Shiver me timbers me hearties! If you’re a fan of all things nautical then we have exciting news! A new Mainland sailing area will soon appear off the coast of Nautilus in a joint community project between Linden Lab and the estate owners of the United Sailing Sims (USS) group.
For those that don’t know, the USS is made up of 9 private estates with 130+ regions between them, themed around sailing, yacht racing and similar sports.
Blake Sea, named after the legendary sailor Sir Peter Blake, will be to the east of the Nautilus City landmass and will cover over 40 regions in size, and almost all of them will be Homesteads. Around the eastern edge of Blake Sea will be the estates of the USS.
Blake Sea Map
This is the first time that we’ve allowed estates to connect to the Mainland in this way, and it is testimony to both the great community the USS has built up, and our desire to work with Resident groups to improve the Mainland experience in different and innovative ways.
Whilst the Sea will be Linden Land, we will be working closely with the USS to provide Sailing and other water activities, games and fun things to discover.
For all Residents, as well as the USS, this offers unprecedented open water to sail through, hang out in or just explore. There will be islands for viewing the regular USS race events and scripted boats or planes to ferry our intrepid residents safely across the Sea from Nautilus. If you haven’t tried sailing inworld, it might soon be time to give it a whirl!
As this project moves along, expect to see updates either here on the Blog or on the DPW wiki page.
As the Northern Hemisphere slowly tilts toward short days and cold, snowy landscapes, our minds inevitably turn to thoughts of togetherness. Once again, it is time for Second Life’s annual celebration of all that is Winter.
Winterfaire is our chance to gather for long nights, blinky lights, hot drinks and gifts in mysterious boxes. We will revel in our usual traditions like the Snowman Building Contest, the wildly popular Lindens v.s. Residents Snowball Fight, and maybe most important, tour your fabulous Winter-themed builds, all around the grid.
Winterfaire will be centered around the ancient Linden mainland regions of Wengen, Voss, Zermatt and Moritz.
This year we will also be using the Showcase in the Second Life viewer and web site to direct people to privately owned lands hosting must-see winter wonderlands.
The Quiet, by AM Radio, one winter experience in Second Life
What are the wintertime traditions in your part of the world? If you are planning a winter extravaganza in your region that demonstrates your traditions, we’d like to connect you to the Winterfaire network of locations.
Just keep these guidelines in mind when you plan and execute your winter builds: We will be looking for builds that are beautiful, well made, available throughout the event, and that present your regional sights, sounds and traditions of winter. We will bypass builds that are commercial in nature, so if you’re basically decorating your store for the season, that’s great, but it’s unlikely to be in the Winterfaire tour. Think of your build as a gift, freely given, to your fellow Residents, not as an opportunity to sell something.
As submissions come in, we will send out Lindens with snowshoes to check them out and bring back their recommendations for the Showcase.
While space in Showcase is limited, we will try to fit in as many submissions as we can, rotating them in and out during the event, giving many builds a chance to be seen.
An application for getting your build into the celebration will be forthcoming next week– til then, I’d encourage you to talk it over in the forum thread, what would be most fun? What are you planning? Are you thinking about creating a special build? hosting a holiday concert, a skating party, or something else? — Go Make It Snow!
The Quiet, by AM Radio
Winterfaire plans? Talk it over in the forum thread. Dusty Linden will be there with more info and to answer questions next week.
The Mono regions on the beta grid were updated with new binaries yesterday that resolve SVC-1421, but more importantly merge the Mono changes with Havok 4. There are now very few open issues remaining, so if you haven’t already, please recompile your scripts to Mono on the beta grid and test them. If you find any problems, please file them as JIRA issues here, or tell us about them at the Mono office hours held in Sandbox Goguen MONO on the beta grid on Wednesdays at 8AM and Fridays at 3PM.
The video above shows Blueman Steele’s LSL version of Conway’s Game of Life running side by side on the LSL and Mono virtual machines. The LSL version running on the left was recompiled to produce the Mono version on the right without making any changes to the LSL source code. Not only does the Mono virtual machine run the cellular automaton over 4 times faster than the LSL virtual machine, but it also uses less than 25% of the CPU time consumed by the LSL version. If you have any other good demonstrations of Mono in Second Life, please let me know.
Thanks again for your continued support throughout the Mono beta process.
Have you got the downtime blues? View the latest installment of Second Opinion, the Second Life newsletter, on our website and coming soon, grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world locations. (Don’t forget to sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues!) This month in Second Opinion, find out what Sabin Linden says about Het-Grid, get information on SLCC, learn about AjaxLife in our interview with Katharine Berry, read up on Stephany Linden’s voice tips and tricks, check out our view on the new features vs. bug fixes debate … and more!
Also, as a reminder, we are no longer emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. For example, you can now get the RSS feed directly delivered to your RSS reader du jour. Have any suggestions on how to make the newsletter better? Email them to the editor.
[UPDATE] Thank you for your comments. We greatly appreciate your continued patience during downtime. Please note that in the near future, and thanks to Het-Grid, downtime will occur less frequently. Don’t know about Het-Grid? Check out Breaking News in this month’s newsletter.
In May, we blogged about Second Life’s upcoming birthday. June 23, 2007, that’s this Saturday, will mark the fourth anniversary of Second Life’s launch. Volunteers have been hard at work planning and building for the event, which will be held in the SL4B sim and surrounding sims and will continue until June 30, 2007. Due to the increasing number of new Residents, volunteers decided to plan this year’s birthday event around Second Life’s history.
I’m currently recovering from a very intense, but enjoyable weekend at Hack Day London which Christopher Linden and I attended to help hackers mashup Second Life.
Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley had brought a webcam, markers and reactivision software they were looking to put to use, so, as we were playingIceTowers with IBM at the time, we thought it might be fun to build a mixed reality version of the IceHouse game Torpedo.
It turns out that Torpedo is particularly well suited to a reactivision implementation as it relies on the position and orientation of pieces placed freely on a playing field, but judging torpedo hits in real life is difficult. It’s also a very simple game, so there was a slim chance that we could build it in 24 hours.
Our plan was to play the game in real life then publish the position and orientation data from reactivision to the web, then use LSL to pull the data in to SL where we could rez the pieces, launch the torpedoes and calculate the results. At the same time a second web cam would stream video of the board in to SL, so that we could watch the game play out in RL then see the results calculated in SL.
Working on the hack was loads of fun and team Supernova did a great job with help from Timeless Prototype in world. The software came together amazingly well but it wasn’t until we started running around scavenging tripods, glue guns, gaffer tape and white boards to nail together the hardware side that we started getting lots of interest from the other hackers.
In the end the lightning strikes, storms, leaks and lack of wifi meant that we didn’t complete all of the gameplay, but we managed to demo all of the technical aspects of the hack live in our 90 second presentation.
Everything we used was open source, so anyone will be able to finish off our work or build some other interesting computer vision application in SL. Nigel thought mixed reality spin the bottle would be good fun. Andy Piper has another SLorpedo write up here and a selection of pictures here. Chris took a video of the presentation, so hopefully we’ll be able to make that available soon too.
I’m already back working on the SL infrastructure, but it’s great to be able to hack on interesting SL applications once in a while and hopefully we’ll see some of the hackers at Linden Lab Brighton in the near future.
UPDATE: Team Supernova finished the game last week and ran it at SL.UK on Saturday, some SL footage of the finished game here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-MoN9d_Nw
Last Thursday, we announced that we would host a Second Life Speech Gestures Contest in conjunction with the Voice Stress Test Extravaganza. We have since decided to postpone the Voice Stress Test Extravaganza, previously planned for this Wednesday, May 9. Fear not – the Stress Test will return, watch this blog for more information!
As such, we have extended the deadline for the Second Life Speech Gestures Contest entries until May 14 at 3pm PDT, providing Residents with an additional week to create and submit speech gestures. Please see last weeks blog post for submission guidelines and more information about the Second Life Speech Gestures Contest.
We had many great submissions to participate in the Third Annual Second Life Winter Festival (read the initial announcement). We’ve chosen the participants for the event and created a set of Tour HUDS with the locations/events inside. Visit Chalet Linden in Wengen to pick up both Winter Festival Tour HUDs and your free official Second Life Winter Festival 2006 T-shirt!
There are two different HUDS, one for the first half of the event and one for the second. (Big thanks to Forseti Svarog for volunteering to set up the HUD system.) The folder also includes a copy of the HUD kiosk in case you want to place one on your own land. When you click the kiosk, a folder named “Winter Festival 2006 HUD & Tshirt” will appear in your Inventory. Right click on either of the HUDs and it will appear in the top right of your screen. Then click on any of the pictures to read more. Once you find what you want to visit, click the right hand button for the landmark.
Remember: The Winter Festival begins today – Friday, December 15 – and runs until December 22!
I had loads of fun at Euro FOO last weekend talking, discussing and building with a great bunch of extremely smart and interesting people. As we were on the continent Piers Harding and I came up with the idea of building a petanque game in Second Life and, as we were building it in Second Life we thought it would be fun to play petanque with pianos. So, on Sunday night we spent a couple of hours in the bar playing werewolf, drinking wonderful Belgian beer and hacking together SLetanque in SL. Alice Taylor put together some FOO camp inspired artwork and Jeannie Moonflower donated a full permissions version of her upright piano so that on Monday afternoon we could spend a fun couple of hours hurling pianos and Cory Edo’s open source couches from the gnubie store around Second Life. In the spirit of the event, open source SLetanque is now freely available under the GPL from my spot in Ambleside.
MASSIVE-3 represented the virtual world as a partially replicated scene graph. Locales were frames of reference in the scene graph and boundaries were links between locales. Transforms on boundaries defined the locales relative positions, scales, rotations and rendering effects, allowing CC-TV boundaries to tiny versions of distant locales, boundaries to shadow versions of locales, torroidal universes of locales joined by boundaries which linked back on themselves and many of the effects which Richard Bartle suggests are impossible in a graphical virtual world.
We then added the concept of temporal transforms across boundaries which contolled the replay of events recorded in the target locale allowing links to locales in the past or to slow motion versions of current locales (we didn’t manage links to the future, unfortunately).
Locales and Boundaries in MASSIVE-3 were lots of fun to play with and the Half Life video shows that they’re even more fun with gravity and guns.
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