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Been a While

Five years.

Has it really been that long? True, SL hasn’t been seeing many major changes in that time, so discussions about where it could be headed next seem… Less than important. I also don’t keep my ear to the wall about upcoming plans as I used to.

I’m still in there, by the way, even if you don’t see my ol’ white stripy avatar puttering about. We all have alts, and some of mine have been more relaxing than others. Tiger is still my go-to for doing WORK, but with SL’s current state of hugeness and massively-concurrent development, I often don’t feel I have much to contribute, or the time to do it in. I’m now more a consumer and modder than a creator.

I just don’t feel like I’m part of creating a world anymore. The world is already THERE. And BIG. Seems exploring it and it’s people is challenge enough.

If I were going to try to think up some new suggestion for the fine folks at Linden Lab, something that might revitalize the feel of SL, it would be… GROUND.

Any of you ever play Minecraft? There’s a good likelihood you have. When you think about the ground in SL and the ground in Minecraft, what about them feels different? Ignore looks and how you can manipulate it… Just think about the feeling.

Second Life has sham ground.  A thin film of practically nothing that’s actually transparent from the underside. It feels about as solid has a kid’s fort made from two chairs and a bedsheet. The ground doesn’t seem IMPORTANT in SL. And it’s not. It’s just a place to put prims.

In Minecraft the ground is a massive thing. It has presence and bulk and a life of its own. It has depths and heights that SL just can’t match (and if it tries, you get ugly, smeared textures).

Can Second Life ever get better terrain? Well, there shouldn’t be any issue with backwards compatibility since we’re talking about what is below the current surface, and right now, there’s nothing there.

What could it be like? A solid volume of some sort, deformable, paintable, and digable. How to dig? Well the most obvious and easiest interface I can think of is subtractive geometry. A new prim property that makes a prim shift into an alternate dimension if you will, completely undetectable unless you turn on your alternate dimensional view.

In that view, you can move these transparent prims into the surface of the ground, and where they intersect, holes are formed. Not necessarily precise holes with sharp edges, though. Make a hill with the usual terrain tools, then place a room-sized cube inside it with a cylinder connecting it to the outside of the hill, and you’ve got a cave with an entrance. Leave it rough and natural and slap some texture paint on it, or put up walls inside for a nice, comfy hobbit hole.

Drawbacks? It will take more vertices to make a more complex surface. Would it be possible to limit the vertex count bet parcel? Perhaps.

It’s all pie-in-the-sky, but something to think about. It would add a LOT of solidity to the world…

 

Last But Not Least

The last names list. It’s not scaling well, and is probably the biggest sticking point for new users right now, prior to signing in the first time. At least, the people I’M trying to get to join. They want a good name and are willing to delay signing up till they can get one. There are a LOT of last names on the list now (over 300), and it takes a while to go through all of them. Many of them now seem to be geared towards a particular country or language – or at least, many of them are unpronounceable to me without working at it for a moment or two.

I like humorous names, myself, but was unable to find one that wasn’t taken after about 40-50 tries. It seems that some of the more generic English-style names have been on there for quite some time. Are they still being dropped after 100 or so uses?

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While The Linden Polishes Its Scalings, PS3 May Leapfrog Past

Second Life has seen an enormous amount of growth in the last year, and that has been both a boon and the bane of Linden Lab. While it means that the real world is discovering (and liking) Second Life, it means any and all mistakes made in the infrastructure with regard to scaling will throw a spanner in the works.

And that has happened.

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Rotten Prims

1) Build a website called rottenprims.com

2) Recruit well-respected players to scout out and review locations in Second Life

3) Collect multiple reviews for each location and total the positive and negative viewpoints

4) Publish reviews and total score on website for each location

5) Provide lists of locations based on scores and individual reviewers

Bonus) Allow populous to rate reviewers. Use relative reviews to create 2nd, weighted scores

You have 30 minutes. No talking. Raise your hand if you have a problem.

UPDATE: Well, I gave you all over a year to do this. Time’s up! Turn your papers over. I’ve just registered the name. 😉

Come-Pose-Yourself

Forum-posted idea reprinted here for posterior. Um, I mean: posterity!

It would be nice if, in Second Life iteself, you could go into a Position Editing mode where your avatar freezes and “handles” appear at each joint. Selecting a handle brings up the normal rotaion edit locus we use to rotate prims, but it rotates that joint instead. Once done editing all the joints you want, and your own actual avatar is in the position you desire you can save this pose as an animation.

This would just be a one-frame pose, but with the addition of a window to track multiple frames, I can see the possibility of doing full animations. All we lose this way is reverse kinematics, but that usually causes more problems for new animators than it helps them. (But it could still be added, as a toggle option later.)

If you are playing a moddable animation when you trigger this Position Editing mode, you are editing that animation (but like the Appearance Editing mode, you can Save… or Save As… when done).

If it’s no mod, or you aren’t playing anything, the avatar reverts to the standard starting pose before you start to edit. (And you can only Save As…)

New Topic: UI

We know that a built-in web browser is coming to Second Life, first as a window, then as WWW-ona-prim.

But what about a third use?

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She Sells Seashells… But I Get Them Free

Now ol’ Shelly didn’t have the best business model. Her little seashore shop sold a product that anyone walking by could pick up out of the sand for nothing but a little back flexing and sandy hands. (And with a re-purposed pooper-scooper cane, even those costs could be eliminated.)

In second life, we have no production costs either. Make one, and from then on it’s pure profit. The problem comes when you realize it’s all just data…

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Advance on My Allowance?

Permissions are all about allowing people and groups of people to do things. At least, that’s the model I’m using. There are two others… Allow everything then indicate restrictions (but that can have dangerous security issues), and mix permissions and restrictions together (but that can/will get messy and confusing).

So if you’ve been following the examples in this blog, you may have gotten the feeling that those dummy permissions I was using may not be so dummy. I did try to keep them self-consistant as I went along, even to the point of going back and tweeking them a bit. I’ve been trying to find a system of encoding permissions that is compact and clear, while retaining the ability to design-in more later. “More” both in number and in variety.

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DHTML Experiment

Well, a couple of hours in learning some DHTML and messing about has got me this, an interactive verion of the permission lists I’ve been making here in the blog. It may not work on all browsers… I’ve only tested on the latest Firefox (PC and Mac) so far.

I’ll be adding more funtionality to it as I think of it. It would be totally cool to have a complete simulation running! 🙂

Next: Advance on My Allowance

A Lot to Go On

Let me try another example here, this time in a future world of Second Life. I’ll use the example from two entries back as the base.

I have a plot of land. I parcel it up in chunks and do a bit of decorating and I end up with this:

Lot Map

I want to rent the two lots out and perhaps make a bit of money. I make a group called “Tiger Tenants” to keep the operation organized.

Now in the Olde Seconde Life, I’d put the land under the group’s control and invite people into the group when they rent a lot. They can then build on their lot, but they can also build anywhere else on my land, including the other lot. There is no limitation on the number of prims they can use, beyond the hard limit imposed by the size of the total land. Also, adding them to the group gives them other abilities unrelated to simple land rental, such as getting a portion of the dwell bonus for the whole area, among other things.

But, thankfully, I live in Nuevo Second Life, where groups work much better!

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