The Man Who Created Second Life Thinks We Can Make an Earth-Sized Virtual World | Hacker News Reader

The Man Who Created Second Life Thinks We Can Make an Earth-Sized Virtual World

nautil.us

49 pointsdnetesn49 comments

I've played enough MMORPG's to know that big is not always better. Usually as more expansions are added the player base spreads out and the world ends up feeling empty and boring.

The best games tend to stay fairly medium sized so that they can maintain density and contact between players. The vast wastelands of Second Life are a testament to the failure of rapid expansion.

A 1:1 Earth makes sense if you want to make a virtual world compatible with AR. Otherwise, I think it only makes sense for flight simulators and games involving space travel.

Even Kerbal Space Program shrinks planets and space down! It's simply too big.

It's also to make the tasks easier. The dV required for launching off the shrunk planet in KSP is less than if it was just scaled up to match Earth like in the Real Solar System mod(s).

The kerbal planets are already so big that there is nothing interesting on 99% of the surface area of them. There are mods to make them "full sized", but they don't make the planets less interesting than they were otherwise.

Really the planet size in that game is about game balance.

I agree, but the Earth-sized world could be used for something interesting too. E.g. imagining the world of the future, where you can teleport, or you can design a bike and copy/paste it to your friends, for real.

Or you could model the society of the future, say without money and no borders. Or fully digital money. The fact that the virtual world is like Earth can impose certain atmosphere and directions the game can go.

The things you mention are unrelated to the size of the planet. I actually talked to a number of bankers from the US Federal Reserve bank 10 years ago about using a virtual world to model money systems. The thing was, they wanted to take a world that I had create, and filled with people, and take over "total control" of the monetary system in that functioning world. My response was no thanks!

This is true. I remember how GTA San Andreas basically just killed the joy of the game for me after spending 20 minutes running to finally find a car to spend ten minutes driving back to an area where there was actually things to do (gee, imagine me wanting to do that while playing video games).

In the first games for PS2 you'd just drown if you fell in this water, in this one you could be forced to swim seemingly endlessly to find a place you could actually get out of the water (only to have to run for 20 minutes to find a car).

I put that one down and never looked back at the series again (although I hear they're really great games these days the concept was kind of played out for me by San Andreas and I barely play video games at all anymore anyways so it may have been a variety of factors besides the time spent running and swimming for no reason).

That's usually because, though the shards' areas expand, the number of shards do not decrease.

Obviously, area-per-player can be held constant if shards are consolidated as the area per shard increases.

As opposed to the real world?

Try driving through Kansas sometime - it's pretty empty and boring too :P

like pokemon. sometimes it's enough, nobody could know all thousands pokemon.. 251 were enough.

Perceived surface area is relatively insignificant - Minecraft is already at least several times the surface area of the planet (details vary by version) even if it's much simpler and vertically constrained.

I wonder how far people get from the spawn point in average...

And how it relate to the average MMORPG.

depends on server count, pvpness, and the sizes of what you like to build -- on a pvp heavy server i bet running 5-10k blocks from spawn before you build is not unheard of.

Are you sure about that? How long does it take to run from one edge of the map to the other?

http://farlandsorbust.com/

That guy's been doing it for quite a while.

> At the end of that most recent FLoB-ATHON Weekend in 2015 we discovered that I was 2,266,779 blocks in the furthest 'Z' coordinate, the equivalent of 2,266-kilometers from spawn! Amazing, yes, but it means we are still only 18.06% of the way to reaching the Far Lands located at 12,550,820 meters! They don't call them "far" for nothing! INDEED!

Ah, I guess I was used to playing on multiplayer where the map size is much more limited.

You may have only played the Xbox version, which did have a strict constraint on the map size. The PC version, IIRC, has no such restriction aside from perhaps memory and/or maximum possible values. The Far Lands referred to are actually a result of this lack of constraint allowing the player to reach a point where floating point errors begin to wreak havoc on the map generator.

Most PC servers have limits enforced to prevent runaway disk usage.

In fact it's now baked into the vanilla game as a command.

Yep. Minecraft's chunk coordinates can cover about 10,000,000 Earth's worth of surface area.

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/The_Overworld#Sizes

I think the SL-style obsession with "we'll do X, but virtually!" is something of an investment-chasing joke. Look at E-mail as an example of a wildly successful global cultural and economic phenomenon.

Do you buy virtual stamps? Virtual envelopes?

Do you use a "lick" emote to adhere them?

Do you virtually walk your avatar to the post-office?

Do you virtually transact with a virtual postman?

...Hell no. The major benefit of virtual worlds is not work or commerce, but entertainment and escapism. It's simple: Most practical tasks can almost always be accomplished better by dropping the messy and incidental limitations of reality, rather than laboriously simulating them.

Before sending a message, I don't walk down a wood-paneled gallery of my friends portraits, I just start punching in their name and I pick from a narrowing set of choices.

Tangentially, Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One" explores a future where a universe-sized virtual world is pervasive in society because everything in the real world has fallen to hell. Not the best literature out there, but entertaining and apropos to the discussion.

Also Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" deals with a very similar society. I recommend both, though probably would recommend "Snow Crash" to this crew more readily.

Interestingly enough, the "metaverse" of Snow Crash was the direct inspiration for the Second Life game mentioned in the article.

Also REAMDE, which features T'RAIN, the fictional successor to WoW.

I bought and read Snow Crash based on an earlier recommendation from HN. Just to give an alternate opinion, so no one wastes (my opinion) money like I did... I thought the book was absolutely horrible. I like fantasy, I like alternate reality, I like novel concepts... but the parts have to match up and make coherent sense. Snow Crash didn't. At all. The story was contrived, the characters unrealistic, the whole thing didn't really fit together in a way that made sense to the point it ruined it. Sorry for the negativity... but I didn't like the book at all.

Technically, it's probably possible, but the problem with Second Life isn't that it's not big enough. And no, the Oculus Rift isn't going to save Second Life. There's already an Oculus Rift interface to Second Life, and it's been around for over a year.[1] Maybe with more resolution... Then again, maybe resolution won't help either.[2] (That's an Oculus Rift used to view a roller coaster simulator.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQVXl-jOKqQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nHvPopqYkA

Big enough re: population wise, at least. SL's still quite profitable, but the numbers are trending down, and having been a user of that world on and off since 2004, I can say it's probably because there's not a lot to do there anymore that doesn't involve making, buying, and selling things.

It demands a lot of technical literacy on the part of its users, both from the hardware demands (the SL client, or "viewer" is infamously demanding of the local graphics hardware and internet connection), and from knowing how to navigate the sometimes obtuse interface and conventions of the world.

..that goes double if you actually want to make things. Then, your corpus of knowledge needs to include 3D design and familiarity with Serious Business modeling programs like Blender or 3DSM. If you're making things besides furniture and clothing, add some programming knowledge into the mix for their own custom programming language (LSL).

This sounds damning with faint praise, but the magic's just not there anymore for me. Still, if you haven't actually had a look yet, you should. There's plenty to explore and there's quite a lot to see before you get bored. The client is free, as is an account.

I've never played. Was there ever anything to do there that didn't "involve making, buying, and selling things," or are you just saying that it has become boring doing the same things over all the years?

tl;dr: There used to be, at least it felt like it, a lot of games and social experiences and other "cool stuff" that was less about showing off how you decked out your avatar and more about either playing games with others or exploring strange environments.

An example: There was this Tetris/bingo hybrid called "Tringo" that was big in the early years. You'd buy a board, and then anyone could click on it, get a human-sized "card", and play the game against anyone else that was in the area.

There was even a reward element to it - you could set a game as pay-to-play, and then the top X players of each round would get a share of the donated proceeds.

Anyways, it was everywhere for a while. If you looked at the ingame list of registered events back then, it was absolutely dominated by Tringo.

(The guy who invented the game even made a Gameboy Advance version of it!)

Eventually, people got bored of it, and now you hardly see it around anymore.

There were lots of other gaming fads (Chariot Races, Tech Warfare, skydiving at Abbot's Aerodome..), but people just stopped coming.

Part of this is due to the server side being really quite awful at having a bunch of people in the same space. Tringo worked because those people weren't doing a whole lot other than clicking on the board in front of them.

This never really got much better over time. More than about 20 people in the same space and the server starts dropping frames (increasing "time dilation") to keep up. It gets worse if those people have any scripted bits on their avatars (and many do, since those run on the server responsible for simulating the region)

The absolute hard limit is 40 people in the same region (65535sq/m) before it won't let anyone else in, but it becomes unusable much before that.

Minecraft and Second Life make for an interesting contrast. Minecraft is a fun game. Second Life is... what? I've seen presentations that claim that virtual worlds would be good for virtual meetings, but no commercial products based on that idea have gained traction vs video-conferencing and screen-sharing.

The simple idea of a fun game turns out to be subtle and critical to success. What is Minecraft? A game. Is it fun? Yes. OK, it has a purpose. Is there another purpose for a virtual world? Unclear.

Even if we can, playing around with http://www.outerra.com/ makes me question if we should.

I'm curious, what argument would there be for why we shouldn't?

This is the first I read about outerra, and it actually looks really cool!

Mostly the argument expressed by others here: it would be too boring and it will encourage the further production of things like No Man's Sky that will ultimately fail to satisfy because the number of hedons per game frame is very low, and the huge/infinite world aspect only makes it harder to increase the density. Outerra is pretty cool for what it is, but I don't see it as the basis for a new Second Life or even an MMORPG. Perhaps there's potential for something on the scale of Dwarf Fortress like populating the planet with billions of unique agents with history, or as an interface to the real world via data collected from the IoT tracking the geometry and movement of every interesting thing on the planet.

Work on improving the interface, and drawing people in, then the size will take care of itself.

Sounds similar to what High Fidelity are building (https://highfidelity.com), which they're also open sourcing.

"Riding this wave of virtual reality expansion, Rosedale’s new company, High Fidelity, is developing the successor to the Second Life experience."

If you thought SL was complicated, try HiFi for a new level of complexity craziness.

Philip Rosedale is pretty high up on the list of people I admire.

He's got a ton of knowledge and experience, (used to work at RealNetworks before his stint at Linden Lab and now this new outfit), has plenty of crazy ideas, executed on many of them (to varying degrees of success and profitability), always keeps moving, and has a downright infectious vision for the future.

Even if that vision doesn't completely pan out, we'll get some very cool stuff to see from the attempt!

Phillip is a great guy, no question.

Being at RealNetworks would seem more a like downside to me. I hated that product with a passion! I think RealNetworks has the distinction of being the only technical product I have ever disliked that much.

First make a usable one. Second Life, even today, is a sluggish and unpleasant experience with a world that takes forever to load even on fast Internet connections.

Minecraft already has a theoretical land size that's larger than the landmass of earth.

Interestingly, the defacto behaviour with players is to start brand new maps every once in a while, even though only the barest fraction of the available space has been used up.

As No Man's Sky proves We can also make an infinite world.

The biggest problem with infinite worlds like that is that it's difficult to make locations feel alive and to knit stories into the world, which limits the stories that can be told. It's great for exploration games where just going through and seeing each location is the game but trying to give areas anything other than cookie cutter stories/interactions is something I haven't seen from a procedural game yet.

Yes, I think we're more likely to see interesting, finite worlds rather than expansive but desolate worlds. As it is on Earth, people like to visit particular locations for their natural or man-made sights.

> Earth-Sized Virtual World

"reamde" from Neal Stephenson come to my mind.

This only sounds like a good idea if you can get vehicles that move faster than airplanes.

> The next generation headsets — head-mounted displays like the Oculus — will pretty likely have gaze tracking in them

How am I supposed to take this guy seriously if he doesn't even know the name of the product he's targeting? The HMD is called the Rift and the company is called Oculus.

He knows. He's speaking colloquially.

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