Month: March 2019

Why Linden Lab Is Building Its Own Engine for Sansar, Instead of Using Unity or Unreal

Inara Pey has done her usual excellent job of expertly summarizing last week’s Sansar Product Meetup, where the topic of discussion was why Linden Lab decided to build their own game engine for Sansar, instead of using an off-the-shelf engine such as Unity or Unreal.

So, rather than reinvent the wheel, I am just going to point to her blogpost, and tell you to go over there and read it all. Among the Linden Lab staff present at the meeting were:

  • Richard Linden, Sansar’s Chief Architect
  • Jeff Petersen (aka Bagman Linden), Linden Lab’s Chief Technology Officer 
  • Landon McDowell, Linden Lab’s Chief Product Officer

So you can get the scoop straight from the people directly involved.

While I think the reasoning for this decision is very sound, the unfortunate fact remains that since Linden Lab is a smaller company with limited resources, feature development will tend to lag behind off-the-shelf engines like Unity and Unreal, which have bigger development teams and lots of users. However, as mentioned in Inara’s notes, backwards compatibility of user-generated content (UGC) is a key issue that needs to be addressed in any successful virtual world. I still think that Sansar is on the right track.

The 30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Today’s Google doodle reminds us that today is the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web (WWW), better known today as simply “the Web” or even just “the internet” (although the internet itself existed long before then). The WWW made the internet accessible to many more people, leading to an explosion of websites (over 1.8 billion of them at last count).

In an editorial on the Google Arts & Culture website reflecting on the anniversary:

The world wide web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 – originally he was trying to find a new way for scientists to easily share the data from their experiments. Hypertext (text displayed on a computer display that links to other text the reader can immediately access) and the internet already existed, but no one had thought of a way to use the internet to link one document directly to another. 

Berners-Lee created the world wide web while he was working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. His vision soon went beyond a network for scientists to share information, in that he wanted it to be a universal and free ‘information space’ to share knowledge, to communicate, and to collaborate. You can find out more about how his work on the world wide web at CERN began, here.

Tim Berners-Lee’s invention, started on a single NeXT computer, revolutionized the way the world communicates and shares information. In fact, it’s hard to remember how we used to do things “before the Web”! Tim could have patented his invention and perhaps made a fortune from it, but instead he made it freely available for the world to use.

The first World Wide Web server, 1990

So today, remember to lift a glass to toast Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The world today would have been a very different place without his invention! Among other things, you wouldn’t be reading this blog 😉

Sansar Outfit Outlay: Sister Act

It’s really wonderful to watch so many people creating inventive costumes for Sansar avatars using the Marvelous Designer software! (Which reminds me, I really do need to sit down and spend some more time learning how to use the latest version to create more avatar fashion for my store. I haven’t touched it in over a year now!)

TimeyMaster has created a wonderful, fun traditional nun’s habit and put it up for sale in the Sansar Store, and the best part is, it’s free!

I paired with a pair of black boots by Cora (S$250), and I’m all set!

Total outfit outlay: S$250 (the cost of the boots)

This picture was taken at the Voyage Live: Egypt experience in Sansar.

Expanding the RyanSchultz.com Blog to Cover Non-Combat, Open-World Exploration Games

I have been playing Eastshade for four days now, and it has been an captivating experience to be able to explore a first-person open world like Eastshade, solving puzzles and completing quests. I am utterly charmed by this game, and I cannot recommend it highly enough!

In fact, it’s been so much fun that I did a little more investigating and I discovered (via this recent, thoughtful video essay and Eastshade review by RagnarRox) that there is actually something called the Discovery Tour by Assassin’s Creed: Ancient Egypt, which is actually an educational, non-combat version of the game Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which allows you to interactively explore various sites in ancient Egypt and learn about them!

So, I have decided that I am going to include a very specific (and rare) kind of game to what I cover on the RyanSchultz.com blog. I will now be including those games which meet the following two criteria:

  1. the game is not focused on combat and killing, but exploring and/or puzzle solving; and
  2. the game features an open world in which you can freely explore.

I now realize that many of my favourite computer games from the past have fallen into this category: Myst, Riven, Obduction (all by Cyan).

The key similarity between social VR/virtual worlds and non-combat, open-world games is that they allow you to navigate and explore freely, and interact with your environment. The key difference between social VR/virtual worlds and these sort of games is that the latter do not allow for multiple users in the same experience (you are alone in that world, except for NPCs). You cannot share your experience with other people. But I find these sorts of games to be so fascinating (and personally fulfilling to play) that I am broadening the scope of this blog to include them, and creating a separate list of non-combat, open-world games on the sidebar of this blog.