But at the moment the g+ fanatics seem to be winning. (Even this Official Google Announcement was apparently posted only on Google+, so I can’t give a real link to it; but hopefully the URL there will continue working and pointing to the right thing.)

Over the next week, we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name.
…
If we flag the name you intend to use, you can provide us with information to help confirm your established identity. This might include:
- References to an established identity offline in print media, news articles, etc
- Scanned official documentation, such as a driver’s license
- Proof of an established identity online with a meaningful following
…
We’ll review the information and typically get back to you within a few days.

(Gotta love that “typically”.)

And for anyone that’s nervous about sending their driver’s license to strangers, we are assured on mashable that

Google will destroy all documentation you send them once the account verification process is complete.

Everyone who feels they need more quasi-governmental agencies in their lives, demanding proof of identity and scans of your driver’s license, and assuring you that their random employees can be trusted with your information, raise your hand…

Didn’t think so.

There are at the same time reports that in order to sign up for any Google service these days, you have to also sign up for Google+ (including, presumably, telling Google your real name, and being prepared to offer official documentation for any nicknames you might want to use); and Google’s search results are starting to return Google Plus pages even when they are by no measure the best hits, which is incredibly stupid and the techs are already telling us how to get around it.

So there are clearly two things going on:

• The Google Plus people at Google either don’t understand Internet culture, or think that they can change it (with themselves as the central storehouse and universally trusted driving engine of that change), and
• Someone with power at Google thinks that (unlike Wave and Buzz, which were allowed to die when it turned out no one really wanted to use them) Google Plus is so important that all of Google’s other services can be taxed to supported it, by forcing anyone wanting to sign up for those other services to also sign up for Google Plus (and, if they don’t want to sign up for Google Plus, to go off to Yahoo or someone instead), and even corrupting search, which is Google’s base offering and frankly the only thing (well, maybe webmail) that we really want from them.

Of course Google may still save itself from these people; it’s far too early to give up.

But what if they don’t? Where will our bellweathers go to escape the stupidity, leading most of us along with them? Facebook for social stuff presumably, because that’s where everyone is anyway. But who will we use for search, and for webmail? And whatever else Google does that I’ve forgotten to mention?

Maybe the best thing would be for us to fragment again, and have there be more than one Big Obvious Search Provider, and more than one Big Obvious Webmail Provider, and even more than one Big Obvious Facebook-thing, and so on. If nothing else, Google’s failure would be a lesson on the dangers of bigness and obviousness, and the arrogance that tends to come with that.

On the other hand, Google’s implosion would open a very big opportunity for someone else to come in and take its place, by doing the good stuff without the dumb mistakes. Not sure who that would be; opinions welcome. What’s Yahoo doing these days? I tend to think of them as an old company that fell into the “web portal” rathole and never really returned, but maybe there’s potential there.

I really ought to make some bold prediction here, so that if Google does implode and my prediction turns out to be right, I can prove how clever and prescient I am. :) But for the moment I will just cross my fingers and hope that someone smart and powerful over there decides that shilling Google Plus isn’t worth corrupting all of the company’s other offerings, and that Google goes back to being the good guys. ’cause I am always an optimist!

(I will get back to the Combat System Scripting eventually, I promise! Or at least I have a good-faith intention to. But you know… shiny things!)

I did a little playing around, and the answer seems to be “it depends”.

Unlike Second Life, which is both (arguably) a bunch of software, and a particular virtual world that uses that software, OpenSim is just a bunch of software (and an Open Source one at that, which means that there are all various forks and versions and levels and patches around out there). So what you get when you log into one virtual world that’s running (some level of) OpenSim may be different from what you get in another.

What I found when I tried out the Scripts So Far in the first OpenSim-based grid that came to hand (running perhaps “OpenSim 0.7.2 ReactionGrid”, although it wasn’t ReactionGrid) was:

There’s one simple thing in the self-healing target script that this OpenSim didn’t like; this line gets a syntax error:

integer health = MAX_HEALTH;

because apparently this OpenSim is even more silly than Second Life is, about global initializers not having any hard stuff like math or variables in them. So I changed that to just:

integer health;

and added a

    health = MAX_HEALTH;

down in the state_entry() handler, and that got rid of the compilation error.

The autopopgun script worked fine except that (as one of the commentors anticipated) I had to create my own bullet for it because there was no popgun in the library to cheat with. :) I won’t post the bullet script and other bullet details here right now ’cause it would be a distraction, but it worked.

Then I pointed the autoshooter at the target, and the target said “Clunk”.

Repeatedly.

As you may recall, this means that it thinks it’s being hit by something that’s not moving fast enough to cause damage.

A little poking around revealed that in this particular OpenSim, llDetectedVel() was always returning 0.000, making it not very useful for our purposes!

As a temporary test, I changed the

    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>15) {

in the target script to the obvious

    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>=0) {

so that instead of “is the thing that hit us moving at least fifteen meters per second?”, it was instead asking “is the thing that hit us moving at all, or for that matter not moving at all?”. To which the answer must always be Yes! :)

With that change the target worked fine; its health count went down while the shooter was shooting at it, went back up again when I moved the shooter away, and then went down and turned yellow and then red and then the target Ceased to Be when I left the shooter pointed at it long enough.

There may be OpenSim-based grids where llDetectedVel() works (this list of LSL functions that work in OpenSim seems to claim that it is implemented), but it didn’t seem to in mine. But other than that, and the one tiny syntax change mentioned above, everything we’ve done so far seems to work in OpenSim!

In case anyone else was wondering. :)

So far we’ve been using whatever projectile weapons happen to be in inventory to shoot at targets, but as soon as we want something to shoot back, we’re going to need either a patient and/or interested friend (but those aren’t always available at short notice), or something that will shoot on its own.

And to avoid the complexities of bullets and all, we’re going to cheat. :)

Here’s what you do to get our project for today, the auto-popgun:

1. Search inventory for “popgun”,
2. Find the last one that shows up; it should be in the library rather than your personal inventory, and be called something like “Popgun (drag onto yourself)”,
3. Don’t drag it onto yourself, but just onto the ground.
4. Edit it, rename it to say “autopopgun”, set the rotations to 354, 0, and 0 (so it’s pointing down a little), and raise it up a bit off the ground.
5. Go into Contents, open the Popgun script in there, and replace all the text with the script below.

It should then sit there shooting a little ball every second or so, and the little balls should vanish on their own, just as if you were shooting it yourself.

You can rez one of the targets we made earlier in its path, or rez a target and then rotate and move the gun so it’s pointing at it, and observe how the target satisfyingly gets damaged and vanishes, just like you’d expect.

Here’s the autopopgun script:

float SPEED         = 18.0;   //  Speed of bullet in meters/sec
integer LIFETIME    = 7;      //  How many seconds will bullets live
float DELAY         = 1.0;    //  Delay between shots

default
{
    state_entry() {
        llSetTimerEvent(DELAY);
    }

    on_rez(integer param) {
        llSetTimerEvent(DELAY);
    }

    timer() {
        string bullet_name = llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_OBJECT,0);
        vector vel = <0,SPEED,0>*llGetRootRotation();
        vector pos = llGetPos()+vel/SPEED;
        llRezObject(bullet_name, pos, vel, ZERO_ROTATION, LIFETIME);
    }

}

Pretty simple script, boiled down from the original popgun script by taking out all of the user-interaction stuff. Basically, once a second, in the timer() event, it figures out the name of the first object in inventory, figures out which way it (the gun) is pointing, and rezzes one of those objects moving in that direction at the given speed SPEED.

It passes the LIFETIME number along to the objects that it rezzes, and as it happens the bullets in the popgun read that number and delete themselves after that many seconds. But we don’t have to worry about any of that, because we cheated and didn’t have to do the bullet scripting ourselves! We are so lazy… :)

Next time, or some time after, or something: our first personal combat meter, so we can stand in the way of the popgun and be shot and take damage!

Click through the poster above there for details, or go to the page via this link here.

Starting with the final script from last time, as usual, the simplest way to allow our targets to gradually heal themselves over time, is to just stick in a little timer that will increase health back up to maximum:

  timer() {
    if (health<MAX_HEALTH) {
      health += 1;
      show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
    }
  }

and add something to, say, state_entry(), that starts the timer, so that state_entry() would now look like this:

    state_entry() {
        show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
        llSetTimerEvent(HEAL_SECONDS);
    }

with HEAL_SECONDS set to like 2.0 or something at the top.

And if you do that and play with it, you’ll find that it works. You may also notice that once in awhile when you shoot the target, it will instantly heal again, which is annoying.

To fix that, we can make sure that the timer is running only when there is actually damage to heal, by moving the “start the timer” line to the place where the target notices damage, and adding a “stop the timer” line to the timer itself, whenever it’s at full health.

And so tonight’s final result looks like this:

integer MAX_HEALTH = 20;
integer health = MAX_HEALTH;
float HEAL_SECONDS = 2.0;

vector color_for(integer h,integer max) {
    float ratio = (float)h/(float)max;
    if (ratio>0.666) return <0,1,0>;   // Green
    if (ratio>0.333) return <1,1,0>;   // Yellow
    return <1,0,0>;  // Red
}

show_health(integer h,integer max) {
    llSetText((string)h+"/"+(string)max,color_for(h,max),1);
}

process_collision(integer index) {
    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>15) {
        health = health - 1;
        show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
        if (health<=0) {
            llSay(0,"boom");
            llDie();
        } else {
            llSay(0,"pow");
        }
        llSetTimerEvent(HEAL_SECONDS);
    } else {
        llSay(0,"clunk");
    }
}
default {
    state_entry() {
        show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
    }
    collision_start(integer n) {
        integer i;
        for (i=0;i<n;i++) process_collision(i);
    }
    timer() {
        if (health<MAX_HEALTH) {
            health += 1;
            show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
        }
        if (health>=MAX_HEALTH) llSetTimerEvent(0.0);
    }
}

We make such progress! :)

(If anyone doesn’t know the story of “Pepper” Pike and his elevation to memehood, see for instance this HuffPo piece.)

I saw this by the side of the road and knew I had to have one. :) Not being swift enough to look in that there new-fangled Marketplace for it, I left an IM for the creator, who very kindly not only gave me a copy, but pointed me to the Marketplace link.

So spread the word! Defend SL against dissent and nonviolent protest! Or even just annoying weeds!

In this posting, we’ll make the targets a little more robust, so it takes more than one collision to make them Cease To Be (or, in more violent language, more than one shot to kill them).

We’ll also, by the end, stick some nice color-changing floaty text over them, so you can tell how many collisions away from Ceasing to Be they are. (I’m sort of swerving between showing how a combat system might work, and giving little lectures on programming style, here, but it’s my weblog and I can do what I want! Feedback welcome if you’d like to see it go faster or slower or whatever, although I don’t promise to necessarily do what any feedback might suggest.)

The nice simple target script from last time was this:

process_collision(integer index) {
    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>15) {
        llSay(0,"boom");
        llDie();
    } else {
        llSay(0,"clunk");
    }
}
default {
    collision_start(integer n) {
        integer i;
        for (i=0;i<n;i++) process_collision(i);
    }
}

To make the target a little harder to kill, we’ll add a “health” variable to keep track of just how many more hits it has left, and update process_collision to count that variable down, and do the Cease to Be thing only when it reaches zero. Other hits will just make some I dunno “pow” noise. So:

integer health = 20;

process_collision(integer index) {
    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>15) {
        health = health - 1;
        if (health<=0) {
            llSay(0,"boom");
            llDie();
        } else {
            llSay(0,"pow");
        }
    } else {
        llSay(0,"clunk");
    }
}

The rest of the script (the collision_start() handler in the default state there) stays the same.

So play with that a little. It’s very nice, but it’s lacking some indication of how damaged the target is. We’ll add the floaty-text for that. It’ll require a new event handler in the default state to initialize the floaty text in the first place, and then some new code in process_collision to update the text when it’s hit.

That gets us to something like this:

integer health = 20;

process_collision(integer index) {
    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>15) {
        health = health - 1;
        llSetText((string)health+"/20",<1,1,1>,1);
        if (health<=0) {
            llSay(0,"boom");
            llDie();
        } else {
            llSay(0,"pow");
        }
    } else {
        llSay(0,"clunk");
    }
}
default {
    state_entry() {
        llSetText("20/20",<1,1,1>,1);
    }
    collision_start(integer n) {
        integer i;
        for (i=0;i<n;i++) process_collision(i);
    }
}

This works nicely, but it is Evil because very similar llSetText() calls appear in two different places, and the “20″ appears in four different places, which means that if I decided to change it to only take 10 hits, say, I would be sure to miss at least one of them.

With the maintainability improved, it does exactly the same thing, but looks nicer:

integer MAX_HEALTH = 20;
integer health = MAX_HEALTH;

show_health(integer h,integer max) {
    llSetText((string)h+"/"+(string)max,<1,1,1>,1);
}

process_collision(integer index) {
    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>15) {
        health = health - 1;
        show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
        if (health<=0) {
            llSay(0,"boom");
            llDie();
        } else {
            llSay(0,"pow");
        }
    } else {
        llSay(0,"clunk");
    }
}
default {
    state_entry() {
        show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
    }
    collision_start(integer n) {
        integer i;
        for (i=0;i<n;i++) process_collision(i);
    }
}

Much better.

And for one final touch, we can make the floaty text be green or yellow or red depending on how damaged the thing is, by just changing the <1,1,1> in show_health(), which causes it to always appear white, to a call to yet another function that will calculate the right color for us.

The final form for today, then:

integer MAX_HEALTH = 20;
integer health = MAX_HEALTH;

vector color_for(integer h,integer max) {
    float ratio = (float)h/(float)max;
    if (ratio>0.666) return <0,1,0>;   // Green
    if (ratio>0.333) return <1,1,0>;   // Yellow
    return <1,0,0>;  // Red
}

show_health(integer h,integer max) {
    llSetText((string)h+"/"+(string)max,color_for(h,max),1);
}

process_collision(integer index) {
    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>15) {
        health = health - 1;
        show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
        if (health<=0) {
            llSay(0,"boom");
            llDie();
        } else {
            llSay(0,"pow");
        }
    } else {
        llSay(0,"clunk");
    }
}
default {
    state_entry() {
        show_health(health,MAX_HEALTH);
    }
    collision_start(integer n) {
        integer i;
        for (i=0;i<n;i++) process_collision(i);
    }
}

Isn’t Nature Wonderful?

Next time, maybe: target, heal thyself!

What I’ve done so far, and hope to get to in this series, includes:

• Stationary targets to shoot at,
• Moving targets that shoot back,
• A combat HUD that keeps track of your “damage” and makes you fall down when you take too much,
• A “medikit” that makes you be less damaged when you walk through it.

Which is enough to have fun battles with your friends and/or Daleks. :) We’ll talk about just that first one in this episode.

A couple of notes:

• If you just want to have a working combat/RP system to play with, and don’t want to learn scripting of it from first principles, take a look at Myriad Lite (Preview 4) on the Second Life wiki; lots of neat features (and a certain amount of complexity) there.
• I’m going to assume here that you know how to rez a cube, and how to get a script into one. Not much more than that, though!
• Loose design goals of the project will include compatibility with various existing things (e.g. it would be good to be able to shoot at stuff with any normal sort of SL weapon), and a preference for less inter-object communication over more, where that’s possible (to reduce lag and complexity).
• I’m not going to worry too much about preventing ‘cheating’ of various kinds; this is mostly to play with, not to organize serious combat RP with untrusted others around.

Okay, off we go!

The first thing we’ll make is a simple target. Here’s probably the simplest possible target script:

default {
    collision_start(integer n) {
        llSay(0,"clunk");
    }
}

This says, basically, “whenever something collides with you, say ‘clunk’”. (You can change that line to ‘llOwnerSay(“clunk”);’ if you don’t want anyone else to hear the object talking for whatever reason.) Technically the stuff inside “collision_start” is an event-handler, and in this case the event is something hitting the prim that the script is in.

So make a cube, put that script into it, and walk into the cube. It will say “clunk”. Amazing!

Of course walking into things is sort of boring, so let’s get out a weapon and shoot at the cube bang bang. Any weapon that fires actual projectiles will do; if you don’t have one, or aren’t sure of what you have, you can use the simple popgun that is in the standard SL library (the lower part of your inventory, where many people never go; there’s some pretty good stuff in there).

Find the popgun, wear it, go into Mouselook (via the Mouselook button, or pressing M, or whatever), mouse so the little crosshair is on the box (the popgun has weightless projectiles, so you don’t need to compensate for any drop), and click. A thing will emerge and hit your cube (with some amusing colors and sounds and bubbles), and the cube will say “clunk”; huzzah!

Just saying “clunk” is good to be able to tell that you’ve actually hit it, but if we’re going to do Combat we want the target to explode into a flaming ball of gas. Well, or at least to Cease To Be, since I’m not going to figure out a particle-system for a Flaming Ball of Gas today.

So here’s another script:

default {
    collision_start(integer n) {
        llSay(0,"boom");
        llDie();
    }
}

Replace the original one with this one, make a copy of the prim, and then walk into it or shoot at it, and it will say “boom” (which sounds more final than “clunk”), and Cease To Be (quite thoroughly Cease To Be, not in your trash or Lost and Found or anything, which is why I suggested you make a copy of the prim).

You can use shift-drag (or just rez a bunch of copies) to make a whole row of these, and either run along it or go into mouselook and pop them one at a time, boom boom boom boom.

Not bad for a six-line script!

Now it’d be better if the target didn’t actually Cease To Be if someone just casually bumped into it. There are various ways to try to tell casual bumps from official Weapon Projectiles; we’ll use one of the simplest: speed. If somehthing is moving more than, say, fifteen meters per second (which is about as fast as it’s possible for a lone AV to move in normal circumstances), we’ll assume it’s a Weapon Projectile (or maybe a car; getting hit by a speeding car counts); but if it’s moving slower than that, it isn’t. So:

default {
    collision_start(integer n) {
        if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(0))>15) {
            llSay(0,"boom");
            llDie();
        } else {
            llSay(0,"clunk");
        }
    }
}

The only new complexity here is the “llVecMag(llDetectedVel(0))” bit, which just means “the scalar magnitude of the velocity vector of the thing that hit us” which is to say, how fast it was going.

The (0) means “the first of the N things that hit us”, where N is almost always 1 (so it looks at the first and only thing that hit it), but in some situations, especially when there are lots of bullets flying about, two or more things can collide with the cube so quickly that they’ll both get reported in the same collision event.

If we were just saying “clunk” that wouldn’t matter too much, but if (say) a slow bump happened at the same time as a fast projectile impact, we wouldn’t want to look at just the slow bump. So we’ll add a loop that looks at each of the things that hit us, in case there’s more than one.

default {
    collision_start(integer n) {
        integer i;
        for (i=0;i<n;i++) {
            if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(i))>15) {
                llSay(0,"boom");
                llDie();
            } else {
                llSay(0,"clunk");
            }
        }
    }
}

Relatively straightforward.

And then, and finally for this episode, just because I like to keep blocks of code simple wherever possible, we’ll pull out the bit of code that gets done for each colliding thing in to a subroutine of its own, and call it from the event handler:

process_collision(integer index) {
    if (llVecMag(llDetectedVel(index))>15) {
        llSay(0,"boom");
        llDie();
    } else {
        llSay(0,"clunk");
    }
}

default {
    collision_start(integer n) {
        integer i;
        for (i=0;i<n;i++) process_collision(i);
    }
}

And there you have it! A nice target that can be bumped into with impunity, but that goes away with a boom when shot (or when run into at high speed in a Chevy, I expect, although I haven’t tested that… yet).

Next time, hm, I dunno… maybe the Combat HUD or something…

Now you can drink it or you can nurse it,
it don’t matter how you worship
as long as you’re
down on your knees.

So I knelt there at the delta,
at the alpha and the omega,
at the cradle of the river and the seas.

And like a blessing come from heaven
for something like a second
I was healed and my heart
was at ease.

O baby I waited
so long for your kiss
for something to happen,
oh something like this.

And you’re weak and you’re harmless
and you’re sleeping in your harness
and the wind going wild
in the trees,
and it ain’t exactly prison
but you’ll never be forgiven
for whatever you’ve done
with the keys.

O baby I waited
so long for your kiss
for something to happen,
oh something like this.

It’s dark now and it’s snowing
O my love I must be going,
The river has started to freeze.
And I’m sick of pretending
I’m broken from bending
I’ve lived too long on my knees.

Then she dances so graceful
and your heart’s hard and hateful
and she’s naked
but that’s just a tease.

And you turn in disgust
from your hatred and from your love
and she comes to you
light as the breeze.

O baby I waited
so long for your kiss
for something to happen,
oh something like this.

There’s blood on every bracelet
you can see it, you can taste it,
and it’s Please baby
please baby please.

And she says, Drink deeply, pilgrim
but don’t forget there’s still a woman
beneath this
resplendent chemise.

So I knelt there at the delta,
at the alpha and the omega,
I knelt there like one who believes.

And the blessings come from heaven
and for something like a second
I’m cured and my heart
is at ease.

– Leonard Cohen

With thanks to Calli. :)

I remember some time back (must have been quite awhile) I was lucky enough to attend a Fifth Rezday Party for Washu Zebrastripe (the inventor of prim hair!), and we were all astounded that anyone could have a Fifth Rezday Party. Of course, as I recall, this was shortly before SL5B, and for a Resident to be older than the world itself is pretty amazing.

I can’t claim that distinction. :) But I do have a last name (or a dot in my name, depending how you look at it), and I remember when the Grid used to go down like every Wednesday (at the very least), and when we had real lag, not these tiny slowdowns that youngsters complain about these days. (We didn’t have none o’ these “sculpties”, either; flexi-prims were new and shiny enough for us!)

I thought I would take a few minutes’ break from the fireworks and parades in my honor and so on to say how great I still find SL, and scribble down my thoughts on some of the reasons why.

It’s very significant, I would say, that I’ve just starting taking a serious look at PvE combat and combat scripting in the last couple of weeks. And similarly that I just started breeding my first breedables in the last few months. Two things, each of which have been around for a long time, each of which are The Big Thing about Second Life to a significant number of people, and yet it’s taken me Five Years to get around to them. And there are still more things waiting for me that I haven’t tried at all yet; probably haven’t even heard of yet.

On the other hand I haven’t played World of Warcraft in weeks (months, maybe); because I’ve done everything that I want to (one 85 DPS, one 85 healer, one 85 tank, all the raiding experience I felt like getting). I may get lured back in for awhile to play a Pandaren, and to get my main toons up to level 90, but then I will probably get bored again.

And dearly as I love Glitch for its humor and quirkiness and art, I haven’t been doing any more recently than poking my head in, tending my little garden, squeezing my chicken and milking my butterfly, maybe gathering a few beans from the nearest bean-trees, and leaving again. There’s a complete encyclopedia of everything there is to do there, and I’ve either done, or decided not to bother doing, just about all of it. I know the devs will be adding stuff, eventually, and then maybe I’ll come back to look at it.

I occasionally get messages from other virtual worlds I’ve tried, like Blue Mars and Twinity and all, about how a new shopping mall has been added, or how they’ve added a new beach where there’s a vehicle you can drive around. And these make me laugh, because they’re so trivial. Can you imagine getting a piece of mail every time someone made a new model of car or motorcycle in SL, or opened up a new shopping mall or public beach? Talk about information overload!

The reason, the only reason that Second Life has been able to hold my interest for five years, is that users can create stuff.

(The people I’ve met there also hold my interest, but that’s interest in the people, which could have been maintained via Skype or email or even (gasp) actual visits, even without SL.)

So this is going to be another post like my original UGC FTW post (three years ago, I see!), only somewhat less organized. :)

User-generated content instantly gives Linden Lab a huge staff of unpayed (and for that matter of paying) content developers, who produce the content that keeps people coming back to the world, and keeps them wanting to live there, and keeps there being brand-new stuff all the time, driven by the Invisible Hand of the Market to cater to users’ wants. User-generated content isn’t just about the creators; in fact it’s not even primarily about the creators. It’s primarily about the people who see or get or buy or otherwise experience the work of the creators, and thereby find the world an interesting and enjoyable place.

(I say it’s “primarily” about the content consumers rather than the content creators because, with a few exceptions, we all consume more content than we create; we all enjoy more stuff that other people make than we make ourselves. I create lots of content that I like and that I hope other people like, but I experience orders of magnitude more content created by others.)

I think this is the key thing that most of the people tossing around the weird little milkshake analogy lately are missing. (The original article, headlined as it is “Why Second Life Failed”, of course seems to me to be coming from some Zone of Deep Cluelessness, since as far as I’m concerned SL is doing just fine thank you.)

All of this “milkshake” thing seems to boil down to saying that you can figure out which products are going to succeed by figuring out what they are for, and then seeing if that is something that people want. (Deep, eh? I wish I could think of deep stuff like that and then write books about it and all.)

I think this is actually wrong and/or stupid in many cases; I would argue that most innovations have been potentially able to do lots of different things, and the reason they succeeded is that their owners were able to figure out pretty quickly which of those things people actually wanted, and bend them in those directions. (In fact even the original milkshake example shows that, if you consider the product to be the store and its services as a whole, rather than just the milkshake line.)

And that’s exactly the right way to think about Second Life. It’s not designed to provide one specific thing; it’s designed to let people create and provide to each other whatever it is they want (within the capabilities of the platform). That general approach can’t lose. The platform has to have good enough affordances for people to actually use it, it has to have good mindshare and stability and so on, it has to be sufficiently funded to survive dry times, and so on; but the general principle is just pure win.

From this point of view, it would be exactly wrong to try to figure out what Second Life is, or should be, designed to do, except for the very high level “to enable people to create and experience stuff that they want to create and experience”. As we (and the Lab) notice some kinds of things that people are using it to create and experience right now, we can definitely make sure that the world is, and stays, good at those things. But that doesn’t mean we can decide that those are The Things, and focus only on those. Enabling User-Generated Content in general, and keeping the world good at that, in general, is in my very strong and pronounced opinion the right way forward. If Linden Lab doesn’t do that, someone else will; and whoever does do it will win.

(And that will eventually mean lots of money, as I’ve observed before.)

So anyway. :) Those are my Fifth Rezday Thoughts on why it is that I’m having a fifth rezday at all, and why and how Second Life has held my interest for all this time, and how it can keep doing that, for the Good of All.

Now, back to the cake!

“I believe the lower edge is dragging on the ground; perhaps if I boosted the hoverheight a bit…”

“Well, that worked.”

Removing the combat HUD leads to instant resurrection.

“Ah, my faithful lethal servants! What shall I call you? Dale’s Killbots, perhaps. ‘Daleks’ for short!

“Nah, that’s a silly name…”

(The combat scripting proceeds apace; the shooting robots there can be damaged and ultimately destroyed using anything that shoots projectiles, pretty much, although new ones get rezzed as long as the system is on. The combat HUD tosses one rudely to the ground after a certain number of hits by any projectile. I also made a full-auto infinite-ammo version of the standard Linden popgun, which is pretty awesome, but probably banned in most RP sims. I am vaguely thinking of doing a series of weblog posts, tutorial-style, on how it all works. Unless I do something else instead…)

Please feel free to share with friends you think may be interested. The discussion will be held in voice and text.

From Rockcliffe University:

Today 16 Nov 5:30 PM Pacific – Forum on Conflict Transformation
Wednesday, 16 Nov 2011 16:44:20 GMT

Today 5:30 PM SLT Wed 16 Nov
Rockcliffe Forum at RUC IM/IT Conference Center
“Intro to Compassionate Coummunication” with guest speakers.

Find out simple changes you can make in yourself to shift your personal and business relationships. Interact with some first-hand roleplays for some quick practice.

Candice has studied more than two years, completed a year-long immersion program, and participated in many workshops as she pursues her graduate degree in Conflict Transformation. Trip has completed 7 workshops with multiple trainers as well as individual training. Join these two Peacemakers as they talk about Non-violent Communication and how they live it every day.

Should be a good time! And remember to check your weapons at the door. :)

But when I got there I noticed some rather clued-looking PvE combat stuff set out, so later on I went over to check out the combat.

(For the non-gamers in the audience, “PvE” means “player versus environment”, where you fight monsters and other stuff in the game world, as opposed to “PvP”, which is “Player versus Player”, where you fight other players, most of whom are much better than you are.)

So I put on my favorite Gruff helmet for decoration, and got out some weapons. Here I am considering the Long Sword that comes free at the entrance (and again there are larger-scale versions of these pictures, if you click through to flickr):

and here I am with my Taltech Range Bow (or something like that), crouching martially:

I charge off into the desert, shooting skeletons of all kinds until they fall down and explode!

And now into the swamp, with the sword out for close-in melee!

One battles one’s way to the ancient necropolis, turning to kill the last few undead attackers on the way up the stairs, and wishing there was some way to take good action-shots of mouselook-mode combat.

Then vaulting heriocally over railings and onto mossy rooftops.

Cowabunga!

(I love the jump animations in my AO.)

Slicing my way to the door to the catacombs, turning to make sure nothing is following me…

Through subterranean passages rife with murderous skeletons and the occasional power-up, to the final door!

There to leap onto the teleporter and TP out quick before something else spawns and kills me (note amusing expression on face due to being axed a bit by newborn skeleton while TPing).

Definitely a good time! I did the basic routes several times, for fun and to get better at it; I died several times, too, which just involves not being able to move until you click on the “revive” thing and get TPd back to a starting point. Somehow I don’t have any pictures of that. :)

I also IMd considerable with the owner of the sim (one of the owners? dunno), who was around (and who was the only name above mine on the day’s leaderboard woo woo), and it sounds like they will be adding more stuff beyond the basic (but fun) stuff that they have there now.

This is really the first time I’ve done PvE combat in SL, and I’m enjoying it. So now of course I am thinking of (A) trying it in other places, and (B) making some of my own. In the meantime, see you in Mouselook! :)

Now this might seem weird at first glance, since people don’t usually consider arcade games to be virtual worlds, but the thing is, there’s no one agreed upon definition of “virtual world”, so really I can write anything that pops into my head, and no one can say that I’m wrong. So nyah-nyah in advance to all you negative commentors!

In order to make Second Life look as bad as possible, I think it’s useful to think about all the ways Frogger is more or at least as much of a virtual world than Second Life, and not think about any of the things that suggest the opposite. Here’s at least eight:

• Frogger is geographically contiguous – Second Life is not. Long ago, it was possible to walk from one end of Second Life to another. Now, SL is dominated by thousands of private islands, many of which are artificially inaccessible. By contrast, you can hop from one end of Frogger to the other, if you don’t get run over, just like it’s possible to walk from New York to Australia in the real world.
• Frogger has an internally consistent, universal physics — Second Life does not. In some areas of SL you can fly; in others, you cannot. You can even change the position of the sun, and soon, the very way light is filtered. And so on.
• Frogger has a pre-existing ecosystem of flora and fauna — Second Life does not. Alligators and speeding trucks thrive in Frogger. Outside of virtual pets and the rare virtual ecosystem, SL is mainly bereft of animal species, and has none that exist independent of their human creators and owners.
• Frogger is self-contained and relatively separate from the the wider Internet — Second Life is much more integrated with the web, and therefore, arguably less “worldly”.
• Frogger doesn’t have much dynamic user-generated content — but Second Life doesn’t have “natural” dynamic user-generated content either. In Second Life, user-created objects artificially instantiate out of thin air; also, Minecraft is better than Second Life, too.
• Frogger is a single unified experience of a world — Second Life contains multitudes of very different world-like experiences. A “world” that contains, for example, space marine shooters, fantasy MMOs, urban roleplay, furries, Goreans, real life educators, metaverse artists, and so on and on, seems less like a world, than a platform for multiple worlds. The real world, after all, contains only one kind of thing, not many different ones!
• Frogger has not stubbornly continued to be successful despite my constant sniping — Second Life has. Not that I’m bitter or anything. But someday SL will finally fail, and then people will stop snickering at me behind my back, pointing and giggling about Blue Mars! Someday they’ll all pay!!11!1!

Ehem. Sorry.

Of course, none of this suggests Frogger is superior to SL, oh no not at all, didn’t mean to suggest anything like that, any more than I did in my “Why call it Second Life when it has a low retention rate?” story, or my “Coffee and Power can succeed unlike SL which is a pathetic failure” story, or my “Second Life has failed due to poor execution and market timing” story, or my “Second Life is doomed because I am not in charge of it” story (parts 1-27). But I will say this: If you’re interested in widening the market for virtual worlds (and I am), it’s a good idea to widen the definition of the category, preferably enough so that it includes some CEO that will reliably return my calls.

(Some of the below don’t seem to have compressed wonderfully well; click through to flickr and press “L” or look at the larger sizes for perhaps better renders.)

That’s the Carmageddon Tank from L+N Signature Designs; I am standing smugly by it in the Hunt outfit from Cosmic Stream Designs and the Deconstructor part of The Machine from Radeon Automatic.

And then inside…

… and showing off the cannon, boom!

… and the machine guns (in the dark) pocketa-pocketa!

Of course it also flies…

… and rises up on its mechanical haunches for driving over lesser things in the twilight.

It also leaps up into the air (all of this controlled by buttons on a not overly huge HUD), but I’m not up to a video.

Okay, enough of that. :) Here are a couple of things from NS6 Engineering:

A cursed tower and a Cloudrider airship, both nice and free, and if they are a bit old-SL in style well that’s nice and nostalgic.

Relaxing in one of the plusher venues of the Hunt:

This one the Royal Thai Gallery (a lovely build, although I had some trouble figuring out just what they were selling, or displaying, where), but in general a delight of this hunt is the wide variety of places, all vaguely tied together by some variously fictionalized notions of Victoriana and technology and adventure.

Compare and contrast with, for instance, the Undertaker’s Parlor from Noctis:

(All 88 prims worth, not including the simple floor and wall prims that I threw up for photographing.)

Lots of things not directly in the Hunt, but still good finds. I’m always looking for more (cheap) bookcases in SL, and this Bookcase Loft from S&S Clockworks was a mere 4L!

(I don’t think I’ve opened the actual Hunt prize from there yet.)

Eventually I actually finished the Hunt! Still far from finishing opening all the packages, though…

Shortly after that, as I was vaguely considering trying to get back to the Rise cross-country from wherever I ended up, I noticed it was time for the Pre-release Party for 1000+ Avatars, Volume 2.

So I went and did that. :)

And a good time was had by all…

• It’s fun to hunt around for stuff,
• You find new stores to shop at,
• Some of the builds of the stores are really nice,
• Once in awhile you find some wonderful new thing that you’re actually going to wear, or use, or whatever, constantly for weeks.
• They are good for the SL economy.

And of course hunts are Bad Things because:

• You get tons and tons of stuff cluttering up inventory, sometimes unopened for weeks or years,
• You spend time when you could have been doing something more creative, and of course
• They are bad for the SL economy.

Because of this ambivalence :) I only occasionally weblogify about hunts that I hunt, but I thought I would weblogify about this one just because (a) I felt like it, (b) I’m a bit short on Lindenbucks, so I am probably not buying as much as usual as I hunt, so maybe I can contribute some publicity :) and (c) it’s a good hunt.

(Note: the reader may interpret the above remark about Lindenbucks as an opportunity to buy me expensive gifts, only if said reader has not bought me any expensive gifts in the last thirty (30) days.)

The hunt in question is The Sinister Steampunk Hunt, themed around stuff that your retrofuture villain, evil genius, etc, might be wearing or carrying or inventing or driving or using.

Here I am, for instance, with the Ether Rifle of the evil Dr. Calamari or something, as obtained by our hero Parrish Ahsbourne (#8):

The elvish green leather armor and cloak are from Destiny’s Designs (but come to think of it from a Lucky Chair rather than the hunt, oops!), and the monocle is from way back.)

The weblog has a list of shops, and hints for each one, which is useful.

(Back in my day, we didn’t have lists or hints! By dag, you started with #1, and the only way to know where #2 was was to find the landmark inside the prize in #1! Kids these days!)

Don’t get discouraged, by the way, if you can’t find the prize in #2; it’s hard for me to imagine anyone ever finding it without some sort of cheating. My own hint: it’s inside a box which as far as I can tell there is no way to open.

But anyway. :) I am up around shop #17 now, of 29, and have lots of very fun stuff. Here’s another shot:

The impressive telescopic monocle is from Sculptify (#3), and the backpack sprouting formidable medical / torture attachments is one of three equally impressive backpacks in the prize from Radeon Automatic (#15). The clothing is that elvish green leather armor again :) and the cigar I think I picked up in a bunker in the Wastelands the other year (so yeah, not directly relevant, but doesn’t it look appropriate?).

L+N Signature Designs (#7) has truly astounding stuff which is pretty much always out of my price range, but for this hunt they have a really quite astounding combat vehicle, which is right in my pricerange ’cause of it is free. No pictures of that, but I had fun driving it around in a combat sandbox shooting the canon and machine guns.

Pictures of the combat car, and various other prizes that I may or may not have found and/or unpacked yet, can be found in the hunt weblog too.

(Hunts didn’t have their own weblogs in my day, either! If you wanted to see what you might have gotten, you had to actually open the prizes. Kids these days don’t know how easy they’ got it.)

Anyway again! :) So that is being fun, and I will probably follow the hunt more in coming days. Unless I get distracted. Like I always do…

A nicely-built shack right by the railroad tracks, and inside…

A bunch of maps, which give out copies of themselves, and other things useful to explorers in general, and mainland explorers in particular.

I haven’t looked at all the things it gave me yet, but this is apparently just one of a number of Explorers Information Centres (or, I can’t help writing, Explorers’ Information Centers) set on some of the various continents. This one (at least) is the creation of Yevad Doobie, someone I’ve never met but now hope someday to. (He has a store near this Centre that sells various offroad vehicles and things; a related commercial website is GreenLaners dot com, and one about mainland routes in general is protected-routes dot com. Clearly a fellow mainland lover!)

As may or may not be obvious from the snapshot, the maps indicate the major named roads, and various un-named ones, as well as the names of the continents, the positions of Explorers Information Centres, SLRR (Second Life Rail Road) routes, and other things of interest.

All of the above are definitely worth a visit if you already love the mainland, think you might, or are convinced that you don’t but are willing to be enlightened. :)

Okay, that is a joke. :) I’ve actually had an AO since sometime my first week in SL, when I stumbled on something giving out completely free and simple (HUDless!) AOs, that just replaced the default hysterical walk and run with ones from some default Poser set.

But otherwise, except for a few brief experiments with some rather eyerolling “sexy” girl anims that came with a gown a long time ago, I’ve used all the standard Linden stands and sits and groundsits and flying positions and things, both as a boy and a girl, and been quite happy with them.

(And it gives Certain People something to tease me about, heh heh.)

Once I’d learned about these things, I cracked open my AO and found that it was just a single old “framination” script, with a mostly-blank notecard and two poses in it. I incorporated that into my Magic Bracelet so as not to take up a whole attachment point with it, and left it there.

Recently in an idle moment I started playing. I found a bunch of random animations in inventory, including some nice ANIMAH AO ones I got from a Lucky Chair or something sometime, and stuck them in my bracelet and added them to the notecard. That was sort of fun, so I went out shopping and actually bought a few more, and removed some of the initial ones that were annoying. (I like nice subtle animations that don’t have me wandering all over the place or constantly fiddling with my hair.)

The next day I got ambitious and converted the notecard to ZHAO format, passed it to the Imprudence built-in AO panel, and poof, a nice lagless AO for Girl Dale.

I also threw in the “Hanged Man” animation that I use in my 1,000 Avatars picture, just for variety. :)

(And yeah, it does awful things to the front of the mini-corset there; that’s the SL AV mesh for ya.)

Then yesterday (was that yesterday?), being in a boy mood again, I worked up an AO for Boy Dale. Rather than starting from scratch this time, I started with the (old, inexpensive) Coolest Man AO from Vista, because from the vendor board it didn’t seem too horrifyingly macho

So now Boy Dale can stand, and even sit, in non-newborn sorts of ways!

I haven’t added the Hanged Man stand to the boy one yet, or converted it to the built-in viewer AO, or really done anything much at all with it. But I’ll get around to it. Unless I get distracted by something shiny! :)

Some random credits:

Vista Coolest Man AO from the Random Old Stuff section of Vista Animations

Various specific poses from the back room of Sinse AO (lots of nice poses at 10L each) and from the wonderful and quirky 3M/MMMA, which I see has moved, and from ANIMAH, which no longer exists.

Girl Dale’s red jacket from CHG Fashion (I think it was a hunt prize), and floral mini-corset from EDS (was that a hunt too?).

Girl Dale’s ossom BAX boots bought at Kungler’s as mentioned previously (now I have the purple as well as the brown; equally amazing).

Top and jeans in standing-up-boy picture from WoE (who have also moved, just to confuse me!).

Clothes in sitting-down-boy picture from “Sexy4Less” which were having a Big Sale inworld but are normally just in the Marketplace.

Boy Dale’s Ankh (always) from Schadenfreude, which is a gigantic elephant, and well worth seeing even if you aren’t shopping. :)

Which is nice, if a bit gimmicky, if you’re someone who wants to own an estate. (Or if you’re a speculator who wants to buy a bunch and them flip them next week for people who missed the sale, for a reduced setup fee, or something Wall Street like that.)

Less gimmicky, and for the benefit of Mainlanders like me who love living in the thick of things, I would recommend that the lab raise the amounts of (main)land that people can own at each level of tier. In the current schedule, for instance, someone paying US$40/month in tier can own up to 8,192 square meters of mainland (plus 512 square meters of tier-free Premium land). At US$125/month, it’s 32,768 (half a sim); at US$8/month, it’s 1024 (one sixty-fourth).

Mainland is quite cheap now, 1L per square meter or under in many places without direct water access. And even at that price, lots of it sits around unsold, I suspect because tier is inflexible, and hasn’t gone down with the falling economy like land prices have.

One approach would be to just lower the prices at each tier, of course; make it US$30 and US$100 instead of US$40 and US$125, or whatever.

I think it might be more interesting to raise the allowed amount of land at each tier, though, and leave the amounts the same. It more or less amounts to the same thing, but psychologically it’s simpler. Someone currently paying US$40 per month and with their tier maxed could immediately go out and buy more land, without having to think about it; whereas if the tier for their current holdings just went down to US$30 instead, they might take that extra ten bucks and buy a fancy new yacht, or even (horrors!) a couple of RL coffees.

What would the benefit be to the Lab? In the short run it’s revenue-neutral, in that they are still getting the same tier payments, and all they have to part with is lots of unowned mainland that isn’t doing them any good right now anyway.

In the medium term there’s some opportunity cost, as some people who would have decided they really did want more land and tiered up won’t do that, since they can have more land now without paying. But on the other hand there are also more sales of Lindens as all those people who now have more land go out and buy stuff to put on it.

In the long term, I like to think that having that land occupied by people who will be doing interesting things with it, rather than lying fallow and empty, will draw more people to the mainland, and to SL in general. Retention is likely to be higher if people see interesting things than if they see empty abandoned or For Sale land. And that’s certainly a benefit.

So how about it, Labbies? Can I have, say, 12,288 square meters for my US$40/month? Be your best friend! :)

This is only a few of the pictures I took; a few more are in this flickr set I made for them.

It has little dancing and cuddling spots, a sailbaoat you can sail, a couple of small art galleries, lots of gorgeousness to look at; it even has its own Facebook page!

Go there!

But not too many at once, eh? :)