Category: Uncategorized

(Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash)

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now. Some Mac users are quite upset (and quite vocal on various social media) about the lack of a native Mac client for Sansar.

Let’s get one thing straight.

CURRENTLY THERE IS NO NATIVE VIRTUAL REALITY SUPPORT FOR MACINTOSH. PERIOD.

Right now, the only proper VR headsets commercially available are the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Both are Windows-based VR platforms only. There is no Mac support. (I’m not talking about the PlayStationVR and those cheap VR headsets where you snap in a mobile phone. There’s absolutely no way you can transfer enough data to support Sansar using those.)

Sansar is being designed first and foremost as a virtual world that supports VR headsets. Read Inara Pey’s excellent blogpost to understand why Linden Lab is focusing on virtual reality in designing Sansar, especially the entire section titled “Running Sansar in Desktop Mode”. It perfectly explains, in quotes from Linden Lab staff, why they have to focus on VR and how the benefits to desktop users flow down from that.

Asking Linden Lab to provide native Mac support for hardware that currently only exists in a Windows hardware configuration is absurd.  In my opinion, they are correct to concentrate their focus on the hardware platforms that currently support virtual reality.

In today’s notes from last Friday’s in-world product discussion meetup, there is the following quote:

When is Mac support coming to Sansar?

For the most part, there has been little publicly-available VR hardware on the Mac platform. For this reason, Sansar development has primarily been focused on Windows users that have access to Oculus Rift or Vive hardware.

Sansar user Livio Mondini posts in the Sansar group in Facebook:

About the rant…[I] have a Mac and no Sansar client, is true but is not a fault of Sansar, ask Apple why they don’t take care of VR with the right hardware until now.

Livio posts two links to Macworld articles that every Mac user should read:

Can you use Oculus Rift with Mac? (June 7, 2017)

For a while, it was assumed that the Oculus Rift would work with Mac just as it was intended to work with Windows, but back in May 2015, the company cleared up the confusion in a blog post. Sadly, it wasn’t the news that VR fans with a Mac were waiting for – in fact, the blog post informed users that development for both OS X and Linux had been paused to concentrate efforts on the PC release.

How to use VR on a Mac (July 10, 2017)

So, to summarise, we’ve shown you that while it’s theoretically possible to use VR on a Mac, the reality is that it’s awkward to do and ridiculously expensive and even then, you could still run into compatibility issues.

Blaming Linden Lab for this situation is frankly ridiculous.

https://flic.kr/p/WKJvGw

This is a great image from Sansar Studios’ experience Colossus Rising, taken by Dennis Obderry and posted to the Flickr group called Sansarian Delight (here’s his Flickr photostream, he has created quite a number of compelling images from Sansar and Second Life). If you’ve never been, go visit Colossus Rising and wander around the remains of a mysterious, ancient civilization in the desert. Be sure to ride the gondolas!

Fun fact: I was among the very first users of Flickr, way, waaay back in 2004, when they were just a tiny Vancouver-based start-up called Ludicorp (this is before they were bought out by Yahoo!). Here’s my Flickr profile. Sad to say I deleted my original account from 2004, but I rejoined in 2015. I haven’t posted very much at all (I have largely moved to Google Photos), but I do plan to post more Sansar images.

It’s been exactly one week now since Linden Lab opened the doors to the public in what they are calling the “open creator beta” of Sansar, and I know they have been inundated with bug reports and feature requests. How do I know this?  Am I clairvoyant? No. Because I subscribed to get a little automatic email message every time someone posts a new bug report or new feature request on their user forums, and my email in-box is just overflowing with all the automatic emails from Sansar!

I’ve also had some people comment on the Facebook postings I’ve made this past week to promote the Sansar Newsblog, saying that they were having problems with Sansar.

So this post is to tell you exactly how to report the problems you are having with Sansar to Linden Lab. I talked with both Jenn, the Lead Community Manager for Sansar, and Torley, Sansar Senior Producer and Audio Artist, today and got some helpful information that I wanted to pass on to you.

First, the best way to report a bug is to create a new post in the Bug Reports section of the community forums. In order to do this, you need to have a user account on the Sansar web site, and you need to be logged in to your user account.  If you do not have a user account yet, you will need to create your account here at this URL: https://login.sansar.com/register.

If you do not have (or do not wish) to create a Sansar user account, there is a second way to report a bug.  Jenn told me you can also just send an email to help@sansar.com. She said that it’s much better to submit a bug report to the forums, because that way, other users can join in and up-vote an item if they are experiencing the same issue as you. How do you up-vote an item?  Simple.  See the little up arrow next to an existing bug report?  (You have to click on the individual title of each bug report to see this.  Here’s an example of what an individual bug report looks like.)

If you click that little up arrow, you can “vote up” that bug report (in other words, say “me too!”).  It also works for Feature Requests.  It’s much easier to share that information around internally with Sansar team members who aren’t in the support system, Torley says.

Torley also says:

And though it seems obvious, you may want to include that (1) solid reproductions (steps to make it happen) of a bug are super valuable and (2) whenever possible, post videos and screenshots. A lot gets lost in words.

So now you know how to get help with Sansar! Now go and spread the word 🙂