Archive for the 'Second Life' Category

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Leaving.

Published on 29th of October, 2007 in Second Life. 26 Comments

I am (partially) leaving SL. I have resigned as a forum moderator, and will be transferring my island shortly. In the process of doing so, all of my SL-related services (excluding AjaxLife) will shut down.

My reasons for doing so:

  • A significant portion of the grid seems to hate me.
  • Many of my friends have already left, making SL rather dull.
  • (The main one) Linden Lab continue to neglect the Teen Grid:
    • Signup is still impossible.
    • Upgrading to premium is broken.
    • No website update in two years.
    • No MapAPI.
    • (list of generic complaints that have built up over the last two years go here)
  • I actually can’t afford the extra 17.5% due to VAT

I already regret resigning from the moderators. Sigh. :(

Those who care will probably still be able to find me around somewhere. AjaxLife development may continue solely due to lack of anything better to do.

Playing with canvases

Published on 26th of October, 2007 in AjaxLife, Development and Second Life. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Playing with the HTML <canvas> tag:

Canvas!

This is a test of rendering a sim map inside AjaxLife using JavaScript. The green markers are people – it does the same same above/below/level thing as the client. The whole thing takes a split second to render on my MacBook. I imagine it’d take longer if I included the missing points (that’s being done at a 64×64 resolution).

Not exactly great, is it? Better than nothing though – still working on it. Anyone happen to know how the client puts the sim images together? ;)

On an unrelated note, I’ll be returning from abroad tomorrow.

New SL Search

Published on 19th of October, 2007 in Second Life. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I found it at the obvious place on their site (after a couple of guesses), and it uses the same URL structure as Google after that, making searches easy.

Having poked around with it, I have noticed the following – based on the incomplete version that I found on their site:

  • It looks good
  • Classifieds are integrated neatly into the system
  • A good chunk of the data is hosted on Amazon S3 – profiles, events, places, top traffic sites, etc.
  • The TG and MG are in separate S3 buckets
  • It appears to use new secondlife:// features – specifically, secondlife://app/event/*/about, secondlife://app/classified/*, secondlife://app/agent/*/about. Visiting these with the RC client open made it crash. That said, clicking most buttons made it crash, so that’s not saying much.
  • Teen Grid and Main Grid results are not separated. I assume that this will change, given the separation of their data.
  • It searches wiki.secondlife.com.
  • A good deal of the data isn’t on S3 yet, so many links just tell you the key couldn’t be found.
  • Main Grid profiles default to visible, but Teen Grid profiles default to hidden.
  • Parcels have a list of searchable objects on them along with their prices, arranged in alphabetical order. Their parcel image is also visible.
  • Boolean operators such as “NOT” work as expected.
  • The search does not apply to the owner of something – e.g. a search for “Alex NOT Harbinger” still returns things owned by Alex Harbinger.
  • You can now grab limited resolution textures off the web at http://secondlife.com/app/image/texture-key/2 – this is used by the search to provide images.
  • The popular places lists, which appear in search (but probably shouldn’t), show sandboxes that are hidden from popular places in the current system.
  • Objects that aren’t for sale tend to appear in the object listings. Oops?
  • Avatar names tend to be just “(waiting)”, although the profiles they link to are accurate. I have yet to find any marked as “(hippos)”, however. :(

Also, lots of people seem to have expensive objects called “Object” for sale. It’d be nice if those were filtered out. The information seems to be fairly up-to-date, but is definitely slower at updating than the in-world stuff.

Of course, this is presumably supposed to be unreleased, so it could all change at whatever time. Still fun to look through though. And it actually looks like it’s a significant improvement over what we have now, woo.

Just need some way of separating out the MG and TG results. I suspect that LL will achieve this by locking searches to one of the two buckets depending on which grid you use.

See screenshots…

AjaxLife updated

Published on 14th of October, 2007 in AjaxLife, Development and Second Life. 9 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I have made a couple of improvements to AjaxLife:

  • It now runs in Internet Explorer – mostly. Due to speed issues some of the fancy UI stuff was disabled. The same effects are disabled on the Wii. Additionally the stats window refused to render in IE, so I was lazy and disabled it in IE.
  • Scripts now have syntax highlighting. Woo!

Hooray for updates. Please note that loading inventory is not recommended in IE – it will tend to make it hang for a length of time proportional to the number of items in your inventory – but a folder with more than about five items will have a noticeable delay. I gave up waiting and forcibly terminated it when I opened my textures folder.

UPDATE:

Screenshot:
[Screenshot lost due to WordPress failing]

Also, note that if you click a function, event or type, a new window will open containing the relevant SL Wiki page. (note the status bar in the screenshot. Also note that it capitalises the first letter, as it should for the wiki).

Oh, and I gave the post a title. “Post #124″ just wasn’t doing it.

Most annoying AjaxLife bugs fixed

Published on 30th of September, 2007 in AjaxLife, Development and Second Life. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

The three, in my opinion, most annoying bugs in AjaxLife have been fixed:

  • AjaxLife would stop receiving messages, although you could still send them – FIXED (well, at least one cause of the bug is)
  • Incoming IMs would not be shown in the IM window, but instead in a short-lived “Lost Instant Message” noticed – FIXED
  • Accidentally leaving the page would cause you to leave the page without confirmation – FIXED (actually a new feature, but still really annoying)

So yay! :D

New AjaxLife option

Published on 29th of September, 2007 in AjaxLife, Development and Second Life. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

AjaxLife Grid Selection

You can now pick a grid to log into. Yay. Note that the two marked as “UNOFFICIAL” should not be used unless you know why you’re using them and what you’re doing. Also, those two still use the SL map. Also note that I couldn’t get the DeepGrid login server to respond (what URI should I be using?), and OSGrid didn’t work – login worked, but the UI didn’t load, instead throwing an odd exception.

I’m reluctant to allow arbitrary login servers, because I can imagine all sorts of ways to abuse this.

We still default to “Main Grid (Linden Lab)” – i.e. Agni.

AjaxLife revived

Published on 28th of September, 2007 in AjaxLife, Development and Second Life. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

No thanks to Linden Lab, I’ve fixed AjaxLife. It no longer relies on the map API – it instead builds up the missing data based on MapBlocks. It was already doing this to fix capitalisation, but was also assuming that sims already existed in the map API. As such, assorted assumptions had to be removed and various changes made (plus there’s now a really ugly bit on the server side for logging in, yay. >.>)
Note that this has two side-effects – you may have to wait a while before any given sim can be focused, and it can no longer tell when you’re trying to select a nonexistent sim. It’ll just consistently fail, and ask you to wait a bit.

But hey, we’re back! :D

LL killed AjaxLife

Published on 27th of September, 2007 in AjaxLife, Development and Second Life. 16 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

[20:29 BST] And now it doesn’t exist at all. Hoping they’re doing something other than ignoring it… :(

[20:03 BST] It’s not fixed. The file now exists, but doesn’t have any region names. So it’ll still crash out. Boo LL people.

[20:00 BST] Apparently it’s fixed, at least for now. Yay LL people! :D

LL seem to have pulled the MapAPI (yes, I know that’s a 404. That’s the problem.) without any form of announcement. So much for their blog.

Some research indicates that they have intended to do so for a while, and were going to make a wide announcement before doing so. Breaking it does not count as a wide announcement.

As such, AjaxLife (which was heavily dependent on the API for the map functions, among others) will no longer function. Furthermore, the replacement lacks an important function to make it work, is still in beta, still has assorted voice-map related things hardcoded in.

Additionally, I don’t want “Powered by Google” stuck in the corner of AjaxLife. Especially since nothing was wrong with the old one – well, at least, not my fixed version of the old one (now also broken due to loss of its data source).

So, Linden Lab. Until you do something about this, AjaxLife is dead.