saying that Sansar will replace SL, are totally wrong. It’s not really possible.”
Of course I agree NOW. But I am less pessimistic that you. I think it would have been possible to have a duplicate SL in more modern software if the conversion task had been started in June 2014 six months after Ebbe came in. Instead approximately a year and a half has been spent writing something that is essentially going to be a crippled SL.
Sansar will have the new VR bells and whistles but it could have been so much more. Instead it will be just another one of the VR worlds that debuts around Christmas 2016.
To clarify, I understand your point about complexity and application of Chaos theory but I think it could have been done. Early in my career I maintained and modified the code of a management, financial, and audit system that grew to several million lines of code. So I’m familiar with large software systems. In my judgement a rewrite of SL using more contemporary hardware and software would have been possible. But development time has been squandered and the lab can’t go back.
And you force me to defend the Lab and Ebbe again. This is a very strange position you are putting me in. OK, so, I’m looking at things mostly from a content, and content creation point of view. SL is successful because it’s market is successful. It’s really the only relevant factor, and is entirely driven by the residents/consumers.
Now, I know a thing or 2 about SL content, and 3D game content in general. Matter of fact, there are few game engines that I have not, or do not sell content for. Being primarily an animator, I’m essentially forced to know all the ins and outs of not only how to animate things in all these game engines, but also everything about meshes and efficiency. Right now, SL creation and content is subpar, and a HUGE mess. It is seriously no longer a joy to create for it. That said, there is a lot of genius in many of the different systems that make up SL, and has from the beginning.
The move to a completely new infrastructure is a NO BRAINER, from a content perspective. The problem in doing so is that you lose all that past genius and need to try to salvage what genius you can to the new platform. Recreating platforms with so many complex systems inherently turn out completely different, especially when you consider that it is really the people using the software that drives it’s development. If your demographic is different, then so will the development be. IMHO, it is impossible to come close to recreating SL, and even something similar. As Ebbe and others have pointed out, NO MATTER WHAT, SL will be around for a very long time. Even if they could make a better SL, that would take a minimum of 5 years to even resemble SL.
Of course, I know NOTHING about Sansar, other than some very basic BS, that is obvious to anyone with some basic 3D knowledge. This is what worries me. Sansar killing SL is not even a rational point of view, in my eyes. We know NOTHING. Even after this Lab Chat, we know nothing that is even remotely relevant. It’s a recap of the last year at the Lab, and hasn’t changed in a year, meaning they’ve shown us NOTHING.
Sansar needs a ton of shit. How does the animation system work? Can I just animate the arm? Can animations be edited in Sansar? What about settings to loop, or set the speed, or mirror, or reversing. What about IK? Will we even have a default skeleton? How will expressions be animated? With bones or blend shapes? I’ve asked numerous times about blend shapes, only to be ignored by Ebbe. What about cloth physics? I could actually simulate real clothing physics in Blender, and convert that simulation into blend shapes, to recreate that movement in Sansar, if it allow us to import blend shapes within out FBX files. Lots of games fake cloth physics in this way. These are some of the details we need to know, and this is just about animation. Again, We know NOTHING about Sansar.
Not unexpected but I was surprised by Ebbe actually admitted it. That the lab expects Sansar to cannibalize SL has become more and more obvious as information about Sansar trickles out.
I do agree with Wagner James Au if the lab handled things correctly SL doesn’t have to implode. But given the mismanagement of the lab particularly since 2008 does not bode well for SL. I hope Open Sim or something better comes along.
My personal prediction is that when Ebbe and his management team see that Sansar is not becoming as big a success and/or expanding as fast as it will need to they will attempt to force SL users into Sansar and both will implode.
I do hope before that, Ebbe will be out and some with good sense will replace him.
Ebbe has done a better job than his predecessors in staying in touch with users. That wasn’t hard earlier Lab CEO’s were not really there for SL users. What I really wonder about about is why he didn’t see and take the opportunity he had in June 2014. BTW that was six months after he started so he should have known the company.
He could have begun a rewrite of SL for more modern hardware/software and now be adding and testing the modern VR and other mods that are mentioned in connection with Sansar.
By Christmas 2016 the Lab could have had virtual world that would have not only seen as different from the other VR worlds coming out about then. It would also be a world that would start out with a population.
We wouldn’t have had all this mess about Sansar canabalizing SL and endin up with at best a crippled SL called Sansar. Unfortunately that improvement boat sailed in June 2014 and Ebbe didn’t see it or chose to ignore it.
I’m not sure what can be done now.
Why the suddenly silence from all the LL fan bloggers, since it become apparent that the Lab chat didn’t work as they expected to lift Sl users expectations.
I wonder if it was then they realized LL was lying to them in their backs or that they just found out how small was the knowledge of Ebbe regarding Sl and how much he is not interested in its future, with or without Sansar.
Yes, small knowledge and he doesn’t care really and that came across in Lab chat.
You should pay attention to the following:
Altberg: “I am firm to have Sansar open by the end of 2016. I am really firm on that date.”
why?
Because CEOs at Linden Lab sign a contract for a term of three years. They do their term and get a bonus at the end (most likely they get stocks or are able to cash in their stocks. Linden Lab is not a public company but they do have investors and company shares).
Altberg his contract is up by the end of 2016. Altberg has been running the company for two years, next to losing a lot of sims and customers he achieved nothing so far. Altberg his idea is to open Sansar into beta by the summer and then have it “ready” by the end of 2016 for general use. This way he can show the board he did his job as they asked. What kind of a job doesn’t really matter as he will be able to cash his bonus.
Linden Lab moves on fear mostly, when the bloggers reported Second Life was now below 25000 sims then suddenly Linden Lab started to care about their land sales decline. The setup fee discounts are a fear reaction, nothing more.
Sansar will go into beta as soon Linden Lab gets motivated enough by a competitor. When Facebook launches a virtual place with the launch of Oculus Rift in the month of february you can be sure Linden Lab will open Sansar into beta in February.
People are well aware about the nasty business that’s going on with Linden Lab now.
I wonder how Linden Lab will finance their survival in the next years. It looks like they just made a very big hole in the Titanic. Woops.
And to all the fan girls and boys. What do you think will happen when Linden Lab has no monies because people leave in droves?
Your friends list goes poof
Your inventory goes poof
Your sims go poof
Your work goes poof
And you can thank mister Ebbe Altberg for this.
What I find also striking is how CEO Altberg speaks about how the “Sansar Team” might cannibalize Second Life.
Altberg says: “Hey don’t look at me, it is the Sansar team that will destroy your virtual world. It is not me I am just the boss, it is the Sansar team that will do the damage”
As for the future……….
When Sansar opens and everybody sees how it destroys Second Life people will not be eager to put in a lot of money. They will just have been screwed out of their inventory worth thousands of real dollars in many cases so why would they spend such large amounts of money again. Linden Lab has now shown they are just a game company and games last 3 years and cost 30 Dollars to purchase so why spend money?
How those Lindens will think back to the age of Second Life where people bought their 1000 US$ sims and paid them large amounts of money so they could have a catering service at the office for their meals, company doggies, yoga lessons and free pizza. How will those Lindens think back at the days before Evil Altberg made his entry destroying a decade of company work and hundreds of thousands programming hours.
Second Life in the news on prime time television all over the globe and the phonesex CEO messed it all up.
Mark, Just so you will know, to clarify matters, and to avoid being painted by fan girl brush zzpearbottom and I are NOT fan girls. Both of us trace the coming implosion of SL and Sansar to the mismanagement of CEO Altberg. We are just not as vitriolic as some of the other lab critics.
On a personal and sort of funny note I may have been the first person that suggested the name “Inara Pey Linden” would be more accurate. I still keep track of her blog but with a bit helping of Lab bias salt.
One fact I am grateful for is I wasn’t sure when Altberg’s contract was up. I thought it was the end of 2016 but I’m glad to have it confirmed by someone else. I do wonder how much of a bonus he will get for the presiding over the implosion of SL and Sansar.
Only one thing really surprised me about the first Lab chat was Altberg actually said Sansar would cannibalize SL. That was obvious from the first mentions that Sansar would be a separate product from SL.
What does make me angry is that Altberg could have modernized SL and introduced Sansar like features if he had started in June 2014. Six months after he started with the lab. Instead he squandered that opportunity. Unfortunately that boat has sailed. If he had gone this route it wouldn’t have guaranteed the future of SL but it would have a better chance than it now.