Project Sansar

[Tamar Luminos]

No flirting required. Just signed up that I was interested, way back when they were taking signups, and got the email when they opened up the creator preview more broadly. I think they're going to open it up more this week, so feel free to toss your name in if you're curious.

http://www.sansar.com/

And as for experience boundaries, that's a good question, I explored a few sorta half-heartedly, but honestly the walking was so slow and I got so bored I didn't scout it out too thoroughly so am not sure. The built experiences I walked through seemed small, like a quarter sim in SL if that, but I don't know what the potential space available really is- I have heard it's more than the typical SL sim but I can't say for sure.

[Tamar Luminos]

Yep, just saw the email- Sansar is in open beta now, anyone can go to the link I posted above and sign up to check Sansar out. Also the NDA is over, so expect to see more people talking about it and sharing screen shots and videos of it now. Here's a couple I took.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/33616776@N04/36251949446/in/dateposted-public/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/33616776@N04/36251947336/in/dateposted-public/

You can see- beautiful settings, meh avatars. The potential is there, for sure, but not sure it'll catch on with most SL folks till they get prettier avatars. Sansar's basic ones are far uglier than SL's built-in basic ones, strangely enough.

(Can't get the images to show, darnit, but posted links to them.)

[Tantus]

ty Tamar! I will give it a shot.

Those pics won't appear since the account is flagged as Mature. So you need to be logged in to Flickr to view them.

I always wanted to create a forest. In SL i played around with it on our tiny homestead sim, But the limited amount of prims always killed most of my ideas. So perhaps that's what i am going to make for "My very own experience" in Sansar. I was invited in last week as well and whole heartedly agree with your description Tamar and with your analysis about the adult content too Glaucon. Where's my date by the way?

Manon, you should try out Life is Feudal for the forestry experience. There are private Roleplay servers with limited combat, where people just go to build their farms and settlements. Some servers have better roleplaying standards than others, where Global Chat is IC and used to send messenger ravens only. Some people do roleplay well, and sometimes you'll see roleplay like this:

19:22:27 #####: '' raven to Mark Markham. we are at ure claim''
19:23:23 #####: ur*

You can build anything from castle walls surrounding a huge settlement, to having a small place out in the woods. And the forests are huge. I was building a spot on the mountainside with views over kilometers of woodlands, rendering thousands of trees.

So you have options of Oak, Elms, Maples, Birch, Aspens, Pines, Mulberry, Apple, Hazlenut and Junipers to work into your build. We had tree lined streets with junipers in a former camp - which looks impressive because these features need to be planned at the very start! Planting the right type of tree in designated locations actually matters in this game, you don't plant anything just anywhere.

[Danika Stenvaag]

Life has gotten way busier and in my final year at graduate school at UCSB and squeezing in beach and surf time when I can, gaming on a computer is a low priority. Only thing that keeps me in SL is sim ownership of Valkyrie Forest - still a busy sim, going strong, and very successful. But I did want to reserve my original SL name in Sansar, Danika Stenvaag, so I hopped on-board the creator train. My first visit to Sansar reminded me of Blue Mars (I only visited Blue Mars a couple times out of curiosity in its early days, but never did much with it). I chose for my very first 'experience' (as Sansar sims are called) a visit to the NASA Apollo exhibit (recreation of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum). I walked around the Saturn V and checked out the lunar exhibits which were pretty cool. Would have loved to see 3D moon maps but can't have everything. I posted some images below. I'm a silhouette in shadows in some of these images!

My avatar looks pretty much stock and rudimentary but oh well. As long as I could scoot around and explore. I didn't see many people in Sansar. All the places I explored were empty except for Zen Gardens - there were a few people there standing around. I helped a lady with her mic so she could voice and showed another guy how to open chat, send text messages, and find friends. The viewer is sparse with view obvious controls, but once you figure it out, it's pretty easy. Still can't run, fly, or sit yet. They haven't worked that out yet. When I returned to Zen Gardens a few days ago, there was nobody there this time. I couldn't find any info hub with people.

If you build it, they will come, is not always true. I can only speak from my experience in what works to bring people and what made Valkyrie Forest popular and that ingredient is 'community.' Valkyrie doesn't get it from raiding or having the latest build trends. It's community. Social interaction is the life blood to make any VR experience successful. Without this, you're dead. There's a great future for VR, but currently, I think people visit Sansar out of curiosity, walk around to look at the graphics and stuff, then log off. I do wish LL much success and hope they learn from SL.

Here are some pix of the Saturn V, Apollo exhibits and yes, I'm a dark shadow in some of these:







I checked out a forest experience because... well... you know me... forest girl and all I stepped off the ship, wandered through the forest, up into the mountains to get a view of the place, then kept hiking over the range to the edge of the sim where I fell off the side into a gray-white mist, before returning to the place I started. All sims (experiences) are similar to sky boxes, not connected, no continents, no oceans. You teleport from one sky box experience to the next using an atlas and wait for it to load, something like Blue Mars used to do:









I wanted to keep trekking up into the mountains, but like all things in life, there are endings, and I reached the end of the simulation and fell over the side into limbo:



I took more pix of other places, but this is just a small sample of Sansar.

[Tantus]

That movement speed defeated my will to explore the world! It couldn't be any slower.

I can agree with their simplified design, since the SL viewer is a complete mess. No self-respecting game releases with UI tabs along the bottom, on the sides and a menu bar with 100+ options above. And then you right-click things for even more options. After all of that, you have the Preferences with a hundred+ further options.

Starting over is the right thing to do, except they've swung into the other extreme with virtually no options or configuration. Building in Sansar feels restricted too, (E & C moves the camera vertically, holding Right-mouse button swings the camera.) It feels like they've designed everything, including building, with consoles in mind. But at least you get to own 2 experiences for free.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REUAt0OO-2A

LL need to bring facial expressions into SL/Sansar. It can be captured from a regular webcam and though it has limited scope in Star Citizen, in SL it could become the most significant addition since bouncy Lolas.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vc4pTFI8D4

And in about 10 years, SL3 will look like this.

[Vector]

Bouncy Lolas!


That made me chuckle my friend. Lots!

[Tantus]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7YqwyEwBO0

Sinespace could be an actual contender for the 'next SL'. It's a long video, I watched parts of it, the two important details being, regions can be 32km x 32km (SL sims are 256m x 256m), with an avatar limit of around 200, plus hundreds of NPCs.

[Tantus]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsCKuWONEPc

TLDR: Build and curate an art gallery, invite others users into your selection.

It's a niche project and the novelty will likely wear off soon, but it's trying something different.

[Qingwen]

TLDR: Build and curate an art gallery, invite others users into your selection.

It's a niche project and the novelty will likely wear off soon, but it's trying something different.

Nice idea, but a little uninspired. It would be cooler to walk around inside famous paintings than just look at the 2-d version on a virtual wall. It somehow pales in comparison to things like AM Radio's scenes and Bryn Oh's various story-artworks in SL.
I also wonder if Getty is going to come after them with a lawsuit (or whoever owns the rights to all those artworks!)

[Tantus]

Nice idea, but a little uninspired. It would be cooler to walk around inside famous paintings than just look at the 2-d version on a virtual wall. It somehow pales in comparison to things like AM Radio's scenes and Bryn Oh's various story-artworks in SL.
I also wonder if Getty is going to come after them with a lawsuit (or whoever owns the rights to all those artworks!)

What I liked about SL initially, was flying around the mainland and seeing what comes out of giving people the tools to build. Most of it was random junk, but every couple of sims you'd find something worth landing on.

Since sculpts and now mesh, the gap between builder and consumer has widened. You just don't see people building any longer, it's all prefabs. Even RP-sim builds were started by agreeing on a set of textures, then each builder worked on their area, throwing some prims together for a truly personalised build. It's all prefabs now.

Learning 3D modelling, texturing, building up a sim for an amazing piece of artwork and paying LL $300/month for the privilege is beyond the creative urge of most people

I think we'll see many more applications like OOW in the future, a sub-gaming genre centred around user-creativity in a multi-user space. It's not revolutionary, the selling point is the ease of accessibility for all.