Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Second Life™ has a valuable virtual real estate market. Yet, SL is not the only virtual world with real estate issues. ArcheAge is coming up on a new land rush and the problems of players losing existing land holdings.
In SL we often hear ‘the rent is too damn high’ exclaimed. I’m one that disagrees and believes the free market gives people control of what they pay or receive and most equitably distributes land and sets prices.
I know a portion of Second Life™ users are into Star Wars®. We have tribute regions in SL. This Christmas a new Star Wars film is planned to come out. Today everyone is excited by the new trailer for the movie that just released. 🙂
Watch more than 30 hours of panels, interviews, and floor coverage, live from Star Wars Celebration Anaheim!
Hypergrid Business keeps many of us up to date on happenings in the OpenSim side of virtual worlds. They currently have an article up on expansion and contraction in the OpenSim worlds: Regions, grids hit new record highs.
It is a good headline. In the first paragraph Maria, author, points out that active users on public grids fell by 909 to 30,000. So, even though I consider Maria a bit of a fan-girl for OpenSim, I consider her reporting accurate enough to give us the good and bad news.
I am a Myst games fan. I am looking forward to Cyan World’s new game Obduction.
Hayden Dingman at PCWorld wrote an article about Obduction having live-action Non-Player-Characters (NPC). You can see live-action NPC’s in a video of Senza PesoI (below – link), a trailer for an Oculus VR experience. If you have a VR Headset, the video is in Oculus format.
Apparently Obduction will work with Oculus and similar VR headsets. The Cyan peeps rant into the problem of how to put video of RL actors into a virtual world and not break the immersion. While some games have animated avatars (in SL we call them bots) Cyan found that outside their expertise and thus too expensive for them to do. Since this game is funded by a kickstarter project the budget is constrained. They looked for a cheaper way.
Their solution is to film with 2 GoPro gamers to create 3D video. They use a green-screen room in the basement of Cyan’s studio. The character can be placed into the virtual world. You can see that in the video above.
I think the idea is to be similar to what Cyan has done in the past. When they reach a point where they need to tell some of the story, they move to a cut scene and the NPC tells you whatever is needed by the story line. It would be rather jolting to go from a VR experience to a 2D movie. This style of video cut scene will allow them to maintain the illusion of the world they are building.
Look for more details about Obduction to appear in August 2015.
Electronic Arts seems to have a reputation for buying successful gaming companies and eventually closing them. This appears to be what has happened with Maxis Emeryville, the developer of SimCity.
The games created at Maxis will still be around and they remain the property of EA. But, the development process of those games is being folded into EA’s other development studios.
Microsoft® has just put a new game development platform out in Beta version: SPARK®. This is a game developer’s free form design tool and game engine. The results can be played on Xbox One, Win 8 and soon other platforms.
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You can read more at TechCrunch: Microsoft’s Project Spark DIY Game Creation Software Beta Begins Today.
Unfortunately this is a Windows 8 app only. As yet it does not even run on RT. It also is more of a novice game maker’s tool. While free form it is still within a set world, a pre-made world that one can modify.
I think The Verge’s article better describes SPARK: Microsoft’s ‘Project Spark’ beta arrives on Windows 8.1, lets you create an Xbox One game.