More New Sets

As promised, I am showing some new stuff I’m working on for the dating game.  I was hoping to be finished by now but I keep getting distracted by other matters.  All I can say is it will be done when it is done.

The sequel is likely going to be in Visual Novel format, which means I can do things like have an actual plot, but it also means part of the process requires me to write a regular novel first, and since November is National Write a Novel Month, I’d like to participate and push myself to write the thing, instead of just the advanced outline I currently have.

Meanwhile, I’m still not done with the set building and rendering on the current project.  Got a dozen or so more pics to do spread over two sets I have yet to build. I may release what I have so far as a “beta” release, haven’t decided yet.

Anyways, here’s another preview of what I have been up to:

Above is a new museum set, the old one was a screenshot from a video game, and looked lame. This one looks very pretty, especially with the reflections on the marble floor.

Here’s the interior of the night club.  There are musical instruments on the stage for a band that will appear in the sequel, but for the current club scene, I just created a DJ.  The DJ Booth by the way is nothing but a black box.

When creating the original pictures, sometimes I saved the 3D files, and sometimes I saved the TIF file renders.  In the above picture, I used the original TIF file, and inserted a new background.

This picture, from the new bar set, takes the original 3D file, with poses and props, and moves it into a new 3D set.  In the original bar scene, I just used a single flat game screenshot for every single bar scene image.  Now with a 3D set, I can give all the pictures new angles and play with the lighting some more.

Then there are pictures like the museum pic at the top, which is both an all new pose, and an all new set.

More to come soon.

Second Life Given Back to the Role Players

So I spent a  fair amount of posts devoted to what seems to be a battle of “visions” going on in Second Life.  A string of posts starting with this one I wrote a year ago.  I have written so many I just decided to create a new sl visions tag. Click to see all the related posts.

So here is the story in a paragraph.  There have been three competing “visions” of what SL should be: The role-player vision, the merchant vision, and the 3D Facebook vision.  Since the resignation of the last CEO Mark Kingdon, the temporary CEO Philip Rosedale has systematically disassembled the 3D Facebook vision, largely because it is unworkable (as I predicted).  Because of the resources spent, changes requested by the merchants have not only not happened, but actually they are worse now.  Merchants continue to quit with profits way down.  That leaves us role players basically in charge, and if you have seen the latest re-design of the main Second Life page, you will see, that SL has recognized it as well.  We are back to “Your World, Your Imagination” again (though not in those exact words).

Now a lot has happened under the brief Rosedale administration:

• Second Life Enterprise Grid – Gone
• Basic account support – Gone
• Premium support – once 24 hours, now limited hours
• Non-Profit/Educational Sim discounts – Gone (or soon will be)
• Avatars United – Gone
• X-Street, soon to be integrated into game, currency exchange Gone
• Teen Grid – Gone (or soon will be)
• Community Gateways – Gone

Now many of these I am sad to see are disappearing, while others I say good riddance.  What they are doing is simplifying the whole thing.  Simplifying, always a good thing.  The general philosophy is now a “hands off” policy, meaning they are giving us players more autonomy.

Meanwhile, check out where their current development efforts are focused:

• Mesh
• Display Names
• Voice Morphing
• Wearable Avatar Physics
• Havok 7 support

Here is what they all have in common:  They are all good for us role players.  If you are in SL because you enjoy pretending you are someone else, whether that is a formal role player in a community, or an informal role player pretending to be someone you are not, then SL seems to be catering to you again, after a couple of years where they weren’t.

Here’s the cloud to go along with that silver lining.  Philip Rosedale has stepped down, and Linden Lab is once again looking for a new CEO.  Furthermore, there is good evidence that the remaining employees don’t really seem to “get” the whole RP vision thing.  Here is hoping they hire someone who does.  Unfortunately, I am not that hopeful.

Wither the Merchant Vision

So there are now two different visions left about what Second Life is, or should be. What vision you are apart of is largely based on what motivates you to play. I call these visions “role play” and “merchant” as a short hand way of understanding them.

There are builders who build for fun, they are part of the role play vision. There are builders who build for profit, they are part of the merchant vision. There is a lot of mixing and gray area obviously.

We can all see that SL has plateaued, and will likely decline soon. This is very bad for the Merchants. It is possible that Mesh could revitalize the market, but I am leaning to the idea that it will radically change the market so much that it is unlikely to help the current merchants.

Most of us Role Players have accounts in other places, especially many open sim grids. When SL closes, we’ll probably spend a little time mourning, then we’ll be elsewhere.  Us non-merchant types will likely move on to Open Sim and start building there. Heck, a lot of them already are. Similarly the various role play communities would move and rebuild as well.

The Merchants don’t have many other places to go.  With no currency, no theft protection, no one to file a DMCA complaint to, the merchants have no desire to move to Open Sim, even if there were no SL.  The market place in SL is one of a kind, the closest is IMVU, and it is about a tenth of the size of SL.

The RPers may have built SL, but it is the merchants that made SL popular, they provide most of the content we RPers enjoy.  We non-merchant RPers are better off with the merchants around, which means we are better off with SL around.

I believe that when SL eventually closes, there will be a new virtual goods market somewhere, innovation abhors a vacuum.  Maybe not of the same nature as SL, but I see other virtual good markets, like Renderosity and various app markets, succeeding in other similar venues, so it is only a matter of time before there is another virtual goods market where creative people can make a few bucks.  This is another topic I have already written about.

Temporary Art in Second Life

There are a couple of temporary art events going on right now worth checking out. The first is the annual Second Life Burning Man event, originally an annual event sponsored by Linden Lab, but they have dropped their sponsorship and it has been taken over by a new group at burn2.org.  They funded 6 servers for 1 month only and spent the first two weeks building, and the second two weeks (October 16-30) with all the displays on hand.

Behind me is the official “burning man” set to be set on fire on Friday I believe.  To reach this event. open your map and search for “burning Man” or follow this slurl.

Because it is no longer an official SL event, the content at the event is allowed to get more “mature” (though not adult).  I am quite certain these naked sculpties would never have been on display if LL was still in charge.  They are very well done and almost look like the fabled “mesh” items.

Speaking of which another temporary event is going on right now on the beta grid.  I kept on crashing, so I sent Rebecca for this report:

Linden Lab has launched Open Beta of the mesh content.  To test it out they have launched 26 servers with mesh content enabled. To see the content you must download the Mesh Beta Project Viewer (Mesh Aditi), then launch to the beta grid.  Once on the grid, open the map and search for “Mesh” and you will find a list of sandboxes.  These sand boxes are the only place mesh will work, and like typical sandbox regions, their content is purged every 24 hours.  The upshot is that you can see new stuff every day.

These two mesh items were huge. I’m about as tall as one of the dragon’s toe nails.  We still have no details about size restrictions or cost once “mesh” goes live.  I am also not sure how quickly it will be. I tried uploading a simple mesh, and it kept on crashing the viewer when I did.

Here is someone I met who was wearing a mesh avatar.  The person was AFK, but his avatar was moving around like an idle  avatar does.  Simple stick figures are impossible to do right now without hide textures.  With mesh you can replace body parts, thus making any kind of avatar possible.

More New Renders

So here is another post with some new renders for the next version of the date simulator.  These focus on the downtown restaurant.  The old restaurant was somewhere downtown but apparently far enough that you had to drive from the restaurant to the downtown town shopping area.  I am establishing a sense of geography now.  The restaurant is right next door to the Art Museum now and across the street from the Home Store.

The restaurant interior is no longer some background picture I found on the internet.  It has big bay windows looking out towards the rest of the downtown area.  You can see Ariane’s SUV parked in a lot across the street.  There is an unseen parking garage next to the museum across the street from a theater you can barely see in the upper right.

The sequel I’m  in the planning stages of has some new locations such as a hair salon (first picture) and a movie theater, so I thought I’d establish their existence incidentally.

With the new geography there is no need to grab the car to go to the museum or the night club, so there are new pictures of the short walk to these locations.  This picture is one of the best I have ever done, a rare back lit image.  The car on the left was a free model I found online and the textures were all messed up, I spent a couple of hours trying to get it to look right.

Next time, I’ll show you the interiors of the club and the art museum.

The World of Minecraft

I remember back in the Atari 2600 most games were developed by one person and brought to market.  The idea of a single person doing a complete commercially successful game all by themselves today is a rarity.

Having created the Dating Sim mostly by myself, I know how much work goes into a single game.  And yet, there are plenty of independent games still being made by individuals working by themselves.  They are almost never competitive with the big developer games, but every now and then a huge hit emerges, the most successful classic example being Tetris.

A new solo effort has been emerging lately, created by a single programmer named Notch.  The game is called Minecraft, and it has become a huge hit in just a few months, despite the 1993 Castle Wolfenstein 3D like graphics.

You are thrust into a randomly generated world made of 1 meter cubed blocks. Each block contains an element, mostly dirt, or stone, or wood, or water but there are also rarer elements, like coal, lava, gold, gems.  With these elements you can craft tools and weapons, armor and fortresses.  Why may you need weapons and fortresses?  Well because days only last about 40 minutes, and half of those minutes are spent in darkness when skeletons, and zombies, and really big spiders come out of nowhere and attack you.  A good weapon and fortress should protect you.

Once you get past the cheesy graphics and learn how to play, you will find the game highly addictive.  Did I mention there is multiplayer, too?  The game is showing amazing growth, and the author is already a millionaire from selling the full version at 10 euros a pop, and the game is still in “alpha” (yes it is a bit buggy, but nothing major).  The game crosses a line appealing to both virtual worlders and RPGers alike.

I’d write more, but I need to finish my tower.  Good intro video here.