Moriash Moreau: My Second Life

Plywood Shutting Down

2011-07-15T09:48:00.002-06:00

I'm sure nobody is reading this anymore but I thought I'd mention it, just in case. The Plywood Webcomic page is shutting down at the end of the month. Read it while you can.

I've also hacked down what was up until recently the Tallest Eyesore in Second Life. That's right, Mo-Tech Tower - all four kilometers of it - is no more. My apologies to the half dozen squatters who logged in only to find themselves hanging unsupported a couple miles off the ground. Happy landings.

And, well, that's about it.

For those of you still making a go of it, enjoy your Second Life.Edit:As Octobriana (Oz) points out, Plywood is still available, substantially intact, at the Internet Archive (the Wayback Machine).

Lumber

2010-03-18T07:49:00.003-06:00

Every month or two, I get another email to the Plywood Webcomic address, from a misguided soul in an exotic foreign locale, wanting to buy or sell plywood. Usually, I just ignore them. I really should start telling them that we only trade in half meter cubes.

Gallery

2010-02-14T17:49:00.001-06:00

Just a quick note: the former Mo-Tech art gallery has now returned as the SkyLounge Gallery, located on level three of the SkyLounge. Drop by and take a look.

Farewell Ordinal

2010-02-11T11:59:00.002-06:00

Well, this was a punch in the gut to go with my morning coffee. Evidently, Ordinal Malaprop, one of the most creative builders in SL, has decided to call it quits.

Miss Malaprop was never one for the dramatic flash builds. Instead, she focuses on the small and the elegant. And, of course, the fun. She has always been on my short list of SL personages I wanted to be when I grew up, back when I still had the SL spark. I can't say her work changed the face of the Grid (whatever that means), although some amazing things emerged from her corner Caledon from time to time. But she brought a much needed touch of class to the Grid.

It's heartbreaking to see another Second Life true believer disillusioned. I can't question her reasoning, especially after feeling the same way myself lately. (Not that I would presume to place myself anywhere within a few parsecs of her league.) Like most of the well-wishers on the blog, I find myself hoping she'll find a way back in, on her own new terms.

In the meantime, the Grid grinds on. New builders appear, and others leave. Today, the creativity and the elegance of that work takes a small, but lamentably significant, hit. Farewell Ordinal. Please find your way back soon.

Going out of Business

2010-02-06T14:58:00.003-06:00

Folks, I'm closing up shop in SL. Mo-Tech Industries is gone. If you've ever wanted a Mo-Tech Product, but couldn't afford one (which I would find astounding), well, feel free to drop in one last time. The entire Mo-Tech inventory is now available as freebies, for a limited time. Click the link up there at the right to get there.

SkyLounge is still staying around, albeit without the tower to hold it up. Yes, that's right, Mo-Tech Tower, formerly SL's real tallest structure, is no more. Couldn't justify the tier just to keep the monument to my own ego around. Feel free to drop by the Lounge, though. The elevator still goes there. Look for the big green carpet and the SkyLounge sign on the ground in northeast Louise.

Addendum: I couldn't bear to part with the Tower, so it's back, albeit in a somewhat simplified form. I know that's a load off your mind. The shop is still gone, however. It's amazing how many prims were left over after getting rid of all the demo products and signage.

Astounding

2009-09-10T19:56:00.003-06:00

Here it is, 7:00 SLT on a Thursday night. In addition to the hundreds of other events, there are 20-some-odd live musicians performing on the grid as I type this. That's really quite amazing.

That's all. I'm going to pick one at random, kick back in the back row, and have a listen.

Addendum:
Ended up seeing Andreus Gustafson at the Sunset Jazz Club. He sings a mix of original and classic rock/alternative covers, does his own keyboards, and plays a mean guitar, to boot. The man puts on a great show... And he's the first and only person to have ever pronounced my name correctly on the first try! Go see him now. SO SAYETH MORI.

Keeping Busy

2009-09-08T16:01:00.008-06:00

Haven't done much that is terribly blog-worthy lately, but I thought I'd take a moment to mention a few projects that have been keeping me busy lately. In my ongoing quest to fight off boredom whilst simultaneously paying my tier costs (been more successful with the former than the latter, to be sure), I've been dusting off a few shelved projects and getting them ready for sale.

Here's a video of the Kaleidoscope Carpet in action. The Carpet, which is a greatly improved version of a not-terribly-popular product from 2006, takes any image and turns it into a kaleidoscopic whirl. I was encouraged to come up with the upgraded version when I was contacted by Evaluna Sperber, Italian Second Life performance artist. Evaluna takes avatar animations, particle effects, prim sculpture, video streams, original music, and poetry readings and combines them into one harmonious whole. Several videos of her work can be found here. The videos don't do them justice, however. I was privileged to experience a private showing of a couple of her pieces, and they must be seen in person to get the full impact. Simply amazing.

In any case, Evaluna had purchased one of the original Kaleidoscopes (a simple, wall-hung affair with touch controls), and asked if I could make her one sufficiently large to appear in her performance. Or, rather, after a half hour or so of back-and-forth via Google Language Tools, we managed to sort that out! The above is the result. As usual, I went far overboard and overly complicated, and ended up having to scale it back and simplifying it. The end result turned out to be kind of nifty, if I do say so myself, with HUD controls, programmable speeds, and so on. I'm sure this kind of thing can be found on dance club floors and so on all over the grid, but to my knowledge this is the first one that allows the user to supply his own photos. Kind of a nice feature, anyway. We'll see if the market agrees. In the meantime, if all goes well, one (or more) of these will appear as one of the backdrops for her upcoming shows.

And, lest you think I've become too cultured, this is the other big addition to Mo-Tech Industries' catalog: X-Ray Specs. Not a lot to say about them, really. They have hypnotic "X-ray vision" animated lens effects, just because I could. The picture above is the promo sign used in the various SL storefront and online locations. Never underestimate the value of sexual harassment as a marketing tool!

In case you're wondering, yes that is me in the picture, sans beard. The slider-enhanced leer was distorting the facial hair, so I swapped in the clean-cut version of the skin. Probably for the best, all things considered. I have to say, though, SL-me's chin is huge.

Finally, the Audience Reaction Chair project I mentioned back in July is finally live! This was a joint project between MenuBar Memorial and myself, and I think it's turned out pretty well. Menu did the particle artwork and sound design, and I did the scripting work. This is the first of what I hope will be many joint projects to come. As I understand it, the mechanics for the Chairs now built into the for the latest season of LaurenLive, soon to appear on Treet.TV. So a bit of indirect fame there, I suppose.

Eh, keep the fame. I'll settle for loads of L-bucks. Take a look at the Audience Reaction Chair and its spinoff product, the Audience Reaction HUD, on XStreet.

Garden of Mo Twitter Feed

2009-07-30T12:17:00.002-06:00

I can't imagine why anyone but me would be interested in this, but the Garden of Mo is now on Twitter. Over the past couple of evenings, I've started wiring the various events and objects in my neck of the woods to send discreet little status message back to a centralized notifications server. The server then relays these exciting updates to the GardenOfMo Twitter feed via Twittermail for the world to see.

I don't know what, if anything, I'll do with this information. Probably nothing, aside from feeding my own curiosity about what goes on in Mo-Tech Tower when I'm not around. Better than hiding in the bushes with a pair of binoculars and a notebook, anyway.

Two Shows

2009-07-23T10:53:00.003-06:00

While working the kinks out of my Fraps installation, I took a short video of the new dusk-til-dawn fireworks show at the Mo-Tech Tower SkyLounge (SLURL link). Definitely not a cinematic masterpiece, but it shows off the particle effects quite nicely. Music is courtesy of SomaFM's Space Station Soma stream.

On a completely unrelated note, I went to my first live SL comedy show last Tuesday (July 21). Mariner Trilling was on the stage, delivering his comic monologue, "Mariner Trilling, Below the Waist," based on his hilarious and insightful articles on romance, sex, and dating in the virtual world. I didn't really know what to expect when I arrived, but the performance was low key, and quite funny. Mariner simply took the stage, kicked on the SL Voice, rezzed a couple of slideshow prims (which were unfortunately plagued by technical difficulties), and went to work. In spite of the usual headaches caused by lag in a crowded sim, Mariner managed to pull off a warm, natural, engaging show. That, in and of itself, is quite an achievement when filtered through the innate woodenness and awkwardness of the medium. After the show, Mariner informed us that he would likely only do one more show, in a few weeks, before retiring this monologue. (I have hopes that he'll come back again, with new stories to tell, but he was noncommittal on that point.) Date and time are unknown, but it would be well worth keeping an eye on your events calendar to catch him. I know I'll be back again.

My initial excuse for attending, aside from prodding by Taralyn Gravois and Menubar Memorial, was to observe and provide emergency tech support for the first use of the prototype Audience Response Chairs. This joint project with Menubar allows audience members an easy way to give feedback to performers, by showing floating particle comic balloons ("Ha Ha Ha!" "Bravo!" "Yay!" and so on), playing sound clips, and running animations. It's very much in the early beta stages now, and has a fair bit to go (mostly in terms of making it less disruptive), but it could turn into something of a small revolution in SL performances. The jury is still out on whether this is an improvement over audience-member-provided gestures and text comments, but the response was tentatively positive. Mariner seemed to like them, anyway, or so I hear.

We'll see if it goes anywhere. For now, the project has at least gotten me out from my script windows in Louise, and exposed me to a new aspect of SL. Well worth the time, even if the project itself ends up dead in the water. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this later.

Friends

2009-07-15T14:39:00.002-06:00

Y'know, I really have a pretty impressive Friends list, filled with dozens of the old-school movers and shakers that helped make SL what it is today.

It's kind of a shame I never actually see or speak to any of them.

Fireworks!

2009-07-11T07:43:00.002-06:00

Feeling bored? Have a little time to kill? Then come by the Mo-Tech Tower SkyLounge (SLURL link) to see some fireworks!

Fireworks start every SL evening at dusk. Stick around a minute or two if you're the first to arrive after dark, as they're rigged with a sensor to save system resources when nobody is around. Or, if you're impatient, here's an Easter egg just for you, dear reader: touch the black stone pyramid in the SkyLounge garden to turn on the fireworks anytime. Enjoy!

Long Time, No Hear

2009-07-06T18:23:00.004-06:00

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? Slowly working my way back into SL again. We'll see where it goes. But first, a brief video interlude!

A few days ago, I received an IM from a resident by the name of ZTAR Magic, informing me that she and a few of her friends had made a machinima music video featuring the trusty old Mo-Tech Pogo Stick. That video was called "Bounce," and it absolutely made my entire week. A rock video featuring pixel babes in leather cat suits and merry widows, bouncing around on pogo sticks... What's not to like? Thanks, ZTAR!

Okay, assuming you can get that song out of your head long enough (...pogo-pogo-pogo-bounce!) to read further, there's been a few changes here and there in the old Garden of Mo. Mostly, I've once again tiered down. Welcome to the new economy, and all that. I've had to delete some of the old standbys, including a couple of builds that have been around since early 2005. That was kind of sad, but it's forced me to re-think and tighten up the remainder. As a result, I've been taking on quite a few projects that have been sitting on the back burner for months now. There's nothing like losing half your property to make you want to sort out what's left.

Now that I've deleted all the extraneous builds on the property, I've decided to focus my immediate attention on decking out the one remaining structure on the site, that monument to my own ego: Mo-Tech Tower. This involved stripping out two of the four floors of the shop and gallery level (500 meters up), and compressing Mo-Tech Gallery down from three to one levels as a result. Above is a picture of the result. (Okay, this is mostly another excuse to photograph an SL sunset behind the Tower. Sue me.) At lower left is Koshari Mahana's Space Sphere(SLURL link), located a few hundred meters above the Librarium in southeast Abitibi. At present, the teleporter is down, so that SLURL (or a flight assist) is the only way to take a look inside. Kind of neat, anyway. I really need to build my own replacement elevator, in my unofficial capacity as Librarium janitor. One more thing to add to the to-do list.

Since the Gallery floor space was cut by 66%, I was forced to re-evaluate what was on display there. Before, I was rifling through my inventory, trying to find anything to fill walls and floor space. Now, I'm forced to be more selective, and I'm fairly pleased with the initial results. Artists include Menubar Memorial (prolific artist and builder of all manner of luxury SL widgets) and Laura Ingersoll (artist and one-time SL friend, now left for greener electronic pastures), as well as a few of my own SL and RL photographic efforts.

In my efforts to prim down the gallery, I went ahead and coded up a project I've been kicking around for a while now, the 5-Frame Slideshow (link to LSL code text document). This script will modify a single prim such that it presents five frontward facing sides (similar to the prims used in the XyText display system, for those of you who are familiar with that), then cycle through the images stored in the object's inventory. The net result is a one-prim viewer, capable of presenting an arbitrary number of SL texture images, five images at a time. I'm releasing the code as public domain. See the comments in the script for setup and use instructions. Enjoy, and drop me an IM if you do anything nifty with it.

For my part, I'm using it to display pictures of assorted graffiti, large and small, found all over the Houston, Texas area. Taking such photographs has developed into a kind of hobby for me, although said passtime has been on hold lately. It's just too dang hot to skulk around in train switchyards and back alleys. (The local graffiti artists seem to agree, as new work has slowed down considerably in my RL home town.) In the meantime, I've uploaded over 200 images to three viewers at the Mo-Tech Gallery (SLURL link). Stop by if you're interested in such things.

A few thousand meters up, the SkyLounge is slowly coming out of stasis, and I'm starting to do all of the little nuts-and-bolts tasks I've always meant to do. Nothing terribly high tech or sophisticated, just little decorative touches and utilities added to turn it from a dead-end location to... Well, a dead-end location with a few more attractions, bells, and whistles.

Above, you can see one of the additional programs on the HoloDeck on level three (you can just barely make out the holodeck controls behind me in the picture, that glowing green dot). I'd always meant to build a particle light show into the SkyLounge. This is the initial attempt. It's a 10m sphere with four emitters (each limited in terms of particle count, of course) cycling through a variety of canned and randomized effects. The end result is pretty trippy. Once I get all of the kinks worked out, I plan on expanding the fireworks show outside of the Lounge, to considerably larger effects in the open sky to the north. There's a vast amount of empty space out there in my virtual back yard, as far as the rendered eye can see. I might as well use it!

Here I am, listening to Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe on my newly created virtual audio/video system, and watching the electronic sunset from the roof of the tower. The AV tuners and server was yet another fiddly little project I'd been putting off. Nothing terribly sophisticated; indeed dozens of systems like this have been created gridwide. But, instead of going out and finding one of those pre-packaged systems, I decided to do it myself. Radio and television tuners cycle through a variety of stations, courtesy of SomaFM and SL's own Treet TV.

Note to self: time to make another donation to SomaFM. Note to readers: if you're running them through your parcel's media stream, you should, too.

Treet TV was something of a new experience for me. I knew it existed, of course, but never got around to actually watching. Second Life has, once again, astounded me. Not only has it spawned its own news organs, including several in blog format and even a few semi-professional electronic newspapers, but now there is an entire television network with music, sports, shopping networks, educational access, talk shows, and more, all aimed at a thriving community from around the world, living in a place that doesn't actually exist. That's really kind of mindblowing, when you think about it.

Last night, while I was putting the finishing touches on one of the television tuners in the SkyLounge, I sat down and watched a live episode of Tonight Live. There were quite a few rough edges, of course, as there are with any SL endeavor. The interviews were surprisingly good, if a bit forced at times. I found it best to go on with what I was doing, and occasionally glance at the screen when something caught my eye. The sad fact of the matter is avatars just aren't that animated or interesting when they're just sitting or standing there and talking. (I've made this argument before, so I'll leave it at that for now.) But the multiple cameras, audience views, close-ups, etc. made up for that to some degree. This isn't machinima, in the original sense, nor should we expect it to be. It's more akin to an old fashioned radio variety show, with visualization elements thrown in. And that works just fine, really.

This episode was apparently a first for Tonight Live: it was the first time they featured a stand-up comedian (or comedienne, depending on where you fall on the RL vs. SL gender presentation issue) on the show. Ms. Wayland was quite funny, and had some amusing points about life in SL. But, frankly, watching him/her performing via stream to a dead silent audience was a bit eerie. There's a reason why comedy is generally recorded in front of live audiences.

Ms. Beebe and Ms. Wayland discussed this issue a bit in the follow-up interview, as well. As they mentioned, it's difficult to gage the audience's reaction, or pause for unheard and hoped-for laughter. But that's assuming that anyone is laughing at all. Laughter is generally a social phenomenon, and laughing out loud when one is truly alone is pretty rare (kneejerk LOL chat spam to the contrary). We may smile to ourselves, sure, but think about it. When is the last time you laughed when you were truly alone? When you were aware that there was nobody nearby, or even in earshot? I'd guess it's been a while. There's an immersiveness factor at play in this, like in any broadcast medium. This is the same problem that led to the live studio audience in radio and television, and later to such atrocities as canned applause and laugh tracks.

Do shows like Tonight Live need laugh tracks and applause signs? Heaven forfend, although a few triggered applause macros might have livened up some of the brief camera shots of the in-studio audience, standing stock still and blank faced during the filming. (I couldn't help but think of Hitchcock's "The Birds." Again, eerie.) Do they need to hand out puppeteering attachments, as a more assertive form of the hoary old flashing "APPLAUSE" signs? I'd be hesitant to advocate such things, but maybe they should, just to bridge the reality-to-SL gap a bit better. Should the audience lock on their SL voice, just to cut through the silence? That'd be a trainwreck. We can't even get people to stop using their cellphones in theaters, much less behave in a respectful fashion and cut out the chatter when they're anonymous. Of course, it's much easier to make such uncouth louts leave the premesis in SL, given the right scripts and a suitably alert security staff. I have no answers, and I'm likely being presumptuous in suggesting that any are needed. SL TV is finding its own way, just as RL TV did half a century ago.

In any case, that's just reaction to one viewing of one show, so it's likely far too early to form an opinion. I really should force myself to watch more SL shows, be they live, canned, musical, talk, or stand-up, just to see how things develop. Who knows? I might even enjoy being social, and getting out of the Garden to see such things in person, every once in a while.

Nah. That's just crazy talk.

Still Ain't Dead

2008-12-08T09:47:00.000-06:00

This blog is not officially dead yet, just in extended hiatus due to RL issues. Stay tuned! Or not!

Nothing Exciting

2008-09-06T19:22:00.002-06:00

Well, I haven't completely disappeared, although my SL time has been severely restricted due to RL work issues. On the other hand, I haven't done anything terribly blog-worthy, either.

I've done a little more work on Mo-Tech Tower, just for fun. This includes adding an automatic landing platform (pic courtesy of Caliburn Susanto) at the SkyLounge. Nothing terribly high tech, really, just a simple auto-rezzer. When an occupant of the Lounge presses the "open" button, or when an avatar (presumably in a vehicle, but not necessarily) approaches from the outside, a door will open on the north face and a network of four 10m circular docking platforms will appear hovering outside. They're not large enough for conventional aircraft (there's no landing strip), but they're perfect for small VTOL craft or, as Caliburn proved, balloons.

It's also ideal for SL's small but dedicated BASE jumping community. One could debate that four kilometers off the ground is not truly a BASE jump, since it's higher than most conventional parachute drops, but why split hairs? It's within 20 or 30 meters of the maximum altitude achievable by SL planes and drop ships (which would evaporate at 4,096 meters), anyway. I suppose if someone absolutely had to be higher, they could climb up to the avatar maximum (just shy of a million meters) using a flight assist. I'd think it'd be a very long, very boring drop down afterward, though.

Just to spite the new rules of the universe, I've also been tinkering off and on with methods of building above the 4,096 meter ceiling. So far, results are not encouraging. Near as I can tell, it's not merely a matter of placing the object root point below the ceiling. I tried multiple variants of room-on-a-stick, with the root below the line, and all of them were returned. Instead, it appears that it's either a matter of center-of-mass or geometric center (which may or may not be the same thing). Long, skinny protrusions anchored to large objects below the ceiling (like the spike on the top of the Tower, which is linked to the roof dome assembly) appear to work just fine. So do tiny objects linked to the end of such protrusions.

I've yet to try usefully large rooms linked to even larger below-ceiling bases, however, mostly because I didn't want to clutter the airspace around the newly installed landing pads with giant, invisible counterweights. In any case, given that any variant of a room anchored to a root point below the ceiling would be limited by the maximum linked distance (about 30 meters, give or take various tricks), it's all a pretty pointless endeavor. Best case, we're talking a small, lightly constructed room sitting at 4,125 meters or so. Aside from the dubious thrill of thumbing my nose at Havok 4, there's really not much incentive to continue.

Otherwise, I've been updating the Fist of Righteous Fury, one of Mo-Tech Industries' oldest products. Evidently, the Fist is the weapon of choice for The Outlaws, an SL biker gang. And one of its members asked if there was any chance of making a Foot of Righteous Fury for their use. Easy enough, given that the Fist uses the built in client animations, which includes punches and kicks. From there, I ended up adding all of the hand-to-hand attacks (left hook, right hook, and one-two combination punches, as well as the aforementioned kick), and cleaned up the status readouts on the dialog menu controls. That, and recoded some of the embarrassingly primitive, kludgey code from my earliest programming days. Now, I can say that it's only about two years behind the times, instead of three. I guess that's improvement?

Get a First Life... Yawn.

2008-08-18T12:09:00.000-06:00

So I wrote the following comment on this article in New World Notes. I made it as far as positioning my cursor over the "Post" button before I realized it's just pointless ranting of no particular insight or merit, and changed my mind. I think Hamlet (name dropping!) might be surprised at the number of times I've written comments like this on NWN, only to delete them un-posted in an effort to marginally improve the resulting average intellectual value of the discourse there. (If only everyone was so civically minded. You're welcome.) I'll leave the question of whether he'd care as an exercise for my loyal readers. In any case, this one amused me enough to copy-paste over here, instead of just zotting it outright. After all, this blog is primarily for my own amusement, anyway.... And nobody has any illusions about the intellectual value of the content here.

There really should be a stupidity fine charged to every TV or print media figure who makes the blindingly obvious and hackneyed "hyuk, hyuk, they should get a first life" comment. Maybe we could use the resultant profit stream to fund a money tree for the rare individuals who actually take the time to check SL out before speaking... Or fund a chain of educational islands with full-time paid press liaison staff, given the number of times I've seen it.

If nothing else, it just proves they haven't taken the minimal effort to install a client on their machine, or even do a quick Google or YouTube search, before shooting their mouths off. I mean, seriously, when is the last time you logged into SL for more than five minutes and DIDN'T see something sadly hilarious or deserving of such derision? (SL is like the web that way, come to think of it. Imagine that!) But all they can find is "Heh heh, they put 'life' in their name... I'll bet I can make a totally original 'get a life' comment that nobody on the entire planet ever, ever thought of before!"

We can take the derision, guys. SL is populated by some of the brightest, or at least the most tech-savvy, individuals in the world. By and large, we're well used to the knee-jerk put-them-in-their-place-before-they-become-our-bosses scorn that membership in such a group inspires. But please exercise the minimal intellectual horsepower required to be original about it!

Ahem. Well. Gonna climb down off this soapbox now, and crawl back into my parents basement where I reportedly belong.

Zero Point

2008-08-11T12:16:00.004-06:00

I guess I'm late off the mark here, but I wanted to join the other mourners in expressing my condolences and outrage for the loss of a Second Life artistic landmark, Zero Point. I've been a fan of Sabine Stonebender's megalithic, psychedelic art for over a year now (practically forever in SL terms). Zero Point was always on the top of my list of beautiful and inspirational landmarks to pass on to newcomers, and I know I'm not alone in that. And now, due to some kind of administrative snafu, it's evaporated from the face of the grid. And yes, returned, even in coalesced form, pretty much means destroyed in cases like this. It's like kicking down a sandcastle, then handing the builder a bag of sand.

Now all that remains of the Point are our memories, and a few handfuls of pictures which don't come near to doing it justice. I'd always meant to go back and take better photos, myself, as all I seem to have is a single picture of one of the smaller and more obscure works tucked in an unregarded corner of her parcel. [Addendum: Actually, that was a Starax Stratosky, not one of Ms. Stonebender's works.] There always seems to be time for that kind of thing tomorrow, though, doesn't there?

While Ms. Stonebender is of course upset, she seems to view this as an opportunity to rebuild. I admire her optimism, and eagerly wait to see what will rise from the ashes. In the meantime, I suppose all we can do is wish her luck, check our billing information again (not that that would have helped Sabine), and look warily at our own comparatively feeble builds. Once again, we're reminded that our shared new world is built on shifting sand.

Tinkering and Calculating

2008-08-11T11:51:00.002-06:00

Just a quick update on the tinkering front. A while back, I decided to pare down the inventory in Mo-Tech industries, converting some older items to freebies, and taking others off the market altogether. (The latter group included poor sellers, as well as items broken by recent changes that I didn't feel were worth fixing.) This reorganization effort allowed me to consolidate two largish, unattractively empty floors into one nicely filled (but still not crowded) space. Somewhat better, from a marketing standpoint, and it doesn't require the use of an elevator to see the rest of my wares. I will never understand why it's so difficult to figure out you should press the big green or red buttons labeled "UP" or "DOWN" to go, well, up or down. Have these people never ridden elevators before? I suppose I should make explanatory signage, but it galls me to have to hit folks over the head with the obvious.

In any case, this left me with three floors (I had two empty floors for future expansion to begin with) in which to tinker. So, I'm proud to announce (somewhat belatedly) the somewhat grand-ish opening of Mo-Tech Gallery! At present, the Gallery is divided into three floors. The first floor contains screenshots, photo-shop manipulations, and other forms of 2D electronic graphic art (putting aside the black velvet Elvis and the dogs playing poker- they're just placeholders). This includes several works by my departed (from SL, not from life in general) friend, Laura Ingersoll, as well as some other works I've collected (or created) over the years. (Basically, the theme is "pictures I had in my inventory that I never got around to hanging" at this point.) Level two contains three dimensional works (currently centered around the theme "low prim things I had in my inventory"- already regretting tiering down), and features sculptures by MenuBar Memorial and Zero Ball, as well as others. Both floors are worth spending a few minutes to browse and admire.

Level three is the one I expect to see the most work on in the future. I've decided to turn it into a gallery of old or failed SL projects and experiments. I've often referred to Mo-Tech Tower as a monument to my own ego. Might as well continue with that theme! Mostly, though, I'm using it as a dumping ground for my old work, as an aid for my ongoing project of letting go of my SL past and gradual end to general laurels-resting. If I dump it there, I can forget about it and move on. Kind of a physical representation of closure, I suppose.

(Speaking of closure, Monica and I are working on a project to close the book on Plywood. Nothing too exciting- and no it's not more comics- but it should be interesting, anyway. I'll make one last post about that when it goes live.)

In any case, this gallery currently includes a mockup of the heli-bike designed for the still ongoing, if substantially neglected, bicycle integration project. (I need to get back to that one. It was kind of fun.) Also shown are a couple of pieces from Babel Two, and one of the versions of the particle contour mapper. Ultimately, I'm going to add samples of the other, more photogenic and/or interesting projects littering my "Projects-Experimental" folder. I'm also going to add a couple of rotating exhibits for some of the excellent props Monica Young/Chrestomanci Bard made for Plywood, as well. A ton of work went into those, and it seems a shame to let them disappear with nothing but photos to remain.

So, anyway, that's one of the things I've been messing with, off and on, for the past few weeks. In other news, I was thinking about SL years verses real-time years, and something occurred to me. Going by the movement of the sun in the virtual sky, an SL day is four hours long. So six SL days pass for every one RL day. That means, by my calculations, avatar Moriash turned 21 on around July 1 (give or take a day). And I didn't even take the poor fellow out for his first legal bender! (Of course, given some of the mind trips I've taken the poor fellow on during his formative years, I'm guessing he'd find mere booze pretty tame, anyway.) I'd say that my rez-day is also about the youngest (give or take a few RL months or SL years) that earns a modicum of respect solely based on longevity. Not ancient or venerable, by any means. But I've occasionally been referred to (if not deferred to) as one of the SL elders in many a group. And, yet, in many gatherings I still feel like a young tyro, a kid. Again, that slots in rather nicely with my calculated age. Still all-but-a-kid, but now with the figurative, metaphorical ability to buy booze for my younger friends. (Don't do that, folks. It's illegal. Unless you mean in SL, then knock yourself out.) Solely by virtue of my age and experience, there are quite a few things I can do, and even places I'm invited to go, that my younger cohorts cannot.

By my calculations, that pegs Steller Sunshine, Second Life's first resident, at the ripe old age of 38. And, depending on how you count it, few of the Linden av-family would be much into their forties. Mind you, this is only pointless numbers juggling, of limited use or meaning. Nonetheless, I find it somehow encouraging. Second Life is still a young world.

Then again, I suppose you could look at this another way. Most avatars won't live nearly as long as Ms. Sunshine. Statistically, the vast majority die off, as their typists get tired of SL, or otherwise move on, long before they reach their teens. Maybe this is more like the harshest days of the early American frontier, or perhaps even the middle ages, where a rare few live long enough to reach adulthood, and the village elders are only in their thirties. But I'm starting to hear the sounds of a tenuous, muddled analogy approaching dramatic tensile failure, so I guess I'll leave it at that. Still, food for thought. Maybe there's something to the 6-to-1 time ratio, in terms of the growth and development of avatars, and of SL in general.

Things To Do

2008-08-07T18:12:00.004-06:00

Last night, I logged into Second Life discouraged and disheartened. If you've followed this weblog at all, you're no doubt tired of hearing about Mo-Tech Tower and the SkyLounge. This 4+ kilometer tall monument to my own ego was my pride and joy, and at one time I considered it one of my greater technical achievements. [Addendum: Okay, "pride and joy" is overstating things. But I really like it, anyway.] Stop me if you've heard this before, but up until very recently it was a serious pain in the rump to build anything above 768 meters. Beyond that, conventional object editing stops working (objects jump to 768 meters if you try to move them with the build tools). You can still rez objects in place, and have them remain indefinitely, though. So building at high altitudes requires a scripted system of automatic rezzing tools. Build the tower at ground level, tuck them in an automatic rezzer, and let it dump a copy for you at the right altitude. Worse, at one time any object left above 2000 meters would be returned or deleted every simulator reset (this actually changed a few months ago, not long after the advent of Havok 4 physics). So add the complication of scanning for simulator crashes and re-assembling any missing pieces automatically. Really quite a bit of work for a dubious architectural achievement, but I was pretty pleased with having one of the tallest (if not the tallest- it's hard to say for sure) structures in Second Life.

Well, as of a week or so ago, all of that changed. See, as of client version 1.20, objects can be moved and edited all the way up to 4096 meters, using the same build tools you'd use at ground level. Now everyone can build as high as they like, with no special technical jiggery-pokery required. And this is a good thing, really. Much more convenient for me, too. But, suddenly, Mo-Tech Tower isn't such a big deal anymore (if it ever was), and I'm left with the vague feeling that I used to be cool. "Waaay back in the old days, we couldn't just dump our houses wherever, all willy-nilly! If'n you wanted ta' build at the edge of the world then, by gum, you had ta' earn it! An' I had to walk all thuh way ta' ANWR ta' get my prims. Up hill! Both ways! You kids, git offa mah lawn!"

So that's where last night found me, logging in late in the evening to experiment with giant invisiprims and occlusion culling to see if I could build a screen to block out the view of all the new 4000 meter skyboxes I was certain I'd find on my doorstep by the end of the week. Depressing. But, as I flew up to my workshop, I received an e-mail from Jenn Hienrichs, founder of the SL Things to Do website. Apparently, Mo-Tech Tower was featured as the August 6, 2008 Thing to Do! As we chatted, Ms. Hienrichs dropped the landmark to the Things to Do group. (Which is eminently cool, by the way. Go. Join it now. So sayeth Mori.) Soon, the Tower was flooded with dozens of tell-tale green dots, all come to take a gander at the mighty Tower.

As more visitors than I'd ever seen at once flew up the elevator, I read the Things to Do write up, written by the well-traveled Caliburn Susanto. (As I later discovered, Mr. Susanto found the Tower over a year ago, on one of his frequent balloon trips across the grid.) The last line of his excellent article really struck home for me. I can't imagine a more flattering or inspiring epitaph for the project. "The Mo-Tech Tower is a landmark in Second Life and a tribute to the early builders and scripters who pushed the limits of the platform in their efforts to create unique content (or just do cool stuff!)." Needless to say, I was stunned.

That one line, whether my work actually deserved it or not, changed my whole outlook on Mo-Tech Tower. Sure, the achievement, such that it was, has been obviated now. Once, it was kind of clever. Now? No big deal. But that's not the end of it! How long can I rest on my dubious laurels, anyway? Maybe it's worth a plaque or something.

Mo-Tech Tower and SkyLounge
Established April, 2007 and December, 2005
Back when this was hard!

Beyond that, it's time to move on. I don't think I'll be installing that invisiprim privacy barrier to avoid seeing my new neighbors. Not anymore. Instead, I think I'm going to pick up on some of the old projects I'd been putting off; projects I've been avoiding precisely because they used to be irritating to do at high altitudes. I've had a "holodeck" built into the third floor for over a year now, but never added anything beyond a simplistic conference room. Maybe it's time to add a few more programs. Maybe I'll add a high altitude vehicle dock and BASE jumping center, as Caliburn suggested. Maybe I'll convert that press conference room into SL's highest altitude movie theater, as Jenn mentioned. Maybe I'll work on poking and prodding Second Life into letting me dodge around the 4096 meter build ceiling, not to claim any records, but just to see if it can be done. Or maybe I'll pull out any of a dozen half-finished projects tucked in the forgotten recesses of my inventory, or work on something entirely new. In all likelihood, nothing I do will set the grid on fire, or even meet with any particular notice. Second Life isn't the little pond of early adopters and enthusiasts it once was. Dabblers and script monkeys like me aren't going to make so much as a splash in the vast ocean it's become. You know what? That's just fine. Time to stop worrying about that kind of thing and enjoy tinkering for its own sake again.

I guess I'll close by sending out a big thanks to Jenn and Caliburn, for accidentally telling me exactly what I needed to hear, exactly when I needed to hear it. I'm glad I ran into you guys.

2008 SLRFL

2008-08-07T12:11:00.000-06:00

Well, I didn't have much to say about it this time (or anything else, lately- sorry about that), but I did participate in the 2008 Second Life Relay for Life this year. Not a whole lot of substance to add, really. The Relay fundraising volunteers put in an astounding effort, and raised over L$55 million for the American Cancer Society. That's over US$193,000!

My team, the Relay Raiders, pulled in over L$10 million, or about US$35,000. I wasn't able to participate as much as I would've liked this year, but between the proceeds from Mo-Tech Industries sales in-world and RL donations, I did manage to raise about L$169,000 (around US$640, over twice what I managed last year). Not too shabby, if I do say so myself! And, like last year, the Jail-an-Avatar event was a smashing success, raising a couple million Lindens between the five teams that participated. I only provided scripting and construction services for the jails, and technical support during the day-long event, but I'm still proud to have been a small part of it. All told, I think we can call this year's Relay a success.

On a personal level, I didn't get to do as much with the whole treadmill stunt this year. I'd actually planned on skipping it altogether, due to RL conflicts on the day of the Relay, but ended up hopping on the contraption and joining in late for a few laps. Since it was something of a last minute impulse, I didn't even try to setup the webcam and such (like last year). Shown at right are photos of the mileage and time readouts for two sessions. The top one was taken at precisely 99:59 into it, just before the timer rolled over to zero. A few moments after, I took a misstep off the back of the treadmill and twisted the heck out of my ankle. Nothing too serious, but it pretty much put an end to walking for the next few hours. I ended up logging out in disgust, and getting some sleep instead.

The bottom picture was taken at the end of the Relay Raiders' victory lap, the following morning. By then, the swelling had gone down, so I decided to run the final lap on the treadmill. All told, I walked about seven real life miles, and approximately 26 in-world kilometers (give or take distance lost to lag and poor steering). Quite a bit less than last year, and less than I'd hoped, but enough to make the point... Whatever that might have been. I suppose it was kind of a neat thing to do, the first time, but I'm just as happy I didn't make a big deal out of it this year. It's too easy to cross over from fundraising publicity stunt to self-aggrandizement. And I already have a weblog for that!

Incidentally, I'd like to offer a nod of thanks to Moo Money over at Massively for featuring last year's promo walk video on the July 20 Cinemassively feature. It's nice to be remembered! Not that it matters overmuch, but the 23 miles mentioned was spread out over the actual '07 SLRFL event. (Yes, I was stupid. My blisters had blisters.) I have no idea how many miles I'd actually walked before that film was made. As part of my morning exercise routine, I did somewhere between 2.5 and 3 miles a day, every day, for at least the preceding four or five months. I suppose that adds up to quite a lot, even if it was done in hour-long chunks with a day's rest between. I know I made at least one pass down every road on the mainland continents at the time. One way into the record books, anyway.

The Pleasure Principle

2008-05-29T19:43:00.006-06:00

I found myself with a few minutes to kill this evening, so I decided to drop by Harrison Hall and check out the Surrealism exhibit. Harrison Hall is part of the Librarium complex in Abitibi sim. It started out as a virtual library by friend and ex-neighbor, OmegaX Zapata. Since then, it's passed to Caledonian library enthusiast, JJ Drinkwater. It's also expanded to include multiple art exhibits, of both the 2D and 3D varieties. Well worth a visit next time you're looking to get some culture slung at you.

While there, I became briefly inspired by a somewhat obscure René Magritte painting, "The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James)." (It was either this or a green apple. And I look terrible in a bowler hat.) Not too shabby for ten minutes' work, huh? I may have to wear this one out and about for a while, just to see if I can stumble over any art history majors.

I'm often surprised by the things I have on hand in my inventory. After three-plus years of disorganization and neglect, I've reached a useful state of creative critical mass. Need a big honkin' lightbulb? No problem! I just happen to have made one back in 2006. Need a greyish suit with an off-orange tie? No problem. I apparently have three of them, for some reason. More and more of my little side projects seem to be going that way, lately. I suppose I should get organized, someday, and throw out about half of my inventory. But I expect it'd just stifle my creativity.

Sorry, LL. Those asset server problems? Yeah, my bad.

If...

2008-02-22T12:28:00.002-06:00

If you have ever placed a 10 meter wide spinning FOR SALE sign above a parcel...
If your home is surrounded by No Entry bars (because your 512 parcel with the freebie prefab might contain state secrets)...
If you use a home security system left running 24/7 (bonus points if it's at ground level)...
If your home security system is set to teleport home...
If your land is permanently flagged as No Scripts without a damned good reason (hint: there isn't one)...
If your land is flagged No Fly...
If you've ever created, or knowingly used, an SL weapon that fires a payload not set Temp-on-Rez...
If you rely on scripts to delete the aforementioned non-ToR payloads (thus leading to hundreds of inert bullets littering No-Script parcels, although I'm inclined to consider that just punishment for the No-Script flag)...
If you have your auto-return set to zero, and then never visit your land to clean up the mess (bonus points for no script, no return, because 172 physical, particle-spewing, non-ToR watermelons really improve the sim performance and FPS)...
If you've ever used an Orbiter...
If you can't figure out how to turn off your AO (using an AO to begin with puts you on thin ice, far as I'm concerned)...
If you've ever sold someone else's freebies...
If your shop is still equipped with CopyBot protection spammers (which stopped working about five minutes after the CopyBot code went public)...
If you still think Cage Guns are cool...
If you have an LOL gesture that sends your avatar into a two minute long giggling fit, complete with animations and sound effects...
If you're wandering around in public with prim erogenous zones attached (we can see them every time we hit the ALT key, you know)...
If you've ever referred to anything in SL as "rape" or "terrorism..."
If you're a Gorean slave, and tell me to contact your master if I have a problem with you...
If you're a Gorean master, and get incensed if I speak with your slaves...
If you're a Gorean, period...
If you wear enough bling to make Liberace question your taste...
If you've ever sent an IM to a stranger saying nothing but "hi..."
If your shop's welcome script greets me with an unsolicited notecard, a landmark, or more than one line of IM'd text...
If you've ever sold a 4x4 plot for 20 times the market rate...
If you attempt to Friend me after a two line conversation...
If you invite me to join your group without ever having met me...

...Then you, sir or madam, are an idiot and I have no interest in speaking with you. Move along.

Just something I had sitting in my drafts folder, and was too timid to post until now. I'll likely be adding to this as the spirit moves me. Turning off comments here. If you don't agree, well, you're wrong. So sayeth Mori.

Back?

2008-02-09T02:33:00.000-06:00

You know, I just had one of the best evenings (and, well, early mornings) I've had in SL in a very long time. What'd I do? Not much. A whole lot of yammering about nothing, and a fair but of scripting guidance for an SL newcomer. I'm going to have to keep this in mind: SL isn't about the technology, or the scripting, or the money. It's about, and has always been about, the people. I can't say I'm 100% back, yet. But for the first time in months I look forward to logging in again.

I've taken some steps to, hopefully, broaden my own personal community in SL. It's a pretty exclusive group, and even required me to submit an application and CV, so we'll see how that works out. In the meantime, well, I'll have to see about catching up with folks I've been neglecting. We'll see if my newfound optimism about SL holds up long enough for the follow through.

My Tiny Life

2008-01-17T09:00:00.000-06:00

No, I'm not back yet. Just ran across a quick bit of news over at Boing Boing, and thought it was worth sharing. Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life is now available in PDF format as a free download from Lulu.com. Basically, it's the story of one man's brief visit (he was only there three months, a major bone of contention for some of his detractors) to the venerable old online world of LambdaMOO. And, despite the text-only environment, you'll see more than a little in common with MOO's conceptual offspring, free-form online worlds like Second Life. The technology may have changed, but the culture is more or less the same. Well worth a read.

Shiny #3

2008-01-01T00:01:00.000-06:00

Hey, look, another one. Happy rez-day to me. Oh, and happy New Year to everyone else.

Folks, I think I'm going on hiatus until I find some way to feel like I'm part of SL, or at least find some way to enjoy it again. Don't hold your breath.

Eight Random Things About Me

2007-12-20T19:10:00.000-06:00

This post used to contain an overly long and embarrassingly dull response to the "Eight Random Things About Me" SL weblog meme. I've removed it because, frankly, it bored even me. Since the post achieved little but irritating the one person I tagged in turn, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to keep it here. If anyone really wants to see it, I've archived it here. [Modified 1/1/08.]

CSI

2007-12-07T14:12:00.000-06:00

As you have no doubt have heard by now, CSI: NY did an episode involving SL a bit back. A few weeks ago, I gritted my teeth and sat through "Down the Rabbit Hole," just to see what all the fuss was about. (Yeah, I know, I'm late to the party again.) Unfortunately, since my TiVo decided to be a little bitch and delete half of my stored shows to make room for a Monk rerun marathon, I ended up using CBS's "InnerTube" to watch the episode. (Yeah, yeah, P2P, Bit Torrent, iTunes, yadda, yadda. I didn't want to mess with any of that at the time.) This was mildly vexing, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I couldn't pause or rewind reliably using their klunky player on my ancient machine. Too bad, because I ended up missing about 10% of the dialogue while I was laughing uproariously at CSI's version of SL. I'll spare you the full review, in part because that boat has long since sailed, and in part because I've forgotten most of the episode and am unwilling to watch it twice. So, instead, I'll just throw down a meandering rant in the general vicinity of the topic. More fun that way, for me anyway.

In general, I'd say they got about as close to a true representation of SL as the public would allow. Really, it was about as close as any movie or TV show can be expected to get to faithfully portraying any computer related topic. Or, as someone once said, "never let the truth interfere with a good story." When there's a conflict between reality and the storyline, we all know which will lose. And on television, reality generally loses out to cinematic impact and viewer expectations, as well. As I've said before, SL is a tough concept for the average Joe to swallow. It's a game-like online world, without the game. Given the limitations of mainstream entertainment, where it is all-but-forbidden to show the viewer anything he can't understand in 45-minutes-plus-commercials, CSI did an admirable job of showing something vaguely akin to SL culture. Can't really blame them for seeding in some imaginary MMORPG gaming to give the viewing audience something to latch onto.

As Tateru (yay! name dropping!) mentioned, this wasn't the SL we have right now. This was SL in a decade or so. Or, rather, the SL the average MMORPG player and Snow Crash fanboy would like to see someday. That's the crux of the problem, of course. Second Life is many things. But a dramatic, edge-of-your-seat adventure? Uh, no. You get onto private islands and such by schmoozing for invites and joining groups, not beating monsters in hand-to-hand combat. Or shooting mystic fire from your hands. Or throwing the exploding heads of your defeated foes. Unfortunately for you Hiro Protagonist wannabes and WoW players, your ability to swing a virtual sword means precisely nada to the SL community at large.

Yes, I know there are various sword games and RPGs. Some are quite nifty, on the rare occasions that lag and other technical issues will allow them to work. That's not the SL community at large, is it? All right, then.

I heartily approve of the "beware of RL meetings" message running under the whole episode. Be careful out there, folks. Freaks abound, and a disproportionate number of them seem to be parked in front of a computer. 'Nuff said.

Up until a few days ago, I would have smugly announced that your computer couldn't be hacked through the standard client via SL. It seems that someone found a way to force an exploit through Quicktime, which is used for streaming media in SL. So, until they spackle up that hole, SL just got a little more dangerous. Live and learn. Still, the whole flashing-lights-and-alarms, "Log out now!" emergency situation? Not going to happen, either.

I approve of using a wireless number pad to get around in SL. (That's what they were using for the the later wandering around and the combat scenes, although most SL melee combat systems require a mouse, as well.) I've done that myself, and it's quite workable. Kudos for not going with the more seductive route of using a joystick. While it can be done, it would've looked kind of silly to even a casual SL player.

The dramatic rocket-pack assisted chase scene was nifty, actually. And much applause for the use of Svarga as a set. I got a laugh out of the mechanic-by-day, shoe-fashionista-by-night character, and could easily imagine such a person in real life.

I suppose someone could make a damage-enabled paintball gun and pull off a hit while in an appropriately flagged parcel. The deceased avatar dropping her shoe was nonsensical, and pointed out the lack of input from technical advisers. I guess I shouldn't judge them too harshly, given that I've used the same technically incorrect plot point in my own efforts. (Oh, by the way, FIRST! Neener, neener, neener! Okay, that's out of my system now.) But avatar attachments (like shoes or weapons) really don't spontaneously fall off, even in the rare instances that your avatar dies and gets TP'd home. Someone could rig an attachment to rez a telltale shoe on demand, but it'd be kind of silly. Might be kind of a cute pre-teleport gimmick for a Cinderella-esque avatar, though. It'd require some scripted inventory shuffling (rez the shoe, then the would-be Prince would touch it to have the footwear pass him a copy of itself before self-deleting), but it could be done. A long and very strange RPG-esque search would then ensue, as Prince Charming goes from female av to female av, persuading each to try on the shoe attachment. Scripts could be included to compare the original shoe's owner to each would-be Princess, perhaps with amusingly scripted object-scaling effects and try-on-shoe animations to deliberately make the shoe too small or too big if they don't match... But I digress.

Similarly, someone could come up with an exclusive island that required passing a test of gladiatorial might to enter (or, more likely, to obtain the necessary group membership to pass the "No Entry" bars). Mind you, given both the potential for cheating (I can say from personal experience that it's virtually impossible to prevent third-party scripted objects from being used to gain an edge in your game), and the huge lag problems for SL action games, such a contest would rapidly become a joke.

The concept of a virtual information broker is an intriguing one, and I suppose I could see technical and social engineering solutions for faking up the White Rabbit's ability to locate random avs for cash. I can think of very few legitimate uses for such a service, though. If I were to decide to turn evil and facilitate stalkers gridwide, the easiest way would be to create a massive group of users to act as field agents. When a customer inquires about the location of a subject, I'd send out a group chat asking "Are you near so-and-so right now? L$50 to the first person that IMs with a location." (Rigid group controls would be required to prevent such a group from becoming a spam fest, and to prevent non-officer field agents from benefiting from the group for free.) There are enough money tree and camping chair customers out there to support such a network. Of course, I could also see membership in such groups being grounds for instant ejection and banning in many areas. I know I wouldn't take kindly to someone who was a member of a such a group coming into my theoretical popular venue and facilitating the stalking of my customers.

Perhaps a grid spanning network of scanners, combined with a name-to-key service, could be used? It would be expensive to build from scratch, but it could work quite nicely piggy-backed on top of one or more of the larger billboard networks (Mr. Lee, et al). It would be easy enough to drop an extra script in a billboard. The network could be further expanded by passing out scanner attachments to the camping-chair crowd, as an automated and more discreet version of the group system above. Payment for wearing such an attachment could be done on a L$-per-hour basis and/or as a bonus if the wearer was nearest the subject when a call came in. No tell-tale group membership would be required, and any necessary news could be relayed by e-mails to the attachments. (This also prevents stalker group members from succumbing to their sense of guilt and notifying the subject that he or she is being stalked. They would have no reason to know if their scanner attachments were even activated, much less who they were be used to find.) Between fixed locations and a few score mobile units, a reasonably comprehensive scanner network could be created, covering the majority of mainland grid and many of the more popular private islands (the ones with popular attractions and camping chairs, anyway).

Using the service would be relatively straightforward, anyway. The stalker (or detective, or whatever) finds the White Rabbit and inquires about a name. The Rabbit checks a name-to-key server, and determines if the subject is online using a standard show-online script with the subject's key. If he's not online, or his name isn't in the name-to-key server(s), the Rabbit refunds the stalker's money (or not). If the subject is online and his key is available, the key is sent to all fixed and mobile scanners. (This is a tricky task. E-mail? HTTP? XML-RPC? Server push or timed checks from the scanners? Tough to send a message to several hundred items in-world at once without overwhelming whatever system was used.) Upon receipt of the key, the scanners send out a single max-range (96 meter) llSensor ping, using the requested key as a parameter. If no results, we have another possible refund-inducing failure mode. (An above-board businessman would probably establish all this before even asking for a fee, assuming the customer can be trusted not to dither around so long that the customer moves before the transaction could be completed.) If said sensor gets a result, the associated script responds (through whatever cross-grid channels are available) with the subject's sim and position. White Rabbit teleports to that location (or if he has class, the general vicinity), offers his client a following teleport (or just IMs him a SLURL if he doesn't want to make the trip himself), and that's that. And, as you can see, the whole process could be automated to cut the live White Rabbit avatar out of the loop altogether.

Okay, so it could, theoretically, be done. Personally, I hope nobody bothers. If your purposes can't be served just as well by an IM saying "Hey, got a moment?" and a teleport request, you should probably find an alternative activity.

Well, this rambling missive has sat in my Drafts folder for several days now, and clearly it's not going anywhere constructive. So I'll leave it at that. In general, aside from some general gaffs (deliberately?) introduced to add tension and move the plot along, I was pleased with CSI's portrayal of SL. I guess that's two qualified thumbs up.

Shiny #2

2007-11-25T21:52:00.000-06:00

Another one. This didn't actually happen to the poor fellow sitting up there in corner of this blog. The dramatic sunset was just begging for some, well, drama. But I'm sure it's happened to someone, somewhere on the grid.

Shiny #1

2007-11-17T20:31:00.000-06:00

After plowing through their back archives, I was inspired to ~~rip off~~ create an homage to Emily Horne and Joey Cormeau's brilliant A Softer World.

I have no idea who the woman in the pink dress is. This was clipped from a couple of surreptitious snapshots, taken several months ago. Normally, I am not inordinately moved by beauty in SL avatars. Where everyone is beautiful, no one is. But I can distinctly remember being struck by this avatar, standing there with a wistful look on her carefully sculpted face while her skirt swayed in the breeze. I hope that, whoever she (or he) is, she will forgive me for using her image this way.

Another Stereo Pic

2007-11-17T20:25:00.000-06:00

Androclese Antonelli's "You Can Leave Your Hat On" (cross-eyed stereo)

Automatic Navigation-Mothballed

2007-11-13T12:27:00.000-06:00

Several days ago, I mentioned trying to come up with a self-guiding vehicle using the right-hand maze solving trick. This morning, it occurred to me that I never got around to posting an update. In short, I'd have to call it both a success and a failure. On the plus side, it is capable of following roads quite nicely. When it works, it works great! From the proper starting point, I was able to get it to run through a couple dozen sims before self-destructing (as is the fate of all SL vehicles). Incidentally, llMoveToTarget seems to handle sim crossings more easily and safely than conventional vehicle code. I can't say for certain why. Worth filing away for future projects, in any case.

However, the usual problems with No Entry ban lines and vehicles still apply. Under normal circumstances, the road follower just skirts the borders of such land, without crossing them. But not so in the case of sim border crossings. Those ultimately are leaps of faith, based on the normal road design guidelines. Generally (~95% of the time), roads continue on the other side of the sim border. So it's assumed, in effect, that if a road leads to such a border, it must continue on the other side. And this works most of the time.

But the occasional fringe case kills it. In particular, roads that cross sim borders at shallow angles can create awkward crossings. If the vehicle is approaching the border at a steep angle (say near perpendicular), and the road crosses at a shallower angle (a few degrees off parallel), the vehicle can end up crossing the edge of the road at the same time as it crosses the sim, dropping it in a third-party owned parcel on the other side. This is normally recoverable, as the road will still be only a few meters away, within normal scan range. (I also added manual controls for the driver, so he can nudge the vehicle back on track if it cannot recover on its own.) But, if that third-party parcel has No Entry enabled, the vehicle will eject the passenger, and Bad Things (TM) happen. Anyone who has driven an SL vehicle for more than five minutes knows what I'm talking about. I sincerely wish they'd fix the invisible ban lines bug at sim borders, for just that reason. And, of course, since parcel parameters (such as the name, group, owner combo I used for picking nav points, or detection of no-entry flags) cannot be read across sim borders, it's an unsolvable problem. At lease, unsolvable without dramatically changing my whole concept.

Then there's the problem of vast tracts of Linden-owned land set to no script, effectively disabling vehicles of all sorts. This one was particularly vexing, as many of the roadways and waterways on the mainland cross these parcels. That pretty much nixed my plans of an autonomous road follower, as this change to no-script tends to happen on the opposite site of sim boundaries, as well. As such, llGetParcelFlags can't be used to detect them, either.

There were a few other land configuration issues that killed it, as well. Occasional fringe cases (such as Linden Maintenance plots abutting roads, misleading the scanner) caused unexpected changes in direction, weird choices in sim border crossing, etc. And one sim-border-brushing turn in Alice on the stagnant river gave me all sorts of fits. In short, it works great for roads... But only roads. The chaos of the patchwork Grid just doesn't lend itself to such automatic navigation. Too bad. Still, I can't consider any scripting task like this to be wasted effort. A use will inevitably present itself.

The only other method I can think of for my proposed road-touring vehicle would involve walking down all the roads on the Mainland, and plotting a course by hand (or by script) as I go. I suppose this could be done. (In fact, I think that's how the Atoll continent's Metro bus system works.) But I find the idea distasteful, not to mention horribly daunting on the convoluted roads of the Mainland.

So, file away that project in the "Experimental" folder for a later day. In the meantime, a fellow by the name of Lionel Oliva has presented me with an interesting proposal for a new SL game. And it looks like I'll have a chance to reuse a few parts of the now-defunct Garage of DOOM, too. See what I mean? No script is wasted.

More on that later.

Copybot? Really?

2007-10-30T11:02:00.000-06:00

This morning, I received no less than three different anti-CopyBot IMs in the span of 15 minutes. Those always inspire an evil chuckle when I see them in the wild.

Copyright Protection Version 3.057285a: !quit
Copyright Protection Version 3.057285a: CopyBot Protection Mark III
Copyright Protection Version 3.057285a: Featuring:- Dynamic Protection with Low Spam.

I can't decide if the features brag line was a deliberate attempt at irony, or if the creator was honestly just this clueless. I'd like to think it's the former, but in all likelihood it's just pure stupidity. Irony is a dead art in the online world.

Of course, the really sad thing is that people are still running CopyBot defeaters. Give it up, folks. Nobody wants your stuff. And if they did, and ~~chose to use CopyBot~~ somehow figured out how to use CopyBot to get it (since CopyBot didn't work that way), the "!quit" command was probably changed about 37 seconds after the first 'Bot was deployed. I expect that either these folks haven't checked on their store in the last several months, or they are massively out of touch. Perhaps even moreso than I am, and that's saying something.

Automatic Navigation Preliminaries

2007-10-30T10:55:00.000-06:00

Lately, I've been kicking around a project involving automated navigation of the various Linden Protected Land roads and river ways. I'm toying with a low-rent, no-camping version of the SL Metro, hopefully without the controversy. Or maybe I'll just make an automatic vehicle for myself, and take a few relaxed tours of SL now and then.

Above, you can see an early test run, with all the built-in debug tools enabled. This version of the navigation script sweeps in front of the vehicle (the black rectangle that I'm sitting on, in center), checking parcel data at each point. If the parcel at that point is named "Protected Land" (or "The Garden of Mo" in this test), belongs to the Maintenance group, or is owned by Governor Linden, then it's a valid location. If not, the point is thrown out. The sweeps are comprised of points along two concentric arcs. The check points are shown as white spheres in this test.

After the sweep, the destination is derived from the average of all the remaining valid points. The vehicle moves to this target (shown by the red spheres), and the sweep is started again. The net result should be a path roughly down the center of the road or waterway. In this case it's running in wide open land, so the path is straight (save for adjustments for elevation). This method works well enough, but has some problems that can generally only be solved by adding more and more check points. This is ultimately a losing proposition.

So, I've since gotten away from this method in favor of the simpler right-hand rule. Basically, this involves checking forward of and to the right of the vehicle. (Directions relative to the vehicle's current orientation, with "forward" being in the positive X direction, and "right" being in the negative Y direction.) If the right hand side is too close to the edge of the valid parcel, bump the vehicle to the left by a set amount. If the point ahead is not valid, turn left by a predetermined angle and try again. Turn right by a small angle each cycle, and the net result is a vehicle that tends to stay within a few meters of the right hand edge of the path.

The process isn't perfect. For example, it tends to make left turns instead of veering right at sharp intersections, as the forward scan tends to hit the opposite edge of the parcel before the vehicle can make its slow right-hand turn to continue following the right hand edge. Tweaking of the turn angles (veer right/clockwise vs. correct left/counter-clockwise) can help this, but that'll have to be determined with live road testing.

Still, even if that flaw is never fixed, it should be sufficient for my needs. The goal is to take a scenic flight across the Grid, not slavishly solve the maze of SL roadways. And it requires considerably fewer checks than the full forward scan above. I don't know how server intensive the llGetParcelDetails command is, but calling it two or three times (I actually need one more distant forward check to avoid running out of bounds at sharp turns) instead of a dozen or more is surely more efficient.

I'm sure I'll talk more about this project later. It's helping my outlook in SL to once again have something to sink my teeth into, anyway. But that's not really the reason I'm showing this particular picture. This was posted to illustrate the typical working conditions on the Mainland. Okay, maybe not "typical," but certainly not uncommon.

Behind me, you can see a batch of billboards, now nestled neatly in the middle of my newly acquired expansion property. Someday, it'll annoy me enough to consider buying it out. (It'll have to really annoy me to merit spending L$9.5K for a 16m plot. In the meantime, big, obscuring trees- which were disabled in this pic- are free.) This is, of course, the guy's whole obnoxious strategy. You thought he was making money from the ad sales? Nah, that's just plausible deniability.

Beside that is an equally obnoxious spinning "For Sale" sign, hovering over an a horribly overpriced 512 plot. Nothing unusual there.

Everywhere else, you can see the results of the nigh-daily griefer attack. A half hour or so before this picture was taken, a wave of self-replicating cubes swept over Abitibi and Louise. Said objects were textured with a scene from the now-mercifully-defunct "Super Mario Brothers" cartoon show, and spewed countless particle images of a flying Mario with wing-bedecked hat. And, to top it all off, each cube bawled "That's Mama Luigi to you, Mario!" over and over again, ad nauseum. One AR, some parcel ban settings, and an object return, and I was able to clear my land well enough to get on with my work. Fortunately, Louise is too far off the beaten path to routinely attract such attentions. Griefers generally go after population centers.

All in all, just another day in Second Life.

Of course, given the state of the mainland Grid, automatic touring balloons (or whatever vehicle concept I settle on) might prove to be depressing. Putting aside the architecturally dubious builds, the billboards, the gaudy shops, and the other man-made eyesores, even the natural scenery is degrading. (Inasmuch as anything is "natural" here.) Above is a picture of a waterway in Keuka, a few regions southwest of my home sim of Louise. I discovered it while looking for long, uninterrupted stretches of Protected Land in which to run my early tests.

Or, rather, it used to be a waterway. Sloppy terraforming and general apathy from the successive owners of the adjacent rental properties have succeeded in damming the flow, and turning the adjacent river into two long, shallow puddles. At one time, this was part of a reasonably large, navigable river valley that stretched across a large portion of the mainland continent. Now, it dead-ends in a watery cul-de-sac after only a couple more sims. Said cul-de-sac is filled with hopeful docks, perhaps in an "if you build it, they will come" attempt to attract yachts to the quarter-sim-wide micro-lake.

Now, I can't remember the last time I piloted an SL water craft. As with all vehicles, I generally lost interest after the fourth or fifth botched sim handoff and resulting crash-and-burn. But, still, this depresses me. At one time, not too far from where this picture was taken, there were lovingly sculpted rapids. A bit further downstream, an inner tube ride allowed visitors to take a leisurely tour downstream. And now? Uninspired waterfront houses, jammed edge-to-edge with piers, stairways, and docks leading to tiny, stagnant ponds. Very sad.

Convoluted Communication

2007-10-18T11:54:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I had a brief conversation with someone via IM. Nothing unusual, just an inquiry about the possibility of purchasing a copy of the SkyLounge tower. (No! It's mine! All mine!) Been getting quite a few IMs about the tower lately. Makes me wonder if there was something that caused a shift in SL building tastes. Sure, now that Havok 4 is on the verge of truncating it at 1024 meters, everyone gets interested. Story of my Second Life.

Anyway, after the conversation, something occurred to me. I was answering it via IM-to-email. So was the other party, via his iPhone (according to the little "sent from my iPhone" tag appended to a couple of his IMs). I receive an IM (presumably initiated from within SL just before logout), relayed to my GMail account. This, in turn, was relayed to my work address. I replied to said IM with an email, which was sent via GMail back to Second Life, where it was sent by internal instant message to the other party. Apparently, he had logged out by then (unsurprising, given the minutes-long delays sometimes introduced by IM-to-email), so the IM was sent to him by whatever channels he uses (at least one relay from his email account to his iPhone). He responded, and the IM was relayed back to me through the same channels, in reverse. Repeat a couple more times.

So, thanks to at least five different telecommunications services, not to mention the dozens of intermediate internet stops along the way, we were able to conduct a simple conversation about a giant tower that doesn't actually exist. Ah, welcome to the information age.

Not Dead Yet

2007-10-11T10:52:00.000-06:00

No, I'm not dead, and I haven't quit... Although sometimes I honestly wonder why. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing with myself here. As it stands, the only thing I do in-world lately is tend to my shop, so I can cash out my profits and defray the cost of staying in SL another month. And then I log out. Obviously, there's a fundamental flaw in my overall strategy here. I desperately need a new project, or something else to get enthusiastic about again. Just existing in SL for the pure, dubious pleasure of existing there is no longer sufficient. The perty scenery just ain't cutting it anymore.

In the meantime, more beating-of-the-dead-horse blog filler! Here are some more Plywood ideas that never came to fruition. I re-discovered them whilst sorting through ancient e-mails in my "SL-Ideas" folder, in a vain attempt to solve the aforementioned dilemma. Some of the concepts came from discussions with Will Webb, friend and neighbor in Louise sim. Some are my own. I think they could have made decent strips, but I always felt like the PPP series was a bit of a cop-out. Can't come up with a real storyline? Do another PPP filler! Ah well. If anyone wants them for their own comic endeavors, feel free.

Plywood Players Present: ER - A few avatars dressed in medical outfits, sitting around looking bored and playing cards. A critically injured avatar gets wheeled in on a gurney. Just as the ER crew is getting ready to leap into action, he *poofs* and teleports home. They sigh and sit down again. "Do you have any threes?" "Go fish."

PPP: CHiPs: "But, officer! I couldn't see the stop sign! The texture hadn't rezzed!"

PPP: Titanic: Lots of drama leading to the "unsinkable" ship disappearing under the waves as it attempts a sim crossing.

PPP: Howard Hughes: Something with Howard Hughes, his obsession with the Spruce Goose, and the fact that it's 33 prims, and can thus never be physics enabled.

PPP: Mission Impossible: The MI spy does his dramatic revelation, attempts to unmask/change his avatar back, only to find out that he forgot to make backup copies of his original appearance. There's also the deal with their true identities being displayed over their heads, but we already did that one.

The Skies of My Youth

2007-09-11T20:51:00.000-06:00

I had some spare time a couple of evenings ago, so I decided to fly up to a trillion meters or so. I've done this kind of thing before, but I thought I'd see if the current version of high-altitude Second Life has anything new to offer.

There was nothing special about the apparati used. I used a total of 38 attachments (all 30 attachment points, and all eight HUD locations), each one housing five scripts. Each script applied the maximum upward force (llSetForce) allowed by LSL (MAXINT, or 2,147,483,648, in who knows what units of measure), as well as an upward push (llApplyImpulse. again at MAXINT) four times a second. When in use, the small cubes shown grow to 10 meters across, allowing for maximum force (maximum push strength is proportional to object mass) and energy reserves. (There's probably an optimal balancing act between size, force, energy recovery, etc. And, of course, I could use more scripts. This works well enough, though.) A trivially simple, brute-force approach, multiplied a ridiculous number of times.

Here are closeups of the client camera HUD info and task bar altimeter. The trip took about 27 minutes, at a speed of 617,283,950 meters per second. And, in spite of travelling at over twice the speed of light, it was one of the more boring experiences I've had in SL. Beyond the knowledge that you're moving at 2c, there really isn't much else to recommend the trip.

Once your avatar passes a million meters, it disappears. I'm not altogether certain why this happens, actually. It's not a gradual effect, like the "av-melting" effect, nor does it happen at one of the programmer's totemistic powers of two. Very odd.

After that, you're left with a monotonous view of the SL sky. Soon, you're robbed of even the ability to pan your camera up or down (either in third person or mouselook), as the necessary coordinates for camera position/focus are moved out of range by floating point rounding errors on the Z coordinates. Other than that, the only entertainment is the occasional flickering of the sky to black. Really quite annoying, actually.

Incidentally, note the client altimeter. It's apparently limited by MAXINT as well. In order to get altitude readings, I had to switch on the client camera HUD information. That appears to work just fine at whatever altitude, although it does jump from rounding point to rounding point as you get higher.

It wasn't always this way. Up until sometime late last year (I'd guess sometime around when the new sun appeared in the sky), there were all sorts of interesting effects. And, of course, your avatar stayed around for considerably longer, melting and jittering all the more as you flew higher and higher.

Addendum, 9/30/07
Historical Note- Based on the one weblog entry I can successfully Google (news about Sun Microsystems and the abbreviation for "Sunday" effectively mask the obvious search keywords), the new sun probably appeared sometime in late April or early May of 2007. I can't confirm, but I still believe that this is probably when the sky effects disappeared. I expect Windlight preparations are involved in this somewhere, as well. I dearly wish I'd thought to photograph the old sun in detail, for historical interest. It had some interesting (if static) sunspots. Alas, nobody thinks "I'd better photograph the sun, it may change someday." A good lesson about the ephemeral nature of just about everything in Second Life.

The shot above, and the ones that follow, were taken in September and November of 2005, using a considerably more primitive booster assembly. As I remember, the trip to a mere billion meters took several hours. For a few hours of that (while I slept), I used a macro recorder to periodically move my camera in prescribed ways (mouselook, up, down, horizon) and press the snapshot key for me. I always meant to take some more formal pictures to document it all, and perhaps even take some video footage, as well. But, alas, time got away from me and the technology changed. And now, all that's left is a few thousand (yes, thousand) unsorted snapshots.

I'm not certain what caused the red hue shown above, as it was one of the pictures taken automatically. I'm guessing some kind of bleedover from a sunset and the distorted horizon. I have a few snapshots like this, some of which are completely red. Very odd.

This is a shot of an interesting effect that kicked in at around 100,000 meters, and progressed until 105,000 meters. Initially, a small, jagged black hole would appear directly above the avatar (no matter where he was). As the avatar rose, the hole would get larger, progressing in a series of wide, blocky bands that faded from deep blue to black. Finally, the entire sky, all the way to the horizon, would be swallowed. Quite an ominous effect. As I remember, the sky would eventually invert itself at higher elevations, and the effect would repeat in reverse. This repeated at intervals for a few hundred thousand meters.

Another shot of the hole in the sky, from a couple thousand meters further up.

I suppose I should mention that the grey avatar was my choice, and not due to any particular elevation or asset server effect. If I remember correctly, I theorized that it would be easier to discern elevation effects on the avatar if details weren't obscured by clothing and skin textures. I wish I'd taken more pictures with a real avatar in frame, now.

I always liked this effect. This is a shot with the sun at the "sunset" position, taken just before the hole above completely swallowed the sky. Very pretty. I used this effect in a Plywood strip, without even thinking about how few people would have actually seen it first hand. Now, I wonder how many folks were confused by it.

At high vertical speeds, the blending at the edges of the sky tends to break down. Turns out the sky is a giant cube with the textures painted on. "For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky..."

This effect is still somewhat visible today, but it used to be considerably more so. Generally, it is most apparent when travelling upward at high speeds and turning (clockwise or counterclockwise, doesn't seem to matter which). When you stop moving, the edges will stay for a moment, then blur back into an apparently seamless sky.

Note the chat readout for my old boosters. It would announce the speed and altitude every ten seconds. Pfft! Only 640 meters per second! Note also the llSetText from my Terra Warp belt. It should be floating above my head, with two lines of text. Floating text is affected by the same floating point errors that cause melting avatar meshes. llSetText became unreadable at a few million meters up, as it snapped several meters up and down ever second. And I've noticed a bit of jitter even as low as a couple thousand meters.

Occasionally, odd effects would appear as the sun moved across the sky. Sometimes, if you watched a corner, you could see perspective errors that revealed the sky was painted on a flat plane at an angle to your camera.

Another sky painting glitch. These generally only happened at very narrow altitude ranges, and were dependent on current sun position and camera angle.

An unusual solar eclipse effect at 205,000 meters, with the sun at the sunset position. The sun isn't just blotted out, it actually inverts to black and charcoal. My suspicion is that it was blacked out as a method of concealing it when it passes under the horizon. Normally this would be hidden by the ground, or the fog effect as the ground passes out of draw distance. Not so here, for some reason.

I may post more pictures later, when I finish sorting through them all, but this is a pretty good overview of most of the sky effects that have now passed into SL history. I'm sure that the new sky is part of Linden Lab's efforts at increasing stability and fixing bugs. And if the only sacrifice is the loss of a couple of pretty glitches, I'm all for it. Still, I kind of miss having a secret world only a few thousand kilometers above me.

Oh well, bring on Windlight. We'll see what it looks like from above.

Visit Scenic 1,000 Kilometers!

2007-09-10T12:37:00.000-06:00

If anyone is interested, I've setup a semi-permanent Av-Melter stand in Abitibi (SLURL link). Just thought I'd mention it after Daedalus Young's recent documented flight to a million meters, and its subsequent mention in the Linden Blog. Wish I'd thought to take videos before somebody beat me to the punch. Ah, well.

Tempest. Teacup.

2007-09-04T11:53:00.000-06:00

This isn't strictly SL-related, but it seems like every time any new SL controversy comes along, someone gets it wrong.

The phrase is "a tempest in a teacup." Not "a storm in a water glass," or a "hurricane in a coffee mug," or even "a tropical depression in a champagne flute." It's "tempest in a teacup." It's alliterative. Tempest. Teacup. Sometimes, it's "teapot." I can live with that, although it's definitely not the more common usage.

"Oh," I can hear you say. "Oh, but Mori, I've heard/read it as 'a [storm synonym] in a [drinking vessel]!'" Well then you've heard it wrong!. Tempest. Teacup. That is the phrase.

Tempest. Teacup. So sayeth Mori.

Just had to get that off my chest. Thank you.

The Case for Immersion #3

2007-09-03T18:12:00.000-06:00

It's been a long time since I've documented a moment of immersion. They've been few and far between. But one occurred Sunday morning.

Friday evening, I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time searching for my first prim hair, then carefully fitting it onto my avatar's newly-shorn scalp.

Sunday, I watched as my mother carefully fit a new wig onto her own head, which is going bald due to chemotherapy treatments.

For a moment, the two realities blurred. All told, it was a moment of immersion I really could have done without.

CyberExtruder

2007-08-31T11:14:00.000-06:00

Recently, I dropped by the CyberExtruder on Avatar Island, in order to try and upgrade my skin. In order to obtain your own custom head, your avatar must take a trip through the CyberExtruder 500. This is a rather nifty bit of showmanship, taking your av through various processes to supposedly mold and model the new mask around your old avatar head. Really quite slick. They put on a good show.

I say "supposedly" because the whole operation (which takes a minute or two) is merely eye candy. I took a ride through the noise, particle, and shiny-bedecked contraption, as you can see above. The end result was that I was presented with a unique key number and a URL for the CyberExtruder website. From there, I was asked to upload a "passport photo" style photograph. They had many tips on the website, but basically you're encouraged to conceal any hints of life or personality. Don't smile, don't wear glasses, keep your hair out of your eyes... Basically try as hard as possible to look like that driver's license photo taken after a four hour wait at the DMV. Once said death mask is uploaded, the CE site processes it and presents you with a preview of the image as a 3D model.

Alas, it seems that a photo-sourced SL skin of myself is not in the cards for me. The website does give you a chance to reject the uploaded photo and try again. My problem was that I would have needed a new head.

While I was reasonably happy with the eyes and nose (considerable appearance slider tweaking would have still been required to get the shape right, an expected and not unreasonable task), the mouth and beard were deal breakers. I don't quite know what my problem was with the mouth. Upon closer inspection of my mugshot, it's clear that my whole face is ever-so-slightly crooked. And, evidently, the process magnified this imperfection. Not so good for one's self esteem, really.

I would have tried again, perhaps getting someone else to take the picture and coach me in getting my facial features held symmetrical in the photo, but my RL beard was a more serious problem. By its very nature, the single-photo-sourced CyberExtruder process cannot deal with full beards. Details are cropped off at the sides of the face, as they aren't directly visible in the head-on mugshot. Instead, the beard simply fades off into a smooth, generic skin tone match. This process seems to work fine for normal, clean-shaven faces (or those with front-heavy facial hair), but I expect that a live artist, multiple camera views, and probably quite a few US bucks would be required to faithfully model my head.

Ah, well, I think I can deal with my current skin for a while longer.

Roto-Tracker

2007-08-26T15:59:00.000-06:00

Yesterday evening, I blitzed through a small, artsy project. Basically, it's a primitive drum loop tracker, allowing the user to pick out simple repeating patterns with various percussion instruments.

Note: I don't really know anything about MIDIs, MODs, or related software. And I haven't thought seriously about the mechanics of making music since childhood piano lessons and chorale in high school. Any relationship between terminology and technical correctness is therefore purely coincidental.

The concept is fairly straightforward. A central physical rotor smoothly turns (counterclockwise) through 360 degrees, using llTargetOmega. Spaced out over 180 degrees (22.5 degrees apart) are eight collision sensors (shown as white columns of light), which use filtered collision events and llVolumeDetect to sense the passing of the rotor. Each time the rotor passes through the sensor's volume, the light briefly flickers off (as if the rotor is blocking it- a superfluous effect, but kind of neat) and the selected sound sample is played. The rotor moves on, the next sample is played, and so on.

Each collision sensor comes loaded with 15 drum sounds, including various tom-toms, a bass drum, a taiko drum, a snare, a couple of cymbals, some wood blocks and, of course, a cow bell. The user cycles through the sound samples by clicking on the base of the lights. The sounds for a given sensor can be turned off altogether, as well.

The rotor has three speeds: low (about 48 beats per minute), medium (96 BPM), and high (192 BPM), where a "beat" in this case is defined as a single sample played by a sensor. The random control directs the eight sensors to select random sound samples, or randomly turn themselves off. A sync control is provided to synchronize the rotors of multiple adjacent Roto-Trackers, allowing more complex patterns. Using multiple trackers, and a relatively lag-free sim (unfortunately, severe lag sometimes pulls rotors back out of sync), some fairly complex drum loops can be created.

I've created an installation of three Roto-Trackers next to the Librarium's Symposium gallery, here in Abitibi (SLurl link). Not much to the installation, really. Just a chair at optimal listening location, and a sensor-driven start/stop control. The latter, the black truncated cone at left, checks for avatars on the parcel. If 30 seconds pass with no avatars standing on the parcel (both in range of the sensor, and standing in a location with the same parcel name), the rotors will shut down. If an avatar wanders onto the plot and sticks around for up to 30 seconds, they'll start back up. While I don't think these devices generate an irresponsible drain on system resources, there is quite a bit going on: three physical rotors, up to ten collisions per second, and an equal number of triggered sounds and prim status changes. Well worth the time to shut down the works when there's nobody around to hear it.

August Update

2007-08-22T11:56:00.000-06:00

It's amazing how time works, sometimes. Weeks pass like days, yet days seem to take weeks. Or something like that. Sounded more profound in my head.

So, here it is, four weeks since my last update. Unfortunately, my RL has sapped both time and motivation for enjoying my SL, lately. So there's really not much to report here. Been kind of coasting since the Relay, in any case. I'd been working so long toward that goal that I hadn't given any thought at all to what would happen after. And now that it's disappeared from the collective SL unconscious for another year, I'm kind of floundering. I have found time and volition to work on a couple of silly projects, though.

Behold the amazing Mo-Tech Stress Relief HUD. Under pressure? Feeling stressed out? Just touch the red STRESS button, and a sheet of our patented Stress Relief Paper (AKA Bubble Wrap) will instantly appear. Just pop, pop, pop your cares away! And don't worry, once you pop that last bubble, the Stress Relief HUD will automatically create more. Now available for free from your friends at Mo-Tech Industries! Get yours now!

Ahem. Got a bit carried away there. Anyway, if you'd like a Stress HUD, you can pick one up on the second floor of the Mo-Tech shop. Link's up there on the right.

This one proved to be kind of an interesting project, mostly due to the number of prims involved. By necessity, each bubble is its own prim. Oh how I wish LSL had some method of returning which face was clicked! It would have reduced the prim count by at least four or five fold. As it was, this simple HUD weighs in at 79 prims. And that was after cutting it down multiple times.

I opted for a centralized script method, mostly to keep the sim from grinding to a screeching halt each time it was rezzed. It would have been much easier to put a script in each bubble, but sixty-some-odd scripts (one per whole bubble) for each HUD would have been a tad irresponsible. I'd intended using bitwise operators to track the status of each prim, with the prim at link number 1 being represented as bit 1 (2^1), link 2 being bit 2 (2^2), link 3 being bit 3 (2^3) and so on. You can probably see the flaw in this proposition: it would ultimately end up with 79 bits. (I tracked the 10 or so non-bubble prims as dummy values in the set, so that I wouldn't have to come up with an alternative numbering scheme. Much easier to just keep everything keyed to its link number.) This comes out to an integer potentially as large as 2^80 - 1. Strangely enough, LSL just isn't prepared to deal with numbers like 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,175.

Fortunately, I figured this out before wasting a lot of time on clueless debugging after the fact. (Surprisingly, too, considering that this is the first project I've done that even attempted to use bitwise operations. Oh well, maybe next time.) Instead, I settled on a list of integer 1's and 0's for status indicators. Prim 1 ended up as list entry 1, prim 2 as entry 2, and so on. Each time a bubble is touched, the script checks its link number, and compares it to the value in the list. If it's 1, it pops the bubble (swapping from a whole to a popped bubble texture, and playing one of three random popping sounds) and swaps the value to 0. When all the values are 0, revert all the bubbles back to 1, reset the popped bubble textures to unpopped, and we're good to go.

As an aside, I also tried using one long string instead of a list, and using string search and replace operations to check each time (character "1" in spot 47 corresponding to link 47, and so on). I timed each operation, and found that, in this instance, they were about equally fast. (A pokey half second per search, give or take a few hundredths. Oh Mono, where art thou?) Kind of surprising. I'd heard that string operations were generally faster than lists. Not this time, anyway. Worth noting, although your mileage may vary with more complex list items.

The other recent project is a working umbrella. This started out as an attempt to get my head around sculpties. Actually, I'd intended the bubble wrap to be my first significant sculpty project, but I couldn't make a convincingly "smooshed" bubble model. I'll probably come back to that later, when my skills improve and when I figure out some of the more sophisticated freeware modeling software. I'd love to make giant-size, three-dimensional, functional bubble wrap. Perhaps with a diving board, and a modest push to loft the av into the air with each pop... Hrm. Okay, maybe I'll get back to this sooner than later. It'll be a metric assload of prims, but I think I can make it work out.

But I digress. Sculpty umbrella. The umbrella fabric (two prims, one open, one closed) was made using Yuzuru Jewell's Rokuro software, set for six-fold symmetry (would have preferred eight, to match the typical large umbrella, but this looks convincing enough). The animations were made using Vinay Pulim's Avimator. Nothing terribly cutting edge or original about this one. Touch, and it swaps from the closed sculpt (switching to alpha 0.0) to the open sculpt (alpha 1.0), and triggers the Hold Umbrella animation. Touch it again, and it reverses the process and shuts down the animation.

From there, scope creep kicked in. It wasn't enough to just have a functioning umbrella! That just wouldn't be me.

First, I added in a simple parachute function. The basic function came together easily enough: run a timer, check for avatar status each tick. If the avatar is in the air and not flying, he must be falling. Trigger a custom falling animation (hanging free from the umbrella, which is pointing straight above), run an llSetForce to reduce gravity, and use impulses to prevent speed from exceeding a fixed downward velocity. Easy enough.

I've found that the fall-down effect will trigger if an avatar hits the ground faster than about 15 m/s. Currently, the umbrella limits falling speed to 10 m/s, but does nothing to limit lateral speed. So, if someone were to start falling with a good amount of forward velocity (say by turning off flight while flying forward at full speed), he'd still potentially hit the ground too fast and fall down. I spent some time trying to come up with a parasailing variant but, for now, I'll just stick with the safe-fall option for vertical movement. Maybe I'll get around to making it into a high-performance aerial vehicle at some future date.

As it turned out, dealing with the animations turned out to be kind of tricky. The problem is that the position of the avatar's hand changes relative to the umbrella's desired orientation. Basically, I had to come up with a way to rotate the attachment for each condition: held and falling. The held rotation needs to be free-floating, so that the end user can tweak it for his own needs. The falling rotation needs to leave the umbrella pointing straight up.

Rotation is easy, simply a matter of calling llSetLocalRot. But I never could find a way to rotate an attachment to an arbitrary rotation relative to the world. llSetRot, llSetLocalRot, llLookAt, llRotLookAt... All end up changing behavior relative to the attachment point. I'm stumped. I ultimately ended up having to rotate the umbrella attachment until it looked more or less vertical when the fall animation was called, then using llGetLocalRot to get the rotation. That rotation was hard coded into the script. Inelegant, but it works. If anyone out there knows a way to make an attachment rotate to face an arbitrary direction (say true North or straight up) from an arbitrary attachment point (say right hand), please leave me a comment.

From there, I ended up adding a slightly modified version of the elevation control script from my ancient Personal Gravity Control HUD (my clunky version of a flight assist). Type "/1 345", and the umbrella will pop open and fly to 345 meters, dragging the user behind it. It's nice to have canned scripts like that lying around, ready to enhance any random product that comes along with only a couple of minor tweaks.

I'm doing something similar with a generalized version of a menu-driven color control script. Activate the color menu, and select the desired color from the dialog box. Simple, and part of multiple projects already, but I've never taken the time to make it truly universal. Now, if I can just work out a vexing bug with the brightness control (allowing the user to pick, say, light, medium, and dark blue), I'll have a useful canned script that can be used with projects from now on. Well worth the time, even if this umbrella never makes it to public distribution.

Next up, perhaps, is a particle rainstorm that appears on demand. Or maybe I'll just leave well enough alone. We'll see.

Webcam

2007-08-01T11:11:00.000-06:00

Whilst attempting to hook up my walk webcam as a media stream, I ran into some frustrations. Evidently, images loaded as media streams (whether loaded directly, or via SMIL) are cached by the SL client. So, if you load a stream like http://www.domain.com/image.jpg, and later change image.jpg, the original image will continue to be loaded from the cache. Very annoying, especially when you're setting up something like a webcam that loads a new version of an image file every XX seconds.

Finally, after much beating-of-the-head-against-the-wall and aimless googling, I ran across nand Nerd's Sculpty Previewer. Evidently, he was having similar problems using media streams to preview sculpt textures without having to upload them. But, nand found a workaround: fool the SL client into thinking the media stream is a brand new URL each time, by giving it some garbage parameters that will be ignored when the stream is reloaded. In this case, dropping in a random integer as an HTTP GET, which will be ignored by the client.

The trick is that the cached image is indexed on the overall URL. Each time the stream is reloaded, it is cached anew, even if the actual object (picture, SMIL file, whatever) has the same filename. nand's solution is one of those forehead-slappingly obvious hacks that, nonetheless, require a deep and thorough understanding of the underpinnings of both the web and the SL client to conceive. Most good hacks are like that. Pure genius!

In any case, here is a heavily commented version of the script I used to display my webcam pictures during the SL Relay for Life, should anyone else run into similar problems. Be sure and read the comments before using.The concept is worth putting in the back of your metaphorical toolbox, in any case. Could come in handy someday!

Relay!

2007-07-31T12:58:00.000-06:00

Well, the Relay for Life has come and gone. Long and short of it, we collectively raised US$115,000 for the American Cancer Society. About $17,000 of that came from our group, McDunnough's Relay Gang, something like a third of which was raised in the Jail an Avatar event on the day of the Relay. I attribute the success of the Jail an Av event to the organizational skills and social engineering savvy of the Gang. The tech was relatively easy. But bludgeoning and wheedling dozens of people into spending hours and tens of thousands of Lindenbucks for a cause, with no reward beyond simple altruism? That's hard, and a skill I know I don't have. Gang, you're awesome!

Here's the kickoff, in front of the Survivor's camp. This year, they did it a little different, in that the "caregivers" (friends and family who have helped other people deal with cancer) were included. I thought that was pretty nice of them to extend the recognition to include those folks. I'm the guy with the black sphere embedded in his lower back. This was the attachment for my RL miles pedometer.

Interesting side note. As we were gathering to start the survivor's lap, my mother was starting her first chemo treatment. She insisted that I go ahead with the walk, or I would have been there with her. But, instead, I was walking. Were I a more introspective sort, I expect I'd have found some kind of symbolism or meaning in this. But, well, at this point it just is.

I expect this is the last I'm going to say about mom and cancer on this weblog. This is my Second Life blog, and that is decidedly a First Life issue. I've said a bit more about it on my walking in SLRFL page, which should remain around for a while longer if anyone is interested.

Here are Tayza Abattoir and I on Mo-Tech pogo sticks, during the "Bald is Beautiful" lap. Tay was very kind to me throughout the Relay, always checking up on me. This is pretty much the only time I tried to stick with anyone while I was walking on the treadmill. It's deucedly difficult to keep up a typewritten conversation while walking on a treadmill! I did walk with the Gang during the final lap, which I performed from my keyboard. So, at least I was minimally social, in any case.

Sadly, I didn't get many more pictures from the Relay itself. Most of the time, I was concentrating on other things... Usually something along the lines of "ow, my feet, owie, owie, ouch."

Here is my backup movement device. I've been having issues with my treadmill interface lately, specifically with the forward key switch. (The other keys still work fine.) I don't know if the reed switch is going out, or if the actual keyboard is wearing out. Either way, I expect closing and opening a switch several hundred times a minute (see this entry for details) for hours on end is a little hard on the equipment. So, I made the above provision in case of failure during the Relay. Fortunately, it didn't prove necessary. Still, I'm pleased with how well the alternate worked out. It's nice to be able to bash out a perfectly functional hack like this, from spare parts in under a half an hour.

I suppose I should dust my keyboard someday.

And this, I confess, was exactly what I envisioned when I thought about the Jail an Avatar event. Bad Moriash, no cookie. Here are famed SL DJs and bon vivants Bcreative Wilde, Naydee McGettigan, and Chelle Moore, (un)dressed to bring in the donations.

And, here's the final results! Overall tally? I walked 23 real-life miles, and something like 85 kilometers in Second Life. Not too shabby for a career swivel-chair jockey! We raised a heck of a lot of money, and had a little fun in a process. I guess I'd have to call this whole thing a success.

Addendum
I've been asked this a couple of times, so I suppose I should clear it up: this was 23 miles spread out over the course of the Relay. I broke it up into short (an hour or two) walks, alternating with equally long breaks. This added up to about nine hours of walking spread over approximately 15 hours. Trying to do that all in one go would have been insane!

Addendum #2
Over the course of the fundraising period, this stunt raised US$310. Less than I hoped, but more than I expected. I honestly have no idea how much the proceeds from my shop raised, since I was immediately depositing every sale into a donation card. Next time, assuming there is one, I'm keeping better books.

Relay This Weekend!

2007-07-26T11:16:00.001-06:00

Well, the day I've been planning for for the last few months is finally almost here. This saturday afternoon, the SL Relay for Life begins! Should be fun, aside from being awake for something like 24 hours straight, and walking on the treadmill for much of that time. Teams are frantically putting the finishing touches on what are turning out to be some pretty amazing builds. Even if you're not participating, you should drop by and take a look. There's some great things afoot in the RelayForLife sims!

By fortunate turn of fate, I came into possession of an abandoned team sim (thanks to Tayzia Abattoir for procuring it for me), for use as my official HQ. It was short notice (the previous team backed out at the last second), but I think I've come up with a reasonable base camp. I've moved over a modified version of SkyLounge Tower, as well as a few picnic tables and a nice little pond. There's an annex of my shop in the base of the tower, as well, in hopes of raking in a few more charity Lindenbucks on the day of the Relay. Of course, all sales go to the SLRFL. If you're considering donating, you might want to drop by my camp and see if anything catches your fancy. There's a donation kiosk available as well.

I've also created a webcam to monitor my walking progress. Said cam is streamed into the camp, both on the screen shown above (located behind the pond) and on multiple screens at the top of the tower. I'm tentatively thinking about doing a two-hour-on, one-hour-off schedule for as long as I can manage. We'll see how long that lasts.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck with a rather crappy webcam. Apparently, cheap cams nowadays don't come with focus controls. They're all fixed focus at about 36 inches. This is fine for its intended use (video conferencing and such, with the cam sitting on your monitor), but not so good for recording across a room. I opted to stick with my old camera, in spite of its poor quality, because it has adjustable focus. Given that I'll likely never use this thing again, I'd rather donate the money to SLRFL than buy an expensive webcam with better quality and focus controls.

Besides, there's less chance of me becoming a LOLcat or some such if the image is this poor. Have to plan for those kinds of things on the modern Interweb.

If you'd prefer, you can also watch the webcam, as well as read a bit more about the project, at my Walking in the SL Relay for Life page. This page also tells a little more about my personal reasons for walking (and, incidentally, explains in part why my weblog posts have been so sparse lately). If you're interested, please take a look at the FAQ on that page.

You can see the measures I've taken to document my walk, and prove that I'm actually doing what I claim. (I've yet to figure out what people think I'd have to gain from faking this, but many folks seemed to think this project would be a failure if it wasn't recorded and documented. Odd.) Each picture (updates every 15 seconds, in deference to my mediocre bandwith) is timestamped. There's a matching analog clock in the frame, as well. (I ended up having to tape black strips of cardboard on the clock hands, so that they'd show up on my mediocre equipment.) I've rigged a simple pedometer HUD to track my SL and RL mileage, and periodically e-mail my RL miles back to the base camp counter, so that my throngs of adoring fans can cheer every mile. I've also added a dry-erase board behind me (not shown in this pic- added later). Drop me an IM if you'd like me to say "hi!"

As an aside, I probably won't be able to have any extended conversations during all this. It's surprisingly difficult to type and walk at the same time!

Unfortunately, I had to make some concession to reality. The mileage counting HUD is based on a timer and a programmed miles-per-hour rate. I couldn't come up with a way to directly interface the mileage or speed readouts from treadmill to SL. So, instead, I'll have to constantly update and correct my speed and distance numbers, by reading it from the treadmill controls and correcting the pedometer HUD manually. Vexing, but it's the best I could do for now.

So I suppose I could be a dirty, dirty liar, and be walking slower than I claim. Or, I could come up with some kind of tricky programming to recycle the same images, with faked timestamps and analog clock readings (although the sub-par quality is working in my favor on the latter- harder to simulate convincingly). Just take my word for it. I'm not.

But, enough of that. 48 hours to go!

Addendum, July 30-

23 MILES!

More later!

Porn is War

2007-07-05T18:26:00.000-06:00

Following is an excerpt from an old e-mail, written a few months back. It was sent in response to a missive from a friend, asking about the prevalence of sex in Second Life, at least as portrayed by mainstream media.

Honestly, as distasteful as I find the porn [in SL], I have to applaud its presence. Once porn shows up, you know the technology has mainstream acceptance. Think of books, paintings, television, movies, etc. Pornography is to information technology what warfare is to more concrete science and engineering. Everyone agrees it's regrettable, and the majority of people don't want it to happen, but you can't deny the huge technological improvements that invariably come with it.

Given my previous post, it seemed appropriate. As many people have pointed out before, pornographic content creators are often the first to embrace new media technology. Or, as Gerard Van Der Leun said in the first issue of Wired, "Sex is a virus that infects new technology first."

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Sleaze on Trial

2007-07-05T12:05:00.000-06:00

Dammit, why do all of the SL legal precedents have to be based around something seedy? And people wonder why I'm so hesitant to cop to my Second Life in front of my RL friends! Every time SL comes up in the news, it seems, it's all about griefing, fraud, or sex.

First we have the Bragg case, in which some guy sues because he employed an exploit on the SL auction website to obtain cheap land in Second Life, then got banned and lost his in-world assets as a result. Sure, there's some ramifications: can LL summarily confiscate assets with real-world value? Can the TOS's claim that LindenBucks have no intrinsic value stand up against the fact that multiple services routinely change hundreds of thousands of US dollars of "real" money for "fake" money, and vice versa, every day? These are important issues, which could set legal precedents for in-world resident sanctions for years to come. Is banning effectively illegal seizure of assets? But, ultimately, it's coming about because some guy got caught committing outright fraud, and is suing because he was punished for it.

Then we have the Familles de France case, about availability of adult content in Second Life. I confess I haven't been following this one very closely, beyond noting their accusations that LL is endorsing pornography, bestiality (Furries), pedophilia, drug use, and quite a few other "Won't somebody think of the children?!" issues, and making such material available to minors. Again, there are some points that need to be resolved, one way or another. Do we need "adult check" services on an age-restricted grid? Or is the age restriction so diluted and unenforceable that such additional measures are required? Eventually, due to evidenciary irregularities, the French courts ruled in favor of Linden Lab. But, yet again, we have the entirety of SL portrayed as a massive virtual den of iniquity in the global press.

And now? Now we have one player suing another over theft and resale of virtual goods. Basically, the defendant somehow obtained copies of the normally no-transfer in-world luxury goods, and was allegedly selling them at a fraction of the plaintiff's price. (Original: L$12,000, or a bit over US$45. Stolen Copies: as little as L$4,000, or US$15.) Quite an interesting case, and one that could, again, set important legal precedents. In particular, he's effectively suing an in-world persona, and subpoenaing LL and Paypal records to obtain real-life identity information. Then there's a variety of copyright and intellectual property issues to sort out. Of course, it's all over ultra-high-end, sex-pose-packed Sexgen beds. Why did it have to be about cybersex toys?!

At the end of the day, the issues behind these cases will need to be settled. And said resolutions could very well shape the future of the 3D Web (always assuming that SL is more than a footnote in that future history). It's just a shame that they have to come out of cases that are so inherently sleazy.

SkyPod 3 RIP

2007-07-02T14:20:00.000-06:00

This entry is mostly for my own benefit. Someday, a few months or years from now, I'll be thumbing through my old weblog entries and see this one. Then, I'll get all nostalgic for about 3.2 seconds and move on. If you're not, well, me then this entry probably won't mean much to you. (As opposed to the cogent and deeply meaningful content normally posted here.) Feel free to skip this one if you're not interested in hearing me prattle on about a building that no longer exists. And, now that you've read all this, your browser has had time to download the inordinately large and numerous pictures. My nefarious plan has come to fruition.

As mentioned before, I'm in the process of primming down in the Garden of Mo. This involves, among other things, removing some of the ancient builds that I never actually used, but was maintaining out of a misplaced sense of nostalgia. This time, I'm taking down SkyPod 3, otherwise known as the Mo-Tech Industries shop. I've recently relocated the shop to the semi-new Mo-Tech Tower (formerly known as SkyLounge).

It sits about 500 meters up, threaded on the tall, skinny stack of cylinders like a bead on a wire. It has a simpler, cleaner appearance than the old massively-grained-rosewood-and-brushed-steel look of the old shop. I suppose I should install some exterior signage, in spite of the fact that it's well above the casual flight path. It looks a little bland from the outside, but it seems to work pretty well from the inside. The modern, charcoal grey interiors provide a nice backdrop for the (supposedly) high-tech products I'm hawking.

Here is the last photo ever taken of the old Mo-Tech shop, appropriately taken at sunset. I remember spending hours working out the textures for the wood grained panels on the exterior face. Since the Brazilian Rosewood freebie texture is not a seamless pattern, I ended up going with a single repeat per face. Someone with common sense might have gone with a different texture, but that just wouldn't have been me. I ended up going with flipped and mirrored textures on adjacent prims, in order to conceal the seams. The net result was a series of 20 meter long Rorschach tests, constructed from absurdly out-of-scale wood grain. Probably not the best choice, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I never got around to upgrading it.

The middle levels were modular, allowing me to easily add more floors to the shop as required. Turns out I never needed the space (one floor had nothing but "watch this space" signs for the entire time it existed), but the idea was sound. I've adapted it for the new shop.

This was the first floor shop. Not much to say about it. Those holes in the floor ended up being a theme in all of my builds. SkyPod 1, SkyLounge, and the new shop all have/had some variant, either with glass plates or with railings. It's a cheap decorative feature.

Here's the Butterfly Kit display area. I dropped the emitters inside a large potted plant, and built a lounge area around it. Every once in a long while, I'd see small groups of people sitting there, watching the butterflies (or fireflies, at the time this photo was taken) and chatting. I'm glad somebody got some use out of it, anyway. Like most of this installation, I built it then never used it.

Behind the plant was a Nutri-Matic Machine (dispenses hot, refreshing beverages that are almost entirely unlike tea) and a couple of cans of food pills. Both are now on sale in the new shop, and are featured prominently in the SkyLounge.

Here's the conference table, located on the third floor. The translucent black circle in the center was a "holographic emitter." On touch, it displayed text showing the current time and system performance stats. At one point, it also showed a floating particle map of Louise. I eventually took that part out, because I was too lazy to create up-to-date map textures. The chairs were an early scripting project. Using the strafe keys, the user could rotate the chairs. Why? I don't know. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

This was yet another installation I never used for its intended purpose. Did I really expect to have high-powered board meetings sitting around this table? I honestly couldn't tell you, now. Mostly I used it as a work counter for building small items, like HUD attachments.

You can see the Mo-Tech Tower out the window in the back.

Here is the upper observation deck. The lights were scripted to come on at night. The silver bulkhead at the left split and slowly opened when touched, allowing aerial entry from outside. This area served quite well as a hot air balloon dock on quite a few occasions.

At top you can see the "sky hooks," anchored within the cloud layer at ~180 meters. The particle effects made it look as if the hooks were pulling on the clouds. Well, sort of. I was always quite pleased with this effect. I don't think anyone ever noticed. Ah, well.

The aquarium on the top floor. Another early project, it was populated with a dozen or so fish on llTargetOmega rotors, swimming 'round and 'round on their circular orbits. The meditation pose was built into the aquarium. Another couple of lounging poses were built into the carpet. I doubt if anyone ever discovered them. I used to build all sorts of Easter eggs into my constructs, but soon realized that nobody ever even attempted to look. Unless it has an obvious poseball, or a bright red button with a sign, few people will try to interact with their surroundings. I find that kind of sad.

Here's the lounge area on the top level. The aquarium is just off the bottom of the picture. At lower right was a single-prim twisted torus sculpture, "Nightmare in Concertina Wire," by yours truly. At left was a few books from the Librarium. I don't remember what they were, actually. I never read them. They were purely for show.

Behind the screens was the useless bed. I don't know what possessed me to build a bed. It had a couple of freebie sleep poses built into the pillows, and was equipped with the jump-on-the-bed script. Of course, the ceiling was too low to really get a good bounce going. I expect there were a few concussions. Looking back, I wish I'd enabled damage under the bed, just to see what would happen.

My old halo rested on the bedpost, while a "mysterious red high heeled shoe" (contributed by Chrestomanci Bard) hid underneath the mattress. I never used the bed. The glass had a privacy screen built into it, also never used. I don't think I'll ever bother building another bed. I don't cyber, and avatars don't need to sleep.

Here's the main entrance to the shop. An elevator took visitors up from ground level, and maneuvered them through the bulkhead (which opened on command from the elevator) to the catwalk. I expect that the narrow, corkscrew ramp cost me a few sales from impatient shoppers. Spiral staircases are usually more trouble than they're worth.

And, well, I guess that's it. I suppose I'll hit "post" and leave this potential trip down memory lane as a gift for my future self. Guess we'll see.

Frequency

2007-07-01T10:05:00.000-06:00

JJ Drinkwater, neighbor and proprietor of the Librarium, just pointed out Frequency Picnic's review of Mo-Tech Industries and the SkyLounge. Thanks, Frequency! The shop's still around, although it has moved about 400 meters up and 60 meters south.

Script Is Missing from Database

2007-06-29T21:48:00.000-06:00

Okay, I've just gotten my third "Script is missing from database" error in the last week. I believe the colloquial term is WTF?!

This one was for a product I was releasing this evening. Vexing. Fortunately, it is only a freebie, and the scripting was complete. The executable is still intact and functional. I guess I just won't be making any upgrades to it. But, still. This should not happen.

Oh, by the way, the first smartass that says "You should backup your scripts on your local hard drive!" dies. Painfully. If I can't depend on SL's asset server to keep up with a damned plaintext file, something is drastically, catastrophically wrong. Yes, by all means, keep up with every disposable plywood cube in my Trash folder until the end of days. But that script I spent a few hours pounding out last month? Eh, it's not important. Flush it!

And, while I'm bitching, what is up with the change to llOwnerSay? Why was it even necessary to change the format of the OwnerSay messages in the first place, and why didn't someone check it before pushing it to a few million customers? Now, every time one of my scripted items speaks to its owner, the message is prefaced with "Object say, ..." as in "Object say, Me am speaking now!" It makes such a wonderful impression on my customers when my products sound like ESL class dropouts.

Honest, folks, I have a basic grasp of English! It's not my fault! I swear, I'm going to post that on a 10 meter tall sign in front of my shop. I'm sure there are dozens of grammatical errors, typoes, etc. strewn throughout the client. But this one actively makes me and every other scripter out there look ignorant. 99% of the SL residents won't realize the problem comes from the client. They'll just assume the scripter doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Not. Good.

Addendum, June 30, 2007
I guess I should have followed my own advice here (the bit at the end). Second life, on the whole, is teh awesome. And the Lindens are doing a bang-up job with a system that is teetering perpetually on the edge of total meltdown, with a few hundred thousand new residents coming along every month to give it a push. Stuff happens, and I expect it. Sometimes, you just have to vent, though. That's what weblogs are for. It's my blog, and I can bitch if I want to.

Ahem. Anyway. On with your web browsing.

More Snapshots

2007-06-29T12:01:00.000-06:00

Just cleaning out my snapshots folder again.

Today marks the final day of the Garage of DOOM. At right is a picture of the Anklebiter monster, taken for a promo sign posted by Onder Skall at his in-world games storefront. The sign shows this picture and the text "the Garage of DOOM." It dispenses a notecard with landmark and the game description, "Shoot monsters. Don't die." Oh, and a picture of me running away from a dozen assorted baddies in the Garage. Simple, but apparently effective, if my traffic numbers are to be believed. Big thanks to Onder for pointing people my way, and for the general support of my gaming efforts.

Sadly, I've had to let it go. Between the prim requirements, the innate SL simulator limitations, and the lag-induced glitches (a new casino in the sim, built out of physics-raping megaprims and stocked with slot machines and camping chairs, tends to drag down the sim performance a tad), it was becoming more frustration that it was worth. I've about come to the conclusion that you just can't make a decent arcade-style game in SL, especially when you don't own your own island. I may get around to posting a post-mortem here someday, but I believe that's going to be the main point.

A moodily lit picture of the down transport from the SkyLounge. I recently relocated the Lounge and combined it with the new Mo-Tech Industries shop (which I'll talk about in another post). But this part stayed the same. I think ballistic reentry is considerably more stylish than a mere elevator.

This discovery made me want to cry. One evening, I had occasion to crank my view distance up to 512 meters. I can't remember why, now, and I wish I hadn't. In the far background, you can see the SkyLounge, at 4000-plus meters. In the foreground, you can see some faux ground slabs hanging in the air. Apparently, someone decided to start a build at max altitude, and was doing so right on my doorstep. I haven't checked on it recently, mostly because I didn't really want to know. I have hopes that the constant need for re-rezzing at these heights scared the would-be builder into a lower altitude build. Apparently, there just isn't anyplace you can build for privacy in SL. Not even at four kilometers above ground.

Addendum, 11:30pm
I just checked. The skygrass is gone. Crisis averted, I guess.

Nothing much to say about this one. On left is Will Webb, with glowing light-source halo. At right is yours truly, wielding a blue flashlight. Said flashlight has menu controls to change light color and flashlight body color. Kind of a fun thing to play with. One day, I may get around to selling it. Or just giving it away as a freebie.

Addendum, 11:28pm:
It's now a freebie at the new and improved Mo-Tech Industries. Search for "Mo-Tech" in the Classifieds and drop by for your copy! Just don't expect any upgrades anytime soon.

Here I am in a jail of my own devising. Were I of a more introspective bent, I might have something profound to say at this point. But, as it is, I'll just yammer about the technical aspects. The jail and HUD are going to be used in an upcoming Jail an Avatar fundraising event for SL Relay for Life. Basically, volunteers let themselves be locked inside the jail, and try to persuade friends to come donate money to buy their freedom. This has been done before, of course. But I decided to make it a little more sophisticated (or perhaps just needlessly complicated).

The HUD allows one jailer to remotely control multiple jails (currently limited to 10, but more could be added easily enough, if prims allowed). He can remotely open or close a jail, change the required donation amount, and reset as necessary. It also relays status information from each jail, including current occupants, current donation amounts, and any error messages that come up. The error checking is what proved to be the most complex, as expected. I had to deal with situations where the volunteer may stand up before reaching his goal. I don't know if every Jail an Av device has provision for this (they should), but there are just too many cases where an av can accidentally (or on purpose) vacate his seat. And it causes all sorts of problems if his donation drive ends prematurely.

Finally, I settled on a manual state-change system. Once an avatar sits in a vacant jail, the door slams shut and the jail changes to collection mode. If he stands up/disappears, the jail door opens for him (it's bad form to trap an avatar), but continues to collect in his name. This gives him the chance to return to his seat after a relog, sim crash, teleport, accidental stand, etc. without the jail losing track of the money he collected. All money goes to the jailer for processing, in any case, but it would be unfortunate if technical difficulties caused someone to have to start his donation drive from scratch. (More than likely, he'd just give up and move on.) This way, he can pick up where he left off, even if his client crashed or the simulator went down.

The down side is the jailer has to decide for himself when an abandoned jail is truly unoccupied. He'll receive a message, "John Doe has left his jail early!" But it will be up to him to find out what happened, and clear the jail if required. I suppose I could have come up with a timer to reset the jail in such situations. I went as far as starting that, actually, but decided that it would be better to have a live jailer with his human judgment mediate the situation. I'm sure I'll catch flack for not making it all automagic but, given that real Lindenbucks are changing hands, I'd prefer to require a real live human be present to monitor the process.

Haikus

2007-06-25T11:43:00.000-06:00

Three haikus found in an unfinished draft e-mail that I started a couple years ago:

Heed well, young player!
Scantily clad enchantress,
She's a man, baby!

"I R sexy grrrl!"
Says the fat man from Jersey,
Dressed in Wood Elf togs.

Online gender lies.
Pixels are cheap surgery
For swapping gonads.

Okay, they may only be 5-7-5 patterned poems. I don't think you can legitimately call it a haiku unless you mention cherry blossoms or Mount Fuji. In any case, just thought I'd share.

Notice

2007-06-06T12:16:00.000-06:00

Folks, as part of my tiering down campaign, I'm afraid I'm going to have to shut down the Garage of DOOM. Once I've reached my required tier goal (hopefully before my tier payment in early July), I will no longer be able to support the prim requirements for the game space and associated monsters. Play it while you can, because the GoD will be gone on July 1.

Thanks to everyone for the comments and encouragement over the past few months. It's been fun.

PPP

2007-06-06T11:33:00.000-06:00

Earlier, I went through some old SL-related e-mails, and ran across this unused and forgotten draft for a Plywood comic. As far as I am concerned, the Plywood Players Present comics were kind of cheating, in any case. When I posted a PPP, odds are it meant I was either feeling burned out or was out of real ideas. Not that some of them weren't pretty good, if I do say so myself, but they always felt like pointless filler to me.

Title: Plywood Players Present #N

Frame One:
A typical court room. Gretel, dressed in black robe, plays the judge. She's sitting behind the bench at left, gavel in hand. Jayne sits at the witness stand at right, dressed in formal attire suitable for court. Jon stands in front of the bench, center of frame, with white hair and the trademark light grey suit. He's playing the part of Matlock, the famous TV lawyer.

Caption (at top) The Plywood Players Proudly Present... Matlock

Matlock (Jon): So you say you saw the defendant leaving the victim's house?
Witness (Jayne): Yes.
M: From your shop waaay over on the other side of the sim.
W: That's right.

Frame Two:
Change camera angle. Jon/Matlock stands at left, gesticulating in a casual manner as he speaks. Gretel/Judge still sits at her bench, now at right of frame, watching Jon/Matlock. The Prosecutor, played by Spicoli in formal black suit, stands at his table in the background, visible between the two. (The defendant, who is irrelevant to the story here, is conveniently hidden by Jon/Matlock.) Spicoli's hand is raised in objection, and his mouth is open. Jayne/Witness is not visible, but it's assumed she's out of frame at right.

M: Now, I'm just a simple country boy, and I don't understand all this technical mumbo-jumbo, but I have to ask...
M: Mrs. Smith, what is your draw distance?
Prosecutor (Spicoli, with emphasis): WTF?!
P: Objection, your honor! Relevance!
Judge (Gretel): I'll allow it. But get to the point, Mr. Matlock.
M: Thank you, your honor.

Frame Three:
Back to original camera angle. Jon/Matlock is addressing the witness. The witness looks upset.

M: Mrs. Smith?
W: It's...
W (emphasis): It's 64 meters.

Frame Four:
Same camera. Witness is slumped in her chair, defeated and deflated. Matlock smirks. Judge bangs gavel.

Offscreen Jury/Audience: Gasp!
J: "Order in the court!"
M: "I rest my case!"

And that was the joke. See, I was going for the old lawyer show cliche about the nearsighted eye witness. Said witness is somehow deprived of his glasses at the time of the incident, and is ultimately revealed to be lying about seeing the wrongly accused defendant. It's been in every legal drama ever made, in one variation or another. And low draw distance equals nearsightedness. See? Ha ha ha?

Draw distance. I was going to make a comic gag centered around draw distance settings. What was I thinking?

SkyPod 1 RIP

2007-06-05T20:13:00.000-06:00

Well, after two-and-a-half years, I finally removed SkyPod 1 from the Garden of Mo.

Unfortunately, due to recent RL events, I'm having to cut my holdings in Louise and tier down. This meant removing unnecessary prim expenditures. And, given that I haven't been in SkyPod 1 for more than five minutes at a time in the last few months, I decided to let it go.

Still, I'm feeling a bit wistful and generally depressed about it. SkyPod 1 was the first thing I built on my First Land plot, way back in early January, 2005. And the Holodeck was my first substantial scripting endeavor. I think every technically inclined newbie comes up with the idea of scripting a furniture swapping, prim saving system at one time or another. It's almost a rite of passage.

I have fond memories of tinkering with the SkyPod's furniture, making jokes about getting pureed by the giant spinning blades, carefully arranging classic literature (or the notecard-dispensing prim equivalents) on the tables in an attempt to look cultured... I'm going to miss seeing it hanging there above me, suspended from its tireless, counter-rotating props. It feels like the end of my Second Life childhood.

Last One Out...

2007-06-01T12:11:00.000-06:00

...Turn off the lights.

Walker Spaight on the recent court ruling invalidating the TOS in the Bragg case.
Tateru Nino on Daniel Linden's recent ominous announcement.
And all sorts of assorted other follow-up that I'm just too disgusted and tired to track down.

In two and a half years of upheavals and crises, this is the first time I have honestly felt that the end of Second Life was nigh. This is, frankly, scaring me. And, clearly, it's scaring Linden Lab, too. Otherwise they wouldn't be making such ill-conceived and intrinsically flawed statements in doomed hope of forestalling another lawsuit. The recent morality-releated changes (the umpteen announcements on ageplay sex, the age verification, the casino rulings, and the list goes on) all smack of desperate, one-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-other-is-doing flailing, not an organized plan for the future of Second Life. I just don't know what to make of all this yet. It makes me want to stand in the Welcome Area and greet each newcomer with "Are you sure you want to be here?"

I don't have anything more to say about this, except to express my anger and outrage. Some assjack suing because his 'sploitz didn't work out may very well end up killing the next step in the evolution of the information age.

Osculation Documentation

2007-05-29T19:42:00.000-06:00

So what did you do last weekend, Uncle Mori?

Well, kids, I spent a bit over seven hours on Sunday poised over my snapshot button, taking pictures in Second Life. In particular, I took over 160 pictures of 320 people swapping spit at the SLRFL carnival kissing booths. That comes out to an average of one picture every 2.5 minutes. Actually, there were somewhat more than 160 kisses dispatched, and considerably more than 160 pictures taken. But I'll get into that later.

By necessity, kissing in SL is something of a mechanical process. To receive a kiss, the donor walks up, pays the booth the required amount of money for the kiss he wants, and a pair of appropriate poseballs is rezzed. He then has 40 to 60 seconds (depending on the kiss) to sit on the poseball. The kissing booth volunteer does the same, and the animation starts. Net result is their avs are driven through the motions of kissing each other until the timer runs out.

It's cute, and everyone seemed to get a kick out of it. But, like all such av-on-av interactions, it continually reminded me of the marionette sex scene from Team America: World Police. Kind of breaks the mood, to say the least.

There were four booths setup. Each booth had three possible kisses, in increasing levels of steaminess and associated cost (remember the exchange rate is something like L$270 to US$1, and all proceeds go to the American Cancer Society):

Kiss on the Cheek (L$50) - The avatars stand a couple feet apart, and slowly lean in to give/receive a simple kiss on the cheek. No hands involved, all very sweet and chaste. For technical reasons, I hated this one. First, it was only 40 seconds long (the other two were 60), giving me that much less time to locate the booth in operation. Second, it was a particularly frustrating animation to shoot. The avatars start standing upright, then slowly lean in for a brief peck before standing up again. This meant that I had to watch for precisely the right moment to snap the picture. And, given the lag issues in a chock-full sim, this was no easy task.
Simple Kiss (L$100) - Similar to the one above, except there is more contact. The avatars still lean (somewhat awkwardly) inward, but the kiss lasts considerably longer (most of the full 60 seconds), and hands are placed on shoulders and/or back. This one appeared to be the least popular. People with little cash generally went for the L$50 peck on the check, while folks who were really into it tended to go for the third option. For the most part these kisses were only purchased by completists who wanted to see one of each kind. There were occasionally some amusing results, as the animations fell out of sync (such as when the volunteer was a little late mounting the poseball) and the kisser got... Well, more than he paid for. I ended up throwing away and reshooting a few pics because of that. But I'm not above showing one of the rejects here for my own amusement.
The Full-On Harlequin Romance Book Cover Kiss (L$200, pictured above) - By far the most popular, both with the donors and with the hooting onlookers. And, again for technical reasons, my favorite. The avs instantly dropped into position and, save for a short delay for the occasional flexi-skirt to settle, I was able to quickly snap the pictures and move on. This turned out to be quite important.

And where was I during all this smooching? I was hiding off to one side, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Originally, we'd intended to make a prop camera for the photographer to stand behind. But, for a variety of reasons, this never came about. And I'm kind of glad of it. I think people were pleasantly surprised when they received their souvenir photos (generally delivered within moments of breaking liplock). At least, I was told as much by a couple of the organizers. But I have no doubt that there would have been issues if someone was standing there very deliberately and obviously intending to take pictures from the beginning. Player/avatar psychology is a weird thing.

As it was, I ended up running a basic bury animation, and hiding my avatar under the ground. That seemed to be enough to render myself practically invisible, in spite of the fact that my nametag still gave away my position. Quite a few people assumed that the photos were automatic, and somehow scripted into the kissing booths. After the second time, I swallowed my pride and stopped disabusing them of the convenient misapprehension. Unfortunately, there is no way to take snapshots by script alone. At the very least, a custom client would be required. Add to that the human judgement required to line up the perfect shot, deal with bystanders in the way (had to do some fancy alt-click-and-pan work in many cases), and an automatic photo booth rapidly becomes impractical, if not strictly impossible.

The picture frames around the photos were courtesy of a nifty (if I do say so myself) little HUD I whipped up for the purpose. Basically, it superimposes the picture frames (seven of them, changeable on demand) on my screen, where they'll be visible when "Show HUD in Snapshots" is checked on the camera settings. I also stretched my client window such that it was square, so that the resulting image uploads would also be square (as opposed to the normal 4x3 image that would be squashed disproportionately to fit 512x512 when uploaded). Net result is a nicely presented, distortion free image, without need for any Photoshop post-production work. I have no idea if I was the first to come up with such a tool- almost certainly not- but it seemed to work pretty well for the purpose. And it was certainly better than a bare snapshot, I think.

The HUD also has four preset camera locations, changeable as required. This let me line up the shots in advance, so I could simply jump from one booth to the next without any manual camera panning (unless required to deal with obstructions). Much faster. And that speed turned out to be vital, as timeframes proved to be quite short. My only warning that a kiss was incoming was a chat message: "Your kiss is being rezzed. Enjoy!" Then the countdown starts. I had very little time to figure out which booth was in use, line up the shot, snap the picture, upload it, paste a "Thank you for supporting SL Relay for Life!" message in the description line (probably an unnecessary refinement, I'll grant), and deliver it before the customer wandered away. (That last bit was important, as I couldn't afford to pan my camera around. I'd invariably miss shots while searching out customers, especially given the lag caused by trying to pan across a sim with 60+ people in camera view.) During busy periods, it was like a particularly frustrating game of whack-a-mole, or a bad RPG mini-game.

Worse, the whole operation was plagued with technical difficulties, from start to finish. Much of the carnival took place while SL had a concurrency of over 40,000 residents. As such, probably one texture upload in ten failed outright. Or, rather, it paused for 30 seconds (remember the kisses were only 40 to 60 seconds long), then flashed an error message informing me I should try again later, forcing me to reshoot and/or hit "Upload" again. Between that and the interminable delay required for the texture to become fully visible once it is uploaded (so I could tell if the picture needed to be retaken), most of the pictures generally became ready with only seconds to spare. Quite stressful, really.

Then there were issues with the poseballs failing to render (another lag issue), causing folks to join the kiss late (leaving me with a scant few seconds to catch the kiss before it was over) or miss it altogether. Unfortunately, they had to implement a no-refunds policy. As it was, many times I saw soft-hearted booth volunteers footing the bill for do-overs when a newbie couldn't figure out what to do the first time. (In spite of the fact that there were huge instruction signs in four different places.) Were it me, I wouldn't have scripted the timer to start until both parties were on board, and given the booth operator some method of manually cancelling them if required. (I only saw one or two people wander off unkissed after paying.) I'm sure there were solid reasons for doing it this way, not the least of which was it moved the line along. Still, it was kind of gut wrenching to see folks lose their money, time and again, because they were too new or too lagged to do it correctly.

And, of course, there were issues with folks forgetting to turn off their accursed animation overrides (I have a deep and abiding hatred for those mobile resource hogs in any case), and getting locked in some contorted semi-kiss while the animations duked it out over priority for each joint. You can see the bright yellow signs reminding folks to disable their AOs. Sometimes, they even worked.

Then there were my own technical issues. Many times I couldn't even risk moving my camera outside of the preset positions, for fear that I'd inadvertently pan it across the dense group of avatars on the dance floor behind me, and get lagged to a standstill for the next minute while my machine choked on the rendering data. And every time I answered an IM or attempted to participate in chat, I'd invariably miss a picture while typing. I'm sure all of my relay group members thought I was a little creepy, or at least massively antisocial, as I sat there under the ground for seven hours straight, watching them in stony silence as they cycled through their gyrating come-hither dances and kissed their customers. Sorry, guys. I'm not some kind of socially maladroit voyeur, honest! I just couldn't afford the time to chat!

I'd say that maybe 10% to 15% of the kisses delivered were undocumented, for one reason or another. And probably a half of the remainder had to be photographed more than once, for a variety of reasons. Given the conditions, I'd say that's pretty good. Still, I'm glad they didn't advertise the "...and get your picture taken while you're kissing!" part of the package. There would have been a lot of disappointed customers.

All-in-all, I can't say that the pictures themselves really added much to the profitability of the endeavor. I don't think anyone went in with the express idea of getting a picture, barring those they snapped themselves. But I think it did make them feel better about their donations. They have a nice little souvenir to stumble across in a few months, when they're shuffling through their inventories. The carnival raised over L$360,000 (approximately US$1,335), within additional general donations of around L$291,000 (US$1,080). Not too shabby! I'm proud to have been a small part of that.

And it just now occurs to me that, after seven hours of watching a few hundred folks exchange lip-locks, I never did get around to getting a kiss for myself. Not that I care overmuch about seeing my avatar get an awkward mechanical kiss, but there's something fundamentally unjust about that. Ah, well.

Wiggle Stereoscopy

2007-05-25T19:17:00.000-06:00

This evening, I spent a little time tinkering with "wiggle stereoscopy", otherwise known as "time for space wiggle" imaging. If you're an avid follower of webfilters, you might have heard about this a few years ago. Jim Gasperini, one of the acknowledged experts in the process, has more examples (some images NSFW) on his website. I know I've seen at least one of his images imported into SL as animated artwork. In some cases, the illusion of depth is quite surprising.

Basically, the process involves attempting to create free-viewed 3D images by taking the two halves of a stereo pair (such as the ones I occasionally post) and rapidly flipping between them. Persistence of vision and parallax effects will suggest depth, to some degree.

I've created a pair of scripts that attempt to generate real-time wiggle stereoscopic views on the fly. Basically, the scripts take a given camera view, calculate an (adjustable) offset for left and right cameras positions, and rapidly move the client camera between them.

The first script keeps the camera's focus centered on a given subject. To use it, alt-click on a subject, then touch the HUD object to activate (see the comments for full instructions). The camera's focus is locked in place, while the camera's position is swapped side-to-side. This is how Gasperini appears to make his images. That's how the above image was generated, as well.

Note that the above is a simulation. I'd intended to include a YouTube video here, but I was unable to get FRAPS to reliably and smoothly capture the wiggle effect on my mid-specs machine. The framerate dropped too low. However, the script above will generate an effect identical to the one illustrated, given reasonably low lag.

The second script works a little differently. Instead of holding the camera's focus on one fixed point, it generates two parallel camera images, left and right. In regular stereoscopic photography, the cameras are not generally toed inward to point directly at the target. Instead, they are kept parallel to each other. This script does the same thing. I've found that the first method (focused on subject, above) seems to work better, but your mileage may vary. The methods used in the second script might be useful if one were to try to come up with an automated method for taking conventional stereo pair photographs, however.

My next task will be to try to get NVIDIA's 3D Stereo drivers to work on my machine, both with anaglyphic (red-blue) glasses and my old e-Dimensional LCD shutter glasses. They claim that the system will work with any software or game running Direct3D and OpenGL. But, so far, they've done nothing but hard crash my machine, requiring a system restore and driver reinstall. I'm going to try one last full uninstall and reinstall sometime this weekend (an NVIDIA driver's biggest weakness is apparently an older NVIDIA driver), but I'm not optimistic.

Credit where credit is due: qDot Bunnyhug and UM3D, have presented concept models for two different methods of viewing SL in 3D. To my knowledge, nobody else has attempted real-time wiggle stereoscopy, but I know better than to claim to be the first at anything in SL. In any case, if you try either of the scripts, please drop me a comment and let me know how it works out.

Av-Melter!

2007-05-21T22:55:00.000-06:00

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been revisiting high altitude travel. Evidently, LL has made some changes to the way the SL client behaves at and above a million meters. Now, instead of a slow degradation over the span of several million meters, your av completely disappears at a million-and-change. Go a few meters beyond this critical threshold, and your attachments evaporate. A few more, and there goes your av. The former can be cured with a re-attach once you're back at ground level. The latter requires a reboot. None of the normal av-revealing tricks (changing groups, rebaking textures, re-attaching objects, dropping into appearance mode, etc) works. So, apparently, we can add another ceiling to the high altitude limits: non-phys movement ceiling (768m), permanent build limit (2,000m), absolute object limit (4,096m), and now avatar existence limit (1,000,000m). (I suppose orbiter victims have been aware of this one for a while now. But, not having been the victim of such an attack recently, it was new to me.) I haven't retested anything beyond this point, as it seemed kind of pointless to stare at an empty sky without even my disintegrating avatar for entertainment.

Speaking of disintegrating avatars, the av-melting effect is still around, to some degree. As you pass a few hundred thousand meters, floating point rounding errors kick in, distorting the individual points in your avatar's mesh in the process.

Sadly, it appears that the effect is lessened with more modern machines and graphics cards. The pictures below were taken on my home machine (three or four years old). I just tested on my brand new work machine, and the effect is hardly noticeable. Just the occasional sudden snap of arm or hand from one rounding "band" to another, and a minor sinking of the eyes. Kind of a disappointing discovery, actually. Yet another experience future SL residents will miss.

Still, I find it gratifying to see at least one thing in SL that actually works better on an old machine. Well, for certain values of "works."

Addendum
For best results, uncheck "Enable Vertex Shaders" in your graphics preferences. This will allow even people with newer machines to see the effect.

I ended up creating a HUD device capable of safely and quickly boosting an avatar up to nearly a million meters, and bringing him back to ground level (via map teleport) on demand. It's kind of a tamed orbiter, I suppose. (Wish I'd done this a year ago, when graphics cards were less resistant to the effect. Ah, well.) This has been built out as a kind of carnival ride, for use at the upcoming SLRFL fundraising carnival. It's this Sunday, May 27, from 1pm to 9pm SLT. Lots of rides, games, auctions, live DJs, and even a kissing booth! Be there (SLUrl, comes active this weekend) there or be square! We'll see how this works out as a carnival attraction. I wish, now, that I had leaned a little less heavily on the av-melting aspect, and more heavily on the million-meters-high aspect. Oh well, too late now. I ain't rebuilding it!

In any case, I'm quite proud of how the little kiosk came out. It feels good to build something simple, even if it is just a few walls and some Library Atoll textures. And, of course, it makes me feel better to actually participate in the SLRFL fundraising efforts, too. I'm also volunteering to take souvenir photos at the aforementioned kissing booth. This will be with the aid of a basic little HUD I whipped up to control the camera and generate hearts-and-flowers picture frames on the fly. Hopefully, that will be a little more value-added than the snaps the participants will no doubt take on their own.

When I started all this, I'd planned on leveraging Plywood into a fundraising tool. (Hubris and vanity, I know, I know.) Advertisements, book sales, character plugs and endorsements... Oh, what plans I had for whoring Plywood for the cause! Alas, after my dismal failure at revivifying Plywood's rotting corpse, that didn't really come together. So, save for the donation of the meager proceeds from Mo-Tech Industries, I've been little more than dead weight in my RFL group. I'm trying to be a bit more active now, to make up for that aspect of the comic debacle. We'll see how that works out.

Addendum, 5/29/07
Well, 55 HUDs were handed out at the carnival. I'd guess that maybe a third of those were actually used, due to the immense lag in the crowded sim borking attachments. Part of it may be poor signage. Folks seem to be remarkably incurious in SL, or perhaps just overly cautious, and often won't even click on a single button unless they know exactly what they'll get. The "touch this and something cool will happen" approach doesn't seem to work. They're going to put out another kiosk at the Midway Fair next weekend. Hopefully it'll be noticed this time.

Three Unrelated Things

2007-05-21T22:21:00.001-06:00

This evening, I finally got around to installing my copy of Laukasargas Svarog's bird feeder kit. For those of you who haven't visited Svarga (Visit Svarga. Now. I'll wait.), this is the home version of the really nifty AI birds that inhabit the island.

I'd had this kit sitting in my inventory for several months now, but never got around to putting it out in the Garden of Mo. Finally, after my neighbor Will Webb reminded me how many thousand Lindens I spent for the device (worth every Lindenbuck!), I decided to go ahead and take the time to set it up. As I was remarking to Will, I'm in a good place with regard to Linden Dollars. They're real enough to me that I can justify going to the Lindex when I need to, but unreal enough for me to waste them without worrying about it. Unfortunately, the same can be said for the latter and the money in my bank account. But that's another story altogether.

The kit comes with a bird seed dispenser, which allows you to feed the birds any time you like. Unfortunately, it's hard coded to sell seed objects for L$1. Mind you, this is, well, chicken feed. But, alas, gone are the days when L$1 is considered "free." Not when the average new resident has to slave away on a camping chair, or bounce from one end of the grid to the other harvesting money trees, to scrape together a few Lindens a day. (Or, well, spend a buck or two on the Lindex, but that's beside the point.) So, I ended up whipping up my own free bird seed dispenser, instead. Laukosargas was thoughtful enough to make the seed object mod/copy/transfer, so I hope he won't mind my reuse of his objects. I'm absurdly proud of the simple birdseed box, complete with glass window, randomly mounded seed, hinged lid, and scoop. Sometimes, it's nice to putter around with inconsequential details like that.

On the right are a few different birds, feeding on the seed I put out. This is strangely satisfying, actually. I expect to spend quite a bit of time out feeding the birds in the future.

On a completely unrelated note, above is a stereo pair (cross-eyed view) of Androclese Antonelli's sculpture, "You Can Leave Your Hat On." The real thing is 20 or 30 meters tall, and composed of a couple hundred prims. The guy has talent!

And on yet another unrelated point, while cleaning out my snapshots folder, I happened to run across this old pic of a virtual busker at a shopping mall. Turns out it was just a particularly creative camping chair, but I found the concept intriguing nonetheless. It's this kind of thing that gives me hope for voice in SL. I think I could almost deal with the gridwide cultural upheaval that voice chat would bring, if it meant spontaneous, live music on every street corner.

Sunset

2007-05-11T11:31:00.000-06:00

Sigh

2007-05-04T07:25:00.000-06:00

Well, crap. I think I just fried my interface box. The NumLock is rapidly blinking on and off for no apparent reason. Here's hoping I can find the time to repair or replace it before July.

Addendum, 5/6/07
Hrm. After shuffling around some USB connections, it seems to be working again. Oh, how I love USB port shuffling, with all the crawling over and under my desk and standing on my head to reach the ports in the back of my machine. Anyhow, short term crisis tentatively declared over. Nonetheless, I think I'm going to shelve further experimentation until after SLRFL (end of July). It strikes me as more than a coincidence that these troubles started not too long after I plugged in the bike, and I really don't want to wear the box out right now. All I need is for it to give up the ghost right before the Relay. I'm already afraid of that happening with my ancient and well-worn treadmill. As it is, I smell overheated plastic after only a couple of hours of walking. The fan I added to the forward cowling seems to help with this, but I still don't know how it'll react to the several more hours I intend to put in on the day of the event. I'm afraid to test it, because I can't afford to replace it with a comprable piece of equipment if this one dies on me. I'm seriously considering going to a thrift store to buy a semi-disposable emergency backup, just in case. Maybe I can swap back and forth between treadmills, pony express style, on the day of the Relay.

Besides, it looks like PCGamerBike has well and truly cinched bike interface technology, including built in key mapping for the forward and back keys for games like SL. Ah, well.

Bike Status

2007-04-29T18:45:00.000-06:00

As mentioned last week, I've been taking another stab at wiring up my old stationary exercise bicycle. This morning, I more or less finished.

Not too much to look at here, really. A momentary connect lever switch is mounted on the frame of the bike (attached to that bit of plywood there at center), right above the bearing for the pedal sprocket. (I'm making up terminology on the fly here, but it's not that hard to figure out!) A bisected scrap of wooden dowel is appended on the sprocket itself. As the sprocket turns, the dowel passes over the switch and depresses the lever. The switch is wired to the Page Up key, and the associated scripts in SL know what to do with the keypresses (currently measuring time between presses and deducing speed). Simple enough.

This morning's addition involved steering. Over the past few days, I've kicked around all sorts of custom switching schemes to allow me to move in world. Finally, late last night, it occurred to me that modern joysticks might already have solved the problem for me. I haven't used a joystick for a decade or more, and apparently they've come a long way in the interim.

The joystick pictured above is a Logitech Attack 3. Nothing terribly special about it, although it does seem to work fairly well. Mostly, though, it was the cheapest one available at the local Best Buy. The important thing is it allows the user to assign all of the controls, including the axis controls. This was a bit of a surprise, and was exactly what I needed! Currently, it's configured to act as fancy keyboard arrow keys. Push it left, it presses the left arrow key for me. Pull it back, it presses the down arrow. And it has a variety of other assignable buttons, which I've configured to activate various utility gestures in-world. The trigger hits CTRL-F2 for me, which turns my flight control script on and off. The buttons at the base control various fine-tuning aspects of the script. And so on. Pretty slick!

So, this one turned out to be quite a bit simpler than the treadmill project (you can see the umbilical feeding the control interface, monitor, keyboard, and mouse for that running offscreen at right). Once I had the joystick, and figured out how to configure it, I just needed to come up with a place to put it. Thus the little shelf hanging off of the handlebars. It's not pretty, but it seems to work. It's nice to have a sufficient accumulation of scrap and spare parts lying around to be able to knock something like that together in half an hour, without having to make a specific trip to the hardware store first.

I should send out a nod to qDot's previous work with bicycle interfaces. His is no doubt more technically sophisticated than mine. In particular, it pre-processes (by hardware and non-LSL software) the signals from the bike, and uses a scheme to more efficiently pass the resulting data to SL. As for me, I simply monitor the keypresses and do all of the interpretation work in LSL. (Fortunately, this does not seem to be a particularly resource-intensive process.) While dDot's approach has its advantages, this seems to work just fine for my purposes. The main difference is mine is susceptible to loss of focus if, say, an IM window is opened. Mildly vexing, but I don't often engage in long typed conversations while biking, in any case. (Might be fun when voice comes along, assuming the equipment isn't too noisy.) If you get a Busy response, well, there's a chance that I'm out riding my bike. Leave a message, and I'll get back to you later.

One thing I notice is the similarities between his time-out scheme and mine. It's been a while since I read his article, so I can't say with certainty if I got the concept from him or developed it independently. In any case, it's the only way this setup will work. The helicopter setup has a timer that resets every time the Page Up key is pressed. If too much time elapses (1.5 seconds, currently), the script in-world assumes that I've stopped pedaling, and the heli-bike plummets from the sky. (The trigger on the joystick turns this script on and off, should I wish to just hang where I am under my avatar's normal flight power.) I like his idea of rigging a bike powered version of SFCave. I'd experimented with a version of that using normal keypresses (press a key, the player is pushed upward, release and he falls). But it proved to require far too much space to operate, and wouldn't fit on my parcel. Perhaps the trick would be to leave the player stationary and move the cavern (in the form of a series of paired prims (roof and floor, with continuously varying spaces between, floating front-to-back under their own power) around him. Food for thought, that.

And I suppose that's all I have to say about this thing. Now, I'm going for a ride!

Random Update

2007-04-23T12:15:00.000-06:00

Just a few things that have been on my mind lately in SL.

First, ran across this Planet Karen webcomic a bit back. Yes! Exactly! It's surprisingly difficult to work in extended conversations in the limited space available in a comic frame. Quite a few times, I had to go back and re-shoot a frame because I changed the dialogue, and couldn't make the proper left-to-right order work out in the space allotted. And quite a few more times, I didn't but should have.

Second, a quick picture of a new addition to the SkyLounge tower. I've added free-floating faux laser show butterflies to the sculpture garden on level one. (They're somewhat clearer in person. JPGs don't handle pure colors very well, even at low compression.) Kind of an interesting bit of manufactured future-retro tech, that. It would be quite easy to have near-photo-realistic butterflies flitting around up there. In fact, I have several flocks of realistic particle Monarchs flying about at ground level now. ([plug] Available at Mo-Tech Industries for only L$250! And remember, all proceeds go to Relay for Life! [/plug]) The trick was to come up with something obviously not intended to look real, and fit the somewhat futuristic feel of the Lounge. Finally settled on this. The orb at top center is a varying cone of RGB lasers, intended to simulate projectors for the associated RGB outlines of butterflies below. Kind of reminds me of the old laser rock shows down at the local planetarium, before they got shut down for excessive drug use by the patrons. Strangely enough, Laser Pink Floyd attracted potheads. Who knew?

Of course, this kind of free-floating display is technically impossible without additional schemes to block/show the light (screens, smoke, etc). Light doesn't just spontaneously stop in clear air. I briefly considered trying to come up with some kind of head nod toward addressing that (perhaps a light fog of stage smoke in the area of the butterflies), but decided I was being overly pedantic about it. We can all fly and teleport. I don't think it's breaking the illusion overmuch if I assume some minor revolution in free-floating volumetric displays, too. In any case, it's kind of a neat effect, if I do say so myself.

Third, last weekend I decided to pull the old stationary bicycle out of storage and have another go at wiring it up. I decided to scrap the existing scheme and start over from scratch. Instead of using a reed switch (which for some reason never seemed to work reliably), I went with a simple spring-loaded lever switch and a bit of bisected dowel rod on the main sprocket. Every turn of the pedals, the dowel passes by the switch and depresses it. Simple enough. I'm a little concerned about wear issues there, since it requires moving parts in the switch. I'll have to see how it works out over time.

Right now, all I've got is elevation control. To maintain altitude, I have to keep pedaling at a given speed. I settled on a range between about 10 and 15 MPH (according to the speedometer built into the bike). Pedal slower, and the Heli-Bike loses altitude. Pedal faster, and it gains altitude.

From a programming perspective, this wasn't all that difficult to work out. In order to minimize lag effects, I divided the work into two scripts. The first script monitors a key (the Page Up key, in this case) and reports the time between keypresses (in hundredths of a second) via link messages. It also contains a timer to determine if the user has stopped tapping the key altogether. The timer is reset each time a key is pressed. If the timer lapses, keys are being pressed slow enough to be considered a full stop.

The second script takes that time and compares it against various numerical ranges: hover, rise slowly, rise quickly, fall slowly, and fall quickly. This proved to be somewhat complicated. Longer periods between keypresses correspond to higher numbers. If the period is longer (more hundredths of a second have passed), the user must be pedaling slower. This proved to be quite confusing and counter-intuitive (one would expect higher equals faster), especially after banging my head against the wall for a couple of hours. About halfway through, it occurred to me that a simple change of interpretation (such as working in frequency, 1/seconds, instead of period, seconds) would have made things somewhat more intuitive. But by then it was too late, and everything had been sorted out. And working in whole numbers (whole hundredths of a second is sufficiently fine resolution for my purposes) is still more convenient. Still, worth keeping in the back of my mind next time something like this comes up.

Worse, the ranges had to be determined by trial-and-error, actually using the bike in question to find comfortable (yet challenging) speeds. This involved a few hours of climbing on the bike, pedaling for a few minutes, observing the various numerical data being spewed out in debug, climbing off, tweaking code, and repeating. (My legs were so sore this morning, I could barely climb out of bed.) Fortunately, I had the foresight to work out the various ranges as offsets from one "neutral" number. Right now, everything centers around approximately 12.5 MPH, which corresponds to one full pedal revolution per 0.73 seconds. This method allows me to tweak speed ranges simply by changing one number, and having the software adjust all the ranges for me. I may even build in a method to do this on the fly, so I can make the Heli-Bike more or less demanding to keep aloft as needed.

So, I had code to interpret speeds as rates of climb/descent. The next trick was to come up with some kind of simple physical engine to drive it all. I've decided to stick with attachments for this project, mostly to avoid the frustrations of SL vehicles and sim crossings. This leaves me with normal avatar flight, and various forces to enhance or cancel a flying avatars normal buoyancy. Basically, the attachment applies an llSetForce along the avatar's Z axis, with positive forces lifting upward and negative forces pushing downward. Again more confusion there, with the inverted fast/slow/high/low/up/down scheme I'd backed myself into. Very frustrating after the umpteenth change of greater-than to less-than and plus to minus.

Originally, I created a linear equation directly relating pedal speed to force. Pedal faster to apply stronger forces and climb faster. In practice, this worked well enough from a purely physical standpoint, but proved irritating to watch. It's impossible to maintain a perfectly constant speed (even assuming lag effects didn't cause fluctuating time readings). So the pedal periods would vary slightly even when attempting to maintain a constant speed, causing associated minor variations in lifting forces. Normally, a minor (a few percentage points) change in force from second to second wouldn't be noticeable. But the effect became quite pronounced when followed by the normal SL client camera. What would appear to be a reasonably smooth climb to an outsider became a stuttering, jerking, motion-sickness-inducing movement when viewed through the damped, delayed motion of the default follow camera. I suppose I could have come up with some kind of custom camera parameters to minimize (but likely not remove) this effect, but instead I settled on breaking the forces out into the five speed ranges described above. The force only changes magnitude if the speed moves from one broad range to the next. Less realistic, but considerably smoother and easier on the eyes when viewed through my own camera. And, really, that's the important thing here. If I can't stand to watch it in action, it doesn't matter if the movement is realistic or not. It'll quite realistically stay parked on the ground or in my inventory.

So, anyway, I now have a helicopter that can move up and down. From there, it's simply a matter of hardware. Normal flight can be used for forward motion and steering, without additional software. I just need to come up with an appropriate controls scheme. Considering that I'll need at least three switches (left, right, and forward), possibly more, integrating this all into my handlebars is going to take a little thought.

More to come.

Addendum
Finished this project, more or less. Seems to work pretty well.

Building at 100,000 Meters

2007-04-20T11:59:00.000-06:00

As you may know (especially if you've heard me yammer on about it on this weblog), the absolute maximum object limit in Second Life is 4,096 meters. Any unattached object that is rezzed above this ceiling, or otherwise moves above it, quickly disappears. This is normally not an issue, unless you're performing some high-flying acrobatics with an SL jet. It can be quite disconcerting to have one's flying machine suddenly evaporate four kilometers above the ground.

However, as I discovered early last year, this effect is not instantaneous. An object that finds itself above the build ceiling will last a fraction of a second before disappearing. Not a terrifically useful distinction, of course, but still interesting.

On the evening of April 6, 2007, I performed a little experiment high above my land in Louise. Using a battery of seven scripted HUD attachments (the seven gold buttons shown in the film below), I attempted to create a solid floor at an altitude 100,000 meters. (The green and white HUD is the flight assist I used to reach the test elevation.) Each HUD is composed of 50 simple rez scripts and a master timing script. Every second, the timing HUD calls each of the 50 rez scripts in turn (one rez every 0.02 seconds, with distributed rez scripts to help circumvent the built-in scripted delays for llRezAtRoot). This is a theoretical maximum of 350 temporary floors per second (50 per HUD, seven HUDs). (The distributed scheme was used in order to avoid the "grey goo" fence.) In reality, the overall rez rate is likely somewhat less than this, due to lag effects and built in delays. If I ever attempt this experiment again, I will likely go with a larger number of rezzer attachments, with a longer delay time for each master timing script.

The rezzed object is a simple, temp-on-rez prim. The floor prim is five meters by five meters by 0.01 meters. This size was a compromise: large enough to easily stand on, but small and light enough to minimize rez delays due to object mass. Following is a film of one experimental run in action.

As you can see, Will Webb and I are able to stand on the rapidly rezzing, rapidly evaporating floors. In earlier experiments, only one rezzing HUD (only 50 floors per second, max) was used. In that case, we were perpetually in the free fall animation, as our avatars continually lost support and fell a couple of millimeters, only to be buoyed by the next floor rezzed inside our bounding boxes. As more rez HUDs were added, we spent less and less time in free fall, until finally we were able to stand more or less normally (give or take the occasional fall and jitter). The experiment filmed above had a small, but noticeable (approximately 0.3 dilation) effect on simulator performance.

It seems likely that, if one were to greatly increase the number of rezzer objects, a stable and largely flicker-free structure could be created. But such a construct would likely be quite costly in terms of simulator resources. One could also optimize the system by controlling the rez timing across all of the rezzer objects. Currently, each of the rezzer HUDs operates independently, and it's likely that the overall periods between rezzed floors is not uniform.

In any case, it seems unlikely that a high altitude construct like this could be made permanent. Even if some form of self-replication could be programmed that was fast enough to rez a duplicate and transfer inventory before the original object dissipated, yet slow enough to miss the grey goo fence, one lag spike would break the chain and cause the whole build to disappear. And, of course, there is little that could be done in such a build, beyond jerkily wandering around and saying "Yep, I'm at 100 kilometers." Chairs and poseballs would disappear before they could be used, and scripts would not have time to execute anything more than the most basic commands.

Alas, it seems that ultra-private skyboxes and the like are still limited to 4,096 meters and below.

Ratings

2007-04-20T11:35:00.000-06:00

Well, it appears that the Lindens are looking at removing the ratings system. Honestly, I'm not all that concerned about it, as you can probably guess from my mediocre numbers.

Not all that stellar, especially considering I've been here a bit over 27 months now. Still, I appreciate the few I have received over the last couple years.

In spite of my own dismal ratings, I can certainly understand why some people would be a bit miffed and disappointed about losing theirs. For many, this is a tangible representation of peoples appreciation of their efforts. For many residents, the occasional IM and pos-rate are the only rewards for their hard work. And even though they don't have any actual effect on the world, in concrete terms, I can sure see how it'd hurt to lose them. It'd be on par with someone breaking into their homes and confiscating their diplomas, certificates of merit, and bowling trophies. I don't disagree with the reasoning (the system consumes desperately needed server resources, and has been gamed and corrupted from the beginning), but it's a tough thing to see happen, nonetheless.

Filth!

2007-04-16T21:35:00.000-06:00

Hey, cool! The Garage of DOOM got a mention in the Death issue of Filth magazine. I'm side-by-side with sexy zombie chicks! What's not to like? Go pick up your copy at the Filth Magazine corporate HQ. And thanks go out to Kitty Lalonde for not making me sound too much of a dweeb.

Tower

2007-04-05T11:56:00.000-06:00

Well, after procuring a little extra prim land (thanks to a land swap with Walker), I've finally taken on a project I've been kicking around since Babel Two in last year's Burning Life. The old SkyLounge has been converted from an arbitrarily hanging skybox to a four kilometer tall tower.

The top of the tower is substantially the same, save for the addition of the dome and aerial at the top. The tip of the needle is at 4,106 meters, or 4,060 above ground. (I equipped the needle with a flashing warning light, for no good reason. Any high-flying plane would evaporate a fraction of a second after exceeding 4096 meters.) I won't say this is the tallest structure on the grid (I know better than to claim the first, biggest, or best anything in SL!), but it's the tallest I've ever seen or heard of, anyway.

By my rough calculations, the tallest possible normally constructed tower would be a couple centimeters shy of 4,133 meters high, assuming it was built on land lowered to nearly zero elevation, and was capped by a linked object (using all the tricks for maximizing link distance) with its root insertion a hair below 4096 meters (the absolute build limit). You might be able to squeeze a few more meters out of it with various prim-twisting tricks on that last prim, as well. I honestly don't feel the need to scramble for that last few meters, and my sim wouldn't allow me to terraform my land that low even if I did. If someone really wants the height record, well, they can have it.

And, of course, one could outright cheat and use a 65,636 meter tall megaprim. I assume that's the max size for such a hack. That's the largest I've ever seen, in any case. (Oh, darn, only 65.6 kilometers across. Why bother?) If it was placed with its root at just below 4096 meters (the build limit is determined by the prim's insertion point), that would allow someone to create an unadorned, single-prim tower up to 36,864 meters tall (assuming zero ground elevation). Said tower would just be a simple solid, with nothing on the top. You can't link to anything greater than 32 meters away, center-to-center, and anything rezzed on top of it would instantly disappear. It would, indeed, be 36-and-change kilometers tall, but it sure wouldn't be all that useful or interesting when all was said and done.

And it would also wreak utter havoc (or should I say Havok?) with physics, and probably get slapped down by the Lindens. Unless you're on your own private island, megaprims are verboten. I find myself wondering how one would even get to the top of said tower, in any case. No known teleporter or elevator scheme will reach anywhere near that high, and orbiters are too unpredictable for such duty. (You'd have to be darn good at scripting ballistics, and have an exceedingly low-lag sim, to consistently hit a target a few meters across from 30-some-odd kilometers below.) I believe map-based teleportation is limited to a few thousand meters up, as well. I suppose they'd have to hand out flight-assist attachments at the door.

In any case, I'll stick with my humble four kilometer tall monument to bragging rights. There's plenty more to do on this without scrambling for every inch.

Here's the base of the tower. Not much to look at, now, but I'm kicking around schemes for improvement. Given that it's nestled between a giant no-entry'd prim hedge, a wooden privacy fence, and a meters-tall cliff, I don't feel too bad about putting in such a lackluster base structure for the time being. I'll probably expand the entry lobby at some point in the near future. It has a nifty irising automatic door, in any case.

You may have noticed that the base doesn't match the top of the tower. That's because the tower rezzing apparatus does some texturing on the fly. Each segment checks its elevation on rez, and adjusts its shade based on height (higher is lighter). So the tower gradually fades from black to white as elevation increases. It also adjusts the inside diameter, getting narrower as it goes. Then the script deletes itself from the segment's inventory, to save on lag. You have to think of such things when you're building a structure out of 400+ scripted components.

As with all extreme altitude builds, this one is vulnerable to sim restarts. Anything above 2000 meters (or so my experiments show- not 2048 meters- odd!) disappears on a reboot. So I've had to add yet another maintenance robot to the SkyLounge staff. In addition to the rez rocket that periodically checks on the SkyLounge itself, and the device that rezzes the radio tuner (which had to be group owned in order to change the media streams on my group land), I've had to add a widget that wanders the length of the tower checking for missing segments. These three devices alternate, and run at several minutes between cycles. My neighbors may lynch me for erecting a superscalar phallic symbol in my back yard (sometimes a four kilometer tall tower with a big knob on the end is a just a four kilometer tall tower with a big knob on the end), but at least they'll be able to do so in a low lag environment.

I had to do a little remodeling on the first floor to make room for the altered method of entry. Those of you who've visited may remember that the old SkyLounge was entered via a balcony on the third floor. Now, the elevator takes visitors up through the center of the tower, and drops them off on the first floor. This meant removing the giant pine tree from the center of the garden area to make room for entry. This was unfortunate, and I almost scrapped the project for this reason alone. But, finally, I decided that I was sick of the tree disappearing and waiting for me to return. (There's a long-standing bug that prevents trees from being rezzed by script when the owner is absent. Given the other issues in SL at the moment, I don't see that one being given priority any time soon.) The big pile of bare dirt looked pretty odd if a visitor arrived before I could log in and re-rez the trees again. I've left the shrubbery, even though it, too, is volatile due to the tree rez bug. I'll replace the donut-shaped mound of dirt with something else (perhaps a fish pond), eventually. The prim sculpture garden doesn't look too bad without them, in the interim.

Next up, I'll be fitting out the ground level with something a little more appealing. Then I'll expand the third level (the free form "holodeck" space) with a few more programs. The never-used stage area is getting kind of old. I'm looking into a particle-based fireworks system (something like Jopsy Pendragon's fireworks show, although I have little hope of matching her artistry), and maybe a sky diving center. Lots of potential here.

Addendum, 11:43 pm

Revamped the base of the tower this evening. I think this looks quite a bit better. Now I just need to furnish it.

Apparently, I'm Legitimate

2007-04-03T10:36:00.000-06:00

Ran across this article this morning on GeekPress. On April 16, US Astronaut Sunita Williams will be running the Boston Marathon... From space. She'll be using a treadmill on the International Space Station, and running by proxy. Her sister will be running the 26.2 mile race in person, roughly at the same time (give or take time shifting required by space station operations).

I think this is really quite cool. And it makes me feel a little less silly about my own comparatively paltry efforts in the upcoming SL Relay for Life. No, I won't be doing 26 miles, but at least there's a precedent for this kind of thing now. Kind of nifty.

Potential

2007-03-25T20:40:00.000-06:00

So this evening I spent a few hours writing Plywood scripts. (Scripts as in actual scripts, not LSL programs.) Nothing unusual about that. Someday, I might even film them. The catch is that these were taken from outlines written while I was in the waiting room at the local animal emergency clinic. The kitty is fine, now, but you can imagine the kind of ideas that came out of that particular brainstorming session. We'll see if I have the nerve to bring them to life.

My main concern is how folks will receive Plywood comics that aren't funny. Okay, I know how folks greet those. I've had some strips posted in the Herald with comments enabled. I mean stories that aren't intended to be funny. Kind of nervous making, that. We'll see if I can pull it off.

Assuming I ever, you know, get back to it. I've sure been living up to my "whenever I feel like it" schedule lately. Ah, well. I think SL can survive just fine without Plywood for a couple of weeks.

Security Cameras

2007-03-20T12:06:00.000-06:00

I just spent a good chunk of my weekend working on security cameras. Or, rather, a kit allowing SL users to create their own camera systems. Those of you who who've checked out the Garage of DOOM know that there is a basic camera set built into the security desk at the entry area. Sit in the chairs, and your camera is automatically sent to one of eight preset views within the Garage. Nothing too fancy, just fixed viewpoints selected with arrow keys, but it provides an easy way to watch a game in progress.

Well, since the GoD interminable beta began a few months back, I've received numerous IMs asking about the system. My answer has always been the same: it's not overly complex, but it does require some scripting/building knowledge and a fair bit of tedious preparation. Each of the camera locations in the GoD's system must be programmed by hand, using preset coordinates for the camera's placement and focus positions. (Basically, "put the camera at position [A,B,C] and look at position [X,Y,Z].") Nothing terribly difficult, but a bit tedious and possibly too much to ask of a non-scripter. And, face it, if they were scripters, they wouldn't be asking me for copies of this comparatively straightforward application. They'd be writing their own. And probably doing so better than I could, come to that.

In any case, after the umpteenth inquiry, I finally decided to build a product that would automate the process, allowing non-programmers to build their own systems using (relatively) simple tools. The end result came in two parts: a camera position recording HUD and a camera-enabled poseball. The poseball turned out to be reasonably easy. It reads a notecard with camera settings and camera coordinates, and overrides the camera of anyone sitting on it. Naturally, it includes a basic sit animation script, as well. Just drop in the desired animation, and the poseball does the rest. A configuration notecard is included to change simple things like the floating text ("Watch Security Cameras" or the like) and text color, and the poseball can be modified as required for color, shape, linking to other furniture, and so on.

However, generating the camera coordinates notecard turned out to be the hitch. I started out with a simple, one-prim HUD for the process. Maneuver your camera into the desired position, and click on the HUD to record its coordinates. Then type "/1 send" to send the coordinates as a properly formatted e-mail. I thought long and hard about data transmission, in terms of e-mail vs. in-world comm channels. People are understandably leery of handing out their e-mail addresses, although it's likely that the purchase price of the HUD would dwarf any profits I could expect from scamming one e-mail address for a spammer. Putting aside my personal distaste for spam e-mails, there's just no profit in it with this model.

Unfortunately, given that there is no way to write to a notecard directly by script, I'm left with convoluted schemes like this. The other option was to have the device spew out the coordinates on a chat channel, and have the user copy and paste from his history. The Thinc printing press uses this scheme, and it works fine for that application. The main difference is the books effectively form their own backups. Miss the chat? Just run it again. Decide you want to change a page a few weeks down the line? Just swap out the image in the book template and run it again. That doesn't work so well here, however. There's no individual cameras to swap around like textures in an inventory. I suppose I could have come up with some complex system to store camera locations indefinitely in memory, swap them around, mix and match them, etc. But the e-mails are much cleaner. Once it's sent, the user can copy it as many times as he likes, and he can mix and match the lines as needed.

That, and it was easier for me to code. By this point in the project, I was ready to let that be a prime design criterion. I was never a big fan of having to either edit all the extraneous chat out of a card or move to an isolated location, anyway. Especially unworkable given the types of locations likely to use this device (casinos, clubs, etc).

Addendum, 4/2/07
Decided to ditch the e-mail system altogether. It worked great for me (I use e-mails to monitor all sorts of in-world events), but a couple of my beta testers were having problems with e-mails simply disappearing for one reason or another. Still not convinced the problem was insoluble, and the e-mail system was undeniably easier to use when it worked. But I could see support requests stretching out before me every time someone had their config data eaten by a spam filter, or lost for various other easily-solved-but-annoying reasons, and decided to drop it for something easier to deal with in all cases. And I think the results will work better for the average user in any case.

There are now two different types of cameras. One is still notecard programmable. This is the advanced option, allowing users to mix and match cameras and create custom names ("Entry Lobby" instead of the default "Camera 1" for example). But instead of sending the notecard data by e-mail, it is sent by OwnerSay and harvested from the chat history. Had to make the notecard reader a little more robust (better error checking, and the ability to deal with extraneous blank lines and such at the end of the notecard), but it seems to work better as a result.

The second camera is the quick one, and requires no user interaction. Just press the button on the HUD, and a camera ball is generated and programmed on the fly. The user can then just drop the poseball wherever he likes, or use the included configuration notecard to adjust poses, colors, text, and so on. Fewer configuration options, and no ability to merge or delete camera views (once the poseball is made- the HUD still allows that for cameras in memory), but considerably simpler to use.

In any case, the basic single-prim HUD worked well enough if things were optimal. Unfortunately, there are a few hitches with camera controls. The main one is that cameras are limited to within 50 meters of the user (unless you disable camera constraints). The natural tendency is to wander around your parcel, collecting camera spots, then go back to your security desk/chair/whatever and dump it all in... Only to find out that half of the cameras are out of range. That left me with a need for some form of audit system. This required going through each camera and checking range. And it required a somewhat more complicated HUD.

After much tinkering, this was the result. When "CHECK" is selected, the user is presented with the display at the left. From there, he can cycle through each of the stored cameras and delete any that don't fit his needs. It also checks for distance from the user to the camera, and warns him if the camera is over 50 meters away. Of course, this is only useful if the user is standing near the intended location of the poseball. (It occurs to me as I write this that I should put a similar check in the poseball as it's reading the notecard.) I also added buttons to clear the memory (triggering the confirmation box at right), send the coordinates e-mail, and record the camera locations. Oh, and I added a fair bit of superfluous shininess, just for my own amusement.

This works pretty well, all told. The configuration of the HUD came after an an "ah-ha!" moment for me. When the "CHECK" or "CLEAR" functions are selected, the entire HUD rotates 90 degrees in the appropriate direction to present the new display. I'm sure most experienced HUD designers came across this trick long ago, but it was a new one on me. It saves screen space, anyway, which is important given that the HUD must be relatively large for text to be read clearly on lower resolution clients displays. And it looks kind of nifty in operation, besides.

You can see the protrusions for the buttons on the edges of the HUD in each of the three angles. In future devices, I'll probably recess the buttons, to prevent them from being inadvertently pressed (discovered this on accident by pressing the edge of the "YES" button and deleting all of my stored cameras). It's easy enough to track the current HUD mode/orientation for now, though. And I like the industrial tool appearance, with the extraneous protrusions on the side. In any case, it's certainly sufficient for an extra tool to build another product from a kit. I don't see Ikea wasting a lot of time and money making their Allen wrenches and disposable screwdrivers look pretty. Functional is good enough.

I'm really kind of enjoying designing HUDs. And I think I'm getting a little better at it, too. I'm going to have to look into refurbishing some of my old products for HUD use.

Daily Walk: 2007-03-10

2007-03-10T12:20:00.000-06:00

Here are some interesting places I've found during my morning walks.

NMC Campus - Just uniformly amazing. Well worth an hour of wandering around. And I just found out that my alma mater is part of it.
Work in progress. - A nifty build, especially for a niche shopping mall. The entire area is setup like a Monopoly board, with the rental stalls decked out as the plastic houses and hotels.
Bukowski Fjord Bridge - One of the architectural wonders of SL.
Unassuming Colossus - Still not certain what it's for, but I like it.
Myradyl's Mermaid Sanctuary and Sea Garden ~ Pirates Beware...
Seacliff Gallery - Actually, Seacliff in general is amazing. It's nice to see a mainland sim end up with such uniformly high standards. It always makes me nervous, though. I fully expect a mini-mall or a giant tower of adverts drop in the middle of it all.
Seacliff Northeast
Kojima Vale
Linden Land - Sometimes, you just need open land with nothing but trees as far as the eye can see.
Southern Creations
D3volution! Fashion Undone. HaT MecHaNiCs, Raggy, Devolution - Nifty build. Basically a run-down junkyard/industrial area, with a shop built in the ruins.
Chained Sky Island
A Stone's Throw Away
Lily World

The Buddha at Lily World

News Brief

2007-02-28T17:52:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note to catalog another few moments of my fifteen minutes of fame. I live for this stuff!

Jade Lily, majordomo of the of the SL Relay for Life, posted a quick entry about my walking film on the SL Relay for Life blog on February 24. Thanks, Jade!
Tateru Nino made a very flattering mention of my treadmill/Relay plans in her Monday Reality Mix over at NWN on the 26th. If you're not reading Tateru's work over at the SLI, you're missing out!
Onder Skall over at Second Life Games weblog wrote a great review of the Garage of DOOM on the 27th. I'm glad to have found out about SL Games. I read through the back entries, and already found quite a few things to occupy those long SL nights. Thanks, Onder! Oh, and they're not short security guards. They're zombie Cub Scouts, armed with slingshots. Much scarier.

Thanks for the linkage, everyone!

Addendum, 3/7/07
Redaktisto Noble, intrepid reporter for SLNN, wrote a very nice article about me and the treadmill interface. The first part is kind of amusing. Redaktisto asked me to pitch the treadmill as if I were selling it. I think I went overboard just a tad. I'm glad he mentioned dDot's previous work. (I'd read about his bike interface before starting all this mess, and found out he'd also done a treadmill a few weeks after I rigged mine.) I've certainly never claimed to be the first. I know better than to claim to be the first at anything in Second Life! Probably just my own paranoia, but I always feel compelled to mention prior art when this comes up. Not that anyone has called me on it, but still.

In any case, as far as I know I am the only person in SL who is doing this now (dDot had to forgo the fitness equipment when he moved a while back), and I'd lay pretty heavy odds that I've logged in more miles than anyone else who has done it before. I guess persistence buys me a few geek points, anyway.

And I expect my regular readers (both of them) are sick of me rabbiting on about this treadmill thingy, so I'll give it a rest.

Daily Walk: 2007-02-26

2007-02-26T06:55:00.000-06:00

Here are some interesting places I've found during my morning walks.

The L Word in Second Life - I've never actually watched the show (since I'm too cheap to buy any premium cable channels), but the build is nifty. And huge. This thing covers dozens of sims, most of which are identical duplicates of each other. This limits overcrowding and the associated lag issues. NBC pulled this trick a while back for their Christmas tree lighting ceremony. I expect this to be the way major events will be handled for quite a while, until the ~60 av-per-sim cap can be beaten. A very expensive solution, but it works. As usual, throw enough money at a problem, and it generally goes away.
NISSAN - Go get a free car and take it for a spin. The access code for the machine is painted on the wall next to this TP location. You didn't hear that from me.
Reebok - This is an old one, but the melted, surreal cityscape behind the main structure is worth a wander.
The Djorkenheim - Another prim-sculpture garden. I really like those types of places, mostly because they can be appreciated without excessive keyboard interaction, mouse clicking, tight maneuvering, and other things that are possible- but somewhat more difficult- to do from the treadmill. Actually, the entire Djork sim is worth a look.
COURTYARD OF GARGOYLES
The Future - I've always liked this place, and drop by periodically to see what's developed. Bring your flight assist (or better yet, find the mass transit system at the center of the sim), because this place is packed with surprises at all levels.
Bergman Books - Falk Bergman's amazing SL bookshop - I first met Falk a couple years ago at Hamlet Au's (nee Linden) NWN Book Expo. He ran away with the popular vote, and went on to make a name for himself making (amongst other things) more and more sophisticated and user-friendly in-world book readers for various authors looking to break into SL. (He's also helping me work out a the SLRFL edition of Plywood Volume 1.) This is his relatively new shop.

This isn't strictly SL related, but it does involve virtual reality, more or less. I went to a get-together at a friend's house, and ended up hurting my shoulder playing WiiSports tennis. There might be a geekier injury than that, but I think it'd somehow involve one-handed typing. My life is a comic book. Another guy (fellow SLer Throfofnir Balnarring) caught a loose Wii controller to the left temple, which left a rather impressive welt. And I believe there were some minor damages to window blinds, as well. If anyone tells you the wrist strap is unnecessary, they lie.

Language Barrier

2007-02-21T23:32:00.000-06:00

Lately, I've been running into something kind of odd when talking to new German residents in SL. They keep asking me about flying, right after "hello." Here's the latest conversation, from earlier this evening:

New German Resident: YOU HAVE FLY [in all-caps]
Me: What?
NGR: FLYING WHERE AND FROM
NGR: IM GERMAN

This is the third conversation I've had about flying in as many days. The pattern is the same in each case. I'm standing around in the Garden, twiddling with something as usual, and a new resident (first a female, then later a male, and then another female) comes up and says "Hi." I answer, and then they ask me something about flying. "You do fly?" was another one. That one actually made me rotate my camera around and check the zipper on my jeans, before I realized the physical impossibility of my painted on fly being down. Another moment of immersion, I guess.

Anyway, I'm more than a bit puzzled about this. Is there some alternate meaning to the word "fly" in German? Or some kind of common mistranslation by English speaking Germans? Or perhaps some cultural predisposition to find the oft-taken-for-granted ability to fly in SL especially fascinating? (I would find that one pretty nifty, if it were true. We all take that for granted in SL: We. Can. Fly.) Has something new been added to the German-oriented welcome areas that would make newcomers want to ask passersby specifically about flying? (No idea what that would be.) Am I being propositioned for cybersex in some culturally unique fashion? (That'd be a first for me, in any language.) Or is there something about me in particular that inspires the question?

That last one kind of makes me wonder, really. Tateru Nino (name dropping!) was kind enough to try to assuage my burning curiosity by asking around amongst her more linguistically gifted contacts in SL, but the whole "fly" meme didn't ring any bells. The consensus was that it was broken English for "Have you flown?"

This seems like an odd thing to ask someone two sentences into an initial meeting, however. Unless, of course, there's something about me in particular. All three times, I was in the Garden, wearing my trademark T-shirt and my Transmet shades. Does one or the other have some connection to an airline, travel agency, drug (???), or something else in Germany that has to do with "flying?"

Anyone have any ideas? If so, please drop me a comment. This is really quite odd!

Walking in the Relay for Life

2007-02-20T23:24:00.001-06:00

Here's how I'll be walking in the 2007 Second Life Relay for Life. This is one of several projects planned by members of McDunnough's Relay Gang to raise funds for the American Cancer Society. More information coming soon!

If you're interested in making a donation, an in-world donation card can be found here (SLUrl link). Web-based donation methods will follow shortly. Watch this space. Thank you!

Addendum, 02-25-07
I've started a dedicated page for my fundraising efforts (possibly in addition to group efforts, as well) over at the Plywood Comic site.

More details on the treadmill interface can be found below:

Relay for Life Kickoff

2007-02-17T15:10:00.000-06:00

Just got back from the 2007 Relay for Life kickoff meeting and, I gotta tell ya', I'm stoked. This is going to rock. Their goal this year is to reach US$200,000 in donations. Honestly, I think that's aiming low. They achieved US$42K last year, with something like a tenth of the population. (I'm guessing from foggy memory. Something like that.) I guess we'll see!

Eventually, when things clear up a bit at work, I plan on making some tie-ins through Plywood and elsewhere. At the very least, I'll have a Plywood donation page and a Relay edition of the Plywood SL-edition book. I'm sure I'll be mentioning this again soon. In the meantime, donate to Relay for Life!

Addendum, 2/18/07
Well, just added IMs to the Garage of DOOM guilting players into making a donation if they enjoy the game. Also added pledge cards in prominent locations in and around the Garden of Mo. And added signs stating that all sales at Mo-Tech Industries will be donated to the Relay. (Maybe that will cover the cost of a few stamps or something.) Spent last night and earlier this afternoon taking footage for a promo film about the treadmill interface and how I'm using it in the Relay. I'll be cutting it together in the next couple of days, once I find an appropriate soundtrack. Then comes the Relay edition of the Plywood SL book, and the associated donation page at the website (once online donations are up and running).

Batteries to power! Turbines to speed! The Moriash Moreau Fundraising Machine is on the move!

Qarl's Cube

2007-02-12T22:31:00.000-06:00

After seeing this comment in an NWN weekend forum, I had to take a look at Qarl Fizz's enormous cave system. It's quite an impressive project. Qarl was previously known for (among other things) creating the technically brilliant and beautiful Blimpco blimp flock (sadly out of order for the time being). I occasionally use the Blimpco project as an example of a benign use for self replication, as it uses a form of smart self-rep (in addition to evolutionary programming to improve each generation) to replenish the flock after blimps expired or were zotted by outside grid forces. I whiled away many a leisurely hour riding the fanciful contraptions, and passed out many a landmark to players old and new who were looking to tour the grid in style.

In any case, Qarl used a genetic algorithm (a concept of which I only have a sketchy layman's grasp) to generate a massive, sim-filling cube, riddled with labyrinthine passages. It's kind of Borg Cube meets Zork. "You are in a maze of twisting passages, all alike." I just spent a few hours wandering the place, but it's almost certain that I didn't see everything. Unfortunately, I seem to have left Ariadne's spool of thread in my other pants. And the trusty old right-hand rule (keep your right hand on the wall as you walk) doesn't work so well in three dimensions. Still, it was fun to get lost for a bit.

I look forward to seeing what Qarl has in store for the super-scalar construction. If you'd like to check it out, here's a direct SLurl link. Since it's a couple hundred meters above ground, and requires vertical movement, you'll need some form of flight assistance to effectively maneuver. I ended up whipping up a simple mouselook-driven mover attachment for the purpose. If you don't have a favorite flight assist, feel free to use this script. It's quite maneuverable, and has adjustable speed control, making it useful for flying in close quarters. Like, say, a 7 mile long cave complex. You never know when you might run across one of those.

A staring contest with a flock of iBall boxes (cross-eyed stereo image).

Daily Walk: 2007-02-05

2007-02-05T21:18:00.000-06:00

Since I'm going to be light on real posts for the next few weeks, I thought I'd take the opportunity to finish up a little project I've had on the back burner. I've created a HUD to record SLurl locations and parcel names for locations on demand. During my morning walks (explained here, for those of you not already tired of hearing about it), I'm going to use the HUD to store interesting sights I run across. Every few days, I'll dump the HUD to e-mail (it generates the webpage for me already), and post the results here. Sometimes, I'll add commentary, and sometimes I'll just let the location speak for itself. This gives me a cheap way to keep my post count up, and perhaps it gives you, my loyal readers, a few nifty places to check out in SL. Win, win!

So, without further preamble, here's the first one.

Here are some interesting places I've found during my morning walks.

Sunseed's Riverside Studio
Zero Point - Sculptures and general psychedelia. Be sure and check out the black cat and pigeons sculpture at these coordinates. Very simple, yet very neat.
Ramonia-Garden of Immersive Sound & Vision Sculpture Art - Came here via a NWN article. Be sure and turn on your speakers.
Cave Rua Water Gardens
Art at Oyster Bay Aquarium and Sculpture Garden
Magic Foundry - Morph Wollongong's place. Actually, all of Theta and Pi is worth a wander.
Cavorite Mines and Praeternatural Mineralogical Society - One of many remarkable locations in Caledon.
Caves of Lascaux and Berry's Bazaar - Via a NWN article. Go check out the caves. It's surprisingly hard to make good, realistic caves in SL. Prims are just unsuited to the task. But, somehow, Berry has managed it. I think part of it is his simple willingness to forego convenient flat floors and avatar-friendly corridors. That's the difference between a convincing cave and a mediocre Star Trek set.
Neo Japan Store
Venice, a city of Love
The Valley of Autumn - I love this place. It's a simple thing: just drifting autumn leaves. But so very well done. I've tried time and again, but have never been able to quite capture the effect. The water garden is also quite nice.

And, since I haven't done one of these in a while, I'll go ahead and post a stereo image of the cat sculpture from Zero Point. Note the multi-frame blur effect on the pigeon at the center. Nice, subtle effect that gives motion to the whole assembly. I don't know why I'm so enamoured of this one, which I'm sure most folks would consider one of the least impressive of the fantastic lot. Perhaps that's why. It's that much more difficult to do realism, and do it well, in SL. Or maybe I just like cats... Or dislike pigeons. In any case, do yourself a favor and visit sculpture gardens like Zero Point or Ramonia next time you're feeling burned out on SL. You'll be glad you did!

AFK

2007-02-05T19:02:00.000-06:00

Just a quick notice of inactivity: This weblog is not dead, but it may be pretty sparsely updated for the next few weeks, due to work conflicts. Don't you hate it when real life interferes with the important things?

Wave of Lag

2007-02-03T23:00:00.001-06:00

Ran across an old video of the land contour mapper I mentioned a while back, so I decided to dress it up a bit. (Music is "Numerator," from Free Play Music.) As you can see, no responsible person would ever leave this thing running indefinitely. Still, it's kind of a pretty effect when Show Updates is enabled. A few screenshots of this process were submitted to Osprey Therian's UI Abstraction photography contest (currently on display in Grignano). They didn't win and, frankly, they looked pretty lame by comparison. Oh well. I never claimed to be an artiste'.

Two Things

2007-02-03T19:15:00.000-06:00

Just a couple quick things. First, Plywood has officially kicked off again. Let's see how long I can keep it going before I run screaming for the hills, never to be seen again.

And, second, what's wrong with this picture (taken January 30, 2007)? It tickled me at the time, anyway. Yeah, I know, it's petty of me to pick on typos. But it's still amusing, given the subject matter.

Huh?

2007-01-22T21:45:00.000-06:00

Sorry, but the system was unable to complete your region crossing in a timely fashion. Please try again in a few minutes.

Well. That's new.

Latest Walking Setup

2007-01-21T20:26:00.000-06:00

or Moriash Moreau and the Monitor of Damocles

Addendum, 1/23/07: Previous weblog entries for this project are here (the computer interface), here (encoders and controls), and here (miscellaneous development). I'm consolidating the links in this post mostly for my own convenience.

Haven't posted any pictures of the walking rig lately, but I've made a few improvements since the last time.

Aside from minor tweaking for usability purposes, I've made two substantial upgrades to the rig. First, I added a shelf below the keyboard for a mouse and mousepad. (I may have mentioned this one before. I can't remember, and can't find any references in a quick search, anyway.) This required only another sheet of pegboard, four long bolts, four nuts, and some washers. But it made things in SL much, much nicer.

If you've ever attempted to walk or fly long distances in-world (as opposed to teleporting like any sane person would do), you know that you can't walk across more than a sim or two without running into an eviction notice from a security system. And, of course, these require the use of a mouse to dismiss, which meant that I had to either step off the treadmill or put up with an eighth of my screen (including the preferred location of my mini-map) being covered with a useless box. Add to that the occasional spam notecard, and I had to come up with something. I was getting as much exercise running back and forth to my desk as I was getting on the treadmill! The addition of a mouse to my rig allowed me to occasionally pay some bills or do a little websurfing, as well, on the rare mornings when the sights in SL didn't appeal.

And, incidentally, why, oh why would anyone think that it's a good idea to send an unsolicited notecard to everyone that walks within 96 meters of their shop? I swear, even if the shop was called "Stuff Moriash Would Love, For Free!" I'd give it a miss if it greeted me with a screen-filling advertisement. I installed a pop-up blocker on my web browser to stop such things. I'm eagerly awaiting new client upgrades to do the same thing.

But I digress. Frequently. The second upgrade involved replacing the unstable tower of TV trays, PVC pipe, zip ties, and duct tape that was supporting my monitor. That rig was never intended to be a permanent fixture, only an interim solution until I decided if I was going to keep on with the SL walking bit. After five months of using it several times a week, I think it's safe to say I'm going to stick with it.

The new rig isn't anything terribly complicated. I just finished it a few minutes ago, after only a few hours work. It's simply a slab of plywood, bolted to the wall for stability and supported by a five foot tall, 1-1/4" diameter water pipe. The pipe is affixed to the plywood table and a wooden base using pipe stanchions and wood screws. I even took the time to paint it. It may look flimsy in the pictures, but it's rock solid. I even felt comfortable replacing the old 17" monitor with an even older, but larger, 21" display. And, let me tell you, I think the older monitors were built with depleted uranium (NSFW audio) or something. Dang near ruptured some of my favorite body parts lifting that monstrosity onto the shelf. But even with the extra weight, it all seems quite solid.

I guess we'll see. If I come home to find a giant monitor smashed to flinders on the floor of my office, well, I guess it didn't work. And if I don't update for a while, it probably means that the Monitor of Damocles fell on top of me while I was at my desk. In that case, I expect a lavish in-world funeral.

Plywood Returns?

2007-01-20T14:43:00.000-06:00

Or, at least, it will soon. Maybe.

Don't hold me to this, but I think I'm going to start Plywood up again. Unfortunately, I'll be going it solo this time around. Sadly, World of Warcraft has claimed another victim. Monica is busy killing orcs and trolls, in addition to RL obligations elsewhere. It's going to be tough to do the comic without her work, but I'm going to give it a shot. So, if you notice a sharp decline in the quality of the props and avatars, not to mention in the funny, blame her!

Big thanks go out to Tateru Nino for her advice on how to streamline our comic creation process. Go read her comics! Now! I'll still be here when you get back.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this later.

Grid Maze

2007-01-16T21:34:00.000-06:00

After last week's mention of the invisible maze in the Messenger, I decided to pull an old project out of limbo and finish it.

Here I am inside the newly completed Grid Maze. The maze is a 20 meter by 40 meter by 4 meter rectangle, with interior corridors composed of 2 meter by 4 meter panels. It rezzes on demand in the SkyArena (teleporter located near the entry point linked there on the right). Just touch the black sphere in the center of the Arena, and select "Maze" from the dialog box. Give it a moment to generate the maze, then have a go at it!

Oh, and I'll let you, dear reader, in on a secret: it cheats! The maze walls rotate at random every few seconds... But only if you're not looking. Each maze wall checks for the presence of an avatar before moving. If an av is too close, or is facing in the direction of the wall, it stays still. If the player's back is turned, the wall has a 50-50 chance of moving. Repeat this across a couple hundred maze wall elements (there's a reason I don't keep this thing rezzed full time!), and the overall effect is quite disorienting.

The maze makes no attempt to verify that a valid path exists in any given configuration. This just adds to the confusion. Dead ends appear where open hallways were before, while new paths open up behind you. I've found that it's quite possible to work your way from one end to the other, simply by retracing your steps until a new pathway appears. But, if you become trapped, there are random teleporters built into the floors and ceilings. Right click on them and select "Teleport," and your av will be transported to a random location inside the maze. (Or, actually, a random location within the same 20 meter by 10 meter rectangle.) And, if you get frustrated, any wall can be used in the same way to teleport outside.

Working out the Arena rezzer for this one reminded me of an important lesson: always look for the simple solution. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work out schemes to deal with avatars standing inside the borders of the maze as it was being rezzed. I tinkered with scanners to lock it out if the area was blocked, push scripts to nudge avatars out of the way, IMs to warn avatars they're about to become trapped, as well as combinations of those and more. Everything was cumbersome and unreliable. Finally, more or less by accident, I stumbled across a simple hack that worked: the rezzer first temporarily rezzes large, invisible boxes to fill the work area. Then, if anyone is inside that volume, their avatar is slowly, but surely, squirted out of the way. Why not let Havok's version of the Pauli Exclusion Principle do the work? A single sensor sweep on rez drives a modest push script, with just enough force to nudge the avatars inside the volume and "wake up" physics for avatars that remain still after the blocking prim is rezzed. (Also a handy tip if you need an avatar to stop hanging in the air after the floor disappears.) After adding that refinement, this turned out to be much more reliable than any other scheme I could devise. So, lesson learned: look for the simple solution first.

MLK Day Avatar

2007-01-15T11:53:00.000-06:00

You know, Lee Cronin and the stalwart crew of the Enterprise said it far better than I could. So I'm going to let the picture speak for itself.

Exactly two people I met in-world this evening got the reference. I'm a little disappointed about that. Makes me feel old. (To be fair, the original Star Trek is a bit before my time, too.) A bit back, it was announced that the average age of SL citizens is 33 years old. That can't possibly be right. I still think there's a small, but dedicated, cadre of tech-savvy octogenarians skewing the numbers.

Moriash (left) and Throfofnir Balnarring (right) as Oppressed and Oppressor (respectively). Cheron grey costumes by Throf. Face and upper body tattoos by yours truly.

I would like to take the opportunity to point everyone to this comment by dga Kyomoon, the originator of the alternate avatar idea. He explains his original intention, and expands a bit on what it would take for the gesture to become meaningful. His intention wasn't to spin this as a learning experience for the av wearers, per se, but as a demonstration on par with the many MLK day parades in RL. Just read the comment. He explains it better than I.

As for me, I honestly didn't see anything all that different in SL today. Not that I could reasonably expect one announcement in the NWN to change the face of SL in 24 hours, in any case. But I was looking, anyway.

I spent a couple of hours wandering the grid, listenting to the chatter and hanging out in the background. (I excel at that. It's easier than interacting.) Perhaps there were more racial epithets skewed towards people of African descent than normal. Or perhaps not. I confess I don't spend much time out in the big bad grid, so I can't really establish a baseline.

Over the course of a few hours, I didn't see anyone obviously playing alternate races. But, then, how would I know? Certainly nobody was flagrant about it. Which, I suppose, could be encouraging in and of itself. Anyone playing up the stereotypes to the point that I'd notice them in passing would clearly be missing the point, whatever that point may ultimately be.

So, the upshot is that I have gleaned no particular insights this evening. I dressed up in my geeky little av, felt a little silly, and wandered SL looking for some signs of people... I don't know, having epiphanies, I guess. What does that look like, anyway? Is there a gesture for it? In any case, I'm still not altogether certain what I was expecting, but I didn't find it.

Sometimes, I think I expect too much from SL.

Read This Now...

2007-01-11T22:53:00.000-06:00

...Because I'll probably chicken out and delete it before too long.

I just spent about 40 minutes writing and erasing comments on this entry in New World Notes. I finally gave up, because it's just too volatile a topic. Frankly, I'm not interested in sitting in the center of a racial conflict on a public forum. Here, on the other hand, with my single-digit readership, I'll risk it.

"Yeah, let's twiddle our appearance sliders and pretend we're Black, in honor of Martin Luther King Day!" Does anyone else think that's a remarkably bad idea? What's next, putting on the cork and belting out a chorus of "Jump Jim Crow?" I can't think of anything less respectful to the late Dr. King's memory than a bunch of middle-class white folks (and, face it, that's still the overwhelming majority in SL) doctoring their pixel representations and pretending to "spend a day living in the world embodied in the skin of another."

Well, okay, I can think of more disrespectful things than that. Quite a few. And, sadly, I see most of them in RL at least once or twice a week. But, still, good grief. With all due respect to Erika Thereian's insights, and precisely because of the experiences leading to them, this is just asking for trouble, of a mediagenic and astoundingly inflammatory sort.

Ten out of ten for good intentions, guys. Minus several million for good sense.

Maze in the News

2007-01-10T12:01:00.000-06:00

The January 9, 2007 issue ( 4.3 MB PDF) of the Metaverse Messenger, in addition to its normal in-depth coverage of SL current events, just did a nice write-up of mazes on the grid. (I've scanned copies of the clippings: part one and part two.) As staff writer John Franchini points out, there are few mazes remaining in Second Life. They tend to be prim heavy, and take up considerable space. And there's no profit in them. I might add that few Grid citizens have the patience either to build them or to navigate them, especially given the frustration and disorientation inherent in clumsy avatar movement guided by the default camera (either in third person or mouselook) in close quarters. But, nonetheless, a few artistic souls persist in maintaining scattered mazes constructed here and there.

I'm one of them. I was quite pleased and surprised to the Garden of Mo's "invisible maze" mentioned in the article. I honestly haven't paid much mind to the maze in the past few months. I'd actually considered deleting it once or twice in the past few months, when my prim limit fell too low, but couldn't quite bring myself to do it. Glad I didn't, now. I may have to get back to a few more of the maze-based projects tucked away in my "Experimental, Incomplete" folder. I've been looking for a new project, anyway.

Here We Go...

2007-01-08T18:01:00.000-06:00

Well, as I'm sure you've all heard by now, the Second Life Client went open source this morning. I'll spare you the semi-informed speculations about the potential enhancements on the horizon, and leave it with a simple WOOT! This is going to be an exceedingly cool time to be in SL.

And yet, I feel the same urge to tape my windows, stock up on water, and check my ammunition that I felt before the last hurricane hit my RL home. Two-million-plus people have just been handed the keys to the kingdom. Open sourcing the client is a necessary step for SL if it is to become the 3D web. But it's also a risky one.

Buckle up, folks. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

iZ

2007-01-02T12:39:00.000-06:00

Over the holidays, I ran across these little iZ toys from MacDonald's. Apparently, they're handing them out with Happy Meals. All in all, there's not much to them. Some light up, some make little musical noises when manipulated in a certain way. (The latter are considerably cooler than the former. Even preschoolers are unimpressed with red LEDs nowadays.) And they're oddly, compellingly cute, in a far-left-side-of-the-uncanny-valley kind of way. I'm sure that you've seen them, or their full-featured cousins, if you were anywhere near a rug rat this Christmas.

Am I the only one who immediately thought of Pierce Portocarrero machinima after seeing this?

Rez-Day

2007-01-01T09:49:00.000-06:00

Hey, I'm two years old today! Well, happy rez-day to me. Haven't changed a whole lot, have I? I think I've managed to look 12 sim-years (remember the four hour SL days) older. Must be the beard. I'm still wearing the halo, albeit invisibly. I'm going incognito.

Sorry, folks, no insights or ruminations, either on my rez-day or on this, the new RL year. Not right now. Though I'm one of SL's elders, I'm just older, not wiser. Maybe next year.

Green Lantern in the Wild

2006-12-28T21:06:00.000-06:00

Today, while wandering aimlessly at New Citizens Incorporated (SLurl link), I ran saw my first Green Lantern in person. The magenta fellow in the green-and-black is Marious Bishop, and he confirmed that he was, in fact, on anti-griefer duty at the NCI. At that point, I think the geeky fanboy in me wrestled my normal restraint to the ground (probably using a cheap knockoff power ring), and I informed him that they (the Lanterns) were "kicking all sorts of ass." There may have been a smiley involved in there somewhere, too, much to my chagrin. Mr. Bishop had no comment on this. I hope that he was just too busy with his duties, but I fear he might have read sarcasm where I intended honest applause. Sigh. Such is the downfall of text-only communication.

In any case, this was the high point of my evening. Here I was, wandering through the busy corridors of the NCI, and listening to so many people volunteering their time and their teeth-gritting patience to help new arrivals to the alien world of Second Life... All under the ever vigilant eye of a lone Green Lantern. It was a page from a comic book, brought to life.

Thanks, guys, and keep up the good work. You're kicking all sorts of ass.

Cleaning Out My Snapshots

2006-12-28T12:22:00.000-06:00

This morning, I decided to do a little cleanup on my local hard drive, and sort through the several hundred megs of SL snapshots tucked here and there. Here's a few of the highlights. Basically, in lieu of actual content, I'm throwing up some old screenshots. This one's a little image heavy (although if you've read this far, the damage is probably already done). That's one of the nice things about writing for a group that plays SL (inasmuch as this weblog is for anyone but me): my readership is all broadband enabled, or they wouldn't be able to login to begin with. Alleviates some of the guilt at bandwidth hogging, image heavy posts. Anyhow, on with the pics.

This is the image that made me decide it was time to do a little housecleaning. It was taken at the 2006 Relay for Life... Back in July. Considering I snap at least one or two pics every day, and each one is on the order of 2.7 megs, I'd say it was time to start round-filing a few.

Sadly, this was my only other pic from the Relay. I came a little late, due to RL issues, and only had a chance to light a few last minute donation candles. But I'm in training for this year. I should be ready for a solid virtual walk come time for the 2007 Relay.

Sometimes, I run across a screenshot that just puzzles me. I can't for the life of me think of why I snapped this one. Still, this is one of the best rental adverts I've ever seen. Makes me want to go out and rent some land, anyway. Which, I suppose, is the point.

Here's a picture of another version of the 3D particle contour map (second half of the post). This one used a different method of projecting the voxels. Instead of tilting a stationary emitter and projecting at a given distance, it just moves the emitter to the desired location and drops a particle in place. This turned out to be much more accurate than the tilt-and-shoot method (no stray pixels caused by lag delays). And it looks kind of neat, as well. The display is generated by a swarm of 64 shiny, silver BBs that move across the display in a diagonal band. I suppose they could be made invisible easily enough, but I kind of liked the effect.

The picture above was taken with Show Updates enabled. Each of the red and blue wedges indicates another update sent to the server. There are 64 emitters, each one making 64 updates every 30 seconds (30 seconds being the maximum lifespan of a particle). Each voxel requires two updates: move to position and update the particle system. That tallies up to a total of 8,192 updates sent to the sim every 30 seconds, or 273 updates per second.

So, uh, yeah. I won't be using this thing very often. Or, pretty much, at all. (I've removed the one on display in the SkyLounge, even though it timed out in 180 seconds. Just couldn't justify the sim resource cost, even for short term, infrequent use.) It was a good educational experiment, in any case.

Ran across this book while I was looking around the SL Library project. This is a cover I whipped up for Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, back in June of 2005. Apparently, the image was carried with the other texture UUIDs that Falk Bergman created for the books. It's nice to see that my minor contribution to SL's literary scene hasn't completely disappeared.

Unfortunately, it appears that my HoloReader book format is dying of technical difficulties. Recently, an annoying bug in particle rendering has crept into SL. I don't know all the details, but the gist of it is that client max particle counts are not being calculated properly. Rendering distances are not being checked correctly, so particles hundreds of meters away (or even thousands- I've checked this at 4,000 meters up!) are counted against the total particle count. So, even if your client's max particle count is set way up, the client will often behave as if it's overwhelmed with particles. Net result is 2/3rds of the particles don't ever render if there is anyone within several hundred meters running even a moderately demanding particle system.

Sadly, this means the HoloReader formatted books I have strewn about the Garden are pretty much unreadable, as their pages continuously flicker on and off. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that. Much as I hate it, I'm either going to have to re-format all of my books in a prim book reader format (expensive in terms of time and primcount, not to mention actual Linden bucks) or retire them altogether. Not terribly happy with either option. Of course, I'd rather the glitch was fixed, but I suppose everyone has their own pet bugs they'd like to see squashed.

Here I am dressed in my grey avatar (as featured in most of the Mo-Tech Industries sales signage), testing out the Cloud Surfer attachment in the Sun Microsystems sims. Kind of nifty, if I do say so myself. Very Dragon Ball Z. I don't think I will be releasing this one on the market, though. Not until lag and object update issues can get worked out, anyway. Seems like half the time the cloud refuses to turn off due to lag issues. And as cool as surfing on a cloud is in flight, it looks quite silly to drag around an oddly shapped poof of white on your ankles when you land.

And here's a sculpture of a prim cat chasing prim pigeons. I have no idea where I found this, but it's pretty good, in any case.

This was an old project I dug out of my inventory a couple weeks back. Basically, it writes letters using bursts of particle smoke. For reference, the building the sky writer is perched upon is 15 meters across. Unfortunately, the display isn't all that practical, as it's overly dependent on client and sim performance. If FPS drops too low, or the viewer pans his camera excessively, large swathes of pixels are lost. And it's not terribly sim friendly, either. (Wow, that seems to be coming up a lot lately.) Each pixel (burst of smoke) requires an object update, as the particle system is turned on and off again. While this isn't so bad for a single seven element display, I sure wouldn't want to have twenty of these running in the same sim. Still, it's fun to have my name written in 15 meter tall letters in the clouds.

I like projects like this one. They let me know I'm making progress. See, I shelved this one about 18 months ago, because it had some bugs that I couldn't work out. Recently, I ran across it again, and looked over the scripts. All of the problems proved to be quite easy to fix, now that I have a year and a half more scripting experience. Kind of a cool feeling.

Lag Control

2006-12-21T21:02:00.000-06:00

Just spent the last hour or so doing cleanup work at the Garden of Mo. In particular, I went through and zotted a few basic sit orientation corrections (scripts that set the sit position on a chair, etc.) and texture animation scripts left here and there that I really didn't need. See, most properties of an SL object are "fire and forget." Things like sit positions, texture animations, particle systems, and so on only need to be set once. They're simply settings stored in the object, like its size, shape, color, and texture. As such, once the script that sets these properties is run, it can safely be deleted.

The jury is still out on just how much impact such a script has on sim performance. Most of these scripts contain one command that runs when the script is first compiled/saved. After that, the script sits idle, doing nothing. As such, their continued existence would seem to have little performance impact. However, some amount of frame time is still consumed, just maintaining their static existence.

In any case, I had a bit of time to kill, so I decided to be responsible and do another idle-script audit of my land. I do this every couple of months, in order to redeem the inevitable bad sim resource consumption karma that comes with being a prolific scripter. This time, just for yucks and giggles, I kept track of the number of superfluous scripts deleted this go 'round...

Fifty-seven!

That is just... Mortifying.

Too Obscure?

2006-12-20T12:25:00.000-06:00

I know y'all are tired of hearing about Plywood, but please indulge me one more time: Did any of the Plywood readers out there get the (somewhat tenuous) reference to Gibson's Neuromancer in the title of the Ursamancer arc, and/or in the (again somewhat tenuously) related plots? Or was I the only one who thought that I was being clever there? I've wanted to ask that for nigh-on a year now, but never found a way to bring it up in conversation. If you did, or if you thought the title was just odd, please drop me a comment below.

Trees and Music

2006-12-19T12:29:00.000-06:00

Sunday evening, I spent absurd amounts of time working on simple things.

First, I noticed that the Linden trees and shrubs in the new and improved SkyLounge tended to disappear for no apparent reason. After a little searching around, I ran across issue SL-18362 in the Second Life known issues list: "Scripted tree rezzers do not rez trees when land/rezzer owner is offline" Well, spiffy. The Lounge depends on scripted rezzers, tree and otherwise. So unless I happen to be online when the SkyLounge is re-rezzed, the trees will not appear. And given that the maintenance cycle scans for the presence of the Lounge every ten minutes, that gives me 9 minutes and 59 seconds or less (depending on where the timer was when the sim shut down) to log in after each sim restart. Sub optimal.

The simplest automated solution I could find involved making a dedicated sensor script to periodically check for the presence of trees. (There's something kind of techno-druidic about that.) If they're there, no worries. If not, it'll attempt to rez them. And, due to the obscure-yet-vexing known issue SL-18362, if I'm not online, it'll silently fail. So, basically, the architectural integrity of the SkyLounge, not to mention the life of my trees, now depends on my frequent logins. No pressure.

Second, I decided the SkyLounge needed a user-controlled media stream. It's nice to give folks a choice, and quite handy to have alternates available when streams go down. Now, as you probably know, music stream selectors are available in every third freebie box on the Grid. But, stubborn fool that I am, I had to write it myself. It's really a fairly trivial use of some basic list sorting (to pick from a few streams and associated descriptions) and the llSetParcelMusicURL command.

But this basic little script ran headlong into technical difficulties fairly quickly. See, llSetParcelMusicURL only works for the owner of the parcel upon which the script resides. Normally, this isn't a big deal, but the Garden of Mo is group owned. So, said script (or, more precisely, the object that contains it) must be deeded to the group. Mildly maddening, since the object can no longer be modified once it's deeded to group (since I'd no longer be the owner), but not an insurmountable issue in-and-of-itself. It just means that I have to make any modifications (such as changes to the music stream list) on a new object, group deed the new one, and delete the old, deeded device each time.

Ah, but here's where it gets sticky. Remember, the Lounge is located at 4000+ meters, where objects tend to disappear unexpectedly. Like everything else, the radio tuner must be periodically checked and refreshed, in case a sim restart caused it to disappear. And since the stream tuner must be deeded to group, this means that the rezzing device creating it must also be group deeded, in order to impart the proper ownership to its offspring. And so must the base station that generates the rezzer object. So, this trivially simple little radio device requires a dedicated support ground system to create a scripted rocket at regular intervals, which in turn flies up four kilometers to check for the presence of a four-prim radio tuner object, and rezzes a new copy if it's disappeared. All so that I can easily change the stations on my parcel's music stream. Rube Goldberg would have approved.

Lights, Camera, Comics

2006-12-17T17:06:00.000-06:00

For those of you who aren't subscribed to the Second Opinion newsletter, Torley has posted another installment of video tips and tricks. This one emphasizes live action video effects (as opposed to still image tricks highlighted in the November installment). And, like the last one, it's a heck of a lot of fun to watch, even if you are SL's answer to Stephen Spielberg.

But, unlike last time, I'm posting this one with an ulterior motive. As you may have noticed (if you're following the Messenger- and you should), Plywood's syndication run is now officially in reruns. Or, as Phoenix Psaltery styles it, "Classic Plywood." The world desperately needs another regular Second Life webcomic. Tateru Nino is doing some quite good ones over at Dwell On It, but she's made it clear that her work is on an as-the-mood-strikes schedule. Someone do me a favor: go stand at the edge of Tateru's chat range and tell amusing SL anecdotes for a few hours, huh? Or whatever else it takes to get her in the webcomic mood. She's been frittering away her time writing insightful and entertaining articles over at the Insider, and neglecting the important things.

But, in the meantime, someone out there needs to pick up the baton and run with it. Frankly, as many hours as I've spent narcissistically re-reading my own work, I am tired of Plywood! Second Life is ready for another voice in the genre. Heck, there are 2 million plus members now. (Or not... Hey, there's a topic for a comic!) Surely someone has something to say! Webcomics can be a lot of work, sure, but they can also be a lot of fun. Just learn from my mistakes, and put your Second Life pseudonym on the comic, instead of or in addition to your RL name. I can tell you first hand that it's quite frustrating to work on a project for over a year, win a good bit of public acclaim, and still be completely unknown to your audience.

Ah, well, enough of that. Here are some tips and tricks of my own for budding SL webcomic creators. Go make an SL webcomic, already!

Camera Lock

2006-12-17T14:06:00.000-06:00

I've been meaning to post this for weeks now, but better late than never: Here is a very simple little script that proved to be invaluable for taking posed snapshots in Second Life. Slap the script in a HUD object, move your camera to the desired position, and say "/2 lock." The current camera position will be stored for later use. Just touch the HUD or say "/2 camera," and the camera will leap back to the position in memory and stay there until released (by touching or saying "/2 camera" again). Nothing particularly high tech, and I'm far from the first to have come up with this. But it makes things much easier for SL photographers, especially if you yourself want to be in the shot. Setup the camera, lock it in place, and then walk your avatar into the frame.

Shrug. And I guess that's it.

Cumulative Update

2006-12-12T11:55:00.000-06:00

Long time, no post. Been busy in RL, dealing with the pre-Christmas rush at work. I will never understand why any client would insist on a project being done "before Christmas." What does that accomplish that a due date of, say, first week in January wouldn't? Nothing will be done between mid-December and New Year's, anyway, so why the arbitrary deadline? But I digress.

This one's going to be picture heavy, folks, so brace yourselves.

I finally finished the new and arguably improved SkyLounge a week or so back. Click the Garden of Mo link there on the right to visit. This version sucked up considerably more prims than the previous model, but it has a more established feel to it. The SkyLounge Mark I always showed its low-prim roots a bit too plainly. This one is a little more open and spacious feel (not that any build composed 90% of windows could ever be said to be cramped). And it's shinier, too. Always a plus.

As you can see, SkyLounge Two is centered around a medium sized Linden pine. This is a reference to the basic Garden of Mo abstract evergreen logo (adopted from the long departed LVZB). That, and I wanted an organic contrast to the gleaming steel and stark white.
More on this below.

After just shy of two years in Louise, I finally decided to add a media stream to the Garden. For now, it's just in the sub-plot occupied by the Lounge. It seemed to need some kind of techno/ambient/groove soundtrack to complete the retro-future feel. When I started it, I originally planned on shutting down the stream when the Lounge was unoccupied. I still like the idea of wind and birdsong being the only sounds in the Garden. But, after seeing a good number of green dots hanging out on the parcel below, apparently just grooving to the beats, I've decided to leave iton full-time for a while. Maybe I need to look into a soundtrack for the rest of the
Garden, as well.

Here's the bottom floor. Kept the old couches, and added a chromed version of the sun-following telescope from the Babel observatory.

And the middle floor. It's basically an outward-facing bar/deli arrangement. The bar counters are equipped with food pills (touch them, and they describe the kind of food pill you've picked), while the little cafe tables have Misfortune Cookies (touch to find out your fate). The latter was a project conceived by Laura Ingersoll, Chrestomanci Bard, and myself. Basically, we sat around and came up with lists of attackers and acts of violence, and I bashed together a quick script to randomly string them together. It's strangely amusing to find out that you will be immolated by an unpublished short fiction writer, or impaled by Oprah.

And, of course, there's a couple of Nutri-Matic machines for your liquid refreshment needs.

The top level serves as entry platform (entry is by elevator to the balcony behind the green panel) and general free-form space. Here you can see me addressing an imaginary audience in the stage configuration. The third floor has a rezzing routine that allows the user to select from multiple room layouts. Right now, I only have a couple programs, but eventually I'll add several different furniture layouts and exhibits. I'm sure I'll mention any good ones I come up with, eventually.

And, finally, a close-up on the central garden area. Fairly minimalist, like everything else in the Lounge. Note the granite prims strewn about. It was either that or more shrubbery.

Aside from working on the Lounge, I've spent a fair bit of time tinkering with particles. Here's an attempt at a 3-D particle chess piece. For various technical reasons, it's not really practical for use as a pawn (or bishop, or whatever it looks like). But it looks kind of nifty, anyway. The script generates stacks of particle rings of arbitrary radii, one on top of the other. If it could be spun on a lathe, it could be created using this setup. Unfortunately, it took an embarrassingly long time to remember enough trigonometry to make this work.

And here's the king of all impractical particle effects, a 3-D "holographic" land map. Each pixel (or voxel, if you want to be picky about it) is a single blob of particles, placed one at a time. To do so, the map generator uses an array of 64 elements. Each element rotates to point at the desired location in the display volume (using llLookAt- setting rotation with llSetRot proved to be too slow), then emits a particle at the required distance (BURST_RADIUS derived from llVecDist between the emitter and the target) to place the voxel in the correct position. This is kind of cumbersome, but it works. Unfortunately, it is both lag sensitive (all 4096 voxels must be updated in under 30 seconds, or gaps appear as the particles expire- this is a tall order!) and lag inducing (each voxel requires two
updates- prim rotation and particle system- to generate), but it was the only way I could find to place a single particle at an arbitrary location in space.

I expect this project won't ever see practical use. It's just too expensive to run, both in prims and sim resources. All told, it's an ugly kludge. But Jopsy Pendragon said it was "rockin cool," anyway. Wow! Praise from Caesar!

The display shown above was taken in the Albion sim. Quite a nice place, by the way. You should drop by for a visit.

Here's a close-up of the generator in action. Each cylinder is an emitter element. It's hypnotic to watch the tubes wave to and fro as they point at each voxel position. Kind of like a particularly spastic sea anemonea.

And here's a picture of the final version (at least until inspiration strikes again). The uninspired land on display is Louise. I like the sim, but one could wish for more scenic vistas. It's on display as one of the programmed exhibits in the SkyLounge, at least until my neighbors threaten to lynch me for periodically dragging the sim to a slow crawl every time someone runs it.

Addendum, 12/27/06
I've removed this exhibit from the SkyLounge. Just a bit too irresponsible, from a sim resource management perspective, to leave out and running.

And, finally, a simple project. Yes, it's a flashlight. Oooh. Ahhh. Yeah, it's not terribly cutting edge. The trick is to place the light emitting prim well ahead of the object. In this case, the center of the light source is located four or five meters in front of the flashlight. The net result is a reasonably convincing irected beam. I did discover one trick: the light emits from the center of the prim, even if said prim is dimpled and cut. This means that you can effectively place a light source several meters away, without having the object itself occupying the space. Could be handy, I guess.

I've had this one in the back of my mind for a couple months now. Sometimes, it's nice to have an easy, uncomplicated project or two on tap. They're a good way to decompress, especially after a long, frustrating day. After I took the pictures above, I spent half an hour with night override on and night darkness set to zero, just wandering around in the dark.

Yes, I'm easily entertained.

Random

2006-11-30T23:59:00.000-06:00

Two things:

First, the new LSL commands, especially llGetParcelDetails, are quite cool. They've already solved some basic problems for me. Thanks, LL!

Second, I've decided what I'm going to do when SL collapses under its own weight, and LL announces they're closing the virtual doors for the last time. A minute before the final shutdown, I'm going to climb on top of the highest build on my land, play Rush's "Bravado" through the local music stream, and jump. Then I'm going to shout my goodbyes, and log out for the last time. I think it'd be somehow fitting for Moriash Moreau to be in freefall for eternity.

So what are you going to do when SL closes?