Playing God in Second Life

Wagner James Au reports from the New World Notes blog about events in Second Life. Today, he's got a discussion with a woman growing her own garden of Eden in the alternate reality that is 2L. From the article: "The result of a year's work, Laukosargas Svarog's island of Svarga is a fully-functioning ecosystem, adding life or something like it to the verdant-looking but arid pallette Linden Lab offers with its world. It begins with her artificial clouds, which are pushed along by Linden's internal wind system. 'If I was to turn off the clouds the whole system would die in about six hours,' she tells me. 'Turn off the bees and [the plants stop] growing, because nothing gets pollinated ... '"

Comments

More please

[Turn-X Alphonse]

More of this please editors. It's an intresting article and was fun to read. Can we get more of this and less Sony/MS/Nintendo fanboys/rumours please?

Re:Fire up virtual ecology

[MattGWU]

There has to be a better way to do plants than three or more intersecting rectangles overlaid with a tree-shaped texture, I just have no idea what it is. Done well they look basically alright, but with poorly-done textures they look awful, with white halos and things. Prim plants would be rediculous. Would have to be something in a distant update. Or just let people make Linden trees as objects rather than grown on land you own (thinking, for example, of the recent gardening competition I was in on land parceled out for the contest but with no ownership. Had to use transparency overlay trees).

I know what you mean about 'mechanical', but it extends to more than just plants! I think flexi-prims will help a little. The problem for me is textures. Some of them look too...'real'. Not real real, but very 'I did this very, very carefully in Illustrator.' Almost too high-res (even though it is decidedly not). Makes things stand out too much and look cartoony.