Second Life – Page 238

February 17, 2012February 17, 2012

Linden Lab Acquires Little Text People Game Studio

Talk of Linden Lab branching out into new areas beyond Second Life isn’t new, but the acquisition of Little Text People game studio is the first sign to outsiders that it’s really happening. I was alerted to this news via Ann OToole’s post over at SLUniverse, which in turn links to a post on TechCrunch about the acquisition.

Then via Inara Pey’s blog post on the subject I discover that Linden Lab have issued a press release on the matter, the question remains, what will come of this, well that’s probably right after the question of who the bloody hell Little Text People are and what do they do?

Little Text People are in the interactive fiction game, which is something I’ve mused over before with regards to Second Life, it’s a perfectly feasible aim but seems somewhat wasted to a degree in a sandbox as rich as Second Life with it’s current character development limitations, which is probably why Linden Lab this see this as a suitable venture for their beyond Second Life line…. that’s not the name of the line by the way!

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February 16, 2012February 16, 2012

Pathfinding Moves Closer

If you want to keep up with technical developments you can go to user group meetings, read forum posts, read the wiki or go and read Nalates Urriah’s blog. I like the latter as it’s a good central repository. This week Nalates has been keep us up to date with the upcoming Pathfinding features, you can read the blog post here.

Pathfinding will help prims navigate around a sim all on their own, this has potential for non player characters, such as pets, barmen (and maids), ambience, bouncers and such like. Pathfinding alone won’t make this happen, as Nalates points out animations will still need to be used but pathfinding is a big step in the right direction of making this more easy to get going.

There’s an alpha overview on the Wiki, which being alpha means we shouldn’t get too excited just yet. The overview informs us of some of the commands and their LSL counterparts. There is also a Pathfinding Alpha Release wiki page which tells us that there will be a development viewer for this, but it has not yet been released. The feature will appear on Aditi first.

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February 11, 2012February 11, 2012

Kitely Announce Pricing

Kitely, the 3D virtual world which uses Amazon Cloud Services for delivery has announced its pricing plans:

Free plan – 120 minutes, 0 Kitely credits, 1 free world.

Bronze plan – $5 a month, 1200 minutes, 300 Kitely credits, 2 free worlds.

Silver plan – $20 a month, 5,000 minutes, 1,000 Kitely credits, 10 free worlds.

Gold plan – $50 a month, 12,000 minutes, 3,000 Kitely credits, 30 free worlds.

Platinum plan – $100 a month, Unlimited minutes, 5,000 Kitely credits, 100 free worlds.

Like in my last blog post, this one also requires a calculator! The way it works is that minutes can follow the user, so if you think you’ll only spend 5 hours a week in Kitely, then the bronze plan would be for you, the Gold plan gives you 200 hours a month, that’s roughly 50 a week, whereas the silver plan gives you around 83 hours a month, roughly 20 hours a week. Your minutes get used up as you spend time inworld, except when you visit worlds where the owner decides to pay for the minutes via Kitely credits.

This is where we need the calculator! If an owner decides to have his world set as free access, then he is charged 1 kitely credit per minute, per visitor, so if two users were in world for an hour, then that would cost the owner 120 Kitely credits.

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February 11, 2012February 11, 2012

Repeats, Offsets, Hellish Maths!

So I’ve been working for a while on trying to figure out how the bloody hell you calculate offsets and repeats to make textures play nicely in Second Life when it comes to applying the same texture across multiple faces. There’s an alternative method, which involves using planar texturing and using the extremely useful align planar textures option. Planar texturing has an additional performance overhead but this is largely considered to be negligible, according to the mesh/rendering weight article on the official Second Life wiki.

However I decided to go the painful route of doing this with default texturing, which took me to maths hell! Seriously. I wanted to use three prims to make a total prim size of 14 metres, two of these prims were just side walls, so their edges would be showing on my front and back wall and then in the centre would be the main piece. The inital size of the prims I set as 0.200 for the edge walls and 13.600 for the main piece, this sounded nice. Now this would mean I’d have to adjust the texture repeats for the edges, as they would not need to have a horizontal size of 1.000, it won’t render nicely if I leave it like that.

One quick way to get a rough idea of how to do this is to to copy your main piece, then untick resize textures and resize it. However I wanted pinpoint accuracy, the way to get a more accurate size of your needed repeats is:

prim size/total building face size.

So for example in this case my first edge piece is 0.200m, the total building face size is 14 metres, so I divide 0.200 by 14, this is where the first Maths problem arose, 14 doesn’t divide nicely into 0.200, it comes out at 0.014285714285714285714285714285714, if I use the unticking stretch textures technique it would come out at 0.014, because it rounds down but that’s not pinpoint accuracy, for pinpoint accuracy you need your calculations to have no more than three decimal places.

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February 9, 2012February 9, 2012

LL Receive Short Shrift From Bloggers

Linden Lab’s call for bloggers has received short shrift from quite a few bloggers, although I’m sure there will be some who will play ball. There have been negative posts from Inara Pey, Hamlet Au, Chestnut Rau, Crap Mariner (very humourosuly too) and another humourous take from Botgirl Questi.

On the official blog post there are also negative reactions, even Marianne McCann pours scorn on the deal, when Mari thinks something is a bad idea you really need to stop and think. Whomever came up with this idea must feel a bit like Andrew Lansley trying to get his wretched NHS bill through the house of commons, however to be fair, Linden Lab’s plan is nowhere near as evil as Andrew Lansley’s NHS bill!

I still think the idea has some merit, it’s not something I would personally participate in but there’s merit to the suggestion. Highlighting other bloggers and their views can help with reach, introduce people to new aspects of Second Life and demonstrate that there’s more to Second Life than a 3D chatroom, of course us Second Life regulars know there’s more to it than that but for someone investigating Second Life, the main website is a good starting point and should be full of the diversity of Second Life.

However, as with a lot of things Linden Lab have done over the years, it ain’t what they do, it’s the way that they do it.

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