Uptown top banking

I wanted to say something about LL's moves against the SL banking community (no, that's not rhyming slang) but I don't really have long enough for a considered post. Not that I care much about the banking community per se - I've never used an in-world bank and have never seen much point in doing so. This is particularly true of those offering impressive sounding interest rates, largely on the rule of thumb that if something looks too good to be true then it probably is.

But as I said when LL outlawed in-world gambling, what these moves represent is a significant change of direction for LL - away from a largely hands-off, anything goes approach, towards a more regulated world. Not surprising I suppose. Host an online service in the US, even on the west coast, and outside forces are going to be brought to bear on it before long - especially once the mainstream media gets interested in it. Actually, this is probably true of most countries - I shouldn't pick on the US. LL should probably be congratulated for holding out as long as they have.

But it does leave one wandering what the next step will be...

Open source terrain

The open source approach to SL object creation currently being adopted by Clever Zebra attracted a lot of blog attention last week. Quite rightly... it's a novel approach and it'll be interesting to see how things pan out.

Today, I note that they are adopting a similar approach to terrain files. Interesting...

As an aside, I now think that one of the things I got wrong when I constructed Eduserv Island was the terrain. Eduserv Island is made up of a lot of hard edges (it is shaped into the letter E - the Eduserv logo). Because of this I adopted the aproach of constructing most of the land mass out of large grass cubes, leaving much of the terrain underneath 20m under water. This has an impact on how some objects float and/or fly I think. The advantage is that there is lots of underground space to play with (though as far as I know, no-one has yet discovered my subterranean building work!).

SCREENBURN_

Via a tweet from Peregrine Juneau I found SCREENBURN_, latest offering from Robbie Dingo (who is always worth watching). SCREENBURN_ is a short story being told thru the medium of machinima podcasts.

WeGame, machinima and sheep

Torley Linden has written a useful review of WeGame - effectively a YouTube for gamers but with a free, lightweight, downloadable tool for creating machinima. Looks pretty neat so I thought I'd try it out.

As Torley says, it's very easy to register, install and configure the software and get going. 10 minutes and you'll have uploaded your first machinima. Looks useful for quickly recording events and the like, where you want more than just an image. Quality looks pretty good also - though the embedded version below doesn't look to have coped with my widescreen format (the version on the WeGame site is OK)..

Here's my first attempt showing firstly, the Machinima Commons stuff that I've added to Eduserv Island and secondly, some jet powered sheep (which I originally built so that Second Friends could throw them at each other, but which since seem to have gained a more animated life of their own).

Selling land bought at auction

A few months back I bought some land via auction. I didn't really want the land, but I was interested in how the SL land auction system worked. Very smoothly as it turns out - so smoothly that I ended up buying something that I didn't really want :-)

For now, I've let one of my other avatars sell shoes from it...

I'd be happy to sell the land again except I can't work out how! It is still shown on the map as being auction land, and there's no 'sell' button on the 'About land...' dialog box?? If anyone knows how to fix this, please get in touch. Thanks.

RSS feed for Torley's Tips of the Week

An RSS feed for Torley's Tip of the Week videos (linking to the lo-fi (in-world) version of each video) is available from

http://artfossett.net/sl-tip-of-the-week/rss.xml

just in case anyone finds this useful. I had to create the feed by hand (well kinda by hand - I used the RSS-xpress tool at UKOLN to do it). Does a feed for these videos already exist somewhere?

I needed the feed because I have a generic(ish) tool for selecting and playing an in-world video from an RSS feed of available videos - it's what I use for the Teachers TV demo on Eduserv Island.

It'd be good if the RSS feed could be generated automatically in some way from the content of the Wiki (or vice versa I guess) but I'm not sure that is easily do-able?

Virtual Ed case...

A hearty welcome back to Shale Bing and thanks for reminding all of us that the path of true SLove doesn't always run smooth - for educational institutions at least - in such a witty style.

Lol...