BreakThink Tank:Second Life (Second Life)

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Martien Pontecorvo cops criticism over his gallery in Alpha Centauri, and seeks solace in a sandbox — not to mention quasi-steampunk polysyllables.

Martien Pontecorvo kicks his User in the backside and finally gets a long overdue post posted.

Much to my surprise, whilst digging through an unwieldy mass of snaps collected quite some time ago, I found a couple of very nice ones indeed…

Precipitate Flood breaks her silence (to the regret of Martien Pontecorvo) and goes on about the Archer House, as well as neighours past and present.

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.

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:

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.

Posted in Second Life (News,Links) by R Cruickshank 3 June 2008, 23:26 tags: second life, speculation, zomg

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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.

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.

According to the Second Life Herald, some idiots calling themselves “DiSSENTiON” (sic) launched an Anonymous-style Youtube video and another griefing attack as part of their campaign (in our best interests, naturally) to prevent Linden Lab from doing things. Somehow I doubt that their plans match up to the griefers’ self-righteous twaddle.

Still, the first link has some nice pictures, and you have to give them some kudos for blending old-skool spamcubes with the speech synthesiser and Youtube thing. But at the same time, it’s still boring old griefing.

In any case, I hereby put myself on their list of target by stating explicitly that the group known as DiSSENTiON does not and never will speak for me. I dissent, as it were, from DiSSENTiON.

Posted in Second Life (Op-Ed,Rants) by R Cruickshank 6 May 2008, 14:29 tags: opinion, rant, second life

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