Stardustu
It has come to my attention that the creation of 3D spaces such as Rally 3D and Towns 3D was never brought up to be talked about as a community decision since Gaia's success was basically community centered. There were no polls or public feedback on the creation of 3D spaces on a site that some of us knew (3D) would fail because of the lack of interest in 3D in a 2D site with 2D avatars. Basically the 3D gaia world seems to have been a flop as we have not heard about it in a while and no one wants to go in it because of the significant lag. Now it goes to my question, I and many of the people who love gaia, loved gaia for their virtual worlds so we can showcase our avatars (otherwise why spend on something you cant interact with? its like buying skins for a game, just that there is no game, or virtual space) and hangout/make new friends.
A way better option would have to convert the original Towns 1 and 2 to html5. Is it possible with AI technology advancements like chatgpt to make that happen or can we start a crowfunder/gofundme to bring back Towns 1 and 2 to html5? because I'm sure I and many OG gaians would be more than happy to start a funder to bring back the only feature that made gaia GAIA on the site. Gaia was mostly known for their virtual spaces. With the original towns 1/2 gone, the site has significantly died. I think this is hardly spoken about because we all know Lanzer does his best and basically solos everything but please do not abandon an entire community of hundreds if not thousands who were regulars in your virtual spaces who have been loyal customers on this site and the many customers/users who will return with the return of towns 1 and 2. (Especially with the revsere marketplace a huge success, many would return, like I did) but we just need virtual spaces back, Gaia's #1 staple. And one of the original avatar based worlds. Let 3D be 3D. But Gaia has it's own unique and original virtual space that can't be found anywhere else. Please really look into bringing Towns 1 back, we have community discords built from the Gaia towns era that would be more than happy to put in the time and money to get our home back.
(also, no one is going to install waterfox, it's really inconvenient and super laggy it's not worth it)
First I would like to apologize for the state of the new Gaia Towns. The final product was not what was promised in terms of performance, and we were very let down by the performance of the talent behind the project, as well as their output.
I agree that GaiaOnline is community first, and we do solicit comments and suggestions from Gaians to determine what to update first, and which directions and features involved in our updates. At the same time, there are certain features such as our event based games that are more of an outlet of our creative team. The core idea behind a 3D space provide us to apply a lot more gameplay related features that our teams wish to realize, and if coded correctly, would had brought forth brand new features that aren't in everyone's zeitgeist. Unfortunately the team we hired was not calibrated to create our vision with the performance necessary.
From a technical standpoint, the things we want to do with the performance we want is possible, but it requires much higher talents, and that is our current challenge.
With the current state of the 3D towns, we are leaning on porting Towns 2 to HTML5. Though just like having a good 3D towns, HTML5 version of Towns also require specific talents geared towards making high performance HTML5 apps, and having a team with the right match in talent is our current challenge. Once we have the right resources, we will start working on the translation.
Sorry for the long and winded response. We spent a lot of time and resources to try to bring new life into the community, and that won't be our last attempt. On a side note, ideas integrating LLAMA and GPT based character interactions are super interesting and I had been testing these models on my free time. They're fun to play with, but no where close to prime time as you cannot tweak the direction of the interactions to prevent undesired outcome or involve actual gameplay parameters. Though we are keeping a close eye on any fun possibilities with the technologies.
