Second Life: Not just for cybersex.

[Pæs]

Has anyone played around with this?
I've been involved in the design, development and administration of Second Life roleplay sims for about six years now. Curious whether any of you spags might have looked into it. Here follows some potentially disjointed thoughts about how all that shit works. If you're not hot for rambling, best to just skip it.

To briefly explain the setup, for those who don't know. Second Life is a virtual world, where users are able to build and design their own environments and accessories. Each region simulator (sim) of the world runs on a single dedicated core of a multi-core server. Where the settings of the sim you are in allow, users can freely create geometric primitives and link these together into more complex objects. SL also allows for 3d objects designed outside of the game world to be imported as textures, where the R (red), G (green) and B (blue) channels are mapped onto X, Y, and Z space to describe complex shapes to the system. By clever combinations of these shapes, and textures applied to their faces, users create some pretty spectacular environments. Once these environments have been created, you have to decide what to do with them. They're a little too costly to just put together and ignore ($1000 US initial setup, and monthly $295 for a full private region, which is the preferred way to buy land, otherwise your neighbours build giant dicks everywhere to ruin your view)

An obvious choice is to start an RPG in your sim. This software has a lot to offer to roleplayers. You can make your avatar appear nearly any way you please. If someone hasn't already designed the things you need to realise your character concept, you can build it yourself. There's an easy to use body shape editor to change the appearance of the default avatar, but if it won't do the things you want, avatars built entirely out of objects are very common. These objects are attached to points on the avatar body, which can be animated any way you please to ensure the creation moves how you would like it to. It's easier to be less creative and buy some macho/slutty motion capture animations for your attractive human avatar, though.

Roleplaying communities in Second Life fail much more often that they succeed. I've had a lot of fun helping to build up and maintain some popular ones, and I've been involved in some that just flopped, too. Usually the causes of these flops are pretty easy to determine. The sim owner hires staff that don't get along. There's a clash between the "I'M JUST HERE TO HAVE FUN DON'T CRITICISE MY ONE-SENTENCE POSTS" and "*Snort of derision* I only talk to people who post paragraphs". Or a combination of the two, where the staff disagree on which is their target audience, or if they're trying to please both. Sometimes the sim just doesn't have enough traffic to attract more people; you need a pretty dedicated group of gamers to be regularly playing to get people into it in the first place. Other times it's just a poorly designed game. This final reason is something I like to work on, game mechanics.

There are a lot of ways of handling these. One common method is to use a combat system, scripted in the Linden Scripting Language.
LSL is a procedural scripting language used to add interactivity to objects. It can make doors open on click, apply physical impulses to avatars to augment their jumping/speed and create a bullet object in front of a gun, applying a force to that object. A lot of sims go for a combination of text-based freeform combat and a first-person-shooter combat system, registering the collisions made by physical objects fired at them. These systems also monitor a user's movement input, using this and the data from functions which detect the position of nearby avatars to determine whether melee attacks hit or not. Most of these systems are very basic and the most popular of them are full of bugs. I've always meant to design my own, and have a whole pile of code snippets towards it. A lot of these have been contributed to the development of other people's systems, but I'm still convinced that the software allows for a lot more than anyone else has given.

Some sims use a meter purely to handle combat and though it strikes me as strange that RL skill with point and click determines the outcome of IC confrontation in places where RP is the focus, there isn't much alternative if you want to use an existing system to handle it.
Other places use a meter system to better control interaction with the environment. If the data stored on your character says you're good at driving, the vehicles in the game will handle better. All of the popular versions of this system incorporate the FPS combat system mentioned above.
Only in pure RP sims is RL ability not such a factor, but I've yet to find an example of this sort of sim that uses a meter beyond simple stat display. I'm still not certain what the best approach is, but I've spent a bit of time moving between popular MMOs to see what works and what doesn't for the script-controlled stats.

If any of you have had a look at SL, what were your impressions of it and how long ago did you check it out?
Those of you who aren't interested in this platform, I'd still like to hear if you have any information about RPG development and balancing.

Also, pics of a sim I liked, to show some of what is possible in environment design. They closed because they didn't have enough traffic to hold new players.

I'll probably edit this post so it makes more sense if I have more to say on the subject.

[Telarus]

Intriguing. As a content creator who dabbles in code, how much does a staff position of a healthy server actually pay? I mean, if I'm totally not invested in RPing there, just producing content.

[Pæs]

Intriguing. As a content creator who dabbles in code, how much does a staff position of a healthy server actually pay? I mean, if I'm totally not invested in RPing there, just producing content.

Mosbunal of the time, roleplaying sims are staffed by people selected from the most dedicated players or entirely by the founders of the sim who might not be making their money back on the place. The people I see making money on sims they work on are the ones who make a cheap combat meter and then run a 'cash shop' style operation for buying weapons that give an advantage over those who can't pay.

It's rare that staff positions in RP sims pay, partially because a lot of sims run at a loss and partially because players are usually more than willing to volunteer their time to the place. I know of a few sims who pay their staff, but I don't know how much. Some few sim owners can run their games as a full-time occupation, many rely on dedicated players, renting personal space in the sim and donating to keep afloat.

Sim popularity is pretty volatile, so those who are looking to make money doing it often need to be running a few places, opening new ones, closing the dying ones... because drama/politics can pretty easily empty a busy sim for a long while.

Content creators are best selling their content themselves if they have their own ideas or if they prefer to work on others' projects freelance coding/building or joining a group which does this. It's pretty tricky to make a name as a content creator working for others, given the thousands of asshats who say they can do it.

[Triple Zero]

Those prices are ridiculous.

I never really checked out SL, but I've always kind of hoped it would fail and die in a fire because if it'd actually take off the way these Linden folks wanted to, it'd be fucking worse than WoW addicts.

Isnt SL like over 8 years old, how come the systems are still full of bugs?

I always got the idea SL was like a first generation web browser, like this VR stuff might be very promising, the software, the "browser", the environment, they can't possibly get it right the first time. So I'd hope it would die and someone would start over, learning from the mistakes and doin' it right, so that we wouldn't be stuck with some half-assed VR Second Internet, that's all buggy and fucked up because of legacy code.

For instance, why do they have their own scripting language? That's retarded. It might have been a reasonable choice in 2003 (though even then utterly lacking in vision), nowadays you'd just plug in Google's V8 Javascript engine for scripting, run the server on Node.js (which also uses V8) and possibly even use WebGL for the 3D (being a standard developed by Mozilla/Khronos--though it has its own issues, it seems more modern than VRML). That way, at least you got the foundations right and using open standards is the way of the future (even Microsoft has learned that by now).

Further, I really disliked how,when SL was a really big hype and all, how all these corporations and (worse!) governmental bodies wasted their money on buying up Second Life "land" (what a fucking scam) building their "Second Life presence" because everybody thought it was going to be the next big thing, like the Internet was. But then it wasn't. And even if it had been it'd be stupid to jump in at that point for that price.
For instance, at the height of the hype there were like 3000 SL users in the Netherlands. Yet some medium-large municipality spent like 50k to build a "virtual town council" or whatever bullshit, while there were probably no more than 6 citizens in that town that even used SL!

And then the whole Linden dollar thing, if that ever was going to be a real economy, explain me, why the fuck would I want to give that kind of power to a corporation like Linden Labs?

I do like the part where people were able to build recursive particle bombs and rains of giant bouncing dicks and shit like that, crashing a server or people's clients, that's some pretty sweet Cyberpunk dreaming

[Pæs]

Those prices are ridiculous.

I agree, they're insane.

Isnt SL like over 8 years old, how come the systems are still full of bugs?

The systems I'm talking about are built and maintained my members of the community. Many of whom aren't particularly capable programmers, but worked out how to make the display about someone's head change from 100 health to 99 when they get struck with an object and worked from there. Memory-hogging scripts accomplishing very basic tasks are pretty common. Most of the scripters are unaware that there are better ways to perform their tasks and most of the game's population don't particularly care to investigate. Scripting is a mysterious arcane art that drives the universe.

I always got the idea SL was like a first generation web browser, like this VR stuff might be very promising, the software, the "browser", the environment, they can't possibly get it right the first time. So I'd hope it would die and someone would start over, learning from the mistakes and doin' it right, so that we wouldn't be stuck with some half-assed VR Second Internet, that's all buggy and fucked up because of legacy code.

For instance, why do they have their own scripting language? That's retarded. It might have been a reasonable choice in 2003 (though even then utterly lacking in vision), nowadays you'd just plug in Google's V8 Javascript engine for scripting, run the server on Node.js (which also uses V8) and possibly even use WebGL for the 3D (being a standard developed by Mozilla/Khronos--though it has its own issues, it seems more modern than VRML). That way, at least you got the foundations right and using open standards is the way of the future (even Microsoft has learned that by now).

Yeah, this is an issue they've run into. The fact that they're building on top of retarded systems. They updated their scripting virtual machine, basing it on Mono, but Linden Lab seem a little overwhelmed by the task of making the current system work, so they aren't making a lot of progress.

Further, I really disliked how,when SL was a really big hype and all, how all these corporations and (worse!) governmental bodies wasted their money on buying up Second Life "land" (what a fucking scam) building their "Second Life presence" because everybody thought it was going to be the next big thing, like the Internet was. But then it wasn't. And even if it had been it'd be stupid to jump in at that point for that price.
For instance, at the height of the hype there were like 3000 SL users in the Netherlands. Yet some medium-large municipality spent like 50k to build a "virtual town council" or whatever bullshit, while there were probably no more than 6 citizens in that town that even used SL!

And then the whole Linden dollar thing, if that ever was going to be a real economy, explain me, why the fuck would I want to give that kind of power to a corporation like Linden Labs?

I started Second Life in Scion City, which was sponsored by the Toyota Scion as a marketing exercise. They had a weak plot going on for the city's history, with a superhero called Scion Snook. Nobody who visited the sim was ever interested in buying a car, they came for the roleplay my friends and I built up around this superhero legend. After a couple of years, Toyota realised that a Second Life Presence amounts to sweet fuck-all and we had to start paying for our own sims :P

I do like the part where people were able to build recursive particle bombs and rains of giant bouncing dicks and shit like that, crashing a server or people's clients, that's some pretty sweet Cyberpunk dreaming

There are so many creative ways to grief Second Life. I started to teach myself to script shortly after I joined up, to write defences against griefer attacks, because there were DICKS EVERYWHERE. Most roleplay sims are pretty safe from that, limiting the permissions people have, and having active staff members to eject trouble... but if you go anywhere else in the game, you'll still get particle spam shutting you down.

[Triple Zero]

Yeah I read that about Mono in the scripting language.

Except Mono isn't a programming language, but the open-source version of Microsoft's .NET framework. From Wikipedia: The .NET Framework's Base Class Library provides user interface, data access, database connectivity, cryptography, web application development, numeric algorithms, and network communications.

So it's not a programming language, but rather a huge library of utility functions that you can stick onto another language.

It's better than not having any of that, though.

Except you're still coding in a homebrewn language, when you might as well use something more mature such as Javascript or Python.

I still wish they would do second life again, but make it open, and do it right, then I might try it out.

Even though my worries about "worse than WoW addicts" still stand.

On SL's wikipedia page I saw a bunch of links at the bottom for "similar projects", btw

[Doktor Howl]

Mosbunal of the time,