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! 
(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 ;})
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