Monthly Archives: June 2006

OK So Second life is not a game, but you can do games in it

Posted on by

In talking about Second Life to people, and in particular the late night building sessions with new people coming along to my Hursley item all the time to ask how things are going, I realized that in all the protestations of ‘this is not a game it just look like one’ I was starting to get asked why it was not used for games too.

Well those of you have have experienced the mainland in Second Life will know games exists. There are casinos and gambling games to get your precious dollars from you virtual pockets. There are racing leagues and race tracks. Large scale quake style combat arenas.

My personal favourite though is “Les White” and his Sim invaders. A cabinet that looks like the real thing and rezzes the space invaders in 3d above the cabinet. There is something very circular about all that as back in my youth seeing space invaders got me into computers. I hope thats a virtuos circle not a vicious one!

Its a nice example of function in a box. Homebrew coding mixed with old school design, re-rendered for web3.0.
Game3.0 anyone?

Also check out Wagner James Au’s review of Russian Roulette sweeping SL

sim invaders by Les White

Content 2.0 at the RSA

Posted on by

I was at the Content 2.0 conference yesterday. The main topics of discussion were around user generated content. Some of the content moved a bit too much in to marketing for my interests, but overall it was a good event. As you’d expect there were a couple of notable bloggers there, including Hugh McLeod from Gaping Void, who talked about how blogs had impacted businesses he’s involved with.

Marc Canter talked about some ideas in his new social networking project, People Aggregator, about how social networks need to be more open and let the user’s control their own data. Bradley Horowitz gave a great talk on Flickr and how it’s philosophies were being adopted by the rest of Yahoo! All of the people writing on eightbar are happy Flickr users, so it was good to get a bit of an insight in to them.

I thought Jamie Kantrowitz (from MySpace) was great, mainly as it’s the first time I’ve heard someone mention The OC in a geek-centric environment. She came under a bit of attack for the way MySpace locks in their user’s data, but I thought she countered that well. I think MySpace targets a different market than a lot of the social networking sites. It was interesting how she talked about successful users on MySpace are those that improve a conversation, rather than simply disagreeing or agreeing.

Main themes of the day included: microformats, myware, attention data, implicit ratings, people-like-me, control and measurement. I think they recorded the event and podcasts of the content should be available soon.

Can you guess where this is ? Second Life meets Real Life

Posted on by

This is a little sneak preview of some things that I have had some success with in Second life

tennis ball in flight

Primarily it is around getting data on an http request to explore some of the possibilities for future sports events. With the french open on at the moment and our collegues from Atlanta working over there, with a certain UK event in the next few weeks powered by IBM, well I had to have a go didn’t I?

IBM & Dojo

Posted on by

Given the buzz of Web2.0, its not surprising to see lots of ajax-based toolkits emerge from lots of different sources, Yahoo! and Google included.

I am glad to see that IBM are getting involved by contributing to an open source project.

Dojo has been on my list of things to learn about for a while now. As a starting point, I can recommend this talk by Alex Russell of the Dojo Foundation that was given at the XTech 2006 conference.

Culture clash in Second Life

Posted on by

In this article Wagner James Au writes about some of the pressures and expectations that everyone is expected to be American in Second Life. I personally have not found it to be a barrier, though I have been happy to express the fact I am a brit. Indeed there are many groups such as Brits in SL who are clearly not just US based. Our eightbar group in SL by its very nature crosses many cultures as the interest in Second Life spans further than us in Hursley and across IBM.

I have also found that in general people are quite chilled out and polite about things. SL is more of a leveller in terms of culture. Though given it is a ‘english’ focussed language based medium I am sure its NLS support will grow. Who knows we may even be able to learn a bit more about one another’s cultures through this medium more than any other?

SL Projects to watch out for

Posted on by

The community around Second life is building up and there are more and more skilled people joining in, as a result some pretty interesting projects are starting to emerge in the secondlife forums, here’s a heads up of a few that i think are especially interesting…

Second Life Protocol
First up there is the SL Protocol Reverse Engineering effort being run by Reuben Stein, this has fired up an interesting discussion thread on the SL forum, the initial posting sparked some serious debate with Reuben being accused of all sorts of things including illegal reverse engineering and opening up SL to a host of security problems. Luckily Phoenix Linden stepped in on behalf of the SL development team to clarify that Linden Labs were in support of the Reverse engineering effort providing it was good natured and not to the detriment of the community.

After this post a few more people emerged and admitted they had been looking at the protocol for some time, a few had actually written bots that work in SL (something that was not widely known before). In addition it was revealed that the entire protocol was described in a file present in everyones install directory and protected only by a simple bit of XOR encoding.

One of the most interesting things to come out of the project (or be uncovered by the project publicity) is the libsecondlife library project coded by Eddy Stryker which provides a C API for writing Secondlife clients, I’ll be having a play with this soon if i get time.

Offline Builder and .obj importer
The Offline builder is a Second life plugin written for the popular Blender an open source 3D editing tool. It gives you a panel in Blender that gives access to the primitives types and options that you have in SL itself.

This tool written by Jeffrey Gomez has tremendous potential, it’s in beta stage at the moment and the functionality to import the objects you create into SL isn’t built in yet, however the ability to build offline and import in will certainly lead to more ambitious projects and a greater audience of content creators.

For the time being Jeffrey has written a 3D model importer script which you can use to get objects inside SL.

Whats next …?

Offline scripting
Another amazingly useful bit of tooling would be a virtual machine to test Second Life scipts out in, I haven’t seen anybody having done this yet but please let me know if you have. I guess that some people are waiting until Linden Labs adopts Mono as thein game scripting engine.

SL offline chat client
I know that some people have already started looking at this one, but with the sudden amount of information available on the SL protocol it’s only a matter of time before IM clients and plugins start to appear.