Five March in Second Life

Twitter and SL

2010-11-04T08:44:00.000-07:00

the twitter api
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-API-Documentation

twitter second life connection scripts:
http://ordinalmalaprop.com/twitter/code.html

twitter box failures:
http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/2010/09/04/twitterbox-failures

second life tutorial on how to do this properly:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Twitter_OAuth_Library

Blender and Unity

2010-11-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

Unity is also fun to do!
Combining Unity and Blender:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectBlender.html

importing and editing Blender projects in Unity.
The textures have to be added manually, as told on the page.

BLENDER again

2008-12-26T21:36:00.000-08:00

This process continues all the time:
new BLENDER installed. (Super: it has a python script for sculpties for Second Life)
BUT
it says "Python not found", but i have installed Python
ok, i installed the latest version....it must be a former version
there is a link to the apropriate page
ok i download that version (although it is not the version wanted, the link points to another version again)
ok, reinstall python, reinstall blender
Blender says "sorry no Python found"
repeat this process again....
the link pointed to a wrong version as i already mentioned....
ok found this version....
and eventually, after about four times downloading and installing Python versions, BLENDER has the version it apparently needs...

the same thing happens for the DEVKITPRO, to program homebrew for the nds....

and while we are trained to do nice and well-ordered OO programming, we drown in versions, updates, patches...
but we are happy nonetheless with these free programmes!!!

i did not include the version numbers, with intent of course, these numbers (version 2.5.2) will change all the time, although this lessons stays the same: patience and carefull reading of the hints, not believing theses hints and links, and expecting to search again yourself.

Exciting sculpties!

2008-10-23T21:47:00.000-07:00

One year ago i made lots of sculpty using the former version of BLENDER.
All kinds of difficulties, and always small inconveniences in the results.

For a new laptop i had to reinstall BLENDER, and discovered that the UV editing mode was skipped. Then a bit of searching resulted in a big surprise:
The sculpty for Second Life plugin!
it can be found here:

http://slost.net/2007/12/19/blender-for-second-life-added-to-on-123107/

here some nice demonstration video's:

http://pkpounceworks.sljoint.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=28&func=fileinfo&id=130

and here for other connections, Papervision for instance:

http://www.rozengain.com/blog/2008/01/02/export-your-blender-objects-straight-to-away3d-papervision3d-and-sandy/

now the world of sculpties is made much more accessable!
some people have done some hard work here, thx!

(of course knowing a bit of BLENDER helps, but in fact it is only up to editing shapes now)

Also in the LSL wikii the sculpty parameters are published, not the least of which is: mirror sculpty! (PRIM_SCULPT_FLAG_INVERT)

(I got a lot of mirrored sculpties in the beginning, not checking it in the upload sculpty check.)

llSetPrimitiveParams:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetPrimitiveParams

The sculpty type can be set, so i want too discover soon what this exactly means:
PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_TORUS
it has all to do with the stitching of the UV plane.

Also the BLENDER plugin is just a Python script, so from this script you can learn how these wonderfull UV images are made.

Also the BLENDER plugin lets you load an UV image, and you can even edit this.

Of course getting the texture right on a sculpty (for instance a face on a head) has to be doen manually, and will always cost a lot of time.....

Alternative SL viewers

2008-05-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

Making a video in Second Life poses some problems:
how to get interaction between two avatars without bothering your friends?
One solution is to run two viewers at the same time, but at the current state of the art of computers, this could be too heavy for your machine. It is for mine!
So i looked at some other viewers, which could be « lighter ».
This was quite interesting!

The main list is given in the Second Life wiki, but not all are listed.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alternate_viewers

You can of course run 2 SL viewers (see the Torley tutorial on this)

Well, most of these viewers are not lighter.
There are the alternatives on the « normal » level:
OnRez for instance is quite the same as the normal latest viewer. A steady viewer, never posed any problems for me.
The Dale Glass Edition, was buggy.

Then there is the interesting « textual » viewer, this is really something else:
The Metabolt.
This is really light weight, you can connect and chat, and tp, and sit, but you don't get the image.
For making video's Metabolt is unusable, because in your main viewer the avatar, connected in Metabolt is only rendered in a primitive way. I cannot guess why. Sometimes the face stays gray, sometimes the skirt. Also, although you can touch objects (from a list) around you, i could not get it to do an animation, dancing for instance. (Always checking what happens in the « main » normal browser, because from Metabolt, you cannot see what is occurring « in world ».)
Maybe this will change in newer releases.

I also tried the RealXtend Edition
Looks cool: possibility to connect to « other » grids then SL only.
Unfortunately it was buggy. Most of the time, and pretty soon after connecting, it disconnected and disappeared without a trace.

Unofficial Viewer: AjaxLife
Then I ran across a browser viewer: running Second Life from an internet browser!
This last option seemed perfect to me:
View Second Life in the Firefox Browser
http://ajaxlife.net

the only things is: giving in my password on this browser viewer: can this be hacked easily. But ok, logging in the first time took so much time that i gave up trying to enter.
The second time i discovered you had to click on the grid button in the second screen???
And instantly it gives you your money, and inventory, avatars nearby.
It is a bit like the Metabolt.
I went in through the main SL to viewer to look at my alt there...
you can talk to each other and the one with the real viewer can see the Browser-viewer person.
But again this browser-viewer connection is not totally rendered.

The fact that you can connect without having a view yourself is suggesting possibilities, a bit in the direction of the actorbot, which lives on an external server.

I tried to have another browser opened and send in another avatar...
Yes, succeeded, this way one can finally make a small party of avatars on one computer.

Later on with Lolito Larkham we danced and I gathered my friends around us. But as already remarked, from these lightweight viewers I could not get these other avatars to dance. Chatting was possible, so making jokes coming from these “unknown” intruders in Five's tete a tete with Lolito was great!

Some people ask Five: why don't you make your own viewer? Haha, one cannot do it all!!!

Inspire Space Park

2008-04-19T23:23:00.000-07:00

Five was wandering around in the oracle garden of Tangerine Anatine, Five wrote an oracle script for her she is putting to good use:
See her gardens Tangerine's Dreams: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nimue/208/168/75
It is really a nice garden and tells a lot about cards and numbers which is interesting, even if you are not a devotee of predictions! I don't want to reveal much more, since the real fun is to discover it yourself!
Five happened to look at the profile Tangerine Anatine and there was this Space Destination. Interesting people tend to have interesting profiles, and yes! Tangerine referred me to something I hadn't seen before:

the Inspire Space Park!

This is a really funny place, situated high above the surface on the huge sculpty prims made by Gene Replacement (wasn't he banned , haha, we see his prims everywhere!!! Is he back now, his profile works again! )

Anyway, although called a park, this is a sort of meteor belt like situation, all kinds of planets and stones and rocks tumbling around each other, you can go on a « sleep orbit » which is really a great feeling!

There are floating zen tables, and tai chi exercises.....you can go from one meteor to the other crossing all kinds of small rocks, don't fall down between these smaller rocks!

And the funny thing is: there are lots of people around! They like this place, it is not a boring shopping mall, nothing to be sold, there is just the feeling of the future! When avatars can cross space without needing a space ship. Really this is what being avatar is all about!

The orbital park is made by the group Virtual Life Media, real virtual artists apparently with bright ideas!
This is the inventive art you are looking for when visiting worlds like Second Life, not copied images of Michelangelo or Leonardo or Rembrandt. I like Michelangelo, think he is great among the very best artists, but it has nothing to do with this world...

And this place has a goal: relax from the hustle and bustle of SL! It is not even copying nature, to get this feeling across. Nature parks in virtual worlds, although I like them, always give me a queer feeling: why am I in a nature park, behind the screen, while real nature is just around the corner?

Ok, so a great place to relax, to think about future possibilities, to wonder about what was, is and comes!

Oh just a last remark: you can go on orbital embrace!!! That just seems heaven to me!

Inspire Space Park Ultra Natural Space Destination in Shinda
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Shinda/28/213/218

Oh, all my pictures are in daylight, you should see it by night!

Teaching in Second Life.

2008-04-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

From our special correspondent Nugget Kidd:

Giving a workshop in several techniques to combine media, I decided to introduce the participants also to Second Life. SL is a superb environment to sketch, to develop ideas, using images, constructing, scripting, sound, animations, and possibly video. SL, as a 3D world is intuitive not to be compared to a real architectural 3D program, but at the same time it has extensive possibilities to express ideas and feelings.
Participants were “forced” into Second Life, and Swann Jie joined the class of her own free will!
So there were eight avatars in total doing the exercises.
All was done on a basic plot of land of 512 m2, and 117 prims.

A great thing about Second Life is that it needs no tutorial:
The examples of what can be done in SL can be found everywhere around, and good ideas have been well developed. The workshop approach to this world was more building and designing than chatting. Chatting and looking at each others results “in-world” is considered a bonus. Social interaction was not a goal.
To get a taste of the virtual possibilities the participants had to make three things: a basic chair, a design chair and a poster. (all within 20 prims, each chair under 10 prim max, hpoing that it would all fit in the 117 prims...)

The basic chair cannot be a chair without having some references to the RL idea of a chair.
The second version of the chair should express some emotion through design, texture or construction.
The tension between the properties of virtual reality and the idea “chair” became too much for two of the participants, they proposed a “world with a moon” or an “ice cream” as chair, Swann Jie and ActionHenk Winkl. This is very possible given poseballs, but is a bit outside of the purpose of this small assignment.

The poster is a way to use Second Life as a 3D drawing machine. Given some text lines and an emoter (SL facial expression tool) you can make a few snapshots of your avatar and using photoshop you have a comic strip.
This idea is elaborated in a very sophisticated way in http://encoreseraphine.com/
The poster exercise became partially a reaction on the SL experience, but also some glimmers of RL popped up in these text-images. Real experience crept in, which was unexpected. Second Life seems to mirror immediately the real life behind it.
This combination of exercises told a lot about the participants, a lot more than you could possibly be expected from such a basic try out of possibilities.
Also you could spot that some participants have a real feeling for SL like worlds, making without any practice maximum use of the medium, others were hopelessly lost and could not construct much more then a cube...
In between these extremes were some people with fast and clear ideas, which also produced good results, ActionHenk Winkl and poohbeermikey Donahue as main examples. poohbeermikey Donahue clearly shows his technical mind with one chair in between a tanning bed and a toaster and the other a toilet with running water!

The try-out was connected to a contest: enormous prizes (25L$) were promised for the best basic chair, the best design chair and the best poster.
I decided to give one participant, the fish in the virtual water the first prize for all of his ideas. This is Net4z Kawanishi, he could have a bright future in Second Life worlds! His poster is of excellent quality and both his chairs are real virtual sweeties!
The prize for the chair in its most basic form is given to Yope Phelps. He also managed to sell his hair even on his first day in SL, and made some fine wings!
Deciding who will receive the prize for the expressive chair is very difficult. Apart from Net4z Kawanishi all the chairs lack either “chair-idea” or real expressiveness. Ok, this prize is for Thomas Paige, who has made a very sweet “fakir” chair, with points.
Then the poster. (Again apart from Net4z Kawanishi, he already got a prize)
Indeed all posters have something to say. Swann Jie even told the whole story of her SL life in one poster!The most powerful are the posters which manage to tell something more then just a pun. These are the posters of GaarAH Heillman and Fluffy2000 Trenc
The prize is for Fluffy Trenc also because he had such a trouble doing something with the virtual medium.
I think the SL introduction will not easily be forgotten even if the participants don't actually engage in an active virtual life.

Teaching totally in SL, fro avatar to avatar can pose a problem: the chat is a poor medium to convey precise ideas, but also to elaborate around ideas. Voice could be added, but I was glad the class was gathered in Real Life to comment on the things thats happened and were produced.
If I look back at this tiny piece of land and see all the things which were made it has became a happy coming together of avatars!

Japanese!

2008-03-11T00:55:00.000-07:00

It all started with the tiny avatars in the shops of Saitot Tammas. Saitot specializes in small avatars of all sorts: animals, pets, robots…shop: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pelinor/236/11/66

You can become a cat with a hat, or have a few on your shoulders, or you can have a bird flying around your head…..
Five followed this tiny avatar trail from one Japanese sim to another.
The Japanese are everywhere!

Remember the Tokyo addict Taka Teatime? He had a quiz about Tokyo and this idea of a quiz was so funny that also the virtual museum Schielandhuis got a quiz!

Then there is Salmaru Masala, this is a extremely funny and very inventive person, making all kinds of very hilarious things, like snoring animations, silly taxies, and sushi eating animations put in a plate with sushi’s. He gives away his jokes, which certainly cost him a lot of work, practically all for free!

But there are also many Japanese sims to be explored. Little Kyoto is very funny and well worth a visit, but Japanese design and fantasies have moved on. The strip figures have become very important.
This is an example of such a modern Japanese sim:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/sugamo/69/22/21, selling tiny avatars again!

Nearby I found this, it looks gigantic! 5 is completely dwarfed. But actually if you try to enter the skyscrapers, it is miniature! Great gag!

Here a book shop of the brightest colors, probably an ordinary sight in Japan, in SL it is a labyrinth!

From the large spaces to the individual encounters again:
One of the shops: Sculpted work – and more, of Arrshu Dagger.
In her profile: I'm Japanese. Ispeak engrish very small.XD.
Well my Japanese is only: Domo! (Which means hello, I think, I hope) I cannot even say in Japanese: I don't speak Japanese...:-(

But we could talk! Really great. Using a translator. You must take care to formulate basic and simple sentences. But it works!
The shop: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Balenissa%20Grove/193/146/80

Her sculpties shown here are really masterpieces. The sculpty has its limitations, due to the limited resolution. The sculptor has to know these limitations. In principle sculpties are transformations of the sphere. So with a bit of pinching and pulling you can get chairs, parasols, bones. Arrshu shows how to be creative to the last square of the 32 x 32 grid.
Arrshu does the sculpties not in BLENDER but in ROKKAKU DAIOU, which means HEXA SUPER (Hexagone!)
This software cannot be found outside of Japan, search only gives craks and key generators!
An english version available is METASEQ, freeware and shareware.

The second problem of the sculpties is the image you use for its surface. To minimize distortion you have to stay on the 32 x 32 grid.
But there is a last detail, as explained by Arrshu. The holes in the sculpty. The sculpty is not only like an apple, but also like a banana! The poles of the sphere have to be left open, because of the coordinate knot which happens to be in these special points. Apparently the combination of Second Life and BLENDER does not treat the poles or the holes very precise: the holes disrupt the exact 32 x 32 grid, spoiling colours over the edges. ROKKAKU, as told by Arrshu has solved this problem and is exact.

Nearby the shop is a “rose bed”, also a sculpty work, this time of Draceina Pinion.
This was really an experience! In the flower there are two positions to lie down. And you are totally surrounded by the red petals, giving an incredibly warm feeling. 5 invited Swann Jie to come around and we got a few marvellous silly pictures of the two of us….
Literally 5 could not stop taking pictures because 5 was totally drunk because of the colours!

Oooouh, 5 has written too long a story!

Will be continued! Sooo much to tell!

Camera fun

2008-02-24T05:21:00.000-08:00

An avatar walks around with a camera.
Folks new to SL always have to get used to this.
But many peculiarities of this camera even experienced users don’t know about.
Even 5 discovered some new possibilities after a year!

Basic camera facts:
Walking and flying: the camera follows from behind, so how to see your face?
Using the arrow keys makes the camera swing, but the avatar too.
Using the mouse wheel zooms in and out.

Swinging the camera around:
Now for this you have to become a virtuoso on the keyboard! Press ALT and click on something, the terrain or an object or an avatar. Then while mouse pressed, move the mouse: the camera swings around in a horizontal plane. The vertical mouse movement gives zoom, for instance to see your own make-up or nose or beard.
To get it moving more freely (but without zoom), also press ALT CTRL, click on object, keep mouse pressed and move mouse! Freely means here in a sphere around the object.

Now to get further away from the avatar, you have to realize the camera is bound to the avatar, but it can escape quite a distance.
You can liberate the camera more using: Second Life menu-> client -> Disable Camera Constraint.
(Found no “client” in menu: press CTRL ALT D)
Then your camera can really roam through space.

Sitting Camera movement:
Sitting on an object gives other freedom. There are the same possibilities as before. But clicking an object somewhere and then using just the arrow keys makes your camera turn around this distant object! Quite fun!
Arrows up down, zoom
Arrows right left circle around chosen object or the avatar.
Page up and down (normally flying) give space up and down!
And then: ALT CTRL and SHIFT (in that order) and arrows gives parallel movement!

What I seldomly use is the Mouselook, Movements in Mouselook mode are somehow not convenient for me.

This sitting – arrow steering possibility is interesting.
The problem sometimes is that you want to show people something in Second Life in a public environment. But then they should have an avatar, most of them have no avatar nor experience moving around flying etc. It would actually be undesirable to have them roam the whole of Second Life. This sitting avatar is a solution for this problem. A Joystick can steer the arrow buttons, a wii remote control might do the same (bluetooth connection and GlovePie for instance). If the rest of the keyboard and computer is hidden, the public can fiddle with the view and the joystick and everything can be done, clicking, etc, without fear of the avatar drifting of!
5 can show the whole of the virtual museum like that!

Tele and Wide angle camera.
As written about before:
You can get quite nice shots for stills using different camera angles. Shortcuts CTRL 8 CTRL 9 CTRL 0
This picture 5 got by going to the limits (or over the limits...)

Scripted camera.
This is fun too, you can script the camera to follow you in all kind of positions, an example is given here: http://slhomepage.com/lsl/FollowCam.htm
In this script the camera is not really free, which is for me: steerable by the keyboard. This is possible too!
I found a nice script: a "scan camera" script of ArianeB:
http://arianeb.com/secondlife.htm (bottom of this long and usefull page)
I turned this around in a camera steering from the keyboard,
for steering camera from arrows on keyboard mind the control permissions: http://slhomepage.com/lsl/llTakeControls.htm
but combining controls and camera parameters, the camera is freed and can follow a path, or steered by the keyboard, letting 5 take a break!
You can get away pretty far steering this free camera, the problem is: the drawing distance of your avatar! The world gets empty behind this limit.

Video
For making video’s, knowing the different possibilities of the camera is great. The walking avatar gives quite an instable image.
A problem is the speed of the normal camera. More convenient for good video making would be the possibility to slow the camera movement, resulting from using the arrows in sitting position. Maybe there is a shortcut for that too? Yes, deep down in the player:
Client (CTRL ALT D) -> Debug Settings ->in the textbox type Zoomtime.
Default is .4, but making this higher (10 – 20 sec) you get a very slow moving camera, great for nice steady zooming. You can let the buttons go and the camera stays on moving, slowly, comfortably, it is like sailing! But there are disadvantages too, the camera moves on and on sometimes, so for normal living, quickly reset it to the default of .4 sec!

Have fun, explore! I imagine even more can be discovered!

skin fun

2008-02-24T01:00:00.000-08:00

First some basic facts:
Basically a skin is the deepest texture layer of an avatar. Clothes, like shirts and trousers are covering this basic layer. T-shirts for instance are easy to make and cover the upper body.
Clothes can be taken off; the basic skin can never be pulled of. Skin is the most fundamental layer.
Even when a skin is replaced, it replaces the last one. No avatar is without skin; also this skin cannot be transparent. The most simple is the Linden skin layer.
So skins you can choose to wear are replacements of this basic layer.
Does everyone need a skin? Every avatar has a skin to start with. It is a basic model. Other free skins with features, make-up, tattoos, are easily found and freebies. “Opium” -skins are found everywhere, and are not bad.
When do you really need a skin: actually only if you plan to show it, that is if you don’t want to wear too much clothes! What is the point of buying an expensive skin, and then covering it with clothes?

Skins are different form “shape”, and the added features like eyebrows, beards and whiskers.

Normal skins: drawing and painted (by computer), abstractions of skins. Some skins are only partial, for instance upper body. These skins can be altered, in darkness lightness or color.
Photoskins: photoskins are based on real photos. This leaves the abstraction of an avatar a bit behind. Photo skins can be too real. Photoskins can have very convincing shiny effects, only turning around such a skin reveals that these gleams are fixed and parts of the skin, not reflection effects.
The third category: fantasy…try throwing a texture in the texture boxes for upper and lower body parts, this is great fun!

Colors:
When do you see the color of a skin: well, when you don’t have much on as clothes.
So with good prim hair (can be found free) and make-up (make-up too, it comes often as a part of free skins) a basic skin can be very sufficient, because you don’t see much of it.
But then showing yourself (haha what is yourself here?)
Going around in shorts or in tops which leave the shoulders free can already be embarrassing in a basic skin. The area of the neck and the décolleté are rather poorly represented. The subtle play of shadows fails quickly and gives nasty effects.

Adjusting the color. Trying to get “black”.
Going around tanned can be done by adjusting the top slider in the appearance menu of skins.
Some skins give the possibility of going really dark, but then there appears to be a problem: the whole detailing fails and the avatar looks like a dark blob on the screen: see the picture.

That might be the reason why the black African skin is not too much around in Second Life. Is Second Life an all white affair? That would be terrible! Asian skins are around, but these are mainly fair skins too. (The Asian effect resides also very much in the “shape” of course, the way the eyes are placed and the detailing of the face.)

So what about the African skin?
This idea of finding out about the darker colored skin became a small obsession. It is very difficult to find these dark African skins doing “normal” shopping. Also the Second Life finder doesn’t help much. The SLExchange finder neither.
White skins seem to be “normal”…???

Searching the internet gave me 2 clues, which were linked. Two blogs in which the same question was posed: what is wrong with wearing a dark skin?

Two problems: the first the one is already stated; the screen colors go very well with fair colored skins, the darker have this problem of becoming dull. (This is the same for movies and television.)

The second seems to be pure discrimination! Here are the blogs referred to:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2006/02/the_skin_youre_.html
http://brace-coral.livejournal.com/50040.html

Avery good reason to try to buy such a skin!
In the blogs there were references to shops. Only two shops offer well made real dark African black skins. (Although pretty good abstract skins are freely available too, but you have to search quite a bit for these darker skins.)

In the end 5 bought such a skin. A photoskin of Midnight at 1500 L$, wow!

The face is realy realistic, in contrast with the absract SL head. Ears for instance, hmmm maybe even too realistic. The specials are the shining surfaces, quite a lot of work for the designer to get this right! The features cannot be changed in the appearance menu, not darker lighter, etc. The shape can be changed of course, this textures always fits around.

Then 5 had a nice skin, what a problem!
5 always went around in a gothic outfit, which covered all of the body! As stated above, if you have a skin like that, you have to show it, wearing only a few well chosen articles…so the whole habit of clothing is changed by a skin!

Worse: a good, nice skin (real beauty) wants to show itself, it seems to have a will of its own. 5 never knew this before!

Actually, as could be foreseen, other things attached to the avatar, for instance the prim hair can make quite a difference too. As seen in the images a black skin becomes really African, when the head isn’t covered by a fancy hair piece.

To accompany this blog a difficult question had to be answered: how to show the differences between the skins? Well, not by showing only the face. Ok that is the reason for this general striptease!

5 is showing of in different skins, the names are covering some all to intimate parts (5 hopes) You can see clearly the difference between the skins, abstract, basic and photo. And then the influence of the hair and eyes can be appreciated. This being able to feel “a bit” in other persons skin is one of the most fabulous features of Second Life for me.

Last question: walking around in a black skin: is 5 discriminated? Not at all! Friends walking out on 5? Not at all!

Shops:
Offering the photo skin, also a couple of good male skins (see the upper part of the picture):
Chip Midnight: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Freelon/50/62/23
Offering an abstract, but very good skin: (below in picture)
Ayesha Bisiani: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Skin%20Within/120/139/28

Bojana Vella showed me Allessandra Island,
with two great dark skins (1200 L$)

Later i found this shop: Archan, 990 L$ with shape included...

All black void

2008-02-11T23:49:00.000-08:00

Black, all black, void black.
That was the status of my avatar.
Sometimes the eyes were visible, only.
Clothes I changed, sometimes they got visible, most turned black too.
Reinstalling Second Life doesn’t help.
Rebaking textures doesn’t help.
Logging out and in doesn’t help.

Something good came out of it though:
I decided to make my own head, of a pumpkin…, in reality it was a fox avatar I rebuilt. I took so many features away it looked like a pumpkin with too eyes on it in the end. Then I made a script moving these eyes around, and I made the pumpkin open up a bit and changing this opening at the back. This opening revealed my “brains”. It was fun, I have put a book inside and a few pictures. Just to get an idea of my brains.
Later on I added a compass structure (script and object) and could steer a robot in RL, just moving my brains! (My brains sent http request to a server and these were detected by a prog on my laptop, which sent signals through Bluetooth to a Lego NXT robot.)

But that did not resolve my all black void status. I decided to check on internet. I had happened to me before, but it went away, now this all black thing was persistent. Somehow somebody told something about two screens? Yes I am using two screens, yes I remember having had problems with beamers, trying to display shockwave animations on the second screen….it didn’t work out.
Ok let’s try this, one screen, black, other, main screen, shift Second Life, rebake textures. Behold! My colors are back. Shift back again, change clothing: all black, a void again. SO this is resolved! Working with two screens, depending on graphical cards, an avatar can go in the all black status.
By the way, my preview on importing pictures: sculpties was gone too in the all black status. Very annoying, because sculpties tend to come in wrong! So that problem is tackled to.

I must keep on to the idea of creating my own brains though. It was fun putting all kind of things into it, and showing it so now and then by a script which opens randomly my pumpkin – skull …

SL connects to RL (scripting)

2008-02-06T20:56:00.000-08:00

Second Life is a world in itself. A world, what is a world? Something which exists in itself and provides the means for its inhabitants to exist like humans. A world has to have enough variety, being a whole, being “closed” in itself. Being closed means here that things in “the world” stay in this world, it is more or less self contained.
Stay ''mainly'' into itself, because only RL is in this sense a world: we cannot get outside of reality, example: the world of music.
All worlds we make up finally reside in reality somehow. Also Second Life!

Unlike Real Life, this Second Life has connections to another world, outside of it, which is, of course Real Life. Quite a few! Besides its own structure, of rendering, objects and avatars here is input of images, sounds, even video, and on the constructive level of course input of ideas and energy of its residents. What would be SL if there were not any avatars having their proper behaviour, well, we see that sometimes: emptiness, void, silence!
Avatars in this world have motives and are independent of each other.
A drive for a lot of people is the money; Linden money can be exchanged in real money and the other way around, this is a connection too! But for some, money is not everything! Some avatars like to program.
Using the Linden script you can enter information in this 3D world, and get it out again. Not as thoughts or memories, but as real hard data!
Linden script has a special function for this, the httprequest. It is a call to a page on the internet, or a page connected to a server. This is it:

key llHTTPRequest(string url, list parameters, string body)

where url is the web address, parameters can simple be [HTTP_METHOD,"GET"], and the body left empty, that is to say the empty string “”.

This request gives a reply, being the text of the web or php page called back into Second Life as a string, a text, and this response can be monitored by the method

http_response(key request_id, integer status, list metadata, string body)

Well and this server can be connected to other “worlds”. The world of internet for instance. Doing statistics of visitors can be stored on a server. Also a microphone can be installed in SL, recording what has been said in its neighbourhood. This microphone can store the recordings on a server.
Connections to servers can be made from a PC, using progs made for instance in C# (or whatever language also allows to make a http-request, say, FLASH, DIRECTOR). So information retrieved from the server can be stored and used on the PC.
This same PC program can make a Bluetooth connection. These connections have two directions. So a cell-phone can tell something to this PC program, telling it the server, and an object in Second Life can ask the server what happened, so through Bluetooth, PC, and server a Second Life object can be commanded.
The other way around is the second direction:
Some object give information on movement, speed and angle to the server, the server is asked for speed and angle by a PC prog and this prog provides a small robot for motor speed and steering angle using a Bluetooth connection. The small robot being for instance a NXT, the Lego robot. And this all works!

Five March was flying around with a sender and this flying around caused the robot to move!
Very funny, but imagine, sometimes it doesn’t work! What can be the reason? In the end it turned out that quite a few owners of land don’t give permission to run scripts! So the http request doesn’t work, and the robot bumps into a wall!
This robot can be steered also using an in between script called GlovePie with a wii remote control. So this means again that the wii remote control can easily get information into Second Life, moving object.
Connecting worlds is wonderful. It is where the cold technical world becomes social.

Big fun also is: I am writing two blogs, one about the NXT and the other is about Second Life. Now these two blogs have met!

Angles in SL, and the llAtan2 method

2007-12-04T22:40:00.000-08:00

Working on the connection of a vehicle in Second Life and a robot ( a simple Lego NXT) to steer in Real Life, the absolute angle had to be found in Second Life.

For this the rotations, llGetRot() were not too appropriate. Not because these are quaternions, and not degrees, no, no:

The problem of rotations in general is that is goes from 0 – 360 and then in one jump back to 0. So adding two of these can give strange results! For instance 180 + 185 = 5! Adding is not a problem, but finding an average might be: the average of 180 and 185 is 2.5, haha!

*(180 + 185) / 2 = 182.5 in our world, but because of the jump in the degree world this becomes 2.5!

I needed the angle of steering for the robot, I had to subtract two angles, and was running into another difficulty: the rotations in SL give only angles from 0-180 degrees. So left and right was a bit difficult to get! Of course there are many solutions to this. (Even with the quaternions itself, but let's solve this without mister Hilbert!)

Two objects, say lying 1 meter apart have a different position. From this difference the angle can be calculated using simple math, normally the arctan, or the atan.

Same problem here: the atan returns angles between 0 and 180 or 0 and -180, so the backwards angles between 180 and 360 had to be found considering the configuration of the objects. Not too difficult but something extra to consider.

But then, for once the Linden script had a surprise to the positive side:
The Linden function is llAtan2, and this 2 is puzzling, not to be explained in the wiki.
Some experimenting resulted in the nice behavior of this function: it returns the full angle, from 0 – 360 degrees. This makes life easy!!

So the configuration for the absolute angle in SL:
Two objects linked, one, sending its position to the root every half sec:

Script:

default

{
state_entry()
{
llSetTimerEvent(.5);
}

timer()
{
llMessageLinked(LINK_ROOT, 0, (string) llGetPos() , NULL_KEY);
}
}

and the root receiving the message and making an angle of this position and the position of his own:

default

{

state_entry()
{ }

link_message(integer sender_num, integer num, string str, key id)

{
vector myPos = llGetPos();
vector childPos = (vector) str;
vector diff = myPos - childPos;
float x = diff.x;
float y = diff.y;
angle = PI - llAtan2( x,y ) ;
llSay(0,(string)( angle/PI*180));
}
}

Ok, the PI in front of the function is extra, whatever you need on angle, which way etcetera, you have to decide for yourself….

And combining this recent angle, with the angle measured just before is what gives me the steering angle for the robot, to be sent to the server and the server is asked for this angle by a C# prog which is running on my laptop, this C# prog is also connected with Bluetooth to the NXT, and it steers! (Well all the connections take a bit of time, so the robot is bumping in a wall before you know it…no steering your own real car from Second Life J

Museum 12, Technicalities

2007-09-30T00:36:00.000-07:00

The main subject of the virtual museum is the history of Rotterdam, not scripting or making sculpties. But some interesting methods are used to make things look alive.

Scripting was used in:

objects in the exhibition, giving comment on touch
special effects, sounds and music when an avatar is near
temp rezzing, giving objects only on a temporary basis
streaming video
some teleportation links
in special objects like a book, giving an abstract
for the quiz, linked to a database
for some tracking of visiting avatars, avatars are registered for statistics
for the HUD, the thing to wear for obtaining coment in a choosen language

techniques using programes outside of Second Life:

for preparing images photoshop was used
for the streaming video i used a MAC with itunes
for making the sculpties BLENDER
for sounds and music, Audacity
the linking to the database is done in PHP pages
the text and comments about the object on display are stored on a server

Notes:

The comments of the items in the exhibition are in the items and are reproduced on touching by the interaction of the HUD, the HUD giving the right language.

This text of the items can be refreshed by a single command, said by an avatar.

The streaming videos were a problem. Not the streaming itself but the streaming of these videos in the group context. I think there is a bug in this group owned streaming video prims construction.

In the museum visiting avatars are counted (database connection) and some statistics of visitors is generated. The average visitor number is 20 a day since the summer of 2007.

The quiz added in December has its own database. Avatars can try up to five questions a day. Questions are randomly chosen from the list of 50 questions.

Outside the museum is a book showing the main subjects of the exhibition, pages can be turned, a bit of comment is added in floating text.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Museum 11, Specials

2007-09-30T00:33:00.000-07:00

Special items designed for the museum are

Some umbrella’s, sculpties, one primers, from aeound 1900.
A standing and a hanging old telephone. Sculpties.
A desk chair, which consisted of 50 prims in its first version, reduced to 10 with sculpty tubes.
two Gispen chairs with curved iron tubes.
A streetcar, driving a bit with original noises.
two mannequin models, with shoes
shovels made from one prim
handles made from one prim
the aeolus tower

The poster about Pschorr has a special script, with about 10 old jazz tunes, playing if an avatar is near this part of the exhibition.

Two special showcases were made, representing the new design cups and plates shown first in the pre-war Bijenkorf, later in shops in the Lijnbaan.

The mannequin models were pretty difficult to recreate, but in the end a reasonable resemblance is achieved.

The video projections on the curved surfaces in the end turned out really cool. The streaming video has not too much quality, but it loads fast. The projections in the real museum are also blurred because of their size.

There are as many as 20 videos in the exhibition, real and the virtual, which enhance the experience.

Added are a lot of sounds. Not only the items but also the avatars trigger these sounds. Sounds are very important to let a virtual space come alive.

A quiz was added, to attract people and to see whether the visitors retain something. Of course, seen a global scale the history of Rotterdam is minute, and very specialized. Some funny questions are posed too: the fastest means of transportation for crossing Rotterdam, where can be ordered the worst cappuccino ever...
The questions are situated in a database, only five questions can be answered a day, and of course, although the questions are a random selection, you never get the same question again. The number of questions at the moment is 45. For a good answer you get 2 L$!

There are about 1000 prims in this exhibition.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Museum 10, Outside

2007-09-30T00:32:00.001-07:00

First the exhibition was built on one floor, like a scale model. Later on the idea of the surrounding building was added, indicated mainly by its front. (The actual building dating from the 17th century.)
The walls are done in a transparent layer, which is in 'phantom' mode, which means a visiting avatar can visit the place by crossing the wall. The roof is also transparent, but not phantom, one can walk on this roof, and look inside.
This transparent shape indicated the building but makes it possible too that the exhibition can be easily overseen.

In the picture above the building is still having only the upper exhibition floor and the basement is formed by the map of Rotterdam.

The outside is now formed by bricks. The buildings around the virtual museum are huge, and were expected to be huge. This recreates the real surroundings of the real museum. The Schielandhuis is dwarfed by the skyscrapers around it.

Slowly connections are made to neighbours. Streets and pathways are formed between the virtual neighbours.

A garden was added next to museum. And surrounding the museum are bricks.

On the museum a giant butterfly is added, to attract the eye. Some realistic particle effects are added, like smoke, and snow in winter.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Museum 9, Now

2007-09-30T00:30:00.000-07:00

It seems strange to say, but nowadays Rotterdam fails to generate more history. Rotterdam is part of Holland and of Europe. What is happening elsewhere is happening in Rotterdam. Big festivals are organized, scandals are revealed, skyscrapers are built. But this is all like it is everywhere else. The end of local history.

Five March: Rotterdam was generating history starting around 1850, by growing incredible quickly, by scandals around the harbour, with figures like Pincoff. Also giant builders like GJ de Jongh, who built the inner harbours, Maashaven, Rijnhaven and Waalhaven, big like former cities. Then the modernization of the city, sacrificing whole popular neighbourhoods and prefering a rather conservative design for a townhall. The war and the destruction and clearing of the inner city. The reconstruction of the harbours after the war. All very exciting. Nowadays we live in peace and more stability. Rotterdam has a local television station and a local whether forcast. But the rains comes from England, and the financial crises from the USA, the oil from the east...

The character of the exhibition is changed in the last rooms. Real historical items are replaced by video screens. Nice chairs and paintings left behind. Events are shown, like the summer carnaval. Reality of objects is replaced by ‘new media’. In fact this can be seen as a preparation for the virtual exhibition on Second Life. Already the way to show the bombardment of Rotterdam in 1940 is done in a way suitable for Second Life. History in this was is as virtual as a virtual world.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Museum 8, 1960

2007-09-30T00:28:00.001-07:00

In the 60ties the trend of reconstruction and work work work, was slowly replaced by the feeling of spending money. Parallel to harbour construction, the city centre was changed into a big shopping mall. People were ready for it. The consumer paradise replaced the feelings generated by the war. Indeed solidarity was imperceptible replaced by the egoism of the buyer. "Shop till you drop".

The Gispen chair designs can be seen here, and the Italian design shown in shops in the shopping zone, the Lijnbaan. Rotterdam celebrated work work work in a series of festivals around the reconstruction of the harbour and the city. The first was called Ahoy, in 1950, the second E55 in 1955 of course, then followed C70. A big tower, Euromast overseeing the harbour was built, and slowly, like after the twenties work was partially replaced by amusements.

C70 also had its riots, still about bad housing conditions in the old districts near the centre of Rotterdam.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Museum 7, 1950

2007-09-30T00:27:00.001-07:00

After the war Rotterdam finds its way again in work, work, work. The harbours have to be reconstructed and at the same time enlarged. Nowadays these harbours stretch towards the see, and even inside the see, making it possible to unload ships, which don’t even enter the harbour.

Container trade became one of the most important activities in the harbour. It is nearly unthinkable the way the grain and the other trades articles were all loaded and unloaded by hand not even 100 years ago. (Recall the first exhibition room, with all its utensils specially designed for coal and grain barrels.)

Constructing and reconstructing is the joy of the engineer, Rotterdam was a paradise for designers, architects, builders, and it still is. New districts are built around Rotterdam. In the South and in the North. People living in the South of Rotterdam are at half an hour travelling from the centre and children growing up in these new districts don’t even have an idea of living in the ‘real” Rotterdam.

Some dreams of architects turned out not to be heaven to live in, like the big collections of huge flats in the North. Some of these flats are torn down, like in the rest of the world. The development of shop to mall, from mall to shopping centre is also shown in the design of the pedestrian shopping zone the Lijnbaan. The first impact of people visiting this new shopping centre was so big that traffic police had to guide the big crowds visiting this new phenomenon.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Museum 6, 1940

2007-09-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

Maybe the time just before the war was the happiest time of Rotterdam. The war ended this in 15 minutes. The centre was destroyed by German bombers to make the Dutch resistance surrender. But even worse for the people of Rotterdam was the last year of the war with Rotterdam near the front and the dissolving of supply lines. The winter was particularly severe. There was little food and fual was scarce. Far more people starved by lack of food and because of the really cold winter of 1945 then were killed in the bombing in 1940.

Other strange facts are that a lot of the remaining buildings in the centre of Rotterdam, which could have been saved, were destroyed and demolished too to make room for ‘a new centre’ of Rotterdam. Even in and around the time of war art (after shopping malls, sport and cinemas) became a part of the city. After the war the famous statue of Zadkine symbolized the city without a heart.

The dream of an architect is realized by the chance to redesign a centre practically from scratch, without any buildings hindering the great ideas about the future. The spirit of Zimmerman, foreseeing a bright future and a modern city is still around and shapes the imagination. Witteveen and van Traa have been working during the 5 years of war to get their ideas about a future city on the map. Their ideas centre around a welfare city, modern, spacious, divided in zones for work and recreation.

Really interesting here is the change of the emotional atmosphere of the exhibition. The amusement and the dancing Pschorr scene is followed by a real dramatic event of the bombing and pictures of starved people. The emotional turn around is complete.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Museum 5, 1930

2007-09-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

In the preceding blog, some of these items here were already mentioned. A lot more can be told. Shops were getting really big, from shop to mall. The Bijenkorf was newly built. The Passage, dating from 1879, was a great success. On the other side of life there was the global the crisis and the unemployment. New flats, based on steel skeletons were built and Gispen made his modern designs for chairs. Several Gispen chairs are shown around the exhibition, and to spot the development in these designs is a joy for the eye.

The streetcar in the virtual exhibition can be made to move, and gives original streetcar sounds.
Traffic is getting denser, although a streetcar was still too expensive for a lot of people in Rotterdam.
Rotterdam is still proud to have had a world champion boxer amongst its citizens, Bep van Klaveren. The rise to importance of sport was paralleled by the rise of the cinema’s. Although there is no reference to it in the spoken documentation of the real exhibition, the people visiting the popular cinemas were contemptuously indicated by ‘people belonging to the culture of the hats with the big lids’. Some of these hats are shown.

Rotterdam, the working city, famous for a dancing? Who can imagine that? Indeed it was true: Pschorr was well known in Holland. People from nearby The Hague visiting it and taking back the last train to The Hague form the Hofplein. This last train was called "the perfume tran".

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/

Museum 4, 1920

2007-09-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

Second Room, Rotterdam 1920-1930

Around 1920 there have been big changes in the character of Rotterdam. The red light district, famous even in Paris is demolished to make room for the new town hall, a new post office and a new trade centre. This could not have been a real coincidence. The main street of Rotterdam is constructed by making a big road instead of the existing canal, part of the inner harbour which became obsolete. The poor workers lived in appalling conditions and the socialists became involved in new initiatives to improve housing conditions. The money demanded amusements, which was found for instance in dancing Pschorr, which was visited even by people from The Hague. The management of work was improved, necessary because of the huge commerce generated by the new harbours. But also the global world affected Rotterdam, with the international crisis caused by the New York Stock Exchange disaster. The dutch should have had some experience with this, given the fact that they suffered already heavily under the first real speculation crisis around tulips in the 17^th century.

In the exhibition three people are singled out:

Zimmermann the mayor who was responsable for the main street, the Coolsingel, the townhall, the postoffice and the new stock-exchange, and the demolishing of the district, the Zandstraat, wich was necessary to make room for this modenisation.

Koos Speenhoff, the first celebrity singer of Rotterdam. He commented upon all what happened in Rotterdam. He made his songs himself, accompanying himself on the guitar. In the exhibition a few seconds of his songs are included in his guitar and the picture of the newly build tower of the town hall.

Arie Heijkoop, city councellor. He protested against appaling living conditions of the workers and their families and succeeded in planning new garden villages in the south of Rotterdam, made of prefab concrete. These districts are still famous and a joy to live in, having a very human scale and a peaceful atmosphere.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl

Museum 3, 1880

2007-09-30T00:18:00.000-07:00

First room of the exhibition.
Rotterdam as a quiet town around 1850 is shown on paintings. Until 1850 ‘progress’ as this is called was kept far from Rotterdam. But the advantages of the position of Rotterdam as a harbour and the technical innovations, like the railway could not be hindered any longer.

Caland planned and engineered the Waterway, a canal connecting Rotterdam to the see. This canal was designed to keep itself clean and deep, by allowing the tide to come on a length of 60 km, so for instance in Gouda, famous for its cheese the tidal effect is felt.

Then with the harbours the people flooded in from the south of Holland where there was a lot of unemployment. And, of course people made fortunes with the new harbours. So there was a mixture of poverty and richness, displayed in items in this first room. Work, the primary item of Rotterdam, is shown in several utensils of the harbour. Work, work, work.

G J de Jongh is shown. He planned the big inner harbours in the south of Rotterdam. Port Rijnhaven, Maashaven and the huge Waalhaven. Although many difficulties had to be solved the expansions of the harbour capacity really boosted Rotterdam to a global trading port.

But also the start of large shops is shown, the first covered shopping street of Rotterdam.

The atmosphere of this time is optimistic and orientated to the future.

In between the first and the second room there is a symbolic reconstruction of the famous shopping street "the Passage", dating from 1879. A street with a roof, like in Paris and London. In the virtual exhibition, there was a chance to enhance this first feast of light and color.

Several small embellishments are made in the virtual exhibition, without changing the character of the exhibition totally.

Special items are the sculpty shovels, indeed here reality is unsurpassed: the real thing of a real tool is so beautiful! So only here a real picture is shown of the exhibition...:-)

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl

Museum 2, sculpties

2007-09-30T00:16:00.000-07:00

Above picture: parasol openend.
This is a picture which gives 3D information. This info is hidden in the colors. Colors are described by three numbers, our space is too. So in a color map one can have all the information about a shape. All shapes? No. The shapes described here are only shapes which can be obtained by transforming a sphere. No holes are allowed, so a teacup, with a handle is impossible in this coding. But many of the things we use are like the sphere, for instance shovels, parasols, umbrella's, chairs. And even telephones.
The problem with the sculpties is always the interplay between the UV map, providing the 3D information and the texture, the image covering this shape. If the grid on this shape is not realy good, the picture will never fit.

Most of our objects are rather rectangular, for these things sculpties are not very useful, also sinc the resolution is low, the corners are blurred.
Only when the object is really out of the most regular geometric shapes, a sculpty is the solution. Like the telephones and umbrella's.

From the umbrella's some parasols were developed, which were particularly nice when combined with a script to change the textures, and using transparent textures.
It was also fun making the show cases with the plates, cups, saucers. These items are shown two times, the first in the pre-war Bijenkorf, and the second in a similar setting, only after the war.
Images of luxury goods, with a design deeply rooted in the decades where it comes from.

Two other special sculpties were the mannequins. These are also repeated, The first representing the mannequins wearing dresses for the dancing, the roaring twenties, jazzy dresses and the second group of mannequins on display are the italian puppets seen in the shops of the Lijnbaan, the pedestrian zone in the absolute centre of the city openened in 1952.

Museum 1, constructing

2007-09-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

The virtual museum was created in the summer of 2007.

First the exhibition floor only was created, the 'real' content of the museum. This floor was surrounded by big rusty chains, as can be seen at the image at the bottom of the page. Then it turned out not to be recognizable for visitors. They were also disappointed, because they expected a building. So a building was built around the exhibition floor. The facade was realistic, but the walls and the roof were made transparent. The walls were also 'phantom', that means an avatar can cross them without being stopped. This made access a lot easier. The roof is also transparent, but here an avatar can land, and see the layout of the whole exhibition.

The virtual exhibition in Second Life is a ‘copy’ of the real exhibition, using Seond Life techniques where this was necessary.

In September the exhibition could be visited. And indeed quite a lot of people visited the museum since then, around 20 different names are recorded each day.

There is a guided tour in several languages, English,
Dutch, French and German. To get the sounds and the text a HUD must be worn.

Choosen or touched items of the exhibition light up, grow a bit for a second and information is given, coming from a database.

In November a quiz was added with about 50 questions.

The museum is made in a relatively small space. Small for Second Life standards. So the exhibition rooms feel full of objects. Actually the scale is real, but the avatars in Second Life are bigger than life. The effect is something which is not found in Second Life: the space feels not empty.

The disadvantage is that one has to move carefully and adjust the camera right behind the head of the avatar visiting...

In the end, not only the museum was constructed, but also the neighbours are happy builders. Like in Rotterdam, once the first big building around, the Schielandhuis has become one of the few places which isn't at the height of a skyscraper. The neighbours like the museum, because it attracts avatars to this part of town, and some like it because of the nice view.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl

SL Blues

2007-08-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-21T00:57:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-16T23:37:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-15T12:26:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-13T01:13:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-07T01:36:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-07T01:03:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-08-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-03T01:41:00.001-07:00

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.

Bicycle

2007-08-01T23:02:00.000-07:00

5 was shopping again. It seems that shopping is a way of exploring the world. 5 was tempted to buy some stuff, and suddenly saw a stunt bike. Since this was a 5 L$ store, and 5 is rather fond of bicycles, this item was quickly purchased.
Where did 5 see the first bike in SL? Yes is was in the Amsterdam sim, it was chained to a fence on a bridge over a canal, yes that was good, but well, what a long long time ago!
5 has to mention the shop: 5 L$ shop it is called.

It goes with a few animations, and the wind speed is increased so your clothes are really flying backwards! Putting it on the ground is like putting clothes or hair on your land, if you have a 512 m2 lot, this bicycle is enough to fill it: 100 prims. All kinds of frame details are worked into the prims. In another store a bicycle was found that was even cheaper: 1 L$. Somewhere called The Dollar Palace
Animations included, like riding a bicycle. Bicycles are arranged with other vehicles, such as sports cars, airplanes….haha.

Then 5 decided to make a more systematic search. This always ends up in a blog!
Looking for bicycle, as expected, not too much is found. Well not much….but clearly not as abundant as clothes!
Showing a bit the limits of SL. No this is not yet the real world, where everything can be found in one city somewhere….

5 found a second bicycle, 18 prims, for as expected, 1 L$! It comes with a leg animation and a standing still pose.

Bicycles By Chase
bike,unicycle,reclined bicycle,exercise,fitness,racing,cyclist,touring,cycle,sport,sporting

This is a real bike mall…..with unicycles too!
Unicycles are 12 prims, 250 L$.
Normal bikes, 30 prims, at 600 L$.
Reclining bikes, yes, at 500 L$ at 25 prims.
Tandems, 30 prims, 750 L$.

Then the next shop is mainly a store for animations, sitting, diving, boxing, and jumping MEDHUE ANIMATIONS, displays bikes of 39 prims coming at 500 L$.
With 18 different riding animations. I suppose they really add special effect, but too expensive for me right now!

La Bicyclette, Bicycle shop and museum of Annie Londoderry
Victorian style bicycle, and other things, carefully built according to photo’s on display. The highrider is 15 prims, 175 L$
There are really neat Victorian clothes too here, but it is a terrible laggy place. But all SL is laggy at the moment....

BICYCLES...Jonx Bicycle store at Ohana, 299 L$
This is a modern but small store, very little imagination
Some race and mountain bikes (45 prims)

3D Digital Art Gallery
A place high in the sky. Racing bikes….yes, but two, for the rest art, well sort of art…..
Strange combination! Two bicycles and art…..
But the bicycle is expensive, one of 500, and one of 1500 L$, but this one apparently rezzes free racing bike's! Prims not indicated…

Ok two bikes richer, for 6 L$ in total, 5 left this search, 5 has to make a bike though, for some reasons explained later….let us go then you and I, march-ing on!

Why 5?

2007-07-29T23:19:00.000-07:00

Here 5 explains why 5 prefers 5!
1:
5 is mainly in contrast with 4, that is to say the rectangle, or the square. Nearly all the shapes you encounter in RL or in SL are rectangular or combinations of rectangles. This has a reason: these shapes fit easily together. 99% of beds, books, rooms, houses, buildings, windows, paintings.
Only some shapes, because of aerodynamics or movement through the water have very complicated elongated shapes, like airplanes, ships, propellers. But in the end the dominance of the rectangular becomes repetitive. Worse still, is the fact that this combining easily together is in sharp contrast with the human. Humans don’t fit easily together. But that is what humans try nonetheless all the time. To work together, to live together, to go on holiday together. And then they are always surprised that it either is very difficult, or impossible to stay together. Why are they surprised? Is this because they are used to seeing all kinds of things combine easily, the rectangulars?
2:
So 5 looked for others shapes, and in particular a shape which isn’t too repetitive, so triangles, and hexagons were also banned, being able to fill the plane without holes. Beehives of course are hexagonal. Above hexagons the shapes with 7 9 or 11 and more sides quickly become very circular, or too close to a circle to be discernable. The pentagon has a very recognizable shape, very different from the square. And look at combinations of pentagons! Always different, leaving holes open, and all different combinations quickly show there own “character”.
3:
So geometry, this very logical branch of mathematics displays something strange: it already has something irregular in it’s logic. That’s interesting! The pentagon as a shape is extremely regular, and combinations of this shape are irregular. Isn’t this a bit like the human being? Following laws but also breaching them. Repetitive and creative. The human being must be like that, it is the mark bench of survival.
4:
Flowers are 70% of the time having 5 petals. Why is that? Well, there is no real why of course, but if starting from a center (the stem) and having to cover the plane, a very convenient way seems to be to split up in 5. But you see nature being very explorative and not obeying one strict law: flowers are coming in 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, double 5, triple 5, and even more complicated shapes like the flowers of orchids. Since we are surrounded by flowers, nobody can say that the pentagon is not known in nature! (Not to mention our hands, the five senses etc.)
5:
If you take a pentagon, and fit another to it, rotating it to have a common side, and repeat this process around a common axis, you get a spiral of pentagons with a nice property: is displays a sort of false perspective on cubes! Of course the pentagon cannot be seen isolated from the square and the hexagon; the five sided shape is just part of the enormous amount of possibilities. After having seen these ‘false’ cubes coming out of pentagons, 5 discovered the so called Penrose tiling. Penrose, a scientist, also played around with pentagons and discovered the false pentagons being able to cover the plane in a not repetitive way. The football is a combination of pentagons and hexagons, by the way?
Funny is that space is normally quite “square”, (called a vector space, after going 10 meters left and 10 meters to the right, you end up on the same spot as after 10 meters right and 10 to the left), but in the thoughts of Einstein, space became, “more than square”, that is to say, he needed a space being able to depart from this squareness, or needing a fifth side to connect left-right with right-left. So although for us small human beings square space is sufficient, the universe needs “more”.

Conclusion: the pentagon is a very interesting shape, being able to demonstrate what we need as human beings: very individual combinations and a lot of open air (the holes between the pentagons when combined) between us, to be able to establish a healthy and creative relation with other human beings!
In the DevShed can be found 3 simple ways to construct a pentagon in SL, (there must be 5!)
There are much more connections to the 5, like the golden ratio, Fibonacci, but well, you can find that yourself!

Second SL

2007-07-29T05:44:00.000-07:00

Looking for an anchor 5 saw something very funny in strange place. Advertised as pirates ships and sea battle games Siege Guild offers all kinds of exploding barrels and bear traps.
(Interactive battles! Plunder and sink for real!!!)

How nice! But suddenly 5 came across a miniature landscape, in quite primitive shapes with a miniature medieval ship in a pool!
This is Second Life in Second Life! Playing the Lindens in the Linden world. 5 could think of mind boggling possibilities: you could ask Linden-Linden dollars to rent this ship, so LL$....
In this square of Second Life squared a battle would rage if it was allowed to gamble, or wager! Because the LL$ is at the moment not yet linked to the real $, it would be possible. Miniature slot machines would appear on this battleship which would provide a relief for the avatars accustomed to spending enormous amounts of money on the virtual slot machines which disappeared miraculously from SL.
Other features would fit in: you would be released from the bear trap sooner if you paid quickly a few LL$. The owner of Siege Guild would be rich fast, only his richness would consist of money which is only to be spend in his miniature kingdom. As soon as he linked his LL$ to the L$ which is linked to the $, the laws which apply to the state where the servers are situated would apply to the Second Life of the Linden would apply to the miniature kingdom of Siege Guild. So the microscopic slot machines would be banned, just like his big brothers and sisters. The miniature economy of Siege Guild would change dramatically from casino financed to selling microscopic miniature worlds inside the miniature world. In this SSSL’s for a moment or two, slot machines would be allowed and the economy would blast it’s way forwards.

So not only “Plunder and sink for real” in the virtual world but also layers of economies and whole geologies of laws applying down from one world on the other.
PS very nicely textured balloons in the neighbourhood!

Astronomy

2007-07-28T01:53:00.000-07:00

5 went for a small search on astronomy. Astronomy is about universe, planets, stars, galaxies, space, and the big bang, for instance. Without doubt much more.
Astronomy as a science is observations and theory, like physics, chemistry, biology etc. Theory always checked by observations, although there is a small knowledge loop involved: theory shaping what can be observed. The history of astronomy on the other hand, for the science unimportant, shows the magnificent struggle of human beings to become able to observe without being dictated what to see by others, kings, dictators, popes, religion, old writings,. The Babylonian priests observed eclipses, right to Ptolemy (around 150) observations were made freely with the naked eye, then the Almagest of Ptolemy somehow became a sacred book, and “real observations”, without prejudice, stopped. Until Galileo, who made himself a telescope using the principle of Huygens, observations were curved back to those of Ptolemy, heavily supported by the church and leaning on Aristotle.
So it took a while to put the sun in the centre of the planetary system. It took another while to place the sun in the outskirts of our galaxy and our galaxy somewhere in a big framework of a curved universe. Hubble of course “identified” the first galaxies as such in the 19th century, the universe was shaped by Einstein, his general theory of relativity the 1920ties , and the shape of our own galaxy after the second world war, with radio astronomy.
Well, what can 5 find back of this in Second Life?
First 5 visited

Jenika's Astronomy Park of Jenika Connolly
Which is a nice start. Jenika presents telescopes, which offer images of the wonders of the universe. The images are shown when using the "sit" for the telescope in a central circle. But don’t think buying a telescope in real life will show you these very intriguing pictures. With telescopes “for the amateur” one can observe very interesting things like the moon, the planets and groups of stars, maybe even the Andromeda nebula (the nearest galaxy), but never the images of the Hubble telescope. Jenika also makes eyes and paintings!
Then 5 found an extended exposition explaining about observations and astronomy in:
Physics and Astronomy

Very nice equipment is shown and a very joking picture of an astronomer not being able to observe through his small telescope because of pollution in the air….
This is a bit what you can find in public observatories with movies about the universe and domes where they project stars on. It is the presentation of science, an introduction to all kinds of aspects. A bit about instruments, o bit about observations, stars, galaxies. All very neat and objective. You can get a list here of other Science-Related places in Second Life, like eco-systems, marine and biology exhibitions etc.

The third place is called Prospero's Astronomy Gallery
This is a private sort of gallery, explaining a few things like the birth of stars and planetary systems.
Also a very nice transparent map of the stars in the sky is presented which can rotate around a central earth. (Oops, 'central' have we returned again to Ptolemy? Well, no, th earth is just the place from where we see the stars around us. So to observe and find these stars, this position is the best.)
So the main focus on the moment is on the tools, telescopes, and the explanations. Of course theories like modern relativity are a bit beyond the reach of the general public, and Second Life of course is the general public.
The Carl Sagan Pavilion in the sim of the Illusion Factory is more a tribute to the astronomer, Carl Sagan. He was involved in programs to discover radio messages from extraterrestrial life in the 60ties. He supported a steady state universe. Certainly somebody who tried to think along other lines than the main stream astronomer.

Visiting

2007-07-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

How do you find things in SL?
Objects, places to visit, people?
It is a 3D world, without a clear one dimensional classification on for instance length or on alphabet.
Words are not what is present.
Never the word was more different from it’s content then in SL.
Keywords are added to everything to attract.
So if something is “not free”- free is in the keywords. Smart? Well the search engine is a blessing, even with the system of false keywords (“no sex”….lol).
There is chance. You are directed, send on a way, follow a path, the oracle is always right, you will find something. So looking for a telephone 5 found nice Victorian instruments and a very amusing brewery. Looking for art, 5 landed in a museum of teacups, still under construction, but very intriguing.

Another link brought 5 to a french rural church, a chapelle, all painted within, which exists in reality

Finding things turns out to be very simple. One word or a simple question from a friend can release a complex query through SL. And looking at things from the perspective of this question the world looks different. Evolution, ecosystem, museum, art, science, laboratory. The search engine won’t bring you the answer or the sim you were looking for, but it will function as an oracle. Bringing better or even more than the answer.
People complain that all is the same in SL. Well only if you don’t have ideas yourself. All you can think of, indeed more, is there, but you have to be able to excavate it from the unordered 3D world. Not only not logically ordered, also in constant reordering.
So you have to be fast, because all is changing, or is being changed, at the same time. Being there in Second Life means changing. Some very nice sims can disappear in a second at the whim of the owner, having changed her mind.
So make snapshots, or and- even better, movies. Avatars change all the time, the sims are rearranged, the ideas trasformed. In SL even more than in the head of the most creative person, ideas are combined and fall apart. Ever shifting worlds.
You can help this process.
Walk around, make notes of interesting things, put these into your profile, you will meet people, look at their ideas, they look at yours, and you have soon other strange places to visit. Talking is more than chatting, you have to inspect the persons you meet, always new aspects to explore. There is more than you ever can imagine!

Visitors

2007-07-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

Is that you? People say to 5 in Second Life? No that is not me. Yes indeed, this is not me.
Who am I?
Let’s us look at the others, who are they?
5 meets all kinds of…..people.
Rabbits playing drums in the desert.
Soldiers parachuting from the sky in the developers hangout.
Pirates admiring an exhibition about Rotterdam.
A pirate, who speaks English, but his girlfriend pirate only speaks French. Or an Indian who speaks German, while his squaw uses the Babbler-translator? Is somebody a soldier because she is dressed like it? Is somebody a lady because he has just sparsely covered long legs?
What is this clothing anyway, and indeed, what is it covering? Does it matter?
Yesterday 5 was offered a ride on a horse, well the horse was an avatar. The person was a horse. During the ride, with the horse in command, 5 wondered - what (who) is riding who (what) to where?
Do you want to be a horse too? She asked. You can buy me.
Not yet! I’ll give it to you. What does she offer?
Herself, herself as a horse, or just the horse, or an idea?
What is a horse, by the way, in SL?

A Horse can poop, can stoop, you can change the saddle, gallop, even backwards. Luckily it doesn’t attract flies.
Flies are absent in SL. Too many prims for too small a shape. No midgets, no flies, no ticks, wonderful world. If you are an insect, ou are not allowed in. Strange ecosystem without insects!
But you can become a dragon, a cowboy, a cartoon hero, superman, a horse, maybe even slimy things.
No, slimy is too blobby, blobby is too difficult, slimy things are forbidden.

So is that you 5? You’ll never know. One thing is clear, there is a difference between the newbies and the older generations. They even spot it themselves immediately. Whatever you are, a soldier coming down in the sim, and changing immediately in a general, a small rabbit playing a noisy potpourri and having a lot of fun, not riding the horse but being a horse, even appearing in an abstract shape, running around as a very serious Indian, changing into an alien…..we have adapted to this world, whatever we are. We welcome the other shapes, we know we don’t know who we are, and this becomes the reason of our existence.
This not knowing who we are makes us open for everything and everyone. You just see what happens. Actually we are stripped of prejudice about who we are, about gender, age, education.
Maybe we are more nacked then ever, being without illusions about the other. More nacked and more armed too.
Maybe we speak a few languages, but we encounter dozens more. Maybe we have read a few books, but we talk with people who have read totally different libraries. We have a few ideas, but miraculously ideas appear everywhere all the time. All caused by “is that you” ‘s. A horse can program, a rabbit knows the Illias by heart, batman gives citations from the Mahabharata.
5 would like to be a flower. Must be possible, 5 prim petals would do the job.

CRUISE!

2007-07-22T03:12:00.000-07:00

SS Galaxy - Queen of the Sagittarian Sea

Wandering in search of a newspaper 5 landed in a cruise ship! Looking at the map with CTRL M, it turns out that this cruise ship consists of 3 whole sims!
Always new wonders to admire in SL!
The perspectives on the deck are really awesome, because of the stretch of this 3 sim construction.
In the lounge, and indeed everywhere else maps of the ship are displayed, which is good because you tend to loose your way, it’s all sooo big!
Swimming pool, sunbathing, ballroom, everything is there, also lots of paintings. Hmmm, well, always the problem what to ask for this kind of art, is it a real painting, which makes it beyond all pricing, or is it just a picture of a painting, uploaded for 10 L$, and duplicated at infinitum?
Of course, of course, a casino, I bet it isn’t the only one in SL! Slotmachines too, tens, twenty thirty, yes yes, we know the breeding of slotmachines is a matter of a millisecond. Lol!
On the deck a huge dome can be seen, being the Galaxy’s ballroom. Nice structure, consisting of rows and rows of prim windows! A bit a calculation to get these windows right…
Good, very nice, for the events on the Galaxy, the ship provides free evening wear. Blue is the main color. Indeed other free assets, such as a tuxedo can be bought, also for 0 L$!
In the middle of the casino there is a horse track, for the betting, will it function?
Shops of course are to be found here, prim hair for instance, since the ship is a mall too. Sometimes the shops are a bit difficult to enter, because the extend two decks, and you have to cross two sims to get to the stairs between the decks and getting back, or would there be a faster way?
This ship makes one wander: what kind of structures could be thought of, to stretch a few sims, and at the same time retain a kind of unity.
Landscape of course, architecture, palaces.
But isn’t this idea great, not to build a landscape first and then put your things on it, but right from the start construct a world in the form of a gigantic ship. Indeed a ship like this IS a world. Some of 5’s friends spend all his time on two sims, rarely leaving this space, 5 could imagine there are people living on the Galaxy all there SL life!
Maybe ships, these cruise ships, are the largest moving structures in RL. Of course architecture on land is always bigger, but it doesn’t move. Ok, in SL this ship won’t move either. In that sense it is comparable to the stone ship in the summer palace in Bejing. Only the size!

Meditation

2007-07-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

After a day of wrestling with sculpties Five happened to come across a hidden landmark in the inventory. It was there for a long time. Often Five wanders around, marking interesting ideas and places for later use. Somehow these half forgotten landmarks can always develop into an interesting tour, providing new clues and adventures.
This time it was a link to a place of meditation. This search for meditation was started by an accidental encounter with a small quiet place in the neighbourhood of a Japanese disco. Interesting, this mingling of noise and being silent. Typically Japanese if you ask Five.

So the first place to visit was:

Buddhist Shrine of Varosha on the Crazy Devil Sim
Strange name of a sim, with this Buddhist shrine, don’t you think?
Eastern paradoxes I suppose!
What was very nice here and also in most of the other meditation places was the carefully arranges sounds. The sounds are all around and provide a very relaxed atmosphere. This is reinforced by the gardens, the trees and the water. In at least two of these places you could wash your hands. Washing your hands in SL? Very nice? And it really makes you feel “clean”, or relaxed. Very interesting.
Five bought a meditation rug, which comes with a candle and a mantra sound for only 1 L$. Only the “meditation” on the rug, indicated in the llSetText-terrible way, says : mediation, which is actually not too bad……
There are a lot of garden in SL. What makes the difference in this case? Five is not the religious type, neither is Five a New Age addict. In these gardens something is found similar to the feelings created by Arab gardens, an essence of persistent self search, meditation of life, an idea of retreat from the world. Hm Five gets soft!

Aegif's Buddhist stupas in Manitoba 2560 Tibetan style stupas
Is more Tibetan as the name says, it is also situated in the middle of buildings , homes and offices, is this a pity? Not at all, if you know how the temples in the East are nearly always in the middle of busy city area’s. Just to best place to be able to meditate!
Still smaller was

Meditation place
But with a very nice view on a bay! This place even has sponsors who finance it! Great!
Well, if you type in “meditation” or “Buddha”, in the search engine of Second Life, you get quite a list of places to visit. Of course not all are of the highest quality, and the meditation sit is quite often exactly the same animation. Which is a bit boring after visiting a few places. But ok, are you supposed to make a monastery tour? (Please, is there a monk around wanting to make a few variations of this one animation?)
Five wondered about these places. It is quiet, it is a heaven a peace, certainly after wrestling with sculpties, Linden Script, making complicated things, shopping, writing about clothes….
Why are these places never mentioned, when journalists write about Second Life. Why always the most negative things? But maybe it has to be like this. Let these places be hidden. The hidden is eternal, just as eternity is hidden.

Sculpty mania 2

2007-07-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

In need of some fine sculpties Five continued practicing BLENDER. Somehow everything went wrong. The basics have become familiar after quite a bit of exercise. Then by some reasons explained later the shapes were always coming out wrong. Well every time this painful proces of slowing down progress happens something can be learned.
:-( ?oh no -> :-)
This is true for real and virtual life. It is the same fun every time.
You want to finish a job, something goes wrong and won't be mastered fast. First you get mad, calling yourself names, (who else is to blame), then you start realizing that the failure points at something interesting, slowly the energy is rebuilding and the mind gets intrigued.
This process of wanting to finish something quickly, getting frustrated, wanting to throw everything away, starting to understand that the real thing doesn’t want to reveal itself too easy, getting interested again, and understanding some important details of the process, is repeating itself again and again. Lots of things to learn in Second Life, even more than in real life, if you ask Five.
What was going on?
After a day of making bodies, torsos really, and the textures on them, images of dresses, old dresses from the 1920ties, the results were … well not quite good, but ok, for the moment…..
The next day Five tried a teapot. The teapot could be made with ROKURO, being a simple shape of rotation. (The handle being another prim of course.) But to practice Five choose BLENDER. Everything went fine, melding spheres together, making the UV mapping, but then uploading the image brought disaster. The image was a total mess and inside out. What was happening? Too much to be true.
First of all, the UV image was rotated by 90 degrees, because the shape was kind of lying on its side. BLENDER doen't mind, but Second Life does!!!
When Five realized this, Five turned the image in Photoshop. But then the shape still was inside out! Ok it had to be mirrored over in the vertical axis, and then the UV image was producing the right sculpty.
Well, Five had to understand more of the sculpties and maybe a previewer would be nice? Because Five spent quite a lot of money on uploading the wrong UV images…..
So another quest on the web brought these interesting links:
First of all, how does it function, this UV mapping: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_Technical_Explanation
And then some interesting software:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims:_Resident-made_Tools
Five tried:
Cel_Sculptpreview
TOKOROTEN(extruder)Sculpted Prim Maker, of Yuzuru Jewell
(The same person who made ROKURO)
(easy for cut-out shapes, like stamps)
And then Math Sculptor 1.0, for a few special shapes. You are invited to write your own addinns, but well.......
These progs are all helping, but also displaying the problems of sculpties: the definition of the shapes is poor. Some exceptions are the very sharp definitions of geometric shapes, which seem to be possible, but Five hasn’t yet found out how (pentagons, dodecahedrons etc).
Getting on with the teapot, very annoyed, Five used the smooth tool in the sculpt mode of BLENDER on the teapot. Very nice this sculpt mode by the way, unbelievably easy and great fun! And Five got the shape of an arm within seconds, a bit of refinement and finished! (The thumb becoming an extra prim.) Strange! Only this is the right arm, the left has to be made all over again, or is there a function in BLENDER to mirror a 3D shape in its “other” mirror shape, a kind of 4D transformation…..LOL?

The wrong images of the arms, with the resulting sculpties can be found in the DevShed, a developers hang-out in Second Life.

Gothic!

2007-07-13T07:32:00.000-07:00

Five went in search for gothic clothes.
What is gothic, well……a rich mix of punk, fairy tails, fantasy, a bit of revolution, not too nice, certainly not civilized, but with lots of “style”. It looks like Victorian sometimes.
Gothic is total fashion comprising hair, make-up, hat, shoulders, large coats, big boots.
Colours, mostly black and a bit of red, or very bright.
Clothes are individual, you are supposed to work on the clothes yourself to make them unique.
You have to have courage the wear them!
Most classifieds or advertisements of shops selling clothes include gothic in their keywords, but most of them don’t have a really gothic line of garments.

The real gothic shops have a tendency to create a gothic atmosphere around them. That is to say a desolate landscape, garbage, fences, ghetto like buildings. It becomes an interesting mix of things to buy and surprise, mystery. This mix is very understandable, gothic is a state of mind, more than just nice clothing. These places are best visited by night!

Well this is the interesting thing for Five! Five likes this kind of themes, see former blogs! And the kind of against the fashionable, "nice" fashion side of gothic is also not far from Five's taste!

So let us go then you and I!
Five dived into the search engine, and a few of the best gothic fashion places are described, always including the surroundings of course!

Schlachthaus auf apfelland Ghetto
Very nice theme sim. Built around an abbatoire (in german Schlachthaus)
Garbage dump, with opening and closing doors.
The most original camping chairs ever seen: urinals in the toilets for man. Discrimination: toilest for women pay only half the amount of the urinals of man!

Goth1c0 - the big shop: goth,punk and cyberpunk clothes & hairs
This shop is situated in small theme region. Between two shops, there is snow and garbage containers, in which you can chill! Snow is blocking doors, you have to search your way in.
Really gothic style clothing, as far as Five understands gothic: lots of rich blacks, with here and there reds. Nice details, and really lots of top hats.
Hm, Five has never seen these clothes in freebies, for these: you have to pay!

~ silent sparrow ~ come explore! (gothic : victorian : eclectic)
The clothes are “nice” version of gothic if compared with the Icewater shop. Very rich details. Hm as with the last shop, you have to save a bit of money to get these clothes, but they are probably worth it. The shop is situated in a big Victorian mansion (greenery included) and there is a small village in Victorian style in the neighbourhood.
The cellars are really creepy, embalming sets? Gas masks? You can even enter the sewers again! You will end up in other Victorian houses!

Ok you cannot write about clothes and not buying, so Five bought The checkmate Loli boy, with darkdelion make-up. Broke again!

Useful shortcuts

2007-07-13T02:30:00.000-07:00

Five March was falling asleep too often, while working on a job.
This is the problem of AFK, the being away from the K-C-omputer.
The person onscreen, without intervention of the other person behind the screen, becomes a sort of zombie, which is rather painful to see.

:-(

Five had to find the shortcut for not becoming a zombie!
So to use another shortcut:
LOL…laughing out loud.

In the beginning of second life Five March found the shortcut to put off the falling asleep without any trouble. But new updates always change the settings of the menu of Second Life somehow. How was it done?
It was to be found somewhere in the Server and Client menu, normally hidden from view…

How to add these menu-items? Search engines didn't return too much information.
As with the EMOTER, it was apparently too easy to write about!
At last in a French site this first shortcut was found: CTRL ALT SHIFT D (what a combination)
Then two items are added in the menu, then:
Client
Character
Character Test
Then:
AFK / Go away when idle, must be unchecked, to avoid the zombie-mode.
(Wasn’t this simple?)

Trying to find the combination Five tried also CTRL 8 and CTRL 0, these combination change the perspective of the camera...it is shown in the menu under VIEW, but somehow Five never used these possibilities. CTRL 9 restores the most normal setting of the perspective.
For images the extreme wide-angle perspective is rather funny, and sometimes even useful, although the rendering becomes extremely slow.
The wheel on the mouse serves also as “zoom”, which is very useful in small spaces.

What a lot of people don’t know is the control of the light: CTRL SHIFT Y for: midday, for instance, other possibilities without shortcuts are situated at under the Menu WORLD, Force Sun, and then a list: Midday, midnight, and daybreak….

Very often Five, as a blog reporter, takes pictures, snapshots, CTRL ~ is the shortcut for this. These pictures appear in .bmp format which eats rather a lot of memory space, to Five uses a free programm: Easy Thumbnails to put the format in JPG.

Very good in building is the possibility to make copies from a selected object by selecting it and then dragging it away while pressing the SHIFT button, it stays on the same axes as you are dragging it!

Ok
LOL
Have Fun!

Grinning (about myself)

2007-07-08T22:40:00.001-07:00

Five March was shopping with a friend, looking as always for bargains. Exploring a Japanese sim Five bought a jacket for nearly nothing. The idea of this jacket was fine, but ok: it was just a first try, because the sides didn’t fit together on the body.
Five looked around, steering the camera along all sorts of things.
Five is always looking for things and suddenly something dearly needed was presented. A grin, a smile!
The faces in Second Life are very very dull. Faces normally don’t show anything. But making a snapshot, you can see that for a moment, the avatar says “cheese”. So it should be possible to change the expression of the face.
So this HUD facilitating facial expressions came as a surprise.
In fact all kinds of facial expressions nicely assembled in a HUD.
And the price was a bargain: all emotions for 15 L$!
It is very funny to zoom in with the camera and look at the different expressions. This emoter, “Smile” as these HUD’s are called, was made by: yaman Oh.
Five searched for other emoters. There is one in the “swiss-knife” HUD of
MystiTools.
This HUD is incredibly multifunctional. All kinds of things, normally done in single HUD’s are here put together. And this one has a free version! The expressions are much the same as the “Smile” HUD.
Searching further Five came across another emoter from EB Creations, costing 1 L$.
This EB creations emoter reacts to chat commands, and has no visible HUD on the screen.
After using these emoters and comparing, Five really wanted to know how to make them.
Nothing much can be found about them. Strange!
First of all you see that all the facial expressions are the same, really. So it seems to be just a command, coming from Second Life presets.
Ok that reflection gave the clue: in fact showing facial expressions is one of the easiest things to do really. The expressions are standard animations in Second life.
So all you have to do is to “wear” a scripted object. In the object ask a permission to animate your avatar, and play the animation from the list, found for instance here:
http://slhomepage.com/lsl/animation.htm
so:
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llRequestPermissions(llDetectedKey(0), PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION);
llStartAnimation("express_open_mouth");
}
already works….
Ok, Five learned another lesson: if something seemed to be undocumented, or is apparently hided in mystery, nobody talking much about it, oh well, then maybe it is even too easy to mention it! Grin!

Sculpty - mania

2007-06-30T09:09:00.000-07:00

After a couple of days, and the very tedious process of learning all shortcuts in Blender, the UV mappings started working. You have to read the few pages about making sculpties with Blender with extreme care. Simply overlooking one small button (Five forgot to put the texture on ADD, instead of MIX) makes your sculpty picture unusable.
Also you have to learn to work with the special but beautiful tool in Blender called ….very appropriate “Sculpt Mode”. In this mode, you can work on a model as if it is clay, adding and deleting material. Smoothing it again makes the shape beautifully organic. Then you have to get used to the way Blender throws this grids on the UV mapping which is without doubt very logical, but can be a bit strange too.

After saving the image, it is often inside out, and you have to deal with a negative texture color. Lately the UV image was saved at an angle of 90 degrees, so Five had to turn it back in Photoshop. You have to learn looking at the UV maps produced by Blender and know, if it is about right.

But well who cares, if the results are really fun!
First of all, Five March made the human shape, the torso. Then Five tried to pull out the arms as far as possible (discovering the in between tool for the grid steered by the mouse wheel – oh boy!), but the long arms were only partially represented in the shape of the torso inworld. Maybe the 3D centre can be arranged in a better way?
Then a mouse shape was sculpted, you can sculpt in a symmetrical way, so both sides are done at once, for two sided animals and humans a quick way to get a basic shape.
And how about these shapes, what a difference now with the ingenious but primitive shapes of many, many prims….what will all be possible? Indeed a lot! Not possible are shapes with holes, but then simple use two sculpties…
Five’s first try-outs look stupid now…..
All these try-outs can be found in the DevShed, on Virgin Island2.
The most beautiful sculpty, indeed it has got the first prize in the sculpty contest of a few months ago is of course the horse of Nomasha Syaka.
Below an image, which shows the sculpty-textures on the shapes. This is of course not necessary.
This horse even can be seen galloping around, but the sculpties take a long time to render so, sometimes balloons are seen instead of legs…..

Five guesses that the possibilities of the sculpties will really change the whole look of SL, an end of an era!

Sleeping around!

2007-06-30T00:52:00.000-07:00

Second Life is a strange world! When you sleep, you cannot be there. When sleeping would be allowed, nothing would be possible anymore! The sims would be filled with avatars and their prim expensive clothing, all the processing power being consumed before even a really awake avatar could enter the sim and start moving around.

But beds and other places to sleep are found everywhere. Empty of course! Some are very inspiring.
A few examples. The first really appreciated bed Five found was in the Waste Land sim. (See blog: Five in "the Wastelands" )

Far down under the surface of this sim an abandoned railway tube was constructed. A railway carriage was put in and in this carriage a luxurious bed was placed behind transparent curtains. The contrast between the theme of this world and the sweet presentation of the bed was truly pleasing. The fact that this bed was really hidden contributed to the feeling of discovering something, which is always nice.

Then we continue with something Five thinks is far too simple for SL: the copying of the real world in Second Life. That is the rebuilding of a house on a piece of land, complete with kitchen, coaches fireplace and of course….the bedroom and the bed. The animations for the bedroom are sometimes directly visible, sometimes not even that. This urge to copy the real world, is unknown to Five, but well, who cares?
Then in the above mentioned desert a nice opportunity for Five to construct a sleeping place presented itself. An old railway carriage, dating from the time of the Wild West, lying around near an abandoned railway line, half tumbled on its side immediately fitted Five’s ideas for a nice unexpected hide-out. A camp bed was constructed, a candle for the night and some half withered images of Russian icons were fixed to the wall.

This way of a temporary refuge, a shelter, or even a sanctuary is a very nice metaphor for Second Life as a whole. Sl being a hide-out for real-life. A sanctuary, a place to experiment.
Later on this bolthole in the desert was abandoned and the bed was rebuilt in a cellar cave on Five’s land. Five left the champagne bottle on the bed, and put a flower from the flowershop ‘Five Daisies’ near the bed. The carriage was immediately occupied by another dweller of the desert. He put in hay, a pleasant warm colorful blanket, a nice book, very nice, Five is trying this out. Above an abandoned saloon Five found Nugget Kidd sleeping right on the floor and decided to join him on the floor, joined in dreaming……...

The text of the icon, in the first image is Da Ljoebietje drug druga, russian, means something like: let us love each other, super idea!

Space!

2007-06-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

Five March about space perceptions comparing real space with the simulated space of Second Life.
When we are young we are told that our 3D space can be represented by drawing a nice renaissance perspective. Before this knowledge children tend to draw like old paintings of the Middle Ages or before, thinking in a sort of not logically ordered space. That this ‘not rational’ space is often more effectively telling its story is often forgotten….
No just as a calculation, space representation should be “right”.
This so-called Renaissance perspective is founded in a beautiful section of Mathematics called projective geometry. This is how we experience space and we tend to think that this method of representing space is the only possibility or the only way. This construction of lines is indeed space!
Small mistake!
When you study experience of space you quickly notice that there is more.
Our brain uses much more kinds of sensorial data from which information about space is gathered, putting all these data together in something which is far from logical, but very effective.
First of all, painters not only followed perspective but also introduced colors changes to indicate space, for instance changing to bluish or grayish in the distance, and bright colors are always used for objects near to us. Objects at a distance are of course also blurred more than objects nearby. These tricks of the trade doe not belong to “renaissance perspective”!
And then there is shadow. Nobody has ever included this in his theory of space perceptions!
(Except for probably Goethe.) It is never fundamentally included in the 3D programs. But shadow is so important for the positioning of a shape in space, in relation to surrounding objects. A table is only feebly standing in space without a subtle shadow on the floor.
All because we don’t have absolute information about the scaling of objects.
Even more important and nearly never realized in software are the reflections and the reflected light of objects being close to each other in space. Faces of people nearly always show signs of reflected light from things surrounding them.
Next:
Even sound and echo is used by the brain to add to our sensorial experience of space. That’s why sound is so important in the movies, defining space and at the same time conveying information about the emotional character and significance of a shot.
In Second Life we have a clear-cut almost too sharp perspective space. Reflected light is absent, being of course too complicated to be calculated. Sound is used, although on a simple level. Nice is the sound while flying, related to the speed.
Sound of steps, while walking and even a Doppler effect is sometimes heard. The typing on the keyboard, varying in volume depending on the distance of the ‘talk’ comes in handy from time to time, to find out if somebody is talking to us.
At the same time these effects can be so like caricatures that the user cannot stop making funny remarks about them….
On Virgin Island some interested examples of the use of shadow can be seen: not only the shadow on the ground under a tree, a parasol or a ‘shade’, but also the shadow as a transparent solid shape can be found for instance under a roof of a shed on the middle mountain.
The shade here is not only a blurred picture on the floor, but even a solid black rectangular block, put on a certain degree of transparency.
This solid shape, clear-cut as it is, adapts itself beautifully to the character of Second Life and the special theme of the sim, being dedicated to the Wild West desert. Added to this is “solid” light shining through windows of a deserted saloon.
Another phenomenon of space found in this desert is the abandoned railway track, giving a vanishing point in the distance and adding much to the experience of space in the sim.
Somehow the space of the plane is only really perceived when the eye is guided by this mathematically ordered and disappearing abandoned rail track. The last phenomenon is the component of the vanishing perspective we almost never experience: height and depth, making a hole in the sim is impossible, what is possible is making a very sharp cliff, with textures almost tearing apart….
And where do you think all these pictures are taken? In the desert of Virgin Island, of course, and the expert of shadows is Amiryu Hosoi!

Don’t pay too much!

2007-06-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

Just after starting with Second Life, Five March discovered the ways to make money, like everyone else. Dancing and camping, brings in the first Linden dollars. The aim of camping is to attract avatars to special places. When searching on the map people tend to choose places where some people are around. So to attract people is to have people around. This is the aim of paying avatars to camp and dance. It results in a row of zombies in your place, because people are working on other things while letting their avatars earn Linden dollars.

The first thing Five bought was prim hair, for 1 L$! Later on Five found out that nearly all you need (on a material level) can be found in Second Life for free. The free things are called the freebies, really all can be discovered for no money at all: dresses, houses, animations, everything. Only for very special things you have to pay. Good shoes are not very often found free.
Nowadays, with a premium membership Five gets a weekly allowance and dancing and sitting on other premises is no longer necessary.

Five even bought expensive shoes, as you can read in another blog.
But every now and then Five goes shopping. Five is always looking for smaller shops, which appear to be try-outs, or starting designers. Here things can be found which are not common.

‘Shiny things’ is the name of a nicely built shop where Five found some jewellery, not too expensive, for instance a necklace for 35 L$. The necklace was really an exception, being worn on a very thin chain, not seen anywhere. With the prims it is impossible to construct a necklace like that. How is this made?
On another night Five was on the hunt again, and found a shop where everything costs only 1 L$.

- enkythings - L$1 SHOP is the name of this shop.
It was a surprise to find out that this same necklace costs only 1 L$ here! Other frivolous items are sold for 1 or even 0 L$! Roller skates, with a pleasant skating animation included and prime hair can be found here. Ok this prim hair is a bit stupid after a day or two, but who cares for 1 L$! Two times, you even get the 1 bug back, from a sploder!

But the price difference and the very thin shape of the necklace really still remain a mystery. Where does this necklace come from? How is it made, and what adventures has it seen? How did it lend in the hands of a 1 L$ shop?
This shop is high in the air. Down on the ground can be found a TP to a sky diving platform. Diving down, will be right through the shop, and boing on the ground: humorous signs are telling you to be carefull: falling newbies! LOL!

Help!

2007-06-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

Stack Heap error!

Five March’s scripts were attacked by this Stack Heap error several times. Documentation is available but not readily found. But while searching the internet Five found the game ‘Fishing’, which was well worth the detour. At last documentation about this error can be found simply on the documentary site about Linden script. ( http://slhomepage.com/lsl/StackHeapCollision.htm )

Each (Linden or LSL-) script has 16 K of memory available, which is eaten on two sides: the stack, and the heap. When these two monsters meet, no memory is left and an error is produced. After the error the script is not running any more, it is halted. The problem is that it is not verifiable if a script is running or not, from the script itself.

Of course 16K is really not much, when compared to the memory of computers nowadays. But even compared to the old Commodore 64, with 64K of memory, this isn’t much. And furthermore the memory is eaten much faster than in the Commodore 64K.
One help is available, but only with a running script: llGetFreeMemory(). This function can communicate the free memory, the least free memory ever, after compiling the script.

For testing this function should be used to check how much memory is used.
So every script of Five, in danger of having no memory, must be tested with this function.
With simple scripts, one can see how much memory is occupied by example a string of a list.

Try it out, adding a global string, or list.
Apparently these strings and lists are really devouring the available space. When running out of memory, the solution is to split the functionality of the script in two (or more parts). One script sending a message to the second script, which also has 16K of memory at its disposition.
In case of the script communicating with an external dBase, the memory is further occupied.
Some testing shows this:
The default script, with llSay(0,(string)llGetFreeMemory()); in the touch_start: 16048 free,

With one global string only declared: 16030
testString = "hello avatar"; 15994
ten times this string: 15638
list, even only declared: 15617
myList = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]; mem = 15336
myList = [testString,testString,testString,testString,testString]; 14705
double the content of this list this list: 13230
adding a local list copying the global one: 12444

So playing around with a list and a string can eat 25% of the memory of a script.
On the other hand, the recording Microphone, which can be found in the DevShed, leaves about 13000 KB free, while doing HTTP request and returning 15 chatlines…..

When a script produces an error, it stops. No function is around to test if a script has stopped, so how to know this?
The solution is inserting a second script. The second script asks the first one: are you still awake? And when no answer is returned by the first script, the second script sends an email (or IM) to the owner: Help my brother has died!
So for instance in script one, the answer is seen to be sent, in the second, it is received...or not!!!

Champagne!

2007-06-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

Five March needed a bottle of champagne to celebrate the first big project in Second Life. But unfortunately the search engine was down at that moment. So Five gathered some drinks from the Moulin Rouge of the sim of Paris 1900. Some drinks have texts included and when finished won’t show up again!
At the same time Five researched about the so called sculpted prims, or sculpties.
Documentation is available, and the software is free.
Here pages are given where to find software and documentation.

http://iramblesorry.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love_28.html

http://slnatalia.blogspot.com/2007/06/sculpted-prims-sculpties-second-life.html

http://amandalevitsky.googlepages.com/sculptedprims

ROKURO.exe is a very easy prog, giving a possibility of producing an axial symmetric shape, like a bottle. So the first bottle was made, just putting an image of a champagne bottle found on the web behind the points of the drawing section of this prog, and putting the points on the outline of the bottle. But then the real difficulty presented itself. The shape was appearing in the world of Second Life all right, but how to put the image on the bottle, the green color, the label, what kind of image is needed?
Putting a checkerboard pattern on the sculpty showed the way the texture is folded around the bottle. From seeing the pattern on the surface of the bottle Five could deduce what is needed and this was not really simple. The bottle had to be flattened out, like a cylinder being cut open along the length. But then there is the problem of the neck of the bottle, this upper part of the bottle, cut open should occupy the same width as the belly of the bottle. This means transforming the shape of the bottle rather radically. But at last the texture was ready and could be projected on the bottle shape. (Well after three tries it was ready….)
With the free program Blender more complicated shapes can be constructed, but this whole prog is much more complicated. Even following detailed descriptions of the way to construct a UV map of the 3D shape, it took several hours before Five could make the right UV image, comparable with the ROKURO prog.
Even long descriptions like the one of Amanda levitsky leave a lot to be guessed. On the other hand, Five discovered that Blender is a absolutely mind boggling program and that it has a lot of very beautiful and breathtaking possibilities.
Far more than only producing sculpties.
Blender can make for instance chairs. So complicated shapes of one prim are possible. Of course, even not thinking of the texture on this shape, you need to program the sit position and rotation!
This was not without trial and error either:

On the one hand sculpties are an enrichment of the possibilities of the prims in Second Life, on the other hand the possibilities are restricted. But for bottles, bananas, the sculpties are fine.
Sculpties and scripting examples of Five March can be found in the DevShed, a developers Hang Out.

Five goes fishing

2007-06-11T23:34:00.000-07:00

How you can start with a head-ache and gradually become amused and end up with a date in Second Life!
Do you like fishing in RL, even if you don't, read this!

Mending a small problem with data transfer, the famous ‘Stack-Heap Collision’, Five was coming across a fishing game in Second Life.
http://fish.neorealms.com/index.php
Five decided to take a look there, and found a very funny game, fishing as expected. A few people were there, which was good, because all the equipment on show was rather daunting.
People around makes it easy to ask some basic things, and also encourages to start fishing. Talking is a big part of fishing!
Five bought a simple beginners rod, for 16 L$ and started fishing, the animations of casting are really good. You have to load bait to your rod and the game is on!
The scenery is well done, you start at a pier, nice in the sun and can sit or stand. Watch out for falling in the water! But well, Five did take a step too far and landed on the seafloor. This was quite an experience, because a lot of monsters are wandering down there. So Five could advise you to fall overboard form time to time…..
The catches are coming in regularly and your inventory fills with all kinds of frogs, lobsters, crabs, sun stars, marills, turtles…all amazing creatures! You can rezz them on the floor or in the air to take a good look on them…..and take a picture. Nothing to get a good meal form at the moment!
Other people are showing their catches, and really bragging about them!
Of course buying more expensive rods gives you the chance of winning bigger fish and monsters. You get points and enter a competition, all shown at the website. Also shown on the site are tournaments, where you can win real money. Levels are indicated from beginner to experienced; Five is still on amateur level of course, being always busy in the desert at Virgin Island.
It takes a bit of time, while you are fishing, to read all the possibilities of the game, there are quest collectors, and of course the big finds for the more expensive rods.
Oops, isn't there a smell in my inventory?
The site indicates other spots in Second Life where you can fish, and you rod stays ‘alive’ as long as you have bait.

People are not only fishing for seafood, but apparently also fishing for…..dates…..well this catch went ‘of the rod’, because……you know….. Nugget Kidd…….

Victim of Love

2007-06-06T02:29:00.000-07:00

Being in the desert sim of Virgin Island, talking in the “Western Style” office with Hanz Eun and Amiryu Hosoi, Five heard somebody shooting outside. Five didn’t dive behind the counter but instead walked immediately to the spot where the shooting came from.

Normally the desert is peaceful and shooters are quickly banned. The desert is for the Gold Game, for Indians and cowboys on horseback. Coming outside, Five saw something very funny.

The person taking an aim at us was really an alien. Five approached him, although he was firing madly. Five looked at him and particularly liked his knees, saying so. He was a bit distracted, had probably expected a very nasty treatment, because of shooting at us, and suddenly he was getting compliments about his knees! And really his knees were worth attention as you can see.

Five kept on talking to him, he was surrounded by now. Five kept on telling him how beautiful his details were, overwhelming him with compliments and every so often again and again giving him other remarks about his knees. It was a kind of shooting back for which he had no defense. He was trying out new weapons, but nothing was helping him to get rid of Five who was constantly following him and making pictures for this blog. So he was changing into a very small avatar. He was shrinking totally and becoming sphere shaped.

Five said, hey guys, now this fellow is egging, he is making small children of his knees, which he didn’t liked at all, so he began to change again, this time a fox was produced, a very strange one, which was so white that it didn’t show much details. A cube was seen in the background so he was playing around with invisibility too, hiding parts of his body.

The transforming went on and on, all changes in appearance were accompanied by cheers from the crowd. But apparently the person wasn’t enjoying the show himself. He was put on the wrong knee by this sudden and unexpected ‘love’ of Five for his special design. Forgetting his weaponry his tried to run, but we were flying at his tail, which was rather long, at last he couldn’t stand all the niceties bestowed upon him and disappeared in a poof………. Another victim of love!

Clo@Yu-ki

2007-06-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

Five happened to come across a small shop, which was particularly nice.

Above the shop is a sketch, in a childlike style. You can make out a name if you look at the right way and puzzle a bit (de-Chloe or de-clue)….

...makes....."Clothes for You"

Chloe Yue, seen in the drawing, apparently Chinese, making clothes "4 a yonug GRIL", for a young girl. The profile says Chloe Yue, which fits well with the puzzle. And in the text of the profile is written: 香港人,居於荷蘭, which I don’t understand at all…..

The shop itself is very simple, just a few transparent panels of bluish glass. You really have to look into it a bit to see the creative poetry of the clothes. Just what Fives likes to do….

The clothes on sale are obviously made by hand, not in a mechanical way, and the prices are very low, another sign that the person designing the clothes is not having a commercial goal, but is still having a lot of fun inventing and making them. Going back there from time to time you may see some items added, but not very often.

Five particularly liked the backpack for, well for only 10 L$. The design is very cute: flowers and cherries, but if you look closer, the flowers are interspersed with….skulls. This makes the thing more than just something nice. Also the hang-blouse is a thing Five has never seen. Your sweater, as worn on a day which suddenly became hotter than you thought, in a knot around your waist. Five wears it very often.

The flex mini-skirts are really very mini, and as with all Chloe‘s designs, having a sharp edge. Discover this on your own!
The name “sjallie” for another item, a free gift, gives away a strange clue, and looking further in the profile you discover that Chloe Yue doesn’t only speak Chinese, but also dutch!
The only negligible disadvantage of the “sjallie” as well as the “hang-blouse” are that they cannot be resized, which almost forces you to become a small person when wearing these items…..but the items are well worth it.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boobero/154/172/23

World: a database!?

2007-06-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

A database is a collection of information, put in a predefined form, so that it can be searched.
An address book is an example. You can connect numbers with words or phrases, even images. Searches can be done on numbers or bits of texts, names, dates. Different databases can be connected with each other. This gives a network of references and information. References: codes that refer to something else. An address is referring to a real street. A telephone number is giving the possibility to speak to a real person.
In Second Life all the forms and programmed movements are coming from the database, only the movements and initiatives and ideas of the avatars are coming from the real world. Five is really moving in a database. Five sees a house? Not really: the combination of objects or primitives forming the house are nothing more numbers in a database. Numbers to positions, numbers to images which cover the shapes. Shapes which are predefined codes form the rendering process. Codes which guide the way the screen is displaying its information.
The inventory, this beautiful invention can be filled practically at infinity. Is Five carrying everything around? Now of course not, Five is only carrying the references to other codes in the database.
So this world is a database. That gives Five something to think about. Is the real world also a database? Think about it: a database carries references, but the real world is what it is: itself, so: real. What Five thinks, ideas, dreams, worries, these “things” are references to possibilities in the real world. Indeed the brain of Five is working with references. Memories are not real, memories are references to events in the real world. Ideas are codes, for instance to put something together in the real world. Language itself, the words, are referential. Philosophy and poetry, or just talking about ideas, take these ideas as content, treating them as if ideas were comparable to real things. Many mistakes are just around the corner doing this!
So our brain is a database, well sort of, but not exactly. Databases are rigid things, the brain is flexible. Databases never forget, the brain does a complicated process of weighing, partly compacting, rearranging, and destroying our experience. Sometimes forgetting is a blessing!
But in principle the database and the brain are more comparable than the brain and reality.
So Second Life as a database, which it is, is more comparable to our brain, then the real world. In Second Life we are really more looking at our own brain, its structure, its functioning then the real world. But thinking about this hypothesis, it seems plainly wrong. We are looking at a stylized version of the world. We seem to go in circles. From database to brain to database to Second Life to brain to reality…..
But in fact this is also a great facility of the brain: the constant re-imaging of data, presenting and representing the idea of the world, transforming every image, over and over again. The brain must do so. It is this power which makes a difference. The brain is certainly not comparable to the rigid database. The reality is not to be captured in a single idea. Brain and reality are shaping each other. Brain being driven to reinforce itself by changing as fast as reality is changing. Brains were divided over humans. Brains could function independently, united back by language. This uniting of scattered brain is slowly gaining momentum. In Second Life the different brains are acting in a single structure given by a database. Trying to play in a common rhythm, and forming a world. Will the brain plunge into this world, rather than continue the fight with reality? Or will brain become bored with the limitations and let it rot like television nowadays?

Nugget has a horse too!

2007-06-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

Rumors were spread that Nugget Kidd dreamt of a horse, the whole desert in Virgin Island was waiting for this horse, only Nugget Kidd was so busy with the new goldgame, he didn't even had time to dance in the disco. Nugget Kidd is a man of rocks and the sand, tornado's, height and sun. The sim Virgin Island is especially fit for riding a horse and all the time you see people enjoying themselves.
So Five was surprised when there was mail. Five received this mail from Nugget Kidd:

Hello Five, you never guess what happened to me! Armoe Lipo passed by in the testing bunker for the goldgame, and was in a very rich mood, he gave me money to buy a horse! Can you imagine? But between the moment of someone giving me the money and the actual buying can pass a lot of time. Although I am an experienced cowboy, buying a horse is very complicated, especially these virtual ones. So I asked Paula34 Benelli for advice. She was prepared to help me out, show her horses, and find the best one for me. We teleported ourselves to the ranch of MacLean. We didn’t even go there one horseback, a trip which would have cost us only a few weeks….
Ok arrived there it wasn't to easy at all. Paula34 demonstrated the menu. Did you know you have to wear a horse? No surely not, you didn't know it! Then riding the horse, it reacts to left mouse click and shows his menu. You can remove the saddle and let it stomp from time to time. Also the horse is willing to do poops on command. These poops lie around for some time, producing a perfect smell, as is even visible on the images. Then the actual riding! You can go so fast you’ll bump head-on into every mountain on the sim! You have to take a mood of the horse which is more quiet! Then you can stay in control. You told the people in your last blog that horses even have eight legs, well this is not true, they have actually 10 legs! Some are invisible for a time, which is quite lucky. If you think about it how many legs would a human being really possess? Think of the dancers and all their special movements!

The only problem were my boots. I had to ride barefoot! There is a walking animation in them, which cannot be removed. And the creator is not to be found, because the boots are apparently hacked. So I had to ride around without my beautiful boots.

The most mind boggling is the jumping around. With a small touch of the page up button the horses makes a beautiful jump, and the camera follows in a very elegant line. Then there is the pausing, you can put your horse close to your rocking armchair, put a bit of hay and a pitchfork in the ground and feel at home........

So far the letter of Nugget. Five thinks that that's enough about horses. As if the human being is not the most important thing in the world. Two blogs about horses! All that fuss, while we can teleport, don't have to carry things on our back, dance without becoming tired, and can fly around, Nugget Kidd, please behave as a responsible member of our modern society! Horses are nice, but first the work must be done!

And Thanks , Armoe Lipo, but you must not spoil my boy too much!

Horses in SL?

2007-05-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

Who can predicts what happens during your life? Who would think ever to be tempted to buy a horse? Indeed, who could have imagined ever dreaming of a virtual horse?
Well, of course it is not me, Five, who is dreaming about horses, oh no!

It is Nugget Kidd, the man of the desert, always searching gold, where everybody has long left any hope. He was looking at some horses, which were roaming free in the desert of Virgin Island. Actually you can walk right through these horses, but be careful: they sometimes leave some droppings, no: quite a few!

But then came horses with people riding them, happy to have a whole sim to take their horses for a ride. And indeed these are beautiful animals. It is not only fun to look at, the animals have a wonderful structure. If you are looking through the right glasses, you can see that they have not four but even eight, yes eight legs. Miraculous how many legs you need to wonder about on horseback in a virtual world. Strange feature also is that the people riding the horses are really having a lot of fun, are relaxed and take their time to have a chat. (Of course they want to show off too, but well, who wouldn't?)

Five, always inquisitive, went on a tour to see other horses. You even can find a horse to do a rodeo act with. But really in town the horses are a bit strange. Then Five asked, do the horses really belong to this world? This Second Life world is a showcase of design, clean, clear cut, bright and shiny, fast moving Futuristic helicopters and spaceships are around every corner, so are smart sport cars. Even though we don’t need any transportation, being able to teleport and fly around. And may be even more important: never becoming tired of carrying the inventory with thousands of articles contained in it! A world of: no eating, no illness no hunger, ok now Five has found another one: no carrying things on your back, no hauling of suitcases. Brilliant!

Back to the horses. The horses a bit weird in the city, really transform the desert to nature, even more than trees and grasses, which always look a bit funny, a bit like the plants of quite a few hundredmillion years ago, the ferns, for instance. The vegetation of Second Life really is a bit prehistorical.

The horses whinny, they make dust, they make clattering sounds characteristic of westerns about horses. Five wouldn't even know if these sounds are realistic, but they are indeed like the ones you hear in the movies. It is a pity you cannot try one out. Not that the owners are refusing it. You cannot lend one because of the permissions: only the owner can ride them. Permissions rule the Second Life world! The owner would have to give them away to lend them for a ride, and who would give his horse away? “A kingdom for a horse!” wasn’t it?

Well Five bets that if Nugget finds gold somewhere that he also will soon be able to ride a horse. Although it is becoming dangerous out there in the sim, because there is settlement of some tribes of Indians, and quite a few fierce amazons are riding around too!

Five in a tent, TP, tipi

2007-05-27T03:57:00.000-07:00

Hello Five, do you see this teepee, Amiryu said. Which tp? (Which tp is normally short for teleportation.) “And how can I ever see a tp?”, Five thought, seeing a teleportation is like seeing a thought, or a sentiment, a teleportation carries a name, but it is not a tangible object, not even in Second Life. But no, a teepee is a tipi, an Indian tent! Funny, the words tp and teepee having the same sound, even in chat. It is easy to get confused. Well Amiryu showed the teepee to get some work done: the teepee has to belong to a tribe, and each tribe has different decorative signs on their teepees and these tribes, being very sophisticated, change their symbols by a very smart dialog box appearing at the upper right corner of the screen of their laptop. But this nice blue dialog box, a sort of a menu has to be programmed. That is where Five March (who, by the way, is borne on the 6th of January) comes in. All sides of the tent, depending on which tribe, have to change in a given pattern, and the entrance has to be opened and closed. A nice fire must be around, and a powerful drum, which sounds makes all the tents in the neighborhood belong to the same tribe. Yes, even in Stone Age societies the laptop has been introduced, disguised as a drum. May be these societies even had their laptop before the cowboys, who knows what was hidden under the beautiful hides?
Well, an hour of programming Five thought, hmmm. This Five never learns anything. Five is always underestimating the amount of work. At the end it was a full morning, because Five wanted to program smart and because of all kinds of stupidities. Trying to be smart often leads to foolishness. In programming it is the stupidities which cost time. And in Second Life the transfer of the object worked on also costs time, because of the setting of the permissions.

Two examples of what can go wrong. To have a quick laugh! First all the textures were loaded in the sides and the part of the menu visible on the screen of the inventory of these objects were completely filled. In one side of the tent one of the textures, all with permissions copy and modify was accidentally introduced twice. What happens? Second Life doesn’t accept the same names in the inventory of an object so puts a “ 1” behind the second name. And at the same time sets the permissions as it normally does: no copy no modify! Logically, but when assembled, it takes an hour to find out where it goes wrong.
Second mistake: all the scripts where painstakingly set to copy. But in some inventory menu of some object of the tent another script was created. It disappeared under down under in the menu, which, because of the many textures, wasn’t visible anymore. New scripts: of course, no modify, no copy. This script, doing nothing, quite empty, also caused a headache, because it was invisibly hidden outside the screen border in a menu which was longer then the screen could show. And because all the other sides were ok…..
Some lessons to be learned here: be more careful Five, don’t mess around!
After a lot of transferring all resulting in “no modify”, the tent was transferred piece by piece, until the side causing all the pains showed up, and betrayed it evil intentions of not wanting to be modified by Amiryu. Then everything was quickly assembled. Only Amiryu had figured out a better name for a tribe! Never change names in software, after everything is assembled. If not prepared for name changes, these names can be everywhere….and they were everywhere. The teepee had to be disassembled again, all the scripts changed, reassembled again. All these simple tasks, after the writing of a really smart piece of software were killing Five. Five wanted to jump out of the window. But in Second Life, being perfectly able to fly, you only fall a bit on the ground, doing a falling animation, in this case in the desert, so happily no harm was done. The teepee was finished at last. Even the fire was an innovation. Using the time difference between touch_start and touch_end, you can make smoke signals!
Ok Five had learned another lesson. Actually quite a few. Some new ideas were developed too. All is well that ends well!
The teepees, or tipis, or tents can be found in Virgin Island in the desert. The tents are hidden in a no go area, so beware, don’t go there!

Delicious downtime

2007-05-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

Every Wednesday there is a downtime in the world. The grid is down. The world doesn’t exist anymore. The time of day is well chosen, at the end of the afternoon. Five is kicked out of virtual reality. It means a possibility to make music, to get a drink, to make a drawing, to sleep.

All kind of things that are impossible in SL. If the weather is fine, Five will take a bicycle and make a tour. Reality is so incredibly tangible, textures are so rich. The sun is really warm. The wind on your skin. Splashing of water, fallen leaves moving and tumbling on the road, making all kind of rustling noises, the humming of a plane from afar, birds of all kinds. And the reed, the reed in the wind at the waterside of old rivers.

Look how beautiful the real world really is! Seen the flowers of the bramble? Some have five petals others seven.

Reed is funny, long leaves, which always tend to be flat in the direction of the wind. Isn’t it strange that these leaves are never blown off? Ok, very elongated leaves. But looking closer, you can really see why. The leaves of reed can rotate! The leaves of reed are fitted on a shaft around the stalk which is about 10 centimeters long. This shaft is at one side, where the leave is open. Because of the flexibility of the tissue, the long shaft and the opening at one side the leave has the possibility to rotate freely. It has to, because of the everlasting battering of the wind, always from different directions. Strange how simple reed already displays a rather complex interplay between its shape, its structure and its setting at the border of water, always exposed to wind, storm and rain.

This downtime is marvelous. Five hopes for a long, long downtime. Nothing to do but listening to the world, of feeling yourself getting warmer while sipping tea, looking around in the room. Time to get some texts written. Time to clean up a bit. Free time. Real free time.

Admitted, Five was nearly crashed in the canal by a car, the driver must have thought he was in Second Life. Children had carefully arranged bits of cutting glass on the road, to cause a flat tire for people on bicycles. Well, there was this inline skater, who tried to kick off Five from the bike, but Five’s bike weighs about 150 kilos so that attempt was easily countered. Yes, and this racing cyclist who thought he was winning the Tour the France and therefore taking a shortcut just in front of Five. Oh and this dog free from the lease, the owner probably thinking that his dog would respect traffic rules. Not to mention this nicely looking, cute child, who suddenly took a sharp left turn without looking who was behind her.

Yes, yes, the world is really nice and friendly. Black downtime makes the world bright. Five wants to finish a book, take a shower, smell the evening. May it take very long to restart the world.

Five thinks linked

2007-05-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

Five likes to think about life, first or second. At the same times Five programmes a lot. This is called scripting in Second Life. So Second Life two lines of interests come together, the reflections and the programming. Sometimes these are mingled: Five looks at life from a gaming point of view: if we change this or that setting in life, what would happen? Most of the time, if you think well, you cannot escape the conclusion that life is a very good game. This is the position of poor old Leibniz: this is the best of all worlds! At the same time you see that so much is so wrong! It was not difficult for Voltaire to ridicule this observation of Leibniz, for instance in his novel Candide.
There we go again, you might think, but no, this time Five stays practical.
Five wants to show you something. A handler which might be handy when working with linked objects. A linked object, when scripted, mainly functions from its root object, sending messages to the links, or receiving info from these links. The linked objects have numbers, depending on which order you follow linking them together.
If you change the order, the numbers are changed. This is terrible! For instance making a HUD with digits, you have to be careful to take the same order, and when you decide to link something within this order, you can change the whole script! This is because although the function llGetLinkName(integer linknum) exists, there is only llGetLinkNumber() in the link itself! Not something like llName2LinkNumber(string name)!
And this is quite needed, sending commands to the links from the root, with llMessageLinked().
So Five proposes a small function, see how it works:

This is all taking place in your root script, please give a name to every link, for instance (for the digital clock) digit1, digit2, digit3, digit4, digit5, digit6, etcetera.
Than at the top of your script you declare a list, linkNameList. Then you make a function, going through the whole list of linked objects, and noting the names of the objects. It is as simple as that.

list linkNameList = [ ];
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//getting linknumbers from link names this in state_entry handler
getLinkNameNumberList()
{
integer x;

//x=0 is taken by the root returns 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
//so we have to go to llGetNumberOfPrims() + 1, to get all the linked objects

for (x=0;x<llGetNumberOfPrims() + 1;x++)
linkNameList +=[x,llGetLinkName(x)];

//these last lines can even be left out, just for checking
integer check = 0;//if check = 1 this gives list of numbers and names
if (check==1)
for (x=0;x<llGetListLength(linkNameList);x+=2)
llSay(0, (string)(x / 2) + " " + llList2String(linkNameList,x) + " " + llList2String(linkNameList,x+1));
}

Ok, then all we need is a small function to be used in the rest of the script, simply replacing the name of the object by the number. Put this function also above the default

// linkName -> linkNumber
integer name2LNum(string linkName)
{
integer x;
for (x=0;x<llGetListLength(linkNameList);x+=2)
if ( linkName == llList2String(linkNameList,x+1) ) return x / 2; //the 2 is because of the ‘strided’ list
return 0; //returning 0 means an error: name not found
}

At the state_entry of the default, we simply call the preparation….

default
{
state_entry()
{
getLinkNameNumberList();//this prepares the list of names and linknumber
//etc….

And now somewhere else in the script, instead of

llMessageLinked( 12 , my1000, "", NULL_KEY); //where 12 is the number of the link

and you can edit and renumber the 12 every time the link order is changed, you use the nice function, just by the putting in the name of the linked object you want to send a message
llMessageLinked( name2LNum("digit4") , days, "", NULL_KEY);
llMessageLinked( name2LNum("digit3") , hours , "", NULL_KEY);
llMessageLinked( name2LNum("digit2") , minutes , "", NULL_KEY);
llMessageLinked( name2LNum("digit1") , seconds, "", NULL_KEY);

So regardless of the linkorder or the complexity of the linked prim, the script will find your digit without a problem!

Succes in SL

2007-05-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

Five showed Second Life to a friend. This friend was very curious and asked a lot of questions? She was very interested in the appearance of the avatars. So you can edit yourself? Yes, nose, mouth, ears, eyes, legs, arms…But also your entire skin. You can change in a second from agreeably sun burnt to a very nice pale, slightly colored skin. You can even do a tryout with an image on your skin. Five does very well with a very brightly colored pentagon, which happened to fall by accident on the spot for tattoos! Some people think this skin is freaky, but others tend to like it. Five is visible with this skin in other blogs.

The eyes of Five’s friend started to twinkle, apparently some desires were come from deep down under…..then she asked: and can I edit my success in Second Life too? That was not really what Five expected! Never thought about this possibility!

But this remark started a whole sequence of thoughts. What is success, anyway? For some it is selling much, for others being loved, supporting a family. Indeed, everything about the avatar can be edited, but just not - the most important, if you really think about it.
In the appearance menu there is even the very interesting radio button male-female, which gives you the possibility to experience (in a primitive sense) what it is to walk around as the other sex. But then this simple question about editable succes clearly shows what kind of 'features' are not at all editable: your speech ability, nice or not so nice behavior, the response of others on your ideas about the world, your friendship, solidarity, working power……and the success in SL, in whatever sense you want to consider this……

Without a doubt, this “what is left” is about two universes more than your simple appearance! You can call this world a “Second Life”, in the sense of a Paradise, at last, but you still end up with yourself. ANd being your own prison is a very, very old thought of mankind.

Five was still pondering about all the consequences of this innocent remark of someone still surviving without SL when Armoe Lipo came along. An old friend for SL standards, so Five told him about the visit and the fruitful discussion about editing your appearance in SL, and that we possibly need, but won’t get, Five supposes, a slider indicating success.

Armoe Lipo immediately started an in depth analysis of the stupidity of the notion of success! He showed very effectively in an unstoppable landslide of chat, that success totally depends on its definition and your position in life! And indeed he is very right! Not the definition of success or the editing of it is important: editing yourself is much more essential. All this appearance stuff, male-female included, is quite childish compared to this transforming yourself.

This powerful intervention of Armoe Lipo gave the train of Five’s thoughts a totally other direction. It was a fine example of the manner language influences our perception of the world, and how words, language, ideas, can be molded and interpreted in an endless variety of ways. The question, which can of course never be answered, about the 'real' relation between language and reality, is very near.

Five likes it tremendously that these discussions, all on a very human level, take place in Second Life! All in this tiny, simple window for chat! So we have a mission: edit yourself. Don’t stop at the length of your nose!
For this simple and very difficult duty, forced labour for every day of the rest of your life, Five wishes you…..succes!

You never walk alone

2007-05-17T23:54:00.001-07:00

Five loves to explore, and is a bit of a workaholic. Exploring and working have one thing in common: it is mainly done alone. And since the keyboard of a computer, and the screen of a laptop in particular, is designed for one person only, this being alone with your computer is quite normal. This behavior is partly continued in Second Life. Building is done alone, designing things, programming, it is all done one your own, by yourself.

But there is just that big SL-difference that while building, and while exploring, you meet other people. These people may be total strangers, but also owners or designers of beautiful things, and of course: your friends. You could consider SL as a sort of 3D website, and many people treat is like that, but coming from SL, even the best websites are suddenly terribly flat places, simply absolutely unexciting, in 2D, but even worse: flimsy in the social sense.
Ok, websites serve another goal, being documentary, promotional, blog; and yes, true, this blog is also a website, lol, as is said in SL encountering a paradox.
Five as workaholic always becomes a bit nervous when friends only want to talk a bit. There is always work to do; a blog to write, a flower to create, a script to be written. But every so often Five’s friends, who are very, very patient people, succeed in putting Five down in a chair, or just the back of a chair, and they teach Five to socialize a bit. Because although Five is boasting about the social aspect of SL, and even teaching students the secrets of communication, it is very difficult in this interesting world of Second Life to sit still.

After months of exploration and experiments, Second Life remains new and unexpected.
And be honest: it would be very strange to sit down and socialize too much, when you have chosen to sit alone behind an illuminated screen in a sort of desolate dungeon in real life, isn’t it?
Anyway, the few moments of rest and talking chit-chat’s really are truly marvelous. Small islands of tranquility in a continuous stream of ideas and things Five wants to do or finish.
So this blog is an ode to those friends, who with endless patience and persistence try to curve Five into the social world.

There was DJ Mainakay, quite in the beginning, a lot of friends in the middle, and at the moment Armoe Lipo, Amiryu Hosoi, Amber Ashton, to name the few which are shown in the pictures.
These friends always ask Five during a tête-à-tête, what are you doing Five? Well making pictures for a blog about socializing…..sorry, always doing more than one thing at the same time……..
And aren’t these images nice? Just like people sipping a coffee? Spending an afternoon in a sunny garden, near a pool?

Yes indeed, there are times to explore the sewers of Second Life, times to wonder about the stupidities, the emptiness, fortunately endless more times gazing at the great designs and ideas of all the people walking around in SL, and………tiny bits of warmth…what is it called? Human?

Thx, guys!

Nonetheless, back to work, and fast! (Behind on schedule, talked too much about talking. Sorry, I’m off…)

Five starts a flower shop

2007-05-16T02:37:00.000-07:00

After finishing a big scripting job, Five had an incredible desire to do something nice and simple. But what is nice and simple? And of course: not what can be found everywhere! Ok you have guessed it: flowers! When young, so three months ago, Five made a lot of drawings of flowers.

And the spring was so beautiful this year. Starting early with snowdrops and starflowers, the whole display of colours and shapes went on and on with crocuses, hyacinths, tulips, lilacs, and there was no end to it, roses, rhododendron with their deep reds. Some flowers are inconceivably fragile, others so robust! But also the weeds and grasses are flowering, Gypsophila for instance, buttercup, daisies.
The daisies were particularly bright this year, and Five choose an name for the flowershop: Five Daisies!
As the Virgin Island Sim is attracting lots of customers, Five decided that for a try it would be good to start a shop in this beautiful sim.
Armoe Lipo helped Five finding a place in the palace and Five started working on flowers.
These flowers are animated by wind and movement. Together with the possibility of softening the shapes and a bit of manipulations of the pictures with the use of alpha channels new and unexpected objects consisting of a diversity of flower combinations were made. Of course the creations all reflect this gorgeous spring.
The shop must not be filled to the top with flowers and endless variations. It must be in style with the classy sim. So Five started experimenting with the interior design of the shop. The colours must remain isolated and the background must reinforce the colour and not muddle it up.
After a few days of shifting things around the shop really reflects the feeling of flowers in Second Life. The flowery objects are not real copies of RL flowers, they are a bit stylized. Five is continuing with experiments and new creations are added on a daily basis. And because of this Five must also remove some items. Adding and removing makes the shop come alive and customers will always see different aspects of Second Life possibilities and different flowers. The flowers are following the seasons, because Five thinks that this also contributes to a natural atmosphere. Well Five would be delighted if the dear reader would come around and stop by, looking at the new motives and patterns of nature.
Of course an ad belongs to organizing a shop and a text was made with the word flower in all languages which Five could think off at that day, including Japanese!

The real reason we cannot eat in SL

2007-05-13T01:32:00.000-07:00

No eating in Second Life! Not really! No drinking either, no coffee, no beer. Ok there are animations, even of the famous whiskey bottle you are getting from all your friends: after sipping a bit, a lot, you will fall down! There are bars in SL, there are restaurants. Drinking champagne in Paris of around 1900! You can buy whole courses and eat them, forks and knives included. But it is all…….a bit dry? A far reminiscent of real food, of real pleasure drinking coffee or tea with friends, eating chocolates, or a cake.
No eating means no hunger. And this thought is more positive: a world without hunger! How many crimes are not committed because of hunger? It can even hardly be called a crime, stealing when you are hungry. Myths are built around it, Robin Hood! Stealing from the rich, to give to the poor!
No crimes of this sort in Second Life. No stealing either, not of this kind.
No eating because the avatar doesn’t need food? No real stomach! (No real brains either by the way…). No not at all: this is not the real reason.
The real reason we cannot eat in Second Life is hidden in the deep structure of this virtual world: the permissions! In Second Life every object has a creator and an owner. These might be the same, but when a creator sells his creations, the owner changes. Creator and owner can always be found by right clicking on something, then choosing ‘more’. A menu opens which indicates creator and owner.
Not only the objects you see in SL have a creator and an owner, also the sounds, the animations, the textures and the scripts, hidden inside the objects. When constructing something, you want to sell, or give away you must be careful to get the setting of all the permissions right.
For every part these permissions must be set, especially if you want somebody else to be able to work with your stuff. If you buy something, there are a few possibilities:
“no copy”, this means you have only one “copy” of the item, when rezzed, it disappears from your inventory - “copy” means you can rezz it, take it back and you already have two copies.
“no transfer”, you cannot sell this, nor give it away, only rezz it, or delete it.
“no modify”, you cannot rescale it, you cannot remove a script.
Ok, so an object and all its part have permissions set or not, influencing the process of transferring and being transferred. A bit dry this stuff isn’t it?
We now return to the eating: what is eating in real life: buying, preparing, eating, enjoying, munching, digesting…a shear infinite process of changing ownership mixing and remixing things, when you think about it from the world of Second Life!
Should real food and all its parts have all those permissions on them, we, real people would be starving before being able to eat the tiniest bit of a pizza. We would suffocate before being able to get a breath of fresh air!
So reality, or call it God, has thought this over and decided that there are no permissions or absolute ownership in real life. It would simple block the whole process of living, of changing, of processing, of evolution.
We now know the real reason we don’t eat in Second Life, the permissions! And we know why absolute ownership in real life is not possible: it would not permit ….life!

Paula34 versus Craig666

2007-05-10T23:13:00.000-07:00

A friend of Five March called Nugget Kidd wrote us this report:

“ I was on a walking tour in the desert, trying out my new longcoat, being robbed of my boots, when suddenly in front of a cabin I found a terrible car. Terrible because it didn’t fit in the scenery, terrible also because you cannot even transport a tray of beer in it. The only thing that can be called a car is a pick-up….But I am drifting away. Sorry, I continue: A beautiful lady on a horse passed by….this even happens at my age…she asked me to remove this car. Of course, for a gorgeous vamp, we stupid desert rats will do everything.

But in SL the ownership of things is quite strict; I couldn’t even scratch the bloody thing. Well, we live in an age of communication, so I asked the owner with IM to remove it. Craig666 was his name. With a number like that, I should have known not to bother and just wait for the owner of the desert….He told me to remove it myself…he was “on a job”. Poor fellow, probably camping in a chair or something. Hm, I repeated my question, sent him a few teleport invitations. And then he came around, of course mad to be disturbed. Yes this is SL, we can find out who left his rubble behind! No hiding your spoiling nature sir! He came with his girlfriend. Started pushing me around, putting caves in the desert, oooh all the usual stuff. Then he disappeared.

It goes without saying he left even more of his stuff around. Paula34 came from her horse and begged me to be permitted to use her weapons! Oh no, not for the moment Paula34! But she would love to defend the desert! She was afraid too, apparently she had got a warning from the owner of the desert not to shoot in the desert. Paula34 preferred riding on her beautiful horse, more than shooting, so she restrained herself. But then Craig666, yes the number is the famous one from the apocalypse came back. He made a tour through the freebie shops I suppose and had his inventory filled with bombs fire, pushing devices. He was again accompanied by his girlfriend. He had to show off!

HA ha, and then I figured that, ok when he is showing off like that, why not Paula34 ? While I was pushed around, I told Paula34 to go ahead! This also is an advantage in SL: even in the greatest danger we can have a sip at our coffee, and chat around to others. How happy Paula34 was! She got out her guns, even bigger then the ones from Craig666 and apparently they had a lot of fun! Afterwards Paul34 and I became friends! She showed me even bigger guns. Ladies with guns, fighting in design clothes on high heels in the desert, it all happens in Second Life! But now she was afraid! Will I be banned now? Well, that’s the advantage of being able to drink … a lot of coffee. I think it will all be affine.

Later on we met in the desert, the owner Amiryu Hosoi, of Virgin Island, me, and even Craig666 showed up. Yes that’s true of SL too: even after a lot of firework, we stay talking. And that’s important. Just after the virtual fight, we were gone to other places, Craig666 had been sneaking back to the desert and cleaned up his mess. That’s funny! But one thing I don’t understand, he said something which sounded strange in my ears: he said: “my name is haas”, I wonder very much what that could mean………."

Thx Nugget, for your story.....and have fun with your new friend!

A concise SL History of Art

2007-05-08T02:34:00.000-07:00

Walking through SL is sometimes like walking through the landscape of some medieval icon. These paintings in their early stages create extremely stylized landscapes, some in very bright colors. Although the perspective doesn't at all follow mathematical logic, the emptiness of space is almost tangible. Just this emptiness is what one encounters al the time in Second Life. People in icons seem to fly, and trees are done individually and in great detail. The drawings are very sharp, the edges clear cut.
Later on in their more baroque style of for example the 17th century the icons get more dark, green-brown colored, and the atmosphere becomes dense, the contours are fading away. Even perspective becomes more regular. But strange enough, these icons seem te be much further away from the imagery of Second Life. Indeed the atmosphere is so stressed, and just that is missing in the virtual world.

These observations made Five think about the styles of art that well fitted for SL and the styles that will never be reached in the 3D-world representations which are nowadays available. Of course within the broad sweep of a style, exceptions are found, and even within the works of one individual painter one finds a large variety of approaches.

So are there other styles to be found which approximate the way SL looks at the moment. Five thinks of Caravaggio and his followers: stark light-dark contrasts, sometimes heavy perspective and bright colors. The renaissance in its discovering of a logically constructed perspective is of course almost to easy to connect with the perspectives of the SL world. Michelangelo with his clear drawings fits in very well, but he as a sculptor is thinking only about space and its effects. Leonardo da Vinci is more difficult as far as his paintings are concerned. These portraits display persons in great detail and mysterious inner world, and together with the blurred landscape in the background, it lifts itself totally from the "primitiveness" of Second Life.

On the contrary, the great Flamish painters represent just the opposite: Rubens and van Dijck, in their enormous paintings will never be approached by the imagery of the virtual world. Densely filled spaces, blurred contours, complex lighting and colors are all packed in a dominating composition which creates a great unity in the surface of the painting. The viewer is not able to move anymore in this space. Rembrandt organizes the surface otherwise, but with his thick paint and just enough superbly conceived light directions to create his famous inner worlds he also is far from the spaces found in SL. Neither, of course the impressionists, but then again the Russian constructivists, beginning of the 20th century, indeed it seems they “are” already Second Life.
The have this clear-cut ideas and concepts, the functional no-non-sense design of everything in SL. And the colors of Mondrian, his light, his straight edges are really as if he already dreamt of Second Life. Bigger canvases tend to me more blurred, although there are some beautiful very small paintings too. The landscape and whole imagery of Second Life is then more like a drawing at the moment, a drawing in fine lines and the colors mostly following the shapes. Wild painting tends to leave the form behind, the colors spread all over the surface, mingle and the space is neither open, nor rectangular anymore. These kinds of styles can be compared with the textures one sees in Second Life, for instance the graffiti in subways and in hidden underground places.

The cubists really form a problem for this reasoning. In its idea it should be at the side of Second Life, but in its appearance the space they create is not accessible at all. And besides that the cubists are applying the technique of spreading out their colors, so even more attacking the crystal clear imagery of open space.

Painting nowadays has a scattered global style, but the main feeling is dreamlike, with techniques coming from child paintings, heavy use of paints in it’s material form, so this will never apply to the virtual computer screen world. The style attacks the normal shapes and forms being in protest against the too rational world we live in according to these painters. The surrealistic legacy is strong and not to be fitted with SL, although some aspects of fantasy, coming from Science-fiction can be connected to the not so human shapes some avatars are taking on.

Illumination in a book of Gaston Phebus, Count de Foix of France.
Icon of the Holy Transfiguration
Rubens, Saint -Georg
Malevitsj, The woodcutter
Franz Marc