- As Primfeed Adds Video Upload Option, Here's Some Pretty Impressive Stats for the Social Media Platform for SLers
- SLua: Why Roblox Creators Should Also Look Into Second Life's New Scripting Language
- Firestorm Streaming Survey Results: Most Aren't Interested… Unless It's Free.
- How Feedback Loops & Interest Algorithms Hurt Metaverse Platforms
- Is This List of Sunsetted Virtual Worlds From Habitat On Missing Any Titles?
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Originally published on my Patreon
Last week's Second Life platform updates were mainly focused on the new Firestorm streaming option, but a long-awaited update to its scripting language might be even more important:
SLua stands for Second Life Lua, a language based on Luau (originally developed by Roblox), extended to harness the full power of Second Life’s existing functions. Think of it as LSL’s more powerful, versatile new cousin—offering you more flexibility, cleaner syntax, and features that make coding dramatically simpler.
Emphasis mine, because it's not only relevant to the thousands of SL creators who use LSL, but the hundreds of thousands of Roblox creators versed in Luau.
Signal Linden (Bennett Goble), head Software Engineer at the company, tells me Roblox's Luau and Second Life's SLua are pretty close:
"It is the Luau virtual machine extended to work with Second Life," he tells me. "We've had to make changes to support the requirements of mobile agents (AKA moving between regions) which means changes to support serializing/deserializing the runtime state. To users, it is the same language, just with LSL functionality. So: the same events residents know from LSL, same functions, with subtle interoperability changes to the language."
This also opens up a new opportunity for scripters working in Roblox:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Sara Baez, like most of the artists I feature, is someone I have never met. Still I know one thing for sure about Sara. She likes dogs. Sara is not just a dog-lover, she’s head over heels for dogs. How do I know? Dogs are in nearly every picture she takes. Often there are other animals, too, but the central theme is dogs, dogs, and more dogs. She must spend a fortune on virtual kibble.
She wrote this about her picture, “Nem todo conto de fadas precisa de um príncipe às vezes, só precisa de sapos falantes e coelhos atentos” which translates into, “Not every fairy tale needs a prince sometimes, it just needs talking frogs and attentive rabbits.:” If this is her fairy tale come true, then she is the princess.
For more of Sara with dogs, click here:
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Here's the results of my New World Notes survey last week, asking SLers what's the most they would be willing to pay for the new Project Zero option of streaming Firestorm/Second Life on a browser.
As you can see above, a strong majority aren't interested in any option, even one that's free with advertising. About 15% were willing to pay $.50 cents/hour to $2/hour, but the most popular "paid" choice by far was the ad-supported, free version. (The Patreon member version of this survey garnered pretty similar results, with 32% preferring free with ads.)
Which is somewhat surprising, from one angle. Rather than pay, say, $2500 for a high-end gamer laptop that runs Second Life pretty well, why not get a low-end $500 laptop and stream a highly optimized version of Firestorm by the hour? Even at $1/hour, this would be more cost effective for most SLers.
However, from another angle, these results point out another reality: By and large, Second Life users are core gamers and/or power users who already own and prefer a high-end PC for many other applications beyond SL.
As promised, I showed these survey results to Linden Lab:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Wishing On Airplanes has a very new photostream with less than 100 followers, but her talent is so mature, I speculate there might be another account that is full of photos. Of course, she could be magical right from the beginning. She doesn’t say. But look at this seascape. I can almost feel the rocks poking my feet, the cool water, and most of all, the temptation to sit on the rock next to the mermaid and bask. It so beautiful composed with the curving line of the rocks meeting the water. It looks so real.
If you wish for more from Wishing, click here:
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Commenting on my post about the failure of Meta to grow Horizon Worlds, longtime reader/veteran technologist Martin K. offers a big picture view impacting multiple metaverse platforms, relating it to recent trends in US society. It helps explain, for example, why Second Life merchandise seems to be 80% fashion/home decor-related, and why VRChat seems largely to be comprised of furry/anime avatars:
Why does Horizon Worlds not succeed in the same way as Facebook did?
Why is Second Life not able to grow its user base?
Why do so many talented creators leave Rec Room?
Let me zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture.
Horizon Worlds, Rec Room, Second Life and other metaverse-apps with user-generated content are struggling with growing their user base.
One of my favorite concepts to think about some of these problems is laid out in the book The Big Sort by Bill Bishop published in 2008. One of its themes is political polarization of neighborhoods in the US. The idea is that there are several feedback loops at work that attract more politically aligned neighbors and push out people who don't "fit" into a neighborhood. This results in increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods.
My hypothesis is that there are analogous feedback loops in many UGC metaverse apps that lead to a rather homogeneous user base of each of these apps.
Typically it works like this:
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I'm working with Julian Reyes and the Virtual Worlds Museum on compiling the most complete list of sunsetted virtual worlds that have existed since the groundbreaking Habitat* in 1986.But are we missing any? You can see the full still being revised list with descriptions and links of sunset worlds here on the VRM site, or review them in chronological order below.
We're defining "sunsetted virtual worlds" as platforms which are a) a multi-user but non-MMORPG virtual world depicted in 2D or 3D graphics, b) where users can customize their own space/room/realm/etc., and c) are no longer generally or commercially available to access online.
Here's our list, nearly 50 in all, so far:
- Habitat (video game) – 1986 to 1988
- MicroMUSE – 1990 to 1994
- CitySpace – 1993 to 1996
- Horseland – 1994 to 2019
- The Palace – 1994 to 2001
- Active Worlds – 1995 to 2010
- Cybernet Worlds – 1995 to 2010
- CyberTown – 1995 to 2012
- KidsCom – 1995 to 2019
- Starbright World – 1995 to 1997
- OZ Virtual – 1996-1999
- WorldsAway – 1995 to 1998
- SAPARi – 1997-2003
- Forterra Systems – 1998-2010
- Worlds.com – 1998-2020
Virtual world titles from 2000 onward below:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
PK’s could be called the power of looking away. So many of his pictures show him looking away from the camera, around corners, into the distance. Just one picture could be intriguing, but if you look at a page of him looking away as on his About Page, the effect is exponential. It makes me swoon, especially with his pop art sensibility, his fascination with the geometry created with light and shadow, his love of duotones that distill a screenshot to its essence. It is all just wonderful. .
For more from PK, click here:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 