There are a couple of problems with your flocking to mainland idea. One of which is that people who have a bad experience remember it for a hell of a long time, and the openspace experience has been a bad one. People are doing something with their openspaces, whether they’re abandoning them or converting them, there has been a significant drop in the number of islands on the grid, according to economic stats -1977. As growth was generally over 1,000 a month during the boom this is a large reduction.

Two things will happen, people will either abandon now whilst there’s no resale or hang onto January when a new homestead will cost USD$375 which may or may not introduce a viable second hand market as there’s not one at the moment.

As for mainland, a new private product, that joins the mainland content but has no waterfront could be viable. This would need to be less expensive than a private island but more expensive than standard mainland. A third party managed mainland sim, giving owners estate tools on the understanding that they must always have public access. That would have potential.

We don’t have any reason to insist on a pure p2p solution. A hybrid solution where servers will supply registration, tracking and other services like money, groups will be good for me. Servers should also be used as “support users”; persistent users with large upload speed to enhance performance.

What we need is that most of the static content will be stored in the clients ahead of rendering. That all the computing related to scripting and physics will be in the client. That most of the communications and coordination between avatars will be p2p. Lag will be minimized, and the number of servers will not have to be proportional to the number of sims. (I would scrape the sim concept altogether.)

I don’t have the full specification of how to make SL p2p, and even I had it, this is hardly the right place. But since you mentioned storage, lets consider some guidelines for handling storage.

User created content does not mean that any user is able to create where ever he wants and the content will be always persistent. This is definitely not the situation in SL as it is now. If you are not a group member then almost always you are not permitted to create anything, and if you are permitted to build, usually your creation will persist for 10 minutes or so, and then returned to you.

There should be two tracks for content loading.

1. Just In Time - Similar to what happens now. p2p and client cashes could help here.

2. Ahead of Time - Each community or developer group owns a big content file that contains the terrain buildings and any other object or clothing that is part of their environment or game map. The group members create and publish updates. The group behaves like any game publisher that allows its customers to download its games from the web before using them.

Everyone can create huge spaces, residential, commercial or game maps. Model builders are free to use any technology and create very detailed and heavy models.
In this regime land is free (save the fee to be paid to the developers), and the company running the world should get its revenue from services and VAT on any inworld transaction.

We are pragmatists. We want a fast world, user created content, an economy that will make us rich fast :-), and most importantly an advanced game engine. On all else we should compromise.

Two comments, though. First, those do not represent the totality of all possible gaming environments — although, granted, definitely a large slice of the market (I’m old enough to remember that “3D games” and “action games” where just one tiny part of all the possible games being played on computers ).

Secondly, you claim that the “vast majority of online players” are “games fans”. Well, I don’t know about that — statistics tend to show that there is quite an overlap of both “gamers” and “socialites” (as well as articles such as this one), and that both have dozens of millions of users world-wide.

Granted, after 2003 Linden Lab gave up on SL as a “games developer platform”. Indeed, as you claim, five years ago, LL really thought that game fans and game designers “should have been the natural end users of SL”. But they weren’t. LL quickly gave up on them, and let them find other platforms to design games (specially, as said, 3D action games — other types work reasonably well in SL).

It’s also true that “content designers” create content for other content designers, or, well, at least for the ones willing to pay for content (who are most often users that happen to earn money through SL, and that mostly means being either in the content business, the land business, or the event hosting business). The problem here, however, is different. Most (and that means a bit over 99%…) of the registered users have no interest in spending money in SL to buy content. It’s a very small economy. I could certainly agree that if SL was more appealing for game design, it might have paid games working inside SL, and these would be another source of revenue in SL’s economy.

Granted, it won’t be thanks to p2p networking (that’s all very nice to say, but virtual worlds with user-generated content require persistence, which is something that p2p networking doesn’t provide), but possibly, as you mentioned, by pushing more of the work done by the servers into the clients. However, there are some things that definitely will always have to come from the servers: textures and prims.

WoW can get rid of all that since all content is installed/downloaded by the clients — including pre-generated and pre-rendered scenes. WoW servers do little else but tracking avatar data. You simply cannot use a similar model in SL. It doesn’t work that way.

Extie: oops, you’re sooooo right. I’m sorry!

Extie- She chairs Thinkers you know.

@mireille, you can read a bit more about the Thinkers group on the Second Life Wikia.

@Ichabod, what you call “weird” I call a “geek” I dislike the negative connotations of the word “weird” — it implies someone excluded from the mainstream society, which is certainly not the case with most geeks. A fashion geek will certainly spend insane amounts of money in shopping for clothes, and a substantial amount of time as well, which for other people might sound completely unreasonable. But fashion addresses a huge “geek fandom” No wonder the same happens in SL as well.

Interesting how you describe yourself as a “games fan” and your reasoning is that SL is not good for a gaming platform. (yes, I’m being ironical; game geeks are also a substantial part of SL’s resident population, but SL definitely doesn’t cater to their needs). I found it also amusing that you think there are not enough servers for the amount of users. Ironically, SL has about 1 server per 9 users online (32,000 regions on about 8,000 servers for about 77,000 simultaneously online users). World of Warcraft has 1 server per 22,500 users. What gives?

@Ashcroft, ultimately, you’re right. My little finger says that this is exactly what will happen in 2009. That’s my prediction

The problem is, ultimately, a lack of consistency of approach. Why have a contiguous mainland supplemented by non-contiguous islands? Why use a world metaphor for simulation (a map with locations and contiguity between them), yet have isolated islands with non-traversable oceans? Why put those isolated islands in a different position as regards estate control and pricing as distinct from the contiguous land? It is very unlikely that the reasons for each decision are consistent with the reasons for each other decision.

The better approach would have been: make no distinction between private islands and mainland. Have a fully contiguous world, including continents and islands. Have some areas owned by Governor Linden and rented to individuals directly (as in the current mainland); have other areas owned by residents and possibly sublet to other residents indirectly (as with current private islands). Have some areas with some degree of planning control enforced by Linden Lab, and other areas with so such control. Introduce tools to enable groups to have their own planning and other governmental controls over certain areas (making such tools flexible enough to encompass the whole range of levels of co-operation, from the current model of either no co-operation or voluntary co-operation to a far more precisely rule-governed system, which rules can be enforced effectively with such tools). Have a mix of different settings (with respect, for example, to telehubs) on Governor Linden land, and permit private estates to do the same. Have a map with visible borders between the different territories.

Such an approach would have generated a consistent, readily comprehensible, economically stable and maximally efficient land market and outline. The current system is fundamentally inconsistent, unstable and inefficient, and the whole of SecondLife - indeed, virtual worlds in general - have suffered greatly as a result. The development of virtual worlds may well, as a result, have been set back by many years, if not decades.

What is the Thinkers meeting that is the held every Tuesday at 3PM

Would you have link to it?

thank you

Mireille

It’s soon. Way too soon. Give it time. And try to survive that time.