Shadowlands (WoW again)

Now I’m going to write things about the new Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft some more, and apologies yet again to the Second Life folks who are still reading here in hopes of someday getting Second Life content again. :)

(I have done some “virtual world creation, albeit not Second Life” stuff that I guess I haven’t mentioned here? Which is odd because it was really pretty cool; enough scripting that I nearly got out a source code control system and a bug tracker, in the service of a really remarkable world build. See Karima Hoisan’s post and teaser video on the subject.)

Anyway, Shadowlands! Somewhat contradictorily:

• I like it quite a bit (the strange systems, the quirkily-different places like the Maw and the Tower of Torghast, the fact that it doesn’t really take itself very seriously, as usual), and
• It makes not the tiniest particle of sense.

The latter point is (and I suppose in some sense there are spoilers for the expansion below, but really if you haven’t yet gotten at least as far as I have by now you probably aren’t someone who cares about that kind of thing) due to a number of factors, including:

• It’s supposed to be set in the Afterlife. This has some amusing side-effects, like encountering the occasional defeated ex-villain from prior expansions sweeping the floor to atone for their sins or whatever, but otherwise it’s pretty unconvincing, since:
• There’s basically no one there. I mean, it’s supposed to have been the place where everyone who dies on Azeroth and and least a couple of other worlds (and quite likely all worlds because why not) goes after they die. So there should be a really incredible number of NPCs around somewhere. But there is no hint of that; there’s like I dunno a few dozen or hundred or something.
• There’s no Shadowlands Archaeology, supposedly because the place has no history, but obviously the place does have history; Revendreth in particular is chock-full of ruins that would have any archaeologist drooling. And Bastion has that one hilltop devoted to that one hero from the past, and the entire Locus of Memory.
• Three of the five areas are full of stuff that gets left behind when one dies, and has no place in the Afterlife: bones and gristle and skulls and skeletons and funerary equipment and like that. That’s just silly; what is all that doing there? What are these the bones and coffins and so on of?
• Relatedly, since this is WoW, one is constantly killing (“defeating”) things. How exactly does that work, ontology-wise? When things die, do they go to an After-Afterlife? Do they just respawn after awhile? (Of course things just respawn after awhile everywhere else in WoW, so that’s a whole area of confusion to think about.)
  • There are a few references to “the True Death”, but if dying in the Shadowlands means that you cease to exist rather than spending eternity doing… something (more on that below) you’d think people would be really really careful to avoid it, at the very least. And the Shadowlands people are always calling us mortals “mortals”, which would seem to imply that they are not mortal, suggesting that there is no “True Death” in fact. Which is it??
  • Sometimes when you die in Shadowlands, a voice says “It is not yet your time, Child of Azeroth”. Not yet my time for what, exactly, voice?
• And why are there so many things? Why are there fish and plants and annoyingly-overhanging rock formations in the Afterlife? Are they the souls of fish and plants and annoyingly-overhanding rock formations that died in the mortal world? How would that work? (The fact that the areas of the Afterlife are all islands floating in a cloudy void, and if you fall off you… die, is a whole nother issue.)
• Before this big power imbalance and war that we’re involved in started, the Afterlife apparently sat around for untold ages not doing that. So what were all the (millions and billions, at least, of) souls doing? Considering this by area, we speculate:
  • In the Maw they were just suffering forever because they were so terrible, which is horrible but it’s basically just Hell so okay.
  • In Revendreth they were coming to terms with and admitting their sins so they could then go to some other area, or to the Maw if they ultimately failed (why this involves vampires I may or may not wonder about again below),
  • In Ardenweald they were taking care of the recharging souls of various Nature Demigods waiting for their Respawn Timers to count down, which is sort of nice, but you wouldn’t think it would require all that many people (they also put on plays, which is cool, although the theatre isn’t nearly big enough for the millions of… okay we’re tired of that complaint).
  • In Bastion they were having all of their memories of their lives removed and archived, being turned into overgrown humanoid Smurfs regardless of what shape or species they were in life (wut), and then trained in battle so they could go out and bring the souls of the dead to the Shadowlands for judgment. Except:
    • They don’t in fact do that; the souls just sort of flow down from the sky in a big river,
    • In the one example we see where they do do that, no battle skills of any kind are required since they’re just magical angels and who would they be fighting?
    • Also in the one example we see where they do do that, they need exercise no judgment whatever, so the excuse we see that they have to forget their past lives so that they can fetch souls “without judgment” makes no sense whatever.
  • In Maldraxxus they were apparently being made into bizarre amalgams of bone and gristle and other corpse-parts for no obvious reason, and then set to fighting each other in an endless round of melee, poisoning, plague, spying, and whatnot, ostensibly to defend the Shadowlands, although it’s not clear against what, and of course it’s eventually against each other, which is obviously perfect for a WoW realm, but otherwise makes not a lot of sense.

In the Bastion storyline, we get the impression that the Shadowlands has in the past been attacked by critters from the Void (just like the rest of the universe has), so maybe that’s what Maldraxxus is training against, but I don’t see a whole lot of evidence for that.

Okay, enough complaining for now. :) As I said, I’m certainly enjoying it, but I wanted to write this stuff down just because it’s fun to write down things that make so sense. As I mentioned, Blizzard themselves don’t take it all that seriously; I don’t know if the line “If this is truly the only way, then I shall find another” is intentionally satirical (I mean, strictly speaking and going by the meaning of “only”, you shall in that case not find another), but when the flavor text for a scroll that you find (when looking for a more important one) in the Locus of Memory is something like “In this weighty tome a Kyrian has recorded every one of the memories of their life. Every. Single. One.” you know that they’re having a good time with their lore and ontology.

(Also, one is constantly being carried around unceremoniously by Kyrians, which is pretty funny.)

Arranging llDialog buttons

Okay, back in Second Life! And/or OpenSim.

A purely Scripting-geekery post today, on a really niche topic.

When you get one of those blue dropdowns (or pop-ups, or drop-ins, depending on your viewer) with a number (up to twelve!) of buttons in them (when you touch a danceball for instance and it asks you what dance you want to do), the piece of LSL (Liden Scripting Language) that shows you that thing with those buttons is a built-in function called “llDialog“.

(All of the built-in functions start with “ll” which presumably stands for “Linden Lab”, but which has made many beginning LSL scripters, including Yers Truly, wonder how an identifier can start with eleven at all.)

One of the arguments to llDialog is, naturally enough, a list of the strings to put on the buttons. And the order in which the strings are copied from the list onto the buttons is… perhaps counterintuitive. For instance, if the list looks like:

[ "one", "two", "three", "four" ]

then the dialog as displayed will look like:

which might not be the first thing one would have guessed.

It basically starts at the bottom, filling rows upward as it goes, until it runs out of strings.

I have sometimes fiddled around to make things come out how I want them to manually, and more often have ignored the problem entirely and just not cared that the buttons were in a stupid order.

But for some reason today I got tired of it and decided to fix it; so here:

list arrange(list l) {
list outl = [];
integer n = llGetListLength(l);
do {
if (n<3) return outl + l;
n = n - 3;
outl = outl + llList2List(l, -3, -1);
if (n==0) return outl;
l = llList2List(l, 0, -4);
} while (TRUE);
return []; // UNREACHABLE
}

This will take a list in an order, and return a list in a different order such that if you pass the new list to llDialog, the labels on the buttons will be in the order that one might expect, left to right and up to down. As in for instance:

llDialog(avatar_id, prompt, arrange(button_list), channel);

It basically just divides the input list into pieces of size three, and then reverses them, with complications in case the input list isn’t equally divisible by three. And because if you ask LSL to copy the first through fourth-to-last (inclusive) elements of a three-element list, it silently copies the entire list rather than (as one might have expected) copying nothing. And because it doesn’t realize that a “do while(TRUE)” will never exit and without the unreachable line you get an error saying that not all code paths return a value. And because llGetListLength is said to be computationally expensive. And because LSL does let you use negative indices (roughly) on lists!

This works in both Second Life and OpenSim, because the scripting languages are extremely compatible for obvious reasons.

Many, many, implementations of this same algorithm no doubt exist all over the place :) but this is mine, for the moment and for what it’s worth!

Spennatrix is OP

I have been in Second Life a bit more in the last few months doing random things, as well as being in Kitely contributing to Karima Hoisan’s amazing builds (“worlds”, they call them in Kitely). But I’ve also been in World of Warcraft even more (hey, there’s a new expansion out!) so I’m going to talk about that here instead. Who knows, if I get used to writing in weblogs again, maybe it’ll occur to me to write some original words about SL again eventually!

(For instance maybe about how it was kind of fun figuring out Bakes on Mesh and having a full mesh head and body for Girl Dale, but that having done it all there doesn’t really seem to be any point outside of like better-looking joints in swimsuit photos.)

Spennix the Rogue has been max-level (which is 60 again now; shades of Classic!) for a little while now, and it’s been pretty fun. She’s rather squishy, as I’ve resigned myself to rogues being, with of course the somewhat compensating advantage of being very good at sneaking and vanishing and running away and stuff. So, good for exploration. She is in the Night Fae Covenant, mostly because I thought the “running around fast as a glowy animal” thing sounded like fun and more in-character than the other covenants. The damage ability seems to do a little extra damage, but nothing amazing.

For variety, I also leveled Spenax the Affliction Warlock a bit, up to 57 as of this writing. They have this nice mechanic where when your second and subsequent characters arrive at the main part of the expansion, you have a choice between going through all the introductory storylines introducing the covenants one at a time and all, or you can go straight to choosing one and then flitting around all the various areas levelling. I chose the latter for Spenax, and the Venthyr seemed aesthetically appropriate for a Warlock. The Door of Shadows ability is fun, and the damage ability, again, seems to do maybe a little extra damage.

Then I decided to focus and to some higher-stress stuff, so I’ve been leveling Spennatrix the Holy Priest, including actually healing instances, which is stressful because if you mess up the party dies, and if the tank messes up the party dies and blames you. (I’m sure tanks say the same thing about healers.) But it sure is quicker than just questing around, and the dungeon-queue wait times are like two minutes tops for a healer. So Spennatrix is 59 going on 60 as of this writing. She joined the Kryian Covenant because of course she did (they’re so pure and earnest that they are going to turn out to be bad guys, right?), and the non-combat “weird little owl guy with a baby voice brings you a potion” ability is amusing. But the combat ability? Well, holy shirtballs!

I mean, I may be pretty bad at party healing (or maybe I’m pretty good, I’m not sure; so much depends on the tank and how bad the DPS are about standing in pools of stuff), but for solo’ing around, a Kyrian Holy Priest is totally OP. (OverPowered, that is, not Original Post{er}.)

Long, long ago, in say Ashenvale, poor Spennatrix would wince at the site of, say, a bear, because they tended to do damage faster than she could heal, if she was going to get in any damage herself and therefore kill the bear before running out of mana.

But now! Need to do damage? We have Smite and Holy Fire. We also have Holy Word; Chastise, which is not only a nice chunk of damage but also a good interrupt and a decent stun, and it comes around so often on the guitar that we can just use it for a little extra damage without worrying about wasting the interrupt part, because it’ll be back soon. We also have miscellany like Holy Nova for an area effect, and that star thingie which does both damage and healing in a line out of front of one, and then again on the way back.

(All priests apparently also have Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death. Spennatrix does not use these. Ever.)

Worried about taking damage? We have Power Word: Shield (which we didn’t for awhile, but now we do again) which makes the first N owches of damage just not count, and we can self-cast it every like 15 seconds. And if we do take damage, we have small fast heal, and big slow heal, and “heal that person and then jump to whoever else needs it the most”, and a Heal Over Time, and a “heal the whole party with pretty graphical effects”, and “heal this person and everyone near them”, and “heal this person an enormous amount if it’s available, and since its cooldown reduces with every small fast heal you cast, it probably is”, and… and… and…

And then there’s the Kyrian thing, Boon of the Ascended, which can be used every three minutes, and basically turns you into this unstoppable damage and healing vortex for ten seconds, with both direct and area damage, all kinds of healing as a side effect, and a big boom at the end that takes care of most of whatever difficulties survived until then.

Spennatrix is no longer worried about bears. Especially the first bear that’s tried to mess with her in the last three minutes.

(And then there are little perks like Levitate, which is an any-time “no worries about falling” thing, as long as you don’t need to steer, and Fade and/or Shadowmeld, which are not as good for sneaking as a rogue’s Stealth, but still very handy.)

None of this helps (enough) in a dungeon with a squishy headlong tank and DPSes that stand in boiling blood, but it’s definitely easier to solo around than I remember!

Update: Ding 60! :)

“Unmindful” The Movie by Natascha Randt & Karima Hoisan

I will take a LITTLE credit for parts of this, mostly my expertise at not having any particular goal in mind :), and a nice “make a ball look like it’s rolling without risking actual physics” script that I did. It’s a great movie, and a great sim; experience both!

Digital Rabbit Hole

On July 16th, I posted here in my blog, about a new world that Dale Innis and I were beginning to build on Kitely – Virtual Worlds on Demand, called, “Unmindful” See post:
As I said in the post, it was an experiment, to prove or disprove something I had come to believe: “You don’t need an idea to create…ideas come…all you need to do is start.”
So we started off  with no ideas about what the world would be, just making sort of odd stone structures, with off-sim wind turbines, and a parade of wild animals standing on rugs moving in a figure-eight. That was our first part of the build, but then unmindful to how the focus even began changing, we shifted in a very different direction. I had the concept, but I promise you, if it weren’t for Dale, we would never have pulled this off. (Have…

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A poem, and a painting, come alive

It’s been my pleasure and privilege to be part of another of Karima Hoisan’s amazing Kitely sims, based this time on one of her lovely poems.  (See previously The Hudson Line, based on the Hudson line, and In Your Head, based on your head (well…).)

The poem is here, and the artist’s own posting on the sim is here; I urge you to follow both those links, and then experience the Kitely sim for yourself, if you do the Kitely thing at all. (And if you don’t, maybe you should; it turns out you’re still allowed to use SL, too! /grin ).

And in the meantime, here are a couple (more) pictures, as further incentive:

Doing the scripting for this sim was great fun, and I hope there is at least one thing that makes you scratch your head and think “How did they do that?”.  Most likely it is the result of Ms. Hoisan and I racking our brains for a few days trying to figure out how to get a particular effect, and then when it seemed impossible her saying “I don’t suppose we could…?” and me smacking my forehead.  :)

How old are Dales and some gnomes?

So yeah, How Old dot Net is all the rage, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to point it at various digital-realm avatars, but here we go!

Girl Dale and Boy Dale both seem to be mid-20’s, which is plausible:

Even drowed-up for Fantasy Faire (see Michele H’s very nice coverage although given how late I always am it is probably over by when you read this):

On the other hand Spennix is, well…

as is her alternate-realm self, the Arcane Mage Tashalorum (now level 100 also with her own Castle; I think we may have seen her here or on Flickr before, at like level 12; leveling is sooo easy these days):

The human PNC architect there is handled more plausibly, so probably we just need a different version of How Old dot Net for each of the races of Azeroth. (But what of the half-gnomes??)

Amusingly, the male version of Tashalorum (two words: Transmorphic Tincture) is apparently an even harder problem:

Maybe facial hair isn’t supposed to be pink?

That’s all for now. :) All various things have been occurring as always, but I have been lazy and not weblogging them or anything. Which means they didn’t really happen yet at all!!

Speaking of vanity…

Meanwhile, over in WoW, I’ve been playing various of my 90s through the brief pre-expansion quests to get the level 515 item and whatever achievement or title or thingie one gets (oh, right, it’s the “of the Iron Vanguard” title, and you really only need to get it once with one character and then they can all use it), and then doing other random things.

I played Spennix just a tiny bit, then my shadow priest for awhile (wicked DPS), and various others, then settled on Spennatrix the healer for some time, including trying to complete all of the Pandaren raids (at mere Looking For Raid difficulty) before the expansion comes out and makes all the existing content easy. (Still have just one to go! The wait-time for raid healers is always really short, I am just lazy.)

Y’all will doubtless remember Spennatrix’s simple white outfit from the other month (okay, the other year). As she went up to 90 and did Timeless Isle quests and got that gear, I didn’t re-transmog every upgrade she got, so eventually she was looking a bit more baroque again:

although not awful; the Pandaren gear is much less bizarre-looking than the stuff that inspired her to do a set of transmogs in the first place.

But so anyway, I was in the white transmog again, standing around with a raid group buffing up to take down the Council of Elders in Last Stand of the Zandalari, when I notice this other Night Elf Priestess, and she’s wearing like omg TOTALLY the same transmog!!!

That’s me on the left.

Of course it’s not really exactly the same transmog, mostly it’s that we both have Mooncloth Robes, and generally non-ornate other gear. She’s got this High Councillor’s Circlet for a nice blue gem matching the blue hair, whereas I have hair matching the robes, and an unmodified Amaranthine Cowl of the Impatient on top (not really a cowl despite the name, more a little top extension with a hairpin) because it looks good, and matches the (also unmodified) belt.

Neither of us quite have the shoulders right, I’d say; I have the White Woolen shoulders or whatever that is, and they’re simple but kind of a weird shape, and actually too white for the white outfit. On the other hand her I think Shadow Council Mantle is a little too ornate for the overall look (although they do go nicely with the gloves). I’ve switched back to the Silver-Threaded Amice look for the shoulders since, and I think I prefer it.

I was thinking about some evil-looking dark transmog for the Shadow Priest, but then I realized that since she spends 99% of her time in Shadowform, no one would hardly ever see it.

And if no one sees it, what’s the point, eh? :)

Gotta ride it like you find it

(That’s actually about the Rock Island Line, and this is about a different line, but it seems apposite.)

That picture is from Karima Hoisan’s new Kitely sim “The Hudson Line”, which she has just announced over in her (much more frequently updated) weblog.

It’s a wild dreamlike re-interpretation of the RL commuter rail line of the same name; in one of those great SL synergies it started in casual conversations about the differences between various people’s living and working environments, and grew into this lovely impressionistic world. I helped with my usual small scripting contributions, and this time even some of the building!

It was wonderful fun to watch it emerging out of nothing (what an age we live in), and while you don’t get to have that fun, you can visit the announcement, and the sim itself (Kitely account or something required I guess?), and ride the train, and watch the movies, and find out what’s down there in the tunnel at the end (and it’s not Grand Central Station, muhahaha).

(Scripting note: llSetKeyframedMotion works very nicely in Kitely these days, and therefore I assume probably also in OpenSim; I do advise not entirely trusting that the moved object will arrive exactly where you expect it to, especially the first time after a sim reset, and setting at least a backup timer as well as the usual at_target() event. But it’s running the trains and cars and trucks and tugboats in the Hudson Line sim just fine!)

Meanwhile in Minecraft…

(Shout outs to the Burro who tends to use similar titles.)

Minecraft, and in particular Minecraft Portable Edition in single-player mode, which is what I do, is much lower-overhead than SL. Tiny computer that I always have with me, no noisy fans or tangly power cords to deal with, no other persons to worry about rudely ignoring or suddenly logging out on, usw.

Of course there’s also orders of magnitude less stuff to do, and no interesting people to interact with whilst doing it. :) But there we are. It fits nicely into the tiny slivers of time that I seem to have lately (in contrast to the richer but rarer larger chunks of time which favor SL).

Attentive readers who have read even postings that I may never have gotten around to writing may recall the problem we’ve always had in MCPE with animals going aquatic.

That’s an old picture of some sheep and cows swimming about in one of the seas, where they are hard to shear or milk, and look silly. (I suspect a bug or roundoff error or something in the animal-wandering code in MCPE, that causes them to tend to stay near the edges of the map, which is where my seas are.)

The other day I got tired of this, as well as tired of mining way down deep in the mines for awhile, and built some fences and stuff. And viola!

That is the brand new Animal Enclosure (or whatever the agrarian name is) out at The Farm, featuring a number of captured sheeps and cows and chickens. And the Enclosure out at Lonely Lake:

which so far has just sheeps.

It is now Much Easier to collect eggs and milk and wool and whatnot (no more swimming or skindiving involved).

Known renegade animals include one Piggy seen deep in the interior the other day, and one last swimming sheep ‘way ‘way off at the edge of the map:

They will be assimilated! Maybe eventually!

(Also, MCPE players who haven’t yet should try hitting a grassy ground square with Bone Meal. Woot! I did this by accident, and was delighted. Also, hitting the leaves of a tree with the Sheep Shears is good.)

Now in fact being able to more easily get Milk and Eggs and Wool isn’t necessarily a Good Thing, since I already have lots of stuff of all sorts, and not necessarily enough places to keep it. Sort of like SL! And RL for that matter!

Most of my Chests are scattered here and there around the world, and full of unsorted and unlabeled Stuff (mostly Cobblestone). Here is the rather cluttered storage area of the Main Desert Base, for instance:

(At least we have double-size chests now!)

Finding anything in them is hard, as is trying to move stuff between them in order to give some semblance of organization so as to make it easier.

Walking down some long bare-walled hallway the other day, I for some reason pictured to myself an amusing scene in which the hallway was lined with little Shopping Mall style stores, with windows and doors and display cases and signs and stuff. (H&M Lonely Lake; big sale today only!)

I started fiddling around and actually building one last night just for grins, and once I’d done that and stepped back from it I was suddenly (thunder) struck with the realization that this could actually be Incredibly Useful for organizing things!

So here is what that first store looks like now:

and you can guess what is in the chest inside. :) The little Nether Reactor Core to the left is just for decoration.

And having done that and been Extremely Pleased, I started making and filling more spaces in that long hallway (between the Desert Mine and Lonely Lake, the long way not the shortcut) with other marked chests, f’rinstance:

and now the upstairs chests are no longer all cluttered with string and bones (and I’ve reserved a big area down there for chests full of Cobblestones), and I can eventually get rid of some of the chests up there so as to have more space for Palatial Thronerooms or whathaveyou.

Woot! :)

Almost inspires me to start boxing up stuff in SL, rather than carrying all eighty-five thousand (literally) things in inventory all the time.

But only almost…

Three Poems

My RL self did National Poetry Writing Month in April; 30 poems in 30 days. I thought I’d post three (at least) of them here, because they have some Virtual World content.

This first one, from the 29th, is notable for having inspired a machinima as noted the other day.

Dactyls are Dharma, too

Here in the midst of the ten thousand thingummies
Hearing the voices of ten million throats,
Feeling compassion for those who have aching knees,
Those who build bridges and those who dig moats.

Sitting in zazen and counting the in-and-out
One and a one and a one and a one,
Mind somehow caught in this insistent rhythm, I
Tick like a clock sitting here in the sun.

Dharma is silent but Dharma is noises and
Dharma is stillness but Dharma is speed,
Why should I think that the circling second-hand
Isn’t precisely the sound that we need?

One commenter (commentor? commentator?) somewhere said they’d learned two new words from it; I’m guessing “dactyl” and “dharma”; both good words to know.

The second one, from the 9th, is very relevant to lil Spennix:

A long way from Kharanos

Well it’s a damn’ long way from Kharanos
To th’ Gate o’ th’ Settin’ Sun,
But the beer is good an’ the beds are soft
When th’ daily slaughter’s done.

I left a dagger in Thermaplugg,
All those long hard years ago,
Took a bit of his gear as a souvenir,
Of Gnomeregan below.

But that crazy old coot was nothin’,
‘gainst the things that they’ve got ‘ere,
Bugs an’ Mogu an’ lizard men,
And hungry ghosts o’ fear.

Someday I’ll go back t’ ol’ Col’ridge,
An’ sit on the porch with ‘em all,
But ’til then I’m out here in the Vale,
Killin’ bugs up on the wall.

Well it’s a damn’ long way from Kharanos
To th’ Gate o’ th’ Settin’ Sun,
But the beer is good and the beds are soft
When th’ daily slaughter’s done.

… and here is an Action Shot of “Killin’ bugs up on the wall”:

(Click through to the shockingly-redesigned flickr for the same picture larger, and in a confusing interface.)

And to close, this one from the 17th. Note that it’s not actually about Second Life, since that has real people in it, not just simulated ones. But still…

Walking Cross-Country

He says he’s writing a computer program
to simulate
walking cross-country
in an unknown place.

Where you might follow a brook upstream
and be surprised by
a forest lake
sparkling in the sun,

And follow a path around it
to a ramshackle house
at the end of a dirt road
where a woman with dark hair and soft eyes
opens the door
and smiles a welcome.

And I say that that sounds cool,
and I also say,
that the real world has surprises like that, too,
and even soft-eyed women,
and he should maybe go for real walks sometimes.

He turns to me,
like he’s about to say something,
but then he just shakes his head
and goes back to the keyboard.

Block

There was something otherworldly about it….

(Submission to the Single Frame Stories thing, for the prompt “Block” announced here.)

And yeah, it’s a bit of a geeky in-joke. :)

Dreaming of pixelated rock

I’ve tried to figure out Minecraft a couple of times in the past, playing with free demos or online versions or something, and it never quite made sense. I didn’t know what to click on to do things, or even what kinds of things were available to do.

Then for some reason I spent a little actual money on the Pocket Edition (i.e. the iPad app, in my case), and it clicked.

It is in some ways utterly awesome, and I think it will be replacing WoW for awhile as my thing to dork around in when I’m feeling too antisocial for Second Life (or, now, when I don’t want to bother with an actual computer, but have my iPad as always nearby).

(Executive summary for those interested in Minecraft vs. SL comparisons: Minecraft is (for me, so far) about using cleverness to build things (and survive) given a set of tricky constraints; whereas SL is about enabling people to build (and do, and be) the most amazing things that they can think of, with as few technical constraints as feasible.)

But now on to Our Story!

The famed Tower of Somewhat More Than Modest Height.

Again I started out unable to do anything at all, but this time I Googled around for tutorials enough to find the key difference between tapping on things and holding one’s finger down on them (completely different actions, typically), and then I was good to go.

Well, for awhile. :) I started out in Survival Mode just because it sounded like fun, and pretty much ignored crafting and dug in the sand and cut down some trees with my bare hands, and sort of threw together a wood-and-sand fort with a little moat around it for keeping away the monsters for the first night.

That did not go terribly well. I could probably have been fine just crouching inside the walls all night (and hoping nothing jumped over), but I wanted to see out, and with my minimal architecture I kept like falling into the moat and being greeted by a zombie who had also fallen in, or going too close to an Explodey Guy, and dying and things.

So I read the web a little more, discovered crafting, built my first Crafting Table, decided that carving out a secret underground base in the sand was more promising for now than building up, and I was off.

The Secret Underground Desert Base with its guard house, and a section of the old Roman Road, seen from the viewing dome atop the Tower.

The glass roof of the Secret Underground Base can be seen above there. The guardhouse nearby is one of the two main entrances (once I had a Crafting Table, the discovery of Wooden Doors was perhaps the next major technological milestone). The other entrance is in the tangle of sand and rocks beyond the glass roof, near the Weird Tall Thing That I Built For No Reason.

The Old Roman Road leads out toward my second base. Once I’d mastered the basics of base-building, I wandered about a day’s journey from the main base, and built a new smaller one in a hillside there to spend the night. Eventually I built that Road leading to it so I wouldn’t get lost. The road isn’t used much, since there’s also now a tunnel between the two bases.

(In fact my whole instance here is pretty much riddled with tunnels connecting everything to everything else, so I never have to go outside to get from one place to another unless I want to hunt or cut wood or tend the farm or something. Does everyone starting out in Minecraft build a spiderweb of underground tunnels, or is that just me?)

Nowadays the second base is mostly devoted to mining, in mostly a downwardish direction.

Looking upward from the current bottom of Deep Delving. The base area, with crafting table, furnace, etc, is ‘way out of sight up there somewhere.

Naturally, being a main mining center, the Delving area seems to produce little or no coal, iron ore, and so on, when compared to random little digs that I make while wandering around…

I still get jumped on by zombies and attacked by spiders and skeleton archers now and then, both because I go boldly out in the early morning and night sometimes, and because they tend to spawn down in the mines (the mine down the ladder from the tunnel near the Farm entrance is officially the Haunted Mine, although now that I’ve put in a few dozen extra torches it seems safer).

At first I was living off the flesh of innocent cows and piggies, and the occasional apple from a tree (as is the usual computer-game trope, eating heals one’s injuries), but when those ran low I went to the web again, and discovered farming!

The water-side farm, with rustic stone farmhouse in the background.

Basically the only crop is wheat, and basically all you do with it is make bread, but each unit (loaf?) of bread eaten recovers two-and-a-half hearts worth of health.

Farming is exponential; you discover your first few seeds while tilling the soil with your hoe, and after that you get something like two or three seeds on average for each seed planted (in addition to of course the wheat for bread). So eventually either the entire world will be wheat-fields, or I’ll just have an unbounded quantity of unused seeds.

Nature’s bounty!

And then I made the Tower of Somewhat More Than Moderate Height just for fun, and it does have great views at the top of the Very Long Spiral Staircase. (There’s currently a giant spider living on the roof at the very top; not sure if it’s stuck there forever or until I break the roof and it drops down on me and I kill it, or if it will expire eventually, but it’s a fun decoration in the meantime.)

There’s also a big basement under the tower (with crafting table and furnace and chest; I love how they look sort of like a washer and dryer and meat freezer all side-by-side in some suburban utility closet), and of course I’ve linked that basement into the tunnel system.

I need to make a map for myself now, of all the various bases (Main Base, the mines under it, Delving Base and Deep Delving, the Tower, the Farm, the Viewing Room, Snowland, the Hunting Lodge, Arboretum Outpost, and various little hillside doors I haven’t named), and how the tunnels connect them all. For instance to get to somewhere (I’ve forgotten just where at the moment) you go into an obscure tunnel in the corner of the mine under Main Base and then take a left just before the end and go down another tunnel, and…

Until just recently there was still one little burrow that you had to travel overland to get to, but then I dug back into the hill from it and eventually happened on an existing tunnel, so now that one is in the network also. Not that I could necessarily figure how to get there very quickly.

For closing, here are a couple of atmospheric shots, of the Tower seen from Arboretum Outpost at night, and vice-versa just at dawn:

The Tower seen from Arboretum Outpost at night. Note roving zombie on the left.

Arboretum Outpost, seen from the top of the Tower just at dawn. Note roving skeleton-archer.

Most recently I’ve added some fencing and planted some trees at the Arboretum, and it better lives up to its name.

So I’ve been seeing torches and pixelated stairs and long narrow hallways in my dreams, and on the insides of my eyelids when I close my eyes. Not, thankfully, the only things I see on those occasions :) but it’s been a common theme. (See also ol’ Headburro, who is doing cool stuff in I think the PC version, and like wearing diamond armor and all.)

If I don’t get into the more complex PC game and the whole modding thing (see for instance this video for a person talking about and doing Minecraft things of which I have no idea whatever what is going on with in), I suspect that the addiction will eventually wane, and I’ll go back to WoW when I’m not feeling SL-ish.

But time will well!

Bored with WoW again :)

So the periods during which I get interested enough in WoW to play it relatively regularly seem to be getting shorter, and less frequent.

The latest one, of course, happened when the Kung-Fu Pandas expansion came out. Spennix got to level 90 pretty quick:

At least I think she’s level 90 there; anyway, she is now! And she got to 90 without doing a single instance, or very many dailies, just questing about. More of the “everything in WoW up to but not including advanced raiding is now dead-easy” effect.

She also has maxed-out Engineering and stuff now, and is very fond of her Mechanical Dragonling pet:

One new thing I haven’t yet done in WoW is the “Pet Battle” stuff. ’cause, I mean, y’know, sheesh?

I also have a Pandaren Brewmaster, as seemed pretty much required, considering.

He’s level 50-odd now, and wow Brewmaster tanking is easy so far! :) But since after the first rather fun Pandaren start zone he’s just doing the same old levels, I find it hard to get really interested.

Spennatrix has also been Holy Priesting around the first few levels of Pandaria:

But again I find it hard to be fascinated, since Spennix just did all these areas not so long ago. Instance healing might be fun, but I dunno shrug.

Spennix has done some Golden Lotus and Tillers and insect-dudes dailies, and they can be diverting, but I always come away feeling like I’ve just wasted a big chunk of time.

Whereas in Second Life, when I look at the clock and discover it’s hours past bedtime, I almost never feel like it was a waste. :)

So expect to see me around the grid a bit more than I have been! (Except of course that this weekend is Thanksgiving so there are RL things going on, and then next week I’m out of town on business and may not have connectivity, and and and…)

I’ll say one thing for Diablo III…

… at least the female Barbarians aren’t wearing absurd bikinis or anything.

Eolfrida is not really pleased about the feathers on the belt, even…

Here’s an article about female armor, that talks some about the D3 barbarian armor, male and female, and how it’s pretty good, gender-wise. I agree.

Apparently the Demon Hunter character is more controversial. :)

Diablo III: that was fun! Kind of!

So I got a free copy of Diablo III for promising not to quit WoW for a year or something (I don’t know, it was complicated, but it didn’t cost anything, and there were some vaguely non-trivial-looking benefits, so I clicked the buttons).

RL has been even more complex than usual and I haven’t been able to get into SL much, but I’ve had enough stolen moments in D3 that I’ve now beaten the game (the first time through, see below), and I can sincerely say that it was worth every penny. Haha, see what I did there? :)

Not that it was worthless, but on the other hand I can’t really see why it was such a big deal, or why it seems to actually have fans and forums and stuff. Unless there’s lots of new stuff in the harder modes that I haven’t tried yet, it seems about as worthy of having devoted fans or forums as, I don’t know, some minor Edward Bulwer-Lytton short story or something.

But anyway! Here is my first character, Cathcart the Monk, the one that I beat the game with on normal mode:

That’s a screenshot, shown actual pixels, of him at like level 34, from the “Select a Hero” screen. It’s also apparently the closest that it’s possible to ever see any character in the game (not counting the pre-rendered cutscenes, which of course don’t show your character).

Here is a shot from within the actual game, after pressing Z I think it is to zoom in to the tiny extent that one can zoom in:

Kind of small and far away, I thought. Want to see the actual expression on someone’s face? Well, too bad!

And, especially irritatingly, what minor zooming-in there is doesn’t understand about having to derender stuff that is in the way, so if you try to zoom in to take a screenshot of some noteworthy scene, your camera is likely to end up obstructed by a wall:

or buried in opaque tree leaves:

My first instinct in cases like that would be to spin the camera-view around, which leads to the next amusing feature of Diablo III: you can’t do that. There is exactly one possible viewpoint, looking down at your character from something like three meters in the air and five meters to the South.

I went to the D3 forums to see if this was really a limitation or if I’d just neglected to find the camera-movement keys, and was amused to see the True Blue D3 Fans forming roving gangs there and fending off anyone asking that question, saying things like:

I dont know man, that type of camera angle is one of the trademarks of the diablo series. Personally i like it as it is, it would not feel the same for me with a different one…

[T]he isometric camera is a staple of the true soul of the Diablo series.

The stationary camera is one of the pieces of nostalgia kept in place from Diablo 1 and 2 are very positive.

and

this isn’t wow

I knew the WoW kids would all flock to d3 with their complaints

and perhaps my favorite:

What legitimate gameplay reason is there to rotate the camera?

which invites two kinds of amusing questions in response: “Yeah, why would you ever want to look in anything but one fixed direction during a battle?”, and on the other hand “What legitimate gameplay reason is there for the characters to have noses?”.

Of course it’s only the WoW players who miss being able to look more freely around the world. Well, and the people from Second Life. And Skyrim. And Call of Duty. And pretty much any game made since 2005. And, well, DOOM. From 1993…

But anyway! :) The inability to see the character close up, or to have a first-person mouselook sort of view, or to look freely around the world, tended to keep me from feeling really immersed. Also the movement system is entirely click-to-move, which I find also detracts from immersion. Feels more like The Sims With Monsters in a way; more like playing with action figures, maybe, than like really being in an interesting world myself.

And it’s really short! As well as extremely linear. There are four “Acts”, each with various quests in them, and you’re taken from one quest to the next and one Act to the next with very little choice in the matter. There are a few side-quests, but rather than being things that you can run around doing at will, they are things that may or may not become available in any particular play through the game, more or less at random; that is, they are largely under control of the game rather than the player.

Once you finish the game once in normal mode (and it’s quite easy, all of the bosses are essentially “hit them until they die, being sure to walk into the health-globes that they spawn so you don’t die yourself”), you get to see the nice victory cut-scene, and then next time you enter the game you are without explanation back at the start, with all of your items and skill and level intact, but this time in Nightmare Mode. Which, as far as I can tell so far, means that the game is exactly the same, except that the monsters are all upgraded to about the same level that you are, so they are roughly just as hard to kill as they were the first time through.

So you get to play the same game over and over if you want (the modes are something like normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno), with the same character at successively higher levels, against successively tougher monsters (or they would be tougher except that you are higher level now too), with maybe a different random side-quest or two thrown in. Thrills?

(There is also an orthogonal Hardcore Mode, which you can choose when you create a character. Hardcore characters are different in that once one dies it stays dead, and you can’t play it anymore. I’d be curious to see a good Hardcore player deal with some of the encounters that seem specifically designed to require two or three deaths to get through, where more and more monsters just pile in. Maybe there’s an Aggro model that I just haven’t figured out, or something, but I’m not that interested.)

There’s a Stash that lets you store items that you find and share them among all of your (non-Hardcore) characters, and there’s an Auction House (not inside the world but just dialogs in the main game menu; another blow to immersion) where you can buy and sell things, and apparently there is or will be some way to buy gold and/or items with actual real-world money (which I have to admit baffles me somewhat; why would anyone care enough about this tiny game to want to spend real money to buy fancy equipment in it?).

I’m still paying Act I in Nightmare Mode with my Monk a bit, although it’s sort of dull. I’ve also created a second character, Eolfrida the Barbarian woman:

You will note I have to take a taller picture there, ’cause of she is Big. :)

Here she is running toward battle at like level 2:

and standing around looking blurry and undefined a few levels later:

Playing a Barbarian is slightly different from playing a Monk, more emphasis on smashing things, more use of healing potions and glomming onto healing drops ’cause of not having any healing magic (so far?), but basically still “click until you have enough magic whatsit saved up to right-click, and throw in a spell from the 1, 2, 3, or 4 buttons once you are high-enough level”.

The story is okay, sort of what you might find in a decent Conan-style pulp novella, with one loudly-foreshadowed plot twist just where you’d expect. There’s some amusing repartee with and between the NPCs, and there’s a little variety and thought involved in equipping the three follower NPCs and deciding which one to take along at any given time, although in fact they seem mostly interchangeable.

Probably worth more than the nothing that I paid for it. But if I’d paid the, what, sixty US$ that it costs retail? I do not think I would consider it a good investment…

Randomly generating terrains

… aka “When the Creator misplaces a parenthesis”. :)

So my first attempt to write a program to generate random but pleasing landforms for my Sim on a Stick did not go quite as expected.

Bit spikey, for instance.

But then I found a misplaced parenthesis! And things got better.

I think I am liking the algorithm…

For the curious, here is the basic (recursive, self-similar) routine, in everyone’s favorite language: Python. (Squished down to fit in the weblog here, not guaranteed to compile as-is.)

def fill_in_terrain(t,lowx,lowy,maxx,maxy):
   ''' Takes the input terrain, where the low-by-max '''
   ''' corners are already filled in, and fills in '''
   ''' everything inside those corners, by the '''
   ''' Magic of Recursion. '''
   if maxx-lowx<2: return t
   if maxy-lowy<2: return t
   xmid = int((lowx+maxx)/2)    
   ymid = int((lowy+maxy)/2)
   hscale = (maxx - lowx) * HSCALE
   # first the corners
   if t[lowx][ymid] is None:
     t[lowx][ymid] = (t[lowx][lowy] + t[lowx][maxy]) / 2 
       + hscale - math.floor(2*hscale*random.random())
   if t[maxx][ymid] is None:
     t[maxx][ymid] = (t[maxx][lowy] + t[maxx][maxy]) / 2 
       + hscale - math.floor(2*hscale*random.random())
   if t[xmid][lowy] is None:
     t[xmid][lowy] = (t[lowx][lowy] + t[maxx][lowy]) / 2 
       + hscale - math.floor(2*hscale*random.random())
   if t[xmid][maxy] is None:
     t[xmid][maxy] = (t[lowx][maxy] + t[maxx][maxy]) / 2 
       + hscale - math.floor(2*hscale*random.random())
   # then the center
   if t[xmid][ymid] is None:
     t[xmid][ymid] = (t[lowx][ymid]+t[maxx][ymid]
                     + t[xmid][lowy]+[xmid][maxy])/4 
                     + hscale - math.floor(2*hscale*random.random())
   # and recurse on the four quadrants
   t = fill_in_terrain(t,lowx,lowy,xmid,ymid)
   t = fill_in_terrain(t,lowx,ymid,xmid,maxy)
   t = fill_in_terrain(t,xmid,lowy,maxx,ymid)
   t = fill_in_terrain(t,xmid,ymid,maxx,maxy)
   return t

def get_terrain(x,y):
   ''' returns an [x][y] array of floats representing a terrain; '''
   ''' range unpredictable '''
   ''' x and y ought to be powers of two, for best results.  '''
   ''' oh, and equal I suppose '''
   answer = [ [None for a in range(y+1)] for b in range(x+1) ]
   answer[0][0] = 0
   answer[x][0] = 0
   answer[0][y] = 0
   answer[x][y] = 0
   answer = fill_in_terrain(answer,0,0,x,y)
   return answer

Fun that all these pretty hills and things come out of that little bit of (also pretty) code…

Breeding like prims

So yet another thing about having one’s own private virtual world is that one can do all sorts of fun but dangerous stuff that one wouldn’t do in anyone else’s.

The main fun-but-dangerous thing, naturally, being the creation of uncontrolled replicators.

(Carefully controlled replicators are safe even for, say, Second Life; and of course SL has the Grey Goo Fence, which is good for the Grid but can be annoying for Residents.)

The other day in my local OpenSim-on-a-stick I made a little physical sphere that randomly moves around. It promptly took off into the open water ‘way off the side of the sim (into space that, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist).

So then I made a tall green wall, and put the randomly-moving ball inside the wall, and that was better.

Then I taught the ball to make copies of itself, and also to randomly delete itself. I set the probability of replicating just barely above the probability of self-deletion, knowing from my days as an Anti-Virus Guru that this should lead to an (initially) slow population increase.

Then I got bored, watching the number of balls inside the wall go from one to two to three, back to two, back to three, to four, back to one…

So I cranked up the probability of replication a bit. And then of course the phone rang and I had to open a different window to do something, and when I went back to the viewer:

Oh, dear.

Well, no problem, I thought; the sim was running kind of slow, but I could just cam up, select everything nearby, deselect the wall, and hit Delete.

And that worked great, except that in the few seconds between my selecting everything and hitting Delete, another few dozen balls had spawned, and they weren’t selected or deleted, and then a couple seconds after that the sim was running so slowly that deleting stuff wasn’t really working anymore.

And then I noticed…

a potential crisis! If the balls were to start spawning outside the wall, it seemed not unlikely I would have to restore the sim from the last OAR file I took or something.

On closer investigation there were at least three balls that had apparently escaped the wall:

but when I went to examine (and hopefully quickly Delete them), it turned out none of them actually existed as far as the sim was concerned, the viewer was just confused as a result of all the physics and lag going on. So that was good.

I thought I would log out and then log back in as the AV with Estate powers (Simona Stick, rather than Test User). I noticed that over on the Opensim console, things were not entirely happy:

It look a long time to settle down again when I tried to log out, and at this point I started to panic a bit. In the time it would take me to log in as the estate owner and try to turn off scripts or whatever, would the sim have become utterly unusable? So instead I did a shutdown on the Opensim console. This resulted in lots more red messages for quite awhile…

but eventually it did shut down.

Okay, smartypants, so now what? Well, it turns out that Opensim in Sim on a Stick happens to use a MySQL database to store everything in, and that due to the Day Job I have some knowledge of MySQL, and the database tables that Opensim uses are at least somewhat documented.

So once I’d figured out the MySQL username and password that SOAS had installed, I logged into the MySQL console, and viola:

mysql> select count(*) from prims;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 1482 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)


So we have fourteen hundred and eighty-two prims. Fortunately all of the self-reproducing ones have the same name, and each rezzed prim (as far as I can tell) corresponds to one or more records in just three different tables.

First we delete the shape-records for the prims (Opensim could save considerable space in the database by compressing out duplicates here, one would think):

mysql> delete from primshapes where UUID in (select UUID from prims where name="moving and reproducing ball");
Query OK, 1294 rows affected (0.05 sec)


So it looks like we have about 1294 replicators

Then, we destroy the contents (prim inventories) of all of them:

mysql> delete from primitems where primID in (select UUID from prims where name="moving and reproducing ball");
Query OK, 2385 rows affected (0.14 sec)


And that more or less makes sense; each replicator typically contains a script and a copy of itself, so we’d expect to have roughly twice as many contents as we have replicating prims. 2385 is somewhat less then twice 1294, but that’s because of that “roughly” in the last sentence, which I will not go into in detail.

And finally, we remove the little beggars themselves:

mysql> delete from prims where name="moving and reproducing ball";
Query OK, 1294 rows affected (0.05 sec)


Another reassuring 1294.

Now we would expect to have 1482-1294 prims left, and:

mysql> select count(*) from prims;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 188 |
+----------+


(counting on fingers) that adds up!

Crossing our fingers and venturing back into the world as Test User, we find:

The wall (and everything else) undamaged, but the nasty replicators gone! And sim performance back to normal. So huzzah!

Disclaimer: I have no idea whether the steps above are actually the right way to remove a bunch of nasty things from an OpenSim instance, and for all I know they have left the database in some incoherent state that will cause it to die horribly tomorrow. If your Opensim world is valuable to you, take frequent backups and don’t go messing with the database directly in MySQL because of something you saw in a weblog once. Also, in retrospect, it probably would have been cleverer to use MySQL just to turn off scripting for the estate, and then gone in and cleaned up normally inworld. But hindsight is a penny earned!

Sim-on-a-Stick and Kitely: they both work!

After I described my uber-l33t bat file hax0ring the other day, Ener Hax emself commented that the latest Sim on a Stick would detect 32 vs 64 bit and do the right thing All By Itself, and also had a more recent version of OpenSim, and a thing to let you choose three different styles of world layout, and so on.

So I tried it! In particular, I exported what I had built so far (i.e. the increasingly awesome house, pictured here being built still in the older OpenSim I think:

) to an OAR file on my laptop’s hard drive, using the actual Opensim documentation, imported it to the sim next door on my USB key just to make sure it worked (matter duplication!), saved Test User’s (tiny) inventory to an IAR, shut down that little OpenSim, installed the latest one from Sim On A Stick (they both fit onto the USB key with room to spare), developed even more l33t Opensim skills by finding out Test User’s UUID on the old one, creating a Test User with the same UUID on the new one, imported the OAR and IAR, and poof!

Test User was ready to start building again in the new moderner and unhacked-by-me virtual universe:

And that was extremely cool.

After building a little more there I thought the next ossum thing to do would be to put this little house-in-a-world onto the public Web somewhere were other people could (potentially) also get to it.

Kitely was the obvious choice, so I looked at various other things first. :) If you are a company wanting to pay a small (by company standards) monthly fee for a virtual server in the cloud, there are lots of people eager to take your money. But if you are an individual wanting really not very much at all for hopefully more or less nothing, the choices are more limited as it turns out.

So Kitely it was! First I went back into the local USB-key world and put a crate in the yard and put all of Test User’s inventory items into it and made a new OAR (since Kitely I think will let you upload an OAR but not an IAR). Then I joined Kitely on the Free plan (by logging into Twitter and telling it to tell them that I was me, which is cool and/or scary), created my one free world, uploaded the OAR, and logged in…

Is that Test User’s house we see in the distance?

Hurrah, it is! (Including the inventory-crate in the yard, and the various textures harvested from the Innertubes, and their accompanying baggage of moral and legal copyright questions!)

Let’s go inside and check out the details.

Everything seems to have come over just fine, including the genuine Dale Innis art on the wall there, with the subtle band of color on the black horizontal piece, that moves slowly from one side to the other, changing hue as it goes. (And the amusing 70’s-style orgy picture in the background.)

Back out to the yard, and the crate of inventory items, and here is Kitely Dale with my favorite custom OpenSim eyes and hair, and Eloh Elliot skin, and home-made “n00b” tee shirt, ready to take on the world! (At least as long as the free two hours lasts, after which I will have to consider buying some Minutes a la carte.)

Fifteen minutes later, there is a nice wall around the yard:

and the universe is threatening to fork. I tried to export it, with the modifications, from Kitely as a new OAR, but apparently I don’t have enough Kitely Credits for that. And my patience for figuring out virtual currencies and stuff had apparently run out, because I went off to write in my weblog here rather than finding out about Kitely Credits and continuing on that path tonight.

Pretty neat, eh? Maybe sometime I will throw a party there! If I can figure out how the Minutes and Kitely Credits required would work an’ all…

World in my Pocket (USB Windows 64-bit version)

So I stumbled across the ‘Sim on a Stick’ idea for the Nth time (that one is Tateru Nino’s; see also SimOnAStick dot com from the adorably pink iliveisl entity, and NWN’s recent coverage), and this time I thought I’d try it.

Tateru’s ZIP file doesn’t actually work under 64-bit Windows, which is what the fancy laptop here runs, but it almost does. The symptom is that after the opensim console says “APPLICATION” you get a popup about opensim.exe being evil, like so:

and then a big Java-or-something traceback about a bad image and an invalid format and similar geeky stuff shows up in the console and it acts as though you’d typed “shutdown”:

I poked around a little, and found the fix here. Basically you just have to run opensim.32bitlaunch.exe instead of opensim.exe (this runs the 32-bit opensim; actually running a 64-bit opensim would be more work, especially since at least one important component, ODE, doesn’t seem to have a 64-bit build that I can find).

So what I did, concretely:

• Open the usb-opensim folder on the USB key in Explorer,
• Copy and paste the “opensim” thing, so there are two now,
• Rename to new one to “opensim64”
• Rightclick on it and Edit
• Find where it says “opensim.exe”,
• Change that to “opensim.32bitlaunch.exe”,
• Save and exit,
• Now run your world just as Tateru says, except:
• Where she says to run opensim.bat, run opensim64.bat.

And that’s all! Mere moments later (and after not being able to figure out how or if it’s possible to tell Firestorm to point at anything besides SL, and being glad I still had an Imprudence around), I was duckwalking around, uploading some great old Eloh Elliot skins and my “noob” tee shirt, and making some brand-new prims on my very own laptop!

That is the comely and talented Test User, wearing capris from the small clothing collection that comes in the ZIP file, the abovementioned skin and tee shirt, and the ever-popular New Hair and New Eyes, admiring the First Three Prims Ever Created In This Particular Universe.

Which is really quite cool, in its own way…

Fashion comes to the WoW battlefield

There’s always been a bit of fashion stuff in World of Warcraft; certain items of clothing or other gear that you could buy or get that were valuable not because of their stats, but because they looked cool (or unusual, or weird, or extra-ugly).

People would make up elegant or funny or whatever outfits out of these sometimes and stroll around in town showing off, or wear them to RP (Roleplaying) events, or costume parties or whatever. See for instance the famous picture of Spennix in the pimpin’ Crimson Felt Hat, which is actually useful for about twenty minutes at level 48, if you’re a Priest, but looks good on anyone:

On the battlefield (or out in the wilderness or the necromancer’s tower or whatever), however, you generally wore whatever you could get your hands on that had the best stats, with little or no regard to how it looked. (’cause of otherwise you would like die an’ all.)

The Blizzard folks did put some thought into gear design, and there are various sets that go together thematically at both high and low levels. But even at that if you’re a holy priest or a warlock or a retribution paladin or whatever at a certain level, there are a very limited number of things that are Best In Slot (BiS) for you at that level, and at most a couple of different integrated outfits, and even those will have been designed by, well, by Blizzard.

And they ain’t exactly fashion designers.

But now that is all changed!

Using Transmogrification, you can make any piece of gear look like any other piece of the same sort of gear (with various complicated rules like you have to own and be able to use both, both must actually have some kind of stats bonus, etc, etc), and that has completely opened up the WoW fashion scene, both in town and in the fray.

(Well, not completely-completely as in Second Life, because you still can’t quite make your own stuff, but you can combine various of the lots and lots of existing-looking stuff in multiplicative ways.)

For instance I hadn’t taken pictures to speak of of Spennatrix, my healer Priest, or even played her all that much lately, at least partly because she looked stupid in her gear.

Here, for instance, is the Mask of New Snow, the best healer headgear she’d come across and/or been able to afford to that point:

I mean, yuck! And also, eek! Is that a look you’d want to trust your life to in battle? More like something you’d expect to be battling against.

A bit later she upgraded to the Cowl of Destiny, which looks like this:

Again, omg and/or wtf rofls. Blizzard’s style choices at high levels have always run to more or less elaborate more or less dark and threatening things, which is fine if you’re a necromancer warlock or a mage or even warrior or whatever, but Spennatrix is a humble Priestess of Elune, the WoW Moon Goddess, and is not really interested in looking like any of those things, thank you very much.

(And her staff, for that matter; Chelly’s Staff of Dark Mending isn’t exactly In Character, but it’s what she’s got.)

So, transmogrification! Being an Illustrious Grand Master Tailor and a Night Elf, it was no problem to cleanse some Felcloth into Mooncloth at the ancient Moonwell over in the mysterious Twilight Grove over in Duskwood, and make a lovely set of Mooncloth robes. Then taking out the elegant Imperial Red Circlet she’d saved from her early adventures, and the Moon Staff of Elune that she quested for in her novitiate (if priestesses of Elune have novitiates, I dunno), and then down to the Ethereal’s place in Stormwind for th’ Transmogrifying (not to mention a trip to the barber for a little magical dye job), and viola:

Now there’s someone you want at your back when you’re tanking Mannoroth at the Well of Eternity, eh?

(Her next robe upgrade, to the Robes of the Cleansing Flame, didn’t look too bad:

but still too much like a Fire Mage or a UPS deliveryperson or something (not to mention making her bottom look huge; what were they thinking with that pattern on the hips??). Much better in Mooncloth:

don’t you think?)

So that’s fashion in WoW! None of my other toons (haha, “toons”) have made as much use of it as Spennatrix, although my necro warlock did use it to color-coordinate a piece of what was really Priest gear that he was using for awhile, and Spennix has used it to get back the look of her very very cool goggles from awhile back. But Spennatrix is definitely my most fashion-conscious WoW character. :)

And back in SL, boy Dale has a rather new look, too! We’ll see how long that lasts. Fortunately, no annoying raids or prolonged quests or tedious grinding are required to change looks in SL; just shopping!