Hi
@genesis !
@jpishgar
For what it's worth -- There were three original groups that did shooty stuff. My best known name in that community was Jeremy Duport and I was around from the beginning, all the way to what I like to think of as the end: when I officially closed the doors on the Alliance Navy's Second Life group with the other people in charge in 2018, years after all our old frenemies had died off.
One of the three was focused on members shooting one another in a simulator
("sim" - a 256x256 meter terrain segment running on its own CPU cores) and is arguably the original combat experience, as it predates the others by a few months. They didn't participate in the wider community, were unsophisticated in terms of the code and assets they used, and died out fairly early on. I think they might have been a bunch of WWIIOL players. I won't mention them again, in part because I've also forgotten what they were called; it's been a while.
The other two were the Alliance Navy
(the group the OP mentions) and a Star Wars fan group collectively called the Clones, where membership was based on buying
(primitively made) clone trooper armor outfits from its founder. Initially the clones were just a way to get the outfit, but after the Alliance Navy's fun stuff kicked off, they gunned up and got involved. The clones didn't survive all that long in terms of the history of the community, but were around at the start and stuck it out a few years. As a founding member of the Alliance Navy *and* the group that predated it
(OP's a little off on that stuff since they know about it second hand), I can say that we were originally made up of sandbox builders making space ship models who were tired of griefers and sith roleplayers
(no, really) wandering in and crashing our game clients. Only later did the combat community stuff kick off. I'll explain! ... In long ramble form.
Early Second Life was a kind of digital wild west. So long as you paid the account creation fee it was a non-logged chat platform with responsive, game-like physics, live user-code, and mixed media uploads. The platform is *nearly* unique in its niche. In 2003 when I first signed up, it was a unicorn. In 2020 there's a long list of dead and dying competition; it *still* has an effective monopoly. Because of all that, in its early years the Second Life platform attracted a bunch of bored programmers - and the kind of kid who might have had a chemistry set a decade earlier, and had fifteen bucks and no problem lying about their age. I don't think any of this could have happened in another environment, or even at another time. Nobody else has done the model right, even with Second Life as a guide.
A sandbox is pretty much land that's been set to allow public object creation, with automatic cleanup to get rid of litter and abandoned stuff. An object in Second Life at the time was made of one or more simple shapes: boxes, ovoids, tori, and so on. You could color, texture, rotate, scale, slice, and skew them, and you could link them together in groups that allowed for pretty complicated models
(relatively speaking). You could also add things to their inventories - other objects, assets, and scripts. Objects have Copy, Modify, and Transfer permissions that can be set by someone who has them and which apply to the *next* owner, because you can sell and trade objects freely so long as the permissions let you. When I said sandbox builders a couple of blocks back, I meant people who were interested mostly in the creative aspects of Second Life and who spent a lot of their time at one of those places making shiny new toys. There were three main sandboxes back then, Newcombe, Goguen, and Cordova, set up in a row on the edge of the continent
(the blob of bordering sims that made up the world).
Our starry-eyed loose community of builders would be making things and along would come some random, firing a gun that would hurl you off the edge of the world and crash your client. Or a blob gun that spawned objects all over *your* objects. Or ... etcetera. These weren't behaviors that were hard to make and lots of freebies existed so, human nature being what it is, it was a common event. Linden Lab, the company behind the platform, were very hands off. They didn't do a lot about that kind of thing. Unless you had a company employee *on your friends list*, it was unlikely you were getting help. Naturally, the usual response ended up being to shoot back. Sometimes, someone from Linden Lab *would* be there - generally they'd help us shoot the griefers.
At the time I was hanging around and one particular user, Mazer Ludd, built a space ship model that he called the Endeavor. It was pretty neat because it was huge, so he and a friend set up a group called the Crew of the Endeavor with myself and a couple of others as the founding members, back in late November or early December of 2004. He'd rez the ship out
(spawn it from inventory) each time the sandbox timeouts caused it to be deleted from the world. We used the ship as a base and we'd jump out of it to help get rid of griefers, wearing a goofy uniform cribbed from a freebie in-world sports game with some shiny green cubes stuck to our shoulders.
A couple of other people who made space ship models started grabbing friends and randoms for their own crews. We had scuffles, established territory lines (The Endeavor claimed all of Cordova, and we held onto it pretty well when we were online), and had odd little diplomatic relationships of mutual enemies and betrayal. Other sandbox denizens were
(mostly) studiously kept safe -- despite everything, most of the crews were still clearing out griefers whenever they showed up. This scenario was both possible and perhaps inevitable because at the time, Second Life didn't permit accurate teleports from anywhere to anywhere - There were spawn locations and public telehubs, but if you wanted to get anywhere besides those you had to walk or fly
(where flying was allowed) from the closest one. Knocking someone far away
(or causing their client to crash), therefore, removed them from a sim for an extended period.
A few months down the line the clones started existing. Episode Two was a couple of years beforehand, but the trailer for Three inspired a guy to make
(and start selling) a clone trooper costume. They had gently tweaked freebie guns edited to play blaster noises: obviously, they started picking up members quickly. A bunch of people with push-based light-sabers started showing up to attack them - and everyone else
(those sith roleplayers I mentioned) At about the same time, someone formed a short-lived group whos sole purpose was to grief the people the crews were protecting: *because* we were protecting them. The ship crews decided to blob up into a single group in early March 2005: the Alliance Navy.
(Fantastically generic, but at least it far predates mass effect. Go us.) There were rather more of us involved in that decision than just the two the OP mentions. We worked together to knock out the griefers and clones, got our own hate group
(the Alliance Navy Rebels, made up of people we wouldn't let join), and things settled down pretty comfortably until June or July, when we told a group of about six people that we didn't want a dedicated roleplay marine team. Naturally they made their own group in response, the Merczateers, and went on to become the second longest lived combat group of all time. Oops.
While the Alliance Navy handled Rebel attacks, we started working on our own guns - and vehicles. We had a handful of freebies but they weren't great. Second Life has a scripting subsystem for vehicles that lets you turn an object with a low limit of parts
(32, including any seats people) into a pretty sophisticated momentum and force system, taking high precision inputs from the client and camera. Not great for ground stuff because they get hitched up on terrain and objects fairly easily - but aircraft? You could move them a lot faster than an avatar could run or fly. You could also put guns on them! This lead to early (terrible) fighters and transports. We could move people around the dead space between telehubs a lot faster with vehicles. A guy called Jared Zander happened to be in the business of repackaging freebie scripts and selling them on in his own models and our senior leadership really liked the aggressive blue dorito shapes he used, so we ended up giving him a command rank in our budding hierarchy. He still charged us for the vehicles. At about this time, one of our nascent leaders, Shadow Keegan, decided he was in danger of being kicked out - so he quit and took his buddies with him, founding the *Alliance Navy 2*. Eeeyup. They ran off into the wilderness, vowing revenge for ... quitting.
At about this point I took time out to go do school stuff, because I used to be a very responsible little nerd. It wasn't actually particularly important school. Like *almost everyone else* involved in this story I used a false age at registration. Linden Lab required users to be 18+ from the very beginning, except for a brief experiment with a "teen grid" some years on. I was taking time off for my GCSEs - so just a little more than 16 years old. I took maybe 10 months but I've heard the in-between enough that I can summarize - although these might be gently out of order.
First, the Alliance Navy got some land, relying on Jared and donations, in a couple of sims called Enceladus and Tethys. It had a bridge over a big ravine, making it pretty defensible because flying was disabled. Second, the Alliance Navy got into a back and forth raiding contest with the Merczateers. This was interesting because it was the first truly long range combat that happened in Second Life, with the two groups' bases being a couple of dozen sims apart. The Alliance Navy's base was just one sim over from a telehub, but the Merczateers managed to set up about six sims away from the nearest one - very defensively useful at the time, because the two groups could set their spawn points to their own land. Third, the "Alliance Navy 2" rebranded through a couple of names but ended up being given a big chunk of land on one of the first large user-owned blocks of sims by the owner, who thought they'd do griefer security for him
(no, really), and renamed themselves after the place - the Venuma Coalition. Naturally the Alliance Navy and Merczateers started fighting them too. After a while of this, Shadow Keegan
(the guy who started them up) was deposed when the guy who owned Venuma realized he didn't actually like people with guns swarming through his for-profit rental land, and the group realized they didn't like their leadership. A guy called Aryte Vesperia ended up in charge and they rebranded *again* as the Novus Ordo Imperialis. A bunch of other groups started to spring up, mostly originally started by people leaving
(or getting kicked out of) the big three and finding friends to make their *own* group, where *they* could be in charge.
All the groups started forming friendships (and death pacts). Teleporting anywhere
(except where you weren't allowed to by parcel owners themselves) was enabled, making transport aircraft a bit useless. I came back! The Alliance Navy wrote the first set of rules mutually agreed on by a bunch of groups - limiting "strategic" weapons because explosions the size of a quarter sim were starting to get commonplace, and that's boring. Single user-owned sims detached from the main continent
(there were several by then - the others were small, rental-based real businesses started by users with an entrepreneurial flair) but accessible through the map started to become a thing. The NOI and AN ended up getting one each, and the Merczateers got one attached to a mini-continent. It was pretty typical to set them up with a big base structure in one corner and a forced teleport location in the other, and have a fighting space in between. We did still visit the sandboxes occasionally in early 2007, but mostly as a sort of pilgrimage for new members. Private sandboxes with access control had turned them into ghost towns.
I've skipped over a lot even in just that first couple of years, but it's left me at over 2300 words. It answers the moderation vs emergent entertainment question though: Both! Just, not the former for very long.
As far as HUDs and so on go, everyone had their own gear and it all did different stuff
(although a lot of it came from common origins because some scripters, like me, made a habit of releasing code on occasion to help other groups keep up - and with how few people were willing to learn the language, a lot of them stuck with odd conglomerations of donated and lifted stuff). The only truly common ground is that it all relied on the built in health system that's been part of Second Life since before it was Second Life. I'm very glad they kept that: without it providing forced teleports home on death, I'm not sure anything like what we had would have evolved in scripts alone. There were pure-script combat systems as well but frankly? Clunky, slow, and horribly resource intensive.
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