Sorry about interrupting your virtual meetings, guys. But occasionally i just came across work on ‘fractal erosion’, so i need to correct myself on the OT comments from before. @gnollrunner might be interested.
No idea how practical this is or how it works, but pretty nice results:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20752.0.html
http://dmytry.com/mojoworld/erosion_fractal/home.html
frob said:
A table setting in VR felt gross among our group.
Sometimes people use tables, sometimes not. Here's another meeting:
This is a Second Life Creator User Group meeting. No table here, just benches around a fire. The people with blue tags are Linden Lab employees, and the others are mostly people who create content in Second Life. Voice is enabled, and while there's talking, there's also text chat and IMing in progress. This meeting is held every two weeks. This time, Linden Lab's VP of Engineering showed up, more was accomplished than usual, and the meeting was bigger. There's an effort underway to speed up the client, and most of this meeting was about migrating the graphics model from OpenGL and COLLADA to PBR and GLTF.
When someone speaks, a green voice icon appears above their head, and on the people list at right. There's spatial audio, but it's not very good. Linden Lab recently acquired High Fidelity, and a replacement for VIVOX is expected.
So, here's a rather old metaverse, slowly being updated. Still far ahead of the noisy metaverse hype industry. Decentraland is still stuck around 2000 concurrent users. 1,237 right now. Second Life is between 30,000 and 50,000, depending on time of day. 33,153 right now.
So, my question is, is anybody even trying to do anything better than Second Life and IMVU? All the NFT worlds are inferior. IMVU is pretty good.
Nagle said:
So, my question is, is anybody even trying to do anything better than Second Life and IMVU? All the NFT worlds are inferior. IMVU is pretty good
You would know if so. Til yet, NFT seems mostly a scam of the super rich at the cost of bored upper middle class people willing to do a gamble. It's not about making games or metaverse, it's about putting big plans on a roadmap, generating hype over social media, then cashing out long before they would ever get there. The American Dream in its pure virtual form :D
Meanwhile, few serious gamedevs interested in blockchain face a serious backlash from majority of gamers being more and more skeptical for those reasons. Plus some more reasons, like blockchain requiring mostly redundant work wasting energy and thrashing HW prices, thus doing gaming no favor. Will ETHs move to proof of stake improve the situation? Probably not. The move probably is just the last step before cashing out, as the masses can no longer afford to benefit from mining. So ETH becomes a coin to buy a Ferrari like bitcoin before, and we'll see a new proof of work coin becoming popular to mine and burn the planet.
Thus, i doubt anything based on NFT and blockchain ideas will become truly successful in the close future. They need some better argument to convince us of being robbed, like Web3 maybe.
But we have some other metaverse hypes not based on that as well, like Zuckerbergs. He thinks we are willing to put on VR/AR goggles all day, just to cut our legs in the virtual world to do a chat with random strangers.
This really shows how greedy CEOs think they could sell us any crap they want, and how disconnected from reality they are themselves.
Well, i think they pay the bill to develop a future which is still very far away. But they won't profit from it. Others will.
The question is: Do we even want to disconnect from reality, and exchange it against a virtual one? What is the promise of a metaverse, beside play to earn or sell your twitter avatar pic for millions?
Why should anyone seriously try to work on a metaverse at all? What is the great experience we can expect from it?
That's my question. Maybe one of you devs experienced on the subject can answer it.
I mean, i'm gamedev myself. The dream shown in Ready Player One lurks in my head since childhood, but we are already there since quite some time. It's on a flatscreen, and the games are disconnected from each other.
But why should replacing flatscreen with VR and merging all games make the games better than they are now? It won't.
JoeJ said:
The question is: Do we even want to disconnect from reality, and exchange it against a virtual one? What is the promise of a metaverse, beside play to earn or sell your twitter avatar pic for millions? Why should anyone seriously try to work on a metaverse at all? What is the great experience we can expect from it? That's my question. Maybe one of you devs experienced on the subject can answer it.
“Do we even want to disconnect from reality, and exchange it against a virtual one?”
Humans do it all the time. We do it for play. We do it for work. We do it for communications with friends and family and even strangers. We will continue to do it. Where you physically are, and your own physical limitations, they don't especially matter in the virtual world.
“What is the promise of a metaverse, beside play to earn or sell your twitter avatar pic for millions?”
As discussed all through the topic so far, we'll do it mostly for play and interaction. Want to be a superhero with your friends? Want to manipulate the world in fantastic ways? Want to have a virtual mansion and visit with your friends? Want to visit the virtual beach for a party, the virtual dungeon alone or with a raiding party, the virtual cloud city for racing around the sky, the virtual town hall for a gathering? You're there in an instant regardless of where you are in the physical world.
But it isn't just play. Want to look at the microscopic world? Want to jump inside a patient's body to get a close-up view of the illness? Want to tour the inside of a running nuclear power plant? There are endless possibility. And you don't have to do it alone. You can do it with as many people as you want. Get a second opinion on your condition, have a teacher show students the details.
Even better, you can also mix the serious with the play. As I described, we've had team meetings in dinosaur filled rooms, in a virtual mall with nerf guns, in a virtual bowling alley. It can be quite memorable.
“Why should anyone seriously try to work on a metaverse at all?”
As above. More immersive play. Better ways to work. Better communication. It's a job you can get paid for. Take your pick.
“What is the great experience we can expect from it?”
For VR, the end game would be akin to a Star Trek Holodeck.
On the fun side that can be whatever fantasy world you want you can create, whether that's a room full of your favorite scantily-clad supermodels who engage in your every whim, or being the star of your own Marvel universe with super powers or mystical ability, or spending time relaxing on a beach alone while you're just lying on your couch or bed. If it can be imagined, in can be experienced.
On the serious side that can be whatever productive use you can imagine, with my mind going to first medical uses and surgery as the biggest benefits to humanity. The doctor could virtually jump into your body, maybe even a point-and-click interface to kill individual cells like cancer, or to monitor how the body is inflamed, bruised internally, bleeding, or whatever else the doctor needs to see. But again, whatever can be imagined.
For AR, the end game is the addition of all information as a HUD.
On the fun side, that can mean games like Pokemon Go, or like the movie Free Guy, where the game elements are just there in the world, clearly as an augmented item but also ever-present. Shopping you could explore exactly how you look in an outfit, and so on.
On the serious side, that can mean things like musicians getting their music score hovering in front of you, names and important information showing up whenever you need it. People who do blood draws will have augmented vision of exactly where to put the needle to draw the blood, or warnings to a doctor that the patient has an unusual nerve right there so cut somewhere else.
frob said:
“What is the promise of a metaverse, beside play to earn or sell your twitter avatar pic for millions?”As discussed all through the topic so far, we'll do it mostly for play and interaction. Want to be a superhero with your friends? Want to manipulate the world in fantastic ways? Want to have a virtual mansion and visit with your friends? Want to visit the virtual beach for a party, the virtual dungeon alone or with a raiding party, the virtual cloud city for racing around the sky, the virtual town hall for a gathering? You're there in an instant regardless of where you are in the physical world.
But it isn't just play. Want to look at the microscopic world? Want to jump inside a patient's body to get a close-up view of the illness? Want to tour the inside of a running nuclear power plant? There are endless possibility. And you don't have to do it alone. You can do it with as many people as you want. Get a second opinion on your condition, have a teacher show students the details.
Missed the reply, thanks.
But there's the issue: The things you list applied to classic video games long before. The dream of VR, using goggles to fool us of ‘being inside’, tracks back almost as long.
And i agree all those are our goals, but no matter if we work on video games, movies, books etc. Only video games are interactive, though. Still, the goals are nothing new.
Now the problem is, although we already have video games on flatscreen and in VR, which is fine, someone comes up with a new buzzword ‘metaverse’ to build up a hype of a new age. But it takes you months to figure out what ‘metaverse’ actually means. And the final consens is that it's pretty subjective. There are no real new features to distinct it from existing technology. Even if it puts in ideas of social platforms, or web3 on the long run, blockchain and NFT, it's still nothing new in terms of user experience.
Thus it appears like blown up and even shady. Why giving an idea a new name, which already exists for decades? That's fishy. It's like pretending something new, so people join in hope to be early birds.
Actually i see an image problem rising already now due to this issue.
frob said:
For VR, the end game would be akin to a Star Trek Holodeck.
Problem: Vergence accommodation conflict can't be solved using current display tech, and there is no solution in sight even for the future. Motion sickness can probably never be solved.
It's thus totally ridiculous to assume a majority of people would accept this discomfort, without giving them any motivation to prefer this over convenient flat screen experience.
Zuckerberg with his legless VR chatrooms is a total joke. Nobody wants it, beside few exceptions ofc. No wonder facebooks stock value crashed to half of its former value.
VR did not become a big platform for games, although gaming reduces the issues with short play times and mesmerizing experiences, so it's the ideal media for VR tech.
Why should it become a major platform for work or social interaction, where immersion won't compensate for discomfort at all, and sessions are meant to be longer? It won't. We are not there yet.
frob said:
On the fun side that can be whatever fantasy world you want you can create, whether that's a room full of your favorite scantily-clad supermodels who engage in your every whim, or being the star of your own Marvel universe with super powers or mystical ability, or spending time relaxing on a beach alone while you're just lying on your couch or bed. If it can be imagined, in can be experienced.
That's what games do.
frob said:
On the serious side that can be whatever productive use you can imagine, with my mind going to first medical uses and surgery as the biggest benefits to humanity. The doctor could virtually jump into your body, maybe even a point-and-click interface to kill individual cells like cancer, or to monitor how the body is inflamed, bruised internally, bleeding, or whatever else the doctor needs to see. But again, whatever can be imagined.
That's rare applications, not justifying a ‘next big thing’ hype. In medicine there is a lot of awesome tech, but regular people neither know nor care (if they are lucky).
frob said:
For AR, the end game is the addition of all information as a HUD.
Well, that's what Zuckerberg really wants - Ads everywhere. No good argument.
You can argue you can find the next restaurant easily.
But you can do the same using your Smartphone. The barrier to wear AR headsets in public is just much higher. And even if it becomes the norm, is it more benefit or curse?
E.g. your HUD alarms you about a bus coming from the right while driving. You are so confused from the flashing visuals, you miss a small kid coming from the left, which you'll hit earlier than the bus.
That's not any more convincing than Musks ‘visions’ of AI cars driving to Mars.
It looks like tech industry is constructing arguments to sell products which lack demand.
Everything would be fine, if the ‘metaverse’ buzzword had never come up. We could just continue on our dream to create a fake reality for entertainment and fun, without looking like scammers, but even failing at delivering attractive marketing promises.
Btw, who says ‘metaverse’ depends on VR or AR? I don't think that's essential? When Sweeney talked about metaverse, he didn't do this, and his arguments and promises sounded more like a new internet. 3D, interactive, but display doesn't matter.
This was much more convincing to me. Even if the vision of web3 currently feels more frightening than attractive too. I really have nothing against headsets. I just don't believe it's generally useful outside games, and it will remain a gimmick for 1-2 decades.
(VR) Motion sickness can probably never be solved.
The elephant in the room of VR. The most successful VR game is Beat Saber, where you stand in a small square and chop at attacking blocks. The VR world is locked to RL, so you don't get the motion sickness problem that appears when vision and inner ear info disagree.
Despite this, VRchat is successful. About 26,000 concurrent users. (The only usage number you can trust, because it can be measured from the outside).
As for what the metaverse is, from the play standpoint it's basically an open-world MMO where the users provide most of the content. Roblox is probably the leading system. (Surprisingly, the company loses money.) Building a good system for a big, user-modifiable world is harder than building an MMO. You don't get to pre-optimize and tune the content during game development to fit the limitations of the engine. So, right now, either you lock content down to low-rez (Meta Horizon, Decentraland) or it runs slow (Second Life, Open Simulator). That's the technical problem I'm into. Looks solveable for a gamer PC or console with a good network connection.
As for NFTs, the definitive video statement on that is “Line Goes Up”. No need to say more.
AR, where you can see through the goggles, is another problem entirely. That will probably work as the hardware gets lighter and cheaper. Probably like Hyperreality. That's an all too accurate satire.
After all this philosophy, what I really want to discuss here on GameDev is not why, but how. The problems of big open-world user-modifiable systems, and who's working on solving them. Roblox and Epic are throwing money at the problem. and Linden Lab (Second Life) is starting to inch forward technically again. (New VP of engineering there. Does not have a “can't do” attitude, like his recently retired predecessor.) So, that's what I want to talk about here. Thanks.
Nagle said:
After all this philosophy, what I really want to discuss here on GameDev is not why, but how. The problems of big open-world user-modifiable systems, and who's working on solving them.
Many are already solved, or at least have solutions.
There are several VR solutions out there, and they're in the mainstream. There are many, many, many games that can use them, either exclusively in the world or with both 2D and 3D views. Some are more “massive” than others, some are more typical online games with dozens or hundreds of concurrent players, some really are massive with multiple distributed data centers across the globe. As you mentioned, VR Chat is highly active, and we logged several hours on Beat Saber, Vacation Simulator, and a few other titles this weekend. My kid is playing Beat Saber as I type this, in fact.
There are a few AR solutions, but none have been mainstream. The people upset about Google Glass didn't complain about the tech itself, but instead the terms like “glasshole” referring to how others in society felt about people around them using the tech. If they hadn't used the big purple light they might have entered the mainstream back then. Titles like Pokemon Go show that even without a headset, AR products can enter the mainstream.
Our limiting factor has been availability of money, not limitations of technology. I've been involved in 2 projects where the bulk of the money came from the headset manufacturers in the form of publishing deal grants, as a minimum guarantee and up-front money. I've also worked on projects where VR was an add-on to a regular product. Our PSVR work was as an add-on, but never finished up to publishing because there wasn't enough of a return forecast, so it wasn't worth more than basic exploration. Adding VR support as an extension to an existing simulation is increasingly common these days. It's trivially easy to drop in a VR camera rig with Unity or Unreal thanks to plugins that support a huge range of hardware, and making the game handle the VR rig as an object can be done without too much additional engineering effort.
frob said:
Many are already solved, or at least have solutions.
Not quite. Current situation: big world with extensive user content, high detail, high framerate - pick two. If you try for AAA title visual quality on user content, the network and rendering choke. That's one of the unsolved problems Tim Sweeny of Epic has identified. Nanite is nice but depends on heavy use of instancing. You don't get that when content comes from thousands of creators.
Nagle said:
The elephant in the room of VR. The most successful VR game is Beat Saber, where you stand in a small square and chop at attacking blocks. The VR world is locked to RL, so you don't get the motion sickness problem that appears when vision and inner ear info disagree.
It's a dilemma, because you can not even compete the immersion of Doom if you can not move. And teleportation is no movement.
I would consider alternatives. Some people now have wall sized TVs. So what if we track the players head and use a big stereo screen to match perspective. Like those Cave systems, or Bruce Dells stuff. You can use it as TV or for games, so you get double the benefit for the high cost. Though, this prevents close up interaction, which ofc. is a huge limitation too.
Just personally i wouldn't pay for that either. I'm happy with the shitty display and speakers i have. My brain compensates for the limitations, i can sit lazy in my chair and only need to move some fingers to interact. It's convenient, and not exhausting. That's big arguments, often overlooked when we dream about widespread VR.
Nagle said:
Despite this, VRchat is successful.
But it's still niche, and will remain niche. Majority of people will prefer real world parties, where they can have real drinks, real fun, and most importantly: Meet a nice girl. She may not look like a porn star 3D model, but you can be sure: She really is a girl, not a man, or a bot. That's life. People meat each other for real, fall in love, make a family.
Though, things can go wrong. They may split, divorce. They may end up broken and isolated. Others just fail to ever get the girl. And those then are the people which are most likely interested in a virtual illusion of another life. To ease their pain, or to distract them, or only to pretend them yachts and supermodels.
Nothing wrong with that, but to me it really looks like an autistic tech industry trying to assign it's issues to whole humanity? It's like them saying ‘Hey, yeah, life sucks. So put on those goggles, give up humanity, and vanish in a pointless void. You'll feel better!’ It's like drug dealers, but drug dealers do actually make a promise about a nice thing you could get from them. Neither of those offers is healthy, but the latter offers an actual experience at least.
The elephant in the room here is the image problem, the assumption generating a hype is enough to sell people anything, and the assumption user generated content would give interesting experiences on par with games.
Roblox does better, by allowing users to create little games. But it's a bunch of kids and amateurs, on technology which looks like 20 years old. I can get much better user generated content for community driven games like Super Mario X or Trackmania.
Fortnite does better too, because it's a proper game. But do some extra events like in game concerts really turn it into a new experience, so it grows beyond being just a game of last man standing?
I don't see any reason to call any of this a new digital universe.
The hype is just a nothing burger way ahead of time, making people only skeptical and annoyed.
Nagle said:
As for NFTs, the definitive video statement on that is “Line Goes Up”. No need to say more.
Yeah, which adds a lot to the image problem.
Nagle said:
After all this philosophy, what I really want to discuss here on GameDev is not why, but how. The problems of big open-world user-modifiable systems, and who's working on solving them. Roblox and Epic are throwing money at the problem. and Linden Lab (Second Life) is starting to inch forward technically again. (New VP of engineering there. Does not have a “can't do” attitude, like his recently retired predecessor.) So, that's what I want to talk about here. Thanks.
Sounds you want a LOD solution, so user edits creating dense spots do not ruin performance.
Sorry for asking questions, but i did not force you to discuss them.
You don't have to think it is solved, if you don't want to be present, that's fine. If it isn't for you then by all means, don't participate.
The world is big enough for all kinds of products, and all kinds of people with all kinds of preferences.
Many people have already got existing worlds going. Many people are already actively engaged, including me and my family with multiple headsets. While some companies may have difficulty with their vision, I've been on several projects that have not had any technical difficulties, the issue was funding the development cost of solutions rather than the solutions not existing. If you are facing a specific problem, there may be solutions already, possibly including changing your design. If Epic is having problems with one of their designs, they have money enough to throw at good engineers who can find viable solutions, and that's Epic's choice to follow that design.
We have many virtual worlds already. We have worlds that are filled 24/7 with many thousand people. Even if it isn't something for you, it is something other people have and enjoy today, and will continue to spread to their friends for the foreseeable future.
