New World Notes

Want Some Free Cartoon Clouds Floating Above Your Second Life Sky?

Because you can get them right here. Created by SLer Stevie Davros, who says "[t]hese clouds will slowly scroll across the sky like the regular ones, but the shapes are fixed." These exist because Davros was recently experimenting with (really fantastic-looking) realistic skies. "Whilst tinkering," he says, "I came upon the idea of going for the opposite - cartoon=look clouds. So I made a few cloud TGA files and tweaked sky settings to work with them. Version 1 clouds are 1024x1024 and the res was not ideal, so I pushed the envelope and made a 2048x2048 TGA for cloud style 2." More about his naturalistic virtual clouds soon (hopefully), but meantime here's his cartoonified clouds to play with.

Versu's Epilogue: How an Interactive Fiction Pioneer's 15 Year Project Ended Up in Limbo at Linden Lab

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

When Linden Lab discontinued its interactive fiction platforms dio and Versu not long after Ebbe Altberg took the reins as CEO, it seemed like most people understood why. For some, these two products were a bit too far removed from the Lab's wheelhouse. Others were relieved, assuming that by trimming the fat LL would be refocussing some of its energy on Second Life. In Altberg's own words, it was just "clean up". "There’s some things that are not as aligned," he told Hamlet during a recent interview.

However there's a particularly sad tale tied up in Versu's fate (literally) and it's why you won't find me applauding this clean up any time soon.

First Impressions of Scribblenauts Unmasked: The Good, The Bad, And The Uncertain

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

I teleport into Gotham City, prepared to fight crime shoulder-to-shoulder with Batman himself. He's the hero the city deserves, but I'm the one it needs--a young boy with a magic notebook and a fangirl sister. A citizen immediately begs me for help from nearby construction scaffolding. I run up to her, notebook at the ready. With the swipe of a pencil I can rescue her from any distress imaginable.

She cries out in desperation and raw anguish, "I need something to tie my beluga whale to!"

Reviews for Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure have been mixed, and after playing a few levels for myself last night I can understand why. As much as I love this series, it feels like there are a lot of little things getting in between me and the joy of solving ridiculous problems with even more ridiculous solutions.

Even so, this comics-based puzzle adventure isn't without its charms. Here are my initial impressions of this highly creative (and slightly flawed) game:

The Drax Files: Robin Sojourner And The End Of Second Life As We Know It

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Every couple weeks there's a new episode of The Drax Files: World Makers, and every couple weeks Draxtor Despres raises the bar a little higher. Last friday he released the latest episode, with Robin Sojourner in the spotlight. It's inspirational, motivational, and definitely one of the best episodes to date.

... Do I say that every time? Well, judge for yourself:

New SimCity Used to Recreate Player's Local Traffic Woes: Super Neat, but Not Super Realistic

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

A contributor to Gamasutra approached last weekend's one-hour SimCity beta with an interesting plan in mind. Unlike a lot of players he wasn't trying to find the magic planning layout needed to maximize city population, or the most efficient arrangement of residential, commercial, and industrial zones--Mike Rose was trying to figure out how a town with a relatively modest population of approx. 15000 could have rush hour traffic jams that would give urban centers a run for their money.

The results are incredibly interesting and seem surprisingly accurate, but that doesn't mean we should expect SimCity to be capable of providing serious solutions to real life urban planning issues... Especially not at launch. Here's why:

Story-Building Platforms Like Linden Lab's Versu and dio Are Already Succeeding -- Which is Why Versu and dio May Not

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

The more I think about Versu, Linden Lab's latest storytelling platform (which I covered late last week), the more it bothers me. Why? Maybe I'm cynical, but it feels like one more clever and creative little thing that just isn't going to go anywhere--even though it absolutely could and should. Interest in interactive stories like these is probably higher now than it's been a decade and a half at least, and lots of other little engines to create and support such stories have been springing up and developing devoted followships. So where does that leave Versu, and its older sibling, dio? Hint: Not in a very good position...

Hands on With Versu: First Impressions After My First Hour With Linden Lab's Latest Storytelling App

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

This morning Linden Lab launched Versu, an interactive storytelling app for the iPad (other platforms are in the works) with a relatively respectable pedigree behind it. Hamlet posted an overview of Versu as well as its launch trailer earlier today, so I wanted to talk about what it's like to actually use this app, and what I think of it beyond the trailers and the PR (a bit like what I did with dio almost exactly 2 weeks ago.)

Roll up your sleeves because this might get messy.

Sextan Shepherd Makes a Mirror in Second Life!

Not long ago in Second Life, an artful Frenchman named Sextan Shepherd created an underwater steampunk city that paid tribute to Jules Verne, with more opulent detail than I'd ever think possible. Not happy with just doing that, Mr. Shepherd went on to make a reflecting mirror in Second Life, something that's supposed to be flat out impossible full stop. But boom, baby, voilà:

"Mirrors are fun," Sextan said, "aren't they?" Why yes they are, especially when they're supposed to be impossible to make in Second Life. And then Sextan Shepherd proceeded to tell me how he did it:

Uccello Reviews Smart Cam For Customized SL Views

Uccello Poultry has a thorough review of the (mirada)smartCAM, a new system created by Damien Fate which helps you create customized, preset views of Second Life -- a useful resource for SL photographers. Another useful function of the system, which will probably prove handy to lots of folks: "You can give a special HUD to anyone else and their view will synchronize with yours with the press of a button," reports Ms. Poultry.

COPYING A CONTROVERSY (Updated)

If the earliest days of Second Life resemble the first century of American history (and they do) then the most recent years of the world seem to be replicating the last couple decades of the Internet in miniature form.  Throughout 2004, SL was an obscure medium for gamers, techies, and assorted early adopters— not unlike the Net’s Usenet groups of the 80s and early 90s— then somewhere in mid-2005, began attracting substantial interest from real world businesses and the mainstream media.  Which, much like Netscape’s initial public offering in 1995, led to the mini-dot com boom we’re awash in now, with massive brick-and-mortar corporations throwing money at the world with a kind of frantic urgency.  (And like the original boom, usually ending up with lightly-trafficked sites of ambivalent success.)

Right on schedule, the peer-to-peer, open source movement that consumed the Internet of the late 90s arrived to Second Life’s community in recent weeks, beginning with the idealism of talented hackers creating cool applications— which quickly careened into widespread protest, accusations of IP theft, and economic chaos. 

Welcome to the Napster era of Second Life. This time, the part of Shawn Fanning is played in part by a tiny pink cat, while everyone else in the world gets to be Metallica. But if I recall right, Lars Ulrich never tried to crush Fanning with a giant boulder.

First, the cool hack from idealistic coders: it begins with libsecondlife, a group of Residents attempting (with Linden Lab’s explicit blessing) to reverse engineer an open source, modified BSD-licensed version of the Second Life client. The ultimate goal are limitless versions of the client, operating on thousands of independent servers insuring Second Life’s spread through the entire Net. While the group has been operating for months, in the last week or two they introduced an in-world demonstration of their client that very quickly became the buzz of the community. The libsecondlife team had figured out a way to log automated avatars into the world, using their scaled down version of the client.

With Eddy Stryker

“The client is a small command-line program written in C# that has all the code needed to ‘speak Second Life’, so to speak,” libsecondlife member Eddy Stryker explained, when he showed me the technology last week. “From the server's point of view it looks and acts exactly like a normal client logging in to the grid, going through all the same steps, it just sends less data… Basically they look and act just like a normal client with a lot of options turned off or turned down.”

The hack suggested a way of finally introducing AIs and non-player characters into the world, creating endless possibilities for game development, simulation, and more, but that wasn’t even the coolest part. Because not only had they figured out a way of introducing artificial avatars, they’d also hacked up a way of cloning existing avatars, clothes included. Not just one or two clones, but over a dozen, dropping out of the sky like godspawn.

Edited in double-time, this video demonstration features me, Talila Liu, and Gwyneth Llewelyn and our several dozen doppelgangers: 

See the video here. Incidental music generously provided by my friend Mr. Nolan Cook, freelance composer and guitarist with DIMES and THE RESIDENTS.

“It logs in to SL, reads the appearances of the closest avatar, and sets its appearance exactly like that person had theirs set,” Stryker explained to me, while I stood amid a forest of Hamlets. “If someone else moves closer it clones that person instead. It's fairly simple code actually..."  And libsecondlife was able to do that with a single server, running multiple mini versions of their open source Second Life viewer.  It was the first public demonstration, but clones had already been released into the world, he added, “silently teleporting from sim to sim collecting data, or running tests on private islands.”

“So the one bad thing I see with this is designers of clothes and stuff bitching,” Talila Liu observed, after her run through the cloning process.

“Yeah,” Eddy Stryker acknowledged, “it could be a problem at some point, and that's a general issue for Second Life overall.  This specific bot, though, doesn't save any information, so when you turn it off all the temporary data is erased.” Eddy already had an application of his own in mind. “I am working on a project for a client right now that needs these mannequins,” he said, “which is going to have an early preview in the first week of December. But at the same time, the libsecondlife library is open for anyone to use, and we have a channel of developers that are all working on their own projects.”

He said that last week, and in retrospect, it was an ominous statement. Because while libsecondlife’s cloning bot didn’t save any information about the avatars it imitated, a similar libSL application, CopyBot, did. Intended by the group as an offline debugging tool, it existed in their site’s source code repository, and someone took advantage of the group’s open library to compile a version— and start selling it in-world. Several more people got into the CopyBot sales business.

And within a few days, as Talila Liu had predicted, CopyBot was savaging the community of Second Life content creators.  But they did more than bitch about it