Love is...

You wont be told a story, but you will get to live one. Its not what is given to you its what you do when you hold it. The more you give to more you get. Love your planet, and every one who is on it. We know you can, so just go for it. Its the right thing to do, and you know it.

No, I've got no idea what they are banging on about either.

Love is... a game apparently... with very cool screen shots.

Virtual learning, real prizes

The NMC have announced $100,000 worth of prizes (yes, that's US dollars, not L$!) intended to create a collection of innovative open-source learning experiences. Very impressive.

I've been wondering about suggesting that Eduserv offer some prizes at Alt-C this year for innovative and effective learning activities in Second Life but not on this kind of scale.

As the announcement says:

Projects funded under the program will be distinguished by the ways in which they make learning fresh or novel, or by the ways they illuminate topics or concepts that are normally very difficult to teach. Immersive learning experiences are especially encouraged, as are tools or devices intended to support the craft of teaching. The most competitive project proposals will not be limited to a single course or discipline, but will rather have broad applicability.

Note that awards, each of which amounts to $5000, are available for projects in either Second Life or Project Wonderland and come in the form of $500 cash and $4500 expert development assistance.

Seamless textures - part 2

My colleague, Peregrine Juneau, laughed at me the other day for producing a seamless cucumber texture. Quite right too! What was I thinking? Can't remember now... something about developing a cucumber avatar of some kind I think.

Anyway... here's a second attempt, using a Bath stone wall just outside the Eduserv offices (in Bath, UK). Bath stone is what almost all of the city of Bath is constructed out of... it's a soft, light-colored sandstone, local to the area.

It's not perfect, because I took the original image in bright sunshine so it feels a bit flat. Also the lack of mortar in parts of the wall rather stands out. I'll try again soon with a better starting image...

Here's how it looks used on my small patch of floating land on Gourdneck.

Making a seamless cucumber image

I've always wondered how to make a seamlesse texture - i.e. a texture that can be repeated/tiled with no obvious lines between the repeats.

Actually, it's pretty easy to do... at least in theory. I had a play with a cucumber-based image (don't ask!).

Here's what I did:

1) Firstly, I found an image of a single slice of cucumber on Flickr (original by Nick Atkins)- use a fruit or vegetable of your choice.



2) Then I used it to create a random pattern in a 512x512 square.



3) Then I moved the left hand side of the image to the right hand side, the right hand to the left hand, the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top. Luckily most graphics programs have an easy way to do this. In Gimp (which is what I use) go to Layer, Transform, Offset... and then choose the Offset by x/2, y/2 option.



Voila!



4) Finally, I used the original single image to disguise the resulting lines, being careful to avoid going off any of the edges of the image.



That's it...

You'll probably find that when you upload this and start using it that there'll be obvious repetition points that only become visible once it has been tiled. These will need to be ironed out manually by using the original single image to create a generally uniform appearance over the tiled image as a whole.

Have fun!

Land issues resolved

With reference to the last post and my collapsing 'For Sale' sign... my land issues have now been resolved.

I bought some land on Sinfro a while back thru the Linden Lab land auctions. When I came to try and sell it, I found I couldn't. Dunno why.

Having raised a ticket to get the problem resolved I then waited over 3 weeks for a response to the ticket. Finally I tweeted about my unhappiness with the speed of response and low and behold (though probably by total coincidence in reality) the problem was fixed the next day. Linden took ownership of the land and then sold it to me for L$0 - seems to have done the trick.

Anyway, I've now got the land up for sale at the very reasonable price of L$7000 if anyone is interested.

...or this

You ain't seen nothing like the mighty prim

I've been having fun with a very simple scripted prim idea. Take, one scripted Mighty Prim, copy it as many times as you like, position the resulting blocks where ever you want, then chat

/999 fix

Click on any of the blocks and they'll all collapse in a heap. Wait for 20 seconds and they re-build themselves into your original shape. Simple huh?

So, you can go from this:

to this:

and back again just by clicking and waiting.

Re-position everything and type

/999 fix

again and it'll remember the new set of positions as well, cycling round the saved positions after each collapse.

Repeat at will...