Malaise Maladay

Details

2009-12-24T07:15:00.000-08:00

It's striking how much a little organization can make a sim much nicer looking than another. Walkways, landscaping flourishes, a small application of these seem to make a sim full of rentals look much nicer than one that is just cut up into pieces and sold for tier without regard to the aesthetics of the environment around the parcels.

SKIMI Central has a handful of rental plots, and a mall with a fairly pleasing appearance. Most of the stores in the sim have an art gallery motif to them, with wood floors, and there are Koi ponds strewn all over. The mall itself has a wide variety of products, mostly involving buildings and landscaping.

When I see nice builds, I always feel disappointed, because it seems like there's never anyone around. A nice sim is a lot nicer with people milling around, checking things out. After all, nobody would want a virtual world without other people in it.

The courtyard area has an accurate, working analog clock. The street lamps use a very slight use of particles for the glow from the lamp -- rather than glow from basic shaders. This means even if you're using a client with no shaders turned on (like I am at the moment), they still look great.

And of course, the lamps turn off with the sun rises, as they should. This is an assumed feature in any serious lamp by now, but I still appreciate it, and it's one of those little things that keeps me coming back to Second Life, and the great builds I find.

Relocation!

2009-12-24T06:51:00.000-08:00

It's been some time since I last posted, hasn't it? There's been quite a few changes lately, and the most significant one is that the store has moved.

The location is here, at a much nicer sim with a more satisfying atmosphere. The old sim, Palm3, was sold to someone else, which means my rental plot was going to be disappearing.

Because of this, my update system for my products broke. Anyone with a version of the Smart Breasts product that is lower than 1.6, contact me for a free copy of the newest version, with functioning updates.

The newest version has a lot of bug fixes, little efficiency corrections, and new bra size HUD support. The default HUDs provided with the product now take advantage of this, and as always, you can program your own as well!

Robo2SL-Powered Model Bot

2009-06-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

In my store I have a wonderful model bot showcasing my products. Until today this was powered by omvviewer-light, a great lightweight Second Life client, but wasn't really ideal since it's a GUI application and the latest build seems to have issues with setting the avatar's appearance. I instead needed something that ran from a terminal, an application I wouldn't have to run from my desktop, if needed.

I've done some light tinkering with the fantastic libopenmetaverse, and from what I've found it's quite powerful. I now have my wonderful model running with Robo2SL, which uses libopenmetaverse. As long as you're running Windows, or have Mono installed (which is true if you're using Ubuntu, like myself) you can run your own model bot with relative ease.

The Lowdown:

Grab http://ftp.robo2sl.org/Robo2SL.MS-0905-1.binary.zip

Find out your UUID in Second Life. You can do so with the following LSL Script:

default
{
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
 MyID = (string)llDetectedKey(0);
 MyName = llKey2Name(llDetectedKey(0));
 llSay(0,MyName + ": " + MyID);
}
}

Just drop it in a prim and touch it.
Copy Robo2SL.config.xml.sample to Robo2SL.config.xml. Comment out everything but the first block. Do so by typing in  at the end of them. Edit the first block with your bot's details, and paste your UUID over the default one.
Run Robo2SL.exe, either by double-clicking, or running inside of a command-line. It'll use the XML file, run your bot, and you can control her from IM in-world. If you can't find her, send her a teleport request. She'll ask you if you want to allow the bot to do so, so just reply with 'yes'.

If the bot looks like a cloud, tell her 'appearance', and she'll attempt to fix her own appearance. If you want her to stand on a posing stand, right-click the object in your viewer, cancel, then tell the bot 'sit'. She actively listens for your interactions with objects and acts from there. Ask her 'help' for more commands.

Come on down to my store to see her in action!

LSL on OpenSim: Yes!

2009-06-25T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a handful of Simulators to open up on OSGrid, and am now testing scripting. Particularly, my Smart Breasts product.

With only minor changes, I've been able to use the Meerkat viewer to export the objects themselves, copy and paste the code from Second Life to new scripts on OpenSim, and have a working version of my product. This is very promising for OpenSim.

I'm currently researching if there's a method to bring this product to OSGrid and other OpenSim grids. The market for it is obviously most likely non-existent, but I'm fully committed to Open Source, and doing what I can to bolster Metaversal interest in non-Linden virtual worlds.

Running an OpenSim on OSGrid with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

2009-06-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

Firing up a simulator connected to OSGrid is remarkably easy, but I ran into an issue with scripts failing to run. Turns out, the version of Mono in Jaunty's repositories is fairly old. You'll need to upgrade from Mono 2.0 to 2.4.

After following OSGrid's guide, I configured and connected a simulator. However, when I created a script, I received the error "Primitive: Error compiling script: Standard output has not been redirected or process has not been started". Subsequent Google-raking found a forum post referencing an upgrade to Mono.

Unfortunately, there no packages that I can find for installing Mono 2.4 on an Ubuntu 9.04 installation. The maintainers held back the version for various reasons, so be wary of issues with your Ubuntu install and Mono that may arise if you use your Ubuntu installation for anything beyond OpenSim.

A kind person wrote a guide for building and installing Mono 2.4 on Ubuntu 8.10, which is unchanged for 9.04. My modifications are as follows:

sudo bash
cd ~

# Remove previous mono install.
apt-get remove mono-common mono-runtime

# Install needed tools to build mono.
apt-get install build-essential pkg-config bison \
libglib2.0-0 libglib2.0-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev \
libgif-dev libtiff-dev libx11-dev libfontconfig1-dev \
libfreetype6-dev gettext

# Feel free to change -j2 to 2x the number of CPU cores in your system.

# We need libgdiplus.
wget \
http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/libgdiplus/libgdiplus-2.4.tar.bz2
tar xpjf libgdiplus-2.4.tar.bz2
cd libgdiplus-2.4.tar.bz2
./configure && make -j2 && make install

# Now it's time to build Mono.
cd ~
wget \
http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono/mono-2.4.tar.bz2
tar xpjf mono-2.4.tar.bz2
cd mono-2.4
./configure && make -j2 && make install

Now you can run OpenSim with properly working scripts. Enjoy!

OpenSim: You've come a long way, baby

2009-06-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

I'm now officially on OSGrid! I created an account, and logged in expecting to find half-working simulators and constant crashes. There ended up being bugs, but overall the experience was positive enough that I would say OpenSim is definitely going to take on Second Life in a big way soon.

If I had to come up with areas for improvement, it would be the following areas:

Region crossing: This involves a large amount of lag.
Avatar physics: When I would stop flying in mid air, I'd launch to the left.
Assets: Inventories and rezzing aren't very reliable.
Appearance: When I would log in, depending on the region I was in, my appearance would fail to load, and nothing I could do would bring it back until I found a region where I could finally edit my appearance, use skins that I'd created, etc. The default shape is uneditable as well, which is very confusing to new users. This is probably related to assets, I would assume.

I'm sure issues of usability ultimately fall under the responsibility of the owner of the grid, and not the software, so long as the technology is reliable. Despite the issues, for the curious resident of the Metaverse, OpenSim grids are definitely worth tinkering with.

Smart Breasts 1.4 Released

2009-06-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Time to blog about it!

I've released an update to my Smart Breasts product, that includes the following changes:

Options Menu (reachable via the owner clicking on them): Allows you to adjust the most common settings on the fly without the use of a HUD.

Control Mode: Allows other avatars and objects to control the size of the breasts, if enabled.

As always, this update is free for current owners and will be sent when you attach an older version. I'm also working on new gadgets and other items that could be used via roleplay, if that's your thing, as well as new compatible tops.

You can view my products at the following locations:

Meta-Life
XStreetSL
Apez.biz
In-world at: [MALADAY] Avatar Enhancements

Meta-Life Shoutout

2009-06-16T13:14:00.001-07:00

I haven't had much of a problem with the recent purchase of XStreetSL by Linden Lab. On the contrary, the unified login procedure gives me one less login to worry about. It'd be nice if they'd implement OpenID publicly so that other sites could integrate without having a kiosk, but that's neither here nor there.

MetaLife is a relatively new service that serves as a third-party marketplace like XStreet, with a few added features. They make product listing quite a bit more simplified, allowing you to simply list your products on the site like you can with XStreet, and then deploy vendors that automatically serve these products. Selling via the vendors incurs no commission to MetaLife, and you can set the vendor to serve products from other sellers as well, fleshing out inventory if it's kind of light.

The vendor is actually pretty decent and it allows basic sales tracking. The reporting isn't as thorough as XStreet's but the vendor integration is what sold me. I have no doubt they'll ramp up membership and be able to become a big player in the marketplace arena of Second Life.

I promise this isn't a sponsored post. :)

Check them out in-world here.