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That’s an awesome summary, thanks for writing it. Second Life is funny - I commented to a friend the other day that the place seemed to get overrun by genitals

That’s an awesome summary, thanks for writing it. Second Life is funny - I commented to a friend the other day that the place seemed to get overrun by genitals (not my exact wording.... ROFL) and casinos. I actually worked for a company that got a bit into Second Life back in the day (we made an official port of Tringo to a TV set-top-box games service). I got the sense that Second Life couldn’t outgrow prims. They were great when bandwidth was low, but game graphics just overtook Second Life and kept going. Content creation was really fun though, especially the collaborative aspect. I haven’t checked it out in a few years actually. Impressive to hear it’s still going, though it’s a shame they couldn’t really jump into VR when the Oculus Rift came out. I vaguely remember something about a VR client, but can’t even recall if it was officially supported. I always remember wondering where they were and why they didn’t seem more prominent. It seemed like VR was what something like Second Life was waiting for, yet they never came to the party. I got Linden’s other experimental thing on Steam (Patterns) and then it disappeared before I got around to really trying it. I’d add AltspaceVR, Bigscreen, VRChat and Rec Room to your list of what’s currently happening in ‘metaverse-like’ things. As a user I find AltspaceVR frustrating as I’m never quite sure when events are on in my local time-zone. Stuff ends up being on at odd hours and I never seem to catch it. Or something seems promising but then you realise most of the people there are kids and it’s off-putting. As for Bigscreen, it’s great for hanging out with friends occasionally. Never really got into VRChat much, but it seems very much ‘Second Life’ in a lot of ways. I haven’t tried ‘Rec Room’ myself but have heard complaints that it’s been overrun by kids. The hardest thing though is finding friends that have VR headsets and that are willing to install any of these apps and go to the trouble of setting up accounts. In this sense I think Facebook Horizon will have an advantage over the others when it does finally become available (it’s not the only one that lets you use an existing account; I remember being able to use my Oculus account for one of the others but can’t remember which one off the top of my head). I also still find that I feel an inertia to entering VR, despite owning an Oculus Quest and being really enthusiastic about it. It’s just easier to pick up my phone and play something on a whim. VR still requires more effort and I think it’s just the isolation from everything that makes it feel like that. Especially when you’re in a place with other people. It feels weird isolating yourself around everyone else, at least for me.

Animats 6y ago
Second Life has serious performance problems. VR requires 90FPS or better, and SL has trouble holding 30. Or 20. Arbitrarily complex mesh content, a terrible level of detail generator, and single-threaded servers and viewers combine to hold performance down. The basic architecture is 15 years old, from back when servers had one CPU. Performance is totally unacceptable to the Fortnite generation. The system can't handle crowds. Second Life is divided into regions 256 meters on a side, and starts to slow down when more than about 40 users are in one region. Regions are usually capped somewhere below 60 users to keep performance acceptable. This is a big, big problem. Anything really good that draws a crowd slows down to an unusable level. On top of that, there's a huge transient when a new user enters a region, and all their asset info is copied into that region's server. For historical reasons, the region servers do a lot of bookkeeping that ought to be handled by per-user server processes, and so, as users move around, they carry with them excess baggage which must be pulled out of the state of one region, sent across the network in the data center, and inserted into the state of the new region. Sometimes transfers from region to region fail, and, as a result, traveling around in a vehicle results in a region crossing failure that disconnects the user. Typical failure rate is about 1-2 times per hour for a traveler. Much worse with multiple users in one vehicle, which kills travel as a social activity. There's a serious architecture problem in this area - region crossings need to be an atomic operation to work right, yet you can't lock up both regions involved for the time required. It's a difficult distributed transaction problem. So there are race conditions and failures. This alone gets the system laughed at in gamer reviews. All this is quite fixable, but needs more staff resources than are currently available. As for "the place seemed to get overrun by genitals", that's not really a problem in practice. That sort of nonsense mostly appears in a few social hubs operated by Linden Lab. Those are default destinations. If you don't have a home location set, you go to one of those on login. Only new users and the jerks who harass them go there. About the only time an experienced user goes there is if the region they're in goes down, which results in being teleported to a random social hub. Everybody else is on private property, their own, their friends, or that of some business, and the owner can eject and ban users from their property. Property rights make Second Life go, in a very real sense. There's not much need for "moderators". Second Life does have a "governance" group. And what comes up as governance issues? Property problems. Users putting up giant billboards. Users with stuff sticking off their parcels onto public roads. (If it intrudes on a neighbors' parcel the neighbor can remove it, but that's not automatic. Having a tree branch or other landscaping hang over is usually OK. Like real life.) Obstacles to boats and aircraft. Pirated copies of in-world goods resulting in DMCA issues. User harassment sometimes comes up, but not that often, because the property rights system lets you prevent someone from entering your property, communicating with you, or even being seen by you. If you want to do consensual sex on private property, it's not an issue for Linden Lab. Nor is it much of an issue for users. There's not much controversy in the user community over it. The perception that Second Life is all about sex is a business problem. Google is anti-sex; you could not host SL on Google Cloud. Twitch.tv, which is owned by Facebook, does not allow video from Second Life. That's a big marketing issue. SL's somewhat casual attitude on sex is alien to the current state of the web. The system has been running for sixteen years. Today we have a division between the sex-free world and the porno world, and that division has hardened considerably in the last few years. SL doesn't have that division, and that bothers some people. This may reflect SL being run out of San Francisco.

Animats 6y ago

Second Life has serious performance problems. VR requires 90FPS or better, and SL has trouble holding 30. Or 20. Arbitrarily complex mesh content, a terrible level of detail generator, and single-threaded servers and viewers combine to hold performance down. The basic architecture is 15 years old, from back when servers had one CPU. Performance is totally unacceptable to the Fortnite generation. The system can't handle crowds. Second Life is divided into regions 256 meters on a side, and starts to slow down when more than about 40 users are in one region. Regions are usually capped somewhere below 60 users to keep performance acceptable. This is a big, big problem. Anything really good that draws a crowd slows down to an unusable level. On top of that, there's a huge transient when a new user enters a region, and all their asset info is copied into that region's server. For historical reasons, the region servers do a lot of bookkeeping that ought to be handled by per-user server processes, and so, as users move around, they carry with them excess baggage which must be pulled out of the state of one region, sent across the network in the data center, and inserted into the state of the new region. Sometimes transfers from region to region fail, and, as a result, traveling around in a vehicle results in a region crossing failure that disconnects the user. Typical failure rate is about 1-2 times per hour for a traveler. Much worse with multiple users in one vehicle, which kills travel as a social activity. There's a serious architecture problem in this area - region crossings need to be an atomic operation to work right, yet you can't lock up both regions involved for the time required. It's a difficult distributed transaction problem. So there are race conditions and failures. This alone gets the system laughed at in gamer reviews. All this is quite fixable, but needs more staff resources than are currently available. As for "the place seemed to get overrun by genitals", that's not really a problem in practice. That sort of nonsense mostly appears in a few social hubs operated by Linden Lab. Those are default destinations. If you don't have a home location set, you go to one of those on login. Only new users and the jerks who harass them go there. About the only time an experienced user goes there is if the region they're in goes down, which results in being teleported to a random social hub. Everybody else is on private property, their own, their friends, or that of some business, and the owner can eject and ban users from their property. Property rights make Second Life go, in a very real sense. There's not much need for "moderators". Second Life does have a "governance" group. And what comes up as governance issues? Property problems. Users putting up giant billboards. Users with stuff sticking off their parcels onto public roads. (If it intrudes on a neighbors' parcel the neighbor can remove it, but that's not automatic. Having a tree branch or other landscaping hang over is usually OK. Like real life.) Obstacles to boats and aircraft. Pirated copies of in-world goods resulting in DMCA issues. User harassment sometimes comes up, but not that often, because the property rights system lets you prevent someone from entering your property, communicating with you, or even being seen by you. If you want to do consensual sex on private property, it's not an issue for Linden Lab. Nor is it much of an issue for users. There's not much controversy in the user community over it. The perception that Second Life is all about sex is a business problem. Google is anti-sex; you could not host SL on Google Cloud. Twitch.tv, which is owned by Facebook, does not allow video from Second Life. That's a big marketing issue. SL's somewhat casual attitude on sex is alien to the current state of the web. The system has been running for sixteen years. Today we have a division between the sex-free world and the porno world, and that division has hardened considerably in the last few years. SL doesn't have that division, and that bothers some people. This may reflect SL being run out of San Francisco.