Well Onwards to Macau!! :D

7-21-2012 hong kong (should be M/D/Y, cuz in hong kong , but whatev lol. This is a post from yesterday, I have one more from yesterday to post as well )

 

Hello readers!! :)
Today I have the privilege to go and explore Macau!
(in RL not SL XD)
Apparently it's this little country that was settled by the Portuguese way back when!
I have no idea what to expect, but it should be fun :>
I plan on studying the architecture, if possible, and designing copies or derivative structures in my OpenSim land! :D

I currently follow, as of today, two Second Life blogs: New World Notes, and Virtual Christine.
Both are interesting, though I just subscribed to Christine's blog today, (www.virtualchristine.com), and I would love to meet both of the blogs writers in Second Life or on an OpenSim grid! :P
They both seem really friendly and helpful, and very knowledgeable about the virtual realms.
I think it all comes with time and experience exploring SL and OS and making friends and learning all about.. well, everything!
The content creation system is totally robust, I want to learn to make custom avatars, to script, and to design awesome things and such :)

I will try to write a few more blogs before the day is over, keeping you up to date on Macau and showing you picture of what it is like out there.

i should conduct an experiment one of these days, just go to like 5 different sandboxes and introduce myself to ten to twenty people randomly, ask them what they are doing, and asking them if they have anything they could teach me.
It would be interesting to see how many of them, statistically, would be friendly, how many would share any knowledge, how many would say they are just starting learning, etc etc.

The possibilities in SL are endless!
If people are willing, it is a very good source for conducting surveys to understand people and answer any questions you may have about anything in general. (of course, these questions are just going to be aimed towards that percentage of the population that plays online games, and then even smaller: that percentage that specifically plays Second Life.)

Onto the idea of "Playing" second life...
I don't like the terminology, Second Life is so much more than a mere game.
It should be called... exploring? all the people that explore and inhabit Second Life, not play.
Oh but for sure, there are people that just "Play" in Second Life, perhaps in Linden Realms for example, but the majority of what I consider to be Second Life consists of people that create, buy, and explore Second Life.
There is no "playing", playing implies the world is precreated and that you have a goal that the creators have defined for you (creators being Linden Labs not the Residents, for they surely do create some rules in their sims), instead we have people exploring a dynamic, constantly in creation and destruction, world with no real objective given to them other than to do what they please.
(with a major exception if they want to Grief(cause trouble), that is not something that is an acceptable choice in Second Life.)

I cannot wait until I find a community of virtual explorers that meet within a time frame that I can manage in my daily and (when school starts) professional life.
I could be immersed in languages other than those that I speak, discuss philosophy with people I have never even met, and potentially give speeches one day if I gain traction and figure out what it is I stand for and believe in.
I want to rally the world, unite the community, and make Second Life all that it can be! (and is supposed to be! Or (imo) should be!)
I want to foster a sense of community, create an easier way for people to find others interested in what they are, and for people to figure out where the events and places that they want to attend are.

It would be really fun to attend a virtual reenactment of historical events, people dressing up as Presidents or famous speakers and giving the speeches to the resident base of SL.

I should, one day when I get a job, rent a lot of land on SL and do a communal living project (I think that's what it's called?), where I build some apartments and allow some large number of people to live on my land.
It would be so fun and rewarding to have a close-knit community of people, all living under one roof.
I would have a fireplace, and at night we would sit around the camp fire and tell stories of our real and virtual lives, tell jokes, laugh, and just bond as one big virtual family. (well, I should say one big awesome family, as family transcends the boundaries of the virtual)

We would script and build together, and have community projects. One day we would build a garden around our apartments, the next day someone would suggest that we build a path though the garden leading to some benches and birds and a pond for a relaxing time to read newspapers or whatever else.
We would have a community board where people could pin or post their ideas or ads or whatever, so whenever someone wanted the others to know about their awesome idea or whenever someone misplaced their creation, the community would always be their to organize discussions and come together to build it.
Honestly, in order for all this to work I would have to be lucky enough to get 50 people (or perhaps 10, 15, or 20 at first) with the right personality types to be willing to participate in my little community.
All these people would be living on my land for free, of course, and all that I would ask in return would be that they participate and give back to the community, that they help give our humble region some spark and flare, and that they are kind to all those inhabiting my land.
That would be extremely awesome, and I would enjoy the community so much.
I would try to build a speaker emporium, so I could schedule occasional speaker appearances for my residents (with their voting or approvals or whatever, or not) in case they wanted to attend, everything from politics and philosophy to scripting and theology.

It would be sweet, I'd try to invite people of renown or good report to my lands to enrich the lives and minds of my people, and I would try to get sculpting and programming experts to come and give classes occasionally as well.
I would provide a feedback box/mechanism whereby Residents could let me know what they thought, and I would openly discuss the ideas I received (though careful not to mention anyone specifically, as I believe in anonymity and discretion) at perhaps the community camp fires, and I would try to get a general consensus as to what the community wanted. I would try to make compromises, and to see where the community moved from there.

There is so much potential in Second Life, but much of it stems from social interaction and events.
So if you're socially awkward like me then you might need to explore and talk to residents a bit more, make friends, and become more relaxed and happy. (<-- my plan for myself lol)

I thought Second Life was dying, but I do not know yet.
It's prices are atrocious though, like 1000 (US) dollars to buy land, and then like 300 dollars a month just to have it?
(thats 4,600 dollars the first year, and 3,600 every year after!)
By contrast, many OpenSim grids charge far less
and offer more land. (although I think they only offer undeveloped land.)

Think about the Kitely Startup 35$ a month for 20 worlds (63,000 square meters I think) and unlimited usage.

Oh we are at Macau!
I will update later!

Thanks for reading!!

Sincerely,

~James Dodon :)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Quick update before bed! :)

Hello everyone! I thought I would post a quick update before I went to bed today!

Today I explored Linden Labs ehh.. Linden Realm, I think it’s called, to see what the new tools for creating mobs had created, and to see if it was any fun.
Well, it was beautiful and actually pretty fun! XD
I ended up earning 31 L$, of which I spent 10 on a handheld image projector, so that is pretty sweet.
That’s like enough to upload a texture or object or something, idk lol :D

I also went to see Batman Rise of the Dark Night, and it was a phenomenal movie, extremely well done!! I love it, it was written well and was enjoyable.

I didn’t get any pictures of Linden Realms, as I was running from the Rock Monsters that will chase and “kill" you (teleport you to a nearby respawn area.

I was reading more of The Making of the Metavers on my iPad, taking notes and highlighting and stuff, and it is very very interesting!!
History is so interesting! (not only SL’s history, but video game and tech history too! But that’s a story for another time (well it’s like a ton of stories, volumes… but whatev lol))
It was talking about LL’s first attempts at socially engineering Second Life to be what it thought it should or would be, and the extremely negative reaction of the Residents.
It tells of the abuse of most all of the features of the early systems implemented in Second Life by the userbase, with people running around in mobs mind-raping people with mass attacks of negative rating them (had to be in proximity to rate someone).
And business owners paid people to “camp” out on their property, to increase traffic and get the rewards offered by LL. (camping = being paid to just hang out)
Ironically, it probably wasted more RL money than what you made in SL just running your computer for the time necessary to earn anything useful.

People often muse that it’s best to make money in real life if you want to have Lindens$, because the jobs in Second Life don’t make as much money and are more time consuming.
Devote yourself to your RL, and spend any excesses you may have on SL if you wish.
(at least, I read something like that on an article google gave me for how to make money in second life)

One of the most interesting aspects of Second Life and of the whole SL experience is the whole concept of the self, the ego, and one’s identity with the world and one’s beliefs.
There are people who are racist if you decide to wear a black skin to see what it’s like, and there are people who gender-bended (role-played as the opposite sex) and fell in love with other people of the same sex within second life!
There are people that have met in SL and then have gone on to overcome international boundaries and to become married!
It is certainly not a game, the effects psychologically are too strong to ignore.
(this is where a “video games are bad for you” complaint could be thrown in, but it’s opposite could be furthered here as well.)

I think it’s effects on us and our emotions result directly from the fact that we are constantly interacting with actual people and humanoid things that, since they are human, say the most interesting and touching things.
It’s the souls of the avatars, the humans that inhabit them, that transcend the confines of the virtual world and embellish Second Life with more than a mere existence as some trivial game.
It’s still bad to spend too much time in SL, but it can be fun and rewarding, I suppose it’s not too bad if you are uber rich and have absolutely nothing to do. (like you already achieved your life goal, raised a family, and completed and Iron Man for fun)

The learning curve for content creation and for scripting is such that I am not surprised that so many people shy away from engaging in such activities.
It is very time consuming and hard to master.
(I haven’t really gotten far yet, but I suppose I could watch tutorials.. but then I feel like I am cheating or something @~@ idk, stupid psychological weirdness I suppose lol)

It would be good to learn for project design and management, and to learn Scripting in general. But it takes a lot of time to do!
The whole Linden Realms side of Second Life is more geared towards the consumption and entertainment portion of SL users, those who cannot or do not want to create and build the metaverse. (Which is perfectly fine, and arguably even more enjoyable. (although odd if they only are interested in the “game” part of SL and not the community, the beautiful creations, and the rewarding process of building something in SL itself.

SL does have advanced building tools, it’s just awkward because it’s like trying to figure out how to use Autodesk 3ds max with no manual: soo many features and tabs and options, it’s very confusing at first!
Luckily the whole framework that makes SL possible, the internet, is an amazing and wonderful resource for tutorials and help!
One of the interesting things about the internet in my opinion is that even if what you are looking for isn’t out there yet, since the internet is connected to actual human beings, much like SL is, you can get help and information from asking questions and joining communities online etc etc.
The other users of the platform are willing and happy often to share their knowledge with you and nurture you, to welcome you into the fold.
It is in this way that knowledge  can transcend the boundaries of the mind and physical regions. However, it is all dependent on your desire and choice to or not to ask for help.
Being sociable is important.

I personally have found that, just like in Real Life, I am socially awkward in Second Life!
How strange really, my Real Life experiences have psychological impacts on my Second Life experience: my mind does not distinguish between virtual and physical interaction, but rather chooses to be awkward and nervous, worried even, when interacting with anyone that I am unfamiliar with.
Maybe SL will help me get over my issues with being sociable. Who knows?

The whole idea that putting on an Avatar other than the one that you feel is you, and it’s subsequent effects on how you feel and what you think of the experience, are very interesting as well.

Well.. I think I squeezed enough out of this topic for now!
(it was, after all, supposed to be a quick blog post!! XD)

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

~James Dodon :)

Designing Really, Creating? Virtually!

Hello everyone! :)
I recently took up the task of designing something to build in OpenSim to gain skills in building, to have a potential place for friends to visit one day that would be fun, and to see what I could come up with and to have fun building it myself!!

I cannot wait until Linden Labs pathfinding tools are released, for game-related thingers so I can add monsters to the thing that I am making :D
It is supposed to be a giant rectangular box, that is actually a maze that when you enter it you wander around and fall through the floor to the next stage in the maze.
There are only three floors in this beta model that I designed, but eventually I will design one with many more floors and secrets, one that will be super massive and awesome!!
(and take up a whole sim!! @O@)
For right now my meager beginnings with building and with this project will suffice ;}

Here are some pictures basically sketching out the project:



These are the basic sketches I did to get a general idea of what I wanted to accomplish with my project.
The pictures go as follows: sketch of entrance, sketch of top floor, second floor, third floor, and sketch of final destination (which you teleport to).

I have also drawn out blueprints on graph paper, which I will include in a blog post tomorrow hopefully. (wait today is tomorrow, it’s 12:58 at night xD so… later today then I suppose lol. Though I am sleep deprived (of own choice) and can’t guarantee quality lol ;p)

Here, I’ll boot up OpenSim real quick to grab a screenshot of what the project looks like thus far (which isn’t much):

Here’s OpenSim running (yes, it runs in command prompt! lol)


Here is the humble project thus far!!
What you see is going to be part of the top floor, with the left cylinder being a secret room.



As you can see, my current level of expertise requires me to make a giant triangular prism in order to allow people to get in and out of the secret room. Interesting huh?


As you can see in the above picture, there is a hidden ramp to go up through the phantom roof and out across into the secret room!!
(originally I had planned for the roof to be phantom and if you jumped right you’d go through it, but without providing a custom avatar to allow me to make the maze height smaller (and thus allow a jump to actually go through a phantom ceiling, instead of popping up and falling back in).
Actually, giving a custom avatar at the start of the maze would be a wonderful idea!
It would make the space needed for the maze much smaller! lol
And would make interesting features and obstacles in the maze easier to construct.
The idea is that as you progress there are more enemies and more chests, and the chests you open have weapons made by me in them (or treasure/freebies).
The weapons allow you to defeat enemies, and the weapons you get-get stronger as you progress through the floors.
(but so do the enemies you face, so there is a balance.)
Only weapons created by me will damage the mobs (mobile objects xD),  and thus you cannot cheat by bringing in your own weapons.

I found out that in OpenSim it is really easy to create a user, but hard to delete them!
You have to edit the database files or something, .db in the bin folder, and manually modify whatever is needed!
I thought I needed it to set the owner of my land, when really I just needed to click “request admin priveleges” or whatever it is in-world, so I downloaded a few programs and tested them out.
The one you want is called SQLite Manager, and it is an add-on for firefox.
When I load it it takes a while, firefox seems to be not responding for a few secs, and then it loads.
Then I click the .db file I want, and then I edit what I want!! XD
(you can change the name of your land and whatever too)

So I am not sure if that is useful, but there you go! \(^u^)/
I really hope to learn Linden Scripting Language and become proficient in it!
It would be a great skill to know and have, and would allow me to create absolutely whatever I wanted in Second Life or OpenSim.
I am curious as to how textures are made for objects with weird shapes, such as cars and bikes and other weird complex things, for things with curved surfaces, etc..
It has to be hard I’d think!
Unless there is a program that can take your model and take your image and take your input and directions to make it look how you want it to.
Like… you it knows which parts of the texture image to distort, enlarge, and shrink in order for it to show up properly.

Idk, I need to figure out sculpty prims and whatnot lol.
Apparently to make doors work you have to cut  a cube in half so you can trick the physics engine into thinking the center of your object is where the doors hinges are, so when it rotates 90 degrees it opens like a door!
(cuz objects in second life do not rotate on a hinge, rather they rotate about the center of themselves. (so a door would “open”, but right in the middle of the doorframe | \ | <—type of deal))

I would like to create replicas of virtual items I have seen in other games so I can enjoy them in Second Life and OpenSim, as I would love to have all my virtual items with me no matter what game I am playing, (so I suppose that would be cross-virtual-universe item compatibility, idk), and I think it would be interesting to do so.
I would like to create a replica of Tom Nooks Pic, from ACWW.
I can rip the sprite from the game, import it into Second Life, design a frame, and be happy with that.
But that image is probably copyrighted, and if I ever sold it I probably would get in trouble.
(I don’t even know if I am allowed to even distribute that image, it’s probably the property of Nintendo or something. Maybe they’ll let me get away with it when I tell them I am a huge and loyal fan, and when I tell them I bought 3 acww game cartridges, two of which I still have.)

Or… I can make a work of art based on Tom Nooks Pic, and import that into Second Life or OpenSim to enjoy or sell for whatever reason I wish to do so.
I just don’t know if using Tom Nooks Pic as a reference for my work, thereby making it a derivative work I suppose, would still violate copyright laws because it would be considered a derivative work building off of and dependent on the original Tom Nooks Pic.

Woah, my brain is like shutting down! (probably literally lol)
I am super tired and it’s becoming harder to focus…
Maybe I should go do Linden Realms to try and earn some free Lindens xD
Well, that’s all I have to discuss for now!! :D
I hope to see you in-world one day!

’Til next time! (prob later today )

~James Dodon


(P.s. mehh kinda lame bonus pic!!
birds-eye view of project aMaze so far!!

                                                                                        )

Life, philosophy, and OpenSim

Hello everyone!! :D

Yesterday I converted the OpenSim installation on my laptop into a local server so my sisters could join me in OpenSim!! ^u^ (I still feel like calling it Second Life for some reason XD it just sounds… cooler, or something, idk lol)
My younger sister got crazy with the creation of prims, making fishes of all sorts and rezzing them all over the island, while my older sister began to play around with terraforming!!

I finished up building my house and found a LSL script online so my door can actually allow people in and out of it: if you click the door it becomes “phantom” and you can walk through it, and if you click it again it becomes solid once more.
All the scripts to rotate doors were making my door rotate in the middle of the doorframe, rather than on a hinge. >.>
Hopefully I’ll figure out what went wrong with that some day soon lol  :)
I am currently reading a few books on animation, texturing, and scripting in second life and I hope to practice and garner these skills in my offline OpenSim server.
It should be awesome!! :D
(though confusing, hard, and time consuming XD)

There are a ton of OpenSim grids that sell cheap land that is then on a public grid!! :D
(although you could probably make it private too, idk)
The most interesting of them that I have seen so far is Kitely, where instead of paying a flat rate per month or per year, you only pay for the minutes you are in-world.
So if you have a large company that meets in-world like twice a month, you only pay for the time spent in-world those two times each month.
(but, mind you, that’s paying a price for each and every person in-world. I think it’s cheap, but I do not recall.)
But think about this, the free account gets 120 minutes free each month and get’s it’s own world for free.
Yes that’s right, this is the only website I have seen so far that offers free land. This is puzzling and interesting, perhaps made possible due to the unique payment structure of the Kitely startup itself.
It has it’s own currency now which can be used in-world, and you can actually pay for your account with the KC currency if you make enough in-world.  
How crazy is that?!?

I applied to joing the google group “The Hypergrid Adventurers Club”, but I do not know if they got back to me yet or not. *shrug
I hope they can teach me how to hypergrid and why it’s not working currently!! XD

In one of the books I am reading it was teaching me about Sculpty Prims, which are basically a prim that you make customly outside of second life and then import into second life as an image that can be applied to a normal prim to turn it into a Sculpty. Whew! what a long sentence! lol
The simplest program to use is SculptyPaint, written in Java, which has some predefined shapes that you tweak and then import into the game. (sphere, flowers, stairs, etc)

I actually made something and imported it in :P
Here look:

There it is! Isn’t it loverly! :p
Reminds me of a chest piece really haha :>

While I have these pictures up, here I’ll post some of the others!! :P


Here is my beautiful house!! As you can see, I even created a ramp to the door!! :P
The only issue that bothers me right now is the tiling of the textures on the two pieces of the house itself above and to the right of the door: they don’t match the other parts of the house!! D:
I believe that is due to me stretching the objects rather than changing their size.. .grrr
I will try to fix that later…

Here is our humble island!! As you can see there isn’t much yet, but what there is makes me happy and is pretty awesome in and of itself!! :}
You probably have noticed the triangular orange thing on my roof, and the big floating blob in the sky, and are wondering what in the name of OpenSim are they?
Well…


They are flying fish!! XD
Flying fish created by my younger sister whom I was mentioning earlier :>
Above in this pic is the Flying Fish Brigade, and if you look carefully you can see a school of triangular fish down under the sea…



Triangular fish look like fish from the front, ya see?
They have two eyes and a triangular body, and like to travel in packs it seems.
Oh, they also like to hide on top of buildings and such it seems.


Here are two fish staring at me and wondering why I am not suffocating under water.


Here you can see triangular fish and a big blobby fish under the surface of the cool and rippling water.



And in the above picture you see yet another type of fish my sister created, a (dare I call it) spherical fish?
I’ll have to ask her what she named these different breeds of fish, because as for right now I believe they are all named the default “Primitive”.


Here is a little family of the circle fish thingies <3333
:3 awww lol


And here is a rogue blobby fish with triangular fish and another blob fish in the background.
Maybe they are playing tag and the blob in the background is chasing him down? @o@


Hmm… speaking of blobby feesh, this is Big Fish Mountain!! :P
Named that while I was naming the picture files for this blog upload, Big Fish Mountain is a spectacular sight, with a giant turquoise fish sticking out of the top of it.
It’s a hard climb though, so steep it may take supernatural flying powers or something to get up there



Here is a gigantic copy of my house that I rezzed in the sky!!


There’s my avatar standing in the gigantic doorway!


Here’s what the inside looks like, and there in the background is my sculpty prim :D

On top of my giant house is a little circle fish I asked my sister to put there so I could nab a copy!! TuT aweee yea!! lol :>

Here is my sister standing on top of another of her creations, clearly posing for what would become her introduction on my blog.
Look at that spirit of adventure and passion in her eyes! She is scanning the horizon, thinking of all the possibilities and planning something new…


Here she is from farther away
(btw, I do not know what that is that she is standing on!! I think it’s like a non-snowman snowman creature thingy that she created!! I think its awesome!! ^u^
It kinda reminds me of a creature we would have seen in Super Mario 64, when fighting the giant (cardboard?) rectangular boss that you had to ground pound on to destroy)


And here she is from the side, about to fly off into the sky, an eagle scoping out her surroundings and planning her next great endeavour…



Well, that’s all the pictures I have to upload today!!
I feel like I have talked about the following before, but I think it’s an important thing to discuss.

Second Life is dying. It’s true. Many people are leaving virtual worlds entirely, and some of them are moving over to OpenSim.
The Residents in Second Life likely aren’t aware of the OpenSim grids, as I wasn’t until I discovered it and wanted my own OpenSim land to play around with, to learn the skills prerequisite to excellent Second Life building and scripting. (and opensim building and scripting for that matter.)
The physics engine of Second Life is superior to OpenSim, sadly, and OpenSim is way harder to navigate.
However, I believe it has always been the plan to make Second Life open source at some point in it’s future, and perhaps if it dies that will be sooner than many of us would have thought possible. (not that I want it to die! it’s something that is really sad, it has the potential to completely destroy the future that I believed in when I chose to believe in Second Life and all that it stands for, to destroy a future of a massive social internet experience, with things such as in-world supermarket stores that actually ship the food you buy and the items you buy to your real-life house.
(for this type of idea, the land regions where the supermarkets would be would have to only allow you to be there with so many others at the same time in your viewer.
I.e. the sim actually has like, lets say, 1,000 people on it at the moment. All shopping for food and items and etc.
Why is it not lagging?
Because it doesn’t load you all into the same instance of it, it loads groups of 50 or 100 together.
You are stuck with the same 49 or 99 people that you entered the market with, until any number of them leave and are replaced by new people teleporting to that sim.
It’s the same sim for everyone, but the people that are allowed to see each other and coexisit have been limited due to space and lag issues. (among other issues)

This is the future I would love to see…
I actually have an idea I would like to pursue one day, but I cannot mention it here for fear of it being stolen by someone with more resources than I currently have at this time.
(not that someone might come up with the idea independently from me and make it all the same)

Second life is like the human face of data and the internet, it’s beautiful and interactive, social and economic, and political and educative, among other things.
There is so much potential!!
All it needs is a really organized and good system for interaction and other things!
It needs a way for like-minded people to meet!
The tech is outdated as far as finding and meeting people, things, places that you would like to, and it’s about time it changes!
Second Life at it’s best would allow so much more than any of us could imagine, but it currently is not as I would hope it would be.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to meet foreign language speakers who speak the language you are trying to learn on Second Life? And to have them help you out and become friends with you?
That would be sweet and awesome!

I read that one of the best ways to learn a language is to go out and be immersed in it, to speak with the locals.
Many of us cannot do this, and many of us will never even leave our country!
Second life allows us the opportunity that we could not have.
It allows us to observe the culture and spirit of other nationalities as well, through their artistic creation and expression in Second Life itself, and through conversing with them.
It allows us to attend speeches, to attend virtual classes where everyone can easily change their view to see the powerpoint if they can’t easily do so without detracting from the lesson or anything at all really.
It allows us to have fun and explore a world of infinite possibility with our loved ones and friends, and allows us to learn programming in a very rewarding environment.
It can teach us project management skills, with designing something and the building it in-world, and allows us to foster a sense of community with community projects building things.

It’s a world that we make ourselves, for ourselves and for others.
Ideally it would be able to support multimedia formats in-world, and have them part of the Second Life world itself, such that you could read pdfs in world, buy pdfs in world, watch movies in the in-world movie theater (movies that you bought tickets for with the virtual currency you bought or earned), the list goes on and on!

One of the issues with Second Life is that we can’t all have jobs in Second Life and make money in Second Life.
There needs to be consumers and producers, it won’t work if there is only producers!
That would also damage the Economy I think, flooding the markets and drastically reducing any existing buyer capacity.
(not sure if I used the right terminology, but I think my idea came through pretty well!)
Not all of us can spend a lot of time in Second Life, the community cannot grow past a certain point unless it is adopted widely by Schools and other organizations, and is an accepted medium for such professional usage.
Once all kinds of jobs can be done within Second Life, or within a computer, then the user base, community, and cashflow should increase.
(although I do believe there is an increase in home-jobs these days, I also think that those jobs are probably time-consuming and that many people who consider themselves professionals would never use Second Life unless it was an industry standard.)

Second Life should have been geared more like Open Wonderland was.
Open Wonderland was developed by Sun Microsystems, and when Sun was acquired by Oracle funding was stopped.
It is currently an open-source community project, if I recall correctly, and it even has a little video detailing how it was (is??) supposed to be used.
It is totally geared towards doing business and towards businesses, and seems to be more along the multimedia idea I mentioned earlier.
http://openwonderland.org/
There’s a link to it, you should go check it out lol.

It’s written in Java so it is truly has the potential to be a  wider in scope virtual realm that allows for what I envision in the above paragraphs.

Well, I think there was more that I wanted to say… but this post is waayyy to long as it is!!
Thank you for reading!! :) (even if you just skimmed for the pictures XD)
’Til next time

~James Dodon


(bonus Piccy!

Hmm.. I don’t always think while sitting on prims, but when I do I hang off the sides of them by my legs!! XD :P ;})

Virtual Growth and Knowledge

 

Hello again all you wonderful readers!!

I told you guys that I would update again, and would include piccies, so here we goo!!
Yesterday I visited the ReactionGrid, the OSgrid, and the good ol’ Second Life Grid.
I made accounts for Reaction and OS, James Dodon, and Almost Nobody respectively, and went exploring!! :>
It was extraordinarily hard to find my way around, and all my teleportation attempts kept failing :/
I did see some amazing places though, and had a pretty good time so far!! ^u^

At the end of my travels I went to my super secret super awesome super super fantabulous  off-the-grid (no pun intended :p) server, where I practiced terraforming and building things. :3
I am in the process of building a house,  but I don’t know how to do the front wall because it looks like it might take 3 prims, when I am sure there must be some way to make it with only 1 or 2…
(I need a hole in it for my door. Prims are just objects, 1 prim could be one rectangular, square, or triangular prism, etc…)
I am figuring this out as I go!! XD

Here is a picture of the house so far…
House:


Oh so you see that thing in the back corner?
That is a dispenser, if clicked it gives the person who clicked it a notecard I wrote welcoming them to my humble world
I’m hoping to add freebies to it as well, so if I ever get on the grid the people that visit will be happy and will help create a beautiful world.

Here are the other things in my world at the moment,

As you can see, I have a weirdo tree like blob, a tree, and a cylinder with a triangular prism attached to its head. (the cylinder is linked to the prism, so they are essentially one object, and they have a script so if you are within 5 meters of them and click them they move 3 meters forward, and if you are outside of the 5 meter range then they turn to face you. :P
Awesome huh? You can write scripts and make the objects behave in interesting ways lol (that’s how you make doors open and close )

My humble little world doesn’t have much to offer yet, but it’s getting there
With freebies such as the newspaper dispenser I got online, I think I can add even more spice than my nooby attempts at creating things like the building XD

On to other things…
While in Second Life the past week or so, I was attending a kinda treasure hunt type o deal, where I have to find these little coins witih emblems on them and click then for the clues as to where the other coins are.
In theory I will eventually reach the final coin and will get a prize for my efforts.
Well….
I found a few of the coins, followed their directions, and wound up in a graveyard.
I began hopelessly clicking graves to see if they would open up and reveal the coin, but instead a bunch of crazy rabbits began to bite and scare the crap outta me XD
I was like OH MY GOD! and I ran into a little shanty in the middle of the graveyard.
And lo and behold, there was the coin!! :p
Needless to say, I didn’t particularly like the rabbits, but I braved them to get a piccy for you :3 *blushes
Here you go!!
(I’ll actually just post a few pictures of my avatar, the rabbits, etc)





Then my Avatar in the Graveyard

This last pic is what it looks like whilst the rabbits are trying to rip out my intestines O_o
Scary huh?
Good thing health was not enabled in this region!! (yes, health can be enabled in certain regions and death is by and far never a good thing!!! lol)

Here are some pictures of my adventures in ReactionGrid and maybe (if I took any) in OSgrid…

This is on the ReactionGrid, as you can see part of the logo in the upper right part of the picture!
That in the center of the picture is what I labored on for quite a while, it says

”~James Dodon :p
this is awesome, plz excz bad art XD”

Idk why I did it like that, but it was fun :D

Here is another picture, it’s my avatar (I always have a hard time customizing my avatars :<) next to a Hypergrid Adventurers Club sign.
(hypergrid is jumping between grids without having an account on the grid you jump to, but still having your other grid avatar be what you are using. )

I want to join the club, but so far I can’t get any hypergrid like things to work :/
Maybe they can help me, but I do not know *shrug

I hope to explore these beautiful and amazing regions more fully, and to meet new people, make friends, and to build a beautiful world as well. :}

Thank you for reading, this is all I have for now,
Stay Awesome!!

Sincerely,

~James Dodon

(P.s. Bonus Pic!! :P
In the reaction grid home area, my avatar glitched!! @o@
(the physics engines of OpenSim and Second Life are different btw)

LOL, got my head up my butt XD
Oh well, thanks for reading!!
Sincerely,

~James)