![]() ![]() In great part, the platform was built out of a sense of frustration over many aspects of Second Life. OpenSims may be slightly better in some ways, but they’re not substantially better in any meaningful way. I have great respect for the OpenSim community, but in general, most of the problems I’m pointing out with Second Life also apply to OpenSim: Graphical limitations, physics limitations, scripting limitations. When you see pirated rare gacha items going for thousands of Linden Dollars on the Marketplace, it really starts to feel like Linden Lab is profiting from their inaction on the issue. It’s one of our biggest customer service issues: People who’ve bought pirated games off of the Second Life Marketplace - 90 percent of them don’t even realize they didn’t buy it from me until they dig back through their order history to find out who they actually paid for the item. “Is there always this much piracy?” she asked me. My wife was astounded when she started doing customer support for my business. I understand the need for Linden Lab as a company to make money to support their platform, I don’t begrudge them that… but they’re not supporting us in turn, the creators who make the platform what it is. Then charge us more to do business there every year. Piracy is absolutely RAMPANT in Second Life, and creators have been screaming for Linden Lab to address the issue for years, and years, and years, and it falls on deaf ears. We are forced into accepting compromises at every corner to accommodate limitations on not just the language, but also things like horrible physics, a severely outdated graphics system, and a “land impact” algorithm which punishes you seemingly arbitrarily for trivial changes.īut Second Life’s biggest problems aren’t even outdated tech - it’s the fact that creators are increasingly feeling left like they’re holding the bag. Its very nature binds you to a myriad of coding practices that would get you beaten with a sturdy rod anywhere else. The LSL programming language is terrible in every conceivable way and thus forces you into writing terrible code. I genuinely love Second Life for what it has accomplished and what it has brought to my life, but a byproduct of Linden Lab’s insistence on going it their own way in every aspect of the platform, from the engine to the scripting language, means that nothing works as it should. ![]() They get prettier as we got sculpted prims and later mesh, and they get faster and less resource intensive as we get new scripting functions, but Second Life is still comparatively ancient technology with cripplingly severe limitations and no application outside of itself. My games in Second Life have been rebuilt from scratch more times than I can remember, but they’re shackled to the same fundamental problems each time. But on Second Life’s 16th anniversary, maybe it’s time to take stock of what we have, and whether we deserve better. ![]() It’s probably why many of them are reluctant to diversify, especially if they’re still making decent money from Second Life. I bet many other Second Life-based developers have also wondered which world they should expand into, but are also not happy with the most well-promoted alternatives. I’ve not been enchanted by the many OpenSim grids that have sprouted up, which I’ll discuss in more detail below. I was also excited for Sansar when it was first announced but found myself unable to muster any enthusiasm for the platform after it became clear that supporting scripted content is not a priority for them. I was an early adopter of Blue Mars, for example, and that’s a story that doesn’t need retelling. Until recently, that’s never really panned out. ![]() I’ve also been on the look-out for a new virtual world to expand into for quite some time. I plan to stay in Second Life and continue supporting my games and developing new products there until the lights go out. I’ve been creating virtual world content since 2005, selling games like Greedy Greedy primarily in Second Life. (Image courtesy Joshua “Karsten Rutledge†May.) How to set up your new mobile VR viewer. ![]()
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