1. Dusan Writer said on June 16th

   Digado -

   Thanks for pointing this one out.

   You know that feeling you sometimes get in SL? When you find that special build, the one with the rendered shadows, the detail, the beautiful use of space? Now - nothing against those places that AREN’T those things, but for me my SL life changed when I found Svarga, probably in month 2 or something. I hadn’t realized until then the capacity of the grid for that level of art, I’d been spending so much time hacking together prims - mostly misaligned because I didn’t understand camera control and kept walking around trying to get a good view.

   But this video makes me long for that. We all KNOW that you don’t need rendered builds to make a space engaging - it’s the people afterall. And Home will have its own issues - nothing in the hands of the users really, it’s a social platform and meant to pull you into games.

   But for brands, they’ll look at Sony’s Home, or Blue Mars, and then they’ll look at SL and, well, all sizzle and no steak maybe, but still.

   Of course there are balances to be made. And Torley’s um, gone off the deep end or something? Not sure…we all have our moments of frustration, I guess he found one of his.

   But if you’re going to trade off fidelity so that content streams then you’d better trade it in for something else - improved socialization tools, more robust building tools (WHY can’t they put in a really robust particle interface, or physics?), or improved “tour” experiences.

   Ah well, maybe M will get a handle on it. In the meantime, I hope he’s looking at videos like this, or thinking about the new Spore Creature editor stand-along thing( http://dusanwriter.com/?p=602 ), and trying to bring back those moments of AWE that attracted us, kept us, but that are no longer sufficient when up against the competition for attention.

2. Digado said on June 16th

   Dusan,

   Home might have its ‘problems’ (I think any social platform does) but I think Home is a pretty solid platform just for players to meet and get into a game - that is its function which I can see it doing very well. The point I tried making is it’s clear function allowed for focused development (as we recently discussed on your blog). It has trophy rooms, game rooms, and demo rooms. Pay per play rooms, and stores for game and avatar customization (as a gamer, wouldn’t it be fun to take your ‘Need for Speed’ car from the game into the social environment?). If Sony doesn’t get too over enthausiastic and raise their expectations to unreasonable levels such as inworld economies and free user content creation, I think Home is going to be great.

   But the point you make about Svarga, and whether it is the people ‘making the place’ - I’m not sure. I think there is an interest concession being done when you open your platform to ‘random user generated content’ in such a way SL has done. Prokofy once attacked me when I said 90% of the mainland looks horrible, but I stand by that today. It’s subjective anyhow, but I do not go looking for ‘okay’ builds - or ‘not bad’ architecture, I want to be impressed. I expect to be impressed. So on the one hand the answer to your question is yes, Svarga is certainly one of those sims that manages to do that, a few of my favorites are the Abyss and the Straylight sim. But when I compare that to Home (just visually - not technically) they lack consistency for me which for some reason limits my experience when compared to the Home or closed world environments. In SL I admire the skill, and creativity, the place even looks good, but if I extrapolate that nagging thought in the back of my head I keep looking at it like a pretty picture on Flickr. I’m not sure whether this is due to my work environment (we create photo realistic 3D renders consistently), but I think there is something else as well.

   I’ve made a post earlier on the value of persistent immersion (removing the elements that could ‘break it’ such as teleporting or free camera control). In that line of thoughts I think it is also the value of consistent aesthetics that makes jaw dropping experiences of the GTA IV, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan etc environments exactly because they are persistent. They create the writers (or observers) ’secondary worlds’ to perfection, which leads to extending the imagination beyond the observable. Take the characters of Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. Through their persistent behavior you know how he is likely going to respond to a scenario, even though the author never actually wrote the scenario. In environments the planet of Dune (Frank Herbert) or even Gor are created in such a persistent manner they allow the mind to wonder, filling in the blanks of an unwritten story - or in other words and the point I am driving at: inspiration.

   I think Home with its consistent, high quality graphics and aesthetics will be able to entice the users by inspiring them with their game content (to begin with) before even participating. This creates great inworld marketing opportunities for pay per play games for instance (or general game launches, or even product launches) because they can participate in this secondary world rather then to create a new one and invite the user all over again, like flipping through pictures on Flickr (or sims in SL).

   Hope that made some sense, I zoomed in a little on the persistence of Home VS the open content creation of SL rather than to reply to every point as I agreed with all the others :)

3. Justin Gibbs said on June 16th

   Video looks great, but I’ve also heard that one reason for Home’s delayed launch was its server requirements. I couldn’t find a link to the article but found a related post by Julian Lombardi on the benefits of a peer-to-peer server architecture:
   http://jlombardi.blogspot.com/2008/04/digital-rainout.html

4. Digado said on June 17th

   Thank you for pointing me to that blog! Interesting post.

   I’ve attended an Orange Island meeting in Second Life on the p2p and scalability initiatives of servers as well, its interesting stuff and it makes a lot of sense to have that p2p architecture. More people logged on, more people to share the workload.

   I think there have been quite a number of reasons to delay Home, I think they have learned from SL as well, releasing their virtual world as a ‘just out of beta’ project is just not good enough, and could be damaging to future efforts to involve their users into the VW.

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