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I’ve already made my own Oblivion home mod – a humble basement in the burnt-out shell of the Main Ingredient near the turnoff to Cheydinhal. No, I won’t release it.

However, I’m thinking that when I get my computer repaired, that I might turn my foot to trying something more ambitious… like dungeons.

In particular, making some more Oblivion worlds to knock around in. Currently I’m playing Ob’ again to try out Kvatch Rebuilt, and I’m finding the inevitable yomping through Oblivion gates something of a bore. So why not invent a change of scenery?

Actually, it could be fun. No doubt some norg’s invented a mod like this already, but it’s worth having a go.

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I’ve begun redesigning the Articles section so that it’s not so date-oriented. The problem, of course, is that TextPattern isn’t an article management system, it’s a blog system. There’s a mountain of work to do in re-categorising the articles, and probably more work in hand-carving a front page for the Articles department. Oh well.

Design-wise, I’ve changed the body text from 12pt Georgia (which was too big) to 11pt Book Antiqua. You’ll also notice that the tag cloud has been removed — this leaves more room for articles, and besides, every article has its tags shown anyway.

Regarding recategorisation, I’ll probably start slotting things under one category only. This prevents list bloat and makes things easier to categorise.

As for the overall design, feel and such, I still have a long way to go on that aspect. I’ve been looking, as I’ve said, at other blogs for inspiration, but it’s been lagging.

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You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been moving things around a bit; shoving the main navigation menu to a top bar, a right-hand sidebar relevant to the section, that sort of thing.

Basically, the BTT style is in need of an overhaul. I have to redo a number of aspects of the system, and that will mean the usual broken link fun and redesign of the whole schmeer.

So, what’s on the agenda?

Change the front page

Currently the default “homepage” is a plain list of the most recent public posts. I’d like to change this to a set of lists categorised by section and presented in a nice table.

Fix the Galleries

I upgraded to Plogger v3.0, but the damn thing has issues with session handling that make it unusable from an admin perspective. Currently I’m looking at a TxP plugin that integrates image galleries into the blog. As the ol’ blog seems relatively spam-free, this suits me just fine. May even speed up the database too.

Rearrange the Articles

“Articles” is less bloggy and more like serialised works of fanfic, or random bits of this or that. I’d prefer its index to sort items by topic or theme, and that means more categories and foogling around. Nothing too dramatic.

Change the Style

I’ve been looking at how other blogs present themselves, and I’m trying to extract useful ideas and integrate them into the design. As the page code includes Textile scripting (e.g. enlarging the name of the currently active section in the menu bar) this has been a little challenging to keep in my head.

More importantly, I need to make the site more readable. If I can nail down the presentation, that could mean I can use a larger font for text.

I’ll be banging on this when I have the time anyway. You be warned, d00dz.

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I was doing some needed goofing off earlier and I noticed that ol’ Hamlet Au has a couple of back-to-back entries contemplating a pair of related stories which go some way to explain why Second Life hasn’t taken off as much as it could have, and instead having a fairly static uptake.

I feel that a number of factors do hold SL back. Here’s the short list:

Read more

Before I show you the picture, some background.

It’s some time in mid-2000, maybe 2001, I can’t remember. I’d just walked up to the Student Union Building at Vic from the railway station. And I see these pink stickers on the wall, on a railing, on an electrical junction box.

The rhetoric is out of the blue; a demand to put a halt to genetic engineering and vivisection. I took offense, however, at the anonymity of the stickering — who was this person, or group, issuing commands? And what was the meaning of this imperious, warlike language?

“Smash” rhetoric is idiocy squared. Sure, the average person’s initial reaction to something they don’t like is to want to get rid of it, preferably permanently. But it’s also infantile. This is university, after all, where the movers, discoverers and leaders of tomorrow go to learn, and think, and research not only where we are, how we got this way, where we are, could, and should be going. That involves discussions — two-way conversation — and being open to criticism.

Also, who were they? The stickers, as you will see, didn’t say. An imperious order, out of the pink.

I spoke back — out came my Bic and a quick retort: “Smash the dimwits who think this sort of thing’s clever.”

Months go by. Schlepping up the slope again, backpack groaning with books, and now the pink is accompanied by green. The anarchists are trumpeting their shoddy utopian wares.

And I have been muzzled! The sticker-placer deliberately stuck a sticker over my remark!

Carefully, I removed both stickers. Equally carefully, I prised them apart. Alas! The anarchists’ hatred of dissent was transmitted to the adhesive, and only with much sundering of pigment did they come free. My writing, now interrupted, is still somewhat visible, however.

Only today did I get around to scanning these labels. And here they are.

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America must be destroyed.

I mean, I was hoping that Obama would have a chance to get elected and either raise the IQ of the country or show his true colours, but I’m afraid America, like China, Africa, the Middle East, and most other third world countries, must regrettably be sacrificed for the good of the human race, and reduced to a trinitite glaze.

The reason? Simple. The administration at Terry Fox Elementary in Barrie Ontario called Children’s Aid on Colleen Leduc and accused her of allowing her autistic daughter to be sexually assaulted. They based the accusation on something a psychic told the special ed worker who worked with the kid. (from Boing Boing

Now, I understand, however wrongly, that the school system (if you can call it that) in the US is terrified of lawsuits, probably because all the money gets spent on sports or something. So naturally they turn schools into jails (in order to Protect The Children™) and make it almost impossible to teach anything except that Authority Is An Ass.

I salute Colleen Leduc in having the wisdom to collect the evidence that refuted these charlatans’ accusations. I castigate the nation that has allowed the education system to become so terrified of blame that it takes the word of frauds and shysters; that has allowed the profession of law to become a playground for vendetta and irresponsibility; that has allowed democratic politics to become a mere “ballotocracy” buffeted by the flatulent winds of punditry and lobbying; that has allowed citizenship to become a fragmented serfdom. I could go on.

If anyone wants me, I shall be in the asteroid belt, slinging choice bits of rock sunward.

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Well, it seems that Hamlet Au really set the prim cat among the particle pigeons in this post about the shadow-draft branch of SL development. As he noted, dynamic shadows would be a nifty feature, but could result in a “balkanisation” of client experience.

I think I know partly what he means. My machine could — barely — cope with SL on my underpowered Radeon. This didn’t stop me enjoying myself; I just had to wait patiently and bumble around with a very low view distance. Even now I haven’t adjusted that too much.

Even the Lindens themselves have stepped into the discussion, and I have to agree with Simondo Nebestanka that as long as you can toggle it on or off like you can Windlight shaders, that’s fine.

However. Dynamic shadows may well raise the bar for building and texture designers. For instance, do you bake shadows into textures, or rely on J Random User having dynamic ones on? Also, dynamic shadows change over time. If you’re trying for a particular ambience, do you really want to trust in people arriving at just the right time of day?

I’ve upgraded since I joined SL, but that was in response to several components including the motherboard dying, and cost more than the US$200 tag flying around. And since then, I’ve found SL getting annoying again if I turn around too quickly.

Hamlet’s also posed another question, how 3D SL should be. He notes that the most populous multiuser environments are not as bleeding edge in terms of rendering as SL is, but personally I see that as comparing pipfruit and citrus.

SL’s main feature is that virtually all content and environs are created ex nihilo by the users themselves. Other MMOs are created by closed teams of professional developers, dictating what goes where, and what the theme is. Naturally this involves a steeper learning curve, and also creates the problem of not offering a clear entry direction for those asking “what’s it all for?”

I like the idea of shadows and want them — I’d happily throw over Windlight for shadows if I had to choose between pixel shaders. There are three reasons for this:

1. Shadows offer better depth perception and stop annoying light bleedover from neighbouring builds.
2. We don’t need Phong shading and multi-bounce crap. Just trace from source/s to surface and kill that virtual photon. Heck, I used that sort of lighting system in Quake for years and still got good results.
3. I stand to make a killing from designer light fittings.

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Over at the OpenSim project, according to UgoTrade, they’re breaking above and beyond vanilla SL with support for mesh-based models — which every game and their prairie squid uses already.

Linden Lab’s initial decision to stick with mathematically generated prims is understandable — textures, especially sculptie textures, are slow enough to download. But if there was a way of securely storing resources client side to avoid copyright violations, this could be worked around. Imagine non-anthro avatars that weren’t reliant on clever scripting, animation overrides (which can in turn be overridden by parcel permissions), and rafts of prims.

Also, it appears if you have a fairly beefy GeForce in the engine room, you’ll get some sweet new graphical features, according to Massively. These include honest to Cthulhu shadows — no more light pollution from next door! A whole market explosion for the lighting industry! — and support for arbitrary numbers of point lights. There’s a gallery of what could potentially come here, and it looks gorgeous.

Me wants. Me wants bad.

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He also has a head full of Memories since he went to see Cats performed at the Opera House on Sunday night, a chipped filling from tonight, and has been watching a number of spots of Yahtzee’s hilarious game review shorts, Zero Punctuation.

This simply cannot bode well, and I hope you all are praying fervently that he’ll continue to be bereft of inspiration for a long time to come.

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I’m well overdue to add new stock to my gallery in Alpha Centauri, and at the same time I’m aware that my building, while an improvement on the not-so-dear old box, could do with improvement.

One means of improvement would be to buy out the vampire club down the road (515 prims, yum!) but spending NZD$400 to do so… I can’t afford it right now. I have an overdraft to pay off first.

What I can do is remodel the existing gallery. Right now it’s too inefficient, boring and needs more walls to hang piccies on.

By ‘inefficient’, I’m talking about the hallway down the side — I need to encourage people to wander the halls, not go straight through. Also, the building’s prim-heavy; what I need is some sort of interesting frontage.

I have an idea that’s more or less inspired by one of the Art Deco buildings — basically a stylish frontage on an otherwise boring box — but that’s better than nothing. To attract custom from Vega, I could put the garden out the back and gradually extend floors out over it. Looking at the neighbouring building, I can add a third floor without impinging on their upstairs view.

This would reduce the number of frontages from three to two. Huh? Well, there is one main frontage looking east onto the main drag in Alpha Centauri, and there’s one looking westward into Vega. Anyone swanning around in Vega, I want to entice in, and also offer those inside the opportunity to look out onto Vega (better than the main drag!)

The trick is making the interior interesting as well. Generally, in the interests of navigability for hordes, shops are more or less walled voids with the produce scattered about the walls. I want a range of different sized chambers which also give a sense of space and adventure. Since avatars can fly and “cam” around, I don’t really need stairs, except out of a perverse sense of expectation (buildings always incorporate a means of vertical movement, it’s common sense.)

Another option would be to lower the ground and build downward — a basement gallery space would add _four_floors and additional wall space.

At the same time, I need to prepare new art for upload and consider textures for the building… not to mention carefully count my prims.

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