Chameleonic Possessions

A while back, this caught my eye:

High Fidelity is Philip Rosedale’s new virtual world project. This is currently in the very early stages of Alpha but you can signup to that Alpha from the main webpage. However you won’t be able to login to High Fidelity or see any of its features.However it does seem as if it is possible to login to High Fidelity. There are clues on how to do this, starting from the jobs page. There a challenge is laid down to people who may want to do paid work for High Fidelity:“We are seeing lots of great applicants! If you’d like to get our attention and also have more fun than sitting in an interview, do the following:Checkout our code on GitHub, build the Interface client, and see if you can login to Hifi. Then, take a look at Worklist and see if there’s a job you can do to show us your work skills.”

via So You Want To Login To High Fidelity? » Ciaran Laval.

I’ve been following a few blogs that have commented on High Fidelity. So far my comment is “Why can’t Philip Rosedale name something with a uniquely searchable name ever?” If this thing takes off, John Cusack will wonder what’s going on with his web hits.

I boggled at GitHub and looked at Worklist – it’s all way over my virtual pay grade. And forget about compiling a client, that’s not alpha testing, that’s cuneiform torture.

Still I did a silly thing and signed up for the alpha. I haven’t built much recently, though Dhughan caught the bug tonight and did something quirky. But I’ve been thinking about Second Life almost constantly, wondering about things to make and kind of… building up a static charge of creativity (literally not much more than the proverbial spark).

So today, knock me flat, I get an email with a link to a survey. I’m on the alpha test mailing list, so I duly filled out the questionnaire. I’m not a highly skilled builder, but I can knock prims together, and texture them, and when I get the bug, I enjoy building. Where I get bogged down is with some of the tedium, and I am too easily frustrated (insert obligatory “Blender broke my brain” comment here).

They asked that the survey link not be shared, but they emailed back the survey and my responses. Edited to protect the clueless (me):

Email * [never you mind]
I am a *

potential virtual world resident
virtual world content developer (designer, programmer, artist)

What are your specialized skills?

I have built things using the Second Life build tools – buildings, attachments, scripted fountains and picture frames, etc.

I have some knowledge of Blender and own two good reference books: John Bain’s “Complete Guide to Blender Graphics” and Ben Simonds “Blender Master Class.” I belong to various inworld Blender support groups and also to a couple of Google+ groups (as GinnyRED57, feel free to follow me on G+, all 3 of you)

I’m a GIMP user and have created my own textures for my objects, and also I create abstract digital art occasionally with other programs and apps (and High Fidelity makes me want to play around with this more).

I’m good at texturing, aligning small prims, and have some familiarity with using scripts (though I am NOT a scripter). I have done some work with a standalone Open Sim workspace and can load OARS, IARS, and terrain files.

I take photographs in RL and in SL; my inworld pictures are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lelanicarver although I am behind on uploading. I enjoy photographing landscapes, streetscapes, and friends’ events, as well as large builds and “art.” I have a large-ish catalogue of RL travel photos on Flickr as GinnyRED57 and wow, I need to upload my backlog. I use my photographs as inspiration for SL projects.

I have several WordPress blogs, and several Twitter accounts, and am comfortable with social media.
Hours per week spent in virtual worlds and/or games:
6
Do you play Minecraft?
No
List any other online games you currently play
Patterns
Have you ever used an online virtual world? (Second Life, ActiveWorlds, There, et al)
Yes
List any virtual worlds you currently use
Second Life, OSGrid, and a standalone installation of Open Sim
Have you ever sold things you created in a virtual world? *
Yes — I’ve earned MORE than $100 USD
In a new virtual world, I’d likely do this the most: *
explore what others have built
Do you mostly use a … *
desktop
When did you buy your laptop/desktop? *
2012
Tell us more about your system *
Well, I like it, I had it built at Fry’s:

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz (3292.53 MHz)
Memory: 4077 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.3165
OpenGL Version: 4.4.0
On this computer I have: *
4GB to 8GB RAM
What’s your preferred mousing interface? *
High-end mouse with buttons I program
The operating systems I use most are: *

Windows 7

When you are at work or away from home, is there an internet-connected laptop or desktop left behind at your house? *
Yes (I wonder what that’s about? Distributed computing, probably)
How many?
4 (actually this varies from 2 to infinity depending on your definition)
If High Fidelity created a much better virtual reality experience using extra hardware (like a 3D camera or a motion-sensing glove), how much would you be willing to pay for that equipment? *
less than $200
Any closing thoughts?
I am excited by the possibilities that High Fidelity could realize and look forward to hearing back from you whether I am involved in the alpha or not.

So that’s that. I’m not sure what will come of it, but I’m curious to see what happens next.

In the meantime, I discovered that the pond by the St Helens shop froze, so I went ice-skating. IN AN AWESOME DINKIES OUTFIT. That’s Dhughan’s nature reserve behind me, with the miraculous frost-resistant plants.

If, like me, you’ve barely scratched the surface of animating for Second Life but don’t really understand how it all works, you might want to look for a class at Caledon Oxbridge conducted by Red Quixote to get a really solid grounding in the basics, with lots of detail. It’s presented in a very focused, text-based format (YAY for text instruction, BOO for voice instruction).

The class consists of a series of engaging slides (many of which use classical cartoon animations to illustrate the theory behind avatar animation using the SL skeleton). A LOT of text will scroll by, full of seriously detailed information. You will be given a notecard with the slides and the class transcript as a part of your materials, plus there is a tutorial on how to create a simple animation in QAvimator on your own later. This is the method that seems to “stick” best for me – I need to refer back to notes a lot, and trying to make decent notes from a lecture-based class format has let me down badly as the typist’s brain cells get older.

Dhughan’s most popular products are all dependent on animations, and it’s becoming clear that improving them is necessary, but neither of us were willing to spend the Linden$ on Avastar, the $22USD upgrade for Blender that makes life easier for clothing and animation content creators. At least, not until our/my Blender skills improve, which won’t be soon.

Also, for some time now I’ve actually had QAvimator installed, I downloaded a lot of Linda Kellie’s .bvh files, I’ve got BVHacker installed, I’ve watched a number of tutorial videos and even dabbled with creating a standard “start” file that’s supposedly already optimized, but that was months ago and of course, I don’t remember much.

Not only that, but I’ve got New World Studio installed and have a private grid handy as a test bed… actually, I’ve got various versions of NWS installed and my file structure is a mess, but I’ve got a place to build, backed up as an OAR, so that I can upload textures and animations and mesh for free. I’ve put in some time today to straighten things out and re-learn how the server commands work, so after some struggle I’ve got my most recent inventory loaded, running the current latest version of New World Studio. It’ll always be a private grid; I’ve toyed with the idea of opening something up on a spare machine that could be a server, but don’t have the calling, I think, it be the goddess of an open grid.

Some of the sites I frequently visit on these “refamiliarization trips” are:

Hypergrid Business: Making New World Studio work for you to remind myself how to configure a specific viewer (currently Kokua)
Inventory Archives – Opensim
Opensim Archives – OpenSim

Next time I upgrade, I really need to follow Maria Korolov’s advice and configure before unzipping the new version. I did it the bass-ackwards hard way this time.

Anyway, QAvimator, tutorial, test bed for free uploads.

Thank God, I was getting really tired of the lame lighting and phototools in Kokua.

We had hoped to be able to have all the latest Linden Lab bug fixes and service improvements in our next release, but it looks like it’ll be another month or two before that code is ready from LL. But we also wanted to get a release out before 2014 with the latest released code from LL and the latest Firestorm development work. This includes new features like Content Import/Export and Collada Export, plus new features from LL like Materials, ribbon particles, etc. Click for the complete “Change Log” and “Known Issues“. Unfortunately we only have a small window of time to get a release out before 2014 due to the coming holidays, so we haven’t had time to polish it up to our normal quality standards; thus we are calling this a BETA. This means it should be considered a fully supported release, but expect it to have some quirky bugs here and there. Upgrading to it is recommended but not mandatory. You can grab the Public Beta release from our Downloads page. CLEAN INSTALL RECOMMENDED!

via Firestorm Public Beta and Win64 Alpha releases! « Firestorm Viewer – The Phoenix Firestorm Project Inc..