20 Years Later, Second Life is Launching on Mobile (arstechnica.com) 26
Remember Second Life? The virtual world launched on the desktop web back in 2003 with 3D avatars and spaces for various social activities. Believe it or not, it has been running continually this entire time -- and now it's coming to mobile for the first time. From a report: In fact, this will be the first time that Second Life has expanded beyond the PC (across Windows, macOS, and Linux) in any form. In a post to the virtual world's community web forum, a community manager for Second Life developer Linden Lab shared a video with some details about the mobile version's development, and announced that a beta version of the mobile app will launch sometime this year.
The video reveals that the app was built using Unity -- in part to make for an easy path to releasing and maintaining the app on multiple platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, and Android tablets. It also includes a few minutes of footage of Second Life's detailed character models and environments, with accompanying commentary by Linden Lab developers about bringing as much of the experience to mobile as possible.
The video reveals that the app was built using Unity -- in part to make for an easy path to releasing and maintaining the app on multiple platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, and Android tablets. It also includes a few minutes of footage of Second Life's detailed character models and environments, with accompanying commentary by Linden Lab developers about bringing as much of the experience to mobile as possible.
Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
The Furries and cosplayers are over in VRChat already.
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I know you're joking, but the furries are a very significant part of why Second Life is still around. They love the "pose balls" and all the kinky things they ca make their avatars do with them.
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Who's joking? I'm dead serious.
Furries and cosplayers are the primary target audience for some kind of make-believe role play. Second life offered that. You could create an avatar that was "you" and you could pretend to be any kind of creature you wanted to be.
VRChat is pretty much the same, just with VR.
40 years later (Score:5, Funny)
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In another 20 years they can call their game Mid-Life (crisis).
Right now it's still Havok [wikipedia.org] though.
Yes, it's still alive! (Score:5, Interesting)
Every few years I go and check to see if SL is still around. I'm surprised that it has lasted, but I'm also impressed with their commitment.
Re:Yes, it's still alive! (Score:5, Interesting)
Every few years I go and check to see if SL is still around. I'm surprised that it has lasted, but I'm also impressed with their commitment.
I go into Second Life a couple of times a week. A lot of people (some of them here on Slashdot) look down on SL but it has a very hardcore group of people who use it. The reasons for this are diverse. Some people have various physical disabilities or personality quirks that make it very hard for them to socialize in regular society. Some people do it as a quick way to do something quick and easy in their very very hectic Real Life. I know for me it was a lifeline during the pandemic when I was alone at home with no one to socialize with. The psychological damage that could have been done to me during that time would not have been minor. Second Life gave me an outlet to socialize, talk to people and not be alone. SL does the same for the other people I've meet in their.
And that is what Linden Labs understands and what a lot of other companies wanting to get into the "Virtual" universe don't understand. SL is at its core a place to interact with people. If you sell it that way, it succeeds. If, on the other hand, you think of this "Virtual" universe as something you can use to categorize people and get information about them (Meta, I'm looking at you) it not only doesn't work but it drives people away.
Re:Yes, it's still alive! (Score:4, Interesting)
> A lot of people (some of them here on Slashdot) look down on SL
That's partially due to:
* It isn't a game, it is a toy. Many find it boring as fuck.
* Performance, even on high end GPUs, is utter garbage.
* Management thinks the crappy 30 FPS is "fine" but you need 90+ FPS for VR. Performance is slowly being prioritized.
* It has a LOT of tech debt. (LL only recently replaced the "FastTimers" with Tracy which has WAY less overhead for profiling.)
* Clunky region crossing only highlights the tech debt.
* > 80% of people use a Third-Party Viewer, Firestorm, due to how bad the vanilla UI is.
* Gloss-Spec lighting looked horrible for decades. (PBR was only added recently, and Gloss-Spec finally got fixed with mikktspace for meshes.)
* Most of the grid is a ghost town of dated, bad asset quality.
* Linden Lab is clueless that the Adult regions + behavior were the primary factor in keeping SL alive. They refuse to embrace RVL (Restrained Love Viewer). Most are migrating (or have migrated) away to VRChat.
* Chat scalability is has been broken for years. (Discord is eating their lunch.)
I could go on but you get the point.
Yes, inclusiveness in a SL is a strength but for the majority of people that isn't THE reason they "play" SL, only because they kept hearing about it, or because their friends told them about it. Still though, congratulations on finding a community that accepts you -- that isn't easy in this day and age where so many communities are toxic.
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> A lot of people (some of them here on Slashdot) look down on SL
That's partially due to:
* It isn't a game, it is a toy. Many find it boring as fuck./p>
All of your complaints derive from just this: it isn't a game. It's a chat and creation platform. If you find chatting with people, or creating your own content, to be boring, that's your "problem". I suppose it's just an opinion and preference, but you turn it into a problem by "looking down on" people who enjoy that.
That's OK, they tend to look down on people who can't do anything creative and are anti-social and whose sole concept of entertainment is to endlessly and mindlessly pretend shooting and killi
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1. I never claimed that I find SL boring, only the reason that MANY do.
2. I (voice) chat perfectly fine in the games I play with my gaming buddies. Many people have the same experience. Chatting isn't the problem (aside from people abandoning SL for Discord but that is a separate issue.)
3. This may come as a complete shock to you but > 90% of people don't enjoy creating content, they enjoy consuming content. While computers have drastically lowered the barrier and empowered many people to create they are
The Office - Greatest Second Life Promo Ever (Score:1)
What do you mean "finally"? (Score:2)
Unless they've deleted the furries and peniscopters it's still not a viable platform for anything, and they're still charging way too much for real estate with no value.
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Unless they've deleted the furries and peniscopters it's still not a viable platform for anything, and they're still charging way too much for real estate with no value
I’m not sure if you’re serious or misspeaking here. People have been making SecondLife style virtual worlds for a long time and SecondLife was the only one to welcome furries and peniscopters in earnest.
And people still use it 20 years later.
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In about 2007 I was able to pay my rent by building and scripting things for professional companies who wanted a "Virtual World" presence (sorry, Facebook, you weren't first to the Metaverse). The reason every single one of those actual professional companies like Sun, IBM, Warner Bros, etc pulled out was because of the complete lack of content moderation ability in public spaces and the extent to which i
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There is no viable second life style meta verse where corporations can advertise.
There will be something eventually but none of the people who want to use it that way have any idea what it will look like. They’ll have to wait for it and it.
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There is no viable second life style meta verse where corporations can advertise.
Well, you can advertise on most VR platforms, but you won't have customers who see it that it's relevant to. Meanwhile, we're trying to make [openmv.org] something more standardized and functional. So far, most of the meetings and discussions so far have been hijacked by furries who see it as a way to enshrine their right and means to host yiff parties rather than a simle open standard for interactive shared experiences as it is supposed to be.
Can't wait until someone gets fired for showing up to a VR company meetin
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There were two mobile viewers, one that required a subscription, but did only text/chat, and another called Lumia that did a very slow version of the full experience with the graphics and all. Lumia was dropped from Android Play years ago, I think the developer gave up on it.
No VR? (Score:2)
Surprised it's not coming to VR, if it's already in Unity.
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There's a VR port of one of the third-party viewers, but it's awful. SL wasn't made for VR.
Proof point that the metaverse is nonsense (Score:2)
I recall using SL a bit in its early days, while I was at Sun. The goals were fine, the implementation OK, the results ... underwhelming. Meeting in SL wasn't particularly better than conference call + shared whiteboard. In fact, almost everyone I interacted with regularly preferred the CL+shared whiteboard if we couldn't be together in person.
Rebranding this sort of thing as the "metaverse" would improve anything was eithe rmagical thinking or simple fraud.
Having it run on phones natively is a nice technic
Didn't Facebook already do this? (Score:2)
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Nope. In SL, you already have legs.
And there has always been a huge market for body shapes and parts. Including the parts that go between your legs. And yes, those parts can interact with other people's parts, and also with toys.
Second Life also features B&D where your entire avatar, including naughty bits, can be involuntarily controlled and commanded by another user. With permissions and safewords of course.
I think that's one of the reason that some other worlds, like the Meta/Facebook one, do not allow avatars to exist below the waist
Everything Old Is New Again (Score:2)
Second Life had a mobile app fairly early on, 13-15 years ago. However, I think it was a 3d party hack that worked by a proxy. (The app worked by the 3d party logging you in on their server, and computing something else to show on the phone. So you had to trust them -- some company in Moscow -- with your credentials. And what you saw was a very limited, but useful, presentation of your session.)
I tried it out, using a throwaway Second Life account because I didn't trust them. But it did work, and was very l