novoKing facebook group

I’ve made a facebook group for the novoKing virtual-world-in-development.

The facebook group is at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10539530401 .

“Michael Zhang” has joined the group, identifying himself as COO of novoKing.

I’m not sure just how to verify his identity, but I suppose an email from a novoking.com address with a beta invitation would do pretty well.

I’m also not sure of just what capitalization and spacing to use for novoKing, I’ve seen
several versions.  I’m not much of a fan of abnormal capitalization.

Project Darkstar mmog server software opensourced as GPLv2

I received the following announcement:

The Project Darkstar team at Sun Microsystems Laboratories is pleased to announce that Project Darkstar has now been released, as open source software, under GPLv2!

The code is available from the ‘Downloads’ section at http://www.projectdarkstar.com .

Project Darkstar is the video game industry’s first enterprise grade, high performance, fault tolerant and highly scalable server technology for online, multiplayer games. Project Darkstar has been designed from the ground up to handle almost any kind of online game imaginable.

Project Darkstar is used  along with Project Wonderland in Sun’s MPK20 virtual workplace world.

https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/

Kaneva - kicked from mall for mentioning Second Life

This seems like a childish and hateful response to me.

Perhaps this attitude helps to explain the low number of users present in Kaneva after so many years spent developing it.  Not allowing virtual world enthusiasts and early adopters to discuss the matters that interest them - namely, among other things, the merits and demerits of different virtual worlds, not allowing the people I posed the question to to provide a response to me,  demonstrating the employee’s inability to provide an answer to the question I posed - how do they expect to garner support by this grouchy repressive behavior?

The question I posed, why would someone prefer to spend their time in
the Kaneva beta, which is extremely limited in the range of actions
available to it’s users,  compared to Second Life, which has many thousands of times
of virtual space as Kaneva, a developed economy, a scripting language, etc?

In my case, I drop in to Kaneva and other virtual worlds because I like virtual worlds.
I visit Papermint and IMVU and fire up Active Worlds at times.  I’m trying a game
called Taikodom  to see what a space game is like.  Taikodom, by the way, looks beautiful,
and while the game is Portuguese interfaced at present, with the game chat being in Portuguese, I was greeted by helpful responses in clear English, and the interface was simple and intuitive enough that despite my never haver used such a game before, I was able to get out of the dock and see the beautiful space scenery without getting frustrated and quitting.  The Taikodom site is  at http://www.taikodom.com.br/Página_principal.

There’s another virtual world in development on it’s way into beta testing, Novoking,
website at novoking.com.  I’ll be looking forward to that.

Commentators on the web  express or report concern about government censorship in virtual worlds.
Who needs government censorship when you have ”baby needs a nap”
behavior like that display by the operator of the Corelli avatar?

New virtual world Novoking said to go beta in September.

There’s a new virtual world called Novoking said to be going beta in September.

http://www.novoking.com

is the site, which is in Chinese.

It’s too late to look at it tonight.

Hipihi 5th Resident Convention

Hipihi just held it’s 5th resident convention.  I was unfortunately unable to be there in virtual person though I was their in actual spirit - i.e., I wasn’t able to attend because the meeting time was while I was at work.

Above is a shot of the meeting.  I recognize a number of the names
floating over the assembled avatars.   I believe that is the most people
I’ve seen in one place at one time in Hiphi to date.

I have posted an essentially unedited Google Language Tools translation of the transcript provided in Chinese in the Hipihi forums at the IdeaShape forums, in the Residents sub-forum.  IdeaShape is at http://www.ideashape.cn .

Facebook Mobile Confirmation Failure User Support Group

The Facebook Mobile Confirmation Failure User Support Group is a group for people that can’t get their mobile confirmation to work properly, or that did have trouble with facebook mobile confirmation and got the problem solved.

Please join this facebook group.

Damnit facebook, we’re people, not mobile confirmation codes!

Possible help running Hipihi on non-Chinese XP

IdeaShape forum user “crazysnake” suggests using the Microsoft ”Applocal”
application to deal with language requirements instead of the
“install Asian language pack and change this and that” approach described
elsewhere (such as in this blog).

The  Applocal utility can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/apploc.mspx.

Chinese architectural build in Hipihi

I will not mince words, I am not knowledgeable enough to know
for certain that is in fact an example of Chinese architectural style.
I do know for certain that this is a very nice build.  No, it’s not my build,
I did not make it.

This build is under construction as of  August 18, 2007.

Why not load up the Asian language package, adjust some settings in
Windows,  sign up for the Hipihi beta and see this build and a number of
other nice constructions for yourself?

http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-view-through-the-windows.jpghttp://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-view-through-the-windows.jpg

More pictures after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Cross Language Search

I don’t know if this is actually new or not, I didn’t check any dates, but I just discovered it. Google has a cross language search that lets you search in one language for results in another. http://translate.google.com/translate_s It’s neat. Try it out.

Virtual World moguls meet across shared Surface in Metaverse Poker Room

A story at http://blogs.cisco.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-c.cgi inspired me to write a fairly lengthy comment so I figured I’d repeat it here.
=============================================
Odd that I see a reference to http://blogs.cisco.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-c.cgi along with a reference to Cisco’s Telepresence technology just shortly after posting in my blog about my notion that it would be interesting to see Linden Lab link it’s San Francisco and Boston offices using Cisco’s Telepresence system.

What I had in mind in my idea was creation of a permanently linked area, a distributed place in the Linden Lab offices where for example Philip Rosedale might walk past in San Francisco and John Lester in the Boston Linden Lab metaverse room would see him walk by if Philip was in the shared location place in the Boston office.

Instead of a desk or table physically located in both Linden Lab offices serving as the shared, co-mingled focal point of the distributed location meeting area, a Microsoft Surface unit could be used instead, synchronized so that the San Francisco and Boston Surface units functioned as if there was one Surface simultaneously. Hence John Lester could sit in shared presence area in Boston and see Robin Harper, for example, displayed life sized on the Cisco Telepresence system’s monitor, apparently sitting across the way a few feet on the other side of the of the Microsoft Surface table unit.

By maintaining the telepresence link permanently, the nature of the shared location virtual place is changed from one that is created on demand in which to hold preplanned events to one that is more like just a normal part of the office, normal except that to a human it seems like one place but it has widely separated physical locations.

Why would Linden Lab have an interest in such a thing? Well, because it’s a metaverse idea and Linden Lab is a metaverse company.

I’d like to see this shared location space extended to other companies that are working on the creation of the metaverse, so maybe Hui Xu would sit down in front of the Beijing metaverse room’s Surface and see Nicole Yankelovich sitting in Sun Lab’s metaverse room in Menlo Park. Philip Rosedale would sit down at the San Francisco site, and John Lester in the Boston area.

Then the Friday night metaverse poker game would start.