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As someone who's writing a viewer (client) for Second Life/Open Simulator, I can comment on that.

The big problems reported by new users are:

- "What do I do now"?

- "How do I fix this &#@#* clothing problem"?

- "Why is this thing so slow"? (usually from experienced gamers)

Entering Second Life is not like entering a game world. It's like being arriving in a new big city. The world is completely indifferent to you. It won't make you do anything. You can stand in one place forever. Some new users never get beyond the entry Social Islands. (Social Island 10 is the Port Authority Bus Terminal of Second Life, inhabited by the same kinds of losers found in real world bus terminals, from panhandlers to idiots with large boom boxes.)

Once new users get past that, they're in a world the size of Los Angeles with about 35,000 to 55,000 logged in users. The population density is very low. Users who just start walking down a road can walk for many hours without finding much of interest. They'll pass stores, houses, gas stations, warehouses (driving around and making deliveries is a game within Second Life), motels, truck stops, airports, and marinas. Many of these are beautifully detailed, but deserted. This is what happens when you have a user-created world where people can rent land and build. They rent land and build, but aren't there much. Second Life is fun for people who can create things and make their own fun. There's not a huge amount of compelling passive entertainment. Roblox and Fortnite have built in casual games with a metaverse tacked on. Second Life has a metaverse with a few casual games. That's the "what do I do now" problem.

Clothing is created by users from mesh primitives, and so, there are a large number of incompatible avatars and clothing systems. Getting mesh clothing from different sellers to layer properly is a huge headache. Making it work is dumped on the user, with a large number of tuning parameters. This is the single biggest technical headache for new users. This whole area needs to be automated. Roblox has done that, with their new automatic mesh adjustment system. So it's possible to solve that, but it's not being worked on much. That's the clothing problem.

The graphics can be good, although since all content is user-generated, the quality varies. Frame rates can vary from 10 FPS to 150 FPS depending on the content in the area. It's that awful because Second Life was designed to run on the hardware of 20 years ago. The clients are mostly single thread and not GPU-oriented. That's fixable for gamer computers. I get a consistent 60 FPS with my own client on a system sized for a modern AAA title. The existing clients will run on low-end computers, although badly, which mine will not.

The overall architecture of the system isn't bad. It's quite distributed. Each region (256x256m in Second Life, can be larger in Open Simulator, a C# re-implementation of the servers) is run by a separate server process, and those run at many different server locations. Second Life currently has all their servers in one location on AWS, but the system does not require that. At times in the past, it's been split between data centers.

It looks like a huge seamless world, and crossing between regions works. Mostly. Region crossing failures are still frequent. The current dev team doesn't understand the problem and avoids working on it.

The biggest problem with the user created content is that lower levels of detail tend to be badly constructed. Second Life was designed before automated level of detail creation worked well, and the built-in mesh reduction algorithm was terrible. It's recently been upgraded from terrible to mediocre. The good algorithms are either brittle academic code or expensive (Simplygon or Unreal Engine.)

That's the performance problem.

> Rosedale has a startup called High Fidelity, and they were creating basically what you suggest, a new SL without the technical debt. It was also distributed instead of centralized. Unfortunately that world has shut down because it wasn't commercially successful. (I expect largely because the people who would have been their early adopters were in SL, and didn't want to move until there was enough content available, and not enough users meant nobo dy was creating content.)

HiFi horrified Second Life content creators. It downloads assets from HTTP. There's no grid. There's no central asset server. There are no mandatory user accounts. So anything you sell can be quickly copied, hosted wherever, and duplicated with complete impunity. SL will kick you off the grid if you misbehave, but HiFi was made in such a way there was no grid to ban people from.

Besides that it was nigh impossible to give them money if you wanted to. You could buy domain names (as in pay for an internal analog of DNS) that was something like $15/year. And that was completely optional. It wouldn't have paid for their coffee budget.

As far as I can tell there was no coherent plan to make money at all, other than "let's tax the economy" in a system that not only was utterly hated by content creators, but where anybody could set up a competing shop any time they wanted.

> I wish they had been successful, the platform architecture was really good.

The code still lives on! Feel free to join our Discord or meetings: https://overte.org/

I saw your other comment after I posted that. I didn't realize the content was so easily copied. Makes sense that creators would be reluctant to adopt it. The less commercially motivated creators were likely affected by the chicken-and-egg problem.

I have much respect for Rosedale for working to create a virtual world based on free software principles. He has said he was expecting the VR headset market to grow sooner. Perhaps he was waiting for that before putting effort into offering commercial services. (Poor timing... if I recall correctly, Quest 2 launched and/or got popular soon after HF closed?)

High Fidelity announced they were changing tracks to a corporate targeted product in May 2019, and entirely shut down in Jan 2020.

The Quest 2 came out in May 2019, and Covid19 became a big problem just a bit after HiFi shut down! Talk about some bad timing.

But anyway, in my opinion HiFi's problem wasn't so much that as bad management. To me it seems like they tried to combine an architecture and a business model that didn't make any sense. The way I see it, there were roughly 3 meaningful business plans, none of which they used:

1. Imitate SL. This would have meant having a grid, a mandatory login screen, and probably a closed server codebase. Keep people inside the walled garden and milk them.

2. Run an open source consulting company. Basically they make this software for custom events, like virtual conventions, concerts, meetings, maybe even a game engine. They'll customize whatever needs be for you. And then there's the source on Github under some commercially unpalatable license like the AGPL, for whoever wants to play with it, to advertise the tech and get contributions.

3. Embrace the community. Run a kickstarter/patreon, talk constantly to the community, sell swag, and basically act like a big youtuber that takes donations from their fanbase. I think they were probably way too big for that to work.

I think #2 had the most potential, especially once Covid19 started. #1 would have required deep architectural changes and would have greatly angered the existing users.

I'm part of a non-profit that develops the code so we're doing #3.

>HiFi horrified Second Life content creators. It downloads assets from HTTP. There's no grid. There's no central asset server. There are no mandatory user accounts. So anything you sell can be quickly copied, hosted wherever, and duplicated with complete impunity. SL will kick you off the grid if you misbehave, but HiFi was made in such a way there was no grid to ban people from.

That sounds amazing. I had no idea something like this existed. I never encountered anyone mentioning it on HN, reddit, discord, etc. Maybe marketing was also an issue for them?

It was still officially in beta when it died, and still rough around the edges.

Also I think naming it "High Fidelity" was a very bad choice marketing-wise.

> HiFi horrified Second Life content creators. It downloads assets from HTTP.

So does Second Life. It's just that the asset formats are unusual.

You can't really prevent people from downloading game assets. You may be able to prevent them from reselling them as their own, by recognizing duplicates. The Open Simulator people are working on change-tolerant hashing algorithms for this.

All true, but there's a vast difference is in the degree of control.

So say a SL avatar maker spends 40 hours making an avatar. At say $10/hour they'd like to make at least $400 to make it worthwhile. So if we sell at $5/each that's 80 copies to be sold. (just making up some plausible numbers here)

Here's how things square up:

SL: Buying stuff is the normal, encouraged mechanism with a well integrated marketplace and currency system.

Ripping an avatar requires additional tools. Ripping an avatar may be fairly difficult due to baked textures.

If found, you may be banned and lose everything on your account. Some things you own may not be replaceable. If you distribute your ripped avatar, LL could conceivably trace its movements and remove it from the inventories of anyone you gave a copy to. All in all, a considerable amount of pain you can get into for saving yourself $5. Most people wouldn't use a ripped avatar out of fear of endangering their account.

So, it's certainly not perfect, but on SL things are very manageable. If LL cares, misbehavior can be punished to the point it's not worth the risk to anyone who actually has anything invested into SL.

HiFi: There is a marketplace, but obtaining the HFC currency is bizarrely painful, requiring obtaining Ethereum, setting up an in-world meeting with a company representative, and exchanging ETH for HFC. Seriously, that's how it worked.

Ripping an avatar is trivial with basic knowledge of the scripting system. The actual avatar is stored on a completely normal HTTP server you can get it from with wget or a web browser. It's in GLTF or FBX.

If found, sure, HiFi can ban your account, but you don't need one. You don't really have an inventory or anything to lose. There's no grid, you're able to visit every part of the universe you're not specifically banned from. You can trivially host your copy of the avatar on any hosting service. You can share it with anyone and the system can't prevent it in any way.

It's possible the avatar maker couldn't even sue you easily if they wanted, because you can just keep using non-official servers hosted in some place that doesn't care about US law like Russia.

It's very much possible for a ripped avatar to spread far and wide with it being nigh impossible to stop. There's no real central authority, so it's pretty much your word against theirs.

> High Fidelity, a new SL without the technical debt.

Not really. Both Sansar and High Fidelity were "game level loaders". You go to an area, you wait a minute or two while the map and content downloads, and you're now running a world locally. Neither of those is a big seamless world loaded through which you can move freely, like Second Life. That's a much easier problem technically. But you hit the edge of the world pretty fast.

Sinespace is a good example of that genre. It has a user count in 2 digits. There's a version of it for business, Breakroom, which is simply Sinespace with pre-built office buildings, better customer support, and higher prices. It was used more during the pandemic.

There are many such systems. They're usually built using Unity, which seems to be good for this.

> It sounds like you may not have used SL in a while. The The current graphics are at least as good as a triple-A game, if you visit locations that are up-to-date and choose quality avatar components

Have you seen triple-A games in a while?!

I'm comparing to the graphics of games such as God of War, Outer Worlds, Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe not the latest or the best graphics but what I'm familiar with. I don't think people complain that those graphics are horrible.

From a technical perspective, there is simply no comparison. SL's graphics are inferior to those games in every way.

Second life can look nice I'm specific scenes, but that's in spite of the dated graphics tech.