Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

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Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.

The Virtual Worlds Museum. Click here to teleport to their Second Life hub with tribute to sunsetted worlds!

“TV POWWW!” by Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman. Read about the first televised videogame here.

The Fitting Room: Try out new SL fits in a secure, private space. Click here to teleport.

Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.

VRChat Now So Popular With Devs, Thousands Are Using a Compiler That Converts C# to the World’s Internal Scripting Language

April 7, 2021
As another sign of the VRChat community's growing strength as a creator ecosystem, here's another fairly mind-boggling factoid:
- Like many virtual worlds, VRChat has an internal scripting language. (Called Udon, in this case.)
- However, many developers (especially those who work on a professional level), prefer to code in C#, which already runs natively in Unity (the game engine underneath VRChat).
- So much so, a VRChat community member named Merlin has created UdonSharp, a C# to Udon compiler, which he built and open sourced on a voluntary basis to serve other VRChat creators, and has a Patreon in hopes that he can keep doing that full time.
- Based on the latest GitHub stats, the UdonSharp Unity package from GitHub has been downloaded around 20,000-25,000 times.
- Which suggests, based on recent stats, as much as 10% of VRChat's total monthly active user base have tried using UdonSharp at least once.
Varneon, creator of this impressive VRChat driving sim, estimates that the vast majority of VRChat worlds using Udon were actually scripted originally in UdonSharp:

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Watch: This Bento-Based Hoverboard With Sick Maneuvers is Seriously The Coolest Item I’ve Seen in Second Life for Some Time

April 7, 2021

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Maybe I'm jaded or more recently out of the loop, but this hoverboard by Val'More using the latest Bento-based avatar skeleton tech is among the most eye-popping pieces of Second Life content I've seen in some time. I reached out to Val'More about how they created it and its amazing flip tricks, and haven't heard back. But if you want to check it out first-hand now, it's on sale in the Engine Room, a steampunk-themed shopping bazaar that's about as impressive: Click here to teleport.

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Iconic “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” Photo Recreated in Second Life

April 7, 2021

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Adam Cayden and friends recreated the famous “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” by an uncredited photographer doing publicity for Rockefeller Center in 1932. This made me think of David Trumble’s “Feminism at Work” that was the desktop illustration on my MacBook until it died. I began to wonder who else had done something similar.

And sure enough there are more, click here:

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Second Life Wesbite Traffic Down Nearly 50% Since 2018, According to SimilarWeb, Likely Reflecting Strong Decline in New User Sign-Ups

April 6, 2021
Surprising stats from SimilarWeb, especially given recent Linden Lab reports that Second Life was enjoying a quarantine upsurge:
- This February, SecondLife.com earned 9.4 million visits, and in the five months prior to that, peaked at 12.7 million visits in December 2020, and averaged visits in the 11 million+ range in other months.
- In December 2018, however, monthly visits to the site were nearly 21 million, and earned similar traffic numbers in the previous five months.
- As a more distant comparison point: In 2014, SecondLife.com was averaging monthly visits in the 16 million range.
Unlike other social virtual worlds, most of which have a mobile app and/or run on consoles and/or Steam, Second Life is still heavily dependent on its website for shopping, account management, community activity, and — perhaps most notably — new user sign-ups. So web traffic on the official site provides a pretty strong indicator of overall user activity, including new users.

This doesn't, however, necessarily mean in-world user activity is also down:

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Watch, Listen: Minecraft Integrated With High Fidelity 3D Spatial Audio

April 6, 2021

Earphones on to hear a whole new way of experiencing Minecraft — integrated with High Fidelity's 3D audio API. This not only makes it possible to talk with players around you on the same Minecraft server, but also experience the world itself in immersive audio, so when Creepers are groaning behind you, it will sound as if they are actually behind you, and when you're walking along a river, it'll sound like the river is literally right beside your computer, and so on:

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Today’s Flickr Pick: Zynthea’s Stream is a Dazzling Break from Same-Old Second Life Screenshots

April 6, 2021

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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Wow! Here I was just slow-paging down again and again past competent but same-old same-old snaps of avatars in lingerie or less, when “Sans Titre” popped out with its vehement black, white, and reds and the bold avant-garde style. It was so fresh it woke me up. It is one of many intensely editorial pics from Zynthea.

The next pic is all about the lips, check it out here:

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Core Has Half a Million User-Created Projects & Over 1 Million User Accounts… But How Many Active Users?

April 5, 2021

Almost missed this tidbit in the announcement last week that Core received $100 million in funding to create a "multiverse":

After just a few months in Alpha, Core already offers more than 20,000 free games in every genre imaginable, has had roughly half a million projects started on the platform, and has amassed over one million player and Creator accounts globally.

Emphasis mine. "Accounts" are not the same as active users, and a spokesman for the company told me the company is "not revealing Monthly Active Users or Daily Active Users at this point." My guess is they're saving that reveal for a major milestone, and aren't in any particular hurry to publicly compete with ROBLOX's insanely huge user numbers.

However, we can make a fairly reliable guess of Core's Monthly Active User numbers based on how many people visit the Core web portal:

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More Tips on Running Second Life on an Oculus Quest 2

April 5, 2021

Reader David Cheney recently tried out these detailed instructions for running Second Life on an Oculus Quest 2 via Firestorm ("This is a lot of fun and works pretty well!"), and added some further tips in Comments:

On my cabled Quest 2 I had to take a couple of steps I found at the VR Firestorm viewer page:

– To fix a black HMD display I created a profile for the viewer in your graphic card settings and enable FXAA. Other types of Anti-aliasing can be disabled.
– To get the stereo images to align I followed these directions using F5, F6, and F7: Set IPD to 0 (zero), adjust Texture Shift until image is sharp and focused (I ended up with 15.0 on a 4k display and 30.0 on a 1k display); adjust IPD to get a good 3D effect.
– On a 4k display the visuals are gorgeous but the mouse/hand controller/pointers are not aligned and so operation is really tough; on a 1k display the visuals are lower rez and aliased but the mouse/hand controller/pointers are aligned and operation is practical.

Kudos to the developers!

Kudos indeed. I'd love to see more VR videos of Second Life beyond the one I posted above(from Redditor "IDontUseAnimeAvatars", who helped get the VR/SL ball rolling)–if you've seen any or are shooting some of your own, please post links in Comments below!

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Top 6 Posts Last Week Including: Core Gets $100M to Make a Multiverse, VRChat Gets a Crossover Game, Second Life Gets Soviet Housing

April 5, 2021
Virtual Pet Rabbit Designed With Behavior-Based AI Born in Sinespace; New Addition to Growing Bestiary of Artificially Adorable Creatures

April 2, 2021

Just in time for Easter, you can buy a pet rabbit in Sinespace (a media partner to New World Notes), and unlike most virtual world pets, Buddy Rabbit is special, built on a complicated AI architecture. As seen above, Buddy can inquisitively explore an area, flee from trouble — even doing flying spin-leaps to get away from pursuers — and follow its owner.

Well, somewhat follow: “You see the rabbit is a wild animal and is difficult to control him exactly,” Buddy’s creator Kokostar warns me, grinning. (He's Kokostar #1902 on Discord.)

A leader in the Swiss Society of Virtual and Augmented Reality, Kokostar has been creating virtual pets in Sinespace for over a year: “I have always been interested in agents which simulate human or animal behaviors.”

His first attempts at pets were rather mechanical, however, so he turned to a sophisticated back-end structure, to give them more life:

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