On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 3:48 AM, Giulio Prisco <[email protected]> wrote:
> SecondPlace, QwaqLife or TeleSim? Open ended, comments welcome. > > > http://giulioprisco.blogspot.com/2011/08/secondplace-qwaqlife-or-telesim.html > I almost missed this thread. I'm also hunting that grail. VR for consumers that isn't lame. CC'd FONC because I think this is actually relevant to that conversation. My feeling is, and I may be wrong, that the problems with Second Life are twofold: 1. There are technical problems with the implementation. It's very crashy and didn't scale well. My suspicion is that the biggest problem they have is getting the user generated texture maps out to all of the clients on the fly. This leads to usability issues, etc. It can take minutes to get to the point where one is actually participating after arriving in a sim, while all those textures and meshes load it just thrashes like crazy. Also there's the server-centric architecture, which is usually harder to scale than peer to peer technology. I have not yet determined what the "weight" of the OpenQwaq server is yet, though, because I don't have enough machines to build out a "production-like" environment currently. It seems a touch crawly running all of the services on my modest laptop under a single CentOS host in VMWare while the client is also running at the same time (heh) and this is not a real measure of server or client performance:) it's currently just a way to warm up my apartment. 2. Their entire business model ended up being a cultural toxin. Free accounts mean spam and griefing/trolling/abuse. A profit motive for users seemed like a good idea at the outset, as it's about the most marketable universal out there, but it seems that DRM+UGC = red light district, real estate, fashion, and a handful of enterprise applications which would probably be served at least as well by Teleplace. I think one ultimately wants user generated content, but I'm not sure what the right way to do it is. One might read a book about Logo:) Minecraft has been running with an honor system for awhile now, and people just don't seem to mess with each other as much there. They're implementing some anti-griefing stuff around treasure chests now, but users build beautiful sculptures, ALUs, delay line memory, etc. Not a red light district to be found. I think it's because you actually have to pay in order to play, and you can't make money in there. My guess is the real difference is in the business model, but it might also be that low resolution volumetrics don't lend themselves as well to amplifying some of the less-awesome universals, instead amplifying much more creative and often non-universal activity. It's almost like Lego geology. These are all just hunches though. I could be wrong. -- Casey Ransberger
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