Ciaran Laval

November 26, 2012

Unhinged Closes In On Target

Unhinged – A Festival For Eku’s head has made great strides in its fundraising aims to help pay for surgery for Eku, so much so that Eku is pretty close to the point where surgery can be booked. On Saturday Eku posted over at SLUniverse;

“Today Nephi passed me 1million linden dollars from the unhinged bookkeeping account.

Its almost hard to find the words to describe how the weight is lifting from our shoulders.. in just a few weeks we have gone from wondering how the hell anything was going to get done, to being close enough to start planning the surgery date.

My heart is absolutely bursting with so many emotions; thankfulness, awe, love… and i cannot say thank you enough to reflect how i truly feel..

love and many many chikins

eku”

However there has been further news since then.

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November 24, 2012November 24, 2012

Some Information On What They’ve Done To The Graphics!

Yesterday I blogged about mysterious improvements to the graphics subsytem which had caused my settings to change from high to ultra and had also seemed to produce a performance increase. I mentioned how the lack of information about these changes were puzzling. I have asked some questions, read other blogs and received comments.

This blog post is therefore coming to you in association with Inara Pey, Honor McMillan, Coby Foden, Hitomi Tiponi, leliel Mirihi and Theresa Tennyson for their contributions in a thread on the official forum.

So what’s the skinny on the lowdown? Well first things first, it appears that if your graphics settings are changing from high to ultra, your graphics settings might not actually be changing, confused? Well it seems that the new rendering subsystem means the bar has been lowered. Honor McMillan makes observations in her blog post on the subject:

When I logged on my settings did show the move to Ultra – BUT, when I looked at them in detail there really hadn’t been much change. Just the $*(@&^%$ physics of course.

The choices I had been using seemed to have remained, so I think one can assume there will be no frying of graphics cards. At least not because the viewer says you’ve been moved up to the next level.

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November 24, 2012

The Future Of Machinima Looks Bright

Over at Venture Beat, Dean Takahashi has a post about one of the discussion panels from the Machinima-Expo. Dean was a panelist on the discussion, there’s a video in Dean’s article of the discussion. The future for Machinima looks bright, but will it ever make a mainstream breakthrough? That seems to be the crux of the issue.

Dean concludes that he is seeing little evidence of Machinima going mainstream but with lower costs for producing Machinima and an active indie scene, it looks sure to grow in popularity. This year’s Machinima-Expo does look to have been a roaring success, so from that point of view, the future does indeed look bright.

Machinima of course goes way beyond Second Life, there are apparently new tools for film making coming from Valve and the Unreal 4 Engine for game developers, the ability to make better Machinima is conntinually improving.

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November 24, 2012November 24, 2012

Things With Potential That Don’t Quite Work Part 1

This is part one of what will probably be a one part series, but you never know. Anyway, there are some odd tips and tricks around LSL and I’m quickly going to look at one of them. Ok so, here’s the scenario, Unhinged – A festival for Eku’s head, has more goings on in terms of DJ events, than you can shake a stick at. So say I wanted to list some upcoming events I’d maybe have a board with this:

An Image Should Be Here — Unhinged Events

However this is a fast changing list of events and before I know it, my board needs to say this:

Now if I were using textures of course, these boards inworld would look funkier, the thing is I can make them a bit funkier, however I’m not using textures, I’m using llSetPrimMediaParams tricks. This is an imperfect solution but one with potential because I’m using HTML.

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November 23, 2012November 23, 2012

Comedy In Second Life Is No Laughing Matter

There’s an interesting thread over at SLUniverse asking about comedy clubs in Second Life. In theory comedy seems a decent fit for Second Life, voice is available, streams can be arranged, you don’t need to wake the neighbours with your guitar strumming, as live musicians potentially do, yet, there seems to be a void and that thread points out some harsh realities. These realities aren’t only an issue for comedians of course.

One issue is material, whereas a comedian can tour a country with a set that audiences will only see once, a regular comedian in Second Life has less of a geographical challenge, I mean we can all teleport to where they’re performing and once we’ve seen a set, why would we keep going back to see it again? Basically we go to them, rather than they coming to us. Ok this would work well for one off shows, but it’s difficult to keep it as a regular slot.

Another issue is the sound of silence, or rather the lack of live laughter. Comedians will probably thrive on laughter, that’s an indication that their set isn’t bombing, in Second Life, that’s not going to happen. A barrage of on screen lol’s, text heckling and people telling each other to turn off their animations or gestures is likely to be distracting for the performer.

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