Threat to SL: Letting Multiverse Beat Us

Levelord was an amateur in 1994.

It's very a cool idea, bring it on! Along with large radii and some proper curve manipulation tools. That would possibly satisfy my lust for mesh Personally I wouldn't miss RT building as much as other features, but as I've said I sure do like having it.

Do you mean that the other way 'round? I don't see what you mean otherwise.

And your basis of this assumption is...? I mean, I understood TSO was more a place to it's users than a game; where's that now? All it takes is for the content creators to move, how long are people going to stay interested in a stagnant world?

Quite possible that market momentum will carry it along, but not a rule set in stone or anything. Plus, it'd a lot easier to move products from SL to Multiverse than Windows to Linux or MacOS.

Well, yeah, the "what SL is" arguments are always dumb and generally just illustrate people's ignorance of how language works.

While Multivesrse itself isn't direct competition to everything SL does it does compete with some aspects of it. Stagecoach Island? That Terrorism traning simulator? Multiuser environments for purposes other than socialising are a growing sector and one that LL have declared interest in.

Personally I don't see a single social world built with Multiverse to be a particular threat to SL unless it's done by a large enough company to give it a decent marketing clout or the coders are extremely talented - it's a lot of effort to make something like SL. What I do see as a threat though, is a group of dedicated people in the right places creating a set of protocols for relating assets to your avatar and taking them with you as you move between worlds built using Metaverse.

I've said it before - an open-source protocol for setting up your own game servers, with people being able to seamlessly (or near-seamlessly, let's not go mad here) move between them would be an absolute SL-killer. It would take the free culture fans away to work on projects under their own auspices, it would take the hardcore geeks away to tinker with the details, it would take the social butterflies away because it would be free to join and the circle would be wider, it would take the builders away because they could start up their own sims at lower cost than SL charges by colocating servers and installing the software, it would take the scripters away because internal languages would doubtless be based on existing open languages.

Only, it's a really massive task, and it would suffer from the same problems and squabbling as other open-source projects do. Agreeing common protocols is something that just doesn't happen very well without a unified driving force.

I don't know about the practical side of creating and implimenting a protocol, but theoretically it seems pretty easy to me - I reckon I could sketch one out in less than half an hour. I totally agree about getting people to agree on a common one being difficult though. But, saying that, it still happens and having a single entity providing the core software means that should it decide to it can crowbar one in.

groovy

This would give SL a run for its money:

http://croquetproject.org/About_Croquet/screenshots.html

Nani?

No sorry

Nani is Japanese for "what"

That's interesting though, I hadn't looked over croquet's abilities all that much.

then I learned something new today. Thank you.

Cat

We both have, apparently. I'll have to look over Croquet later.

Croquet is cute but ... hardly so much more advanced than SL just because it already has HTML on a prim. It has some other nice architectural elements and some very good people behind it but no unified force driving it into the market.

One of the main problems with it seems to be characterized by this part of the mission statement
and the fact, that is a "designed by a committee". This is not to say that there ain't no successful concepts which have been designed by a committee. It just takes a long time ...

I've played around with Croquet for a few hours. My opinion is that while it's interesting and has a few nice features that SL doesn't, I think it's likely that it will never become much more than an academic curiosity. I really hope LL has taken the time to take a good look at Croquet though, because it has some nice ideas.

The colaboration abilities are what really struck me about this program. Say for educational purposes for example. Things that floored me were things like drawing a picture inside the world and that picture becomes a 3d object. I'm still looking it over.

Cat

With Croquet being for academic efforts and collaboration, and SL having the Campus Second Life idea, I wonder if there's any thoughts about sharing code bases. That drawing things that become 3d thing is definantly high up there on my list of "OMGWTF" cool stuff.

That would be interesting but Croquet does not rely on a central server. Its based on pier to pier. (no server costs weeee lol)

The drawing thing is pretty cool, what is even cooler in my opinion is low level control that Croquet offers. It allows you to write OpenGL code to render objects for example.

/112/92/83195/1.html

In what ways do you perceive SL to be architected like a game?

Well, we don't have enough control over how we present content for a start. The camera controls in 1.9 will help, but we still need more.

You're entirely wrong!!! They need alfalfa sprouts!!!

This important topic should probably be in it's own thread.

I can see that as both a good thing and a bad thing. It runs counter to what SL exists for, a free exchange of ideas in a community setting. Giving that kind of access is like granting people the ability to upload custom meshes from Maya or what have you, a whole niche of people (programmers like myself) would suddenly dominate the market with stuff no one else but equally gifted people could hope to match. You'd see people staring in awe of the fantastic moving mosaics of colours and then complaining that scripting is too hard.

That doesn't stop me from wanting it, but I know it won't happen because of that. There are people who think LSL is too complex as it is, and I'd rate it somewhere around Turing. o.O;
But the painting a 3d object idea, that's rather visceral and intuitive. Anyone know how to paint a fish (to use the Croquet example) and the ability to make that into a fully realized 3d object would allow talented artists to draw detailed pictures and "pull them from the page" so to speak. But even if you are an art dunce, you can use that technology to make more useful and complicated shapes than simple prims could allow.

I liked croquet's ideas but I thought the implementation leaves way too much to be desired but ... portals ... if only LL would implement portals...

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discuss

I was on the team who designed PNG, and given the amount of squabbling over that and my absolute failure to convince the rest of the group that layer animations in PNG would be a killer feature*... I don't see something a thousand times more complex getting off the ground.

Not without someone like Linus Torvalds or Jordan Hubbard who's both visionary geek *and* peacemaker.

* The whole group was trying to come up with a "GIF killer", I was trying to see what could easily be implemented and open up a new niche. They split off the animation effort to a streaming animation format that got totally sideswiped by quicktime and mpeg-4, and now most of the flash applets on the web are simple layer animations... that would have been far smaller and more portable as animated PNGs.

Speaking of which, why the hell can't you upload images to SL as PNG?

I think people would rather want a world that looks cool and has lots of cool stuff, even if it was created by a minority, than to not have these things. And it's not like the current tools would go away so people could still make stuff like today. Anyway, if SL doesn't eventually implement things like meshes and a more low-level API then some competitor will, and if they manage to make a world where, unlike croquet project, there's actually something to do and some people, then I think lots of people would leave for that.