Postcards from Second Life

[andygates]

Cool things I've come across while avoiding the dens of iniquity in SL and looking on the Events list:

Live music. If you're streaming a shoutcast radio station to clients anyway, it is trivial to have the source be a live performer instead of a recorded one. The result? A venue with the performer's avatar onstage, the audience where you'd expect them, and - and this was weird - the same sort of performer/audience interaction you get in physical venues:

Onstage blues boy plucking a squeaky guitar: "Good to see so many of you in here tonight... where's Mindy?" Brief pause while he spots her on the floor running a dance script. "Hey Mindy, good to see ya again. Hey, where's DarkAngel?" The gothed-up anthro dragon at the bar looks at the stage and raises a glass (ctrl-\, animation from his inventory>run in world).

...which raises two points: One, avatar names can be plain arse (as discussed at length at academic virtual worlds forum <a href="http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/">Terra Nova</a>).  Two, there's no reason not to stream chat right back and mix it to make an earshot custom stream for every user, apart from raw bandwidth and processing (!) but would you want to? DarkAngel will not sound like a dragon. And a cross-gender alt will sound totally wrong...

Nice guitar plucking though.  And a weird spooky feeling that I was actually at a gig, even though I was in my kitchen and the artist was probably in his lounge and most of the audience were probably in their underwear or feeding the kids.

Next groovy thing is the International Spaceflight Museum, which has a really neat amphitheatre framed by lifesize models of real rockets and, NASA TV streams and up on the terrace, a working orrery.  It's that "if a real museum had a limitless budget and holo-projectors, how would they do it?" kind of look.  Very professional, very impressive if you're a spaceflight geek.

Now, can anyone help me get a shaded-greys image into proper transparency?  I have tattoos to put on my avatar.

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

What format is the shaded-greys image in? I could have a go at fiddling with it in the GIMP if it's something I understand.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Aha, got it - the problem was that there's some layer-jiggling you need to do to get the transparency right. Namely, set a white background, take a mask and save that to the alpha channel, then delete the mask and swap the white background for a dark grey one to kill fringiness, before exporting as TGA. Mud, clear as :)

Thanks for the assist. The transparency is now working, but I've still got to work out the correct stretches and deformations to get the tattoo looking right: like most game skins the texture gets warped in highly-3D areas, so the belly "carpe diem" text is easy, but around the shoulders with this backpiece is trickier.

It's a very weird feeling putting a real-world tat on an avatar.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Eeeeeeeep, that's given me the Uncanny Valleys! I wonder whether it'd still do that if I didn't know it was a real-world tat?

[andygates.livejournal.com]

You never know... it's a lot finer and more delicate than most in-game tats - now, for a real case of the Uncanny Valleys I should give it to my alt!