Torley Lives

Alrighty, into the breach, mah fellow avatizzles! Second Life 1.7 is out?actually, not quite yet. It's the PREVIEW version, which means there's gonna be a boatload of bugs to work out. But what exciting, dangerous times we dwell traffic in.?A science experiment!?I've already filed a few bug reports looking for more anomalies, crashed a lot, and started a lively forum thread to get the excitement worked up! Some key points o' mine to mine (this is by no means comprehensive and I'll be picking off more as I see fit):

• HUDs are very cool from the little I've seen so far. You could basically assemble your own dashboard of stuff or maybe even overlay a pink transluence on your whole screen so you can see the world through rose-tinted glasses. (When are we getting a drunkard's filter?) However, attaching one (or more) HUD somehow glitches the display of property lines. Fly and try. That's blessed bug report #111101.
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• There are now a dozen, instead of the old deca, of buttons on the bottom of the screen. As a result, they're smaller and a bit scrunchy. Also, "Mini-Map" is now called "Radar", which displeases me in an unsatisfying retro way. If anything, it should be MiniMap without the dashthing! However, what's nice is the Build button cue?if you're on nobuild land, it'll indicate as such, similar to how the Fly button was dimmed in the past. However, clicking the Build button at present jarringly displaces your cursor to the middle of the screen.
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• IMs come through when you're (BUSY). I don't get it! Bug report filed. Also, IM windows come to the forefront, like it or not, something that's really annoying, especially if you get a lot of IMs. There should be an option to have the "classic" 1.6 behavior back and simply show "IM Received" button in the lower left-hand. If I want to open the window up, I will!
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• Clothing button's utility is questionable. Sorting by Name works but not "t" for "type". There should be a way to organize metafolders, or some way to figure out what outfits you've worn the most so that it'd be truely useful. Also, no current way to show what's all worn in that panel. Should be more columns for organizing this data to help you wear better, if anything.
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• Something's chromey about looking into the horizon. Rezzing of distant objects feels slower but I don't know if that's because the prevgrid is on crashalicious sims or what. The gradient glow of the horizon looks softer, smoother, although the horrible sun reflection into the water is still present. However, one good point is it doesn't appear to intrude and jag into buildings like it does in 1.6.x. I am a?zealous fanatic when it comes to sunrises and sunsets in SL.
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• LoD (Level of Distance) doesn't appear to show thin objects better than previous versions. I tested with my logo and a thin hatband and it still bleeds through.
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• Map screen has improved severely. A personal wish of mine was to see autocompleteable fields instead of these LONG, inconvenient dropdown menus. Thanks Lindens, they're now in! I'll have to test how responsive they are with a longer list of Regions, however. Also, the map tracks and zooms smoother, reminiscent of some popular combat games, and doesn't appear murky and a dinge anymore. Detail, even color, are significantly better. It's starting to feel like Google Earth. Only not Google, and not Earth. Also, maptracking?Friends is a lot better for these reasons.
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• Related to this, there are some welcome UI tweaks that bring SL closer to the liquid interface I have dreamed of for so long. It may just be psychological, but mouseover on buttons and moving windows and even typing into text fields feel a tad more responsive. Things fade in and out instead of a binary 0/1 switch, enhancing the immersive experience. Also connected is this: try clicking Show Telehub Coverage on the Map! SMOOTH.
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• I haven't done enough framerate testing with other avatars in my vicinity. Yet.
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• For accessibility purposes, menus can now be more driven by the arrow keys to select items (like Windows itself). Test by clicking on a menu and then moving the arrow keys around. Rather than rotate your avatar, you'll see the difference.
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• Alt-Enter for toggling between fullscreen and windowed mode doesn't appear to work consistently for me. What I mean by this is that it hides the window and I have to Maximize it manually again.
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• ADDITION OF CLEAR CACHE BUTTON! Thankye Lindens! Personal wish of mine, a simple and effective method instead of going through whatever the heck we're doing now. Boondocks.
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• Coords now display on the menu bar instead of in the Radar MiniMap, which is pretty kewl.
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• Looks like some redundancy of particles when rezzing prims?my avatar's left hand shoots out double lines. Not sure if it's supposed to be this way but I don't prefer it.
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• No idea either why Contents tab doesn't make full use of that panel (and could easily be used to display a couple more items in an object) when Texture clearly stretches its interface elements all the way to the bottom.
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• Can't negrate anymore. Aw, screw it… how the heck am I supposed to stay tru 2 tha game of "NEGRATE ME, FEED A HUNGRY LINDEN! ^_^" I ask??? Interface looks like it can be improved for this, since now we're dealing with binary changes, it'd make more sense to have checkboxes instead of radio buttons (tip of the flower hat here goes to Dave Zeeman hehehe).
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• I can't find a selectable difference between the old "Light" and new "Full Bright". Where is it? O thanxies Rathe… it's under Texture. That's kinda confusing. Maybe both Light and Full Bright should be there. I?don't know?"Light" could be a material, anyh00.
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• OHNOES DELETE BUTTON DOESN'T WORK TO DELETE SELECTED PRIMS @#$%!!! (Exception: have a menu from the top open.)
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• Should be?separator line to mark difference between "normal" attachment points and HUD ones in the Attach To submenu.
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• Logging in no longer?crossfades you into the world of SL. It's very stark and sudden. Don't like it. Similarly,?I don't know why the TP progress bar is lower?than center, and it doesn't show names of scripted attachments being loaded anymore. Don't like that either. I don't know if Local Lighting is any faster but it seems to have a more subtle glow instead of a harsh glare. More testing awaits.
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• Meh,?clicking the I-beam in the main chatbar and then opening the IM window doesn't switch focus properly so the I-beam is ready to go in the IM window. It USED to do this, and it certainly still does it viceversa (click in the IM window's chatline and then close the window). ~files another bug report hehehe~
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• FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY . . . GOOD LORD!!! OMG… try this. Get an object stuffed with items, like one of those new Resident giftpacks. Rez it, and then… easypeasy… right-click on it and select "Open". OMG!!! No more of the convoluted getting items out of boxes crap! THIS is the future, and it's in the present. Could a progressive extinction to boxhead syndrome be coming?

That's a wrap from the TorTor for now. Some of the above are KNOWN ISSUES, yayzerama, which means they will hopefully be addressed soonesque! Thank you graciously to all the Lindens who put such hard work into this.

When you first visit Jeffrey Ventrella's site, you'll find a cute graphic that loads pretty quickly and some links reminiscent of old skool websites. The labelling is morosely cheerful, with a gray "Virtual Creatures" tag pointing to two digital miniorganisms concerned with FOOD and SEX.?Click on it, and it'll take you to another page with a small installer package. Run the program, and you'll smile. I have it open right now as I'll describe what else unfolded.

I'm not going to talk about the man's biography, for if you want to see his resume, you can Google for it. I'll explain what I find so delightful about Ventrella's work, and its relevance (and irrelevance) to SL now?since he's currently a Linden, consulting for LL since January '05, info?which I also Googled for.

This Gene Pool program looks like well-aged Amiga software right down to the font. It'd make a spanking screensaver too. Even the mission statement grabs me: "preserve, celebrate, simulate BIODIVERSITY". I'm clicking and dragging these little d00ds that look like balloon animals and they're interacting. Some of them appear to be humping, so it's all good. Hehe… I just piled a whole bunch on top of each other. @_@ Lemme get a screenshot here…

That's unretouched. The variance is amazing. Some look like slugs, some snails. Lots of hot interspecies action. The colors help too. Just a very fun, compact toy to observe and gain a window into a certain microverse, and of course, interact with it (see where I'm going with this?). Like SL, Gene Pool will totally eat up your CPU.

In the world I exist in, I look for gems. They don't have to be obscure, but they often are. Fun little trinkets to collect that would work well in a gift basket, and can amuse curious minds of all ages. I emphasize that, all ages. Except, maybe, prenatal and dead. And therein lies… life!

Ventrella's website happens to be one of those rare, accessible finds, a veritable giftbasket-cum-cornucopia of plethorial goodies. Clearly there's specs info for the technically-savvy, and plenty enjoyable little noodlings to play with too, not unlike an early Cyan game. I went through, exploring the links,?seeing what each one led to. I wonder if Ventrella would ever package up all the tidbits in a simple installer or integrated program, and you could play each one like a module, a child's busybox. What especially captivates me is that even though the graphics can be crude, the motion is convincing. What better way to spend my early morning than lobbing seeds at a virtuavian?

Each bit of hypertext you click on leads you to a new gateway. D00d's got mad skillz. Check out how he maps music to shapes too, I totally get this shiznit. In fact, one of the reasons why I'm so drawn to what's going on here is because of his ideas. I really relate, am voluntarily lodged into this vortex, this magnificent potpourri of frantic fun and a wealth of wisdom at the same time.

Ever played Gravity Tetris? Fluid dynamics workouts, complete with?dithered Macintoshesque graphics??O I know, maybe you just want to see a stickman walk with its daddylonglegs. Hot damn, these aren't just great screensaver modules (passive), or pieces of manipulative edutainment (active), they're great, period.

/me?sits back and takes a deep breath.

Jeffrey Ventrella's done a lot of work with avatar faces. That is, like, how they emote. Now, the people in There didn't wig me out as much as the dogs. (I sincerely would have wanted to see what he could do with cats.) I went up a hill with some avatars and one guy pulled out his dog, and made it do tricks.?This is really something a still shot can't do justice to, so you should see it for yourself. It's part of what I always wanted in a liquid interface.

As an autistic person, I've had longstanding difficulties reading facial expressions. It's bad learning from "real people" precisely because it requires a lot of staring. This disturbs others, and is an uncontrolled, wildly unpredictable?and quite oftentimes too, uncomfortable?environment. I see a lot of benefits in reading avatar faces. I'm a big fan of Gestures in SL and get a big whoop out of watching the kickdance loop or my "yeah" fistpump and the many other articulations.

However, there's a current drawback, and that is: facial expressions are not as elastic and natural, and therefore not as helpful and conductive to learning. I don't know of a way to get more custom ones in, and you're stuck with two choices of smile: regular and extratoothy. You can mash up others, yes, to hideously hilarious?results. It's also not the easiest thing to have a big face on the screen and play through different anims automatically, as it requires the Gestures window to be open, if not a posing stand which might be able to do this too (but they tend to be more for fullbody than the face alone).

I still don't read facial expressions well, and there are a lot of signals I don't pick up on. I'm learning though, and when the process is engaging and warms my tummy, it makes stepping forward a more amenable ordeal. My interactions with computer interfaces border on the liquid at times, and I'm hoping for more of this as it makes things a lot easier. A practical example of what I'd like to see more of, in relational terms, is Ventrella's Tumbleweed Browser.?I recall seeing a joint project involving Apple comparable to this a long time ago (was it Kaleida?) but it's like the seeds were planted yet the harvest never came. Being able to morph and crossfade through animations like an analog mixer instead of a binary switch, controlling degrees of presence with variable-percentage intensity, would add so many new varieties of "feeling what you say"!

For me, I am hypersensitive to little things like latency. Part of this comes from my background in music?clockwork timing and a childhood of routine?and I seem to be more finetuned to it than most. I see gaps, stutters, holes, and it bothers me a lot. Lag, in SL, correlates with this. We'll never be 100% lagfree but I'm arduously fascinated by what gets better. Those who come to SL with little computer background have every right to generally wonder, "Why are things so slow?" or "What's lagging me?"?and to learn what's going on. Those are important questions, phrased incompletely, leading to more questions and answers. Ventrella, to me, holistically seems to have a grasp on all of this. His many theories point to a more fluid mechanic (if such a thing is possible) within online spaces. This includes what he terms "Avatar-Centric Communication". Read this and change your (Second) life. Use the term "avatology" more, spread the word?like puppeteering is an art, so is manifesting possession of your avatar.

It just keeps getting better and better. Incredible schtuff.

A chat bubble that emerges from the head of an avatar (such as in There) is a form of ectoplasm which is emitted from the brain (or mouth) of the avatar. It lives in the simulated worlds of avatars, and is therefore more like acoustic energy than an IM text message. The "old-style" form of avatar chat, which appears as lines of text in a window at the bottom of the screen, is inherently disconnected from the simulated world. "Avatar-Centric Communication" (There, Inc.) aimed to solve this problem. I believe we have only begun to explore the space of this new form of communication, especially in regards the next topic:

After sinking deeper, why am I not surprised that Jeffrey also links to an incredible balloon artist? And where else can you go on the Net to play with a jiggly feces species? I did recolor this one.

In case I haven't made it clear, I'm giving my recommendation of the highest order for you?to go and visit ventrella.com. Download the toys, upload your brain, and have phun!

I've isolated some things I'd like to see refined. Squeaky wheel gets the grease. My blog uses HTMLArea for "WYSIWYG" editing, which is by no means the best, or even nearly the best editor of its kind, but it's serviceable. It has numerous quirks like not outputting the cleanest HTML (I think) and not always saving changes within the scope of the Blog-City interface. I'm disappointed I can't have styles for autoformatting text either; it'd save me a lot of time cumulatively. I've looked into ways of automating this but've not found anything reliable so far.

Second, in line with the little annoyances that get to you, I've improved my SL experience over time by practicing with the scroll wheel. (My opinion, this disclaimer doesn't need to be stated redundantly.) A mouse with one button isn't enough, nor is a mouse with two buttons. I feel better having at least 5 buttons, including the one in the scroll wheel on top. The wheel has proven invaluable to me in SL, because it allows for such quick zooming without holding down Alt and clicking. I use a very standard mouse?which is relatively inexpensive and pays for itself in productivity. Assign extra buttons like I have to Inventory, IM, and History windows and you'll be set.

Furthermore, I've remapped keys with a macro package in SL to better things. I know it sounds like a crazy idea but Ctrl-T for Instant Messages strikes me as a nimble, fickle move. So, I've changed that to Ctrl-Space, MUCH easier to mash on when flipping between main viewport and greyspace (as I sometimes call it). This is backed up by the extra mouse button also set to IMs. However, I don't use this much on a practical basis so I'm going to have to find another commonly-used function to take its place.

On an aesthetic note, I want to be able to recolor the SL UI in the future. The white-on-gray contrast isn't the easiest to read, and I'd prefer to blacken it further. I'd also like menu highlights to be something like hot pink, so they really stand out. It helps the experience be more immersive for me.

A big boon about ROAM, as I've stated before, is that you can IM while getting around. This also saves time. You may have noticed the thread title, which is woefully?and thankfully?currently out of the time. TPs are incredibly stable for me, relatively fast, and they consciously make me think more about scripted attachments being loaded as they're counted. I have a lot of gratitude to Lindens for this. And look forward to many more improvements.

Appearance has been noted as being unintuitive, with a sliders way of deformation but what about alternatives, like someone who wants to click and drag on their avatar like they do a prim? Granted, the structure of an av is much more complex, but like graphics tablets greatly facilitate computer art, perhaps the pressure sensitivity could be put to use here. If that's too vertical, again, a scroll wheel can provide different degrees of magnitude, and conceivably use your mouse buttons to confirm changes. An av should be sculptable like clay, moldable and accomodating to your vision.

Next entry will be a casual Toreview of Jeffrey Ventrella's site.

Don Linden just sounded the call for all of the Residents to "get out of the pool", so to speak, so I've been watching the front page of the Second Life website and seeing the population inworld drop. Appears to be some latency, as of this writing 6:17 AM), says 192 inworld. I have a big day planned. First Town Hall in awhile…

Snapzilla seemed to go brokers again, which sucked but reminded me of the last time I let Ano know about such a thing, and he's so great with the site. I hope lots and lots more Residents come and share their pictures. Oh, wait, site just flooded with an ingorge of photos, including this last one I took before I logged off. It's an abandoned hat store, I say this because the creator doesn't show up in Find anymore, and those creepy eyes are just bleeding with anarchic exhuberance or something. Bought a few, they're unfortunately not moddable as my caption indicates, but will see what can be done.

Now 6:25 AM and SL's front page (wish stuff I namedropped constantly got automagically hyperlinked to) shows 163 inworld. Wonder what's up with that. Maybe next time I shouldn't log out.

Munchflower Zaius has her own sim, I forgot what the name was, think it's Nomine. Isn't it great what she's done with the place? I'd like to see more ground textures in SL, I really would. For all the variance in the gridverse when it comes to builds, the ground?and extensibly, trees and shrubbery?are pretty banal after a point. This is a great example of a fantastic ground texture, contrasted with a plywood base and some sort of scientific device in the foreground. I can think of few exceptional Resident-customized groundlings in SL: Taco's cartoony green comes to mind, and so do the rich beaches of Naughty. Any more you've seen??Inform!

Can there be too much of a good thing? I'm all for excessive indulgence and some things in SL are a rarity when it comes to quality in quantity. Here's a few, which I could see having broad use:

• aquariums (lotsa homes, shops, and restaurants could do with 'em)
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• bridges over roads (scarce because of builds crossing Linden land, but possibility on more islands)
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• multi-octave musical instruments that can?be "chorded" with the keyboard
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• hat?megaplaza?

Like tater gems!

I hope one day?that damage-enabled will more accurately mean that, and when you get shot, you'll bleed progressively. I'm hoping for avatar decapitations, or even cartoonish flattenings. This tank, by Aleksandr Martov, would look totally badass if you could ride it into the Welcome Area and stand up and throw confetti. It'd be even cooler if someone aimed a rocket launcher at it and blew away a side with treads. I liked Carmageddon precisely because of being able to bash things up like crumpled paper. Reminds me in a way too, of the old Hot Wheels cars I had with parts you could slam and they'd quickly spin over, showing "damage". HUD? Doomface?