Lively, Lively, lalalalala. (Doesn’t run in wine, nor Linux. So I’ll abstain from testing that yet.)

Ah, did you see that we have weblin on http://primforge.com/ yet? There’ll be some nice improvements by the Primforge Group around that, soon…^^

Today, while I was busy trying to stream the Finale of the Soccer EM (never say soccer^^) to our land on meetingpoint, I had a funny effect. I am building a new TV receiver for DBC Radio TV Switzerland, and every once in a while, I used that to check if the media was still working. Then, within the first few frames of Torley Lindens funny video “How to build a 1 prim barstool” (streaming directly from youtube, which is super easy with the new DBC TV), some magic happened:

Now we have a huge Torley Linden, wearing some sort of Spy vs. Spy costume and a watermelon ghetto blaster protecting our Sim.

Btw, the Soccer Streaming didn’t work for me. All ZDF live broadcasts have a Quicktime option, so you can find out the rtsp streaming url and paste that in your Media Options. But ARD (“Das Erste”) only broadcasts ASX or WMV streams. Somewhat lame for a public payed TV station.

Gnaagnaa! Ich habe heute, am 6. Juni mein Passwort fuer den hier aufgetretenen Fall von Datenbanksenilität zugesandt bekommen. (Ich weiss, in Institutionen kommen die Emails auf so einen Rollwagen und werden dann von Azubis durch die Institutionen geschaukelt, aber das waren zwölf Tage!!)

Klasse, endlich mal schauen, warum Primforge immer noch nicht in der Suche auftaucht (Ich hab auch ein paar lecker Screenshots in unserem Portfolio abgelegt, falls mal wer wissen will, was wir so machen.)

Und? Geht natürlich nicht. Genau wie mein erstes Firmenprofil, taucht auch das zweite nicht in der Suche auf. Torrid nach Admin telefonieren. Hab heute schon 5 Stunden lang mit Freenet, Alice und T-Kom rumgeschäkert, da ist das ein Klacks, sollte man denken:

Ich glaube, bei Projekten, die vom Senat gefördert sind, muss man einfach gaaaaaanz laaaaangsam klüüüüücken.

Aaargh.

Ich habe noch nie eine dermassen selbstgekochte, fehlerhafte Website erlebt wie Interactive-City-Berlin, eine mit großem Tamtam eröffnete Platform für Gamesdeveloper in Berlin, vom Senat gefördert und wasnichalles.

Keine einzige Transaktion, die ich auf der Website vorgenommen habe, ist ohne Fehler abgelaufen, selbst die einfachsten Dinge wie Passwort zurücksetzen oder Adresse ändern erfordern nachhaltigen Beissholz-Einsatz.

Aktuelles Beispiel: Heute ging zum 3. Mal mein ganz normales Passwort nicht. Also zurücksetzen. Anstatt dass sie mir einen Einmalkey schicken, wie das good practise ist, kommt das neue Passwort per Email, dazu ein Link, wo man sich neu anmelden soll. Hmpfh. Gelesen, getan. Fehlermeldung: “Dieses Konto ist inaktiv”. Aha, toll.

Email an Support: (Natuerlich nicht einfach “Hallo webmaster@interactive-city-berlin.de”, sondern so ein verf*cktes Webformular.) Freundliche Anmerkung verfasst, Email, Name, Schuhgröße eingetragen, Nachricht senden: Klick.

Fehlermeldung: Sicherheitswarnung: Ihre Eingabe erfolgte zu schnell. Sie werden daher als Spambot eingestuft und Ihre Nachricht wird nicht übertragen.

Waaaaahhh.

Es gibt doch nun wirklich genug Webprogrammierer in Berlin, die ihr Handwerk verstehen, ich selbst koennte einige davon vermitteln. Diese Moronen!

Just playing with my new Linden-Onlinescanner. It says there are 49 Linden^® officers online right now:

[15:38] lindendetector: Bambers Bao Benny Blue Bub Chandler Char Cole Colossus Content Echo George Ginsu Glenn Green Gulliver Guy Harmony Jaime Jeska Jesse Jim Jimmy Jon Keiko Kona Kyle Lexie Leyla Lightfoot Mia Michael MJ Morpheus Natria Nicole Niko Q Rheya Robin Rowan Shamiran Socrates Soft Stash Teeple Tess Torley Zara

Hmmm…

Just a short note on the Dryad Tool, I blogged about: Here’s a video of the author describing his work. Unfortunately the Linux version is still not ready. But the principle is easy to adapt to Second Life avatars or other multi parametric builds.

When I was a very young avatar in mid-2006, and just made my first steps in that world of ours, one of the things I learned from the elder guys were the jokes about the physics engine, and it’s upgrade in the “near” future. “kk, I give you full permissions on that object as soon as they finish Havok2. Hahaha.” Havok2 would never come, I learned. Who cared? Lindenlab surely were busy with other stuff, I understood. And why should there be another physics engine? Everything was working perfectly, sortof. I grew older and learned a lot, in that vast rush of personal development and learning, you can expericence only so often in your life, having the opportunity to jump into a totally new world. I decided to be a professional developer, Primforge was founded, we built some awesome sims.

One night when we were building a labyrinth for Gamesload Island, Dread crashed the sim. There was this tunnel, the players should jump down from a pebble, run through a field of moving prims, not touching anything, while dangerous objects were falling down from the ceiling.

Dangerous indeed! The rezzer producing these spiky, nasty, physical objects had a built in time constant, that was set just a bit too small. Whenever it rezzed some of these spiky balls, and they were touching each other while falling, slowing down, blocking the way for the other nastities to come out, after a few seconds the sim slowed down and crashed. Game Over…

We had a hard time to stop that process, since everytime the island would boot up, the nasty-rezzer sitting at its old place, happily starting to do what it was invented for. Or at least what was implemented. Eventually we managed to delete the object, without being deleted by it. And then we crashed the sim once more, on purpose, just for the lulz^^.

That physics engine wasn’t so perfect after all, I learned. If we could crash a sim that easy, maybe griefers could do so too? Or even take down 17 sims in a swastika pattern? Nasty, nasty bug. Well, the solution was simple, Linden Lab just had to prohibit the use and possession of icky, spiky objects!!1! Thanx Philip, nothing like that ever happened… ^^

And that other thing, Mono! Actually, Mono never made it into buzzword heaven, but, hey, 100 times the performance of a good old LSL script. “LOL, sure, You can have my brand new SexGen Platinum, but not right now. Lets wait until they implement the Mono backend. Hahaha!^^”

Well, that’s long ago. We had a lot of fun since then (and loads of stress, crashed sims [I didn't do it!!], miserable script performance, general lag, etc.), while SL grew up to 20 times its size, slowly, then very fast, and now back to slow again. Why should there be any change? Everything works perfectly, sortof (*gg*).

Surprise, Lindenlab don’t think like that. They have been planning the Havok update and the Mono Engine for more than 2 years, and it’s knocking on our (scripted) doors right now. Mono is running on the Beta grid, in that same moment, that I’m writing this lines. Havok4 is on some sims on the mainland already. We will see a much more stable grid soon, and one with a vastly improved performance.

4 times the memory space, and 100 times the performance for each new script. Less processor time for scripts, that means more time available for inter process communication, networking, database transfer. That means: More complex, better usable, and richer applications in Second Life.

We just have to invent them, implement them, use them.
It’s happening now.

Regarding this Wiki post, Lindenlab are planning to introduce the Mono engine as a replacement for the current scripting engine in January 2008, at least on some simulators at the beta grid. In early talks (40 minute Video at Lang.NET 2006), Jim Purbrick, Senior Developer at Lindenlab, and probably better known as Babbage Linden, told about a 50-150 fold increase in execution time. The Wiki still says it’s 70x faster than the currently used LSL2. Together with the new Havok4 Engine, that would mean a vast performance boost for all Sims, hopefully enhancing the inter and intra world communication too. At least I hope so. ^^ It’s certainly good to hear that LL seem to have a master plan in improving the grid basics on a long scale… Ah, we need a new Client for that, because byte-compiling happens client-side.

Add: Mono won’t replace LSL, at least not in the first iteration. It just serves as a better performing framework, so we will still have good old LSL in the editor, but it gets compiled into a brand new bytecode behind the scenes.

(The slides are taken from the video I mention above.)