Threat to SL: Letting Multiverse Beat Us

The problem with them is that they were essentially addons of HTML, rather than vice versa.

Ooh... I'd never heard of vrtp. Gonna have to go look into what went on there.

Wonder what other 'failed' metaverses there've been...?

YAY!
Competition makes companies work harder. Consumers win
==Chris

Agreed - yay!

Absolutely.

Personally, I'm excited to see how the whole multiverse thing develops, i'm not terribly worried about it being a threat to SL. Games aren't a "there can be only one" proposition- look how many FPS or RPGs there are out there. A new game of similar type doesnt neccesarily mean doom for all other games of that type. They will all have thier individual strengths and weaknesses that will match with people's corresponding preferences.
The more, the better.

SL is nowhere near the first 3d system to allow user content creation. You've been able to upload and use your own meshes and textures to use on your own world in Activeworlds since around 1995. In VRML vased worlds, we've been able to do this even earlier. In Adobe Atmospheres (is this thing dead yet?) you could build with an offline editor and then upload it to your 3d space for others to browse around in. In There, you have to go through their content submission process (or you used to have to) and wait for them to approve your models and clothing etc. and the list goes on....

Ever tried creating levels for Doom, Quake, or Duke Nukem? Their editors sucked. LOL but they been around for ages too.

Csven, it's interesting.. Sun Microsystems tried this model with Java. Thinking build the platform and people would come fill it out.

Well, eventually, they did. However eventually Sun Microsystems had to give up and simply fill in a lot of the details themselves because the solutions others were providing were causing too much fragmentation.

I think there is a fine balance between what you provide for the platform and what you let other people provide. Obviously, we've seen some of the tension in that balance that LL is trying to strike.

Csven, it's interesting.. Sun Microsystems tried this model with Java. Thinking build the platform and people would come fill it out.

Well, eventually, they did. However eventually Sun Microsystems had to give up and simply fill in a lot of the details themselves because the solutions others were providing were causing too much fragmentation.

I think there is a fine balance between what you provide for the platform and what you let other people provide. Obviously, we've seen some of the tension in that balance that LL is trying to strike.

Well, I do for one (and I use 3DS for a living). There's nothing social about working in offline tools.

"Who gives a dam" was probably a little harsh but I believe the social aspect of SL is almost totally seperated from the act of building the environment to be social in. I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually had to build something in front of another person in real time. Yes it's useful and it's great fun, but not a requirement for social interaction not by any means. This not saying I don't want the function I most certainly do. But I also want finer detail and mesh can give us that detail. It's been mentioned that there are plenty of other "worlds" that offer social interaction, ( far more more popular too ) but there are none that let you completely design your own environment whether online or offline. None that actually work anyway. That is what attracted me to SL, and now I've been here for long enough I can see how and why I think it's not working at this time. Real time building using lego bricks is not something that will keep SL alive when the competition is offering the ability to use your own server space ( giving you control over much more than just privacy ), sell stuff online using REAL money ( you might have to find something a little more real to sell ) and have your friends around for tea ( and anyone else who you allow to drop in ), with the added advantage of a common internet wide protocol and open source. That's the future I see and want to happen. When I joined SL the CEO was muttering about open sourcing but SL does not appear to be heading that way.

[ it wouldnt be a post of mine if I didn't edit it at least once ... I forgot to mention that Metaverse has the potential to offer many things that SL can't, but I also agree it's not likely to be SL's nemesis. ]

Well my view is that the employees at Linden Lab need to eat more cabbage.


See! I'm far smarter than you lot. So I win this thread too.

Ok.. what is multiverse?

Yeah so um..it can beat SL for me how when I've never heard of it?

Think of the WoW game engine.

Now imagine that BLizzard wants to allow you to develop another game for it, for the small sum of half a million dollars.

Ta-da! Multiverse.

It's a middleware game engine for companies who don't have the skill/R&D to pull off their own MMORPG engine. Kinda like how Havok is for folks who don't have the time to re-invent complex physics collisions in real-time.

In other words, it's a competitor to World of Warcraft, not SL. The chance that the engine has even half the technical featureset that SL has is roughly negative three percent.

protip: SL looks like ass because it's designed, built, and "run" by amateurs and their friends. My houses can't compare to a Quake level designed by the LeveLord.

'cept it's free to develop for and all the games use the same program to run (it'll probably have a built in browser to pick which one you want too I'd wager).

Oh, I think I read somewhere they'll host your game for free too.

I still think the way forward is more like the web though - it doesn't make sense to me to have one piece generic server software to run all the different kinds of projects people are going to want to do.

Whereas every Monday at 2, I host an event where social building is the damned point.

Ooh... just read the FAQ.

It must have been something else that was offering to host your game for free, since Multiverse are charging. The most interesting things thouh are that not only can servers transfer data between them, but that you can write your own code for the server software.

LL really are going to have to get a move on if they want to keep up with this. It's not exactly a direct competitor, but it will compete in many areas and sounds like a damned easy way for somebody to build a straight up competitor.

I could totally see some people getting together and making an open standard using Multiverse that could blow SL out of the water. People, this could be the beginning of the end.

No reason why it would have to be viewed as the beginning of the end for SL users.

Except, as I see it, Multiverse has the potential to quickly become much better than SL. If that happens, chances are SL will gain few new users and a fair number of current users will 'defect'. SL won't keep going if LL run out of money...

Good call. Imagine if most of the grid was built by Neil Protagonists! Not that your houses stink by any stretch of the imagination, man.

Yes which is a great thing. But you do it because you can, it's fun, not because building is a requirement for social interaction. And I wasn't arguing against it, it's a feature I deeply want myself, like I said, useful and great fun. My argument is against the way it's implemented which doesn't appear to be working very well and isnt really going anywhere special imho. I actually said "who gives a damn about slow rezzing blocky building" and I mean it. I think we've probably already seen about the best we can do with our Lego bricks. The only way it can get better now is to give us far more flexible shape creation.

And your point is?

I sold my land because of technical problems and unpleasant neighbors.

Second LIfe is now incredibly slow rendering, tons and tons and tons of gray loading textures, and crashes.

Might be tough for LR, but Philip Rosedale won't go hungry if LR fails, neither will Pierre or the other investors. The staff is highly talented, they should have no trouble finding jobs. Not anything to cry about for them.

Users closer to my income level with big investments in SL might lose their investment in SL, but if they switch to a better platform which by virtue of being a better platform can bring them a larger pool of customers, they should be able to benefit in the long run, so long as they don't hold on to the past.

This is not a world, it is a program. Programs sometimes become obsolete. WordPerfect used to be number one, now it's not. It's only a problem for those who can't let go of the past and embrace the future instead.

Sorry, Suezanne I don't get where you're coming from. I meant it could be quite likely that this could be the end for SL (and possibly LL as a company), nothing more.

Now, just a few things I want to get out before I go to bed:

Multiverse seems kinda like "Flash for MMOs" to me.
There's already a huge amount of content out there that can be imported into it, and a great deal of it is pretty high quality too.

These are screenshots from other things done with the graphics engine that Multiverse is based on (and the engine that that engine's a port of):
http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=84345
http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option=com_gallery&Itemid=75

Just for the record, I enjoy Second Life and really like and respect LL - I'd hate to see SL fail. It's just when something comes along that's this incredibly close to how I'd go about building a virtual world system myself, it's hard not to see it's potential.

I think the argument it's not a world might not go down very well, but the gist is pretty much what I meant when I said I don't give a fig about SL. It's simply a piece of software that's used as a means to an end. That end won't go away but the means to get there will change over time and that's an unstoppable force. My personal belief is that SL won't be able to change fast enough to keep up. We'll see, and in a lot of ways I hope I'm wrong, I've put a fair amount of my energy into this place in the last year. I agree with the general consensus that Metaverse is unlikely to derail SL but I also think SL is deeply flawed. That's only my opinion, there's no need to get upset about it

Well everyone's so focused on SL being flawed and Metaverse being new and shiny and so far unexplored for bugs by the public at large that no one's considered that perhaps LL could move SL onto the Metaverse engine. I mean, it IS just an engine. It's not a direct competator for SL, and I agree with everyone above who said it could be used as an indirect means of being a competator by making an SL wannabe. But LL can move to it too, and suddenly they're a thousand times better because not only do they have all the new shinies, they have well over a hundred thousand people already waiting for an upgrade.

On the topic of real time building, I take full use of that. I'll build stuff while I'm talking with people because I like to multitask. Hell, I seek out people to build in front of because I either want the company or I like to show off. It wouldn't be the same if you had to build in an offline program like Maya, and that destroys the whole concept of using SL. I'd rather model for Unreal or NWN and upload content into modules or mutators if that were the case. The alternative is to build vertex manipulation into SL as a kind of advanced build tool. And as much as I'd love that (being a dabbler in real 3D myself), and as much as I'd kill for CSG (just say the word Lindens, I'll hunt down all these posters! >D ), I know it's beyond the comprehension of most people. I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain what CSG is and how it would make life better in SL over the past week.

I would be happy with JUST CSG being added. I don't care about mesh manipulation, it's usually not worth my time and effort to mess with it anyways (I usually end up with a mess of vertices instead of a viable torso, or face), but being able to subtract a prim from another prim is something anyone can understand regardless of technical knowledge given a few lessons.

the Multiverse middleware engine is to SL as Puzzle Pirates is to Unreal Tournament 2004.

Even IF someone came up with some hot shit tech, ported it to Multiverse, rewrote the server code, and hosted it somewhere, there's not really any chance most (yes, most) users of SL would jump ship at it. For one, people are established here. This is a "place" to most people, not a "platform".

SL will win for a looong time, even if they had feature freeze (which they don't), simply because they're the "first", the original, the ones people have to beat.

Microsoft Windows XP isn't the best kid on the block, but it still has 90% market share. Even Though Apple has a better OS, and there's about 500 distros of Linux (all free!), and people have been making their own operating systems for years now.

But it's the de facto standard. So is SL for social worlds.

OMGNOTAGAMEPLATFORMDIGERATIPANTS

meh, let's avoid the "what is SL" arguments. Multiverse isn't competition for SL, for the last time. And I'll bet $L100 that we won't see a social world developed with that software survive for more than six months.