Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

Making of Second Life

Making a Metaverse That Matters

Contact me — links below!

My Patreon Supporters

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.

The Virtual Museum Team hosts several museums in Second Life, Wolf Territories Grid and Roblox. Check out all the teleport links here.

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

Last Chance to See a Collection of Prim Sculptures of Great SL Artists of the Last 15 Years

November 26, 2020

Above: Mr. Clip posing by a sculpture from the legendary prim artist Starax Statosky

Give thanks to great Second Life prim-based sculpture artists from over the last 17 years by visiting the Gratitude Art show between now and the end of 2020: Click here to teleport.

As I wrote in September, it was curated by longtime virtual art advocate Chuck Clip (above) and Mariposa Upshaw, and hosted in the University Of Western Australia's virtual campus in Second Life, which is finally being removed from the world for the New Year. After putting out an open call for submissions, they were deluged by entries from renowned artists like Chic Aeon, Glyph Graves, and Alpha Auer. Chuck even contributed a sculpture from his personal collection, from the beloved Starax Statosky, who started impressing the SL community as far back as 2005 or so. (Full list of contributors on Clip's blog.)

"I mean," as Clip tells me now. "It's a veritable who's-who of SL art and art history."

It was a labor of love for the curators:

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Unready Player 2? Reviews to Influential Metaverse Novel Decidedly Mixed

November 25, 2020

There's an official ROBLOX experience promoting Ready Player 2, the new sequel to the metaverse novel partly inspired by Second Life and became so influential, it was required reading for employees at Oculus. (Because why not make a dystopian novel about a future so horrible everyone wants to live in VR a company's frame of reference.)

But is the sequel any good, and worth a read over the holidays? A advance couple reviews below with mild spoilers, so caveat geeker:

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This Flickr Photographer’s Dramatic Landscapes Are Actually SL Screenshots

November 25, 2020

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

Powder focuses primarily on beautifully composed landscapes. It is a remarkable skill to come upon a sim created by someone else and frame a picture as though you could place every item yourself. I loved this picture and the beautiful sky showing through the windows and the lights shining on it from the front as well. She provided a SLURL and I went to check it out, but unfortunately it is now a homestead for sale.

I love her framing…the next is a great example:

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VRChat Survey: Over 1 in 3 Say They’ll Pay for a Premium Subscription

November 24, 2020

Results from last week's not-super-scientific-but-still interesting survey on VRChat's new monthly/yearly paid subscription option. With 175 responses (a solid sample for this site), well over one-third say they will pay to subscribe. That is a minority response, but for a free-to-play virtual world, it's a relatively impressive response. As a point of comparison, Second Life only has about 60,000 Premium subscribers, which is roughly just 1 in 10 of the active userbase.

And looking at VRChat user concurrency, this suggests a strong potential for good revenue. With 24,000 peak concurrent users, VRChat probably has monthly active users in the low to mid six figures. (A good rule of thumb is to multiply peak concurrency by 10x.) So if this survey scales with actual subscriptions, that would translate to about $1 million a month in subscription revenue for the company, more or less. (A big "if", to be sure.)

This would be tiny in comparison with, say, what Roblox is reportedly making, but for a virtual world where a third to half of the users are actually using a VR headset, that's a decent niche.
This Artist Uses Light, Framing & Casual Poses to Make SL Avatar Photos Come Alive

November 24, 2020

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

Jena Lynn is a slice-of-life photographer, a Second Life Vivian Maier except of course she is shooting herself in the process of living, not other people. I love the appearance of spontaneity, the idea the camera was just raised at that very moment. There is no sense at all that the picture was planned and staged, but of course it was. And that is genius!

The next picture shows how powerful framing can be.

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Does the SL Community Care Enough to Clamor for Well-Optimized Mesh?

November 23, 2020

Pictured: Slink Redux body bundle, a rare example of popular SL mesh avatar content that's also well-optimized

Last Friday I wrote about the new Black Dragon viewer update which checks whether a mesh avatar is well-optimized or not. Reader "Down With Underboob" (LOL) tried it out in SL over the weekend, to see how much mesh content was poorly optimized, and came away shocked:

So I took Black Dragon out for a spin at a fairly busy club. There's only one avatar in the place who is "decently optimized" per the report. This guy is wearing a system avi and system clothes… I like what BD offers, but please get real. Nobody wants to go back to looking like an avatar from 2008. Photographers like to use BD's capabilities, but again, they're not going to use system avatars to pass these complexity tests.

Show me some mesh bodies, heads, and clothes that pass these tests and don't look like they're from 2008, and I'll consider trying them. Does he think we're all going to run around bald? I don't want Warcraft hair in SL. Until then, I'll stick with what I have. I'm satisfied with the 15-20 fps I get at this club and I can get upwards of 100 FPS when I'm hanging out on my platform at home in Bellisseria.

I'd also point out that he's tilting at windmills if he thinks designers are going to start posting complexity/triangle counts in their vendor ads.

I'd say it's the responsibility of the many SL bloggers and YouTubers to report on the complexity/triangle counts of the content they feature, warning them that high poly items will likely cause lag. Failing to do so would be like a real life fashion reporter failing to mention the clothing items they're recommending are made of toxic materials.

As to her request for optimized mesh to try out, Slink is among the few mesh body creators well-known for optimization.

But is there a market for good optimization in general? Reader "Seph" thinks not so:

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Top 5 Posts Last Week Including an NSF-Funded Study of SL During the Pandemic, and How Oculus’ Facebook ID Requirement Harms VR Developers

November 23, 2020
New Black Dragon Feature Shows Your Much Lag Your Second Life Mesh Avatar Is Causing (Likely a Lot)

November 20, 2020

Pictured: Niran in a Belleza 5.2 Bento mesh body — which has over 1.5 MILLION triangles

There's a new update to The Black Dragon viewer for Second Life, and it comes with a great new feature: An option to check how well-optimized your mesh avatar is — and shows you via a color code whether it is (green) or poorly optimized (yellow/orange/red):

So rather than confusing the user with an artificial "maximum" it now clearly states that it is simply recommended to stay below a certain point. Reaching this point also no longer immediately results in the "super bad" red rating but rather gives you the "eh" yellow/orange rating, see it as warning. As before you get a summary of all ratings together, right now its still very simple but i might actually add a 3-point answer that takes the 3 worst offenders and gives you hints and possibly even guides (or links to those) how to solve these.

As previously reported, most of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are very poorly optimized, and a key culprit for Second Life's poor performance in general. Linden Lab refuses to do anything about this — the CEO basically told me "So what?" when I asked him face to face — but Black Dragon creator NiranV is a passionate advocate of optimization, and wants to improve SL's environment:

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Carmen King Explores Sansar as Only Carmen Can — And Has Tips for Making It Better

November 20, 2020

After basically becoming the queen of Second Life YouTubers, Ms. Carmen King reluctantly donned her dusty Vive headset –"I get insane motion sickness… [and] "normally can't last 10 minutes in VR", she says — to re-visit the social VR world of Sansar.

"First time I tried," she casually notes, while getting strapped in, "I saw people trying to fuck in the middle of the ocean."

No such luck this time, but she does narrowly avoid an alien probing and inevitably wields some dildo-shaped hand controls. Further Carmen-esque NSFW hilarity ensues, so just watch.

"Sansar seems really fun and I love how smooth the game runs," she tells me now. "Virtual Reality makes it a lot more exciting as you feel like you’re actually in the game!"

Sansar was originally developed by Linden Lab before its acquisition by Wookey; but does she prefer it to Linden's original world, Second Life?

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VRChat User Survey: Will You Buy the New Plus Subscription?

November 20, 2020

NOTE: If you're viewing this on a mobile device you might need to tap-slide-scroll on the survey below to view and take it:

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After many years in free-to-play Beta and seeing impressive growth, VRChat is finally offering a paid subscription option (details here and summarized below). But are VRChat players actually interested in paying? Please take this survey, even if you're a very casual VRChatter -results shared next week!

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