Month: February 2012

Pathfinding prepares to blaze a trail on Aditi

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update: Linden Lab have made an initial annoucement regarding pathfinding.

In his December 2011 address, Rodvik touched on some of the work Linden Lab would be continuing through the early part of 2012  – such as performance and stability – and outlined some of the new features we can expect to start seeing in 2012. Of the latter, he particularly highlighted pathfinding, by saying, “For creators our first new feature for 2012 will be pathfinding. Because worlds feel most vibrant when they are full of life, one of our next focuses for Second Life is the ability to make high-quality “life” within it. So in 2012, we will be rolling out more advanced features that will allow the creation of artificial life and artificial people to be much smoother. For starters, in Q1, we’ll unveil a new, robust pathfinding system that will allow objects to intelligently navigate around the world while avoiding obstacles.”

NPCs: Alpha testing on Aditi soon?

Details of this new capability, aimed towards what are popularly referred to as Non-player Characters or NPCs, is now beginning to emerge.

Rand Linden has updated the pathfinding overview page on the SL wiki to provide initial information, together with an outline pathfinding API page. There is also a set of alpha release notes which suggest that people will be able to start testing the new capabilities on the Beta grid and include a bullet list of currently known issues.

The API and overview pages give insight into the LSL commands that are to be associated with pathfinding – most notably llCreateCharacter, described as, “Convert the current linkset to an AI character. By default, the character’s shape will be an upright capsule approximately the size of the linkset, adjustable via the options list. The linkset must use mesh accounting”, as well as associated commands intended to assist in various modes of movement (and evasion).

The overview page is interesting in that it gives more information on the fact that pathfinding will not itself animate an NPC:

Pathfinding is not an animation system. It does not provide a way to animate a biped or quadruped in conjunction with the new movement functionality. You must use existing methods to animate characters. Nevertheless, pathfinding enables more dynamic movement and provides a better system for controlling character movement than was previously possible. For more information on creating animations, see Animation.

The alpha release notes provide a list of the Aditi test regions however, at the time of writing none appear to be open to public use as yet – I was unable to access any of them earlier today, either via the World Map or via the use of the Address Bar within the Navigation Bar of the Viewer. The four regions in question are (SLurls):

  • PathTest1 (secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/PathTest1/131/101/23)
  • PathTest2 (secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/PathTest2/100/170/26)
  • PathTest3 (secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/PathTest3/103/127/23)
  • PathTest4 (secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/PathTest4/127/194/29)

Given they are on the Beta grid, the most obvious way of accessing them is to log-in to Aditi and use the World Map to locate them prior to teleporting.

According to the alpha release notes, the pathfinding commands will only be available on these regions, which appear to include various obstacles and courses NPCs using the functions can attempt to negotiate.

Pathfinding regions

A pathfinding tutorial is also in the offing, although the page for it is currently little more than a placeholder at present – again, expect more updates as they become available.There is also a wiki index page for a category of pathfinding, which should be of assistance in quickly locating the broader information on the subject as well as details of specific dedicated or associated LSL commands.

From this, it would appear that LL are pretty much keeping to the schedule outlined by Rodvik at the end of last year and that by the time you read this, the pathfinding test regions on Aditi may well already be open to public access. For those who are keen to get involved in the project, the updated wiki pages are worth keeping an eye on in lieu of more direct information coming through other channels, such as the blog or technology forum.

ISM: looking to the future

Posted on by Inara Pey

There has been some speculation circling as to the state-of-play with the International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life. The ever-vigilant Daniel Voyager first reported the sims had vanished from the SL map, alongside that of NASA’s CoLab sim (ISM is not in any way linked to, or affiliated with, NASA). since then, questions have popped up elsewhere regarding the status of the project.

ISM: Down – but far from out

As the ISM has been such a landmark feature of Second Life, I decided to contact Kat Lemieux, a prime mover behind the project, to find out what is happening and what the future might hold.

The first order of business was to establish why the ISM regions – Spaceport Alpha and Spaceport Bravo – had vanished from the grid. Rather than being “gone forever” from SL, their absence has been the result of a number of circumstances combining at the wrong time to leave bills unpaid. However, matters are in hand to get things up and running again, as Kat confirmed to me, “Right now I’m trying to straighten out an issue between PayPal and LL billing, but that should be resolved in a day or so, and the sims will be back soon afterwards.”

And when they are back – expect a grand re-opening party to be announced!

Nor does the good news end there.

While much is still in flux, and the longer-term future of the ISM needs to be carefully considered, Kat remains confident that it will continue to be a presence in SL and may even look towards opening “branch museums” on other suitable grids at some point – but the focus will remain on Second Life.  “I don’t foresee ISM leaving SL completely as long as we can afford to stay,” she told me. “Several island owners have offered to host us on their land if we decide to sell the sims, but whatever we decide, SL is still where the people are, so we need to have a presence there.”

ISM has been cataloguing humanity’s achievements in space within Second Life since 2005

Other changes may be less obvious, but are important to the future running of the museum. The ISM Corporation, for example, has been wound down, and will be replaced by a more focused team working on the project.  “Since we created it for the purpose of obtaining tax-exempt status, and that didn’t happen, there was no reason for it to continue, and it was just sucking up resources,” Kat explained in reference to the decision to wind-down the corporation – an understandable move in the circumstances. The ISM website, however, will be continuing, and updates are due to be put out in the near future – although again, initial focus will remain on getting the ISM regions back up and running smoothly in the short-term. In addition to the website, there are plans in hand to launch a public Facebook page for the ISM to help further raise the profile of the project.

As with all large-scale operations,  ISM has had a few internal issues to deal with along the way that have tended to slow things down a little – fund-raising and business management being two of them, as Kat candidly explained to me. “Trying to pay for maintenance and running a business as opposed to playing with prims and textures just aren’t as much fun for the kinds of people who were initially attracted to starting the museum. Even running events, which we did quite a bit, wasn’t the same. That’s fair, as there is no law saying the same people have to enjoy every aspect of such an enterprise; but we didn’t seem to have enough of those willing to do the business side.” These aren’t issues that will easily go away, and one senses that if there is someone out there with the passion and drive to lend their weight to the project in these areas, their help and support would be most welcome.

But for now, things are looking decidedly bright for the ISM – and the current down-time will hopefully shortly become little more than an unscheduled interruption to what has been one of SL’s finest and most informative destinations since 2005.

If you would like to help support the ISM and volunteer your time and abilities, contact Kat Lemieux in-world. If you would like to show your support for the project via a donation, you can do so via PayPal to ismuseum-at-gmail.com (remember to replace the “-at-” with “@”!) or in Linden Dollars paid to AyeEss Emms in-world. 

Related Links

Linden Homes – whither next?

Posted on by Inara Pey

At the end last week, Linden Lab started putting out a survey aimed at Premium Members on the subject of Linden Homes. This is in all likelihood the follow-up to a comment made by Vogt Linden at SLCC 2011 that the Lab would be looking at Linden Homes, wherein he noted that – and without going into specifics – the scheme had been good for user retention, but had grown somewhat stale, and that as such LL would be looking at how to refresh the offering.

my Linden Home

The survey is a good first step, and in keeping with recent moves by Linden Lab to seek feedback from the community (such as with overhauling inventory). The survey itself is a multi-page affair, largely with multiple choice responses in the form of radio button (either / or) and check boxes (multiple responses). It takes a couple of minutes to complete, and it by-and-large asks pertinent questions on Linden Homes and the wider matter of Premium benefits (which you are asked to individually rank in terms of personal importance to you, the options for each benefit running from Very Important to Not Important, with Neutral as the middle ground).

There is also an opportunity to provide more specific feedback to the Lab at the end of the survey in the form of two free format text boxes in which Linden Home owners are encouraged to give detailed feedback and thoughts / suggestions.

In some respects, Linden Homes straddle a difficult divide. On the one hand they offer a quantifiable benefit for new users that encourages them to take out Premium membership and helps guarantee they remain engaged with SL as a result of the “investment”. On the other, there is a risk that they impact on the overall land rental / housing market, particularly for those who gear their business model specifically at smaller land holdings and what might be termed “starter homes” in SL. How big an impact this actually is itself hard to quantify – at least for those of us not engaged in that specific market segment.

Certainly, it is probably fair to say that Linden Homes, as currently implemented, haven’t worked entirely as originally intended – when launched, LL did see them as a means of getting people “onto” the property ladder, with the aim of people then moving on to “bigger” things land-wise as their needs grew. I’m not entirely convinced this has been the case – and the desire to revamp the offering would suggest that LL feel the same way.

The problem is, of course, how do they improve the offering, without running the risk of being seen as “further” eating-in to the rental market as a whole (if this is indeed an issue)? Making Linden Homes more attractive through larger prim allocations, larger land footfalls, etc., does run the risk of drawing people away from renting elsewhere – and I suspect that LL are fully aware of this risk, as the survey suggests some possible enhancements in other areas:

  • The ability to build more complex objects
  • Decorate a home more elaborately
  • Have more control over the Linden Home land parcel
  • Replacing the Linden Home with a personal build
  • More community events and social opportunities
  • Tutorials such as building & scripting
  • Land market expansion opportunities.

Of these, the last three strike me as the most flexible of options if harder to practically implement, although the first three are liable to be potentially the more popular among respondents. Land market expansion I would see as a useful element to add, simply to try to help stimulate the “upward” movement of those coming into Linden Homes that LL originally hoped would be the case – although I admit, I’m somewhat stumped as to how this could be practically achieved.

Community and social events might also work – the Linden Homes are billed as “communities”, but the truth of the matter is, “community” plays a very minor role. Most Linden Home regions have the same issue as everywhere else – large tracks of land, few people. Were LL to be more pro-active in stimulating regional events it  might encourage a greater feeling of “community” – although that is admittedly a big might, and one very hard to measure in terms of overall benefit / success compared with the amount of effort required to get things organised (or in even encouraging residents to take up the challenge).

As it stands, the Linden Homes regions do have “community centres” that largely seem to be devoid of traffic and simply going to waste – so attempting to put these to better use might be worthwhile. As might opening them to advertising by in-world businesses and estates, which itself has two potential benefits: money raised from the use of vendor boards could be put towards the cost of monthly (or whatever) entertainments, it demonstrates practically that LL are working more “with” rental estates rather than in “competition” with them.

A further idea might be for LL to simply reduce the volume of Linden Homes per region (or offer more in the way of regions devoted to parkland and / or water), and offer Linden Home residents greater opportunities of using such “rural” sims – such as allowing them to rez their own boats to go sailing or explore the waterways, or vehicles / horses to explore parkland and country tracks – perhaps even supply rez-on-demand facilities for home owners to use.

These are entirely off-the-top-of-my-head ideas which may or may not be practical. I’ve tried to give full and detailed feedback to LL on Linden Homes via the survey, complete with a range of thoughts and ideas. I’d encourage any of you yet to receive the survey / yet to respond to it to do the same. That LL are seeking feedback is to be applauded, even if (like me) you don’t use your Linden Home that routinely or as your primary place of residence in SL and / or see little reason to change things.

UWA 5th Machinima Challenge; L$700K in prizes

Posted on by Inara Pey

On Friday February 10th, the University of Western Australia (UWA) kicked-off their fifth MachinimUWA Challenge under the title Seek Wisdom.

On offer are prizes totalling L$700,000 (approx. $3,000 US), including a top prize of L$130,000 and a UWA special prize of L$100,000, with eleven prizes in total on offer. The challenge is being co-sponsored by UWA, AviewTV, Philip Vought & The Tornado Gallery.

The Major Rule and Other Requirements

To quote from the press release on the Challenge:

Your machinima can be about whatever you choose, but there is one rule all entries must follow. The only requirement is that at least ONE of the 100 Treasures from UWA must form part of your story. These are actual treasures, however at least 17 of them exist on UWA land in Second Life. You may choose to include as many of the treasures as you like so long as there is at least ONE. Apart from this, feel free to film anything, anywhere. You may use props at the location, or maybe want to change the footage later during the post process, this is up to you… as long as the treasure or treasures you choose to be part of your Machinima can be recognised and form part of your storyline.

The recommended running time for entries is around 4 minutes 30 seconds in length. This isn’t a hard rule, but entries aiming for the UWA L$100,000 special prize, which will be awarded to the machinima that best captures the essence or spirit of 100 years of seeking wisdom at UWA, must fit within the recommended length.

Additionally, entrants are asked that they acknowledge the works featured in their submission and the lands in which the submission was filmed.

Completed entries should be uploaded to a suitable broadcast medium (e.g. Vimeo, YouTube, etc.), and links to the film sent to the UWA’s Jayjay Zifanwe and LaPiscean Liberty.

Closing Date for Entries

Midnight SLT, June 30th, 2012.

About the Theme

“Seek Wisdom” is the UWA’s own motto, found in its coat of arms, and was selected as the theme of the challenge to honour the new way education is delivered at UWA, “New Courses 2012.” The requirement to include at least one of the 100 treasures from the UWA in entries is to mark the university’s upcoming centenary in 2013.

Where to find 17 of the 100 UWA Treasures in SL

To help machinimatographers get started, the UWA press release for the Challenge lists the location of 17 of the treasures in SL, and entrants are encouraged to read about the 100 online treasures in the UWA book to gain a further feel for possible subject matter.

Prize List in Full

  • 1st Prize: L$130,000
  • 2nd Prize: L$105,000
  • 3rd Prize: L$85,000
  • 4th Prize: L$60,000
  • 5th Prize: L$40,000
  • 6th – 10th Prize: L$30,000
  • UWA Special Prize: L$100,000 (awarded by UWA members of the committee)
  • Best Machinima Poster: L$10,000 (awarded by SL Machinima Poster Archive; Glasz Decuir)
  • Machinima Audience Participation Prize: L$20,000

Links

Questions relating to the challenge should be sent directly to the UWA’s Jayjay Zifanwe. Seek wisdom poster by Eliza Wierwight.

Viewer release summary 2012: week 6

Posted on by Inara Pey

Updates for week ending: 12 Feb, 2012

This is intended to be a weekly round-up of current public SL viewers (of which I’m aware). Links to my most recent reviews of said viewers will be included, but may not reflect the current release. As few Viewers are static, and releases are made according to individual development cycles, further versions of any given Viewer may well be released between these updates, and as such the information here may become out-of-date as the week progresses. Please check with the relevant download pages.

Changes since the last round-up shown in green.

SL Official Viewers

Available for: Windows, Linux, Mac

V3.2-based TPVs

V1-based TPVs

  • Cool VL version 1.26.2.16 (stable) / 1.26.3.4 (experimental)
  • Imprudence version 1.3.2 (stable) / 1.4.0 (beta 2)
    • Released: 1.3.2 – May 18th, 2011; 1.4.0 – Sept 25th, 2011 (download page)
    • Available for: Windows, Linux, Mac
  • Phoenix Version 1.6.0.1600
  • Singularity version 1.6.0.3

Related Links

Of blogs and blogging

Posted on by Inara Pey

Over the last couple of days, I’ve had the opportunity to re-visit LL’s recent call to bloggers through commenting on a couple of fellow blogger’s posts on the subject – namely Mariis’ Explorations and Nalates Urriah. Mariis and I are pretty much on the same page on things – as our exchange demonstrates; Nalates admits herself perplexed as to the derisive reaction of some bloggers (and I count myself among them), and I’ve attempted to provide explanation which actually formed the basis of what I’m about to say here.

These exchanges have been part of a wider cogitation on the matter, and as such, I’d like to put a further alternative idea to Linden Lab on the matter of working with the blogging community. I’ll leave it to TPTB at LL (assuming they’re still reading this blog!) to decide on the usefulness / applicability of the idea. In putting it forward, I’ll also state that I’ve little doubt the broad thrust of what I’m outlining here may well have been stated elsewhere and well ahead of me – so I apologise to those that have raised it first if I’m repeating things.

The idea is this: rather than seek to solicit blog posts on an exclusive basis, LL should perhaps consider looking to reprint suitable blog articles within their own web space. This may well be slightly more labour-intensive for them (although given by their own admission they do have staff routinely perusing and reading blogs, so the overhead shouldn’t be that big an issue) – but there would be significant benefits, in particular:

  • They show that they are willing to work on a more collaborative basis with the community
  • They are free to cherry-pick that articles they wish to reproduce in their pages without let or hindrance, and free from controversial “public” submission guidelines
  • The official blogs stand to get fresh content
  • They don’t directly impact on indvidual bloggers’ freedom to cover SL or their ability to enjoy the drect benefit of having their own words appearing on their own pages.

Such an approach stands to generate a lot of goodwill from the blogging community. For a start, who would not feel somewhat flattered upon the receipt of an e-mail from LL requesting permission to reprint an article that has taken time and effort to put together? The e-mail needn’t be too hard to put together either; I’d suggest something like: “Dear X, we recently read your blog article on Y and found it to be both informative and entertaining. We would like to reproduce it in under the Guest Blogger section of our website. You will of course receive full credit for the work, together with a link to your own website. If you are happy for us to include your article in our pages, please reply to this e-mail within Z days, together with a 3-sentence biography relating to yourself. We will, of course, inform you when we do reprint the article”. Or words to that effect. I think it fair to say that such an e-mail would give a person quite a feeling of recognition / involvement.

It would also give LL the freedom to reproduce articles they like and which fit their overall requirements. Any concerns relating to wording, etc., could be taken care of through the use of a disclaimer printed ahead of the article, vis: “The views and opinions in the following piece are those of the named author. They do not represent the views or opinion of Linden Research Inc., its employees or agents.”  (or again, something similar). Granted, it’s not 100% watertight, but given LL are retaining a free hand in selecting the items they might wish to reproduce, one suspects contentious or deliberately controversial articles are not going to be among their likely candidates for reprinting.

And on the matter of exclusivity itself: would LL really be losing out to any great degree in foregoing the requirement? I actually don’t think so. I rather suspect (and with respect to all) that, with the exception of a handful of high-profile blogs, LL has a much broader potential readership in the form of the entire SL community bouncing in and out of their website via individual Dashboards than the majority of bloggers enjoy on an individual basis. As such, LL aren’t likely to miss out that much because some have read the article ahead of it appearing in the official website.

All-in-all, and subject to my not having missed something in the equation, this would seem to be a win / win situation for all concerned. Linden Lab get to freshen-up their own blogs and are seen to be positively connecting with the community; bloggers get to keep on doing what they do best without diverting their attention away from directly nurturing their own blogs, whilst also having the freedom to turn out posts that might well be suited to being picked-up by the Lab.