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· thearidians.org (11) newest: We\'re Back apollo 18th Feb @ 15:32 EST
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January 2007
Midian City: Torleystalkers a Go-Go
apollo [blog] Sat 13th @ 13:53 EST
midian city, places, slurl, torley, visit
If you're more than peripherally interested in Second Life then the odds are good that you have heard of Torley Linden in one capacity or another. I like to read Torley's blog for many reasons; from the point of view of a writer I'm amazed by her prolific and high quality output, and as a reader I enjoy her point of view and enthusiasm.
I often find that the places she highlights in her blog or on her photostream are vibrant and well designed and are places that I would want to visit. As much as I dislike feeling like a Torleystalker, which I am honestly not, I can't help but go and check out a lot of the cool builds highlighted by her.
Midian City is one such place. Photos do not do it any kind of justice, especially if you have a decent graphics card capable of local lighting. In my delirious state after discovering how amazingly cool the VBO-enabled First Look Viewer is and blogging about it earlier, I couldn't resist running over to Midian City in order to see how the new viewer would handle a busy sim with high quality graphical elements to render. The viewer performed admirably but I soon got lost in the experience that is Midian City.
The sim is an exemplary one too, a shining jewel on The Grid I am sure. The architecture and texturing are both amazing in their abstract quality and when taken as a whole. Influenced by Blade Runner and Sin City the world created by Jade Steele is focused and purposeful, with some of the best use of local lighting I have seen in SL. This sim really showcases what SL is capable of graphically and reminds me that the often bland, simplistic, low-res feel of SL has a lot more to do with content creators than it does with the SL client's rendering engine.
The fact that the new First Look Viewer with VBO turned on makes it possible to move about the city smoothly and confidently without all the usual SL hitching, grinding, turning lag and general choking doubtless added significantly to my experience and overall mood today, but that certainly doesn't take anything away from the masterpiece that is Midian City.
Footnote: I happened to see a certain Hamlet Au from a certain popular SL news site teleport into the sim while I was there today. If they end up getting featured, I can only say that they deserve to be. Everyone in SL should see this place, if only so they can know what SL is truly capable of graphically and thematically, when you have a designer that is good at what they do and cares about their builds. In this vein there are a few other places I want to write about and I will in good time.
Pirates Enjoy Rock Music
apollo [blog] Mon 8th @ 07:11 EST
beach, exploration, pirates, slurl
"It's a small world after all" belongs to that certain class of adage, which endure despite sometimes flippant overuse, enduring because they so often prove to be relevant and true. By way of example, when I viewed this photo on Torley's Flickr photostream I had the strangest sense of recognition despite knowing that I had not previously visited the build.
After sharing the photo with Aradia she reminded me that a friend of ours had owned that very piece of land until recently and we had actually visited it as a barren island not long after he initially acquired it. One could certainly see the potential of that land in its uncultivated state and I am glad to see that the new owner has constructed a quality build fitting for the locale.
The build overall is of a consistent theme with detailed textures and meritorious use of staple beach prefabs and local lighting to create an immersive scene. The streaming rock music is cool too. If you are interested in the romanticized pirate theme, as Aradia and I certainly are, then you could do worse than visit Monkey Island Rock Music.
A Real World Interlude
apollo [blog] Fri 5th @ 17:05 EST
apollo, ordinal malaprop, real world, site features, slurl, snowball technology
There is an interconnected set of difficulties associated with returning to work in the real world, which run roughly along these lines:
- I am naturally a "night person" and tend to gravitate to this kind of schedule when I have more than a few consecutive days off [work]
- Returning to work also means returning to something approaching a less vampiric schedule
- The combination of driving to work and working through the workday has a tendency to exacerbate any fatigue in one's system while simultaneously subtracting available hours from one's day
The end result of this situation is therefore variously a diminished availability of time to be exploring new places in Second Life and a diminished reserve of energy with which to focus on SL, which means that honestly, I haven't been in-world too much this week.
I did stop by Ordinal Enterprises in order to purchase the Snowball Technology that was previously highlighted, with the full intention of reviewing said technology, but sadly due to the reasons outlined previously I have not even unboxed the devices or indeed ascertained whether or not any such removal of packaging is necessary or required. I have, however, been working on various site features; they will come into effect during the course of the weekend and should enhance the reader experience greatly.
A Toolbox of Sorts
apollo [thearidians.org] Mon 1st @ 16:48 EST
slurl, toolbox
One of the major reasons why I became interested in computer programming is my desire to remove the drudgery from common tasks. Computers are very good at performing the most mundane sequence of events time after time with exacting precision, provided of course that you are able to define that sequence in terms they can comprehend. Frequently this process results in vast systems of varying complexity, but occasionally the result is a simple tool which is probably unlikely to revolutionize the world, but is never-the-less useful.
I have decided to create a Toolbox of these useful scripts so that I may also remove some of the drudgery from your life. The first such tool is a simple SLurl maker, which, rather than expecting you to type the sim name and x/y/z coordinates in separately is able to parse them from the standard formatting returned in the location information box of the "Places" search window in SL. This makes the process of generating SLurls much less bothersome and should prove useful until Linden Lab implement their "copy location to SLurl" feature that was recently discussed.
A Fresh, New Year
apollo [blog] Mon 1st @ 12:39 EST
new year, places, slurl
My avatar was created towards the tail end of 2005, so for me 2006 represents my first full calendar year of exploring and being immersed in the Second Life experience and I feel as though I have learned a lot over the year. My building and scripting skills have improved to the point where I finally felt like selling something and I feel much more comfortable with the mechanics of operations like switching avatar form or changing skin.
Aradia and I have visited a lot of places in SL and it's only a shame that I didn't get around to firing up this website earlier in the year because we've seen some charming places and cool builds that were unfortunately not memorable enough to be able to recall in hindsight, but were fun enough in the moment to have recorded for posterity. Still, of the many locations we've been there are a select few that do stick in my mind, so I thought I would share those now, in no particular order:
- Isle of Wyrms (Here Be Dragons!)
- Elf Sims
- Samurai Island
- Lost Gardens of Apollo (No relation)
- Intemptesta Nox
- Tiny Tykes (Best viewed with a Tiny avatar)
Moving into 2007, I'll be making more of an effort to document and highlight any interesting places as we find them. There are many more features to be added to this website which are related to this process, such as [the two of us] being able to easily upload snapshots and the previously mentioned imminent configurable RSS feed options to aid in consuming the data.
Mostly I'm excited about the prospect of writing on this website and looking forward to what this New Year will bring.
December 2006
Dragon Release Event
apollo [blog] Fri 22nd @ 09:52 EST
dragon isles, release event, slurl, solstice
Dragon lovers and fans of Daryth Kennedy rejoice, for today is your chance to become an adult dragon. For those who do not know what this means try an FAQ and for those who do know, a word to the wise: this release is being held in the new sim called Cathedral.
Masquerade Ball
apollo [blog] Wed 20th @ 13:02 EST
dragon isles, party, slurl
I attended a masked ball on the Dragon Isles last night hosted by the awesome mask lady Siyu Suen with music and dancing and a competition judged by the hostess herself. The party is a good example of how finding a good community within SL can provide relevance to the inworld experience: although I enjoy drifting around the grid and finding new places as much as the next avatar, it is fun to be part of a friendly group of people who know how to have a good time. It didn't hurt that I won one of the competition categories, either.
Slurl It
apollo [thearidians.org] Sun 17th @ 09:22 EST
site features, slurl
While working on the site yesterday I came upon the idea of adding a small graphic to Slurled Links in order to make them more visually descriptive. I was engaged at the time, however, in disembowelling the innards of the scripts that make this website tick and so I noted it as a future feature to implement at a later date.
By some strange coincidence then, between the time of inspiration striking and the possible point in the future where I would have eventually implemented this myself, I happened upon the website of the sublime Ordinal Malaprop and in perusing her archives I happened across the very thing I had imagined moments prior!
Therefore this website is proud to use Ms Malaprop's Slurl visual aids with but a tiny change: I prefer the icon to be to the right of the URL and the background of my website is not white. I also brought the SL Hand icon into the bosom of my webserver and converted it to my preferred PNG format, but the essential principal is as described in that referenced article. A hearty thank you to Ms Malaprop.
November 2006
The Urge to Build
apollo [blog] Tue 28th @ 20:30 EST
aradia, building, lag, musing, slurl
I have a love-hate relationship with building. I believe it can be one of the most fun things to do in SL, but I believe it can also be one of the most frustrating. Sometimes the frustration happens on an artistic level when the expressiveness and creativity simply refuse to flow, but more often the consternation is a by-product of one of the primary factors that makes building in SL fun in the first place; the shared nature of creation there.
In order for SL to support a truly shared building environment where the results of one person's editing actions are reflected in the world in real time, it is necessary to send data back and forth every time a prim is moved or resized or has any of its properties changed. This makes building in SL highly dependent on the overall responsiveness of your Internet connection, the general latency of your route through the Internet to Linden Lab, the amount of congestion on "The Grid" and the lag of the simulator server you happen to be building on.
That's a lot of potential for lagged building but I think in the end it is worth dealing with because it can be so much fun to build something with friends, or in my case to build something with my wife and share our time together in that way. For example we built a Rose Garden together, which is layered with the type of spontaneous creative touches that can only spring forth from the collaboration that is made possible by SL.
The power of being able to say "What if we did this over here..." while throwing down rough prim shapes is staggering, especially when your building partner can take those shapes and modify them to suggest another idea or different slant on the proceedings and then they can be cleared away in order to demonstrate a new idea with the minimum of fuss. The dirt mound with the shovel and the rabbit is one example of how the garden build grew organically in this way.
That said, trying to build under heavy lag does make me throw my hands up in the air and scream. Especially when I'm experimenting with the build tools trying to discover new shapes or looking for a particular prim form to express an idea I have, and I can't get the tools to respond to me. In those moments, it would be nice to be able to build offline.
Inaugural Aridian Artifacts Opening
apollo [shopping] Sun 26th @ 20:45 EST
aridian artifacts, slurl
It may please the good sirs and ladies who peruse these pages to know that I, Apollo, have finally entered into the entrepreneurial environment within Second Life. An SL friend of ours is in the process of building a Role-Play friendly, medieval themed village called Twilight Village, and he was kind enough to offer us a shop there, which we are calling Aridian Artifacts.
Currently the shop is populated with my Muramasa line of fine Japanese-themed weapons, featuring Bo and Naginata style devices and soon to include Katana style swords. I am also planning to sell my AngelFlight script, which makes flight above 250m possible, as well as allowing things like hovering, faster forward flying speed, independent pure vertical thrust and a built in radar. I will be selling that both as a script to place in other attachments and as part of an as-yet unnamed jewellery line.