Torley Lives

Ever heard of FollowCam? It's a series of LSL (Linden Scripting Language) calls which enable, among other things, some really kickass, cinematic motion when your avatar is moving around. You could be walking, running, flying, or even in a vehicle.

But — if you haven't heard of it — do not be ashamed, my child. Unlike flexiprims and local lighting (gosh, remember when lighting used to hog the CPU and it looked pretty but sucked major FPS?), FollowCam isn't nearly as discoverable. At the time it came out, some months ago, I remember some Resis asking me if it was a new Preference option. Not so, altho the not-altogether-unrelated Camera Springiness is one of those many GUI choices.

Context:

• FollowCam in the LSL Wiki - don't be alarmed if you're a non-scripter and your eyes glaze over, just know the end results can be tremendous
• Ben Linden's free script and demo movie - he hit the nail on the head with show over tell
• Historical Release Notes

… and I know I must be missing a few more here. But there's not a lot to go on. Given my fanboishness, I might be forgiven for citing my own blog entries mentioning FollowCam, over and over.

A good redundancy.

Before I go on, if you're asking, "Why is changing your camera such a big deal?"

Easy.

You'll recall that, at the dawning crest of 3D games, something many of them got pounded over the head with was BAD CAMERA ANGLES. Like, running into a corner and finding your whole screen obscured. Or being able to easily jam your cam and see the inside of your character's head, as one Lara Croftian grotesquerie proved. So now, in Second Life, like so many other things, you can customize your camera. It's just not being done very much at all.

If you're in Second Life, the quickest way to see FollowCam for yourself is to open your inventory and open the Library > Objects folder. Drag "Kart 1.0" out of there onto buildable land, right-click and ride it. See how fun that is?

The cam doesn't even have to move: Yumi Murakami made a BijoCam which lets you set up fixed viewing angles, and Kyrah Abattoir worked on a kewl house employing her CamSys implementation. Kinda like how in classic Resident Evil, you're 3D and can walk around, but the cam… it just don't move so you can't see the zombie coming out from around that corner. ARGHHH BRAINZ!!!!

Richard Linden explained to me that FollowCam isn't more difficult to use than the very popular particle systems we have — all those poofers and bling! However, FollowCam doesn't enjoy the same ubik-ness of the former; there's no Jopsy Pendragon of FollowCam with simple setup templates, so who do we learn from by example?

Lemme tell ya, it's a YUGE opportunity, a void, and even a market to step into, if someone wants to. Do away with any false preconceived notions that "It's all been done before!" and invest in FollowCam.

Somebody make a FollowCam starter kit already!

We're at the crossroads of several forks here, one of them being the (continued) rise and credibility (what the heck is that?) of machinima. And how can you make a film without a camera? There you have it. Just like some great directors have a recognizable style by the way they shoot scenes, our FollowCam-using machinimakers will stand out too.

So, my open invitation is, if you've made something kewl with FollowCam, I wanna know about it. It can be a vehicle — I've seen some of those — but I'd really drool if anyone made the drunk-o-vision or — the jittery, amateur, handheld cam simulation I've been hoping for, for so long. I also, hopefully, desire to come inworld and experience your invention for myself. Please don't hesitate, let me know!

If you love Second Life and dual-core processors like I do (I'm on an Opteron 170), you'll know how handy it is to let a phat app (e.g., Photoshop or a video editing suite) sit on one core while Second Life gobbles up the other. For medium-to-heavy multitaskers, the investment's well-worth it. Not to mention prices are coming down and popularity's going up.

Catch is, Second Life isn't yet optimized for dual-cores, so you may have some unpleasant problems like stuttering and general slowness. You should really read "What do I do if I experience poor performance on a dual-core computer?", and one more tip I learned from Steve Linden: pop open your Client menu (Ctrl-Alt-D) and turn ON Rendering > Use VBO. For me, it effectively solved the problem of SL grinding to a halt with RenderPool usage — which you can see using the Fast Timer charts, Ctrl-Shift-9, and expanding Geometry. What a noticeable speed difference, and less of that nauseous upon-login crawl.

BTW, this doesn't seem to apply to dual-core Intel Macs. If you've found differently, please leave me a comment.

From an ad on another site (I wish I could remember which one), I found out about Clipmarks, which is like Reader's Digest for the early 21st century, but more hyperkinetic, even more digested, and dare I say even funnier? I haven't signed up for an account yet but it's great for grabbing news-and-not-news on the go. The whole premise behind it is saturating you with infonuggets and saving your time.

Needless to say, it's appealing to my sometimes-terse tendencies. (Like one of those tasty English stews I know not the name of.)

Check it out, and get an account before I do. Ha-ha!

P.S. I generated that thumbnail in WebShots Pro.

Asketh and thou shalt receive. Isn't that how it goes?

Remember when just the other day, I was observing the lack of pretty pictures in news articles about Second Life? Not to mention the genericism (baaaad) in the press. Just today, I noticed my wish was granted, and more!

I'm a Canadian. The Vancouver Sun is blessed to have Randy Shore not just doing a single article, but a whole series about his Second Life adventures. Complete with red clown nose (I'm sure clio would approve), and PICTURES. Well, they're just thumbnails in Randy's Second Life blog — he's Silas Leroux in SL, BTW — but a promising start. Maybe his paper-published articles will have more SL snapshots too.

Coming closer and closer to my roots — first the Telus store as blogged by Mark Wallace, now this: Randy wrote that a Masters of Digital Media Program in BC is coming to fruition, complete with virtual campus in Second Life. Wowza. See, this is the stuff I care about: gemful points that tend to get overlooked, and when you see them, you smile. And that's what it's all about —

but wait, there's more!

Also check out "Livin' da vida loca in a virtual world", and his latest, "Virtual world, real cash". Yeah, it's another of those articles about the economy, but certainly don't get me wrong: a topic can be opined about many ways. It's like Second Life itself: so you've got a block of atomistic Legos, called prims (short for "primitive shapes") in our world, and what do you do now? What you do says a lot about who you are.

Continuing the Canadian — and specifically, British Columbian, where I'm from — tradition of excellence in Second Life happens to be Randy covering a local success, Nyla… who goes by her first name in RL and is Nyla Cheeky in Second Life. Of course I think her designs are genius, how could I not? A wonderful example of someone who hadn't heard of me previously but I can certainly relate to in the sphere of colorful, vibrant fashion. Nyla was certainly excited, she even IMed me to tell me the good news. Being the avid newswatcher I am, even moreso for watermelony dresses, I let her know I'd already read the article. I'm just glad she got off of Help Island; we need more people like her bridging realities and bringing their physical fabrics into Second Life and vice-versa. It's rarer than one might think (or hope), and I'm hopeful for more pioneers like Nyla.

The article also has a great nod to Fox Diller. I don't know what the percentage of Resis in Canada is, but I'll just mention I'm blessed to work from such a quiet location. This was the way of the future, and is the way of the present.

Another suggestion for Randy in addition to linking thumbnails to fullscale piccies: please use hyperlinks! One of my pet peeves is when a web address is on the web without being linked. I think more articles should be designed for the web and presented for paper.

Speaking of pleased, I'm more pleased than punch. Wonder Punch, the name of the Nyla dress Torley Jr. is wearing in these stylized photographs:

Most of what you see is the hat, but it begs the fundamental question: isn't it a nice hat?

This one's a repeat, and worth republishing!