Meditation

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.

Paula34 versus Craig666

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!

Five plays with Fire

Second Life has some reminiscences of the primitive shooter games which featured on the early computer. The games where your thumb got numb from pressing the button, to shoot on all kinds of nasty flying objects. Because continuous firing wasn’t invented in these middle ages of computer history, you had to click of push buttons or the mouse incessantly. It were the days before RSI, the repetitive strain injuries and all was well. If something doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t exist.

Firing can be done in Second Life. An object produces other objects, the bullets, which exist only temporarily in the Second Life world. These bullets, or whatever are removed automatically after about a minute. Five isn’t too thrilled by weapons, but the possibility of the making of these temp-rezzed objects is very interesting, because it can also serve more peaceful ends. It is like melting cannons into ploughshares. This alone should be a reason for Five to use this way of making objects. The objects coming out, rezzed, are stored in the inventory of the thing that makes them. This is also very nice: it’s the kangaroo idea: an object has other objects in its belly. These temporarily produced objects can again be filled with other objects. It is not only a kangaroo, but also the idea of a Russian baboesjka, the puppet in puppet in puppet idea. This principle can be fire for programmers, but this blog is not about that kind of fire.

Other virtual fire was needed to use in the game of gold searching in the desert.

The idea was to let players gain a bar of dynamite to get access to secret places where they could find more hidden items. But an object giving of an explosion, smoke, and rubble? That’s programming particle systems, sounds, and this rezzing of temporary objects, which must be exploding, shooting away. This exploding can be done by using the Havok built in SL. This Havok produces natural falling and bouncing of objects, and the effects are never to be programmed by hand, because it involves lots of calculations which have to be done very fast. It is done on a deep basic level in the software.

Experimenting began. Five made an object which rezzes other object around itself, producing clouds and sounds. All went well, steadily more features were added. And then suddenly it went wrong. The kangeroo thing didn’t react anymore on commands. Five checked everything but eventually was puzzled by the malfunctioning. After a few hours of doing something else the solution was found: the lindenscript is delayed by all sorts of things, the rezzing of objects, the talking of objects between themselves (the rubble has to know in which direction to fly away), the smoke effects and the sounds. By loading more and more effects on top of each other the script got mixed up in itself and refused to function.

The solution was to separate all the different effects by enough time to let the script carry out the commands. So a whole string of effects states are ordered in a sequence in the so called timer event.

Then the explosion is well performed, although even then, depending on the traffic in the sim, some effects can be forgotten, making every explosion a bit individual, which is quite good.

Of course the fire is obtained by the text animation script you can obtain free.

Five was often working in the middle of fierce and violent effects. This made Five think, because Five is much more in the habit of making peaceful games. Shooters are not in Five's repertoire! Could it be possible to make a friendly explosion? So the rubble was replaced by flowers, the smoke by flowery images, and the fire animation was replaced by cheerful colors, jumping to and fro. But then again all was going wrong. The flowers proved to be too heavy for the sim, and the sim Five was working in was going down! You know, also peaceful acts can endanger the world? Luckily this Second Life world is partitioned, one sim going down, doesn’t mean the whole world is in danger. The sim quickly recovered from the flowers, removed them and regained consciousness. But the flowers were not saved, so no pictures from these peaceful demolitioners of sims in this blog!