Ariane’s New Hood

I mentioned a few posts ago that I am doing some set design stuff to enhance the current Dating Sim and to set up a sequel.  This has been challenging and fun, and I thought I’d show off a few new renders.

Today, I am showing off the local neighborhood. The dating sim has 3 places near Ariane’s house: The park, the convenience store, and the burger joint.  The park I am leaving the same, but since the convenience store was a crappy screenshot from a video game, it needed a new set.  I surrounded it with tract homes to indicate it was in the suburbs with the house.

I actually created two convenience stores, mostly identical except the posters on the wall and the employee at the counter.  Going to the store before going downtown will get you the urban location.  After downtown gets you to the suburb location with Ariane’s friend Jessie.

Ariane’s backyard was built with screenshots from The Sims 2, and beyond the red picket fence it was pretty much vacant.  Now there are more tract houses and trees, and if you look close enough you can see the city park from her backyard.  Its about 2 houses down the road, easy walking distance.

I still have not decided about the back yard. I just built the 3D set as a concept so far. There are over 100 pictures set in the back yard that would have to be redone.

Finally in the local neighborhood, I decided to replace the well known fast food joint with a diner style chain called Drive-N-Dine which I made up myself. I bought a new model and recolored it and redesigned it to my needs.

With building my own models I get to play with geography and design a “world” to play in.  Just as you can see the park from the back yard, you can see the same tract houses out the window in the diner, and you can see the sign for the diner on the left edge of the gas station picture.  One of the models I got has a fake drink called “Loco-Cola” so I included signs for the drink inside the convenience store, and put a “Loco-Cola” soda fountain in the diner too.  I put up advertising posters and billboards for other places that show up in the game too.

The Coming Mesh Revolution in Second Life

Second Life took another step towards adding mesh support by lifting the NDA on the closed mesh beta.  What that means is that they like the results enough that they are committing  to its development.  Considering that the vast majority of 3D games out there use nothing but mesh for their content, its a big deal.

They have chosen the collada as the import format. This is as expected as the files tend to be smaller than OBJ files, and there are plenty of converters to collada. What has yet been decided are the rules:  How complex can the models be?  What is the size limit? What will it cost to import?

Not only will you be able to import mesh objects, but also mesh avatars.  That’s right, you will be able to  replace parts or all of the standard SL avatar with new meshes.

A lot of people are treating this as just a new feature to go along side prims, flexis, and sculpties.  I think not.  I think it is a game changer that will affect SL at every level, especially economically.

Consider that sites like the Google 3d Warehouse has thousands of free collada models, most of which can be imported right into SL.  Instead of spending months to build your prim replica of the Eiffel Tower, you can just download it and import it in minutes (assuming you have the land for it).

Consider that tools like 3D Ripper can piggy back on Open GL and capture all 3D objects in your Second Life view and convert them to OBJ files that can be converted to Collada files then imported back into SL. Its harder to use than “copybot”, but you don’t have to worry about those pesky permissions.

Consider the economics:  Prefab houses built in Sketchup are faster easier and look better than the prim variety.  Mesh hair will quickly replace prim hair as the style of choice. Mesh clothing is a possibility, forget the crappy looking SL skirts or prim skirts.  Hats and other accessories will look a lot better, too.

I suspect there are going to be some really amazing looking regions to explore built mostly of meshes.

Will mesh work on third party viewers based on 1.25?  How fast can Open Sim implement this?  I believe Collada support is one of the key missing pieces for wide Open Sim acceptance.

Lots of questions, and lots of changes are in store. Some will no doubt be negative, but I’m staying positive. This may be the needed kick in the teeth to reinvigorate SL again.

The new Apple TV SUCKS!!!

As I mentioned before, I have one of the first generation Apple TVs and use it quite often to rent movies, and play purchased iTunes content on my HDTV.   It has its limitations, but I like it.

On September 1st, Apple announced a new version of Apple TV that pretty much gets rid of everything useful about the Apple TV and replaces it with a $99 piece of plastic crap.  If you have a lot of iTunes TV and movies that you want to view on your HDTV, I highly recommend going out and getting one of the current old Apple TVs before they yank them off the shelves in favor of this useless round brick with an HDMI plug.

Why is this such a piece of crap?  Let me count the ways.

1.) In order to watch purchased iTunes content, you have to have a networked computer turned on with iTunes running, thus negating the electricity savings you get with the new “greener” unit.  Apple says you can stream off an ipad or ipod as well, but then you have to have your ipad or ipod running to make it work.  The current version uses more electricity, runs hot, and keeps taking itself out of standby mode, but still runs fine all by itself without another computer running.

2.) The new Apple TV is STILL not compatible with uPnP or even iTunes servers.  This is easily the most requested feature by current Apple TV users, and yet Apple continues to fail in this regard.  UPnP is the future of home networking, and everybody knows it except Apple apparently and Logitech the makers of Squeezebox which suffers from the same shortcoming. (I had a Squeezebox in my home for all of 10 minutes until I discovered its lack of uPnP support and then packed it back up and returned it to the store).

3.) It brings nothing new to the table except for support of purchased iTunes content. XBOX360, Playstation 3, Wii, and many of the new Blu Ray players can do everything else the new Apple TV can do, and they support uPnP too.  If you don’t care about uPnP, get a Roku, its cheaper and has more features than the new Apple TV.

4.) Yet another overpriced HDMI cable to purchase, and my xbox and PS3 box are already taking up the two ports I have on my TV.  The old Apple TV has component out, and separate audio out so you can hook it to your stereo system and play DJ with the iphone Remote app. All that is gone on the new version.

5.) Its not 1080 compatible.  True, most streaming HD sources are 720, including all the HD downloads in iTunes.  Also true that unless your TV is bigger than 42 inches you will not notice much difference, but still, its the principle of the thing.

Apple had an opportunity here to do something really cool and really revolutionary with the Apple TV and blew it!

The Emerald Saga

The Emerald Viewer for Second Life is dead.  If you find copies online, don’t download them.  If you have an old copy, delete it.

The Emerald saga needs to be written.  It is a story of “open source” gone horribly awry.  It is a story that reflects horribly on the makers of Emerald, as well as reflecting horribly on Linden Lab for creating an official viewer so gimped that more than half of the players of Second Life preferred Emerald.  Somebody needs to write the story to give us a detailed account of what happens when software development goes wrong.  Unfortunately, I can’t write it. I only know the generalities and not all the dirty details.  I’ve written about Emerald before, as well as about some of the crap some of the devs have engaged in, but I have not followed the whole story completely.

Let me give you the basics as I understand them.  Back around 2007, Linden Lab released the source code to the main viewer as “open source” as a way to speed up development and squash bugs, and it was a success.  They also opened up SL to be used by 3rd party variants of the official viewer.  They also open sourced the LSL Libraries which included a program affectionately known as “copybot”.  Many consider this last move to be a mistake as it resulted in many of the problems in SL today, but the release of the libraries also have given programmers insight into how SL works, leading to the development of Open Sim.  Copybot is, in its official form, an extremely useful tool, and restricted by permissions, but being open source, programmers can remove the 2 lines of code that restrict permissions and be able to copy anything in Second Life except unmodifiable scripts.  It is also not user friendly in its library form, so hackers started incorporating copybot as an easy to use “feature” inside of their third party viewers.  One of the first to do this was a viewer called “Onyx viewer”.  It included the unrestricted hacked copybot as a tool as well as a ton of other hacking tools usable in Second Life.

The author of the Onyx Viewer was Phox, aka Lonely Bluebird, aka a few other names.  Despite it being an underground viewer someone took notice that the legitimate features were actually useful.  A group of programmers including Phox all working on viewers got together to form Modular Systems, and created the Emerald Viewer, a feature rich alternative to the official viewer.  The feature that made Emerald become popular as a third party viewer was of course bouncing boobies, but other enhancements with the radar, macros, built in animation override, and IM enhancements caught on with players.

Now some of the features that Emerald offered were not part of Second Life.  They worked by accessing databases run by Modular Systems rather than Linden Lab.  Anyone who used Emerald to log in to Second Life, also connected to Modular Systems.  In the beginning the connection to Modular Systems seemed innocent enough, but some openly wondered if they were collecting data with these connections.  Turns out they were.

Then Linden Lab released official viewer 2.0, and there was a nearly unanimous sentiment that it sucked.  Support for the old viewer ceased at LL, leaving it up to 3rd party viewers to give the people what they wanted.  LL answered back by requiring third party developers to register with LL and putting restrictions on what these viewers could and could not do.  About half of the third party devs quit developing over this, and there was strong sentiment within the group developing Emerald to do the same.  Linden Lab, sensing a backlash, revised their restrictions, and Emerald was back on board.

Over the summer, Emerald kept growing in popularity, more popular than the still buggy official viewer.  Some reports suggested 70% of the people logging onto Second Life were using Emerald, and because Emerald had a feature allowing you to see other Emerald users, these reports were believable.

When the majority of the players in SL are using a 3rd party client, that is not a good thing for Linden Lab, no matter how you slice it.  LL needed a way to reverse this trend and found it in a file called llkdu.dll, a proprietary file licensed only to the LL’s official viewer (due to patents owned by Kakadu Software) designed to speed up rendering of jpeg2000 files which is the format of every texture in Second Life.   All other third party viewers use open jpeg to render.  Emerald created their own called emkdu.dll and left it closed source, violating the GPL in which the third party viewers operate.   Apparently in reaction to pressure from LL to open source the file, another notorious hacker involved in Emerald development, Fractured Crystal, did something amazingly stupid.  He used an unknown exploit built into the Emerald viewer to create a denial of service attack on a rival developer’s website (the same guy that exposed Modular System’s data collections), bringing on even more severe wrath from Linden Lab.  In order to try and save Emerald, Fractured Crystal quit the team.  Other exploits have been discovered in the Emerald code as well, making the whole viewer look very suspect.

Linden Lab  threatened to pull Emerald off the list of approved viewers unless changes were made, such as the removal of Phox (and two other known hackers) from the development team.  The other two hackers quit, Phox refused.  Instead, all the other legitimate developers quit the Emerald team and Modular Systems.

I should point out that all the details in the last two paragraph are not verified, and the actual details and time line are all a bit fuzzy. The only sources come from blogs set up by some of the other Emerald Developers like Jessica Lyons.  I’d love to read a detailed blow by blow account of what has really been going on from both the Linden Lab perspective and the Modular Systems perspective.  There was probably some good drama going on behind the scenes at both places that I can only speculate on.

Emerald is now officially taken off the approved SL viewer list, and as the only developer of Emerald left is a notorious hacker,  it is advisable to stay the hell away from it.  A lot of former Emerald users are also changing account passwords as a precaution.

An approved viewer with many of the same features as Emerald is Imprudence, which has been around a while and is the favored viewer of Open Sim for Macintosh (there’s a PC version too).  Not yet approved viewers in development which are based on Emerald, minus the questionable code and features, are the Phoenix viewer and the Ascent viewer.  I have not tried any of these yet, but with Emerald uninstalled, I will soon.

UPDATE: All versions of Emerald are now being blocked from logging in to Second Life. The Phoenix and Ascent viewers are now officially approved third party viewers.  This blog post, has some more details on this whole mess.