In November 2018, I reported that the 1867 Luxembourg sims (also known as Pfaffenthal 1867) moved from Second Life to Sansar. This was one of the first major moves from SL to Sansar by a roleplaying community, no doubt helped along by the fact that Sansar had lots of free space available for building. Not having to pay Linden Lab for seven sims in Second Life would have been a strong incentive to move.
Well, it would appear that the creators have packed up yet again, and moved from Sansar to Roblox! Here is the trailer for the new 1867 Luxembourg:
I have explored the new Roblox version of 1867 in my VR headset, and it does have some interesting features, such as sudden downpours of rain (keep that umbrella in your backpack handy, you’re gonna need it!) and the cycling of day to night, which feel quite natural. Overall, the texturing and lighting, while not as high-quality as Sansar, is still very convincing. It’s beautiful work, and it definitely stands out among the more cartoon-like fare hosted by Roblox.
But what I don’t understand is how the project manages to hold on to their userbase! In hopping from Second Life to Sansar to Roblox, they must have lost a few users along the way. According to a comment attributed to 1867 Luxembourg community leader Hauptmann “Cyberpiper” Weyder, in Wagner James Au’s coverage of the move on his blog New World Notes:
Sansar has been a disappointment. We managed to do a whole street eventually, but had to start over because of too much lag, trying to figure out ways of more efficient texturing or building. Also Sansar had promised mobile development, which was then taken off the roadmap, a big disappointment for us. And… we all know it… no traffic in Sansar… for now…
So we have put Sansar development on the backburner, and decided to develop our own MMORPG, starting off by developing a ‘childrens version’ on ROBLOX….
This is a loss for Sansar that could not have come at a worse time. It reminds me of how the MetaMovie project moved from High Fidelity to NeosVR earlier this year. Perhaps now, in our “winter of discontent” for social VR (or, as Caitlyn Meeks puts it even more succinctly, “VR Winter“), we can expect more such moves by projects in search of platforms that meet their needs better.
It would appear that there is less platform loyalty out there than before. This might even be a good thing—if the platforms losing projects get the message that they need to pull up their socks. (I’m not holding my breath. I honestly don’t expect to see any major new developments to come out of either High Fidelity or Sansar for the forseeable future, as both companies seem to be hunkering down and focusing on survival mode until we reach our “VR Spring”.)
It will be interesting to see how the 1867 Luxembourg project develops over time. Will they eventually give up on Roblox, too, if another platform beckons? You can follow the ongoing saga via their Twitter feed. And you can pay a visit to their new Roblox build here. I wish them well, and I give them one piece of advice: pick a place and STAY PUT FOR A WHILE. 😉
UPDATE Nov. 24th: There’s a brand-new, 13-minute interview with Cyberpiper, the creator of 1867 Luxembourg in Roblox, which goes into the background and history of the project as well:
I respect Cyberpiper and his team, but they hit the same roadblock that Harvest did. They put a lot of not-exactly-optimized models into a single world, with pretty large textures, and of course that induced heavy lag, even on best systems. Roblox seems to have some ways of (partially) dealing with this, for example thick fog that makes anything further than 50-100 meters invisible. I wish them good luck, but they should still remember that no matter how good an engine is, it will not be able to do great job with unoptimized assets. Some sacrifices have to be made, heavy optimization too.