Well… the funniest I’ve seen.
Visit She’s So Unusual Shoes and check out the Noob Heels
Land of NoR (LoN) Goes DCS2
This post is about the insides of the RPG’s within Second Life. The largest and, what until now, most exciting game in SL has changed its combat/RP system. What does a meter change mean to a game?
Land of NoR (Nation of Remembrance) is self described as a Dark RPG with combat. Previously it used the WARPS (now XRPS – NextRPS) combat system. For two years this 29 sim RPG used WARPS. Now for various reasons Land of NoR (LoN – do we have enough acronyms yet?) begin upgrading the WARPS to XRPS and is now changing to DCS2, another combat system. Why?
KirstenLee Cinquetti S-17 and S-18 (208 & 209) Viewer Review
This is a Second Life photographer’s dream viewer. I don’t use it for everyday use. But it is fast and has great visual features. As KirstenLee is changing things faster than most other viewer makers so this may be the least stable of the alternate Second Life® viewers. Others claim it is the most stable and needs the least CPU power. That just has not been my experience. Still, if you want that great shot of an area or model looking so sexy, this is your viewer.
Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote about viewers in June and felt the S-17 (198) viewer was simply great. See Pushing the Limits.
I did try it in a combat sim. Server lag, automatic weapons fire and all… it did pretty good. No locks ups and the FPS stayed over 10, which is great for a combat sim.
Big News? Myst-Uru-SL
Update Aug 27
Cyan Worlds, Inc. announced in the Myst Online forum that they are working with Creative Kingdoms on MagiQuest an MMO version of the ARG part of the theme parks.
Original Article
The Myst-Uru community, especially those that moved too Second Life, has been waiting for a project that Cyan Worlds sort of named ‘Something Else’ to finish. Why?
You see the Myst-Uru MMO game previously on GameTap as Myst Online Uru Live (MOUL) closed in April 2008. MOUL fans don’t give up. That happened once before when an earlier version of MOUL closed and fans hacked up servers and started to put the game back online. This time the fans were promised the MMO game as open source. Code was to be published this Spring.
Preview of Coming Things in Second Life
Here is a cool video of the 3D mesh import and dynamic shadows coming to Second Life. If you click to watch on YouTube, you can click the HD button and see detail and read the menus. I suggest that and stop the video to check out what is in them.
Video Gone… 🙁
It is interesting to see ‘Upload Model’ in a menu. As they advance through the video they turn on dynamic shadows. If you have used Kirstenlee’s S-18 viewer and played with dynamic shadows that part will be familiar.
Use of ‘Deferred Rendering’ for shadows is an older technique that Maya has used for years. It has been improved over time and will likely give the Second Life Viewer the ability to render hundreds of lights instead of the 6 to 10 it handles now, without a significant performance hit.
For a bit more information see New World Notes. And their follow up: Aimee Logs Into Second Life… From Within Second Life!
Another good blog post is here: Linden Lab Announces Mesh Support
The ability to remote access computers from SL is a possibility too. See: Trescothick Aims To Please
Also, notice the shadows and lighting. Under the arches there is a light reflection. This is diffuse light or indirect lighting. Usually only done when ray tracing is available. So, this will be a big step up for SL.
Blue Mars Beta This Month
If you have not heard, Blue Mars is a new virtual world using current state of the art tech, described as a Next Generation Virtual World. It will be along the lines of Second Life, with significant differences. It is in Beta now and at the end of August the Beta will expand to a larger more open Beta. Tools for learning to build within Blue Mars are available now.
One of the bigger differences is content creation. Property rights are supposed to be better protected. Builders are more controlled. There are 3 levels of builders/creators, City, Block and Content. It seems a City builder is somewhat like the SIM/Region owner in Second Life (SL). A Block creator is more like a Parcel Owner in SL. Blue Mars (BM) block builders are restricted by the city builder they lease or rent from. Pricing to join any of these groups has not been released.