Shadows, a first look for me

Having recently acquired a new video card I decided to check out the unsupported shadows feature that’s appeared in the latest releases of the SL Viewer. The results weren’t too bad. The resulting frame rate for me was 8 FPS, somewhat usable for general SL use. The below video is the results I got.

youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_Hd6rX8SnI

You’ll notice that alpha textured items tend to flicker in and out and that the avatar shadow tends to degrade into point shadows.  Below are a few screen captures. The built in picture utility doesn’t work and fails to capture the shadows. A Print Screen or external utility will capture them though.

In the above pic notice how dark it is at noon below Crap’s Clock Tree. Also notice how the eyes tend to glow/shine a bit too.

The Palm trees cast a shadow over the plane in the late afternoon. The shadows look weird at high noon as the prims used for the palm leaves  are vertically oriented and cast almost no shadow when the sun is overhead.

Midnight is really dark now, even with the moonshine. GoSpeed’s fedora shades her face making it hard to distinguish her features.

I can imagine that many improvements and tweaks will occur before the shadow features are officially incorporated into the SL viewer.

 

Some thoughts on SnowGlobe

Wow, what can I say. Snow Globe works really, really fast. I’ve used it for a week now and it is my default viewer now. A lot of other bloggers have written about it, notably Gwyneth Llewelyn. I’m not sure if she’ll bring this up in a future post but it occurred to me that the potential implementation of private/personal asset servers opens up a whole new world for moving assets between grids. The biggest issue with going to an opengrid is that you have to start fresh with basically no inventory and very few options to outfit your avatar. Imagine of you will that your avatar’s shape, skin, prim hair, Animation Overriders and clothing were hosted on a server outside of the SL main grid. You could teleport between the Main grid, OSgrid, Hypergrid, OpenLife grid, and essentially be the same avatar in appearance in all of them.

Of course this presents a wide range of issues and challenges. Being able to protect the intellectual rights of the creators would be a problem to tackle. Perhaps some sort of encryption or watermarking would be called for. I can also imagine a whole new class of merchant that sells their products outside of SL. If such a scheme were to take off I can also imagine SL avatars imported into other virtual worlds. Just so long as the game/world engine could faithfully render the correct amount of polygons and animate it in a decent manner I can see it taking off. Picture this: Hamlet Au conducting an interview with his trademarked white suit in World of Warcraft or Crap Mariner terrorizing the peaceful resorts of Blue Mars.

I’ve just scratched the surface here and I am sure others can take these ideas further. The Metaverse will potentially get much bigger if it goes in this direction. Perhaps our avatars will not have to die if our current worlds fade away.

http://gospeedracer.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/virtually-forever/

 

Torn to Pieces (my heart)

I saw something today that literally tore my heart to pieces and made me cry out loud. Like many of you I am following the events in Iran closely. A revolution 30 years ago toppled a despised ruler who tried to force secularism down the throats of the Iranians. Fast forward to today and another revolution is trying to build up speed to topple an oppressive regime using fear and religion to keep people in line and obedient. Whereas the previous regime used secret police to do their dirty work the current rulers use plain clothes militia (Basiji) that are really no better than armed thugs. With the power granted to them by their weapons and tacit approval by the government they terrorize and intimidate anyone that stands out and presents a threat.  On 20 June a 26 year old Iranian woman named Neda Agha Soltan was on the street with her music teacher watching the demonstrations when  a sniper shot her in the chest with a high power weapon. In less than 2 minutes she died from her traumatic injuries, nothing could have saved her. This is a video of her last moments. Watch it. This is what the enemy of freedom does to it’s enemies. If you turn your back it will come for you and your loved ones. This lovely woman was some body’s daughter. She could represent anyone’s daughter, sister, or wife.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlehNLfk90c

If you can do something, do it! If not, then talk about it, share it. Tell your president this should not stand.

When you look at this video her eyes look at the camera phone at first. She is looking at all of us.

 

KONA Radio in the news!

A while back I was interviewd for VR Style Magazine June 2009 Issue. The issue is now out and can be found here http://issuu.com/slvibe/docs/vrstyle-june09 . The interview can be found on page 142-145. All in all a pretty nice article. Maybe a bit brief but I’ll take the publicity where I can.  In the interview I stressed on how I tried to stay in touch with the SL community through DJ gigs, SL based sponsorships, promoting our “hometown artist” and sharing the music where I can. I recall as a youth hearing community radio stations that interacted with the locals. That is increasingly becoming a rarity nowadays. DJs and sales staff are being whacked left and right in favor of canned and syndicated programming. Those old fashioned mom and pop radio stations do exist. The other day I was exploring the great plains in Google Map and stumbled across a wiki link for Rugby, North Dakota, the geographic center of the North American continent. Seems they have their own radio station. Visit this link  KZZJ and explore the site a bit and you’ll get the picture on how radio used to be.

 

One of the cool mashups that plays on KONA Radio

This has been one of my favorite mashups ever from an artist called “CCC” . How many artist can you spot in this video?

 

A LOTR Fan Movie – The Hunt For Gollum

I saw this on my Plurk time line today and I was wowed by it! A group of Tolkien fans have come together and created a fan fiction movie 40 minutes in length dealing Aragorn’s search for Gollum. In the Ring trilogy it’s only given a brief description so these people decided to write and film it for themselves. The website for the product is here :  http://www.thehuntforgollum.com/

Here are the trailers on Vimeo:

The production values are outstanding to say the least! In a way these fans remind me of how some in SL take fiction and create their own stories from it via Role Play. And they do it very cheaply too. A game based on a popular franchise cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to produce. An SL group will pay a minuscule fraction of that. Now compare “The Hunt for Gollum” produced for some $6,000 to the LOTR trilogy that cost millions. Wow, just wow.

I know where I will be the 3rd of May!

 

RC sailboat – SWB Skutsje

Every now and again a new toy or device arrives in SL that is just plain fun. The last thing was Seven Seas Fishing. It is fun, social and you are awarded with free fishes, creatures and puzzles to solve. Today while in Nantucket I saw something that caught my eye. A “radio controlled” sailboat. The Dutch sailing barge, or “Skutsje” was lovingly crafted by Surfwidow Beaumont and it incorporates several HUDs (Control, Camera, and Control). Like most sailboats in SL the Skutsje uses the SL wind physics to drive it (it also can run on a motor). You also get a hand held remote to simulate the experience.

The particle wakes are a nice touch too:

The package also comes with miniature bouys so you could set up a race course and run for time.

I recommend using Mouselook to sail it and using CTRL-8,9,0 to zoom in and out to track the sailboat better at distances.

You can buy your own for only $250L here:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nantucket/39/183/22