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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 ... '"
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.
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 sure wish I had a bee toggle switch for my yard. It'd make mowing the lawn a lot less stressful.