SL Blues

Suddenly 5 woke up, in the middle of the night.

Disgusted with SL.

After many, too much? months of…

Yes of what?

Dedication…or, ….addiction?

Too much maybe.

Saturated.




Sometimes in reading a book, totally immersed, reaching the end, this happens too.

A book can also present a framework in which we drown for a moment, hours, days, so are games…

So, unlike the world from which we never wake up, there is a waking up from SL.



How delightful the sheets feel

How nice real paper looks.

The small river, reed on its banks, really talks to me, listen!

This piece of wood, what a presence it has, you can even smell it.

The resistance of a needle when entering cloth

My hand being expressive of my mood.



How could unreal become real?

Incredible funny, because the world too causes moments of disgust



When the individual is crushed again and again

When a point is lost, blunted in an avalanche of unimportant things

When a bright and fresh morning is slowly smothered in a dusty chaotic day



In that sense this disgust of SL

Makes it more real again




What could save us?

What could save 5?

As always

What is it that saves this world?


A few friends?



5 needs a bit of a holiday!

Linden Logic

or: 1=1 is NOT TRUE!

Scripting a bit 5 came across some strange characteristics of the scripting language of Linden Lab. Strange characteristics mean that it wont do what you expect, or that you have to be very careful working with it. Programming is following intuitively rules about how the language in general functions. Intuition stumbles over these strange things, they are not expected. Bugs come in various sorts and kinds, the stupidities, the typing errors, the designs which are simple not working, but the most awful to debug are the results of situations where the script is plainly not well designed.
In principle you can program everything because of Leibnitz’s great phrase: Nihil est sine causa, or nothing happens/is without a reason. It was of course Heidegger who turned this around in: Being is just that which has a reason. So since programming is just following the lines of causing, you can program everything which is. Only some things take a bit more time to program than others. This more time is multiplied by 2 because of illogical features of a language.
An example, a string is a sequence of characters or numbers or spaces. You can print a string. For instance a name is a string. Inserted in a string can also be a command like new line. Then you can add to your name a telephone number, or an email address. The address can be on the next line. So far the Lindenscript is ok. Then the script offers the floating text llSetText. In it you can put a string and it will be displayed above the prim it is in. And suddenly the string behaves differently! Two commando’s new line placed directly behind each other will give only one new line. The same string in the llSay commando displays the two new lines without a problem. So putting a string like that in a floating text, you have to search for two RETURN’s and put a space between them…….(my oh my…)
Then you decide that the string has to be placed in a database and want to retrieve it again. For this llEscapeURL is used, because of the niceties of the HTML posting, putting %20 where there is a space. That’s is ok so far, but then you actually want to retrieve a large string, so you go the other way around: llUnescapeURL, and behold: the string is shortened considerable! What has happenend, oh dear, search the dBase, search your script, pull you’re hair out!!!
But no: Lindenscript, thank you: this function llUnescapeURL only returns a string with 254 characters, so it cuts off a string which is as a string is defined, in principle without a limit, the limit being the memory available. SO strings can be as long as you want, but using llUnescapeURL it is cut off, and also this cutting of gives a PARSE error in the client…..hmmm, we like that very much, mister Linden!

Talking about the database, you can make a lot of things possible working with a database. The Lindenworld is slow, but get your data to a PHP page connected to a database, you can get the speed of a PHP page connected to the trigger from SL. In ideal combinations for making games possible which need lots of calculations.
Here again something strange happens. The answer coming from the dBase is a string (yes!!! there we go again….) in front of this string is a mysterious return, which is not traceable, nor can be filtered out. That means that if the answer from the PHP page is 1, you cannot compare it to the number 1, nor with the string 1, because this one has the mystery RETURN in front and so is different!
So 1==1 can be FALSE!!!
Now, to get around this 5 uses this trick: let the PHP page send this back: 0 *** 1, then make this a list, with llParseString2List, so it becomes [0,1], the first 0 being contaminated, and just take the second entry in de list!!! This way you avoid the contamination, and 1==1 is TRUE again, as it should be.
This all is clumsy, and has cost a lot of debugging time. Being is that which has a reason. But it doesn’t have to be reasonable it seems, in de SL scripting world.

Flintstones

5 was showing a friend around, she was bored by all she saw. Well what do you like then, the Flintstones? Yes! Ok, let’s find out if there are Flintstones in SL. And yes there are there!

Bedrock - Flintstones Town

It is a cartoon sim, high in the air. There is even a flying saucer giving a tour. All kinds of languages, but no French! And I was there the next day with a French friend, who speaks only French, so we switch to Spanish.
The ambiance is really like the movies, bright colors, and all kinds of jokes on the stone age. Dinosaurs of course, some with staggering textures.

This tour is ending by a very intriguing passage through the earth, never seen this!
Lot’s of other surprises with the Flintstones, the two houses of Fred and Barney are a bit like expected, ok, but the heating of the oven by the fire of a small dragon is a beauty. Then there are two games inserted, a bowling game and a mini-golf game. Both costing 25 L$, and you can play a very long time. The bowling is straightforward, you can cheat a bit by standing closer and closer to the bowls, haha!
The minigolf is a bit difficult. You have to rez a ball, you get a red arrow, you can turn this arrow by getting in a fixed camera position and then using the arrow keys, you can adjust the power by clicking on this very small red arrow, then, how stupid of you, you stand in the way of your own ball. The bouncing is rather primitive too. Also in this game you can advance on the lawn, but the ball disappears after a hit and the rolling around? All due to this primitive world, 5 is sure the game makers have suffered a lot from the scripting constraints. These games add a lot to the fun of the Flintstones land, which suffers a bit from the main problem of SL: emptiness. The Flintstones is a lot of noise and always this terrible Fred yelling and running around, here all is quite…….until….until……the lion roars, wow, I never jumped of my seat like that in SL before, haha.
The jail is funny too, you can even escape, how, well, 5 lets you find out, where do you end up, ok, you end up doing SL gymnastics. 5 won’t tell more. So the friend of 5 was a little bit more interested now, not much. The second French friend, she tried the mini golf game bravely, but not being too experienced in games, she didn’t manage.
All the things 5 encountered here pointed out to funny little inventions to be searched for. Without doubt 5 hasn’t discovered all the features which have been put in by the creators…To be returned to…..

Atmosphere

Shopping is buying atmosphere. We are not buying because we need an article. We are buying because we lack atmosphere, mood, feeling, warmth, compassion.
The shops don’t offer articles, they offer something they think is this 'lacking' atmosphere.
This idea of shopping for…having a great time, was discovered, or invented between 1850 and 1900. Shops were paying more and more attention to the design of the shop, the way to present, the effect of lights and color.
Malls exists mainly because of this, a continuous display of atmosphere without worries, where everything is fine, where everything is possible, oops, buyable.

If this is true for RL, than certainly it is true for SL. In fact you don’t even buy something, when you buy it, you only buy shape, colour and light! An idea, that’s what you have bought. Ideas are in the mind. Indeed the mind is the centre of these ideas, the mind is only working with ideas, mind-sets, even the image of the body is only 'in the mind'.
All of course when the belly is satisfied, lol!
Ok then in SL everything is a bit more primitive then RL, more cartoon like. Most SL shops don’t worry too much about atmosphere.
But there are a few fashion lines which have to carry along there mood, and they do! The gothic, the punk. So 5 likes to search out these places. Here it is where the high design, the neat, the clear is attacked, made a fool of. Filth is around, rust, dustbins, graffiti. But all, well again, all as an idea....
Why is it 5 always ends up in these places, not wanting to be ‘nicely dressed’. How can 5 know, even the mind is an idea of the mind…
Follow 5:

!Kalico Kreations! Neko, Emo, Goth, Punk, Hair, Clothes
Situated high up in the air, beautifully arranged buildings, even a bit out of balance.
5 bought super boots here, Chernobyl boots! Real terrible boots! 5 loves this kind of imagery.
By the way in the basement are lurking monsters….don’t forget to wander around!

On the ground:
!Punk-iT!
Here too, under construction 5 supposes, very much this sought after atmosphere, not really a lot of stuff to buy. It is a bow, which has only an inner side, from within you think you are in a big town, sky scrapers and all, but if the camera wanders further out….
Really a great place for practicing your wide angle with CTRL 8
This is fun too: litter is flying around in small gusts of wind…..

Also high up in the air:
*THE PSYCHOBILLS BUNKER* PUNK GOTH ROCK ROCKABILLY ALTERNATIVE
A nice bunker, high in the sky, made with a lot of love for the ‘underground’. Nice paradox. There is a ‘high dive’ into a tank with green water.
Look at the image of the windowpane, still having the bottle in it, which went right through it!
Under construction too, some nice boots, 5 bought here a ‘Skull waistcoat’, better in german: ‘totenkopf weste’…

Death, the last idea...

Dresden

The Old Masters Picture Gallery

Amiryu Hosoi
gave 5 the link of the Dresden museum
http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2007/08/gallery_dresden
have a look there 5 !
Here is de SLURL:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dresden%20Gallery/121/132/36

And 5 did, wow, what a scale, 5 sims together ! It is a reproduction of the real thing, but how can you do otherwise? Somebody asked, is this real or imagined, haha! The paintings, all those paintings, how could anyone, or any company have imagined all these themes, all these subjects, landscapes? This can only be the work of artist after artist, of century after century of work. The work of the best. Famous paintings, too famous even. Vermeer, the best of Vermeer, Rembrandt, Holbein, you name it. This makes it completely different from mainstream SL. Here you don’t ask, why is it so empty? For sure, the museum will be crowded where the Vermeer hangs, and here you are alone. Fantastic! The paintings are scanned very deep, which means you can really see every detail when zooming in. This has also a disadvantage: lag. You are regularly completely frozen. The computer, client-side is totally swamped with bits of paintings, but the painting is of a quality, well, words are failing here! 5 is really future minded, but what you see here….. This is introducing RL into SL on the best way possible. There are a few drawback, all the frames of the paintings are the same image of a terrible golden frame, repeated endlessly throughout the museum. And this image is badly treated by cutting and pasting too. This quick and unconscious framing is incomprehensible compared to the quality of the paintings. For the rest the detailing of the room, the whole palace is stunning. Here you don’t ask yourself, isn’t reproduction boring? It is over the limit. That this is done in Second Life is really showing the quality of this world and that all the negative publicity will be forgotten.
It is a very positive contribution and improving the whole world. This is something 5 puts on the list of showing to friends, new and old!
Of course all depends on the paintings of the centuries, the enormous collection, and your appreciation and understanding of the paintings. Their force and imagery power is visible, in this virtual context, which is maybe of the same kind as Second Life, although transformed.

MOYA

Always searching for art 5 found a land called museum MOYA.
5 visited this land a few times. The first time there only was chapel, called “la chapelle”, because the owner of this land is French. He is an artist and he is showing his works in SL. His painting is very robust and colorful, which always has a great effect on the computer screen and in the environments like SL.
(This medium prefers the bold things, and is very rude to thin lines, just because of the resolution of the screen.)
Moya is building, and building and building! Every time you come back all kinds of things are added. He is just starting so the grand architectural design is lacking, the place develops more like a medieval city, adding staircases and new spaces where needed and where possible. And indeed this resembles his style of intuitive spontaneous painting.
Figures all around, sheep, animals! Indeed styles too: mainly figurative, but also abstract.

The chapel (Chapelle moya, clans, alpes maritimes, france, cote d azur, reconstitution de la chapelle peinte par Patrick Moya ) is particularly convincing, because it is a space with murals on the inside. This is very convenient for the SL prims, and has a beautiful effect. More than just the reproduction of something from RL into Second Life. Landscapes and figures in situations referring too, but also different from Christian themes.
In the museum itself we can see a lot of paintings, which are presented in a traditional way, AS IF, Second Life was a museum.
The paintings are made with visible joy, being colorful, funny and alive. A cartoon like style is used and sometimes his figures are cut out and put in space. Moya’s style is young, vibrant and very much of this time.
The letters of his name are coming back all the time and serve as a layer of inspiration - as if Moya would need this. Maybe sometimes these letters are a bit too much. Indeed looking back, the chapel doesn’t show these letters, which makes it more “universal” less only 'MOYA'...
Moya himself is dressed in his own pictures, of course, and for this imagery he has chosen his masks paintings. He is accompanied by two of his creations following him as a part of his dress, a very funny and creative way of using SL possibilities.
The masks, and paintings around this theme 'MASK' are different from the paintings earlier described. Indeed these paintings, in dark colors are gloomy. This contrast adds to the “thinking space” of the artist. It makes the joy more joy and the black more black.
There is a room for experiments too, and here we see the images of Moya moving too and froo, waving in space, rotating and transforming. This fits the images very well, but on the other hand the special effects of SL can be used much more subtle to achieve a more striking result. Which will be just a matter of time .. with the speed Moya adapts himself to this world!
Very worthwhile place to visit, and if you don’t speak French, the artist has a translator, which (of course) adds a lot to the fun of having a conversation with him, he is nearly always online!

Sculpted, some tricks

The first stage in sculpties is to get to work with BLENDER.
Then you have to struggle with the UV pictures coming out of BLENDER, hey, they do not immediately and always have the right rotation for Second Life. This is boring, sometimes you have to retry several times, mirroring and rotating the picture.
Sometimes looking at other pictures which worked helps, but apparently a picture of a shape has no single UV picture in sculpty land.
Then there is the problem of definition. Sometimes you loose all the rigidity. This is very obvious with sharp exact shapes. 5 of course experimented with the pentagon, this five sides shape is hard to get!
The first tries were really terrible.

Then 5 made a shape and selected out the colors. In Photoshop the UV image was made in a very abstract painting, with 10 colors. 10? Yes, five layers on top of each other, so adding the colors gives 10.
This resulted in a very exact shape, but indeed the corners are not really on top of each other, showing how complex this UV mapping is, how to get these point-colors right. This still has to be found out. Well 5 spend at least 300 L$ on uploading pentagon UV images... :-( Really there should be working viewers outside Second Life! How to make one???

( a PS: this small preview prog (free) can see the problem with the rotation, not the being flipped horizontally ogf the image, but no zooming is possible, only some rotation with the arrow keys....
http://www.jhurliman.org/download/sculptedpreview-1.0.0.zip
)

( ok this is a PPS: Wings 3D, with this plugin installed:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=183764
can also import and preview the UV map, it also shows the rotation mistake, but not the mirror problem (?), Wings #D is also free, and here you can zoom and rotate the shape....but you have to give the UV image another format, from the BLENDER comes .tga, and WIngs asks for .bmp, ooh it will all be so simple in the future.....)


Then 5 saw that to get a better resolution you have to get (in BLENDER) a lot of lines round the corners an as few as possible on flat surfaces. If you know this trick, you can nicely define for instance handles, as shown here.
The old hanging telephone, no soooo obsolete, lol, everyone having his own telephone-computer-digital camera in her pocket is of course not too simple to construct. The casing having between 6 and 12 primitives in normal building had to be reduced. Well it is a bit of work, but it really was worthwhile. Everything has to be done by the cylinder shape of course. You have to take care, and to deliberate where to put your two holes. And don’t forget to add your seams right in the beginning, because afterwards the points to join to the seam might be hard to select!
Of course the horn has to be made in one primitive, then this phone will be 7 prims in total, included the small horn for listening in on a conversation....
So, this stratagem of constructing sculpties is slowly getting 5 to the point where a lot of classical primbuilding can be replaced by the sculpties. Of course to get definition, for instance the human body has to be split up in face, torso, arms, legs, and hands. SO a human body, for the moment consists of 7 prims…..dressing it can demand extra prims. You must not become too sculpty, sometimes the classis prims are a lot easier, and if you have prims to spare…..
But you see, a handle in classic prim building is at least 4 prims, in sculpty it is just one.
Super, but one problem still remains, this is the texturing. How to get your image around the sculpty?
Indeed, when you organize the shape according to the principle of defining corners you can sort of keep the planes in the shape “logical”, so that the image projection becomes somewhat easier. But with the hanging phone, of course the plate with the numbers is still a classic cylinder prim.

In a balloon

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, 5 was invited to join a balloon ride above the landscape of second life, by Taka Teatime. 5 and some other friends were gathered by Swann Jie and we took of from the very futuristic looking landing platform in the sky. The balloon itself too was very modern, white, grey, steal and glass. The bottom of the balloon, well the part in which you have to sit was so transparent that 5 had the impression that standing up might become immediately sky-diving.

Here you see how to “ride” a balloon:

[4:09] Taka Teatime: help
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Help:
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Say START to startup the balloon.
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Say PARK to shutdown the balloon.
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Say SPEED <1> to set the balloon's speed.
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Say ALT to move to the target altitude. Example: SET ALT 300.
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Say UP or DOWN to move up or down by the specified number of meters.
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Say GO to move in a particular direction. Directions are: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW.
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Say STOP in to stop all motion (with physics).
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Say NEW PILOT to let another avatar pilot the balloon.
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: .
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Horizontal movement: Up/Down arrows = north/south, Left/Right arrows = west/east.
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: Vertical movement = PgUp/PgDown (or E and C)
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: .
[4:09] Terra Balloon 3.1 whispers: For the instructions notecard say INSTRUCTIONS.

The ballons steers quite gently over the land and the sea. It is amazing how many building there is in the sky, and you have to steer away from it. When 5 pointed the camera on something, the problem was to get the camera back, because there was nothing left in the sky to point at. Great were the snapshots with the fisheye angle, just hit a few times CTRL 8. Well my friends did this, but all after an hour or so moving around in the fisheye mode, the sent 5 a urgent message: how do I get out of this great angle of vision? Well quite simple: CTRL 9! LOL….
Then 5 tried to steer the balloon. This was going alright, you can say a direction and a height and the balloon is changing its gently path of floating through the world. Just a few buildings, but it wasn’t to clear if the balloon just flies right through them, or that it was a near collision. Than came the sudden end of the ride, we were above land from which we were ejected with force, landing in the see.

[4:19] Taka Teatime: we are on the ocean.
[4:19] You: busy steering....
[4:19] Jaco Schaffner: mind the lighthouse
[4:19] Cannot region cross into banned parcel. Try another way.
[4:19] Jaco Schaffner: mind the SEA
[4:19] You: ooooh boy!!!!!!
[4:19] Taka Teatime: we crashed...
[4:20] Swann Jie: hahahahaha
[4:20] You: under the see
[4:20] Swann Jie: what happened
[4:20] Taka Teatime: we have to go back teleporting.
[4:20] Swann Jie: where is everybody...
[4:20] Jaco Schaffner: I seem banned
[4:20] You: hahaha, sorry!
[4:20] Try moving closer. Can't sit on object because
it is not in the same region as you.
[4:20] Cannot region cross into banned parcel. Try another way.
[4:20] Taka Teatime: I'll collect the balloon.
[4:21] Try moving closer. Can't sit on object because
it is not in the same region as you.
[4:21] You: the ballon can enter that parcel we cannot!!!!!
[4:21] You: what an adventure

The balloon was in the land where we weren’t allowed. Trying to salvage the balloon was impossible! And we stayed in the sit animation. Teleporting back to the landing spot and everything was ok again, but is was quite an amazing ending of this floating adventure.

Think Big prims!

5 was exploring again, euh, shopping, oh no, exploring…..
In the entrance of Tombstone 5 found a box with large prims. Prims being the building blocks of Second Life structures, can be land, can be diamonds, can be houses, beds and clothing. These primitives, or prims are limited from 0.01 to 10 meters. These limitations are ok for most purposes but sometimes you need a large base for instance, or you want to construct a dome, which blocks a bit other structures or the awful “For Sale” signs.
You could simple save 10 or 20 prims, when using the big 40 x 40 prim as a base.
5 had encountered a large sphere long ago, so these things exist too. Apparently these big prims are from the old days of Second Life, and somehow still survive, being copied.
So 5 found a box with quite a collection and soon tried them out. Big towers, a large moon, a big dot and even bigger, prims of 4 sims wide!
But these prims have some disadvantages; first of all, rescaling is not possible. So you are stuck with this big thing! Anyhow more inconvenient characteristic was soon discovered: the big prims cause considerable lag! Movements becoming slower or jaggy, with only one such big thing in the neighborhood. 5 tried to find some documentation to confirm this. Nothing was found on the internet. So a few experiences were done all indeed confirming the lag problem. Maybe it is the combination of sculpties and the big prims? Sculpties are considerably slower in rezzing, displaying a blob long after other regular prims have established themselves…
Ok that finished the applications with the big prims, because lag, for the moment is not what we are waiting for. The world is already full of lag.
But well, a few strange pictures with big towers, and a big pink blob are fun too!
Then 5 went back to the The Sphere of Tranquility,
Which is an very nice application of a big sphere, being transparent at the outside and showing a starry night sky at the inside. The space being filled with vegetation, water things and cushions to sit, to make a converstaion…..5 always shows new friends this place….

And what is fun also is to go up, flying, you discover a few more big spheres! A
moon and the planets!

Always good to shop,...explore!

Homeless?

Yesterday evening 5 met a very funny guy, and when you encounter somebody like that, be sure to check his favourite places ! That’s the way to see the best of SL!
First of all the avatar: really a tramp, and since 5 is interested in both humour and the aspect of decay or dust in SL this was very entertaining!
Second Life of course is first of all being more beautiful, stronger, more design and this all fits somehow with the reduced computer worlds. Dust is the most difficult to program and costs enormous amounts of computer power. And so are things like rust and filth. Well for the rust you can upload a texture, this simplifies matters and luckily a lot of people are thinking along the same lines, introducing the “real life” bit of dust and rust in SL.
So here is the homeless avatar! He comes at great detail, with a backpack, his beer and a few teeth! 5 was quickly given this outfit, it’s free! When chatting a dustbin appears….
Homeless, have you noticed all these homes in SL? Have you noticed that they are all empty? The beds, the kitchens, the bathrooms? Indeed, we cannot sleep in SL, that would be a to large strain on the servers. So we log out, and disappear from the world. SO indeed our status is logged out, homeless, most of the time. We are even at a different level. When sleeping we are logged out to from RL, well a bit logged out anyway. Logged out is a bit related to homeless. Who wouldn’t prefer to see her avatar neatly packed away somewhere in SL for the time we sleep, rather than it being dissolved and only regenerated from shear terrible cold data the next time we log in? Well, that was the train of thoughts of 5, musing a bit about the homeless aspect in relation to SL. Homeless indeed: to run SL you have to have your connection and your computer, so homeless pour devils we are!!!
Haxon Steele was his name, he came as a homeless in the desert, and in his profile some advise about love has been given:
Haxon tells us:
You never see love coming but , you always see it go.
A relationship is only as strong as, the least one interested.
"Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option”
...lol....5 quite agrees!

5 noted this name, for exploring his favourite places later on. These were indeed well worth the teleportation.
For instance
DarkDharma Avatar Isle
of DarkDhama Daguerre
Lots of funny avatars, they are displayed in groups around the sim, and lots of freebies, be sure to check these out!
Pirates, seniors, and crying babies! WHo wouldn't be a crying baby again, well not 5 actually!
The second link was Tombstone Arizona Role Play Western 1890s
. This is a role playing sim. It is a village in the west around 1897. You must wear special clothes and even instructions how to rob a bank are given. Of course you can buy dresses (the standards for RP are free), and all kinds of Wild West clothes. Nugget Kidd should have known this place! Indeed his boots and long coat can be obtained here to!



Roleplaying, for instance How do I “Rob the bank”
Well, for Nugget to buy his cowboy clothes, he should have known this place!
And a few very interesting freebies, like the collection of “Big Prims”, dating from years ago, when there was apparently no 10 meter limit set.