Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

Manual V.00000000001

I've received enough interest that I put together a rough Ogoglio manual. Keep in mind that this is not an end-user manual, but a technical document for people who want to poke at an incomplete and unstable space hosting server.

Even if you are pretty geeky you'll probably be more satisfied if you wait until I think the platform is far enough along to build a pre-compiled demo download.

In the mean time you might find the core concepts page interesting.

Tree House

Someone took the time to brave the crude Second Life tools in order to create a place that looks relaxing and fun, but then what happened? If you fly around most of Second Life, the lack of population indicates that most people build and leave. They're still paying rent, which would be a good sign for Linden Lab if they hadn't built a land system which requires roughly the same resources whether it is populated or not.

If many people hang onto their land because of the time they invested, I wonder what would happen if the libsl'ers really do as they say and build half decent SL backup tools. Will people backup and drop their land to a CDR that sits along side the half edited iMovies and an outline for a first novel?

Grrrr

I openly admit that I'm not the strongest linear algebraist. For a while, as my little animated skeletons contorted incorrectly, I despaired that this web coder had finally swum too deep in the game programmers' ocean, but after breaking it down to atomic problems and building them back together I found that my code just couldn't be wrong.

So, I broke the cardinal rule of humble programming and began to blame Other People's Code. After poking around in the Blender Motion Kit, it turns out that it doesn't spit out motion data correctly for anything except the simplest armatures. It doesn't complain, or look totally wrong, but it does something simple where it needs to be complex and the results made my models zig when they should zag.

Tomorrow I'll break out Poser and generate data that doesn't make me crazy.

UPDATE: I can't seem to locate my Poser CD, so I rolled up my sleeves and fixed the Blender script to do the right thing. Now I can makehuman and blend to my heart's content.

Wikitecture

As I build out the tools for space builders I run across interesting ideas which mostly consist of applying various web patterns to 3spaces. Lately people have been chatting about wikitecture, which I have summarized with this outline:

Versioning
- history
- revert
- offline backups
- shards

Sharing
- default to open, but lock when hot
- vandalism isn't fatal
- snippet libraries

Communicaton
- proposals, vetting
- ref. patch submission to code repo
- talk pages
- feedback: traffic, thumbs up/down, comments (by object, by view)
- leadership: de facto or de jure

I'm intrigued by the idea of tightly versioned spaces, though it's tough to justify the complexity on the server side for more than regular backups and a broad restore capability. We're already seeing the libsl folks making noises about backups and versioning and perhaps answer is to place the versioning burden on the creator side in the form of IDEs working against code repositories and pushing periodic updates into spaces. But that's not very wiki-wiki, is it?

A Little Fun

I'm having no fun working on the avatar animation kit, so I took a little time off to play with the web API. In this short video you'll see around 800 randomized building shapes written into a space.

Yes, I know my avatar doesn't animate and has blocky shoulders. *sigh*

CC Licensed Models?

I was thinking about my dearth of open licensed models to include with ogoglio when I remembered that all of the Elephants Dream models are on the DVD they're selling. So one Elephants Dream DVD is on its way to Seattle.

Other than Teapotters, I haven't run across sites that clearly mark models with open content licenses. There are lots of "free for personal use" models out there, but most of them include copyright violating models (e.g. coke cans) and they aren't meant to be redistributed. So people can put them in their own ogoglio spaces but I can't put them in the default library.

Someone has to have created this already, right? How many 3D student projects are just sitting on disks, waiting for someone to give them a venue.

Textures

I've had some interest from a couple of 3D artists so I thought I'd spend a little time making the spaces capable of looking less terrible. After going through this tutorial on mapping textures to complex shapes in Blender I had something like this:

Then I improved the ogoglio loader and I exported the data from Blender right into an ogoglio space:

TEH WIN

Did Barack really just cameo on the DS?

Question

What happens when I click this bland door?

You tell me.

HeadCase

Now that HeadCase is coming out from under their rock I can mention that they're working on some tasty "intelligent, adaptive and autonomous digital characters for online multiplayer games, virtual worlds, communities and the world beyond". It's the beyond part which is interesting, so I hope that they throw off their veils sooner than later.