New World Notes

Open Forum: Is There a Recent SL Project as Ambitious as VRChat's Udon Tycoon That I Should Be Covering?

Writing about Udon Tycoon in VRChat last week, it occurred to me that I haven't covered a Second Life-based project of similar ambition and scope in a long time. (Beautiful sims, to be sure, we got that covered, along with light roleplay game experiences in SL.) But Udon Tycoon has user-created, physics-enabled, save-able coaster building that's rideable and instantiated in the same world at the same. Is there a recent SL project (say within the last 3 years) with roughly comparable inventiveness? 

This is not a concern troll post, I'm genuinely curious -- it's quite possible (as has happened many time before) that there's some amazing project quietly being built deep in the heart of Second Life that the creators don't bother to promote, since they're not concerned about publicity per se, and enjoy the creation as an act in itself. Which is great for them, but the world should know too. (Well, I sure would.)

Mic is open below -- let me know! Please include links and contact info wherever possible.

Really Useful Aquarium Features Mesh Fish That Feed, Low Land Impact, Multiple Customization & Sizing Options (NWN Partner News)

The Really Useful Aquarium is a cool product from New World Notes media partner Really Useful Scripts Corner -- lead developer Grace7 Ling gracefully demonstrates its many features in the video above. Available in her Really Useful Scripts Corner on the Marketplace and at her SL store (click here to teleport), Grace’s fish tank is fairly unique among other virtual world aquariums:

“Many of the older aquariums are using flat textures of fish that cycle around in a fixed way,” Grace notes. “The Really Useful Aquarium has mesh fish which swim randomly around the tank. The swim speed and turning speed of each fish can actually be customized if you know how. Secondly, if you are not using the display shelf, the tank is actually quite versatile and can be resized to rather surprising dimensions, and the fish will adjust automatically to the new dimensions of the tank.” (Watch below.)

On top of that, aquarium owners or their guests can feed the fish:

Watch: Scripting in Second Life with C#, a Feature Once on Linden Lab's Roadmap But Apparently Forgotten

My post on UdonSharp, the user-made C# compiler for VRChat, inspired me to reach out to Jim "Babbage" Purbrick. Because when he worked for Linden Lab, he was aiming to make it possible to script in Second Life with C#. Sad to say that didn't come to pass, and he left the Lindens in 2010. As he wrote on his blog then:

Alas, tomorrow is my last day at Linden Lab and Babbage Linden will never get to see C# scripts running in the wild in Second Life, but I very much hope that I do. I hope that C# support is eventually added to Second Life and that I don’t have to wait 170 years to turn the handle. As another Babbage said when he failed to build the Difference Engine: “Another age must be the judge”.

Watch Jim's demo above to see how cool that could have been, with more background on his blog.

"Supporting C# and other modern languages was always the end goal with the work on Mono and we implemented the Mono scripting engine to be language-independent," he tells me now. "Although in production we only ran LSL scripts compiled to CIL we had development builds which would run C# compiled to CIL with normal C# compilers and then processed to inject microthreading support with the same tools that processed the assemblies produced by the Linden Script Language compiler in production."

Bringing C# to Second Life, as he explains, would be an enormous modernizing leap for the platform:

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: