A month after its re-launch, Versu, the interactive storytelling platform, gained very positive feedback from the New York Times on Monday July 7th.
In Text Games in a New Era of Stories, Chris Suellentrop, the video games critic at the Times, describes the first title to be released under the new Versu label, Blood & Laurels, as seeming “to herald a new creative template that could be applied to nonfiction as well as fiction,” adding later in the article that it “offers is one of those quintessential video game moments, a first glimpse at something on the horizon.”
Blood and Laurels: a focal point for a New York Times article on the resurgence of IF games
The article itself is an examination of the Interactive Fiction genre, both looking back at the early days of text-based adventure games see as the origins of the genre, and at the state of play with the genre today as a medium enjoying a popular resurgence.
As with other reviews of the game, The New York Times piece underlines the feeling that with Blood & Laurels, one is less a reader and more a participant in a piece of theatre in which improvisation – both on the part of the reader and by the other characters – plays an important role in the unfolding scenes and in setting the direction the story may take.
In describing his experiences in reading / playing Blood & Laurels, Mr. Suellentrop also further expands on his comment about the “promise of what might come after it”, noting, “when I replayed the game, I didn’t feel that Marcus had become a different character when he decided to, say, betray Artus [one of the principal NPCs in the story] rather than execute his commands. Instead, it seemed that I was just learning how he might behave differently under the vagaries of circumstance.”
This potential to offer different perspectives on behaviour within certain situations is possibly where a yet-to-be-tapped wellspring of opportunity may lie for the Versu engine in the future, something possibly reflected in Mr. Suellentrop’s comments about Blood & Laurels offering a glimpse of something on the horizon. Richard Evans himself spoke to this, as I reported back in May 2013, when he presented Versu: A Simulationist Interactive Drama, at the Games and Media Event at the Imperial College London.
Whether or not the Versu team can / will move to expand opportunities in which the engine can be used beyond the IF genre remains to be seen; which is not to say the engine can’t survive without moving away from the IF genre. Far from it; the combination of Versu and Prompter would appear to be opening the doors on broad new opportunities for IF writers.
Certainly, and considering the bumpy road Versu has so far endured, it’s good to see both it and Blood & Laurels continue to gain the attention of the games media with positive reviews and feedback. Long may it continue.
Footnote: Richard Evans will be speaking at this year’s Develop Conference, (Brighton, England, July 8-10th), where he’ll be examining the relationship between games development and AI research.
Updates for the week ending: Sunday July 6th, 2014
This summary is published every Monday and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information
Black Dragon updated on July 2nd to version 2.3.9.9 (c) – core updates: fix for motion blur issue as a result of fitted mesh updates to avatar skeleton – change log
V1-style
Cool VL viewer updated on July 5th – Stable release to version 1.26.12.6 and Legacy version 1.26.8.64 – core updates: please refer to the release notes
It’s time to kick-off another week of fabulous story-telling in Voice, brought to Second Life and Kitely by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library.
As always, all times SLT / PDT, and unless otherwise stated, events will be held on the Seanchai Library’s home on Imagination Island.
Sunday July 6th, 12:00 Noon, Kitely: Selections from Lord of the Rings
One evening Frodo and Sam were walking together in the cool twilight. Both of them felt restless again. On Frodo suddenly the shadow of parting had falling: he knew somehow that the time was very near when he must leave Lothlorien.
“What do you think of Elves now, Sam?” he said. “I asked you the same question once before –it seems a very long while ago; but you have seen more of them since then.”
“I have indeed!” said Sam. “And I reckon there’s Elves and Elves. They’re all elvish enough, but they’re not all the same. Now these folks aren’t wanderers or homeless, and seem a bit nearer to the likes of us: they seem to belong here, even more than Hobbits do in the Shire. Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them, it’s hard to say, if you take my meaning. It’s wonderfully quiet here. Nothing seems to be going on, nobody seems to want it to. If there’s any magic about, it’s right down deep, where I can’t lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.”
Caledonia Skytower invites you to join her at the Rivendell Terrace as your favourite Lord of the Rings character or a member of your favourite Middle Earth race. On offer are selections from Tolkien’s classic story of Rings, Hobbits, Elves, Men, Wizards and more, all bound together in an enduring tale of good versus evil.
Teleport from the main landing zone to Willow Island, walk through the White Gate and up the Elven Path
Monday July 7th, 19:00: Space Wars: The Colonel’s Tiger Continues
This week, Gyro Muggins continues another story from Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin wars, The Colonel’s Tiger by Hal Colebatch.
The colony ship Angel’s Pencil is the first human vessel to encounter the Kzin. Following a violent exchange, the Angel’s Pencil relays her situation and the attack on her by the Kzin, including detailed information on the anatomy and physiology of their attackers. While the reports are dismissed by many as an outbreak of psychosis on the colony vessel, for one ARM agent, they trigger a memory about a confrontation between a human and a “tiger man”, which took place in the 19th century on Earth …
Tuesday July 8th, 19:00: A Dog’s Purpose, Concludes
Reincarnation can be confusing for a human; reborn into different lives, trying to learn lessons of the past in order to discover one’s purpose … Imagine what it must be like for a dog.
That’s exactly what humourist W. Bruce Cameron has done in his 2010 best seller A Dog’s Purpose. Bailey, pup of a stray, is rather surprised to find himself reborn as a Golden Retriever after being euthanized. It surprises him even more when, after a happy life involving a young boy, a farm and more, Bailey passes from the world … Only to find himself occupying the body of a German shepherd bitch. Thus comes the realisation that he is serving some higher purpose.
The problem is, and as his lives continue, Bailey can’t figure out exactly what that purpose might be…
Travel with Caledonia Skytower and Kayden Oconnell as they continue their journey through Bailey’s heartwarming and funny tale of many lives, a dog’s-eye commentary on human relationships and the unbreakable bonds between man and man’s best friend; a story in which love never dies, and true friends are always with us.
Wednesday July 9th, 19:00: Tall Tales: American Legends
Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, John Henry and more. Legends? Or were they real people whose large lives have gotten even larger with the telling and retelling of their adventures? From their origins in the days of the old frontier years. tall tales have become a major element of American folk literature. The tales of legendary figures of the Old West owe much to such stories, told in a way that makes the narrator seem to have been an eye witness; a good-natured exaggeration of the events and exploits becoming a major part of the story itself.
So come take a perch up on the top rail of the corral with Caledonia Skytower for some tall tales about the men and women of American folklore who cast long shadows.
Thursday July 10th
16:00: First Nation Tales
Caledonia Skytower and Dubhna Rhiadra sit down to bring us more native tales from the first peoples of the North American continent.
Drawing on number of sources and resources, Cale and Dubna have, over the years, drawn together collections of stories and legends from across a number of First Nation tribes, including the Zuni, Omaha, Paiute, and Hopi as well as legends from Kwaikutlsome in Western Canada. Some of these stories have been published, others of which have come from the long tradition of the spoken word, with archetypal tales handed down through successive generations.
“We have everything from Raven stealing the moon, to how Winter and Summer came to be, and the Creation of Corn,” Cale says of the stories. “The thing I like about them, is the imagery and the “themes” are almost Aesopian. They are all lesson/moral/cautionary tales.”
Join Cale and Dubhna as they delve into this treasure chest of tales and legends.
19:00: Legends of the Brethren Court
Shandon Loring takes to the high seas with none other that a young Jack Sparrow, Pirate Lord of the Caribbean Sea, Captain of the Black Pearl, and the youngest Pirate Lord ever admitted into the Brethren Court. With the Shadow Lord seeking to destroy the Brethren Court and it’s down to Jack – sometimes helped, sometimes hindered, by his fellow brethren Pirate Lords – to prevent it.
21:00: Seanchai Late Night
With Finn Zeddmore.
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Please check with the Seanchai Library SL’s blog for updates and for additions or changes to the week’s schedule. The featured charity for July-August is WildAid: seeking to end the illegal wildlife trade in our lifetimes by reducing demand through public awareness campaigns and providing comprehensive marine protection.
Episode #26 of The Drax Files Radio Hour was posted on Friday July 4th. Marking the 5th interview segment while the “regular” podcasts are on hiatus for the summer. It features none other than the remarkable Tony Parisi.
As usual, and as well as being available on the show’s website and on Stitcher, episode #26 is also on YouTube, and that version is also embedded at the end of this article.
For those not familiar with the name, Tony Parisi is the co-creator of the VRML and X3D ISO standards for networked 3D graphics, and a 3D technology innovator. He’s a career CTO / software architect and entrepreneur, has and is serving on a number working groups, and may also be familiar to some as one of the SVVR Creating the VR Metaverse panel in April 2014.
In June he published a blog post entitled Virtually Anywhere, which serves as the launching point for the interview. In that post, he makes the case for the metaverse being the 3D web, pointing to the work of Vladimir Vukićević and Josh Carpenter (who was also on the SVVR Creating the VR Metaverse panel) of Mozilla in bringing native support for the Oculus Rift and other VR devices to Firefox; work which is also being being paralleled by Brandon Jones at Google for Chrome and also within Internet Explorer. This is something he sees as undoubtedly beneficial, commenting:
We’re now seeing attempts to develop Virtual reality for the Oculus Rift using web technology. There are a couple of browser extensions you can get for Firefox and Chrome that will talk to the Oculus headset, you can write some JavaScript code for WebGL to render in stereo. And so people are starting to experiment with that, which is a really good thing, because I believe that open technology is the way we’re going to build the virtual reality metaverse.
He admits that the post is something of a manifesto to get VR onto the web, rather than seeing it recycled through walled gardens utilising proprietary applications which must be downloaded and installed in order to be used. It’s a manifesto worth reading, and certainly one to give pause for thought. A 3D web has long been talked about – often in terms of the technology which will supplant the web as we know it (e.g. as SL was once glowingly described) – actually seeing the web itself evolve to leverage virtual and augmented reality makes far more sense, being a more logical evolutionary step.
Vladimir Vukićević and Josh Carpenter – working on browser support for Oculus Rift and other VR devices – see their joint presentation (images: Wikipedia and Mozilla, respectively)
Through his development of VRML and X3D, Tony is no stranger to the potential of VR or, for that matter, virtual worlds. In discussing VRML, he points to Blaxxun Interactive (originally “Black Sun Interactive”, a name taken from virtual night club featured in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash), credited with the development of one of the first 3D community platforms designed for the Internet back in 1995.
While VRML didn’t catch on in the manner hoped, being an idea somewhat ahead of its time given the state of play with hardware, data transmissions speeds on the Internet, etc., it did give rise to X3D. This, together with improvements in home computing capabilities and better Internet connectivity, saw Tony and his colleagues poking at virtual world environments.
The famous Business Week magazine cover
“We were sitting in a garage doing it together,” he recounts, “And then Second Life got on the cover of Business Week in 2007. Everyone probably remembers the famous Anshe Chung avatar on the cover; and that’s when the boom starter and hype started around Second Life, around ’07.
“And by that summer, literally two months, three months later, I had a lot of investment money from large venture capitalists to do the same thing in a web browser, lighter weight, a little more mainstream targeted. Second Life was thought to be for the geeks, the shut-ins, all these pejoratives you can imagine, disregarding the creative impulse and all the wonderful stuff that was built. And so a lot of folks, including management in my start-up, for example, felt that there could be a middle-of-the-bell-curve mainstream virtual world experience targeted at about everybody that would work just great.”
The product was originally called Flux, and while it didn’t quite go as planned, as Tony wryly notes, it did morph into Vivaty, which carried on through until 2010, and Vivaty Studio is still around today.
Over recent months we’ve seen 64-bit versions of some third-party viewers arrive, notably Singularity and Firestorm, both of which are available in Windows and Linux flavours. Their arrival has raised questions both on when we might see a 64-bit version of the official Linden viewer and – more particularly in this case – when users might see a 64-bit Mac viewer arrive for Firestorm.
Well, the answer to this second question might be in the famous phrase, Real Soon NowTM.
Tonya Souther, a member of the Firestorm development team, brought word on Wednesday July 2nd that a 64-bit version of Firestorm for OS X should debut with the next Firestorm release – although it is liable to be a few months before that release is made.
Tonya has been building on the work started by Cinder Roxley – whom she acknowledges in the blog post – and has been getting things to a point where it is possible to compile a 64-bit version of Firestorm which will run on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later.
Firestorm developer Tonya Souther
A major part of this work has been in rebuilding the third-party libraries used in compiling the viewer, and Tonya explains some of the bumps in the road she encountered along the way to getting things sorted out. She also offers her own code repository for people to see what she has done in bringing everything together.
The results of Tonya’s efforts now resides in the Firestorm master repository, and will build successfully in either 64-bit or 32-bit, should anyone who self-compiles the viewer wish to give it a try.
Tonya advises anyone who does so, that in order to build a 64-bit Mac version, they must use Nicky Dasmijn’s version of the autobuild tool and specify the -m64 switch, although nothing else changes.
Tonya also goes on to state in reference to self-compiling:
If you’re switching from building a 32-bit Firestorm to building a 64-bit version, you should probably specify --clean to make sure you start fresh with everything at 64 bits. You also need to do a --clean when building for OS X from repository revisions after the change (revision 42327 or higher) if you’ve previously built for revisions before the change (42298 and lower).
As noted towards the top of this article, .DMG files for the Mac 64-bit build will probably not be made available until the next formal Firestorm release for all three platforms, so please do not request them from the Firestorm team before then. Also, and as with all 64-bit viewer versions, there will be no SL-specific version of the Mac 64-bit release when it does officially arrive, until such time as the Lab provides a 64-bit version of the Havok library used within SL-specific viewers.
Finally, and as advanced warning, Tonya notes that once the 64-bit version of Firestorm for Mac officially debuts, the Firestorm team will cease their support of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard – which is in keeping with the Lab’s ceasing support of OS X 10.6 in April 2014.
For further information, and for technical enquiries, please see Tonya’s blog post.
There were no deployments to the Main channel or to the BlueSteel and LeTigre RCs. Magnum received an update to the Experience Tools project, intended to provide a fix for BUG-6438 “Objects attached via llAttachToAvatarTemp to object owner detach when script is removed from prim inventory” and UI updates. – release notes.
Week 28 Updates – LSL Support for Materials
Subject to last-minute hiccups, it is likely that the LSL support for materials (normal and specular maps, and diffuse texture alpha mode) currently on BlueSteel and LeTigre will be promoted to the Main channel and to the Magnum RC in week 28 (week commencing Monday July 7th).
LSL support for materials looks as if it will go grid-wide in week 28 (week commencing Monday July 7th)
There is still no additional throttling in place for the LSL materials functions, as testing revealed they may not be any need for them. adding to this, Maestro Linden said at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday July 3rd, “It’s throttled via the normal script time throttles, there’s no special X/minute throttle. Well, also there’s a throttle for accessing the materials list by viewers. So even when your viewer knows that an object got material X via the update, it may have to access the RenderMaterials capability to look up the render parameters, and that capability access is throttled (the viewer knows to request at a rate below the throttle so that it doesn’t hit failures).”
Experience Keys
There is liable to be a discussion of the Experience Keys project at the next Simulator User Group meeting, to be held on Tuesday July 8th, with members of that project team in attendance. The meeting will take place in Denby, on the main grid, commencing at 12:00 noon SLT.
Webkit News
As I’ve previously reported on a number of occasions, Webkit is a third-party library used within the viewer for a number of tasks. For example, it powers the built-in web browser, and is used to display profiles (unless you’re using a viewer supporting legacy profiles). It is also used with like Media on a Prim (MOAP) and many in-world televisions. There have been an increasing number of issues with Webkit which have caused some pain (see BUG-4763 and FIRE-12642, and FIRE-11057), and Monty Linden has been poking at as a part of he ongoing work with the third-party libraries used in the viewer build process.
A major problem here is that Webkit itself has deprecated, leaving the Lab needing a replacement. Speaking at the Future of SL meeting, hosted by the Firestorm team on Wednesday July 2nd, Oz Linden indicated that a decision has been made to replace Webkit with the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). There is no indication of how long this work will take, as it is a very non-trivial effort which is leveraging work already carried out on the Lab’s next generation platform and other internal services.
GPU Updates
Also during the Future of SL meeting, Oz indicated that there are two upcoming changes which will affect GPUs and GPU memory usage. Both are currently with LL’s QA team.
The first eliminates using the GPU card name as a means of recognising the card’s capabilities. Once released, the viewer will be able to recognise GPUs a lot more dynamically. One benefit of this is that people with state-of-the-art GPUs should no longer experience the viewer failing to recognise their card and defaulting to basic graphics
The second is a fix for how the viewer uses a GPU’s memory. “Many of you will have noticed that we don’t use all of the video memory on your video cards,” Oz said of the fix at the meeting. “It turns out that’s because of a very old bug that plagued us a long time ago and we sort-of arbitrarily, in order to avoid tickling the bug, we capped how much memory we would ever use.”
With the fix, the viewer will be able to measure the amount of GPU memory and then allocate itself what is liable to be a reasonable share of that memory.
A month after its re-launch, Versu, the interactive storytelling platform, gained very positive feedback from the New York Times on Monday July 7th.
Episode #26
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 