Month: February 2013

Posted on

Joined Up Thinking Can Help Content Creation

When I was a lad I spent a lot of time on the Second Life Forums, not being productive. Now that I’m older, I spend a lot of time on blogs or other websites, such as dio, not being productive. However it has to be said that there are very productive sections on the Second Life Forums, your mileage will vary on what you consider productive, but the creation forum is a good place to discuss creation issues. There you can discuss your creation issues, ask questions, provide replies and discuss a lot of pros and cons of content creation. There are forums for fashion, Art, Music and Photography,  animation, machinima, building and texturing, mesh and LSL Scripting. Therefore pretty much all the bases are covered and yet, there is a glaring missing link.

There are no stickies pointing people to the wonderful world of the Second Life Wiki. The Wiki has some superb resources, that’s where you’ll find the LSL Portal, which has so much information about scripting functionality, this should be being highlighted.

The Wiki will also take you to the excellent Creation Portal, where you’ll find information on all your old creation favourites. In many ways things are arse about face, people go to the main site for information, they go to the forums and ask questions. The only link to the Wiki from the main page appears to be the Second Life Developers section, but really, Linden Lab should be promoting their Wiki all over the forums.

Continue reading “Joined Up Thinking Can Help Content Creation”

Posted on

Farewell Superflufee

Superflufee, your cuddly megastar made of mesh, roaming the virtual world & possibly in love with a prim lady, is moving on to pastures new in what appears to have been an intellectual property faux pas. I say faux pas because it’s ten to midnight here and I didn’t want to say au revoir….. yeah that was cheesy.

Anyway, I say faux pas because here was good brand promotion, Draxtor Despres, Pooky Amsterdam and many others have been exemplifying their excellent machinima of Superflufee over at meshinima.com for quite a while now. This promoted machinima really well, it also promoted the mesh avatar flufee very well, that’s what I mean by brand awareness.

Alas all good things come to an end and it seems as if the people who own the intellectual property rights of the avatar, don’t see the value in the machinima and want to move in a different direction. I don’t know the full ins and outs, I haven’t spoken to Draxtor Despres, Pooky Amsterdam or the IP owners of flufee the avatar, although you will find many flufee items being sold on the marketplace, which brings us back to the brand awareness issue because I wouldn’t know about that if I hadn’t seen the machinima!

Continue reading “Farewell Superflufee”

Posted on

Kansas State Researcher Studies Religion In Virtual Reality

Phys.ORG has an article on a Kansas State University researcher who is studying religion in virtual reality, in particular it seems Buddhism in Second Life. The article: Buddhism in second life: Anthropologist studies spirituality in virtual reality describes how Jessica Falcone of Kansas State University has been taking a look at religious practices in virtual reality and exemplifies why Second Life is a good place for such practices in certain circumstances.

The article is not earth shattering and it’s not really telling us anything new. However when we’re mostly talking about tier, marketplace, Flufee being no more, as revealed on this week’s Metareality Podcast, it’s sometimes nice to read an article about some of the core strengths of Second Life, namely user generated content and connecting people who are physically a great distance from each other.

One of the issues is that Jessica Falcone is interested in, is why are Buddhists building temples and meeting in Second Life, one of her quoted reasons:

“For some Buddhists, they may be living in an area without a Buddhist community and this may be the only place where they can practice their religion with other people. It is a way for them to come together and listen to teachings or to do group meditation sessions, even though it may not be possible in real life.”

Continue reading “Kansas State Researcher Studies Religion In Virtual Reality”

Posted on

Suspicious Activity Detected On Twitter, Security Breach For Anshe Chung?

Two unrelated reports of possible security breaches, one at Twitter which is confirmed in a blog post and one for Anshe Chung which is uconfirmed but seems to be true, as reported by Shiloh Lyric over at SLUniverse.

I saw in my Twitter feed last night that people were reporting they’d received an email from Twitter informing them that their passwords had been reset, then others pointing to that Twitter blog post to confirm that this might not be a phishing attack. However even the existence of a blog post doesn’t mean it’s not a phishing email, so if you receive one, tread with caution. The Twitter blog post actually has some good tips on password securit, such as trying to make your password at least ten characters, use a mixture of upper and lower cases letters, numbers and symbols and don’t use the same password on multiple sites.

Twitter are also  advising people to follow the advice of the US Department of Homeland security and disable Java on their computer.. and then rewinding a little to tell people to disable in their browser.

The email on the Anshe Chung issue is interesting in some ways, because it was sent by Linden Lab and relates to Second Life passwords. However it should be noted that this is not due to a security breach at Linden Lab.

Continue reading “Suspicious Activity Detected On Twitter, Security Breach For Anshe Chung?”

Posted on

Making More Plans For dio

Ok so I’m enjoying playing around with dio and The Search For Hod Rumble (see previous post for details) is well under way, whether it ever goes from private to public is another matter. My intention with this project is largely to play around with the features and get a good understanding of the platform whilst having fun at the expense of Rod Humble. However, even though I’m only at the start of my project, I have picked up some tips.

Plan your project

There are some really decent and very short tutorials on dio and they are well worth watching, this should help you with get started. However, whatever your project is, it’s worth planning and if you’re plan is interactive fiction, then you definitely need a plan. I advise using tools outside of dio to plan your project, a pen and paper will do along with some good old fashioned flow charts but planning works well, as I’ve discovered when I get into my project and realise I should have done things differently!

You’ll want a plot, then you’ll want a diagram of sorts, really, this is important, although you may have a photographic memory and not need plans and diagrams, for most of us, they are important. After a brief start you will soon realise you are losing track of your characters, rooms and paths if you don’t take notes. Do not be put off by this, taking notes is in the long term a good habit to get into anyway, as I discover the older I get and look back at my VBS and Powershell scripts at work or my LSL scripts in Second Life, where I thought I was too clever to need to comment on what I was doing! Bad move!

Continue reading “Making More Plans For dio”

Proudly powered by WordPress
Follow

Get the latest posts delivered to your mailbox: