First day exploring Inworldz

A friend told me earlier this week that he was going into Inworldz to have a look around, and so, as I had never checked it out, I decided to sign up and see what it's like.  Eelco tried to sign up too, but he failed to get his authorizing email and was caught up with some coding he needed to do and so I went in alone.

I chose my starter avatar, a green fairy, and signed in.  The first change from SL is that you're greeted by a mentor who gives useful information and hands over things like a free animation overrider to get rid of the loathed duck walk, and a exploratory HUD which has landmarks for all sorts of different places.

I wasn't very happy with my avatar, even after I had changed her shape, and so I went off to do some shopping.  There was the same problem as in SL - I found mentions on blogs of good designers but had to search through whole shopping sims with dozens of shops to track them down.  Some sims had a very high quality of goods on sale in a market, and others were very variable.

I found some really bad shoes in other sims.  I quite liked the ones from Pulse, but I would have liked some spikey heeled shoes which didn't have quite such a precipitous heel.  In general (and based upon one day only) it looks as though Inworlds is about three years behind SL in building, use of mesh and clothing and skins.  I was a bit wary about freebies in case they were ripped from other places.

There are a lot of people selling sculpty-based furniture and objects which have become old-fashioned in SL because of the advent of mesh.  I bought several skins from Pulse, clothing and shoes from Pulse and hair from Emotions.  The end result didn't look too bad.  I also bought a few replacement animations for the AO from creators whose names I recognized.

There are a few differences from Second Life.  Uploads are free, there are wide open spaces on the sandboxes - at least European evening time.  Some aspects of scripting are different in ways I don't understand... I will have to ask my technical advisor to look into it.

Eelco and I did a little exploring around the scenic sims.  Some of them were well done and others less well done.  The sims with a *lot* of sculpties were laggy for me.  I'm looking forward to exploring more.

All of your stuff are belong to us?

Lots of talk and comment about the new terms of service imposed upon Second Life residents, which includes the following paragraph: "...you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, re-sell, sublicense (through multiple levels), modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafter developed, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed, and to advertise, market, and promote the same. You agree that the license includes the right to copy, analyze and use any of your Content as Linden Lab may deem necessary or desirable for purposes of debugging, testing, or providing support or development services in connection with the Service and future improvements to the Service."

New World Notes reports that Linden Lab respects the rights of creators in their creations and didn't intend to imply that they were about to launch the biggest rip-off resale organization in SL history.  You can read their comments in that story here:  http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/09/linden-lab-tos-textures.html

As far as I remember the ToS has always included words to the tune of "All of your stuff belongs to us".  This has just enlarged that and added a few more caveats and abilities to rip off... it doesn't mean that's what they're planning.  They're just covering their asses.

Shaping the future

Misty in Kreations mesh outfit - one of the better fits

I'm sometimes very frustrated by the feeling that Linden Lab don't understand their customers very well at all. I've known a lot of Lindens in my nine years in Second Life, and most of them (not all) have used whole different avatars when they swapped out from one style to another. Very few stuck with a humanoid avatar and tweaked it in the way that is normal for a resident.

Caliandris was based upon my avatar in Uru, as I arrived in SL in 2004 after Uru had closed for the first time. Avatars in Uru weren't as customizable as they are in SL, and gradually over the course of time I have refined her look, bought better skins, added mesh hair and prim eyelashes, bought better clothing.... I change my avatar more or less every time I log into SL - I change clothes, change hair, choose attachments appropriate to the things I am doing, particularly if I am exploring RP sims.

I'm finding the arrival of mesh clothing both fascinating and frustrating. Many of my costumes are rigged, but it isn't possible for them to deform to the shape of my avatar. Linden Lab wasn't aware that people would want to do that with mesh! That just staggers me.  I would say that the number one activity for most dedicated SL residents is changing their avatar... particularly if they don't build or create things themselves.  It's definitely the number one creative activity in SL, changing and dressing up the avatar.  Some people (like most Lindens) prefer to buy off-the-peg whole avatars and simply swap them out, but that's because most Lindens came into SL as a job, and people who enter SL with a work identity don't immerse in the same way that residents do.  They can't.  They are supposed to be working.  It makes a huge psychological difference to you if you have a working persona and avatar in SL.

LL introduced meshes, without realizing the potential for clothing, which means that at present, although it is possible to buy rigged mesh clothing, it is necessary for the creator to make the clothing in several sizes to roughly fit the avatars.  Thus in SL you have to make your avatar fit the clothing instead of the other way around.  The meshes usually come in different sizes and with textures which will make the appropriate part of the anatomy disappear, but even so.   I have tops which require me to set my arms to the minimum fat and minimum muscle to make them fit, even when I am wearing the largest size.  As the largest size caters for my relatively large breasts, it looks absolutely ridiculous and cartoony to have stick-thin arms.  Cold Logic is particularly bad for that I have found, although I like a lot of their mesh clothing.

It could be possible to deform the meshes to fit the avatar, and it was left to an external fundraiser run by Maxwell Graf to raise money to see if an external scripter (the ex-Qarl Linden) would be able to write the code necessary to make this work in SL. The difficulty is that people generate meshes for upload to SL in all sorts of programs, and they don't all work the same way.  And LL is needed to work to incorporate the program into the main viewer, because third-party viewers aren't allowed to create new applications which aren't in the mainstream viewer any more.

The project has been underway for many months, and the last I heard it was in Linden Lab's hands.  I hope they get on an incorporate it soon, because many of the mesh clothes I have bought would require enormous changes to my avatar to come anywhere near fitting.  In fact I have a whole cupboard full of adapted shapes I have made so that I can wear the mesh clothing I have bought.  The thing is, I have spent nine years on making my avatar.  It would be rather nice if I could deform the mesh clothing to fit my avatar, and not have to make it the other way about.

Media exploit affecting SL viewers

Firestorm viewer with preference window open

Cristiano Midnight from Second Life Universe has posted a warning to disable media in viewers, because there is some vulnerability that can be exploited to gain access to accounts.  It is obviously hard for anyone to post detailed information about an exploit without simultaneously alerting the small percentage of people who would like to benefit from such an exploit.  I trust the source of the information, though, and know that Cristiano would not have posted a warning without good reason.

You can disable media before logging into SL by changing your preferences in the viewer at the login screen.  

His second piece of advice is to uncheck the box which asks you to store your password.  Someone on the comments stream on SLU points out that you have to be alert to the fact that the viewer may automatically recheck the box if you don't keep an eye on it.  If you have been using the remember password facility, you should clear your cache too.  This can be selected in the preferences at the login screen, and then you should close your viewer and reopen it to trigger the cache to clear.

I don't know what the exploit may be, or how the viewers are vulnerable by using media on a prim or streaming media.  There has been a general warning not to use media on parcels where you don't trust the source, but I think that warning has been around for so long that people have started to disregard it.  If the vulnerability is even more severe than it was thought to be, it is very important to get the word out.  I don't know if anyone has been affected by the problem... but the best outcome would be that the vulnerability is fixed before that happens.

For those using firestorm, step-by-step:

*Start your viewer, uncheck remember password box
*Click viewer at the top left of your screen, choose preferences
*Preferences window opens.
*Choose Sound and Media in the left hand column - uncheck all the boxes for playing media and sound
*Choose network and cache in the left hand column - click to clear cache and confirm it when the pop up asks you to confirm.
*REMEMBER to OK the changes bottom right of the preferences window.
*Close the viewer by clicking the X and confirm.
*Restart the viewer, check that the remember password box in unchecked.  You will need to log in (making sure the remember password box is unchecked) to make the change to remember password stick.

Balancing act

Moving through some sims is like wading underwater

There's been a bit of discussion on the SL Universe forum about pathfinding and whether it adversely affects sims, and it reminded me that I have been meaning to have a five minute rant on the theme that everything in Second Life is a balancing act... you have to balance what you want to achieve visually and interactively with the performance you want to achieve.

Unlike games, where the background and a lot of the objects in a scene will be fixed and pre-downloaded to your computer, and where you may be prevented from moving into a different area, in Second Life currently everything is dynamically streamed to the user's computer.  This means that the size of textures, complexity of objects, number of avatars, amount of scripting all have an effect on how fast things render and how well the region performs.

It's tricky because the visitors to a sim will have different computers, graphics cards and nternet connections, and all of those may affect the rate at which things stream or render in world.  There is a world of difference in how quickly a scene renders if you have your settings on Ultra and if you have them set low - and how pretty or otherwise things will appear to you.  Many aspects of the user experience are not under the control of a sim owner or designer.

However, certain things have always helped.  If you use a limited set of textures and make them as small as possible, if you reduce the complexity of the physics for the mesh objects in a sim, if you use as few scripts and make them as elegant as possible, all these will help to make things as fast as possible.  Only you can judge whether having big beautiful textures is more important than being able to load the sim environment quickly.  It's all a question of balancing your priorities, and it requires thought and planning to make it work for you.

As I posted on that thread on the SLU boards, articulation of prims seems to me to be a pretty big sim killer.  It's one of the reasons that it is hard to use pathfinding in a realistic way, as there aren't a lot of animals which can be made to move around naturally without articulation. 

A few years ago I helped to build the Linden Homes sims, which included trees with (non-pathfind, scripted) birds and squirrels in them.  I pretty soon realised that these had quite a negative impact on the sims and so removed them in the sims I was dressing.  We later had a general squirrel strangling effort as the impact became clear. 

For those who haven't used it, pathfinding is a simple way to make animals and objects move around a sim without having to program the locations.  The idea is that the system makes a navmesh - this was explained to me as being like a tablecloth laid over the sim terrain and objects - which gives a pathfinding creature information about where the terrain and objects in a sim are placed.

This navmesh is what a pathfinding creature will navigate automatically if set up to pathfind.  Thus a creature set to follow avatars, will automatically follow anyone who comes close enough to it, and will automatically avoid obstacles and shouldn't disappear into the terrain.  You should always be careful about having objects penetrating the navmesh, especially those which have physical attributes. 

However, I think that a lot of the negative impacts reported for pathfinding are actually attributable to the articulation used for creatures which pathfind.  It's the reason I cheated with flexi-fur for the goats and creatures I made for the Wilderness sims.  Avoid articulation if possible.  Or at least, be aware of the impact that these things may have on performance and only rezz creatures which have it when necessary - don't leave them going in empty sims if you can avoid it.

I'm sure it sounds like I am a killjoy when I say that you have to be prepared to balance your need for impact and interactivity with the need for a sim to be usable, but much like a web page which takes too long to load, if you make a beautiful sim with interesting interactive content, which takes too long to rezz or is painfully slow to use, people will simply teleport to somewhere more comfortable.

Misty's Goodbye

I was fired as a mole last Friday.  I've probably already written more than I should have done about that.  I made a video, whilst regretting the many photographs trapped in my inaccessible mole account.




At the moment I wnt to hide in the wardrobe and wait for everything to pass. It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time in virtual worlds, but it's a shock being suddenly cut off from an avatar which has become part of your identity. There's a general sadness at losing something that was part of my life for five years.

I'm going to do a tour of some of the places I built but didn't have photographs for, and maybe I'll make another video when I have time. Currently I am mostly trapped in the real world, packing boxes and cleaning up the house before it's sold.

I'm lucky to have made such a lot of friends in Second Life. I didn't have images of a number of moles who left some time ago - Igneous, Earthy, Macho, and Abnor were all missing from the list. All will be well. It's obviously a time for changes in my life - in every life.

YouTube web on a prim

I've been using web on a prim for some time, but recently needed to display a YouTube video on a prim. Of course, I wantedthe video and not all the comments and other stuff on the page. I knew that there was a way to do this, but forgot, and it took some searching to find the very simple information I needed.

Some people though it was necessary to edit the prim to "cut off" the parts not needed, and some people thought a script would be needed. No. This is how to display just the video on your prim. All you need to do, in step-by-step form:
Create a prim by right clicking, choosing create and left clicking. Texture it as you wish.

Whilst in the edit menu, choose the texture tab.

Click select face in the upper part of the edit menu, and select the face which is the one you want to display the video.

Click the plus button at the bottom of the texture page of the edit menu, to add media to the prim. The edit menu changes and there is an input bar at the top of the page with a preview screen beneath it.

Copy the URL of the video you want to screen into this input bar, but where the URL says watch?, add in an underscore and the word popup. Thus where you once had watch? you will now have watch_popup? This is all you have to do in order to have just the video pane appearing rather than the whole page from YouTube.

Click reset, apply, OK.

If you wish, you *can* use slice to cut off the border which still may appear above and below your video pane.