/sl/ - Second Life

>>47945

There are lots of projects that try exactly that like High Fidelity, sine.space and everything thats based on OpenSim. You could count even VRChat as SecondLife clone. But all of them has less options or completely depends on whatever LindenLab does.

Being better than LL is not hard, getting users that provide content is the hard part.

>>47946

Well, what will get content creators to move over? I know they are the compete backbone of sl and I know LL treats them like human trash, Is there anyway a creator of an sl like world could improve the conditions and what not ?

>>47949

"Dying" SL has 5 times the amount of active users of VRChat on its prime.

And the VRChat user count dropped 70% in just half a year. Wait another 6 months and it will be gone.

>>47948

You get content creators by having customers for them - you get customers for them by having content.

Or you get so many users that the hobby creators already make enough content and you don't need cancerous reselling "creators" on your marketplace.

I think that the only real virtual world would be one that people can run themselves, by running your own server and visiting other servers, just like the WWW.

OpenSim is doing that, but it doesn't work out. They never got enough development going to make their own viewer, they are still just the copycats, completely dependent on LLs development.

>>47949

>>47950

So what I'm gathering is...

>Makes stuff already inplace to help boost people to come on that will help content creators to jump ship

>and give people the power to allow to host their own sim with their own server

I like that last idea, But how will the company make any money to continue to make the game better? are you saying rely on their own mp? what if they don't have enough people at first so their mp doesn't so as well as it should.

On an off note I'm now wondering why LL doesn't have their own shop on the mp. (I don't want someone to say they are just lazy because we already know that)

>>47951

It lacks in what you can do by limiting you to have to buy a vr headset to do anything. Most people are going to say fuck that, and most people have. Any of my friends that have a vrheadset tho who where on sl have moved over to vrchat.

SL is withering on the vine because the Lab refuses to focus on what actually made them a viable entity.

They want to move beyond SL into other things but every extensional idea has been a failure.

New libraries to extend SL's capabilities into .lua, an XML injection layer in the client HUDspace....there are so many things they could do in the background but all they're doing is sitting on the money they're making and then wasting it on things nobody wants.

And lets not even get started on their lack of marketing and keeping SL relevant to end users...cause they simply don't, Someone with a brighter vision of multi user UGC development platforms needs to buy them out of the equation so we can stop being stifled by a development house with no passion for their product and no vision for its future.

I've always thought if someone took Open Sim, fixed all of the stupid things LL and the other OS grids won't, then they'd have a solid alternative to SL. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, you just need to show up with a wheel that's better polished than LL's.

I'm not saying it would succeed wildly and knock SL off its perch, unless you can get a full development studio together and the server space for asset servers and all that, I think you'd be stuck as a second tier grid. But if you aimed it at game modders and artists, and basically give away some free land to anyone who can make something so good other people would log into your grid to check it out, and set up content creation to keep out the really laggy crap we get in SL, you could probably make it to king of the second tier grids and that might be enough to pay the overheard.

Remember, most of good content creators in SL are in it because they like making shit first, selling it second. You just have to give them a good reason to log in to your grid. Better framerates, less lag, better graphics, and more tools and features for creating content are all good motivators. Unless their SL content is laggy crap it should be easy for them to make stuff for SL to sell, and also upload it to your grid where they can have more fun with it.

>>47948

>>47995

SL doesn't treat creators like trash compared to all its viable alternatives. They allow people to keep a majority of their profits. This is not normal. Sure, there was that mass ban for the bestiality stuff, but LL did unban the people they did wrong by - while cleansing content that the majority of people found disgusting.

Especially in recent times, they've added features geared towards what people are doing and the issues they see with the content that's being made. Bento, Bakes on Mesh, Animesh, EEP, LI increases for land - there's been a slew of development that's actually out and usable with RC viewers. They've increased fees but they're certainly putting the extra money to use in ways that benefit content creators.

If you're talking to your friends, sure, a lot of people enjoy making content just to make stuff. But if you're talking about the people who actually get their asses into events and regularly release quality stuff? Yeah no, the money here is pretty good and while we might dabble in other places for fun, money IS a huge motivator and you can't get that kind of cash anywhere else at the moment.

The other issue is what I've seen happen with VRchat where it would be impossible to create a paid market without straight up purging all old content, because it's ripped. SL did not start with the ability to use meshes, so there was not a good deal of ported unoriginal content - sure there were people copying each other, but no one could upload a game model. Because of that history, people are used to original content. It is unacceptable to blatantly upload rips. People are kicked out of events, and their stores are shamed on lists if they upload game models. The only way to ensure this on a new virtual world, though, is to actively moderate every upload, or to control who can upload. If your entire market is rips, then there's little incentive for people to make original content to compete, and there's a whole world of liability issues.

Making an SL competitor really isn't as easy as "well let's just make SL but with better features!" the same way that making a youtube competitor isn't about making a video streaming site with better features than youtube.You have to attract AND reward content creators. If it's not worth their while compared to SL, all you'll be left with are the dregs that couldn't make it on SL.

>>47971

>What is High Fidelity supposed to be anyway? Current year Furcadia/Habbo?

High Fidelity should be SecondLife for VR, but also the Server code is OpenSource, so you can run your own region yourself (but i don't know the exact details how accounts are managed, you might still need their servers for account and marketplace).

It has a budget of 36 fucking million USD, so you would expect something awesome, but until now, they didn't really deliver anything new and they already develop for 5 years.

>because of that history, people are used to original content

You believe that the popular creators in SL create their mesh models themselves? This will be a huge shock for you now: They don't! They buy it from places like turbosquid.com.

Did you never realize that when a creator releases one brand new model, that other creators will have the same thing, just slightly different with modified textures, just a few days later?

>If your entire market is rips, then there's little incentive for people to make original content to compete

This already happened, you can't compete on the marketplace with original content, especially not on events. Events do not promote original content, they promote rip offs and reselling.

When mesh uploads got introduced in SL, the current creators were worried about not being able to compete against 3rd party meshes. And they were right, They either started to upload bought 3rd party stuff or they vanished into oblivion. Also they started DMCA wars against everybody and public shaming - most of them completely unjustified.

The reseller "creators" aren't worth shit. You don't need them. A new competitor could easily just buy and resell those models on it's own. The problem is that you already need a large userbase to make it financially viable.

>>47995

Many commercial OpenSim grids tried to get the crown and be the next and better SecondLife.

But because of the many technical limitations that you have if you want your users to be able to use SecondLife viewers, everybody who is hosting a sim can also overwrite permissions.

Commercial grids that still wanted to have those permissions because they want to make money with content had to shut their users in. They forbid hypegrid tps to other grids and their users can't run their own sims. So basically they are just like SL, but even worse.

InWorldz is the Nr.1 most popular example (they had to shut down this year).

You can't make money with content in OpenSim, everything should be Full Perm. and thats not a bad thing, i saw some nice projects in OpenSim that did outclass their SecondLife counterparts by far. OpenSim even has NPCs.

But hell, all those pre-mesh people that want to sell their system clothes on Kitely or some other OpenSim markets are cancer. They are still fighting against everything that's mesh and assume that everybody who has anything thats mesh is a copybotter.

>and set up content creation to keep out the really laggy crap we get in SL

kek, most people don't realise how true this is. Bad content is the huge Nr.1 reason for lag.

On my region in OpenSim, that is currently filled with up to 15.000 LI, i get constant 70 fps on my laptop, with drawing distance set to >600. In SL i have to limit drawing distance to 200m to get acceptable 25 FPS in a Full Region.

The content is the difference. i am decent at Blender now and thanks to OpenSim being Open, i can just (re)upload and combine my things how i want them to be.

Ever built a beach in SL with one of those beach building kits? Export them -> combine them in Blender, cut things out that are hidden anyway -> upload them again with reasonable LOD levels. A 100 LI beach suddenly has just 2.

But initial loading time, before you see something, is really really crappy on my OpenSim Region, because the connection of the PC thats running it is shit and because OpenSim itself, which runs on mono, has a shit network performance.

>>47996

>>47999

LL does some things very right that their competitors get very wrong, no doubt. And they're making some improvements like some of the things you mention, but they still don'tseem to be doing anything to deal with the main performance killing issues in SL. Either they don't care SL runs like crap, or they don't understand how SL works. Either way they're being stupid.

And I never said you could compete with SL just by being SL with better features. I said that the most you could probably hope for was being more successful than the other OS grids. The OP didn't ask about competing with SL. They asked about making a better SL.

If you want to actually compete with SL you need a full development studio, with competent people helping you design the thing from the ground up, and a lot of money to pay for everything until you can finally start making a profit.

>>47996

VRChat has already figured out the problem to the "paid market" issue. At least, the Japanese community has. They literally have worlds that act as stores and malls where people can try on avatars or grab props and they're given a price and told to contact them on Discord. If anything it's equivalent to pre-marketplace SL right now.

VRChat's biggest "issue" is the fact that people who play SecondLife now are, to be blunt, lazy. Let's be real, how many worlds do you walk into where there's just a bunch of people AFKing? Or just talking in PMs, ignoring public chat entirely?

Or, if you want to e-fuck (like a good portion of people in SL do) you need a headset at least, and full body is preferred. Then on top of that instead of just sitting at your desk cranking it out to your avatar posing on a screen, you're positioned somewhere in you room pelvic thrusting into the air like a retard. You also need decent social skills, etc etc

In general, Secondlife is more "convenient" than VRChat. When I want to play VRChat, I'm only playing VRChat. I generally can't do anything else. If I boot up Secondlife, I can literally let it sit in the background and ignore it until someone PMs me.

>>47950

>Wait another 6 months and it will be gone.

People said this six months ago. Also HTC is literally funding them at the moment. You're wrong.

>>48027

>The OP didn't ask about competing with SL. They asked about making a better SL.

Ok, but then every hg enabled OpenSim grid is technically already a better SL.

It's an SecondLife clone with slightly more features (NPCs, ossl functions) you can host your own sim and there is no (no modify) bullshit.

The only thing thats worse is the competition issue. No users, no creators.

And it has tons of problems that it inherited from SL.

I think that just being slightly better than SL really isn't enough.

>>48107

VRChat couldn't even overtake SL during it's initial hype. They might stay around if they get solid funding, but it's no competition.

>>48110

>And it has tons of problems that it inherited from SL.

>I think that just being slightly better than SL really isn't enough.

You're absolutely right. No SL user is interested in leaving behind their friends, inventory and all of the existing user created content of SL for something slightly better, and no one uninterested in SL is going to be impressed by a slightly better knock off.

SL's biggest problems all come from LL thinking "as long as it (mostly) works" is good enough. That's the main thing that needs fixing, but it's still a huge amount of work. I don't think anyone could do it unless they had a small team working on it full time for a couple of years.