New World Notes

TONIGHT: Inventor Prototypes Battlebot in Second Life -- Then Creates it in Real Life to Fight On Discovery Channel's Battlebots!

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Above: Sharky in SL and in RL (images courtesy Constantine of Nano Station Technologies

Tonight at 8pm on the Discovery Channel (check your local listings!), there's a chance for Second Life users to cheer on a hometown champion: Episode 6, third fight of the night, it's Sharko (woot woot!) versus Slap Box (boo! hiss!) on the popular Battlebots reality TV show. 

Sharko is the creation of Edward Robinson, known in Second Life as Artorius Constantine, owner of the Nano Station Technologies store.  For the last few years, Constantine has not only been making a real life living from his SL inventions (animesh roleplay bots and so on), but taking what he's learned from the battlebots he's made for Second Life fights, and applying what he's learned to design real life battlebots:

Are LSL Scripters Too Powerful in SL's Content Ecosystem?

/secondlife's very interesting "Ask Me Almost Anything" thread from programmer "HisRant" (which I blogged last month) led to an interesting conversation from him and "jaggedpuma", who makes a ranty but substantial case that scripters are too powerful in Second Life:

I think scripters have far too much power over the other kinds of content creators... I have yet to find a LSL scripter who wants to be reasonable about commission splits or they charge in excess of $500 USD for a full perm script which could break after a server update or be remotely disabled at any time by the scripter if he thinks I’m too successful. How many artists have been screwed this way by scripters? Too many I reckon.

Agree, disagree? Whatever you think, he goes on to make a salient point about Project Sansar:

Last 2 Days to Visit in Second Life: Igor Ballyhoo's Latest Installation, and the (Apparently) Closing Inaka Sim

At the end of this month (that is to say, when Saturday becomes Sunday), two great pieces of Second Life content are going away:

• Acclaimed SL-based artist Igor Ballyhoo has a new installation at the Linden Endowment for the Arts sim, running until the end of May: Click here to teleport.
• Inaka, a beautifully constructed sim simulating modern Japan, is reportedly closing this month, reportedly due to Copybot problems. (Details are sketchy, and in Japanese.) Anyway: Click here to teleport there while it yet exists.

Inaka hat tip: Puma Jie.

SL Pathfinding Update: No Negative Impact on Almost All Existing SL Content, Says Lorca Linden

The Linden Lab developer known as Lorca Linden has an informative update on the new Second Life object pathfinding feature in the comments of the blog of Nalates Urriah. ("Although Lindens do not generally post on Resident blogs," he begins, "I am going to make an exception in this one case." Why this is a general rule, I have no idea.) Despite earlier fears, Lorca says pathfinding performances is generally performing well:

Adeon Writer Builds Working Portal Gun in Second Life!

This is a triumph; I'm making a note here -- HUGE SUCCESS:

Yes yes, a working portal gun inspired by Portal made by Adeon Writer. I want to tell Portal writer Erik Wolpaw about it, because he'd probably be impressed, or at the very least say, "I'm busy with Portal 3 here, so go the hell away."

Now, I've seen other Portal-esque Portal guns made in SL before, but I know Adeon to be a clever sort of someone, so I'm thinking this was impressively scripted. [Update, 11am: Adeon explains how he does this after the break. - Hamlet] And not only can you apparently teleport yourself with Adeon's portal gun, you can evidently teleport objects too, watch:

SL Pathfinding a Potential "Tsunami" (If We're Not Prepared)

I rely on Nalates Urriah's blog for getting geek-heavy updates about Second Life code and features, so when she mentioned in a recent post that Linden Lab's new pathfinding features presented a possible "tsunami" of problems, I paid attention:

When the pathfinding code is released to the grid, she explained to me in an e-mail, "Doors need to work in new ways. Bridges will become a performance issue. Anything that moves and cuts the Navmesh [pathfinding objects], anything would cause an AI critter to change path... will incur a lag cost. Again, how much is a question." Right now, she continued,  "[i]t seems the plan is to roll out pathfinding enabled on all regions and let estate managers turn it on or off. If that is done, tsunami."

Whether there's a tsunami or not depends on how Linden Lab rolls out the pathfinding code, and how SL landowners deal with it. Here's Nalates with the full geek exegisis -- read and discuss after the break!

Impressive SL Pathfinding Test with Cars is Impressive

SL's new pathfinding tools are being slowly rolled out to SLers, so we're going to see more impressive demo videos like this:

Created by ac14 Hutson who was "just messing around with the new pathfinding functions", he tells me. Now guess how many users in this video are driving cars. Answer:

Open Forum for SL Developers: What'll You Do With the New Pathfinding Tools?

In case you missed it (and you really shouldn't), here's a demo of the new pathfinding tools created by Linden Lab and available to SL developers in the next few months, offering robust movement behaviors (follow, patrol, etc.) for scripted objects:

When I first started watching, I wondered, "How are they going to create pathfinding that recognizes dynamic content creation and object moving?", and that gets answered (like a boss) at around 4:30. Read more about it here, and also on the official Wiki here. Question for developers reading this: What will do you with these tools once they're available? And yes, please feel free to promote your coming projects, because we want to know about them.

Minecraft-Style Mining Comes to Second Life (Kinda Sorta)!

The inevitable has happened: You can now mine rock in Second Life like you would in Minecraft. That's thanks to Jezebel Madzuko's Minecraft Mining Kit. The kit comes with several varieties of Minecraft pick, and TNT, so you can expedite your mining with fricking explosions. Since you can't actually mine Second Life's mountains, Ms. Madzuko's kit also comes with a giant block of destructible rock. So once you go into first-person mouselook, aim at a block and start clicking -- it starts fracturing with every blow (which also comes with a Minecraft-style "carving" sound effect), then finally dissolves into a harvestable resource. It pretty closely captures the Minecraft experience. I rezzed my copy of Jezebel's kit into a Second Life sandbox, carved a tunnel on one side of the cube, and made a staircase that took me to the top.

“[I]t comes in chunks of 252 prims,” Jezebel tells me. “One prim equals one cube.” She’s created a very clever script which effectively turns each block into a “killable” object, or mob:

Wear Conway's Game of Life in Second Life!

Here's some crazy brilliant inventiveness in Second Life before 2010 ends: Adeon Writer created an LSL-scripted version of Conway's Game of Life, which is impressive in itself, but then went another step further by making it a Linden Script Language program that you can, say, put on some prims and wear. And why not display the life and death of a whole virtual species on your back? Watch:

Adeon open sourced the code, which you can get right here. "You'll need to drop that script into an object made of the correct amount of cubes (the script will tell you if you do it wrong)," he tells me. "It should handle everything else and build itself. For those not build savvy, I can send a copy to anyone who wants one, feel free to distribute or improve it." In other words, the Game of Life is an open source project in Second Life.

Adeon was inspired to make this version of Conway's simulation after seeing a previous one by Jim Purbrick (when he was still at Linden Lab), one using LSL, the other running in Mono: