Craig Mayhew’s Blog

I’ve installed the release candidate and had a play with the new media on a prim feature. At the moment it’s only supported by the Second Life viewer. So, even though the OpenSim server supports it, none of the open source viewers do. I’m very impressed with it although I quickly hit limitations as you can see in the image.

You may immediately notice that may avatar refused to render at all in the second life viewer. It does render fine in other viewers so I’m not yet sure what the reason was for this. That aside, the media on a prim feature was limited to 4 prims. Any more than that and they just appeared white. The closer I got to the prims, the less problems I had and clicking on a prim would force it to display at the expense of another previously working prim.

I’m not sure what causes this limitation, it may be hard coded into the second life viewer or may be something that can be modified via settings, but despite looking I haven’t yet been able to get it to display a whole wall of media enabled prims.

More on this soon!

I have a keen interest in virtual worlds, they can allow you to design anything you want providing you have the time and the knowledge. This is what originally pulled me towards second life. Unfortunately when I started to use second life I didn’t really understand how second life was used or how I could go about creating my items, objects, content etc. The learning curve was fairly long. I now understand how to do many of these things and intend to share it as much as possible with all of you (in a future blog post).

Learn by example and all that so let’s look at what second life is used for by looking at locations near my virtual house.

Second life is about communication, education and expression. It’s about designing things for others to use or for you to use with others. It’ about collaboration and meeting like minded people. Within 2 minutes of my house in second life I found the following places:

House of the wolf http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Orions%20Vale/244/221/98 This is a huge cathedral, it’s not short on detail with spiraling staircases, vast pillars and tall towers. I’m not sure it was built with a particular purpose, but it’s fun to explore. Hide and seek maybe?

Circuit la Corse http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Valis/67/6/122 This is very long race track for people that love driving in second life. It’s built by the Linden Department of Public Works http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/08/the-linden-department-of-public-works/ who are working to make second life a better place (More on this later).

1930’s Tokyo http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mordreds%20Crossing/121/7/161 This is a simulation of a section of 1930’s era Tokyo. Cars and trams are driving around their scripted routes. The area must consist of 100’s of buildings many of which you can enter. This was designed by a group called “Swing Era Japan”.

If you like exploring, your onto a winner. As usual the problem is finding the diamonds in the rough, as there is an unimaginable ammount of content is second life and most of it is of poor quality.

Second life is also starting to suffer many of the same issues as the real world. They are trying to build roads that interconnect densely populated areas, but they are having trouble finding a route without uprooting people from their land. Linden labs are also trying to create areas of beauty such as parks, forests and other simulations so that people have quality locations to meet in and to promote a positive image of second life.

Another major issue that has come about is the Intellectual Property rights of in world items. Programmers are able to easily copy items that may have taken someone else a very long time to create with use of a modified viewer. Some people are then selling these items at knock down prices, creating a black market. These issues sometimes spill over from the real world with people using textures they have found by searching Google and reselling them as part of an object within second life. Music is also suffering IP issues as it can be easily played on any parcel of land by the land owner. All they need as an exernal URL to stream it from. Most land owners do not pay royalties for the music they play and as far as I am aware, this is completely un-policed.

Second life has given me lot but it was just a stepping stone to something better. For me, second life didn’t allow me to design without limits. Mostly because it has an economy, an economy is built on rules and therefore limitations. I wanted a virtual environment that can extend and supplement my reality. I needed my own virtual space where rules are none existent unless I impose them. I needed my own simulation. Enter openSim. openSim is a complete virtual environment much the same as second life where essentially, I can run my own private second life server. I can use as much space as I like, build as big as I like in any way I want to. I’m not limited to a very small quantity of computer resources, I’m only limited by my hardware and how efficiently I use it. Slowly I have begun merging this with other applications that I use in the real world. I intend to blog about these uses I find for the tiny universe I have created and experiments I will run.

Watch this space.