After seven weeks of work, this is the not-quite-finished result. Of which, they showed off at Dragoncon.

What’s great about this is that ever since the game came out for Xbox360 and then PS3, it has truly rocked the gaming world with its fascinating twist on FPS. It was more of a story-driven FPS that at every turn had something new. The Big Daddy character was one of those obviously which is why it’s so cool to see people create replicas of it.

This particular build actually has moving parts such as an animatronic hand, and an actual spinning drill. What can you say, the attention to detail always gets you places. Now if only they would make a movie out of this game…

Photo Credit: (scenemissingmag)

I love it when I see some friends get highlighted in the gaming world. Recently, a buddy of mine from Fat Princess, McNublet, had his clan thrown into the spotlight by Titan Studios. Congrats, Nubs! Amusingly enough, it wasn’t but a few weeks when Nubs asked me to join the Broccoli Crew. Couldn’t commit since a guy’s got to keep his “blue lightning” reputation on the villager express.

What’s interesting is that this doesn’t really show the all of the high speed rushing offensive tactics. It’s actually pretty normal stuff and they have left most of the more advanced villager skills out of the video. Yes, folks… it is possible to capture in less than thirty seconds if you know what you’re doing. Under the minute mark is probably easily done on almost all of the maps. Perhaps BC will throw out some more training/recruitment videos. Currently around ten members and counting, who knows when Nubs will pull the plug on recruiting and just focus on current roster. Either way, don’t be surprised if you ever see me as a ringer for BC if they ever need it in leagues.

One other thing. On the Great Gorge? More than just the villager can carry on the route above. And the fastest and sneakiest attacks require only two villagers to pull off. Been there, done that. Damn, I need another fix of FP.

1. Check to see if your PS3 already has NAT2 connection. You can either test your Internet connection, or check the Internet connection status. If it already says NAT2, then you’re good to go and you don’t have to worry about it.
   
2. If the connection is NAT3, then you have to do some PS3 and router configuration. First you have to set up your IP to be static on your local network. Figure out what you what the IP as and fill in the rest of the broadcast and other information.
   
3. On the router side, you need to port forward some ports to your PS3’s static LAN IP. These ones you need to do NAT2. TCP: 80, 443, 5223 UDP: 3478, 3479, 3658 You may wish to just forward the UDP range of 3478-3658 instead of the single ones to remove two steps.
   
4. Check your PS3 connection. If you’ve done all of this, you should now have a NAT2 connection

The reason for all of this is because there has been some issues identified in the past with Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 (different ports) games. Specifically, Fat Princess happened to have some network issues and the developers announced that along with the fact that the main servers are getting bombarded, there’s also the NAT2 issue that’s more of an ongoing thing.

In any case… check your connections and you might be able to get a little more juice out of your network.

Unfortunately I missed the beginning of the programme, with a presentation from Qarl Linden, but I saw the stupendous presentation by Anjin Meili, inventor of the Snurbomatic sculpty device, where he showed what could be done with converting bump maps into sculpties. The event was pretty crowded, and so the sculpty took a little while to resolve — but when it did! The result was a frieze that looked in SL almost the way it would in real life – it looked substantial and truly 3D, and not at all the same as a flat texture frieze has looked, to date, in world.

That there is a camaraderie between those who specialise in sculpty production in world was evident from the fact that they paid tribute to each other during the talks. Anjin was followed by Cel Edman, developer of sculptypaint, a fantastic free program which I have been using to make sculpties. He explained that he had only been in SL since May this year, but that he is an exceptional SL creator already was clear from his presentation.

We can apparently thank the fact that SL was down and Cel was too new to get into the Beta grid, for the development of Sculptypaint, as he explained. He gave some tips for Sculpty producers, recommending that they pay attention to the LOD (level of detail) rules which means that you see 32 by 32 XYZ up close and 16 by 16 by zooming out. His tip was to make the model 16 by 16 and then put the fine details in 32 by 32.

Cel’s second tip was to use aggressive texturing to make the sculpty look good. Cel was followed by Aminom Marvel, who talked about efficiency in sculpty design, and showed some amazing things. He recommended that creators should look at last-gen games to see how to use meshes in an economical way, and showed some examples of efficient use of sculpty prims.

The sofa shown above is two sculpted prims, which have been used to the maximum effect. The back of the back cushions has not been sculpted, allowing the vertices to be used for the side cushions instead, as it is hidden by the back of the other sculpty prim. He likened the technique to making balloon animals, use the minimum mesh required, then squish off that bit and make the next.

TheBlack Box, next demonstrated an automatic in-world sculpty production system which I had not seen before, and barely understood. It seemed to be good at producing organic shaped sculpties, and is currently for sale for $5000 lindens on SL Exchange. In the listing on SLX, TheBlack Box pays tribute to Cel Edman, Anjin and Elzbiet Meili, and invites others to collaborate to make sculpty-making easier for all. It seems to me that this is the best of SL, collaborating and moving projects forward together, supporting and helping those coming along behind.

The program continued beyond my UK bedtime, but it was obvious that there was an educated and interested audience crammed into the sim convergence on Dr Dobb’s island. The talks seemed to range from the very basics of what sculpties are, to technical approaches to changing the Level of detail which were above my head, and so the speakers appeared to have made an effort to make their talks relevant to every level of attender. I learned that it is possible to see the mesh in SL by pressing control + shift + r, which was an interesting experience! It may not be new to the technically equipped among my readers, but it was new to me.

I was impressed by the range of content, the speakers, and the way the event was handled by Dr Dobb’s staff, who welcomed and introduced each speaker. I have run events like this in SL, and it can be stressful and difficult to make a series of events seamless, but they managed this. I was also impressed with the performance of the sims given the number of people who attended.

Material from the event is going to be set up in the conference centre, but I recommend that you run, don’t walk, to Dr Dobb’s and register for the rest of the week’s programme of events.

In Another Place I made a long blog about making clothes in SL, and I can see now that I crammed too much information into a single article. I am planning to make this mini-series on making clothes in four parts. Part one: using in-world appearance tools. Part two: using graphics programmes to make and upload clothing. Part three: using flexi prims and attachments to make composite clothes. Part four: shoes. If there’s anything else you’d like me to post about, don’t hesitate to make suggestions to me in world via IM or through the comments.

Using the in-world appearance tools to make clothes has the advantage of being quick and easy. The disavantage of it is that you can only use certain shapes and finishes. Clothes which have beeen made in an external graphics program can have transparent sections wherever you want them, and can have detailing like buttons and zips drawn onto the texture as part of the creative process. Clothes made using the in world appearance menu only won’t have those sorts of details.

If you are already making objects using the in world tools, a lot of the the processes in making clothes will be familiar to you. The conventions for choosing textures and colours are very like those for objects, except that you cannot repeat textures or stretch them for clothing.

Before you start 1: In order to make clothes using the in-world menu, you will need textures to use. These are pictures of cloth or fabric, which you can use to make your clothing. You have a few already in your inventory, and in your library. There are a number of places in-world to get free textures: the Gnubie store, and Stillman Bazaar are two which come to mind immediately. There are also many texture stores in SL.  Sometimes textures will deploy into folders in your inventory, and sometimes they come in boxes. If they come in a box, you will need to have dragged the box out of your inventory, opened and transferred the contents to your inventory in order to use the textures.

There are many places online to get free textures. You will need to save these to your computer, and then upload them into SL, which will cost $10 lindens per texture.

You need to know that some textures tile, that is they can be repeated across something without any join showing, and some textures do not tile. Sometimes that can be deliberate: if you have a texture with a shadow at the top or bottom, the texture will not tile vertically because you will see a hard line where the shadowing ends and the next repeat begins, for example. Some plain textures will tile very well even in parts of repeats. Others are very difficult to use well. Learning which will work and which won’t for clothing is something that’s hard to teach except by experience and experiment.
Before you start 2: save your avatar’s current appearance into a folder to ensure that you do not lose it. To do this right click your avatar, choose appearance, then choose the make outfit button at the bottom of the appearance menu. Click into the boxes for skin, shape, hair and eyes along the left hand side if you wish to keep all the elements of your appearance together in a folder. Unclick the boxes for anything you don’t want to migrate into a new folder. Click to rename your new folder (you can also opt to have the different items rename to match) and then save it.

It took me some time to realise that it was possible to make myself new clothes using the appearance menu. Right click on your avatar and choose appearance, and a bewildering array of choices appears before your eyes. Concentrate on making a pair of trousers and a top first. When you select “pants” in the menu on the left, your current pair of pants, if worn, will appear in the pictures on the right of the window if you are allowed to edit them. If the pants you are wearing are modifyable, you will be able to change anything about them — the texture, the colour, the length … but you will not be shown as the creator of the new pants if you do this, and you will lose the current version of those pants. A window telling you that you can’t modify this object will appear if they are not modifyable.

Either way, select to take them off using the button at the bottom, and then to make a new pair, if you wish to make a new pair of trousers and have yourself appear as the creator. When you choose to make a new pair of trousers, you are asked if you wish to wear the new item. Say yes to this. You will be wearing a white pair of trousers.

You can see two boxes in the middle of the appearance window, between the headings on the left and the pictures on the right. The top box is labelled fabric, and you need to click on this to choose the fabric that you wish to use for your trousers. A texture picker window will open up, looking like this:

All the folders containing textures or pictures will appear in the list to the right of the texture picker window. You may need to click to open the one you want, and then can scroll down to find the texture you want. Select it, and the trousers will show the texture in the window, and the texture will change on the trousers. You can click back into the fabric window if you want to try a different fabric, but remember that the versions will only be saved if you save them, if you change them before saving that variation will be replaced with the next.

In addition to using a fabric texture, you can add colour. This can sometimes provide unusual and attractive effects. You may lose subtlety and contrast, but on the other hand the right colour can hide up variations in shadowing and colour and conceal defects. Click into the colour/tint box to open the colour picker.

Once you are happy with your texture and colour, you can begin to adjust the trousers using the sliders for the windows on the right. Most of them are self-explanatory, and allow you to see the effects of moving the sliders from one extreme to the other. For trousers, you can choose the length, how high they come, looseness, how flared they should be, how wrinkled. don’t be afraid to play with the sliders — this is the only way to learn what the effects of moving them are, for yourself.

Once you are happy with the result, click save as, and name your trousers. I would advise you to try to be as descriptive as possible, because searching through dozens of “my new pants” in the inventory is a very boring game! “My bluegreen velvet long pants” will be far more useful. Make sure that if you make changes and want to keep the original, you always”save as” rather than saving.

For avatars who wear skirts regularly, learning to make trousers is essential, because wearing a pair of trousers in the right colour will avoid show through of the avatar’s legs through the skirt. I really don’t understand why SL creators who make clothes don’t routinely make a pair of undertrousers for their skirts and dresses. Some do, an awful lot more don’t. You can do this, however, and if necessary use just the plain texture and a colour to do it. It looks so much better when your bare skin isn’t showing through. If you want to make a pair of undertrousers of the right length, wear the skirt you are planning to wear over them, and then you can adjust the length of the trousers exactly to fit.

Making your own clothing in SL, even if you never wear it, helps you to understand the way that layering of clothing in SL works. Let’s try a shirt next. Click shirt in the list on the left, and if you are already wearing one, click to take it off, and then to create a shirt.

Again a white shirt will appear on your avatar, once you have OK’d wearing the item you are making. The routine is the same as for the trousers: choose the texture and colour, and then adjust the length of the arms and the length of the shirt. Remember that with the upper body, you have three layers to play with, undershirt, shirt and jacket. You can add gloves and a skirt to a shirt or jacket too. Things to know are that the layers appear in logical sequence on the body. Thus a jacket will always be the top layer, if worn. A jacket can be worn completely open at the front, whereas a shirt or undershirt cannot. You can make a coat using the jacket for the top and a skirt for the bottom section, and both can be open or closed. If you use a lacey texture for an undershirt, it is possible to make it look like a trim to a shirt or jacket layer. Experiment!

Once you have something that you think you might want to keep, do save it by using “save as”. If you revise it and decide you like the revision better, you can always delete it, but it’s hard to retrace your steps if you haven’t saved. Finally, once you have finished making clothes, organise them into folders in your inventory. You can right click on the clothing folder and choose to make new folder, and rename it. Each person organises his or her inventory in a different way, but I organise outfits by name, and then individual pieces of clothing in colour folders. Whatever you prefer, it makes sense to organise it while “top3 green” still means something to you. Even if you aren’t keen on the results you achieve, hold on to them for part three of this series, when we will be making attachments, which could be added to a plain shirt or jacket and transform them….

I was building in NCC over the weekend, and came across a very annoying thing:  although I was wearing the right tag for the group the land is set to, if I tried to drag an object over a parcel border, I got a constant error message that told me that the parcel didn’t allow objects to be introduced.

It was tremendously annoying — I was building in the air, and couldn’t see the parcel boundaries.  In any case it seemed nonsensical, because I could originate blocks in that parcel, I just couldn’t drag objects across the border.

I had a sudden inspiration though — I had created the original block with a different tag on.  When I set the block to the right group, I was able to slide it over the parcel border again.

As far as I know, this is a change in the way things work … and I am not sure whether it is intended or not.  Currently a parcel owner can choose to allow all residents to build, introduce objects or run scripts, or they can allow only members of the group to do that.  In the past, checking to allow members of the group to build or introduce objects would have allowed anyone with the right group tag to do this.  Now it seems that not only do they have to be wearing the right tag, their objects have to be wearing the right tag too.

A question from a friend who has been in SL some months reminded me how many little things are hidden away in the menues along the top of your screen. one of these is very useful when you seem to have invisible prims around, or have lost a pose ball because you made it transparent.

Go to the top of your screen, choose view, and then choose highlight transparent in the drop down list. This makes all transparent prims show up blood red, and allows you to select items like pose balls which you may have thought were lost forever.

The downside is that everyone’s transparent attachments turn up red, sometimes multiple penises in various states of erection, which gives an odd appearance. So I’d advise you to switch it off if you don’t want to be looking at everyone in a new way.

I will never forget the day I learned to use highligh transparent. I was working on a team build and was taught how to switch on highlight transparent, as we were using transparent prims to help people avoid falling off the build. We actually used remarkably few transparent textures in that build though, and so when I moved around for the rest of the day, I forgot I had highlight transparent turned on.  I teleported home, at that time to Dore, and thought I had been the subject of some sort of griefing attack. My particle fire jars next to the door had turned blood red… the windows were red… the trees and plants were red. I IMd a friend to come quick, believing I had been the subject of a virtual paintball attack, puzzled as to how they could have done it. Of course, everyone laughed like a drain when I realised that I had highlight transparent turned on, and turning it off set everything back to normal.

I have found this trick particularly useful if you want to move poseballs around while seated on them… highlight transparent enables you to click on the poseball and edit and reposition it, even though transparent while being sat upon.

Hope it helps!

And I know that it’s a skill that some have gone through the painstaking documentation(s) to learn. Fortunately for the rest of us noob, we don’t have to do that anymore due to some of the basics being covered by others in nice easy formats. SlTutorials provides a nice one-stop shop to finding your basic design and development fundamentals. Not everything is in video format, but there are a couple of prim basics and advanced tutorials that are done and compiled in flash based videos (aka YouTube).

While the development bug hasn’t bit me yet, this definitely peaks my own interests lot more due to the ease of finding information in one source instead of parading myself all over the Internet to find it.

Have you been curious enough to learn, but haven’t had the inkling of where to begin? Perhaps here’s your chance.

On Thursday I was supposed to have a telephone interview with Rich “Tisirin” Weil, Community Relations Director for Kaneva, but I had several conflicts come up and couldn’t participate. I had sent Rich a few questions to give him some idea on what direction I wished to take the interview, and he kindly emailed me answers to those questions along with the suggestion we have that phone interview next week. Rich I appreciate your working with me.

I had suggested to Rich, that Kaneva’s changing the economy where credits became reward credits, which could only be used for personal items (because the items bought with the reward credits can not be sold, traded, or given away) had hurt the creative innovators inside the World of Kaneva to the point where those innovators were leaving.

We absolutely want to do whatever we can to facilitate innovation, creativity and fun in Kaneva.

As we continue to develop the Kaneva service, and add new features for our members, we have had to temporarily tweak or alter some systems. The Rewards / Credits changes are a good example of that. Because we plan to sell Credits to users to enable them to buy things in the Virtual World, we needed to make sure that there weren’t any holes in that system where people could just get unlimited Credits for free (by creating multiple accounts, for example). However, we also wanted to be able to give new members some starting money. The result of those two needs was the Rewards system, — an alternative currency in Kaneva that can be used in a similar but limited way as
Credits, but also gives our members starting money and gives us the ability to safely hand out “free” money for various reasons.

The transfer of built-up homes and spaces in Kaneva is actually a different matter. We have temporarily disabled this because of some issues that came up around moderator / owner privileges that were potentially exploitable. We’re reworking that and will have a new system of owner / moderator privileges and home/hangout transfers in at a future date.

When we roll out the Credit Purchase system, then members will see fewer restrictions on items purchased with Credits (as opposed to Rewards). The Credits / Rewards system, once fully implemented, will help encourage all those things and give Kaneva and our members maximum flexibility.

What are the plans to allow user created content in Kaneva? Will in world tools be available or will users have to use outside programs? Any idea of a time frame for allowing user created content?

We’re not ready to talk about our plans in this area at this time. But, again, we recognize that our members can be very innovative and creative. We want to make sure we enable, encourage and reward that.

Now there is no control over texturing items in Kaneva…. Unable to determine the repeats, alignments of the textures etc. Will that be something for the future?

I’m not sure I understand the question here. Members can still texture items in Kaneva as they always could. Witness the Pizza Restaurant hangout, for example. It’s a marvel of texturing creativity.

O.K. Rich, let me see if I can get you to understand with a couple examples. This is a texture of Spanish Tile with one repeat per face horizontal and also one repeat per face vertically.

These faces are the same size and this is that same Spanish Tile texture — only this time it has 5 repeats per face horizontally and it also has 5 repeats per face vertically. Starting to see what I was trying to ask you?

Again this is the exact same Spanish Tile texture on the same size face, only this time I have there repeats per face set at 0.023 horizontally and 9.642 vertically with a rotation of the texture at 37 degrees. Again these faces are the same size and in the same alignment orientation to the virtual world. This thumbnails are linked to larger images.

One of the wonderful things about virtual worlds is they can become so “real” when there is a level that them mind can fill cogitative gaps during virtual immersion. The level of immersion into the 3-D environment of Kaneva seems to be lacking …. One reason is the inability to control your view … will there be attention given. to that aspect?

We are constantly working to improve all aspects of the Kaneva experience, so improving immersion and perspective are both things that are on our list. We haven’t received a lot of comments on the camera system thus far, but I’d be very interested to hear what our members had to say on the subject.

There are many complaints about not being able to create folders to hold textures, items, etc. I mean when you upload a 1000 textures to build with…. Scrolling through them all is a pain in the ass.

Your wish is granted! Our new media library upgrade allows our members to categorize all their media on their profile page, including textures/patterns, and it’s live now!

Here is a comment from one of our readers… Give me your thoughts about her comment.

I am pretty sure I am the one you are talking about in Kaneva with the Real Estate office and the Cemetery. I have actually pretty much left Second Life at a chance to be in on the beginning of what I felt like would be a good opportunity. I joined Kaneva on March 7th and now 3 months later it feels like we took 2 steps backwards.

I saw one great update and that was with them fixing the alignment problems, I dont know what it was but THANK YOU!

We still all look alike, we still have the same clothes, we were given a plant but that was taken away, then we were given a new light but that turned out to be the plant. LOL
A few small bugs were fixed but that wasnt something we could have functioned without.
The profile pages have been loading extremely slow the last few days and I noticed today that each page was loading around 200 invisible gifs…. hmmmm food for thought.

I have a very little money and it is impossible to “earn” any money in Kaneva right now….
I have people still sending request for communities to be built but without the ability to even transfer the community to them when finished, I cant even build them one for free!

Rich seems to avoid the question ReneeM asks in her quote with his response:

We have already implemented an avatar art change that gives our members more choices in differentiating their avatars. As I addressed above, we are aware of the issues around transferring Hangouts, so we’re taking a look at that system overall. We do want our members to be able to build and transfer Hangouts, as well as have a robust Owner/Moderator system.

Yesterday was the day new avatars came to Kaneva!

They can actually be made to look somewhat better than these examples, by working with a few clickable arrows and a slider or two, but much diversity is still allowing user created content.

I logged into the Kaneva’s world upon completion of the download and nearly had a heart attack when I reached my apartment and found every texture I had placed had been replaced with the texture of a new Kaneva T-shirt. Thank goodness I lost server connection and had to log back in again…. and my L.S.U. Textures were back in place.

I decided to go to the mall and spend some of my reward credits on all the new men’s clothes, as I do not particularly enjoying wearing the same thing everybody around me is wearing. I teleported to the mall, which only had 58 people in it when I arrived, only to move about three steps then freeze up and after a few moments lost access to the server again.

At this point I figured I may as well check on the Kaneva web page to see if they were mentioning anything going on with the servers. Couldn’t find out anything about the wold servers, but found this shopping catalog page, where there were listed samples of the new women’s clothing.

They also have pictured in the shopping catalog pictures of the empty apartments so you might get a very limited idea on what you are wanting to buy for an apartment…. hardly anyone would want the closet they start you off in.

I wanted to go back to the mall and buy some clothes, and I tried again.  I was heading for a clothing store when I noticed there was a Kaneva Bank over in one of the corners of the center of the mall.  I went to see how much Kaneva Credits were going to cost, but found it was a depository for items you didn’t want to carry around with you, rather than a place to exchange dollars for credits and visa-versa.

I turned and headed for the clothing store  and again loss the server.  When I tried to get back into Kaneva I received an error message…. basically showing me the servers were down.

I can only assume that the good folks at Kaneva are pulling their hair out about now… trying to work out their “bugs”.  I will make an attempt here in a little while to go back into Kaneva and see what has changed, and try to buy some clothes with these worthless reward credits I have.