Nowadays a lot of big VR and AR efforts are funded by millions of dollars, the founders who should have the passion aren't doing the actual development, and many if not all staff are probably anxious to leave and catch an uber for $12 cocktails at the local hotspot.
That's not a bad thing. God forbid it's healthier. But it is a different environment and we can't expect the same creative output.
My friend worked on it back in the 90s told me about it. It was licensed to MTV. Huge cult following.
I found this: https://archive.org/details/vw_traveler-bill_gates
https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/31/sansar-vr-creator-beta-s...
An interesting open source alternative in the social VR space is Phil Rosedale's High Fidelity: https://highfidelity.com/
But personally, I am currently infatuated with the much more light-weight Rec Room: https://www.againstgrav.com/rec-room/
Oh, and it's already full of furries, so you might as well torch it and start again.
Many of the most prolific creators I knew on SL had some affiliation with the furry fandom. I would take that as a good sign, actually: they tend to be early adopters.
For what it's worth, I've never had that problem.
Does it also happen with your local sandbox?
The local sandbox is still laggy crap on a recently-built i7 desktop with a 1-year-old NVidia card, though.
In a way it almost seems like the inverse of Craigslist. SecondLife feels so over-the-top and sloppy that I think someone will come along with some new technologies and replace it with a leaner more performant product. But they haven't.
Perhaps, but that's the sort of diversion worth reading. Please continue.
- an interconnected world of user-built locations, with near-seamless travel between them
- an environment in which every object is user-crafted and scripted, and can interact with each other and with users in a dynamic networked physics simulation
- a client which bundles the development environment, including 3D modeling and scripting tools, fluidly into the main game interface, such that objects can be created and edited on-the-fly and experimentation can happen live alongside other users in a social environment
- its own currency, convertible to real-world money and back via an actual exchange, and tools for conducting commerce both in-world and on the web via an Amazon-like marketplace
- infinitely-customizable avatars which allow for combining components from multiple sources and creators, spawning a micro-niche of virtual "fashion" trends, events, and blogs
What holds SL back is the accumulated cruft of ~1.5 decades of development mistakes [0], legacy technologies, and backwards-compatibility requirements with an ocean of content. But it's always been worlds more ambitious than modern claimants for the title of 3D social environment of the future, which seem content to be multi-user VR YouTube clients.
[0] I could go on and on about the mind-boggling pile of hacks that keeps SL ticking, but that'd probably drag this thread too far off topic :)