Tweak Tweak Tweak

More recent visits have had me stumbling upon small groups of helpful people, including a young girl named yuji (I believe) who walked me through the program settings to help me move around a little bit easier. Things actually improved 3 fold with the small amounts of tweaking I did. Went from almost 3 FPS (Frames Per Second) to at the most 10 FPS. A noticable improvement. I can climb stairs no problem now.

Now the main thrust of Second Life seems to be the social aspect. Dozens of "Events" are showcased and advertised every day on SL. These can range from Art Gallery showings to Gaming Events to Club Meetings to out and out parties. Now once you get together with everyone you have objects you can interact with. By selecting an objects "Use" function, you can do the default which is to sit on it, or you can perform a sequence of motions pre-scripted into the object. Like for instance they make objects that can make you go through the motions of doing jumping jacks. Or at a dance club you can get up on a platform and dance. All scripted. You just active the object and off you go. Dancing machine. There are of course more "Adult" versions of this, which are not only pervasive but rampant throughout the program. Everything from Pole Dancing to out and out lovemaking with several "action globes" attached to a bed are the norm and usually get the most attention and fetch the most cash. Can't imagine my surprise in going to a club, sitting down with my friend and watching a woman climb on the pole and start dancing and gyrating to the streaming music that was pumping through the place. Makes for a fun party and of course with the liberty of as much or as little clothing as a person wants to wear, can make it very fun to watch. Not sure how anatomically correct things get but they allow for the use of "tattoo" graphics to be placed in all the right spots from what I understand. Not that I've gone looking.

So I'm here and I'm looking for a purpose for being there. Sure I can go and hang out. Chat and rate people and earn a modest living. But what if I want to do more. What if I want to buy clothes or buy myself a stake of land and build a dream home or a place for my friends to hang out at. For that I need to learn how the economy of SL works. Something that I'll talk about as things move on. And as soon as I learn how.

Bandwidth Issues?

Another thing I'm finding as I explore is that for some reason the program is constantly downloading. Even when I'm just standing around talking to people in a stationary area. At first I thought it was the music playing that was causing it (many events and established clubs and stores pump streamed music for their guests) so after turning that off the amount I was downloading did kick down from about 350k/second to 140k/second but it often would jump right back up to 350k/second at random points for no reason. Only thing I figure is that even peoples AVATARS are huge and labour intensive to download. Talking with a friend of mine, the one that introduced me, she discovered this program the bad way, finding out she had used up 60% of her bandwidth for the month after only 8 days of the month. So she has paid more money to expand her bandwidth cap to 8 gigabytes. Sometimes I think computer companies hire these people just to make these programs to help push along the technology curve in places that are needed. Like the bandwidth area.

I am getting good days with the bad though as far as lag goes. Makes it a little bit easier to work with your inventory and add and remove gestures, which I've mentioned before. Nice little function in the program allows you to program your own gestures using the stock "actions" that come with the program. You can add as many actions as you like, insert sounds or even have text appear over your head while you do it. I'm sure you can upload sounds for this express purpose, but like anything else not part of the program this costs $L dollars. You're given a limited amount of cash when you start and you are given a weekly "stipend" or paycheck depending on how social you are. You can click on any person you like and "Rate" them, on their overall behavior, their building skills or their object skills. Rating each catagory costs $L 1 but rate enough things or people and your "stipend" increases so that you get more money.

Of course the biggest way to make money is to create objects for people to buy in the program. This can be anything from objects full of gestures, as I talked about before, to clothing, to action spheres. Action spheres are about the most interesting thing to do with the program. But I'll save that for its own entry.

Off Topic Garbage: Right now my big video game kick is Diablo II : LOD again. For some reason the appeal of playing online for free just doesn't lose its... appeal? Plus I've got this great idea in my head that I'll make a nice "Item Farmer" Barbarian and make some money on ebay that way. But the whole ebay thing is another story. Perhaps my short term goal right now is to earn enough PayPal cash to Sponsor Red Vs Blue next season for $30 or $40 bucks. And they deserve every damn penny. Go see them today, you bunch a cockbites.

Growing Pains

I have visited Second Life about 4 times now. Unfortunately I have to overcome a major stumbling block with this program, as I have a lackluster video card. Hmmm, how to put this for the uneducated. Ever had to walk through mud? Or wade your way through a tangle of kids in a narrow corridor or small room? Imagine exploring a whole world that makes you do this with EVERY step. Very frustrating.

Secondly, I hate the interface. Too much clutter, not enough organization. It presents itself in a certain way that you think you can do what you want but then when you try and do it suddenly it doesn't work. For example: I was given a "box" of gestures. Basically how to express yourself visually works is you are given a bundle of "gestures" you can use and you "enable" the ones you want to use and just leave the rest in your folder organized inventory. Those that you enable then become available in your gestures pull down list. Sounds like a lot of extra work eh? Well then someone gives me a "box" of 200 freebie gestures. So how do I even put them in the "gestures" folder in my inventory? First I have to set the "box" on the ground. I keep quoting box because its the generic term for the object. You can make boxes look however you want. This one looks like a beach ball or something. Then I have to edit the box and go to its contents window. So now I have a list of gestures. Great! I'll highlight them all at once and drag them over to my gestures folder in my inventory. Hmmm, can't make one of those bounding boxes. Oh I can use shift to highlight them one by one. Ummm, I'm still doing the "shift-arrow key" to move down the list but the window isn't moving. Ah hitting page down seems to move the box independent of my selection process. Will hitting END while holding SHIFT highlight them all? Nope. Oh well. *poke poke poke poke poke poke* There done. Now click the group and draggggg... wait a second, it changed the selection to just the one I happened to click on for the click and drag motion. Damnit. Wait to select them all again. Now try the right click. I saw an option to "copy" the items. There. All selected. Did the right click / copy. Now I go to inventory and right click on the list where I want it. The paste command is there but its grayed out. Why is it grayed out?

"Yeah you have to move them over one by one, its a pain isn't it..."

Ah thanks for pointing this out after I've been slaving over this for the past few minutes. I thank the girl and nod, not too happy about this development, not that its her fault of course. Just the program. So I begin. One by one...
click / drag. Click / drag. You know this doesn't make for good TV now does it? Anyhow, I get bored and leave it for later. All further attempts to get at this list of gestures has proved fruitless though. I somehow closed off the contents directory on the object and now it won't open so I can see the list of gestures again. So its been deleted. Its bad enough I'm in a painfully slow environment to begin with, but to make an interface that requires the most amount of work to do the simplest thing? Not good business. I guess they must be counting on other parts of the program to draw in customers. But I'll get to THAT in another post.

Off-Topic Rambling:

The fine ladies and gents at Rooster Teeth Productions, the creators of the now infamous and insanely popular (if you're an internet geek) Red Vs. Blue, have released the final episode (Episode 38: K.I.T. B.F.F.) of Season 2. Its been a long winding road, and they even had the guts to bring the Season to a very climactic moment with only 2/3rds of the season completed. They had a lot to live up to and managed to succeed in impressing everyone involved (again said internet geeks). Of course you only got to see the final episode TODAY if you were a sponsor. For even just $10 dollars not only do you get to see the episodes TWO days earlier but you get them in a higher resolution than if you were to wait and download the episode for free on Sunday night. Donate $20 and you get a free DVD shipped to you for that season, complete with extras and commentary. Oh yeah, and did I mention the extra videos you get to see that no one else does? Go ahead and check it out at www.redvsblue.com and see how it was from the very beginning. They have a rotating archive of the Season 1 episodes and a list of all the Season 2 episodes as well. One way to tell what you're in for though is to check out the PSAs first. You may not fully understand the dynamics of them but they give a good indication of the sense of humour and the quality of writing that comes with the series itself. So what are you waiting for already? Go check it out!

My Second Life... or was it my third? Fourth is right out...

Blogging has been going on for quite some time now and I thought that after my more or less unsuccessful jaunt through DeadJournal that I needed to find a greater focus for my rantings. So just recently someone introduced me to a program called Second Life. It is a 3D chat program that progressively tries to run your computer into the ground while you use it. Not for the faint of processor, that's for sure. As I learn and grow in Second Life I will document those things here. Of course I do have a life outside of Second Life, but those posts will be add ons to whatever posts I make about my journey.