New World Notes

Force Awakens Gives Second Life to Star Wars Roleplay in Second Life (So At Least It's Got That Going For It)

Not film still - a screenshot from Second Life (via Zam)

Force Awakens may be a totally disappointing movie in relation to three-plus decades of anticipation (just admit in your heart you know it's true), but it has given a second life to the once thriving Star Wars-roleplay community in Second Life. This from Ashley Barry, a former active member of that community, who visited after a long absence:

The Force Awakens, the most recent Star Wars installment, has led to a new surge of activity in the RP community. When I traveled to the latest Coruscant sim a few days after the film came out -- there have been multiple versions of the planet in Second Life throughout the years -- it was populated with so many diverse looking avatars: Mandalorians, Bothan soldiers, Twi’lek’s, and more. I was home again and it felt damn good.

More from Ashley here, who describes an incredibly detailed sub-community that has been thriving in SL for roughly a decade. I last wrote about it in 2008, when it was in full flower:

Want to Make Human in an Open Source Avatar Creator?

Make Human is an open source avatar creator which longtime avatar expert Connie Arida just pointed me to via Comments. Noodling around on the site for the first time, the platform's skeleton and musculature system seems pretty impressive (as above, from the gallery), but falls short when it comes time to create vividly human avatar faces. (Hello Ms. Uncanny Valley.) But maybe that just means they need some help from folks in the SL avatar community, who are working a pretty high level now. Speaking of which:

Will Amazon's Lumberyard Not Unity Rule the Virtual World?

Free, cross-platform, based on the revolutionary CryEngine, connected to Amazon's server architecture, which many MMOs and other multiplayer games already depend upon, it sure seems like it:

Support for mobile devices and VR headsets is in the works and should be available within a couple of months... If your game needs a scalable, cloud-based runtime environment, you should definitely take a look at Amazon GameLift. You can use it to host many different types of shared, connected, regularly-synchronized games including first-person shooters, survival & sandbox games, racing games, sports games, and MOBA (multiplayer Online Battlefield Arena) games.

Sort of strange that Project Sansar isn't being developed in Lumberyard (or is it?), seeing as Amazon's Jeff Bezos is an early investor of Linden Lab. Also notable:

New World Notes Readers Overwhelmingly Support Sanders & Clinton - Typical Politics for Virtual World Fans?

On the eve of the New Hampshire primaries, here's the US political candidate you're most likely to support:

So Bernie Sanders has the most support, followed somewhat closely by Hillary Clinton -- both of whom are trailed far behind by all GOP candidates. (With Donald Trump, somewhat surprisingly to me, the most preferred Republican candidate by NWN readers!) I'm also surprised that neither of the Libertarian candidates I included in the survey, Gary Johnson and John McAfeee, rated a single vote.

Question is -- how typical are these results for fans of VR in general or Second Life in particular?

Unreal's In-VR VR Editor: Looks Impressive, Exhausting

Now this is pretty impressive, and an interesting solution to an existing problem in VR development:

"The industry's dirty little secret with VR development," says Epic founder Tim Sweeney, "is we're developing these VR experiences while we're sitting at a PC using a mouse and keyboard." This isn't actually a secret, but it's something that feels increasingly weird as the technology improves. Things like a sense of scale don't translate well between flat screens and VR; props that feel normal in a traditional PC game, for example, might look outlandishly large or small in an immersive environment.

The controls are a bit similar to what I've seen with High Fidelity, but much more complex and suitable for professional 3D modelers. One small problem:

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Despite Little Usage, New York Times Puts Its Virtual Reality-Based News Coverage on Front Page
• MMO Racism: Slurs Usable as Search Terms in Both Second Life's Marketplace & In-World
• Despite 5M Shipments, Google Cardboard Shows Little Use
• High Fidelity Adds Feature for Recording Complex NPC Behavior in Oculus Rift-Integrated MMOs
• Linden Lab CEO Teases Project Sansar Screenshot of Rapidly Created Mars VR Experience

Linden Lab CEO Teases Project Sansar Screenshot of Rapidly Created Mars VR Experience

Well now Ebbe Altberg, this is an interesting thing to tease us with:

Took just a few hours to create a multi-user #Mars #VR experience with #ProjectSansar pic.twitter.com/YvTER74Kui

— Ebbe Altberg (@ebbealtberg) February 4, 2016

Much more appealing and intriguing than the generic Project Sansar images we saw last November. Far more intriguing is the claim this took just a short time to create. I think that strongly implies one of three ways to handle user-generated content I floated last May:

Flickr of the Day: Davey Spinotti's Spectacular Second Life

Davey Spinotti has a copious and crystalline collection of Second Life scenery photos, some quiet, interior still shots, some expansive, lush scenery, some dramatic urban landscape -- all given a post-production shine to make them seem like paintings. Above, for instance, the classic steampunk city of Babbage. Click through to each of them, because they usually come with further info on the location, and links to visit them yourself.

High Fidelity Adds Feature for Recording Complex NPC Behavior in Oculus Rift-Integrated MMOs

The latest update of High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's upcoming Oculus Rift-enabled virtual world, has another new feature besides massive concurrency that's seriously impressive: Full body avatar recording which can be applied to an NPC.

"The recording takes what your avatar is doing and any of the attachments and records them all," as High Fidelity's Chris Collins explains it. "With all the movement trackers that are available, it is very easy to record avatars and then make them playback on whatever trigger you want. E.g. if an avatar walked into a room, make an NPC turn around and and start talking [to them]."

One powerful application of this technology is making NPCs in MMOs much more complex and interesting. Usually, NPCs move around in a very simple loop (if they move at all), but this recording feature opens up a means of making them behave in a much more complex, intricate fashion -- including and especially in large groups of NPCs:

Second Life Recreation of Lawrence's "Pinky" is a Top Google Search for Real Life Photos of Lawrence's "Pinky"

Virtual "Pinky" - first page on UK Google, third image on the third row

An Internet mystery solved! Yesterday I wondered why people keep Googling my virtual reality blog in search for an 18th century painting, and a bloke named "Shirtbloke" pointed me to this page on UK Google.