DLP® Interactive ProjectorTechnology…Coming to a Classroom Near You

This looks quite neat to me. I’d like to see what use it could be put to with virtual worlds and other 3D interactive applications.

Second Life Answers crashes my brower

I am sick and tired of trying to use the Second Life Answers site.  Sometimes it fails with a “Connection interrupted” message, other times it fails by crashing the browser.  It’s crashed my browser several times tonight.

Second Life Answers crashes browsers

It appears that LL is going to increase the amount of secondlife.com that uses the Jive software that produces this failure.  The various forms of failure that have happened to me and others at Second Life Answers are also occurring in the new dasheboard pages located at secondlife.com/my/account/

I am not pleased.

Yes Virginia, there are still Second Life Mentors

In response to a question in the Second Life forums, this is let the world know that there is indeed still a Linden Lab operated group called “Second Life Mentor” and there are still mentors. When an official mentor is “on duty” they should have their group title displayed as shown in the accompanying picture.

Hipihi next version preview video

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There’s a preview of some of the features of the next version of Hiphi at http://www.vimeo.com/4057576

The next version appears to have cars you can ride in and doors that move, among other nice things.

There are dark spells in the video, presumably the result of Hipihi’s rigid day-night cycle, which I’ve felt all along is a serious mistake, both for average users who want to see the world around them, but also for making videos. Machinimatography without control of the lights – yuch, bad decision, Hipihi.

It appears that land editing allows for making caves or something similar; either that or you can deform a prim’s mesh.

There are fluttering flags as well.

There’s rain – I hope, though I don’t know, that if there has to be rain, it won’t be rain that goes through objects. Better no rain than rain that goes through objects.

The video shows a nice shiny effect, I don’t know if that’s new or just not something I can see in the current version very well owing to my lousy video card.

I don’t have an ETA for this next version.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

オオカミとブタ。Stop motion with wolf, pig and 1300 pics.

I really like this video, so much in fact that I’ve promoted it on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, orkut, and bebo, in addition to this blog post.

Novoking crash with d3dref9.dll message

I can now run the disco part of Novoking fine, but when I try to run the regular virtual world part of Novoking, the application hangs, around 10 per cent on the progress bar, and after a lengthy pause, I may get the error message shown in the picture below.

Novoking has worked properly up till the last week or so. I’ve not changed the computer hardware.

“d3dref9.dll” is a directx dll that is supposed to provide a software emulation of a 3D graphics processor for use in debugging.

I can’t read the error message, aside from the d3dref9.dll, and I can’t copy and paste the text to translate it.

I’ve spent hours now reading about d3dref9, and I can’t figure out why I should get this message or what to do about it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

How to run multiple acccounts at once in Second Life®

The question of how to run multiple instances of the Second Life® viewer appears many times in the SL forums.  Here’s a way to do it that is apparently not well known.

With a current SL browser, you can set an option in the Advanced, Debug Settings dialog to allow you to run multiple avatars at the same time on one machine.   The option is called “AllowMultipleViewers” .  Set the value of “Allow Multiple Viewers” to  TRUE. Once you set this value, exit Second Life.  You should now be able to run  Second Life with one account, and then start the program again and run a different account while the first instance of the program is still running.

This eliminates the need to mess around with your Second Life shortcut.

Novoking – I can fly again!

For months now I had been unable to fly in the Novoking virtual world owing to a change in the Novoking system.  When I first joined Novoking everyone could fly from the moment they first joined.   One of the new versions introduced a change to the system requiring users to “level up”, to complete some tasks of some sort, in order to level up and become able to fly.  There might be other things that “leveling up” involves, but if so I don’t know what they might be because I don’t read Chinese. 

That’s why I couldn’t level up, I don’t read Chinese, so the onscreen instructions in-world about how to perform the leveling up requirements weren’t useful to me. 

I moaned and groaned about this in the Novoking forums, and on my blog, and asked about it in the Facebook Novoking group, and in the Hipihi forums, and in LinkedIn, and other places I can’t keep track of. 

Not being able to fly in a virtual world, after over 5 years of flying in Second Life, makes being in the world seem like being in a closet or a car trunk or a coffin. 

Last night I logged in to Novoking and to my surprise my complaining and asking and begging must have been heard because I can fly again!

I assume that somene on the Novoking staff heard my tale of woe and manually leveled me up or toggle the Fly-NoFly bit or some such.  Thanks, Novoking! 

Anyone interested in virtual worlds who can read Chinese, or who is willing to make the effort needed to deal with an interface in a language they can make neither heads nor tails of should give Novoking a try. 

The url is Novoking.com, as one might expect.  The site is in Chinese, but there is an English option, although the English version is out of date. 

Novoking allows users to import builds from 3D modeling programs like 3D StudioMax and Maya. 

I’ve saw moving objects in Novoking today, an airplane moving and a bow and arrow with a string that moves when the arrow launches.  The arrows passed through my avatar, but once they stuck in the target they became physical again. 

Novoking is a good looking virtual world; it has “reflections”, which I think are baked in at the time of object creation, and which if done with good judgement on the builder’s part, are quite a nice effect.

SL Jira issue: Http 403 FORBIDDEN response when posting to forums

SL users, please consider voting for the following issue in the SL bug tracking system.

The problem is that certain cominations of word used in posts cause the  post to fail with a message about “403 Forbidden”.

The url for the issue is

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-917

The title is “Http 403 FORBIDDEN response when posting to forums”.

The description is:

If you create or reply to a forum post and use the word “select” followed (even several sentences latter) by the word “from”, then you get a 403 Forbidden message. Someone has an over restrictive keyword scanner at work. Same failure using IExplorer, Firefox, Opera & Google Chrome. May be other keywords that are throwing errors.

ref:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=298663

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=297899

Possibly related to https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-715 ?

Second Life bug: VWR-3947 – Ugly font rendering in menu bar after upgrading to ATI drivers 7.12

A  bug report was filled in the Second Life issue tracking system back in 21/Dec/07  and has yet to be fixed.

The problem is distorted text in some systems using ATI graphics card with Catalyst versions 7.12 and above.

Please, if you are a Second Life user, vote for this issue so it gets some attention.  I want to upgrade my video drivers and still have clear text.

The url for this issue is http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3947 .