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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 ... '"
Her Dwell bonus for the day is going to go through the roof! It's not even her own servers in jeopardy, it's Linden that has to hold up!
Really sweet area! I'm already there!
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
From what I understand of it, the type of people who used to play MUSHes back in the day (as opposed to people who played MUDs) would enjoy this sort of "game", since it's all about creating a new environment rather than actually playing a game. Personally, I found MUSHes insufferably dull, and preferred the gameplay of actual MUDs, but to each their own I guess.
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?
I like muppets.
God was a woman.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Swarga means "heaven" in Sanskrit/Hindi.
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.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
I would like to see a mmorpg that takes place in a real ecology, where trees can be planted or cut down, animals can flourish or die out depending on how much they have to eat, etc... Perhaps the players could be dependent on the land for food, water, and shelter.
The downside, though, is that the world would have to have a stable ecology, and be big enough that players can't kill off whole species or otherwise destabilize the system.
The right way to do plants is with multires techniques; start with a high-resolution model, prioritize points in the mesh by number, and as you need to decrease poly counts for scenes, delete points and generate new, lower-poly-count meshes. Plants will generally have a fairly low scoring bias so that they have lower priority than other items in the scene, and be degraded first, but when you are right up in a bush then each branch can be rendered or what have you; when it's in the middle distance it might have gone from 5,000 polys down to 50 or 100 of them; On the horizon it might be 1 or 2 polys. Because the number of polygons changes smoothly, there's no pop-in problem, objects can be shown at their maximum visible distance, and they gracefully increase in complexity so they don't suddenly "sprout" features that you couldn't previously discern - at least, when done right. Multires is still mostly unexplored country, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I just fired up SL and went there (about the only time I "play" SL is when I see a post like this). Cool design wandered around a bit and that was enough. Not enough to make me want to explore anything else in the game.
So basically you pay to work for Linden Labs. Wow, sign me up!
I sure wish I had a bee toggle switch for my yard. It'd make mowing the lawn a lot less stressful.