Darb Dabney’s OpenSim Blog

Just a note to describe more fun sailing with the new Windlight viewer, and the Wee Tiny Tako 3.2 (that’s a version, not its length. The actual craft is sporting a 2.25-meter waterline!

For my Dad’s birthday this week, I took a sail to the Northern Continent.

Along the way I sailed through ANWR
Finally, I met some unpleasantly private waters that were poorly marked, and my craft reverted to my Inventory, leaving me sitting on a coral reef. Just before this mishap, I enjoyed some fresh winds up to 12 knots northerly and boat speeds up to 7 knots.

Plenty of fun!

This post has little to do with OpenSim, except to share the enjoyment of the new viewer that works well enough with sculpted terrain megaprims in OpenSim. This evening was simple diversion, a novel experience of sailing in a Wee Tiny Flying Taco, learning how to sail it better, and navigating the ancient inland seas from Gualala through Rosedale and Kapor to the timeless shores of DaBoom. Virtual weather was very pleasant with a westerly 7 knot breeze. I moored off Stanford’s southern shore and strolled a bit, and got to see some square-rigged pirate ships up close. The tiny Taco fits well under bridges and as always, Second Life from tiny eyes seems bigger and perhaps more wondrous.

One annoyance, for me, was that the new viewer seems to have altered the rules for focus-and spin when mousing. While learning how to build detailed interiors of structures, I really got used to the click-to-focus, followed by an Alt-click to rotate point-of-view around that clicked focus point. Now that seems lost and I miss it very much. It matters not too much with sailing, but the way it works now would seem crippling to me when it came time to build fancy structures. So for that, maybe OpenSim folks will want to keep the 1.19.0.5 installer fairly close at hand!

Silence is not becoming of a little blogging avatar. I’ve posted here and there, nagging others and such over the past 10 weeks or so. I’ve even missed the 9 millionth SL account somewhere along the line. But despite my silence in this space, it’s not like I’ve been sitting on my spherical posterior!

In August I brought together a few bits of technology, tested out a Vista-based budget PC with a little ATI Radeon X1500 upgrade to its graphics. Lo! and behold, somehow the SL viewer worked OK under Vista. Annoyingly, the MS OS trolls rated the native ATI driver at a lower “Windows Experience” rating than the default MS graphics card driver. But the Pentium Duo box was fairly stomping for around $550 with the upgrade. Later in the month (OK, maybe a couple of days later) I wedged the box into luggage and got it set up about 10 zones easterly of SL time.

The cool part was being set up in a medium-sized eastern European city, with cable modem, trucking around SL and having perfectly nominal voice conversations with known avatars. I may have been many thousands of RL miles displaced from home, but I had to say so to have anyone notice. In fact, they were probably a bit skeptical about my claims (like many people might be the first time they get an overseas Skype call.) Try as I might, there wasn’t any difference in the experience that I could tell between using voice-enabled SL in the SF Bay area, and using it in Romania. SL might eventually turn out to be a pleasant supplement to webcam conversations.

Technology-wise I’ve also gained a bunch of media knowledge in these quiet weeks. Thanks to the good folks at Berkeley Community Media, I copped 24 hours of training in field production and Apple Final Cut Pro; for someone like me who has almost enough undergrad and graduate Documentary Film Studies classes to get a minor, it is wonderfully refreshing to see non-linear editing in action. Sure, I’ve got a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements in the home lab running on a PIII/800 Coppermine, and I keep a Pentium D running XP Media Center edition to get some DV capture action happening. But compared to a Dual-Xeon 3 GHz G5 Mac with 4 GB of memory and Final Cut Pro, it’s kids’ stuff that I have at home.

Add some FRAPS action and the SL script Filming Path (from Geuis Dassin and Nand Nerd), and I feel equipped to exploit the Berkurodam build as a sound stage. Now if only I had talent to match my technology…

I did set up a burning car crash in Berkurodam and then neglected to clean it up for several days. Apparently some of my neighbors were displeased, or a strolling Linden took exception to the air pollution that was released by the fire, and (embarrassingly) the mess was cleaned up by them and returned to me. After that, I’m determined that any carnage left on the Berkurodam set will be cleaned up shortly after filming.

Also, in another mainland area, I’ve built a machinima studio of moderately grand proportions, and had some dialog with not-so-near neighbors who suggested ways of lowering my albedo, particularly at night. With very little effort, I blissfully got with the Goth program and have had some fun. Now the studio is a one-acre tower with a shroud of darkness on the outside, and chroma key blue glowing on the inside.

Again this semester, I’m very glad to say that there is a student group has been willing to set up a term project in Second Life. There’s no more space in Gualala, but there should be plenty in the machinima studio for the time being. I look forward to their construction!

Finally, before I fade into RL dreamland, I want to echo my appreciation for Orange Montagne’s book Metaverse Manifesto that I read over the Summer. It’s great! While I haven’t heard from Mr. O directly, I was pleased to post a review of the book on Amazon where I got my copy and recognized today that he’s read the review.