Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

  • Raph Koster’s Stars Reach Kickstarter Succeeds in One Hour – Including 4 People Who Pledge $10,000 Each to Buy Their Own Planet!

    Stars Reach Kickstarter Raph Koster
    The Kickstarter for Stars Reach, Raph Koster's highly ambitious galaxy sandbox MMORPG I wrote about last month, just launched earlier today… and surpassed its initial $200K target goal within an hour. So far it has over 1400 backers, with the majority pledging between $30-100 for early access to play the game, along with other benefits.

    On the very highest end, four people have already pledged at the "Galactic Plenipotentiary Tier" at an eye-watering $10,000, which comes with your own whole world:

    Claim a Planet: Choose a climate and planet type, have it named after you and assume immediate governance of the planet when the game launches. Disclaimer: Maintaining a planet requires an active population. [Emphasis mine! – WJA]

    "In the game," Raph tells me, "planets can be abandoned, wormholes can collapse, and the map shifts over time. So you get a planet and skip the claim process, but you still have to be active enough to keep it." In other words, you can have your own world, but you need to keep maintaining it.

    Stars Reach's success on Kickstarter demonstrates the willingness of gamers to crowdfund a new MMO, something that was very much in question even last month. In this current climate, with the game industry in painful flux, it offers hope that devs might consider crowdfunding their way into publication.

    What advice would Raph Koster give other MMO/virtual world developers on crowdfunding their own projects?

    "Have most of your game done first, so you can let people play and build their confidence that there’s something actually there," Koster tells me. "If your game isn’t good, it won’t go well, of course. But if the game is solid even in early stages, then you are providing proof that you are worth backing."

    Watch the trailer below!

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  • Cajsa’s Choices: Minimalist Second Life Fashion Photos by Zlaggy

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

    Zlaggy is a Second Life microblogger on Flickr. She is an exciting blogger because she has a unique and creative fashionista. None of her looks are like anybody else and that’s what I most admire. Her photos are excellent and minimalist, just her against a white background most of the time but with clever poses and completely unique outfits such as this tricorn hat with a black bodycon dress and an arrow. She’s fierce. 

    For more of Zlaggy’s unique looks, click here:

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  • The Coming of “AI Fast Fashion” in Second Life — and the Danger of Not Addressing It Now (Comment of the Week)

    Max Graf Rustica SL economy AI

    Max at his mainstore/sim, Rustica [direct teleport here]

    Last week's post on how AI-based image-to-3D mesh conversion will impact virtual world economies dependent on mesh content has inspired quite a lot of conversation across Second Life social media. Indie creator Tim Hannan demonstrated how it's now relatively easy to generate an SL-based shoe from a real world photo; while the results are rudimentary, the quality will quickly improve.

    Maxwell Graf, a longtime 3D creator/merchant in Second Life and many other platforms, argues that we must decide now how to co-exist and regulate AI-based content in the virtual world. Read his argument (originally posted here) below. 

    [Gen AI programs] will chip away at the market until there is no viable reason or alternative for creators to continue doing completely original work and being able to make any amount of profit from it to justify the effort, unless profit is not the desired result or customers are willing to pay a premium for items they trust are being created without it. At some point, AI will dominate the economy of available goods in the marketplace, simply because it makes it easier to make money.

    The SL creator economy is already a predominant aspect of why SL continues to exist at the size and concurrency it does. Roleplay environments, entertainment, hobbies, live/DJ music venues and even just hanging out with friends has diminished considerably over the years and the creators making stuff is the main pillar supporting it now.

    However, even that has changed over time, in types of content, point of purchase/marketing methods, pricing and product usage; the market is dominated by avatar bodies, fashion and accessories, mostly presented at events, purchased mostly from Marketplace and considered largely disposable (wear it once and put it away, etc.) Not always, but I am considering the primary market. Even furniture, home and garden items are rarely used for the amount of time they used to be before being changed to something else.

    Add to all of these factors the expansion of the number of creators/brands available, vastly increased from even a decade ago. ALL of these factors contribute to dividing up the limited economic pie of sales into smaller and smaller slices, at a time when the plethora of events and competition drives the pricing of items down and down, limiting return unless volume is increased.

    THAT nexus brings us to AI and how it is arriving at exactly the moment when that volume economy is dominating the marketplace:

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  • Top Four Posts Including VRChat Volleyball and the Coming of AI-Driven Mesh Generators

    RL photo to mesh to Second Life

  • Dramatic SL Portraits & Placid Landscape Photographs by Dongo Sama

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

    Dongo Sama’s “Violence” is one of those pictures that make you stop and look. There’s no scrolling past such a bold and, yes, violent image.The intense expression of the avatar with the tension in his hand and the swirling red and black. Red is a martial color. People who wear red are more likely to be perceived as angry than those wearing blue or green. Yes, that feels violent. It completely achieves its purpose. 

    Dongo also did the “Amour Eternel” I featured last week. There he used red’s association with love and passion. Color choices often send a message.

    For more from Dongo, click here:

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  • Read on My Patreon: Nyric, Ambitious, Upcoming Minecraft Meets Midjourney Virtual World

    Nyric gen AI interview

    Just posted:

    Nyric is an upcoming game (on Steam here, watch the trailer above) that blends sandbox/virtual world creativity, survival/crafting gameplay, and generative AI in an ambitiously fresh way — so much so, it's almost a new subgenre. ("Minecraft meets Midjourney" might be a fair elevator pitch.) The lead developer, Kayla Comalli of Lovelace Studio, also counts Second Life as an inspiration to Nyric. "We aspire to that level of emergent chaos," as she puts it.

    Join my Patreon to read the rest here.

  • Meta’s Horizon Worlds $50M Creator Fund Yet Another Deep Misunderstanding of How Metaverse Platforms Work

    Meta Horizon Worlds metaverse fail

    I promised myself I'd stop picking on Meta after last month's "Make Horizon Worlds succeed or get fired" debacle*, but this latest announcement is too painful to keep quiet about:

    Meta has made some strides on content by attracting more and more creators to build for the platform and creating some of its own first-party games inside of Horizon Worlds.

    Now the company is making another big bet to incentivize creators to build on Horizon Worlds; today it announced a $50 million ‘Creator Fund’ that will pay out to creators of worlds that drive high visits and retention.

    If you're an indie developer or studio who needs the work, you should definitely consider applying, but this fund is basically Meta's open admission that Horizon World as a metaverse platform is fundamentally not fun.

    Historically, successful metaverse platforms like Rec Room, VRChat, etc. are rich with amazing content created by the user communities themselves which they create for free because they enjoy the very process of creating and enjoying them together as an end in itself.

    Paying third parties to create this content not only does not make the underlying platform any more fun, but it will inevitably lead to content that's not optimized for highly social, casual play, where metaverse platforms thrive. I just blogged one such example from VRChat, a community-created volleyball game, again made for free by the users themselves.

    All of this is why one of my golden rules for metaverse development is the creation process should be fun and rewarding in itself, and that the platform should not be monetized immediately. You want a large and highly active community on there before thinking about that. Which Horizon Worlds is decidedly not.

    Or as Richard Bartle explains it: 

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  • New VRChat-Based Volleyball Game Is So Playable, It Has a Player League & Live Sportscasts. So I Interviewed the Creator!

    VRC Volleyball (website listing here) is the latest attempt in a decades-long quest to create a seemingly simple thing: A physics-enabled game involving a ball that people can play together from around the world in a 3D virtual world in real time. Most attempts end up being comically, unplayably laggy.

    This new version in VRChat, however, has been playable enough to generate not only a large returning audience — over 300,000 visits since launching last November — but also player leagues… and even live sport casters on YouTube. (Watch above.) 

    The world's creator, mamemoyasys (on Twitter/X here), had never actually played volleyball in real life when they started building it, but was inspired after reading the volleyball-themed manga Haikyuu!!

    They also saw a need for such games on the platform:

    "Many game worlds in VRChat are similar to FPS games," they explain, "where even if people are playing together, they often feel like they are acting separately. I wanted to create a game world where everyone interacts with a single target, leading to natural communication."

    At first, the ball itself was powered by Unity’s physics engine, but that didn't quite work well enough for gameplay:

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  • What Will Virtual World Economies Do With Image-to-3D Mesh Conversion AI Programs Coming Soon?

    RL photo to mesh to Second Life

    Tim Hannan, an indie creator who's been doing some interesting experiments blending Second Life video/images with gen AI (as here), recently sent me these two fairly alarming — but actually not that surprising — images. 

    The image on the left is the photo of high end basketball shoe. The image on the right is the same shoe in Second Life.

    In this case, I do mean "same", in the sense that the virtual shoe shares the underlying digital substrate as the RL shoe, so to speak. While it's possible to recreate the shoe in Blender by hand, the modeling was done by an algorithm which first ingested and then extrapolated the 2D image itself to output it into a 3D version.  

    "There is now a free open source [AI] model for image to 3D mesh that can be run locally," Tim tells me. "Just a quick sample I don’t know crap about 3D modeling etc." To do this, he uses an all-in-one AI program with a plug-in for the 3D conversion. "Give it an image it returns a .gilb (?) file, then I just load it in Blender, [then] convert to .DAE for Second Life."

    This does not mean, I should quickly add, than an avatar right now can just come along and wear this virtual version of the shoe. It would first need to be rigged to the SL skeleton and optimized with the various mesh bodies. For SL fashion merchants, this technology might still be useful for prototype/showcase purposes. (I.E. "Hey fam, do you want a shoe like this in SL?")

    For creators like Tim, who might use the shoe (or anything else that can be so modeled) as a non-interactive prop in his machinima, it's good enough to use right now:

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  • Whatever Became of Blueberry in Second Life? Read the Story Only on My Patreon

    Patreon Gizem Mishi Blueberry Kiwi Turkey

    I recently saw someone on social media wondering whatever became of Blueberry in Second Life, and in case you missed it, I told that in-depth, highly personal story of Blueberry / KiwiCo creator Gizem Mishi Akin on my Patreon a few months ago. I continue to be grateful Gizem was so willing to share so much about herself in it. And for that very reason, the story will probably be one of those stories that will only be available on my Patreon, at least for the near future. So I hope you consider joining for free to read it all here.