Sometimes the forums are down, so here is a short list of my own views on the (eventual) future government of SL:

- Linden Government as “permanent” benevolent demitheocracy as the Executive Branch (eventually with Linden staff rotating posts)
- a Second Life Parliament with representatives of all SL citizens (land-owners or not), with mandates which would be held for at most 2 or 3 terms in a row
- Government has several branches, two of which could be partially staffed by residents: an “institutionalisation” of the Mentors/Liaisons, and a “conflict moderation” authority (with policemen, even if just passive ones, who just take notice of events and report them or not), both reporting to the Lindens and with no executive powers
- Parliament organized into factions - basically groups specifically created for Parliament and where members would discuss their views with their (elected) officers
- Parliament acts as advisory board to the Government, passes legislation, etc. through Working Committees - one for each “area of interest” in SL. Working Committees should have at least 1 member for each major faction. They present proposals from the residents (and the faction members) on an agenda to be voted upon at parliamentary sessions
- Parliament with 50-60 members (or probably more…) but only a few (say, up to 10 or so - the Faction Leaders) would be “in session” at any time due to SL constrains. The rest (and the community at large) would listen to Parliament sessions by some broadcasting/repeater mechanism, and interact through IM with the faction leaders)
- Final proposals, after being voted, are submitted to the Linden Government for execution. They may approve it or not (ie. absolute veto power on legislation).

Also: THE REST OF THE CURRENT STRUCTURE IS MANTAINED IN PLACE (ie. interacting with Lindens directly, reporting bugs and abuse directly, discussing in forums, etc). However, the purpose of the resident-elected Parliament is to try to prioritize “important” issues as LL employees’ time & resources are limited. As the game grows, Linden employees will have less and less time to keep up with things and we should be helping them out. Let Lindens be the “last court of appeal” on each and every case, but try to sort it out by the residents whenever possible.

In the future (or not): for some sims, organize local government with an oversimplified structure, allowing elected local representants to decide upon local taxation level, general management of funds, land use, etc. Sims’ residents would decide on the level of local government (and their representation at the federation level). They could have no local government at all, or complete dictatorships (as in the case of one resident owning the whole land). Note that this COULD be done today with the available tools provided that the Lindens acknowledge some sort of local authority. You don’t need special “superpowers” for that.

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You’re scared? Don’t be. Please note that in the forums, we have 250 active members of about 10,000 residents, ie. most people don’t care about what’s going on, they just want to have fun and go on with their (second) lifes. Of those 250, 98% are anarchists. So there is just a tiny tiny minority which has proposed some concrete plans for some form of government. Although the original proposals came from the Lindens themselves, they seem now somewhat reluctant in “imposing” it on the anarchists, as probably they didn’t expect such a strong, negative reaction to this idea.

I’m currently a member of one of the factions, the Social Democratic Faction, which encourages capitalism but assumes that wealth earned by speculation (and not by applying skills to create a product, ie. a building, objects, scripts, clothes, animations, etc.) should be taxed in order to provide funds for the common good (I’m oversimplifying). Like other factions, this is a group (a tiny one!) of politically active residents who want to participate in establishing the foundations of some sort of government in SL (even if they don’t mean to get elected lol).

Second Life has numerous nifty features, and despite some bugs, the urge to create all kinds of stuff has made me eagerly test for each and every one of them.

I wanted to get an "online status" on my web page, and this means using XML-RPC, a standard, open-source interface to inter-application communication. Linden Labs has provided a way for the "outside world" to communicate with scripts in Second Life and even has provided a 2-page description on how this could be accomplished. (more…)

I finally found out the best introduction so far on animation for Second Life using Poser!

Thanks for Ulrika for all her trouble in getting this basic tutorial available online!

The only extra thing you need to know about animations is letting Poser do the scaling for you, and usually replying that your arms are on the X scale.

There are LOTS of animations in BVH over there! I found out that if I start with Ulrika’s “default pose”, change it to just one frame, and import any kind of BVH file, the next time I save it, it will import nicely in Second Life!

Now you just need to grasp the techniques to make proper animations (*laughs out loud*)! This is beyond myself to explain. Ulrika gives a few hints but you really need to follow extra tutorials and read the whole of Poser’s manuals. Still, it’s great fun, and I really hope you’re able to do that special dance sequence you always wanted to but never had money to afford!!

When do I know that I need therapy for stopping to play Second Life?

1) When you spend more time online playing the game than working for your boss.
2) When a 20-hour day just feels “natural” to you.
3) When every hour spent “off-line” is spent reading programming manuals, looking for new animations in the Internet, or browsing through clothes’ shops to get new ideas.
4) When you wake in the middle of the night remembering that you have forgot to tell something “important” to someone in Second Life.
5) When you actually log in just after remembering that
6) When suddenly your routine work and daily chores are just not interesting anymore. Your boss complains that you’re not really working as hard and as motivated as before.
7) When you ask yourself: “hey, people are making money out there in Second Life. Real money, not just Linden Dollars. I could perhaps earn as much as US$1000 a month if I work hard, and it’s better than my current job!”
When suddenly the people you most hate in the world are the Linden employees. Just imagine, they are PAID to be in the game and help people out with their problems!! Grrr I do it for free every day…
9) When you care more for your neighbors in Second Life than your own neighbors in Real Life. After all, people in Second Life are much more interesting.

and more serious than that…

10) When you start to neglect your own friends and SO in Real Life.

Oops. Now I’m really worried. Perhaps joining this so-called “game” wasn’t such a good idea at all.

I’M AN ADDICT. What should I do now??

For a change, stop updating this website and go back to work…

Having played around with objects (hard to master), scripting (well even harder really) and clothes design (stupidly simple if you know Photoshop well or something similar; the only hard part is being a good clothes designer. Like in the real world!), I thought I would take a hand at animations…

The economy in Second Life is not always easy to follow. Land is bloody expensive. Objects are relatively cheap (around L$75-L$300 for good creations, homes and vehicles tend to go a little beyond the upper scale). Scripting is assumedly one of the worst-payed activities. Nobody buys scripts (there ARE exceptions), however, scripted objects are worth much more than regular ones, specially if you got an UNIQUE object (I built my own “magic ring” for changing the walking animations. The magic ring is awful, just a few glass cubes glued on a metal torus, but the script makes the difference). Events usually gather much money. Clothes are stupidly easy to do, as said, so only very good designers and stylists get good money from their creations. After all, you can create average-looking clothes just by using the in-built tools in Second Life!

But animations… ah, animations are always in great demand! The prices can be rocket-high. I’ve been charged L$75 for just one simple pose (so not really an animation). For two poses I could get a pre-fab home! (much more useful). Average dance routines start at L$150 or so (the ones everyone has) and a little more exclusive ones cost perhaps L$300 or L$500. Of course, the really exclusive ones can’t be got in the shops. You have to go to a Master Animator for that. And don’t even talk about very sensual animations or explicitly sexual ones. You can’t get them, period. You have to buy objects where they’re incorporated and that’s that!

So I thought to give it a try. Linden Labs recommend Poser 4 or 5 to create “special” BVH files (this actually means that BVH files created by some other programs won’t work as well), so I downloaded the demo version (you can’t do almost nothing with it. More important than that, it doesn’t save your work. And it’s limited to 30 days). Alarmed with the complexity of most programs, I was thinking if I would need a master’s degree in computer animation just to create a simple movement (say, a twist of the hand or so). Actually, my alter ego in Real Life has some theoretical know-how in computer graphics and did some ray-tracing algorithms and 3D-modellers during the student days. So I wasn’t too discouraged and thought about seeing what I could do.

I was impressed. Poser is stupidly simple to use. So simple, as a matter of fact, that creating decent-looking animations is a piece of cake. Hell, I could do a new gesture in about half an hour, and it looked almost good. I guess I could be doing complete dance animations in a day or so! Oh my goodness. This is almost too good to be true! Dollar signs were appearing in front of my eyes (well, L$ signs, anyway) when I thought about the money I could make!

Next thing I saw, most animations in the game haven’t been done by the so-called authors at all! No, there are THOUSANDS of animations out there, ready for download, and people just upload them into Second Life and sell them like pancakes - at sky-high prices! Oh gosh. This is going to be fun.

Here is the catch: yes, animations can be fun, you can easily do your own animations with Poser, but… Poser is bloody expensive! And without being able to save your work in the demo, I guess this is my premature end at becoming the next director at DreamWorks or Pixar or even Disney

I’ve been looking around for other tools which are more friendly to my tight budget. I found about Blender (it’s more a modelling tool and not a true animation program) but it seems that Blender’s format is not 100% compatible with Poser or Second Life. Hmmm there must be a reason why Linden Labs recommends Poser…

Well perhaps one day I will be able to own a legal copy of Poser and release to the world my incredible animations. Until then, people have to live with what they’ve got. And still, there are lot of free animations out there in the Internet for you to download and upload into Second Life…

Wow. I thought this would be easy. LSL (Linden Scripting Language) looks like C++, Java or Javascript, so I thought I would give a go at it. Actually, just like Java, it’s an interpreted language, but it gets precompiled before it goes into the magic stores at Linden’s.

The hard part at scripting is getting the state machine working. For those of you who have never programmed on a state-based system before (programming for Windows, the Macintosh, or KDE/Gnome works in the same way) and just have looked at the several scripts, it looks easy, doesn’t it? After all, everything you do puts the object in a “state” - either touched, or worn, or listening to voice commands on the chat line, or getting permissions from the user, etc. So it should be just an easy matter of defining the right responses to each state, right?

Wrong. I thought the same.

My first example was the Cigarette Vending Machine here. You can get cigarette packs from it, each one costs L$3, and gets you 20 cigarettes in a pack. The pack will happily give you those 20 cigarettes, and then will silently refuse to give you more (you got to buy a new pack then). Each cigarette lasts around 6 minutes or so.

All these things are fairly easy to do - you got events for dealing with retrieving payments, giving objects to users, tracking counters, and timer events.

The trick is handling the “correct state”. All objects in Second Life are “always running” from the moment they’re first created. This means that if you drop them on the floor and pick it up again, they will be in the same state (although probably they’ve called a few events in between). If you give them to someone else, the state won’t change. Alas, if you give permissions for an object to animate your avatar, and give it to someone else, this doesn’t mean he/she gets permission to animate him/herself, too!

Finding out which state you’re in and resetting things properly IS painful! For instance, with the cigarette pack, if someone smokes 5 cigarettes and gives the pack to a friend, it should properly still have 15 inside, so if by any chance the pack gets reset, the counter shouldn’t go up to 20! On the other hand, when building the cigarette pack, testing it, and dropping it into the cigarette vending machine in the first place - the state has changed already! When someone pays for the pack, and is given a copy from the vending machine’s own inventory, what state is it in?

Fortunately, making a COPY of an object resets it. It’s just a new object. But it’s not always easy to understand what is a “copy” and what is “the same object”…

Clearly finding out how things work properly in Second Life is NOT easy. I still have some quircky bugs creeping along my creations…

I started building my first home the hard way: aligning objects one on top of the other. It took ages just to get the various parts of a wall fitting correctly around the windows. And when I was finished, ah well, the house was too small to let two people inside…

Worse thing was, I was taking so many primitives that I soon filled up my share! What was wrong? this house was a simple lodge, nothing fancy, and with one single room…

Well, the trick about building is simple: use “partial” primitives and lots of textures. Partial primitives is what you get when tampering with the primitives and create “holes” in them. Say you want a window inside a wall. Instead of building it the traditional way - 4 primitives for the wall around the window - you can get away with a cube with a “hole” in the middle (a square section). So you reduce the number of primitives to just one! The same applies to doors and other stuff.

If you need very detailed things - like a veranda’s grille, or several windows supported by a grid in iron or PVC - the best way to do is to use a texture. Use Photoshop or a similar program to get your overall image in the best detail you want. As you’re working with a texture and not with primitives you can get amazing detail. Then create a simple, thin cube and do it transparent. Now the trick is to apply the texture twice - on the “outside” and “inside” of the object. The easiest way to do this is simply to open your inventory and drag & drop a texture on top of the face. You can also do it from the object modeller (just select the radio button which says “Select Individual”).

Now you can get a very complex home with windows of all sizes and detailed texturing with just… one primitive! Draw a giant cube and don’t close it completely, you’ll need a door. Then in Photoshop create several textures, for the inside and outside, leaving a “transparent background” for the windows. If you do it right - aligning textures properly is not so easy and requires some skill - you could build a one-primitive house (well with another one for the door) just like that! Cool, huh?

In my case I gave it up and just bought a prefab home from Dominion’s Sam Portocarrero has lots of clever designs with very nice texturing, and special types for mountainous terrain, or with a more modern look instead of a conventional one. Look him up on the map and get your new home for as low as L$150…

This was my home in Second Life® for almost 10 months, I have since moved on, but I’ve left here a few old photos…

Uli is a mountainous region with a lake and a river well below. I live almost at the top of one of the mountains, so I get a good view on what’s there to see. Here go a few images of my home:

The outfit I’m wearing is my own creation. You can get it for free if you wish, just get in touch with me or with Dee McLean.

You can always visit me at my new place if you wish!

Well this is probably a very silly concept, but here it goes…

Good clothes design in Second Life is actually very cheap! Some of the best designers (like Von) do amazing creations and sell them for as cheap as L$ 150 (you can search for “House of Von” in the Find Places and teleport there to look at her most excellent clothing store - and there are bargains there!). In some cases, for a little more, you can even order your own outfit! And an “exclusive design” will probably be around L$500 or so. When you compare this with the price of getting a small plot (perhaps 10 times as much for just 512 sq. ft.), you see what I mean.

So, is there a place for second- or third-rate clothes designers at all?

Well, here comes my ShareWear concept: give your clothes away! And make them modifyable and copyable. However, ask the new owner something in return, as a donation - or a rating. Even a rating can be cool, it just costs L$ 1 and you go up in the rankings and improve your weekly stipendium from the Lindens!

Just by giving clothes away there will always be people who’re going to pick them up and remember your name. Who knows, some may even order you a custom-made design. The top clothes designers are always busy and this could be your chance after all…

So, how did I do it?

Actually I’m no designer, much less a clothes designer. What I did was to copy some designs from La Redoute’s online website. This is a French catalog shop, selling their clothes all over Europe. One thing I found out is that they don’t have only models wearing clothes - no, they sometimes have a front picture of the clothes themselves in front of a neutral background.

What I did was to get those images (they have reasonable quality), put them into Photoshop and copy them over the clothes templates you get from Linden’s site. In many cases that’s all I did! Except for some tinkering - stretching and slight distortions - and retouching (to make sure I got the bleed zones right), there is not much else to do!

As a matter of fact, the results can be quite impressive, as you get real-looking textures from this method. In other cases the results are not so spectacular.

Of course, the choice of the clothes you’re wearing also helps a lot :-) This particular outfit comes from my own line of ideas for “casual wear” - nothing too fancy, but also not too out-of-style. The French catalog of La Redoute has some lines exactly in that style (yes, they’ve got a few clothes for going to parties and nightclubs!).

You can grab a copy of this outfit either by getting in touch with me or with Dee McLean. Dee is famous in SL for offering all kinds of things and she generously carries all my clothes to give them away!

Read also about my concept on ShareWear.