New blogging software

Linden Research has updated the software for one of their blogs today. The overall improvement looks great. It’s a little confusing at first to figure out what is where and what everything is doing. Eventually I’ll adapt. One thing that I keep wondering is why they didn’t do something similar for their home page for new visitors. Instead, the improvement for the home page ended up being a dark page that is not only unprofessional in business environments, but also causes strain on the eyes. The other thing that I am noticing is that their is a lack of a consistent theme along all of their websites. The home page is black, the blog is white, and the rest of the site is white with complementary shades of blue. From a branding perspective, it appears that you are visiting different websites all together. The logos and orange login buttons help pull the branding together to identify the site.

Todd Borst – Guru Animator

Todd keeps popping up in my life. DrFran Babcock introduced me to his work with many great animated pets and a Puppeteer Prim Animation Kit. This past year, he made a great pet dragon for relay of life. For the past few months, I’ve been seeing these shop assistants. I didn’t pay much attention to them until tonight. They are pretty lifelike in that they change their poses, blink, look at you, and also offer some dialog menu options. I checked out the creator of the assistant only to find Todd. Wow. He gets around.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Schell using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Playing with the air

It turns out that anything at 400.000 meters and above are not rendered at all on region maps. When building sky boxes, keep this in mind and do not build too low.

I have a few more tests that I am carrying out. I’m looking into transparency, as well as what happens when two prims at the same position/size overlap. I’m looking into depth as well. If a prims center is 400 meters or above, and it’s thick enough so the base is below 400 meters, then will it show on the map? My guess is no – but I’d like to verify. Any reason to this? Not yet. Just playing around in the air.

posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Showing Off at The Ivory Tower

I decided to head on down to the Ivory Tower to see what may be new there. Many of the old stations are still available. I decided to walk through a simple one and make a neat design. Me being me, I went ahead and started to make it spin, and animated each prim texture to glow with different colors. I set it to be physical and turned it on its side to watch it slowly roll its way across the room.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Natoma using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Woes of Sit ‘n Spin

I found a simple way to make 1 prim seats without using sculpties. I was even able to make them spin correctly while the big wheel was spinning. When it came to sitting, I ran into a big problem. The avatar only stays in line with the root prim when spinning rather than the prim that he sat on. It appears that the last option would be to continuously update the rotation of the avatar itself (llSetLinkPrimitiveParams). This defeats the idea of client-side processing by putting more load on the region and adding unnecessary bandwidth. Another side effect that I saw is that once you sit on a seat, the rotation axis changes (llTargetOmega). It is interesting to see how these things conflict.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Ivory Tower and a 40 meter ferris wheel

I started making a small cylindrical building only to have it turn out looking like the ivory tower. It had too many prims and I started looking into using mega prims. Somehow I got carried away and ended up building a ferris wheel. With 24 prims, I have the basic idea of a 40 meter ferris wheel setup. The only problem now is that I need 1-prim seats that spin in the opposite direction, as well as synch properly. I can probably do some boxes, but scuplties would be the way to go in this case. Maybe I should look into other ideas.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

HeatSaver Thermal Shades

HeatSaver is a company with a showroom in a virtual world. The main product on display is a thermal shade which saves up to three times more energy than thermopane windows. At about 18$ per square foot, the price of a thermal shade can be costly. However, depending on your location and heating, you can break even in cost savings in about two and a half years. Every order is customized to fit a specific window. They even do odd shapes such as trapazoid windows. They offer Thermal Shades to residents, companies, and contractors.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Vio using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Pose Creation Studio

I had seen the pose creation studio on XStreet in the past. It was somethign that caught my eye because it allows you to create poses in-world without the need to buy software such as Poser. What I didn’t realize was that the Pose Creation Studio uses a real avatar rather than a prim-based model. This changes things completely. You can rez items like a chair in place, and then pose your avatar to sit properly. Clicking on the little prim manequin gives you a menu asking how to move that specific part. When everything is setup properly, you have the option to export the pose. The demo model has exports disabled. It leads me to wonder if there will be an Animated Pose Creation Studio.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Drakul using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

If a prim crosses a region

I was starting to think about mega prims and how they are often used twice to overlap each other when crossing region boundaries to prevent prim bounce as well as falling through. The idea is that once you cross a region, the physics no longer apply to the prim you were just walking on. In that case, you would fall through if it overlapped to the other region. If you lined two prims next to each other, one on each region, you could end up bouncing up in the air. Having two prims in the same spot, but slightly offset so they each sit in a different region solves the problem. So… do prims on the region map work the same way? If I have a prim crossing a region, it may not render. Let’s see!
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Deduction in baby steps

It appears that anything built above 400 meters does not appear on region maps. I have a hunch that items 399.999 meters is the cap. I’m started to get precise in deducing where the cap is by rezzing items at every meter between 390 and 401 meters. After I find the cap, I’ll start playing around with thick and thin objects, angles, as well as transparency.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Stepping it up

I have often designed buildings on simulators so that an image appears on the map of the region. I am a bit curious as to the maximum height of prims that are renered. I’ve noticed that skyboxes and other buildings that are up high are not displayed on region maps. For a little test, I’ve created a ton of colored prims at different heights of 10 meters each. Since Philip modified the region map generation code, it may only take 2 days before I see some results.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Where’s your head at?

I decided to pay a visit to Torley’s Here region to see what has changed. I found a small fishing shack by a pond. A box with a small table holding a flower was inside with some pose balls. I tried it out and found that my head was missing. Something tells me that there may be a painting that resembles this image.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Here using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Vio Afterthought meeting

Talking about how virtual worlds are becomming the new internet past all the buzz.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Vio using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Testing Yahoo Pipes

After reading about Yahoo Pipes on Peter Stindbergs’ blog, I decided to try it out myself to capture all the news going on about the five islands: Woodbridge, Edloe, Los Arboles, Harbour, Nowhereville, Meta Magic Studio, BlaksleeWorld, Mare Draconus, and Marylis.

Five Islands RSS

It’s pretty impressive how you can throw many feeds together, pull out posts matching keywords, combine unique posts, and then sort them appropriately.

Language Detection

My projects always starts as a cube. This one is going to detect the language of people who pass by my store, and then display a pie chart along with a link to google charts. So far, I have it plugging into the same API that I use for my other statistical reporting charts. The last time I worked with in-world pie charts, it was for displaying the old rating system and land ownership in a Region Directory.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Hooper using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Acedia Albion VJ

Acedia invited me over to her party where she was operating as a video jockey. Many of her friends, fans, customers, and new customers were to have a good time dancing and socializing. I got to see plenty of new products that Acedia has been creating. Acedia Albion was one of the first fashion designers to come into the virtual world long ago and has a high quality to her outfits.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Acedia using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Tunaverse Oddness

Time to get lucky, get odd, or both. Tuna Oddfellow invites the tunaverse to put on a lucky wild outfit, loveliest crazy custome, and come on down to the oddest ball in the virtual world to the Research Center region. Tuna plays with interesting concepts of animated 3D kaladiscopic environments where people interact, dance, and have fun. Everyone is invited to let their hair down, relax, and have fun.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Research Center using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Relay Improvements

Crap Mariner improves the chat relay system for his boat so that all simulators can receive status messages of where the boat is located. He rezzed a diagram on top of his map to explain how the system works. Yellow lines represent a region say, where the pink is a whisper. The chats never bounce back because there are alternating channels used for the whisper versus region messages. Whisper is used to cross region boundaries, where region messages are contained within the region. It all makes sense to me.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Edloe using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Estimating automated vehicle arrival time

Crap Mariner has really brought the community together at the five islands by creating a boat on a predefined path. Each region has a few docks that the boat stops at. His latest feature to the system was to create a miniature map that displays the boats current position.

He and I talked for a while and he provided me with details regarding the API. I started working on a billboard that can be displayed at each dock that would be able to state the location of the boat as well as estimating how long before the boat will arrive. The boat takes about an hour to make a full round. This will help people to be aware of how long they may wait before getting a ride.

posted by Dedric Mauriac on Edloe using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

A reasonable policy to land cutting

Today the Lindens announced their new policy on land cutting. I think they got it rite. They reported that only 10 people own 50% of the 16 sq. m. micro parcels that are on sale today as a result of land cutting abuse. Rather than enforcing a rule into the system or relying on abuse reports, they will run their own reports against the system to identify the culprits and approach them individually. In turn, they will also look into perhaps capping the price at which a micro parcel can be sold (but as a separate issue).
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Scylla using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]