Week 8

1. SL Cool Places - Find 3 cool places in SL to profile in your class blog. For each, include an image, the SLURL, and a concise description of WHY this place is interesting/useful to you. Ideally, the 3 places should be cool for different reasons.

The first neat place I found was the Long Beach Carnival and Amusement Park (Long Beach 182, 112, 35). I found it interesting because there's a lot of man-made architecture being duplicated here on this sort of idyllic island.

The second I found was a sort of jungle island. It was at Aeryglow Wildlife 151, 128, 29. It had a lot of trees and the focus was more on nature, though there was a central platform with a ball that let you do a dance if you interacted with it. I just liked the recreation of a natural environment.


The last cool place I found was an arcade at Flotsam Beach 112, 180, 21. There were some replica cabinets of old games around, and the character could play them. If you interacted with them, you were given an URL where you could play the game on the web, though there were a few games where you could take a more hands-on approach within Second Life itself.

2. SL Cool Features - SL abounds in features/capabilities, things to do in the world, to do to your avatar, etc. Develop at least basic competence in 3 and profile in your class blog. For each, include an image, at least one link to How-To information (or explain it yourself concisely), and a concise description of WHY this feature is interesting/useful to you.

One of the things that's a huge draw in Second Life is customizing your own avatars, and a major part of that is just making shirts. I've made this shirt here with help from photoshop, then uploaded it into Second Life for L$10, then selected to use the texture as a shirt. This interests me because when I am able to customize my avatar in a virtual world, I feel a lot more of a connection to them, and there is more investment into having built them up. There's a clothing tutorial over here. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clothing_Tutorials


Another major part of Second Life is the creation of objects in the world by users. I find this facscinating because it allows people to show off things to friends and expand the boundaries of the world beyond what it might have initially been intended to do. A tutorial on creating basic shapes can be found here. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Prim

The simple shapes and upload of textures eventually gives way to the existence of far more complicated systems and objects for users to interact with. In the case of this object, I played a simple game similar to Rock Paper Scissors, which used Street Fighter II as a theme. Attacks beat throws, Throws beat blocks, and Blocks beat attacks. There were three other special options available, but they can only be used once. Learning to interact with the complex systems of the world is useful, but in this case, it was largely restricted to a very simple menu-driven point and click interface.

I'm still having a little trouble with parts 3 and 4. I was able to make a linked object, but scripting and special effects are giving me problems. Also, I'm having a lot of problems trying to find a way to get Wings 3d to let me export to Second Life. A lot of sites make reference to a zip file at the Wings 3d site, but I can't find any.