metaAfrica Township

Sunset on metaAfrica Township. For financial reasons Uthango are closing the homestead regions I previously rented on and instead have opened up a township as a residential area on one of the two remaining full regions. Of course, this is sadly the kind of environment in which TB thrives and I tried creating my own build on the Cityscape platform using so-called grunge materials.

I do have some moral qualms about pretending to dwell, however virtually, under conditions so far removed from my own real-life. There are so many beautiful sims in SL and this one is no less marvellously rendered. However, there is still a palpable shock for a coddled Westerner on rezzing in the township. I can only justify my virtual presence on the basis that Uthango supports projects in such places and I am hopefully supporting them. And yes, Africa should have a voice in the metaverse.

Moreover, I do want the microbiology students to experience other regions of SL related to their studies and to be aware of the presence inworld of non-profits as well as educational institutions. Last year they went to Karuna (HIV information sim funded by the US National Library of Medicine) but that project has sadly ended. This township in Virtual Africa is a worthy successor and there are many other things to see and do on the sims beyond the township itself. The covenant also talks about turning residents into micropreneurs. An interesting thought.

slurl

1rez multi-sculpted protein

I added the Cord Maker script to the atoms in the Protein Rezzing Toolkit (PRT) and then rezzed the protein (1rez, lysozyme), generated the sculpty textures, applied them to prims inworld and assembled them with the prim-intensive version as a template. Indeed, assembly was somewhat slow and tedious but the result is a worthwhile reduction from 779 prims to 38. If I replace the alpha and beta structure (red and blue here) with the single pipes and planks prim I made previously, that number reduces further to 23.

This represents a useful halfway house between Hiro Sheridan's single-prim sculpted proteins and the multi-prim versions generated by the PRT and Monolith. Asorel Todriya did something similar with conventional prims but inevitably the end-result looked less, well, organic. The challenge now is to add detail back in a way that is prim-efficient but allows students to explore and annotate the molecule in meaningful ways. While this general approach has a number of limitations, it has one supervening benefit, namely that each student or group can be given their own semi-detailed molecule to work with.

Shared media resource bookmarks

An ultra-rapid blog just to highlight an attempt to use delicious to compile a list of resources for those wanting to use and implement solutions based on shared media. When thinking of Web 2.0 applications on a prim like EtherPad, I've started by focussing on the subset that are free, synchronous and zero-registration (like EtherPad, in fact). I obviously don't have time to test every feature of every application and I will also be pointing at other resource sites as well.

Dashboard 0.41

To reprise, this is a seven-screen shared media viewer. I've actually cut out some of features of the previous version. It no longer packs/unpacks, follows the avatar or distributes landmarks. On the other hand, I added the ability to load websites onto individual screens from a notecard called keySites. Just rightclick|Touch and select KeySites from the menu.

I'm distributing it via the Subscribe-O-Matic group -- you can join at the Simply Beta Learning Technology Centre on Daxos (slurl). The group also has an RSS feed. Eventually, I'll setup a vendor there (the object is set to buy for L$0 but I don't recommend you leave it around just in case anyone manages to reset the URLs, though that shouldn't be possible if you're not the owner). Also, note that audio for Flash and QuickTime video is sim-wide.

The dashboard is still a little buggy; you may need to touch the screen or controller twice on occasion. The menu (and help) is available by touching the non-screen prim that acts as controller.

Experience suggests that you may sometimes have problems getting all 7 screens to work although in theory the shared media supports the 8 nearest to the avatar camera.

Shared media overview

I'm going to be contributing occasional blogs to the Elucian Islands group on Nature Networks. The first (rather long) blog is on shared media.

Prim Oven

This is a quick and dirty review of Prim Oven, the companion to Cord Maker I reviewed previously (see that blog for creator and purchase details). To give Prim Oven a spin, I attempted to replicate the pipe-and-planks component of a molecular model generated previously (the p&p components were originally added manually over one of the prim-intensive protein models and set to semi-transparent and, yuk, glow).

Overall, Prim Oven works pretty much like Cord Maker with a maximum of 15 prims per model. You can make a few alterations to the base prim type (swap prim shape from Box to Cylinder, Path Cut, Taper, Top Shear) but I didn't have time to play with these and, to cut a long story short, other things don't work; see xstreet for details.

I used the same shortcut as previously, viz copied the script from the base prim to the prims I wanted to sculpt, pressed the red button on the base unit, generated the html, loaded the web page, copy/save/uploaded the texture, applied it to a prim, resized (alas, no helpful info, unlike Cord Maker) and repositioned. Like a dummy, I left the base prim out so that was in the sculpt too.

Overall impressions? Surprisingly good. The picture shows the p&p (minus glow and alpha) on the right with the sculpt (with plywood texture) superimposed on the p&p prims (with alpha and glow) on the left. The alignment is good enough to use from this perspective, not quite so good from side-on (there's some sheer too) but probably still good enough.

I have never seen sculpties like this. I didn't even know you could make them with the elements so far apart. I also tried making a sculpt from a linkset and was surprised that this worked partially -- 2 prims appeared of the 10.

I haven't tried texturing yet. The instructions are a little vague on this -- apparently any texture on the blue surface on the base prim gets twisted but I may have got that wrong. The inworld shop at Nipponbashi has some templates but I don't know whether they just work for box-based models. I suspect so. Even then, I am mightily impressed. In due course we will see mesh imports and this might open other avenues but in the meantime this is a low-intensity way to do simple things that save prims.

Cord Maker

As prim counts are becoming more significant, I've been looking at tools that generate sculpted prims. I've bought tools for generating sculpties previously but they've never really worked for me. They are either too complex or too unwieldy. However, Cord Maker (and its companion, Prim Oven) by Japanese creator sTwo Acker seems more promising as it nimbly bridges the gap between prim-based building and sculpties.

With Cord Maker, all you do is rez special spherical prims, position them, number them by touch and then get the base unit to chat some html which is saved as an htm file. Viewing the file in the web browser generates an image that is saved and converted to png format (I actually copy/pasted the image into IrfanView for that step). The png image is uploaded and applied as a sculpty texture to a basic prim. Resize the prim (this info is also chatted separately) and the job is done, the gaps between the prims being filled automagically (there's a preview mode based on temprez prims that gives you some idea of what to expect).

I generated a couple of sculpties (each specified by 15 prims, the largest number supported) to ensheath part of a prim-based protein. I positioned the special Cord Maker spheres (numbered in the picture) over the atoms although it did strike me that it should be possible to semi-automate the process, either by scripting the Cord Maker prim to position over the atom or by incorporating the script in the protein rezzer (the script is copy but no-mod, no-trans). A half-way house was to add the script directly to the atom prims and this worked pretty well for the remaining prims (not shown). I applied a generic texture to the sculpties and made them semi-transparent so you can see through to the atoms.

The net effect was to reduce the prim count from 69 to 3! The downside is that there is no simple way of texturing (Prim Oven, which is used with box and cylinder prims, has a free texturing template for sculpties made from a maximum of 8 prims), there is no touch-scripting (at least, not yet) and the joins between prims are, inevitably, sometimes rather obvious. Overall though, this is the easiest way to generate custom sculpties, albeit of limited complexity, that I've yet seen.

Cord Maker and Prim Oven (which I have yet to explore but works similarly) are available at sTwo's shop on Nipponbashi (slurl) for $L800 and L$1000 respectively and for a little more on xstreet.

Yet another presentation viewer?

With downsizing imminent, I have been taking a greater interest in prim counts and SlideTalk is my first product made especially with this in mind. It's a freebie 1-prim texture viewer that pre-rezzes images on the (very narrow) edges for faster transitions. Touch either side to change slide forwards or back, the lower border to access slides based on order of display and the centre to access a menu. The menu lets you:

• go to the first slide (reset),
  
• control who runs the viewer (owner-only or public),
  
• give a notecard or object,
  
• turn the (5 min) timeout on/off,
  
• allow a 9-sec sound clip to be played (or not),
  
• allow text to be chatted from a notecard on a per slide basis,
• denote a board as a sync board so that it changes pages at the same time as the main board.

As ever, textures (named Slide01 et seq) are played in alphabetical order and sound clips have the same name as the slide plus the suffix "_sound". There is hovertext that shows basic instructions on the first slide and thereafter the slide number and count. It changes from white to green if a sound is being played.

The text for the chat notecard (named zzScript) is readily captured from a PowerPoint presentation outline and then it's just a matter of inserting titles of the form !Slide03 where Slide03 is the name of the texture. As you enter a page, the text gets chatted somewhat after the fashion of SpeakEasy, albeit all at once and fully automated.

I hope in due course to add shared media to the mix.


As ever, SlideTalk is beta quality has no warranty and is unsupported. I'm in the process of opening a freebie centre (Simply Beta) for my stuff on Daxos so SlideTalk can be obtained from there. Alongside it is a simple pinboard should you ever have the need of one and a board for the Simply Beta Subscribe-O-Matic group. More to follow hopefully.