Threat to SL: Letting Multiverse Beat Us

http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2006/63038.html

Holy crap, I really hope Linden Lab can catch up before this goes out of Beta:

- Importable meshes
- Tools to zoom in and out of world easy without flying everywhere
- Unlimited landscape for a server for alternate worlds (Linden Lab is releasing preambles to this in the 1.9 patch, if I read this correctly - letting people add prims, etc. It's only a matter of time before LL lets size of land be dictated by the owner, since we already have the technology to share sims on servers.)
- Much cleaner build interface
- Nice land customizer interface that uses sliders and/or painting for editing terrain

The race is on....

Looks like good stuff.

Indeed it is. I think it's only a 'standard' game platform though.

I wouldn't worry about THEM. Second Life has got teh Aimee...Their ace in the hole, their trick up their sleeve, I am the cavalry... I'm the.. umm You know... supporter numero uno... the umm mHrmm wonder if Multiverse will put me on their web site if I defect....

thats nothing really and its not going over take SL its just a very shitty mmo creator theres many of them like realmcrafter, torque, Kaneva and many more MMO or FPS type engines.

Nothing new there engine already sucks ass!

AND WTF has this to do with SL or threat to SL?

This does like same thing and its a MMORPG its made already with basic and most easy tools ever to create a MMORPG.

http://realmcrafter.com/Gallery.php

It is "only a 'standard' game platform"?

Wasn't that the goal of Philip? To create a platform to build the Metaverse on?

If the word 'game' is what you think makes the difference, think again, please. Multiverse is a platform and a toolset. You could build many different kinds of systems with it ...

I checked out Multiverse in December when they put out their initial press releases. The architecture looks VERY impressive - which is not to say much: it is a toolbox and has to be tried out before you can say something definitive about it.

The only big point, where they are "behind" SL seems to be "user created content". The idea to let the users create their world has proven very effective for LL. This is the biggest USP going for SL, IMHO. Multiverse has no modules in place for that. No integrated scripting language either. But those modules could be added rather easily ...

Currently Multiverse looks like a good platform to build your own little MMORPG or MMOG cost effectively. This is not a direct competition to SL. But if some developers take the toolset, add scripting and user created content and spend some serious marketing money, this might become a very serious contender as the foundation for the future Metaverse.

Yup I agree with Kane, nothing new here.

Competition are good!

SL looks far more light/sun in.... I have always wonder why most games must be so dark?.. My mind are not dark (Ok a smaller part).. I want happy feelings...

The CEO doesn't sound as intelligent, and sounds like he just wants your money. As opposed to sounding intelligent, and wanting your money without you knowing it.

Yeah, businesses suck! They brought us the internet at affordable prices!! Oh wait..

They're cool.

Doh.

I think Pham is right on the toolset aspect of Multiverse. Just quickly passing over the website, I see something like NetImmerse. One could build something like SL from it, though I wonder...

SL is about user-created content. LL realizes that most people aren't 3D modelers. Sure, if we had meshes and whatnot, we could have some really cool and efficient things in SL. But at what cost to folks who like to dabble? A few of my friends have never touched 3D, and never would have -- Until they started to mess around in Second Life, building stuff using its sometimes highly annoying (to those who how to use 3D software) generic prim system.

The only way around this would be to have a 3D modeler built into a system such as SL, that could generate/edit the mesh, but then you have the task of writing that on top of everything else.

Doesn't look like a possible competitor to SL at all. There's a world of difference between offline design using modular tools to create content for a game engine and streaming real-time building and collaboration where the act of creation is part of the in-world activity. That was really a cheesey demo.

Complacency kills. Multiverse is just one of the competitors we could see in the next couple of years. I don't give a fig about SL, and frankly being able to design in Lightwave or Maya or 3DS or whatever is my ideal, who gives a damn about slow rezzing blocky building. An efficiently designed mesh would load just as fast as anything currently does in SL and a proper caching system would work just as well most things in SL DO NOT change that quickly. I've said many times, most of SL looks like a landfill and that's how I really do see it. So much for interactive design, yes it's nice to be able to knock something up in front of someone else in real time, but it's not my prime reason for being in SL. I think you'll find really all most people want is to be able to meet and talk and play around somehow. Building online is only a small part of the mass activity that happens in SL. If someone comes up with a system that lets me host my own server I'm so there!

This sounds very negative and maybe it is. But imo SL is rapidly going down the pan, and LL need to address a lot of serious issues if they wan't to keep ahead.

That task surely is there - but so is an architecture that would allow it to develop such a module and even license it to other developers.

I would not easily dismiss this competition. Multiverse is no competitor to SL (or LL) in itself. But it could be used to develop a viable competitor. The idea to have a platform with which to build a number of different "worlds" which can share resources and technology is not essentially a bad one ...

Please consider the context of the event, Cotton.

To make a presentation at Demo (which caters to the investors community to a large part) and not focus on growth and revenue potential would be kind of fruitless. Investors are not especially interested in making cool things but in making money.

Multiverse itself isn't competition for SL, but it would give people a toolset and ability to potentially create something that might be. With that said, I agree that complacency kills.

However, from what I see so far, LL is aware of that. Maybe we don't always agree with the directions they as a company head off in, but it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time. But, LL is moving forward. Even if not at the pace that some folks want.

I used to play There. I loved There. And then I heard about SL, which seemed to have a lot more to offer. But, I tried it, and it would not run on my system at the time - at least not for any length of time. I could connect for ten minutes or so, and then I'd crash for some reason or another. What I saw in my admittedly limited experience, was to be honest, not that impressive. It just wasn't as fluid and appealing as There, for me, at the time.

Since I've come back to take another look and have spent some fair amount of time playing, I could not imagine ever going back to There. SL has progressed to a great degree since the first time I tried it and now. I just don't see that happening if LL were being complacent.

Just my $.02 thrown in.

I pretty much agree with everything you're saying here. I'm not sure how "cutting edge" I really see SL as being any more, to be honest. Sure it's novel, but that's not generally the same as cutting edge. Rapidly the technology is ageing, in my opinion.

1. We're stuck at Havok 1, certainly not cutting edge.
2. We're stuck with a centralised architecture (no matter what they may say, fundamentally SL is centralised).
3. We're stuck with prims - that's a big one for me, a really big one. SL looks antiquated, blocky and clunky because we're building with blocks. A seriously cutting edge application in this sphere would be providing mesh support, there's no two ways about it. I do not have time for excuse being streaming, much more knowledgeable people than me about mesh file sizes etc. have debunked that on other threads.
4. There's a whole host of scripting implementations that have been produced "half done", such as XML-RPC for example
5. We're promised a new renderer, but when is this going to appear?
6. There are fundamentally arbitrary limitations on "user input features". Why can't I capture the QWERTY keys, for instance?
7. It is also unfriendly for the end user because, as a developer, you aren't given the tools to be able to make things easy, such as UI widgets over and above the limited llDialog, for example.

What has been implemented feels rushed, incomplete and second-rate. My example from recent months has been HUDs - it's the simplest, most basic implementation they could manage. It's shoddy.

So yup, roll on a serious competitor. What's been highlighted on this thread isn't that competitor (in my opinion) but I still keep my fingers crossed that one appears sooner rather than later. And, if it's polished, then we might just see the sky falling here.

To all those who still think this is cutting edge. It's not. It's just novel.

Personally, Moopf, I agree that SL is not cutting edge. But, I see progress from the first time I was here and now. I have no real clue how fast that progress happened. Like I said, maybe they're not progressing fast enough...

I see efforts, though. And I simply submit that LL is aware of the notion that complacency kills, and that they're moving forward, even if not fast enough to suit everyone.

How large, really is LL? How many programmers are there? This is not a smartass response, but a legitimate question. I'm curious to know just how many programmers there are working on SL, because X number of hands can only do X number of things at once.

I wouldn't worry about Multiverse quite yet! For starters at the moment you have to be a company and present an idea pitch in order to get involved. That might just apply to the beta, but it might not.

For seconds, platforms like this already exist, namely Game Gardens. Ok, it's not 3D - but most games I've played within SL aren't really 3D either.

The prim modelling is a key point of SL. If modelling was moved outside SL it would start getting back into "talker with avatars" territory. You'd have to have the right software to make anything, and only the highly skilled people could actually make anything look better than we have right now - which would drive everyone else out of the game and remove any feeling of freedom.

Sure, there has been progress. Things like custom animations were big improvements. But when was that? A very long time ago now. What big new shiny thing have we had since then? Somebody's going to have to prod me (and if anybody says Video on a prim, I'll kill them - it's nice and all, but it was hardly that important). Progress over the last 12 months has been decidedly slow from what I've seen. So slow, it's near stagnant.

I think LL are aware that complacency kills but I also think their hands are tied - so much of their system is poorly organised and put together that they're having to re-code the underlying nuts and bolts to have any chance of being able to push forward. They're probably cacking themselves about a competitor because, whilst they're busy trying to re-engineer their platform to make it easier to push forward, a competitior might just steel the march on them.

In the end their platform might be the thing that kills them, rather than complacency.

And a good values worth of $.02 too !

I totally agree I'm absolutely certain LL are not as complacent as some of the older residents.

And yes we've seen many forward steps, but SL is suffering growing pains in the extreme atm. We now have a worse renderer than we had 6 months ago. Things appear slower, in the the wrong order, and and are generally rendered in lower detail than they were only 2 versions ago. Reducing level of detail in order to keep up with the bandwidth demands of the residents is a sign the system is severely strained.

I've said a few times that SL reminds me of Mosiac and Netscape. They were great for a while but they failed to maintain their dominance for reasons that seem similar to SL to me.

Historically pioneers rarely succeed in the long term, the competition sits back and watches and is able to re-examine the problems using the first attempts as example of what to do and not to do.

I'm not going to list a litany of SL faults, we all know them and we all have opinions on how to fix them.

I'm still here in SL, about to expand my little empire too if my plans come off, and I'll remain as long as ther'es nothing better on offer. But my loyalties to LL are almost zero, for many reasons. ( which is a shame perhaps ). I'm not alone I know that for a fact.

No, you're not alone, I feel exactly the same on that score. The only difference is that I've shrunk my "little empire" recently.

I know. The problem is, the investor community of today, aren't the leisure suit wearing cigar smoking cowboys of yesteryear. The really amateurish demo doesn't serve to impress anyone at all. How many of us here went gaga over that demo?
Even if it succeeded, consumers would go like 'eek, another Multiverse based game'.

On the other hand, for SL to have a quantum leap in improvement instead of the seemingly ad hoc method currently in place, I think at one point, they'd have to abandon most of the legacy data that people have created to opt for a newer engine thats built from scratch using all the lessons learnt from the current flavour of SL. I am sure there are lots of things that Linden Lab would like to do, but can't do because of pre-existing conditions.
In the end, all it takes is more money and rabid customer loyalty to stay on.

Exactly! SL version 2. Even with very little backward compatibility would give me a reason to be loyal to LL !

::resists temptation to list desired features::