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A couple of years ago after seeing this game in a lot of documentaries, I decided to download it.
Didn't get it at all, what a confusing whatever-it-is.
Didn't get it at all, what a confusing whatever-it-is.
SL is on a bit of an upswing, lately. Since mesh support has been added you can now have much better avatars and environments, basically up to the skill of the creator.
Previously, a lot of things were limited by trying to work with the horrible primitive system and using wonky build tools like sculpted prims that aren't supported anywhere else but in Second Life.
Now, though, a lot of the bottleneck can be shown off to be at the server's end. Simulator performance is pretty much terrible across the board in any place a reasonable number of avatars gather up...and the average avatar carries enough crap scripted gear around to cripple a sim just because the people scripting it are horrible.
Who knows, maybe once the environments are pretty and the avatars are nicer...people might actually demand Linden Labs improve their failing infrastructure. That would be a nice change.
Previously, a lot of things were limited by trying to work with the horrible primitive system and using wonky build tools like sculpted prims that aren't supported anywhere else but in Second Life.
Now, though, a lot of the bottleneck can be shown off to be at the server's end. Simulator performance is pretty much terrible across the board in any place a reasonable number of avatars gather up...and the average avatar carries enough crap scripted gear around to cripple a sim just because the people scripting it are horrible.
Who knows, maybe once the environments are pretty and the avatars are nicer...people might actually demand Linden Labs improve their failing infrastructure. That would be a nice change.
Also, if you want to know what the #1 and #2 most popular activities are, it's probably "idling while playing another game" and "idling while browsing the internet".
@Dragoonkin
You sound like you play, and you seem like a... I won't say normal, how about "level-headed"... you seem like a level-headed individual. I suppose you can see by the comments, and I'm sure you knew already, that Second Life has a bit of an image problem with the rest of the intarwebz. How do you feel about that, and is it deserved?
You sound like you play, and you seem like a... I won't say normal, how about "level-headed"... you seem like a level-headed individual. I suppose you can see by the comments, and I'm sure you knew already, that Second Life has a bit of an image problem with the rest of the intarwebz. How do you feel about that, and is it deserved?
It's pretty much completely deserved. I stay in the military community, though, which tries its' best to be distinctly sexless. I say tries, but, you can't avoid it when the next sim over could be a sex club. You do what you can though.
There's nothing else anywhere like the Second Life military RP community. You have your own groups, with your own bases, and your own gear and ranks and whatever else. There's just nothing else like it.
You want to have tanks and fighter planes and jetbikes and whatever else? Make it. It's yours. No other game can touch it in that respect.
There's nothing else anywhere like the Second Life military RP community. You have your own groups, with your own bases, and your own gear and ranks and whatever else. There's just nothing else like it.
You want to have tanks and fighter planes and jetbikes and whatever else? Make it. It's yours. No other game can touch it in that respect.
That sounds kinda awesome, really. And this is primarily people that... what? They're in the actual military now? Or they have been? Or they're role-playing it, or what?
Basically the military-RP community is kind of like FPS clans. Only taken to another level.
There's a bunch of groups, who all fight each other. Each of them (for the most part) has their own simulator that's their base. They make their own rules for their base, build their own bases, make their own armour, make their own gear...pretty much whatever they want.
The whole thing is kind of a bizarre, tenuous gentleman's agreement between a bunch of groups that have no overarching, uh, "authority" to moderate them. Like, if you're playing Team Fortress 2 there's a set of rules. You can do X, Y, and Z. In SL military...there's nothing like that. If you make it, you can pull it out. Fully-automatic shotgun that never reloads and fires ten times a second? Done.
So everyone has their own rules, and everyone tries to play nice together, and fails completely quite often as you'd assume when you let a bunch of people play "King of the Castle" in their own little fiefdom. ;)
Honestly I could write a whole article about SL military, I probably should sometime. It's one of the more interesting facets of Second Life. It really couldn't exist anywhere else but a huge sandbox environment.
There's a bunch of groups, who all fight each other. Each of them (for the most part) has their own simulator that's their base. They make their own rules for their base, build their own bases, make their own armour, make their own gear...pretty much whatever they want.
The whole thing is kind of a bizarre, tenuous gentleman's agreement between a bunch of groups that have no overarching, uh, "authority" to moderate them. Like, if you're playing Team Fortress 2 there's a set of rules. You can do X, Y, and Z. In SL military...there's nothing like that. If you make it, you can pull it out. Fully-automatic shotgun that never reloads and fires ten times a second? Done.
So everyone has their own rules, and everyone tries to play nice together, and fails completely quite often as you'd assume when you let a bunch of people play "King of the Castle" in their own little fiefdom. ;)
Honestly I could write a whole article about SL military, I probably should sometime. It's one of the more interesting facets of Second Life. It really couldn't exist anywhere else but a huge sandbox environment.
And since I totally didn't answer your actual question, the whole thing is basically a big roleplay thing. Our group has actual and former military members, so do others, but the majority of it is just folks who are goofing around and just want to shoot at people.
@Dragoonkin:
ya remind me of a RL friend of mine. He's been in SL military RP since 2007ish bouncing between groups as they wane and rise.
Personally, I've been sticking to practicing 3D animations with SL, along side some Fantasy and Sci-Fi themed RPGing(metered mostly). It's amazing to see some of the things that can be done like the combat systems and the weapons and vehicles, but at the same time, there's enough "jank" in the system that I never stuck around too long.
ya remind me of a RL friend of mine. He's been in SL military RP since 2007ish bouncing between groups as they wane and rise.
Personally, I've been sticking to practicing 3D animations with SL, along side some Fantasy and Sci-Fi themed RPGing(metered mostly). It's amazing to see some of the things that can be done like the combat systems and the weapons and vehicles, but at the same time, there's enough "jank" in the system that I never stuck around too long.
@Sterling
I'm trying my best to not mention names of groups to not pimp or put down anyone, since I think everyone has their place within the military community. ;) Even though I've been in one place since 2008.
SL combat is really pretty terrible when you get down to the brass tacks of mechanics. It's just the breadth of possible things that really makes it special. I don't do much (any) of it anymore myself, I'm just an administrative person. ;)
I know a friend of mine always talks about making her own entire combat system, Julia Faulkland (of Fairlight fame). If anyone's ever going to do it right, it'll be her.
I'm trying my best to not mention names of groups to not pimp or put down anyone, since I think everyone has their place within the military community. ;) Even though I've been in one place since 2008.
SL combat is really pretty terrible when you get down to the brass tacks of mechanics. It's just the breadth of possible things that really makes it special. I don't do much (any) of it anymore myself, I'm just an administrative person. ;)
I know a friend of mine always talks about making her own entire combat system, Julia Faulkland (of Fairlight fame). If anyone's ever going to do it right, it'll be her.
@Dragoonkin
Wow, you know the maker of Fairlight? Impressive.
But yeah, that's really the reason I stuck to areas with more turn based combat scenarios and the like. More "dungeons and fragons"-y type places. Few I went to were just pure RP. Anyhow, lost interest for a long while, but I keep going back every now and then to see how things are.
Hopefully LL adda things that would bake it easier to make smoother combat experiences.
Wow, you know the maker of Fairlight? Impressive.
But yeah, that's really the reason I stuck to areas with more turn based combat scenarios and the like. More "dungeons and fragons"-y type places. Few I went to were just pure RP. Anyhow, lost interest for a long while, but I keep going back every now and then to see how things are.
Hopefully LL adda things that would bake it easier to make smoother combat experiences.
Here's another regular Destructoid reader who has also been strongly involved in Second Life, though in a much different field than Dragoonkin.
My area has always been amusement parks. Since 2005, I have tried to recreate amusement parks using Second Life, with varying degrees of success. I'd say some of my latest rides can replicate what you could see on RCT3 or similar games. You can see them on a sim called Prim Hearts.
Second Life has always been about the money for me. I knew 3d design, and I liked amusement park rides, so I took it as a job (and a very lucrative one, at least until SL's name started to be associated with sex and porn, and sales went down). I haven't had almost any contact with the rest of Second Life for a few years.
@Tristrix: "Second Life has a bit of an image problem with the rest of the intarwebz. How do you feel about that, and is it deserved?"
Oh boy, do we know it...
Imagine you have a job. You are good at it. You like it. It pays your bills. Then, suddenly, your boss decides to make some STUPID decisions. Retarded decisions. You tell him so. Repeteadly. And he ignores you. You write messages and drop them in the complaint box, which is removed without a word a week later. And then he removes the coffee machine so that the workers can't talk with each other.
And then he plasters the office with pictures of giant dongs and invites the press...
It is deserved. Linden Lab has made nothing but terrible decisions. SL had a huge potential, and now no one wants to hear of it.
My area has always been amusement parks. Since 2005, I have tried to recreate amusement parks using Second Life, with varying degrees of success. I'd say some of my latest rides can replicate what you could see on RCT3 or similar games. You can see them on a sim called Prim Hearts.
Second Life has always been about the money for me. I knew 3d design, and I liked amusement park rides, so I took it as a job (and a very lucrative one, at least until SL's name started to be associated with sex and porn, and sales went down). I haven't had almost any contact with the rest of Second Life for a few years.
@Tristrix: "Second Life has a bit of an image problem with the rest of the intarwebz. How do you feel about that, and is it deserved?"
Oh boy, do we know it...
Imagine you have a job. You are good at it. You like it. It pays your bills. Then, suddenly, your boss decides to make some STUPID decisions. Retarded decisions. You tell him so. Repeteadly. And he ignores you. You write messages and drop them in the complaint box, which is removed without a word a week later. And then he removes the coffee machine so that the workers can't talk with each other.
And then he plasters the office with pictures of giant dongs and invites the press...
It is deserved. Linden Lab has made nothing but terrible decisions. SL had a huge potential, and now no one wants to hear of it.
This comment section reads like an interview article. I have never witnessed such a thing. This should happen more often, please go on guys.
It's already equal to a frontpage feature about SL stories in my eyes, very interesting and informing ones at that.
It's already equal to a frontpage feature about SL stories in my eyes, very interesting and informing ones at that.
As far as sex in SL... Well... It isn't really good at much else. Due to just the laggy nature of the engine there isn't much action wise that works. So games, etc while possible just don't end up being entirely fun.
So it comes down to being a giant chat program with a visual aspect. What does this visual aspect enhance, or what is it good for over traditional text only chat platforms?
- Meeting people. Conversations are space based, so if you'd like to meet a group of people or join a conversation... Just walk up to them and say Hi. You could argue why not just go outside and do that? Well it's probably a lot easier to find people with common interests in SL than it is to find them by just walking down the street. Especially with how visually exaggerated things are. You're more likely to see an SL avatar decked out head to toe in Nintendo gear than you would a real person, thus their interests are more readily apparent.
- Roleplay. Can add visual elements and while not vital for roleplay it can enhance the experience for some.
- Creating. Ever want to make a super awesome space theme park? Well now you can. It's making your dreams or thoughts come to life so that you can share them with people and express them to people in a much more pleasing / easy to understand form. It's a way of expressing yourself you could never accomplish with text. Also the added benefit of it being interactive.
- Sex / Porn. Let's be honest here... Sex is a medium very intertwined with the 5 senses. So the visual and audio aspects of SL are what draw people to look for that experience. Combine this with the ease of meeting people in SL and it's understandable why that community exists.
At the end of the day SL encompasses all things on the internet. That includes the good and the bad, but really... What's good and what's bad are relative to the viewer. People are always going to hate some part of the internet... For every person who takes a moral self justified stance against sex and how wrong it is... Another person is there just harmlessly having fun with it.
I mean people think sex is creepy? I'm personally creeped the fuck out by the people running around role playing children with a fake mommy and daddy. That shit is disturbing. The sex is normal in comparison.
Overall though I don't think banning anything is the solution here. SL is very visual and in the sense you're never going to be able to avoid stuff completely. Try as you might it's just there. Banning sex to appease one set of people isn't really fixing a problem. It's just imposing one user base's self righteous moral beliefs upon another section of the community. As I mentioned earlier I'm disturbed by people RPing kids. Should I call for them to be banned as well? Where do we draw the line on what is or isn't acceptable?
SL is always going to struggle to grow because it requires one thing of it's community... Tolerance. We all know people in general are a bit short on that.
@Sarg: I'd say my issues with Linden Labs not listening to people mostly revolve around the viewer 2.0 interface and how damn awful it is. They tried to shoe horn a design that people are familiar with (Web browsers) on top of a platform where it doesn't fit, they've been told this repeatedly, yet they still pushed ahead with it and dropped the old UI.
So it comes down to being a giant chat program with a visual aspect. What does this visual aspect enhance, or what is it good for over traditional text only chat platforms?
- Meeting people. Conversations are space based, so if you'd like to meet a group of people or join a conversation... Just walk up to them and say Hi. You could argue why not just go outside and do that? Well it's probably a lot easier to find people with common interests in SL than it is to find them by just walking down the street. Especially with how visually exaggerated things are. You're more likely to see an SL avatar decked out head to toe in Nintendo gear than you would a real person, thus their interests are more readily apparent.
- Roleplay. Can add visual elements and while not vital for roleplay it can enhance the experience for some.
- Creating. Ever want to make a super awesome space theme park? Well now you can. It's making your dreams or thoughts come to life so that you can share them with people and express them to people in a much more pleasing / easy to understand form. It's a way of expressing yourself you could never accomplish with text. Also the added benefit of it being interactive.
- Sex / Porn. Let's be honest here... Sex is a medium very intertwined with the 5 senses. So the visual and audio aspects of SL are what draw people to look for that experience. Combine this with the ease of meeting people in SL and it's understandable why that community exists.
At the end of the day SL encompasses all things on the internet. That includes the good and the bad, but really... What's good and what's bad are relative to the viewer. People are always going to hate some part of the internet... For every person who takes a moral self justified stance against sex and how wrong it is... Another person is there just harmlessly having fun with it.
I mean people think sex is creepy? I'm personally creeped the fuck out by the people running around role playing children with a fake mommy and daddy. That shit is disturbing. The sex is normal in comparison.
Overall though I don't think banning anything is the solution here. SL is very visual and in the sense you're never going to be able to avoid stuff completely. Try as you might it's just there. Banning sex to appease one set of people isn't really fixing a problem. It's just imposing one user base's self righteous moral beliefs upon another section of the community. As I mentioned earlier I'm disturbed by people RPing kids. Should I call for them to be banned as well? Where do we draw the line on what is or isn't acceptable?
SL is always going to struggle to grow because it requires one thing of it's community... Tolerance. We all know people in general are a bit short on that.
@Sarg: I'd say my issues with Linden Labs not listening to people mostly revolve around the viewer 2.0 interface and how damn awful it is. They tried to shoe horn a design that people are familiar with (Web browsers) on top of a platform where it doesn't fit, they've been told this repeatedly, yet they still pushed ahead with it and dropped the old UI.
@Iron Dragon
I disagree slightly with you there. ACTION games may not work terribly great, but things not so timing sensitive work alright.
Metered combat is alright, too, but unfortunately if there's one thing SL lacks in its' amateur community, it's decent game-mechanics designers.
The Viewer 2.0 interface is pretty much gone now, though, if you don't want to use it. You can pull a client like Firestorm and have just about the original 1.0 interface, or the newer 3.0 interface.
I disagree slightly with you there. ACTION games may not work terribly great, but things not so timing sensitive work alright.
Metered combat is alright, too, but unfortunately if there's one thing SL lacks in its' amateur community, it's decent game-mechanics designers.
The Viewer 2.0 interface is pretty much gone now, though, if you don't want to use it. You can pull a client like Firestorm and have just about the original 1.0 interface, or the newer 3.0 interface.
I'd say it's still shamefully lacking in tools, too. Imagine if Photoshop went about 8 years before giving you the ability to see how big the canvas you were working on was, until that point it was just an arbitrary 0-100 on an "image size" slider. Then imagine in like CS3 or so Adobe FINALLY added the ability to see the pixel size of your canvas....but it was off by about 500 pixels, give or take depending on the size of the image you were trying to make. Yeah, try making a website in Photoshop under those conditions.
That's pretty much the state of SL's tool set.
Ever notice how SL avatars have freaky short arms? Yeah, for women avatars you pretty much need to max out the avatar arm length slider to get proportionate arms, even then if your avatar is more than 6' tall maxing out the arm slider still leaves your arms short. Oh, and SL starts out women avatars at about 6'8", so yeah, everyone has short arms and there's really nothing you can do about it.
Problems like this are why people who actually know how to make stuff by and large tend to avoid SL.
Also, SL still doesn't support NPCs. You can make some using bots, but the way SL is set up you can only fit about 30 people to a sim (square land area that basically represents a server) before the sim becomes unusable, and bots eat into that number because the sim treats them like real people, sending them all the same information, eating up all the bandwidth a regular avatar needs for receiving textures and whatnot.
Oh, and did I mention that SL penalizes you for optimizing your textures, models, etcetera? In many cases a well optimized mesh environment will eat up more of the arbitrary allowed resources than an SL custom format model that always uses far more polygons than it needs. It makes no sense!
Not to mention the marketing. The above screenshot is probably better than the typical SL marketing screenshot, but it's still pretty ugly compared to how SL can look.
[imghttp://community.secondlife.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/13035i24B8CF37482445D2/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1[/img]
Anyways, SL is a brilliant concept just exceptionally poor execution. It's only saving grace is that every other virtual world to come out has been even worse. I do hope the new CEO can turn things around.
That's pretty much the state of SL's tool set.
Ever notice how SL avatars have freaky short arms? Yeah, for women avatars you pretty much need to max out the avatar arm length slider to get proportionate arms, even then if your avatar is more than 6' tall maxing out the arm slider still leaves your arms short. Oh, and SL starts out women avatars at about 6'8", so yeah, everyone has short arms and there's really nothing you can do about it.
Problems like this are why people who actually know how to make stuff by and large tend to avoid SL.
Also, SL still doesn't support NPCs. You can make some using bots, but the way SL is set up you can only fit about 30 people to a sim (square land area that basically represents a server) before the sim becomes unusable, and bots eat into that number because the sim treats them like real people, sending them all the same information, eating up all the bandwidth a regular avatar needs for receiving textures and whatnot.
Oh, and did I mention that SL penalizes you for optimizing your textures, models, etcetera? In many cases a well optimized mesh environment will eat up more of the arbitrary allowed resources than an SL custom format model that always uses far more polygons than it needs. It makes no sense!
Not to mention the marketing. The above screenshot is probably better than the typical SL marketing screenshot, but it's still pretty ugly compared to how SL can look.
[imghttp://community.secondlife.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/13035i24B8CF37482445D2/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1[/img]
Anyways, SL is a brilliant concept just exceptionally poor execution. It's only saving grace is that every other virtual world to come out has been even worse. I do hope the new CEO can turn things around.
why is it that everytime someone says Second life. we all instantly think of furries? why can't we just think of the shit physics and a doucehy mod that bans you for making fun of his avatar.
@Dragoonkin
The metered combat is mostly used in RP sims from what I've seen though just to spice things up a little bit. Even with the guns SL has: the sims lag, bullets mis-rez, etc. I'm not saying it isn't possible. It completely is. I just haven't found anything very fun or worth playing in SL for more than 5 minutes.
Also last I tried firestorm (Few months ago) it was still disappointing me in the UI department. I'm going to continue to be disappointed with it until it lets me minimize windows. Something I'm amazed still hasn't been implemented. If I'm working with a set of tools I don't want to close and open them every time I need them. I like having a stack of programs minimized as a form of task management. I'm one of the scripting / building crowd and SL 2.0 / 3.0 still aren't where they need to be. For now I'm clinging on to Phoenix until it breathes it's last breath.
I just really wish Linden Labs would pull their heads out of their own asses. When a majority of your users are on a 3rd party viewer, you're doing something horribly wrong.
The metered combat is mostly used in RP sims from what I've seen though just to spice things up a little bit. Even with the guns SL has: the sims lag, bullets mis-rez, etc. I'm not saying it isn't possible. It completely is. I just haven't found anything very fun or worth playing in SL for more than 5 minutes.
Also last I tried firestorm (Few months ago) it was still disappointing me in the UI department. I'm going to continue to be disappointed with it until it lets me minimize windows. Something I'm amazed still hasn't been implemented. If I'm working with a set of tools I don't want to close and open them every time I need them. I like having a stack of programs minimized as a form of task management. I'm one of the scripting / building crowd and SL 2.0 / 3.0 still aren't where they need to be. For now I'm clinging on to Phoenix until it breathes it's last breath.
I just really wish Linden Labs would pull their heads out of their own asses. When a majority of your users are on a 3rd party viewer, you're doing something horribly wrong.
@Pennywise:
Yep. I absolutely know what you mean. The screenshot I used in the header is one I dug up off my hard drive from... think that was back in 08 or 09, when I didn't have a computer what could run a 3rd Party viewer which was capable of more intense lighting and shadows. My thumbnail is one I dashed out to snap right before posting this, but it's small, so it hides a lot of detail.
Was gonna use this at first since not only does it have all the graphical effects... it also shows off a fully functional two mode(gun and melee) working Bayonet rifle a friend of mine made for me. Also, the stance animation I made myself:
Opted for one with more people in it instead. Felt it fit better.
Yep. I absolutely know what you mean. The screenshot I used in the header is one I dug up off my hard drive from... think that was back in 08 or 09, when I didn't have a computer what could run a 3rd Party viewer which was capable of more intense lighting and shadows. My thumbnail is one I dashed out to snap right before posting this, but it's small, so it hides a lot of detail.
Was gonna use this at first since not only does it have all the graphical effects... it also shows off a fully functional two mode(gun and melee) working Bayonet rifle a friend of mine made for me. Also, the stance animation I made myself:
Opted for one with more people in it instead. Felt it fit better.
@Sterling Aialya Lyons
I was more criticizing Linden Lab's inability to better market their product, and put some professional quality presentation into how it looks to new users. ^^;
For the majority of people checking out SL, scenes like the header image of this article might be the best they see because of this.
@Iron Dragon
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, you most certainly can minimize windows in SL. You always have been able to. A majority of users have been on third party viewers since long before Viewer 2, due to the features you can find in them that the official viewer lacks.
The original Viewer 2 release was really bad, that soured a lot of people, but it was eventually fixed. The current UI is highly customizable.
I was more criticizing Linden Lab's inability to better market their product, and put some professional quality presentation into how it looks to new users. ^^;
For the majority of people checking out SL, scenes like the header image of this article might be the best they see because of this.
@Iron Dragon
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, you most certainly can minimize windows in SL. You always have been able to. A majority of users have been on third party viewers since long before Viewer 2, due to the features you can find in them that the official viewer lacks.
The original Viewer 2 release was really bad, that soured a lot of people, but it was eventually fixed. The current UI is highly customizable.
@Pennywise:
I know. I figured I could use that to make a comment with another picture showing my avatar off. XD
But yeah, I think that the best attempt LL had in marketing SL is with the short lived campaign where they showed people IRL side by side with their SL avatars that looked like them. Just... too bad that Eve Online did that a few years earlier with a much cooler edge to it.
I know. I figured I could use that to make a comment with another picture showing my avatar off. XD
But yeah, I think that the best attempt LL had in marketing SL is with the short lived campaign where they showed people IRL side by side with their SL avatars that looked like them. Just... too bad that Eve Online did that a few years earlier with a much cooler edge to it.
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