Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Daniel Voyager has an article out about the coming 10th birthday of Second Life™, SL10B.
The ‘official’ announcement is here: The SL10B Community Event is coming!
The domain sl10b.com is owned by someone in Scottsdale, Arizona. The registration is classed as private, so no company or individual’s name shows up, that sort of makes sense for a resident sponsored group. But, it is also not very transparent. I don’t see anything on the SL Blog yet.
The Materials System Project is steadily progressing. We do not have an ETA, yet. We do have a bit of a place marker in that we are told projects are moving in the order of; Chat HUD User Interface, Server Side Appearance, and then Materials. So, we know it will arrive soon, but is still a ways off. If we want Materials to work the way we want, we need to be able to provide feedback during the coming Beta Phase of the development process.
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To be able to give feedback we need to understand how to make and use of Normal and Specular Maps (or textures – interchangeable words in this case). So now is probably a good time to start learning the basics to allow us to participate in the beta testing without looking too ignorant.
I check the Myst Online community every other day or so. I found they are talking about and excited about the Alpha/Beta releases of a game called Xing (pronounced zing) The Land Beyond (more videos and pictures here). For those of us familiar with the Myst worlds the game is very similar. Several reviewers have already made the connection. Xing’s big claim to fame for Myst fans is, like Myst, its non-violent, so it is a great parent-child activity to share.
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The creative team behind Xing is White Lotus Interactive. John Torkington and Koriel Kruer started the Xing project as a classroom project in early 2012. The first 4 levels became one of the top ten finalists in the IEEE GameSig competition at Chapman University. In a completion judged by industry professionals they took second place. Then in late 2012 James Steininger joined the team.
This video is about the mover behind the 1920s Berlin Project in Second Life™.
[youtube EkE_F2nEf4g]
We know this person as Jo Yardley. She is inspiring. Drax wrote this on the YouTube site:
An avatar named ‘16’ made a video showing her testing of the fixes now running in the Magnum RC channel.
[youtube xgwtXk9lCsc]
The video runs 2:40 minutes. In it you can see what I’ll call perfect crossings and messed up crossings. When one can cross and turn it shows the system is working. Without comments in the video we cannot tell when she crossed and lost control, at least I can’t – not for sure. I think the camera jerks are from problems with the crossing.
Whatever the case, things seem to be working pretty well for these ‘fast’ crossings.
We don’t hear much about changes to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) these days. But, today is different. We got a bunch of stuff. Exciting stuff!
At the Server Beta meeting Kelly and Maestro Linden were announcing several new changes.
There are changes coming to the Particle System in Second Life™. Maestro Linden said, “Alright, so there’s an upcoming server maintenance project, which will probably go to RC next week it has your usual bug fixes, but it also includes goodies for new LSL features.”