Today I packaged up the piano keyboard and put it for sale on XStreet. I’ve rebranded with my old BrighterWorlds trademark (long before the days of SL). Maybe easier for people to remember. I saw most keyboards were priced around 250, so I put mine up for 249 L$. I had help from a couple of friends translating the information to French and German. I also hired some help to translate into Portuguese and Japanese. I’ve started to work on the ability to record and playback my songs. It’s starting to become an interesting concept of making things talk to each other. I have plenty of ideas of the direction that I would like to move these into. I need to keep from making things too complex.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Every now and then I have a desire to make a programmable music box in a virtual environment. Today I went a step further. I found a program to create MIDI files and found a music box in the sound bank. I used Audacity to record and alter the sounds a bit to my liking. I then Created a piano keyboard texture and uploaded both the sounds and two octives of sounds. I created a script to sense what area of the prim was touched to play a specific sound. For starters, I now have a 1-prim keyboard that plays single notes of a music box.

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

I reached my goal for the second day of the event. I now have a word count of 3361. I walked my character through different rooms and both he and the others are starting to get more of a personality. I’ve started to focus on shortcommings of characters and unexpected events (although small). I keep thinking about eve-online with the process of what happenes after death. It’s starting to lead into the plot, but I am working on setting up the environment and defining the characters first. One benefit of NaNoWriMo – I have an excuse to have a first draft that is horrible.
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I’m debating if I should bring my store back online. I’m thinking about just limiting to a few products rather than the 100+ items that I had. Many, in my mind, were simple, or just didn’t really fit in the direction I was moving towards. I believe that I should have just focused on a limited few. In this, I made a mockup of a store that would just display an interactive model of each product with a hologram/rezzer with the idea that I would outline information of each product as it rezzed. I’m narrowing it down to about 15 products so far, but still undecided. There are also a few gray lines I need to avoid crossing with work.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Another day wring for the NaNoWriMo. The twitter account is updating without any problems. I am finding that I am already falling behind others as I was sleeping. I’ll have to make up for the lost time and get my butt into gear. Perhaps if I get more than my daily goals completed, I’ll have a better chance of finishing. Here goes nothing.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on sLiterary using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

The End

It was 5:30 in the evening on a warm sunny day. Torin, a young man in his twenties, was fully relaxed, laying against a tree on the edge of a clearing with a gentle breeze blowing against him. His eyes closed, he was managing a delivery of supplies on a simple delivery mission through his link. The signal stopped an he opened his eyes. “What the…”

Coming To

Torin came to consciousness. He could not see around him, and his limbs felt too heavy to move about. His link was online, but his mind was a bit too drowsy to use it. Nothing appeared to work with the link. Torin laid there, physically and mentally tired.

A womans voice appeared to be talking to him. He started to make out what she was saying. “Are you up dear? Can you say anything?” Torin tried to speak, but could only get out, “uuhh…” To this, the woman was delited and pressed him further. “That’s fine dear. I am one of the staff here at the Tach Facilities. My name is Ormina. Your in one of our recovery units. Don’t worry, you will be just fine. It will take some time to come to your senses. What is your name?”. Torin tried to move his head towards the direction of her voice, but soon gave up. “s, s, s…” He was too week to move his tongue even. “Tell you what dear, I’ll let you rest a bit more and check back on you in a little bit.” With that, light footsteps could be heard fading away.

The room was quite except for machines. A respirator could be heard with each breath. A couple of monitors were measuring heart beats. He soon identified his with a slow heart beat. It could almost be controlled to speed up or slow down with his thoughts. He tried to focus on something else. Although his arms felt heavy, he tried to move them about. He was not making much progress and focused on his fingers instead. At this moment, he realized that one felt particularly different.

After some time, Torin was able to move his finger an free it from the odd sensation. “Oh dear, we must leave that on.” The familiar voice was followed by his finger being pressed against something. “Can you speak yet?” she asked. “Yesssss….”, he said – his voice in a slur. The nurse, Ormina, was delighted. “That’s great news. Let’s try getting your name, shall we?” Torin took a deep breath. “Tornnn”. “Torn? Is that your name?”, she asked. “No. Tor”, he said and took a deep breath, “in. Tornn…”. The warm voice of the nurse comforted him. “Ah, I see. Torin is your name. I see you are still a bit weak, but the good news is that you are recovering quite quickly. You’ll be alert in no time at all.”

A mans voice with confidence came to and asked “How are you doing Tarin?” Torin could feel the mans hands feeling different parts of his body along with hard instruments. Ormina’s voice was heard in response, “He is just coming to. He still needs quite a bit of time.” “Nonsense, I need these folks to clear out of here ten minutes ago. We have people waiting.” At that moment, blinding light shot through Torin’s left eye and he let out a yelp, quickly followed by the right eye. “He is stable an his pupils are fine, throw him in a chair and free this bed up.”

Torin knew that his eyes were open, but he could only see remnants of the bright light in any direction he looked. Out of the side of his eyes, he could spot medical equipment in a dimly lit room. “I’m sorry dear. It isn’t normally like this, “ Ormina said, gathering her nerves, “with everything that has happened recently, we are overcrowded. Let me help you up.” The bed started to raise his upper body up an forward, while his legs went down. The bed stopped an Ormina asked him to scoot.

The doors burst open at the end of the hall and Tarin spotted two beds coming in with patients in them. The man from earlier cursed an said, “We’ve only got room for one, take the other down the hall. Ormina, hurry up with him and clear that spot!” Tarin felt as if he had just fallen into a chair next to the bed an was quickly carted to the next room.

Orientation

Tarin sat and waited. He was still tired and drowsy. A man had taken him from Ormina an carte him through a maze of hallways. He now found himself in a room with quite a few others who appeared to be in the same condition as he was. Towards the front of the room, people were more vocal and a few were walking about speaking with each other, and a dialog between them could not be understood as to who was speaking to whom.

“How did you hear of that? I can’t see the cloud.”

“Again?”

“People are saying it was the Isscha working with the Lerrque.”

“100^th times a charm!”

“Five signatures. All were the same.”

“I just don’t see what they have in common with each other.”

“What if I’m still alive?”

A door slammed shut and a loud voice could be heard over the chatter. “Listen up people. I am here to get you up to speed on recent events. I’m only going to say this once and there will not be any questions afterwards. My name is Hald Turkal. You are at the Tach Facilities in the Voruz station in Untomu. Many of you believe that you were just at Mosuw. For those of you who do not know, Mosuw was destroyed two months ago. Normally you would have ended up in the Tach Facilities in Essdar, Sampolu, or Faom. Essdar was destroyed in the aftermath, and the other two facilities have reached full capacity. Your signatures were transferred here through emergency protocols from Essar, or from the other two that couldn’t handle the surge.”

Hald paused. “My link …”, someone started to speak. “I said no questions!” Hald called out. “Now, for most of you, this process should be like clockwork to you. The only difference is that we are running you through the system a bit quicker and cutting corners to meet the demand. For the rest of you, it’s probably the experience of your life. As you have been instructed during your link orientation, your signatures are to be stored in the cloud and continuously updated at all times in the case of events such as this. You died. Welcome to hell, heaven, or what ever you wish to call it. However, it is the same place you left. Your signatures are now within new tachs that were the best resemblance of your previous tach. Due to the nature of this event, you may find a few parts here and there that just don’t seem rite. Fill out the appropriate forms and a tach facility will contact you. Until they are available, you’ll simply have to deal with it.”

Hald looked around the room. No one spoke, but everyone had questions on their face. “We don’t know the details of what had happened. There is still an ongoing investigation. The area is unapproachable for the investigators. Everyone an his brother appear to be claiming this as their own demonstration of power. There are rumors, and speculations. You’ll be able to find out all you like once your links are authorized to connect to the cloud. You’ll be called later for authorizations. That is all.”

Hald left the room and it immeiately became a buzz with everyone talking about the inccident. Tarin felt relieved that there was a reason why he couldn’t use his link. “First time?” Tarin looked up an saw a short man of a heavy stature. “Yes.” he replied. “The names Belath. I’ve been through this myself a few times. One of the staff here owes my group a favor. If you stick with me, I can get us through this quick and we can be off.” Tarin sat there. After a few moments, he explained, “I can’t get up.” Belath looked him over. “Nonsense. It’s all in your head.” He move the chair forward a bit and then lifted it to dump Tarin to the floor. Bystanders took notice. “Hey what are you doing?”. Tarin rolled over and Belath leaned over an pulled him up to a sitting position. “Relax, I know what I’m doing.” Tarin was furious. His heart was pumping quickly and he tried everything he could to get up an take his frustration out on Balath. “See? He’s up an standing in no time!” Balath said. A woman came from behind Tarin and put his arms around him. “Take it easy buddy, he’s just getting your blood floowing so you can wake up.

Linking Up

Balath made good on his promise. Balath, Tarin an two others who Balath knew were called first to be authorized. Tarin was taken into a small room that appeared to be the size of a closet. The walls were bare except for an interface on the wall opposite of the door. He was asked to place his face into the visor and look into the field. When he did so, metal arms came across and restricted his head from moving. He felt a warm sensation move up and down his body a few times as he watched the display show a model of his body. “Signature confirmed. 97.3% tach match. 0.03% abnormalities found. Parameters within acceptable range. Authorization granted.”

A sudden rush of information flowed throughout the link.

I was helping out Ina Centaur tonight with her NaNoWriMo counter. She and I worked together to create a way to update twitter as people enter their word count into the clock. Now our status’s show up at http://twitter.com/vwnanowrimo. With that done, I have a few scripts to look over and find out where some calculations may be off on the back-end. I’ll leave that for tomorrow.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on sLiterary using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Side note: I found this site to be helpful for random names – http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/

There were a few people here, but most have gone off to sleep. I started on my own novel and got my first personal goal met of 1666 words. Only 29 days left to meet the deadline of 50,000 words. I don’t know if I’ll finish. I haven’t any other year. However, the stories I made are ingrained in my head. There are interesting … to me. This year I’m doing one on science fiction that is related a little to both second life, eve online, and my personal experiences. Hopefully I’ll make it to the end.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on sLiterary using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Working on an interesting game idea for a physics based game – sock monster. Collect as many single socks as possible. Collecting matches takes points away. I’m inside of a giant dryer that spins an throws the socks all about. Really interesting to see in action.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I started noticing a lot of sounds from one of my neighbors on the main grid and discovered they had a chicken farm. The wierd thing is that I keep hearing things like farts an such. My guess is someone is griefing them somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find anything. From what I’ve been hearing on many SL Podcasts, people don’t like these chickens because of the lag they cause. Oh look … one of them says it is dead and revivable. Interesting…
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After New World Notes wrote a story about a college professor designing an giving away a game kit, I headed on over to the location and picked up a copy. It gives some basic functionality, but can be customized. You basically run around collecting tokens and try to avoid traps which end up taking a few coins from your pouch. Once you have collected enough coins, you find a prize board to view a few slides, and then answer questions on a quiz. Get all the questions rite and you can collect a prize. Collect enough prizes and you can win the game by checking your score on the final score reporter object.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Motru using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

One of the ways that CSC was able to support the large number of people in- world on the first day of its 50th anniversary was to replicate the islands. Everyone was still able to have the same experience no matter which island avatars arrived at. A load balancer created to send landmarks to avatars inviting them to one of the islands. The island determined was based on both the number of agents present, and parameters indicating to potential for lag.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on CSC 2 using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I’ve recently installed Ubuntu on my laptop. The thing runs really nice. There are lots of pretty effects, and I’m starting to get a good grasp of how to use the terminal to install and update applications. (I know sudo foo!) I decided to check out Second Life as well. You don’t necessarily have to install anything, as it is simply unzipping files to a new folder and running the “second life” file. One difference that I have spotted already is that there are more options availabe for the “Hardware Options” dialog when editing graphics under preferences.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Pavane using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I’ve been able to cut my scripts initial memory down so that I have about 41k available. Originally I had about 25k available. The primary tips are to reduce the need for functions, global variables, lists, and string length. The other thing to cut back on is the amount of features you are starting off with. Keep the script as simple as possible. The shocker for me today was the memory consumption of llResetScript. I found that in some cases, I could replace it with a state change back to the default state with a memory savings of over 500 bytes. Other times, this method had no effect at all. This confuses me. Why is this method so memory intensive sometimes?
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Woodbridge using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Over at the train station, I noticed Mytee Boa walking by. Both her and I were looking for the last apple out of 10. We joined up and searched the sewers for some barrels of apples. She showed me where to get my last apple. We must have spent the next hour looking for her last apple. She was about to go offline, until I confiremed that she got a few others that I had mentioned. I showed her one of them and and sure enough, that was it! The two of us went to claim our achievements as apple bobbers. I still have many items to find in the Octoberville 2009 hunt by PixelTrix.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on PixelTrix using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

After what seems to be a really dark and spooky place, I have finally walked into the light. Can this be even more light at the end of the tunnel? I can only hope, but I suspect it will lead to darker times.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on PixelTrix using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I decided to head on over to octoberville and check it out. I haven’t been here for years. The last time I came down here, I got a laptop and a filing cabinet in 2006. A few things have changed since then. The scavenger hunt has grown a bit and seems to have a story associated with it. Some rooms will not work unless you solve puzzles in others. There is also a role-play aspect to it and some puzzles need more than one person to help you out. It’s a long game. The lag isn’t any help either. That has got to be the worst part of it. I guess that is why they say it will take a few days to complete the hunt.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on PixelTrix using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

This is my entry for the 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge 181 – Fourty.

Each day the programmer goes for a walk around a pond to relax. He sees a man playing a flute. It echoes over the water and fills his ears with musical joy. A gathering of large fish are often seen swimming close to the man playing the flute. Ideas fill his head about a fairy from the woods that turned his wife into a fish, and that he plays only to lure his lost love back to him. It is a silly story without an end or a purpose. After forty minutes, the programmer returns to a life of stress.

Download MP3: Lewis Moten – 100 word stories 181 – Fourty

This Step Up campaign regarding content theft keeps reminding me of an old program to stand up against poverty. It’s not really that old, it is just that no one has really participated in it within Second Life after it’s first debut. In the real world, it goes on every year. This year, it will be on October 16-18 (A little less than seven days from now). The two campaigns sound so similar and are around the same time. Step Up is on November 5th. If you would like to Stand Up Against Poverty, I’ll have a little discussion event on October 17th at 6-7pm PDT, and free bracelets to help you stand up.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Hilbert using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

I decided to check out the Imagine One peace tower in memory of John Lennon, to be lit by his widow, Yoko Ono. Apparently, I found the unofficial tower made by Lennox Larkham. The tower is primarily a visual feast of animated circling eye candy. The first thing that I noticed was that the floor was made up of several layers of churning water. The tower is more of an experience to fly up in, and feathers are freely available to help you fly high. One wall was full of “My peace prevail on Earth” in many languges. (Side note: lookup September 21, International Day of Peace). Throughout the island, and the tower you can see different national flags and roses left behind in rememberance. My favorite part was falling back down through the lights.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Outer Land using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]