THE FIRST PART OF THIS HAS A LOT OF WORDS, AND THEN, THE SECOND PART HAS A LOT OF PICTURES. SO THERE'S A PAYOFF. CAPICHE?
Apparently, I have an acrimonious finger on the trigger — of Second Life's inworld camera! Which is downright weird when you think about it, 'cuz by default, your avatar does the motion whirrrr-click! and there you have it, a picture, despite the fact you're not actually using film, nor it the picture necessarily being taken from your av's vantage angle. You can zoom so far away and take a picture of yourself looking into the "lens", or go into Mouselook and sit on a box (that you rotate) and snap yourself again… and as long as you have enough digital memory, you can keep capturing the moment. My point being, it eventually transcends the 1's and 0's and all gets rather metaphysical. But what you can appreciate, I hope, are end results.
Throughout the last few weeks, I've been helping to test WindLight for bugs, and today, helped Zen Linden come up with use cases for share-able skies when we get to that… yeah, it's been in the making, having sky + day cycle settings be exchangeable just like any other inventory (asset) type. Got any specific wishes? Let me know, load my back up with 'em! *points* I think fully-permissive skies should be embeddable in notecards, just like other stuff can be. And I bet we're going to see hacky trix like:
"Hey, I have a parcel and don't own a whole region so I can't set a sky setting from the server-side, but here's a notecard with a sky inside. Just play that and come into my house with the mood the way I want you to experience it!"
Sure beats jiggling around Mouse Moves Sun.
I must say, one of the awesomest things about WindLight debugging is, it's not easy to get bored — you have something pretty to look at when you tire of relogging and/or crashing and/or going through other manual repetitions to make sure you've got a solid repro so our dear Developers can confirm and fix the bug and it'll pass Quality Assurance and so on and so forth…
Thus, while I was finding said bugs, here's 155 snapshots from moi recording WindLight Wonders, aka "the semi-early days". Some you've seen before on my Flickr photostream, in lo-res. Or as basis for an Alternate Virtual Reality. Some of these are super hi-res @ 3200×2348 and others are "merely" 1600×1174, for the reason that there's also a bug about taking hi-res photos which undesirably glitched some of mine up. Some look so peaceful, you might wonder what was happening at all, if anything. What some of these pictures don't show is when I was rushing T-minus-5-min. to a meeting, with a stack of web browser tabs open, loads of email to check after the meet, and multiple pings from fellow Lindens asking me questions I'd have to get back to soon enough… but does that detract from the solitude or is Second Life uncannily less stressful in some respects because of this, what we often don't see behind the screen? I leave this with you.
WindLight (some of it, I say thankya to the creators), through the eyes of Torley…
FinE . . .
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I believe that the bridge between image and art is intent. To capture a moment, a sunset perhaps, is a wonderful thing. To manipulate the sunset, the colour of the sky, the very fabric of perception, for the express purpose of conveying a feeling, is that perhaps art? I believe so. Even if it only ever appeals to an audience of one.
And art is a marvellous thing, so long as we can choose whether or not we want to live in it. So long as I have a simple way to switch between my personal "default" preferences for my reality and that preferred by the creator of a region, I shall be happy. Perhaps something executed as simply as turning the streaming music on and off. I have yet to try the windlight viewers so maybe it is that simple already.
Nice images too, by the way, most of which appeal to an audience of at least two
)
when can we beta again!!!
worried about the brazilian waves out there
omgorgeous…
& I see your avatar's reflection on the water…
Buy, sell, trade, and imbed in notecards. LSL access. Make them real inventory. I'd love to see "Sky Artist" listed as a possible career.
Imagine being able to put on a "widescreen" HUD with the sky of your choice. Scripted camera setups for photography and video with built in skies. If I can do it with the uuid instead of having to drop copies of the Skymark (What are they being called, anyway? Sky settings is kind of clumsy) that'd be even better.
Will the sky be scriptable?
I once did a gesture that made the avatar wave and then all the windows opened in the house……(it did a shout on a channel that the windows 'heard')
…..it'd be cool to wave and make the clouds roll in! Wizards and the like would love that.
"What some of these pictures don't show is when I was rushing T-minus-5-min. to a meeting, with a stack of web browser tabs open, loads of email to check after the meet, and…."
All the things that were distracting during the creation don't matter now anymore. That is true for all works of art. For your photos, for Robbie Dingo's video, for Van Gogh's paintings. I have been on several moviesets and there's always stress and equipment not working and people not liking eachother, but you could never tell from the end result.
And the same is true for SL itself. There is lag and there are bugs and there are griefers, but once somebody has finished a build (like Madcow's work) or when the photos are made or the clothes or avatar shapes are done, all of the problems don't matter anymore.
Oh wicked feedback, thanks guys! So I was talking with Zen some more about this… SCRIPTABLE SKIES is pretty lucrative and it'd be worthwhile to do something down the road but it might not arrive for awhile. When we get post-process effects like nightvision (yeah, Splinter Cell-style!) it'd also be useful to make them scriptable, so you can, for example, attach an HUD and have it turn on and off. Vertex shaders are our friends, and more are arriving after so many months, years even, of hoping for some of these graphical wonders…
@Wolf: Very profound. That makes me think of why I communicate my art. To show my intentions. I have a big joy about "the story behind the music" and other art forms, learning *why* a creator went forth and did something, even if it was a "happy accident" (as Bob Ross was wont to say when he was still living). We definitely want to keep the current functionality of letting you locally override regional skies, but to easily see what other people are seeing server-side too.
@Mathieu: ~a month or so, may depend on other factors like release of First Look: Voice but I'm hoping it comes back out in a big way!
@Day: Yes, real reflections, rendered in realtime. They're a lot of fun. The next phase of ripple water is here.
@Storm: "Real inventory" sounds like the most easily-communicatable way to get things done too, instead of introducing some oddball new way of doing things, use the familiar. I have started to ruminate that sky artists shall be called "skyscapers". Got a better name than "sky setting"? We don't have a committed-to name. I wonder what'll catch on big in the market… I also hope these advances will let people shoot more dynamic skies, as opposed to photographing flat sky textures.
@Benja: Very kewl idea about wizards… I imagine someone doing a dramatic, time-sensitive event in the region and making the sky go dark at the touch of a button, and then carnivorous mecha-dinosaurs come out and start stalking the guests…
We've talked internally about having rolling restarts with apocalyptic effects. It's funny because the sky is so fundamental (the world would look hideous without it), and yet, you can add it like a spice and make other things taste good.
@Daedalus: I think it's a testament to creation, then, when we can make something and push it out to the world, because all too often, the stresses and duresses are detractions which challenge getting stuff done. Even something as passive as procrastination can affect someone from really ever accomplishing what they seek out to. And that's a great point you make.