Up or Down in S.L. - literally

The heavenlyness of S.L. is now 100K people, some playing occasionally, others like myself pathologically addicted. Suffice to say I love and have been waiting for something like SL for more than a decade. Fantasies are coming true and I get to misbehave (within the margins of TOS, dear data) every day. Love it love it love it.

Now I was wondering. There are like a xptillion annoying young adolescents and teens rummaging about in ways we dare better not speculate about on chats like MSN. I bet there is a chance (risk) that one day an appreciable slice of these kids might tumble into SL. Ofcourse the user interface needs to get better, but I intuitively and mystically sense a saturation point where those kids are gonna spill into S.L. And if that happens (2006? Phil seems to thing so!) well you have an S.L. with a million people in no time. *especially* with the success of WoW... People are looking for alternatives.

Expect those rampaging hordes, that is what I am saying !

You can expand S.L. in the four directions of the compass, untill you have an unmanageable, largele incomprehendable swath (sprawl) of islands. I wont mind having an SL landmass that is so horrendously big it is impossible to explore. However ... there is an alternative.

I can see S.L. going up - and down.

Imagine going up. Glancing up from the ground, you see a prerendered mass of stuff in the sky. You know it's there, are constantly reminded something is up there, high in the sky, a teeming mass 10 miles high, huge as the american defecit. And better ... you can go there.

Going there is like going to anyplace in S.L, expect it is "suspended like a cloud" in the sky. These sky realms I can see in my mind's eye are like huge zeppelin landmasses, each with their own primly limitations, casting shadows down below on the surfacebound of S.L. citizins. The sky realms could have their own unique sets of rules. I can see trees reaching up to the sky realms, elevators ferrying people, levitation boats literally moving from one realm to the next, island realms, cloud realms, you name it.

Stuff dreams are made off, right.

Similarly I can envision going down. This brings an environment with some other mechanics. Basicly it is the task of the land creator now to burrow from solid rock, creating cavernous spaces, tunnels, underground realms, surrounded my stuff. This would have to change the basic interface of the game; the camera would have to zoom in when blocked by solidness as to avoid blackouts... But with an amount of reprogramming it would create a unique environment.

Imagine a cavern as big as an island, with stuff all over. Buildings on the ground, interspersed with glowing bioluminiscient mushrooms, ornate street lighting... buildings suspended from cavernous walls, bridges, towers, andsoforth.

Have a look at an environment like Dungeon Keeper. The creator of an underground land would have to cut his space from the darkest of rock, literally creating space to move... Can I call it a paradigm shift? If linden labs then proceeds to create a number of free rock wall patterns, stalacmites and 3D shapes (like they do now create a nice sunset and sunrize around the clock) then you set the benchmark for mouthwatering environments.

Am I making sense?

Lets lift S.L. to a new level...!

My girl suggested an even more wild scenario. To understand this one, you should read the bookms "vacuum flowers" and/or "schismatrix" and most certainly "the high frontier". For good measure throw in "The moon rush" as wel.....

Imagine space, mostly empty. Take the solar system with all nine+ planets, some hundred or so moons, many thousands of asteroids, all in blissfull freefall conditions. Now put into place celestial newtonian mechanics. Make distance traversable in an amount of time reasonable for gameplay but just slow enough to pose some sort of obstacle. Put into place an economy, generally based on trade, speculationm resource management (mining) and stuff... maybe even piracy.

Now put into place O Neill habitats. Those place will be strikingly similar to any place we have in SL right now... except for the fact they will be inhabitedby cyborgs as well as a majority extremely pretty girls and boys. Most will be just living blissfully happy, just like is happening right now in SL, having sex, buying clothes, chatting and being extremely vain at some times and gregarious at others...

BUT add ship travelling mechanics like in Homeworld, or the Jupiter experiment.

Now imagine this taking off, with a quests like in WoW, with the generic resource aquisition grab.. expect for one thing.

Which is VOTERS. Political power in the system is based on electorate. If people become citizins of your little island habitat they give you solar system "voting power" and tax income...

Just imagine a game set on this premise. Most people wont vaguely understand the implications... but those who read the above books... I bet those people will by now have a glint in their eyes.

Unless some miracle happens to the SL performance, the in-game population likely won't increase above 5k. For, as, you note, the more play, the worse the play gets to the point where you are better off using YM or sumptin.

This is fundamental, irreparable limitation of the design of SL, and Philip's delusions notwithstanding, we have just about reached the saturation point.

Rumor has it that there is a second generation SL (aka SL2) under development which should hopefully not contain the SL1 asset system design bottleneck. Unfortunately, Linden Lab has not seen fit to tell anyone when we might expect that to release so they mostly pretend that game performance is not lousy contrary to the majority of player experiences.

There was a recent article on Terra Nova exploring the issue that no one really knows what the MMO player counts are for SL or many other MMOs. As for the LL statement that 90% of 100,000 accounts have logged in to SL in the last 90 days, I'll simply say that I trust government budget figures more.

I would love non-linear space, so you could create a Tardis, you walk through the door and you're in a new space-time with larger dimensions on the inside than on the outside. When they add llTeleportAgent() it may become possible to simulate it, but it would be better if there was some way of simply mapping space so that everything... avatars, objects, light... followed the metric you laid down.

You could do it by defining a "wormhole prim". A wormhole prim would have a face that was mapped to the face of a second prim somewhere in the same sim. Vectors passing through this prim would be mapped to the corresponding vectors on the wormhole face on the paired prim. This could be simulated fairly easy by the rendering engine, at little cost in performance, by having the client at the end of each frame render the view from the viewpoint of the wormhole prim at (say) half the draw distance, and texturing its local copy of the local prim with that so it's there for the next frame. This would mean the view would be at least one frame behind, but that shouldn't be noticable unless you made a loop of wormholes... but *that* could be used for interesting effects.

Collision with the wormhole face would instantly teleport the impacting object to the matching wormhole, so when you walked through the wormhole, you'd be in the corresponding location.

If the destination wormhole was smaller than the original, the view would be scaled up and the draw distance correspondingly reduced, so you could have a "Lilliput" vs "Gulliver" view.

llWormhole(integer face, key wormhole_end, integer flip);

You'd need the flip flag to implement mirrors.

On thing they could do would be to set up a second second life, with its own asset server. Travelling from one to another would involve some kind of "customs" mechanism, and your avatar on the other side would only have that inventory they'd paid "duty" on.