Category Archives: Second Life

Second Life Ecosystem

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Here is fascinating example of what is possible within Second Life.

Laukosargas Svarog is a veteran of the UK games industry including some time spent on Lionhead Studios’ Black & White. Having taken some time of to raise a child at home, she has been putting her creative juices into the world of SL.

In just one year, her island of Svarga has been developed into a ‘fully-functioning ecosystem’ with early evidence of emergent behaviour in the plant-life she has created.

Just one of the many directions the blank canvas that is SL can be taken.

IBM and the future of games and the future of journalism

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You may have noticed that a few of us are very supportive of Second Life as a medium to explore the technology and to see the future of the web. Web 3.0 even.
This link takes you to something that is currently on the IBM main homepage. Which makes it (for us) very significant.

It is focusing on the fact that many of us know that some of what would be considered game technology actually has many more uses. I say this as a gamer for over 20 years. In some ways gaming changed the course of my career in that it is what interested me about computers in the first place back in the 1980’s.

Part of the IBM article mentions the embedded reporting of Wagner James Au who has been able to document the rise of web 3.0 from within web3.0 itself.

In reading his blog I have found out a fair few things, but I had not come across his other articles here that document Web3.0 and Blog2.0 from his point of view.

It is very insightful and well written. It also strikes a chord with many of the things I have been saying so maybe I am a little biased. See what you think though.

Outbound communications from Second Life

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I finally got to try the llhttprequest, it was in a 10 minute gap in the day, when my daughter who is 3 today decided she only wanted to play with Grandad.

Anyway, I did not intend to do things ‘properly’ but I did want to see if the new outbound http would let me add function to what I had already. Extend rather than port the XML-RPC inbound code I already had.

The existing “legacy” or “chesished” second life objects were 4 different instances of objects with my weatherrss script in them. Just to explain the objects in second life can and could open a channel making them available to be talked to from outside of second life. The outbound mechanism was only email.

Anyway this led me to create these objects, and cut and paste their unique ids into a piece of externally hosted PH. This PHP did a call to a well known weather service and then sent it into SL to the set of unique ids I had added to it. One click 4 objects get updated

The problem was triggering this, getting second life to send an email as a way to ask for a refresh was not great. I had a webpage with various URLs that were precanned calls to my PHP with various country location parameters.

Anyway the new 1.10 Second Life let me put a call in an object in an llhttprequest. So I simply got an object to use the same URLs as in the original webpage.

I now have an object in SL that can take user input and as my PHP to update all the various weather instances I have.

Obviously there are better 2 way mechanisms, like why bother using the XML-RPC at all, but this one liner let me exploit what I had and gain massive extra function.

It would now be very easy to create a map or globe with hotspots. Trigger external events by avatar presence and sensor events etc. All very useful.

A flexible world

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Tonight Second Life had a major upgrade. There are all sorts of nice things, but it is not very often we get a point release of a piece of software and all the users go WOW! Thats an exclamation not World Of Warcraft.

Because second life is as much a development tool as a place to hang out and try things, getting a new tab and set of properties for objects, or new functions in the code becomes instantly interesting.

One of the main things under the covers is a new httprequest function to let objects talk to the rest of the (www)orld. I was a bit short of time tonight and attracted by something much more shiny and engaging though. Flexible textures and primitives.

Everything in SL used to be flat, or made of lots of prims to make surfaces. Well now we have a whole new bit of physics to make wavy textures. I instantly turned my rock solid St. George England flag into a nice wavy flag, and then resized it to a nice england cape.

Things like this really inject a whole new set of ideas, and a chance to revamp some things.

wavy england flags

Games within games: Tringo in Second Life

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As we all know by now, Second Life is less of a game and more of a virtual world with its own economy. Of course, inhabitants in a virtual world need virtual pastimes. A quick scan of today’s advertised events demonstrates that ‘Tringo’ and ‘Slingo’ are both more popular than ever.

Second Life events

While Slingo (imagine a slot machine merged with bingo) has long been a popular game on the internet, Tringo seems to be more specific to Second Life.

So what is it? Well, earlier today, Wired reported on the background and popularity of Tringo, which is an unlikely cross-breed of bingo and tetris. I won’t try to cover it in detail here (perhaps because I’m busy playing it in another window? I’ll let you guess) but there are plenty of excellent coverage of the game out there already. If you don’t fancy trying it in Second Life, you can always play it on the publisher’s website instead.

There are plenty of other games in Second Life besides Tringo. In fact, Linden Labs hosts an annual contest to develop compelling in-game games. (2005 winners, 2006 winners).

It will take some time before any of them overtake the *ingo games for raw popularity in Second Life though. As a sign of its success, and another excellent example of a real world crossover, I notice that Tringo has become a GameBoy Advance title too.

Second Life 3d Printers and ARGs all in one post

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At last a business is emerging to combine second life and 3d printing

A few people may have heard me harp on about 3d printers over the last couple of years, yes even before blogs 🙂

We have seen a few ideas and hacks that let you get opengl renderings out to a 3d printer. I had talked about buying one anyway and running it in my garage.

Things being what they were I ended up in investing time and money in a Second Life which has had much more impact amongst my community.

Now though, things are merging, maybe it is time to start going RL to SL and back to RL all as a service. RL drives the creation of SL space and objects, those objects can now be recreated as RL objects.

Also as the TV show Lost seems to have started creeeping its way out Alternate Reality Game style (see post on perpexcity.com) with its http://www.thehansofoundation.org/ then maybe we have three trends merging? ARG in SL and RL but requring actual physical objects to be printed in 3d

Just for completeness. The Alternate Reality Game is a specific type of media experience. Notable for its weaving of various types of technology to deliver a message or story. The ‘story’ is usually not planned in advance , but the authors watch the fans as they start up wikis and blogs and websites and adjust their path and involvement based on that activity.

Unlike a lot of marketing, it seems to be based on not having much in the way of advertising to start off with. There is a reliance on a small clue (referred to as a rabbit hole) that the writers are relying on an observant and inquisitive person to pick up on. This then acts as a seed of viral enthusiasm. With the original finders feeling a sense of one upmanship or leaders of a community. Whilst still allowing the later adopters to pick up on the whole story.

BBC Radio1 party in Second life

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We have all just been to an excellent UK based event. BBC Radio 1 is broadcasting in Second Life.
The event is hosted in a dome, there are lots of free dances and glowsticks as people from around the world are listening to the Chart Show.

It is a bit of a watershed in that this is commsioned by the beeb. The builders are Rivers Run Red

I had a chat with Foxdie Ghia and Fizik Baskerville who were both very helpful. It seems again to add to the radio listening experience, wandering around seeing other people dancing away and chatting, without distrubing the whole media experience.

It is great that the BBC are prepared to dive into this sort of environment and the event is so far well attended by a great many experienced (far more than me Epredator Potato) SLers.

I arrived with my england flag that I threw together for the world cup. I was going to make it wave, but the party was too much fun to bother messing around in photoshop.

It certainly helps convince the doubters of the power of the metaverse, and again stops it being some geek fest.

Well done everyone 🙂

Just go to secondlife.com and use the event finder for Radio 1, its hooked into the big weekend in Dundee, but will no doubt be around for a while.

radio 1 party

radio 1 party

radio1 party

radio1 party

Web front end for Second Life ?

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With the enthusiasm for Second Life going strong among our group the ideas are flying everywhere. One major area of interest is getting information from outside in and vice versa. Along this theme one idea was that of presenting Second Life in a browser, this is in someways a step backward but would allow access to Second Life to be more pervasive and accessible to the majority, dipping in to the game for a short period of time or when on the move at an internet cafe could then be possible.

I stumbled across Hive7.com this morning when reading an article by Phoenix Psaltery in the latest copy of the excellent Metaverse Messenger Second Life’s web published news paper. Hive7 is very much modelled around Second Life, placing you in an MMO setting with custom scripting and object creation, only this time its all 2D in browser and written as an AJAX application. It’s a great example of what can be done when you’re prepared to push browser technology near to its limits. Unsuprisingly Hive7 has attracted the attention of Pathfinder Linden who spent some time there creating a replica of one of Second Life’s welcome areas. There isn’t currently any link up between Hive7 and the Second Life world, but with the similarities I’m sure either the Lindens or Hive7’s team are thinking about it….

Lessons from second life

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The last few weeks have brought a quite intense immersion in second life. What started with just checking what the tools were like has ended up being a quite a movement.

Quite a few of us have found that the linden labs platform with a mixture of 3d model creation tools and a very rich scripted language is letting us explore many of the ideas that may have been held up or on the backburner. It would appear that the open nature of second life, the ability to protect intellectual capital, to build and expand on other team members work is causing many more innovative ideas to surface.

Some of these will start to appear here on eightbar.

Due to our immersion in second life we were invited to attend an opening event at a campus island created by NMC. This was an interesting event in that many of the people were very new for Second life, but you could tell the more experienced dwellers by the costumes and looks. The community aspect that we all helped one another along and shared ideas was very liberating. The nearest analogy is a wiki, but in 3d and with all the contributors being there and seeing one another.

NMC event

I also have ended up putting some skin in the game by buying a private island (server) for us to share some of our ideas and the mere fact this existed has encouraged our own community to form around it.

Whilst it was very empty.

An empty island

We soon had a board room.

board room

But all work and no play makes jack a dull boy so we have all been out in the metaverse experiencing the richness of the user created world, such as live concerts.

Concerts

Its certainly brought a great team together who have a common interest, and are finding ways to express all sorts of creative and technical ability.

Second Life – Outside in

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A few of us have been exploring second life. I have a humble plot of land in the ‘metaverse’.

Being more techie than arty I have been exploring how to make the XMLRPC elements work, and seeing what potential there is in the scripting language that lives behind all these weird and wonderful objects.

The plan was to make a glowing orb respond to events outside second life. There seemed to be very few examples and lots of comments about things that did not work. However…… the orb on a stick in the right hand side of the picture is controlled by a form on a web page and some PHP.
So its state can be controlled by anyone accessing the page, rather than being actually in second life.


Light off

Light on

There is also some floating text (not shown) that hovers over the orb, the contents of this also comes from the standard HTML form.

The orb also emails a task ID I have elsewhere to tell me what the current message and state of the light is.

I believe that Linden Labs are looking at better ways for the objects to talk out of the ‘metaverse’ but for now it seems to work pretty well once you know the ID of the object you need to talk to.