This is No Way to Run a Railroad

 
Location: Watching Linden Lab Run Things Into the Ditch, Again.

I'll again try to host my meeting of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable tomorrow. Our title for the meeting is "What will you do with virtual worlds on your summer (or winter!) vacation? (TAKE TWO!)"

When last attempted, the Grid was down and only one lonely avatar made it to the Roundtable venue.

Then we rescheduled promptly, so we could at least talk about holiday plans before the Summer (or the antipodean Winter) break fades away. But Linden Lab has other plans: three days of work and "some regions may be taken offline and remain offline for extended periods of time."

I cannot imagine our newest educators in the group being pleased with this.  At the same time, Premium members are promised a "latest Premium-only perk. . .a fully interactive railcar that you can ride across more than 80 regions of the Second Life Railroad. Up to four people can ride and explore on each car!"

Well, wheeeee to that! I could not even get four of us to log in last time, and I certainly have had rotten luck crossing sim borders in my own vehicles.

What a fiasco this virtual world is becoming, for any serious work.  This is no way to run a railroad, even a fake one.

Hat tip to Prim Perfect for alerting me to this in an aptly named post, "There have been better weeks for Second Life."


My summer plans: beef up the Jokaydia Grid build for Fall. After all my prognostication about mobile apps in the last post, my department chair asked me to teach my first-year seminar again, and I most likely have missed the deadline for the iPad Initiative grants. I will run the Usher simulation again for my class...somewhere.

Avination: This Calls for The Grip, Kungfu

Location: Avination Grid

In the June issue of Prim Perfect, I'll run a review of this fast-growing grid derived from OpenSim.  I am still working on the piece, so I will just note a few highlights now:

• There's an active user-base that recruits new residents by word of mouth in SL.
• Concurrency runs about 300 and active logins per month run over 4500.
• The grid offers gambling and adult content without age verification (ouch).
• Avination has a working currency and easy conversions from Linden Dollars or Paypal (I bought 1000 credits to kit out my avatar, freebies being very scarce, and uploaded some clothing textures).
• Many well known content creators from Second Life have added stores in Avination, as they have done in InWorldz. Reasons? No hypergrid, strong IP protection, very restrictive freebie policies.  Not a place for educators, but I can see the lure for RPers and social users.

I found the grid's residents eager to have me tour around, something that offset my disappointment that this grid is primarily for socializing, roleplay, shopping, and gambling. Perhaps all of these closed grids will trend that way, as we educators seek something different.

Given that the grid restricts name-choices in much the same way that SL has done, I picked a last name from a list. Seeing "Kungfu" and being reminded of my favorite GI Joe, the African-American Adventurer, I knew what I had to do: Grip Kungfu was born.

The default dark-skinned avatar was nice. I purchased some good hair with a long queue in back, bought an AO called "Danger Man," and I was ready for whatever Avination tossed my way. I can take it. Before I had avatars, a long time before, my bud Gary and I made up tons of stories with our GI Joes.

You can guess who the coolest GI Joe was.

Flipping Scenes, Back to Openlife

Location: Openlife Grid

I have covered Openlife, briefly, in this blog. I had found performance and stability to be increasing there, but last month I spent several hours in-world there, writing a review for Prim Perfect, and discovered a passionate and small community of builders at work.

My Prim Perfect columns do include advocacy of a grid's best features, and Openlife has something I'd not encountered in a another virtual world: scene flip. This permits a region manager to set up five different "scenes" for a region and, with the push of a button, reload everything. Thus a roleplaying community in a space-opera setting might have ready, with just a flip, a massive starship interior, an alien world, and an empty-space starfield for space combat.

Openlife's founder, Sakai Openlife, has persevered through a difficult update and the issues with performance that stymied my trips there in 2008 and 2009. This grid is worth another look, and several residents responded to my requests for advice with great enthusiasm.

Pantaiputih Korobase came to the grid in November 2008, after he "escaped" Second Life for a new base of operations. Like the other Openlife residents I met, he notes that the new grid "made me personally turn into a much more active user, OL made me create, decorate regions with my own buildings and made me learn all the time. More over and most importantly, I made some really good friends in OL."

His thoughts were echoed by Shai Khalifa and Cheops Forlife, who talked to me in-world and, in Shai's case, met me at the Over the Rainbow region to discuss the work of builder Surreal Numbers. The build quality of several sims was as good as anything I have seen in SL.

My Prim Perfect column will cover more details soon. But for builders and social users who want a small and closed grid with good prices, Openlife remains an attractive alternative.  Educators needing hypergrid access might not find the grid to their liking, but scene-flip alone makes handling OAR files of regions very simple work for changes to simulations "on the fly."

Home Improvements: Random Prim Drift in a Large Build

Location: Caulking Seams

It's ironic that I talk about this on a day when, in real life, I need to caulk a seam between our house and a not-so-well-made addition. The building settles unevenly, and mortar joints love to crack. Good-quality exterior masonry caulk stops those cold drafts.

But there's no HGTV for avatars (though Prim Perfect comes closest). Even that fine magazine focuses more on style and design and not repair and renovation.

Renovation? In a fake building? Should be as simple as deleting prims or moving them, right?

Viv Trafalgar and I were touring the Second Life House of Usher in the guise of Madeline and Roderick, in order to shoot Viv's machinima I featured here a few weeks ago. I noted a rather large gap in a wall, and Viv, ever the master builder, noted that large builds do that. Elements creep apart over time. I don't know the reason; perhaps it's an infinitesimal rounding up or down when linked prims overlap ever so slightly. There's a JIRA at the Linden Lab Web site about this.

Torley Linden, who cares and knows a lot about technical issues in the code, asked a resident to give examples or reproduce the problem so Linden Lab could investigate. Here's a technical but vexing reply from Khamon Fate:

 It's a floating point error that is seen nearly every time one edits a prim's location, rotation, cut et al by the numbers. Type 35 degrees Y rotation into a prim and watch it magically adjust itself to 34.97 degrees. Doesn't seem like much really, but when that same calculating error occurs as the sim places, and replaces prims, they seem to drift. Those same miscalculations cause textures to be suddenly offset. The list goes on to include misplaced telepoints, odd ground configurations and really just anything the server has to manage mathematically.

It's a deep, fundamental problem in the server code and really must be fixed for these types of problems to be resolved.

I have not noticed the math error in our SL or Jokaydia Grid build, but I'll try an experiment of noting the position of some prims and then checking with my next log in. And, yes, it happened at Jokaydia Grid too. I found that a linked set of prims for Usher's interior walls had crept away slightly from some unlinked parts, including doors and "headers" over them.  Fixing that was easy--I had to realign the doors' headers and match the texture to the main wall's settings. Then I linked them.

As I did this, I was reminded of another "101" lesson: don't link scripted items to the linkset. I know that when I blogged about making a fireplace; the scripted prim needs to be the root. So I left doors and chimneys unlinked and floating free, as the rest of the House drifts.

My fix is to link the entire House in a few segments: roof, interior walls, exterior walls, crypt. I can then tweak each one a few hundredths of a meter to re-align the ancient manse.  If only it worked so well, on a cold December day, on a brick-and-mortar home!

My posts on building in virtual worlds are aggregated here. Happy home improvements!

1939 Nostalgia: Back to the World of Tomorrow

Location: Reaction Grid, NY World's Fair

Since I'll be doing a feature on Reaction Grid for Prim Perfect, I simply could not resist featuring the build of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. It was "The World of Tomorrow," baby, and by 1960 we'd have 10-lane superhighways elevated above robotic farms, planned cities, and 100 mph mass transit running from Pleasantvilles spread over the map like 1000 Greenbelt Marylands.

Heady stuff. In fact, a virtual world rendered in 1/18 scale.

Funny thing, but the first thing I saw in Reaction Grid exists in real life, a few miles from my house.



image credit: Jenosale at Flickr

Iggy materialized about where I’d left him on his last visit: the NY World’s Fair managed by Trivia Tiratzo and built by Joey Cernov. I wrote an entire chapter of my doctoral dissertation on The World of Tomorrow, the Fair’s official name. The entire two-sim homage to the Fair (many sims would be needed to do it all) demonstrates the power of megaprim builds in OpenSim.

Since my last visit, I spotted a new building on the grounds: the pavilion for Belgium designed by Henri van de Velde. By chance, it not only is one of the few buildings left from the Fair, but it was moved to Richmond VA and rebuilt, where it serves as offices for Virginia Union University. It had been the university’s library as well. My dad went to that building to sign up for Navy duty in 1941, a couple of days after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Eerie coincidence, that, but compelling. I pointed Iggy into the building and looked around.


I noted that the entire building is done in brick in RG, whereas the actual structure as it stands today reflects its 1939-40 design, with a slate-clad central tower (notorious for leaking, a faculty member at VUU told me, when it housed rare books!) with radiator-fin décor right out of Flash Gordon.

I'll have more to say about this build, as well as Jokay Wollengong's work in Reaction Grid, in the next issue of Prim Perfect.

Bald-Headed Freak Joins Prim Perfect Staff

Location: Other Grids

I'm pleased to announce that starting with this issue of Prim Perfect, I'll be writing a monthly column about grids Beyond Second Life.

This opportunity to work with Saffia and her talented collaborators will also have a salutatory effect on me. I hope to bring an outsider's perspective to a journal that does a fine job of covering fashion, architecture, and design in virtual worlds. There is, after all, a lot to be found beyond Linden Lab's walled garden.

It's too easy to stay in the familiar, well trodden paths.

It's wise, given the year's turmoil at the Lab, to lay some "just in case" plans if an acquisition or bankruptcy leads to all our virtual goods going "poof." It happened in There, Lively, and Metaplace, after all.

With those sobering thoughts in mind, my first trip will be to Third Rock Grid. After that, who knows!