Noteworthy: Sysperia Poppy's work at The King Has Fallen gallery

Melancholia at home
Originally uploaded by Emma Nowhere.

Sysperia Poppy has done an amazing collection of portraits, a few of which feature a close friend of mine, Super Calamari, or Cala as she prefers to be called. The title of this one, Melancholia, struck a nerve, since I've been feeling more than a little down lately, and Cala has always been there to cheer me up.

Sysperia's work can be seen in-world at her gallery, The King Has Fallen, at Sonata (159, 235, 262).

Using Flickr photos in Second Life

My friend Lana Miranda recently pointed out to me that the QuickTime player in the Second Life client could also play SMIL presentations. For those that don't know, SMIL is an XML-based media description format, created by Real Networks back when Philip Rosedale was the Chief Technology Officer there before he founded Linden Labs and became Philip Linden. SMIL was standardized by the W3C and Apple implemented SMIL 1.0 as a supported media type in QuickTime 4.1 (we're at version 7.1 of QuickTime now, although sadly it still only supports SMIL 1.0 and not the later versions of SMIL which provide nice features like transitions and animation).

Second Life has the ability to play QuickTime movies overlayed on primitive objects. As a consequence, you can play streaming videos on in-world television sets and movie screens. But, since QuickTime can also play SMIL-based presentations, this opens some interesting possibilities for playing other media types as well.

One of the more interesting usages that occurred to us was to be able to pull images from Flickr and use them in SL. To that end, we used Flickr's robust web services API to create a nice little "Web 2.0" web application called PhotoMovr to let you do this easily. You can check it out at http://www.photomovr.com. It's just a beta and not hosted on a particularly fast server, so if it gets a lot of usage it might slow down, but it does work quite nicely at the moment. If you have a Flickr account and you have photos organized into sets, it's very easy to use. Feel free to give it a spin.

Here are some snapshots of Flickr photos being viewed in-world using the QuickTime movies generated by PhotoMovr:

Creating parcels

Nowhere HQ Land Planning 1
Originally uploaded by Emma Nowhere.

Most rental sims try to divide up the land into as many rectangular parcels as possible. Nowhere is meant to appeal to people who appreciate the aesthetics of the landscape and want to live in a place that appears to be the result of natural geological processes. This means that parcels are going to be somewhat harder to draw out than in most of the rental flatlands. Here, you can see me reviewing the parcel boundaries which are overlayed on a map of the region that was retrieved using the undocumented SL Map API.

How to plan a sim

Nowhere HQ Land Planning 6
Originally uploaded by Emma Nowhere.

I haven't posted recently, so I thought I'd share a couple of snapshots of planning out a sim landscape. Here you can see the original landscape of Nowhere and below it the updated version. The images were created using Backhoe and Screenshot Plus on a MacBook Pro and then using Photoshop to crop and save as TGA files to upload into Second Life.