First step towards matrix. Tried Second Life today. Put friends networking, MMORPG, 3D modelling, avatars all together in a coffee jar and shake up well to get this one.

First impression

Was put on the orientation island which felt remotely like ‘Black and White’ and ‘populous: the beginning’ games, particularly when I fly around on the island. This one has a sequence of posts with tutorials on the basics of SL. Off the main tutorial land is an island with lotza interactive objects. The exit on the tutorial island puts you on an square in the sim world grid which is supposed to be your ‘home’ (which you can switch).

Money

Dance for Money

One of the obvious thing felt is the ‘being broke’ thing. I am yet to be oriented on that matter. Not bothering about that one now though. Amazing enough I saw people doing silly things like dancing in casinos (screenshot alongside) (which resembled some human farm from some sci-fi story) and even whiling away time on bean bags for earning money (these bean bags showed text bubbles telling us how much has been earned). I guess no one would let go bean bags which gave you money.

Modelling

Most of the aspects in the avatar can be edited. Body, head, face hair, dress all of them. I wonder how much of it should be parametrized is required while making the original models.

The 3D rendering is not too good. It looks like an early 2000 3D game. Most of the reality work has to be done with textures. I had a quick look at the settings, though not much was found (except the graphics card memory setting) that looked modern.

For bonafide need-a-life game addicts it is suicide to get into SL.

BTW, the linux Second Life client is 32 bit. Had to get the same version of geForce driver on my ia32 chroot and pure 64 linux installation for this to work.

Full of Half life 2

Half life 2 is a nice game. I liked the dystopian environment (the way I like night mares, you can wake up to the nicer reality ™). The game is close to being an interactive movie. This level has a nice big bridge where there is some cliff-hanging action. There isn’t much music but I like what is there. Its well timed for me.

Lost Coast : Cathedral

The fights are not special except one of the level where are supported by Antlions (large insect thingamajig). In the ‘Anticitizen’ level you get to command resistance forces. Not many boss battles. For the sake of it they had put a strider in a hall and gave us some energy balls to pick and throw. After a quite some tries I could bring it down. Its a nice break from the tense action in Counterstrike games (when you put the bots in expert mode). BTW, I did not mean that I win any of those expert mode battles (I manage a few kills).

Lost coast

The lost coast tech demo is a nice show-off demo. I liked the shine on the rocks, improvements in character rendering and the dynamic tone mapping. I guess we are close to what is needed for the matrix :-). Its just a matter of putting raw power for finer rendering.

FPS sickness

No Clip

It was there all the way with first gen games where the scenes scrolled faster and quite outside the natural range of speed. It reduced, but not enough for me to be able to sit and play the game for hours. The games like Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem were ok as long as the levels were in the townships. As we started closer to the bosses irregular terrain showed up, with bad textures. These caused real discomfort. DooM 3 changed it. Except for the intended scare and claustrophobia in DooM 3 it was quite easy on my stomach.

HL2 is not really up to DooM 3 in this but its better than HL and other FPSes I’ve played before. Felt it yesterday while popping those striders from atop remains of some building. 60 degrees (not sure) as field of view is not enough. I keep flicking the mouse left and right. The visuals dont move smoothly = uneasy stomach. It would be cool to have an FPS setup with like 9 monitors slightly concave to give as much field as your eye wants.

If the rock was rendered by various Engines.

Came across the pic along side (shows major game engines rendering a stone). Gave me a laugh.

XMMS 2 is really good. I had heard of this but I pay real attention till I tried it the day before. I find it good to have done away with a gui panel for my audio player. It is nice to have different kinds of clients for controlling the player. Am thinking of hooking PocketPC PDA up with it. Its gonna need compiling xmms2 for WinCE. Its gonna be tough to find time at work to do this. Its gonna be nice.

Computer game players are a lot but its not a popular breed in India (though, becoming lesser so everyday). Women players are few (but many top players are women, thats another thing). To find an Indian women player is tough. I stumbled upon this lady’s profile on Orkut. Reminds me of my sister’s FPS bouts. I remember having hooked up my friend’s pc and mine and playing Quake (the first one) demo in co-operative mode. My sis did quite well. Her favorite genre is RPG (Role-playing games like Ultima), which is my favorite as well.

Bundled CD Rom.

When I was a kid (7th – 9th grade), getting a PC was a dream. The smell of the plastic, floppy and hard copy manuals is etched in my head. Some times I get this ‘CS lab’ fragrance from some of those shiny manuals that come around. I was introduced to my first PC (486) by my unc (I was in 12th – high school). I fell for comp. games along with my sis and a cousin. A bundle of 4 games from Creative along with the SoundBlaster audio card made our day. It had Ultima 8 : Pagan, Strike Commander (My first 256 color flight sim), Wing commander 2 and Syndicate (a strategy/action game). I still have the CD (check the pic alongside). Nostalgia (sigh).

In other news, my Sunday was ruined by fruitless (rather un-satisfying) shopping. It was intended to upgrade my wardrobe. My reduced interest, makes the shopping for clothes rather painful. Bad headache all after noon (sic.).