The Mono regions on the beta grid were updated with new binaries yesterday that resolve SVC-1421, but more importantly merge the Mono changes with Havok 4. There are now very few open issues remaining, so if you haven’t already, please recompile your scripts to Mono on the beta grid and test them. If you find any problems, please file them as JIRA issues here, or tell us about them at the Mono office hours held in Sandbox Goguen MONO on the beta grid on Wednesdays at 8AM and Fridays at 3PM.
The video above shows Blueman Steele’s LSL version of Conway’s Game of Life running side by side on the LSL and Mono virtual machines. The LSL version running on the left was recompiled to produce the Mono version on the right without making any changes to the LSL source code. Not only does the Mono virtual machine run the cellular automaton over 4 times faster than the LSL virtual machine, but it also uses less than 25% of the CPU time consumed by the LSL version. If you have any other good demonstrations of Mono in Second Life, please let me know.
Thanks again for your continued support throughout the Mono beta process.
Have you got the downtime blues? View the latest installment of Second Opinion, the Second Life newsletter, on our website and coming soon, grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world locations. (Don’t forget to sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues!) This month in Second Opinion, find out what Sabin Linden says about Het-Grid, get information on SLCC, learn about AjaxLife in our interview with Katharine Berry, read up on Stephany Linden’s voice tips and tricks, check out our view on the new features vs. bug fixes debate … and more!
Also, as a reminder, we are no longer emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. For example, you can now get the RSS feed directly delivered to your RSS reader du jour. Have any suggestions on how to make the newsletter better? Email them to the editor.
[UPDATE] Thank you for your comments. We greatly appreciate your continued patience during downtime. Please note that in the near future, and thanks to Het-Grid, downtime will occur less frequently. Don’t know about Het-Grid? Check out Breaking News in this month’s newsletter.
In May, we blogged about Second Life’s upcoming birthday. June 23, 2007, that’s this Saturday, will mark the fourth anniversary of Second Life’s launch. Volunteers have been hard at work planning and building for the event, which will be held in the SL4B sim and surrounding sims and will continue until June 30, 2007. Due to the increasing number of new Residents, volunteers decided to plan this year’s birthday event around Second Life’s history.
I’m currently recovering from a very intense, but enjoyable weekend at Hack Day London which Christopher Linden and I attended to help hackers mashup Second Life.
Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley had brought a webcam, markers and reactivision software they were looking to put to use, so, as we were playingIceTowers with IBM at the time, we thought it might be fun to build a mixed reality version of the IceHouse game Torpedo.
It turns out that Torpedo is particularly well suited to a reactivision implementation as it relies on the position and orientation of pieces placed freely on a playing field, but judging torpedo hits in real life is difficult. It’s also a very simple game, so there was a slim chance that we could build it in 24 hours.
Our plan was to play the game in real life then publish the position and orientation data from reactivision to the web, then use LSL to pull the data in to SL where we could rez the pieces, launch the torpedoes and calculate the results. At the same time a second web cam would stream video of the board in to SL, so that we could watch the game play out in RL then see the results calculated in SL.
Working on the hack was loads of fun and team Supernova did a great job with help from Timeless Prototype in world. The software came together amazingly well but it wasn’t until we started running around scavenging tripods, glue guns, gaffer tape and white boards to nail together the hardware side that we started getting lots of interest from the other hackers.
In the end the lightning strikes, storms, leaks and lack of wifi meant that we didn’t complete all of the gameplay, but we managed to demo all of the technical aspects of the hack live in our 90 second presentation.
Everything we used was open source, so anyone will be able to finish off our work or build some other interesting computer vision application in SL. Nigel thought mixed reality spin the bottle would be good fun. Andy Piper has another SLorpedo write up here and a selection of pictures here. Chris took a video of the presentation, so hopefully we’ll be able to make that available soon too.
I’m already back working on the SL infrastructure, but it’s great to be able to hack on interesting SL applications once in a while and hopefully we’ll see some of the hackers at Linden Lab Brighton in the near future.
UPDATE: Team Supernova finished the game last week and ran it at SL.UK on Saturday, some SL footage of the finished game here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-MoN9d_Nw
Last Thursday, we announced that we would host a Second Life Speech Gestures Contest in conjunction with the Voice Stress Test Extravaganza. We have since decided to postpone the Voice Stress Test Extravaganza, previously planned for this Wednesday, May 9. Fear not – the Stress Test will return, watch this blog for more information!
As such, we have extended the deadline for the Second Life Speech Gestures Contest entries until May 14 at 3pm PDT, providing Residents with an additional week to create and submit speech gestures. Please see last weeks blog post for submission guidelines and more information about the Second Life Speech Gestures Contest.
We had many great submissions to participate in the Third Annual Second Life Winter Festival (read the initial announcement). We’ve chosen the participants for the event and created a set of Tour HUDS with the locations/events inside. Visit Chalet Linden in Wengen to pick up both Winter Festival Tour HUDs and your free official Second Life Winter Festival 2006 T-shirt!
There are two different HUDS, one for the first half of the event and one for the second. (Big thanks to Forseti Svarog for volunteering to set up the HUD system.) The folder also includes a copy of the HUD kiosk in case you want to place one on your own land. When you click the kiosk, a folder named “Winter Festival 2006 HUD & Tshirt” will appear in your Inventory. Right click on either of the HUDs and it will appear in the top right of your screen. Then click on any of the pictures to read more. Once you find what you want to visit, click the right hand button for the landmark.
Remember: The Winter Festival begins today - Friday, December 15 - and runs until December 22!
I had loads of fun at Euro FOO last weekend talking, discussing and building with a great bunch of extremely smart and interesting people. As we were on the continent Piers Harding and I came up with the idea of building a petanque game in Second Life and, as we were building it in Second Life we thought it would be fun to play petanque with pianos. So, on Sunday night we spent a couple of hours in the bar playing werewolf, drinking wonderful Belgian beer and hacking together SLetanque in SL. Alice Taylor put together some FOO camp inspired artwork and Jeannie Moonflower donated a full permissions version of her upright piano so that on Monday afternoon we could spend a fun couple of hours hurling pianos and Cory Edo’s open source couches from the gnubie store around Second Life. In the spirit of the event, open source SLetanque is now freely available under the GPL from my spot in Ambleside.
MASSIVE-3 represented the virtual world as a partially replicated scene graph. Locales were frames of reference in the scene graph and boundaries were links between locales. Transforms on boundaries defined the locales relative positions, scales, rotations and rendering effects, allowing CC-TV boundaries to tiny versions of distant locales, boundaries to shadow versions of locales, torroidal universes of locales joined by boundaries which linked back on themselves and many of the effects which Richard Bartle suggests are impossible in a graphical virtual world.
We then added the concept of temporal transforms across boundaries which contolled the replay of events recorded in the target locale allowing links to locales in the past or to slow motion versions of current locales (we didn’t manage links to the future, unfortunately).
Locales and Boundaries in MASSIVE-3 were lots of fun to play with and the Half Life video shows that they’re even more fun with gravity and guns.
Just before Christmas I ran a workshop as part of the Screenplay "Boss Frenzy!" day at the Radiator Festival which allowed children to
collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with
collage. Dozens of people came to the Broadway in
Nottingham and got busy with pens, pencils, paper, scissors, glue and
magazines to design bosses for our "You’re The Boss!" shmup.
Well, I’m pleased to say that the game is available here and the Game Maker file (which you can use to remix the game) is now available here. The graphics and audio are released under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, while the game itself is released under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The intention is to allow the game to be modified and media added or removed to create a derivative work, but for the original media to be left unaltered.
So, download the Game Maker file, download Game Maker and have a play! Adding a new boss is as easy as copying one of the existing bosses, replacing its sprite and then copying one of the rooms and replacing the boss with your new one. You could also add new music, change the backgrounds or change the gameplay entirely. Game Maker is definitely worth a look as I think its scripting approach is really slick. I’m glad I’ve played around with it as it’s given me a few ideas for LSL.
When you’ve finished remixing, please let me know! If we get lots of good remixes it might be fun to combine them all and then release "Super You’re The Boss" in a few months. Also, let me know if you run a "You’re The Boss" workshop. We had lots of fun at the original workshop as you can see below.
A few weeks ago I ran a workshop as part of the Screenplay "Boss Frenzy!" day at the Radiator Festival which allowed children to
collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with
collage. Dozens of people came to the Broadway in
Nottingham and got busy with pens, pencils, paper, scissors, glue and
magazines to design bosses for our "You’re The Boss!" shmup.
Well, with many thanks to the 8bitpeoples for letting me use their great music, I’m pleased to say that the finished game is now available for download under a Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. Just unzip the file and run YoureTheBoss.exe on any reasonably up to date Windows PC.
I’ll hopefully be making the Game Maker file available in the new year so other people can run their own "You’re The Boss" workshops or just mod and remix the game to their heart’s content.
My high score is 9465 on level 28. Have fun and Merry Christmas!
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