Of course what is a biologist going to use mesh to do...make cars?
Here are some of my first attempts at mesh modeling in Second Life. The mushrooms weren't too bad in terms of cost to upload and for land impact..but the green Equisetum inspired plant cost 30$L to upload the model. I wasn't taking particular care to optimize the mesh. Probably wouldn't have been too expensive but I extruded the mesh in the tops to get that texture and I think that is most of the cost.
But sounds like another reason to go to an Open Sim grid.
Sometime ago I posted about a script generator for Second Life based on Scratch. The idea is is to graphically generate LSL script by first fitting program blocks together. The original Scratch generator was out of MIT. The MIT Scratch site is here: http://web.mit.edu/~eric_r/Public/S4SL/. Recently a Flash based Scratch LSL generator has been put together by John Bennett from the University of Colorado to help introductory computer science students learn to think computationally.
The interface is similar to the MIT Scratch for LSL, The new Lash version is called called FS2LSL. Here is the interface along with a real simple program to change the color of a prim from red to green to blue and to white, shown in Scratch blocks.
The LSL code generated by FS2LSL can then be copied and then pasted into Second Life or other viewer's script editor. Granted, my program is super-simple but it gratifyingly worked without any modification. The code is well laid out and some automatic commenting related to the program is generated. The web site for FS2LSL gives lots of good examples many of which are from Scripting Your World: The Official Guide to Second Life Scripting.
Most of the basic elements of the LSL language are covered, but don't expect to make complex menus and don't expect to find more than a few math functions built in. But you do have the ability to make your own functions. I appreciate that there is good coverage of control structures and if you work with IF statements you might find FS2LSL useful for working with them.
I am not an expert LSL programmer; It took me forever to understand events and states for instance but I think FS2LSL is potentially useful not just for beginners but people such as myself who are trying to improve their programming skills. Certainly anyone just starting programming in LSL either in Second Life or OpenSim's version of LSL will find this tool useful, though it may not be completely compatible with OpenSim's version of LSL. The Link to FS2LSL's page and examples is http://redwood.colorado.edu/jkb/fs2lsl/. The link to the actual Flash program is at http://www.free-lsl-scripts.com/Secondlife/Posts/fs2sl/
I've badly neglected my land in Second Life so I have been spending a few days doing creating this little forest lane. Second Life runs on Windows 8 and I use a Logitech touch pad in lieu of a mouse. This is my region on the Second Life mainland, Carmine. In Second Life I am Simone Gateaux.
If you do Second Life come visit at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Carmine/202/205/135
He discusses a way to hunt up the appropriate URL by poking around in Second Life. He writes:
"Where does that link come from? I pondered. Obviously, the last part is some sort of asset ID, like each avatar has the equivalent of a texture’s database ID. I poked around URLs at world.secondlife.com many of which return XML data, and my hunch is the search engine that you use in world is XML based.
So I went in to Second Life, poked around my profile, all of the bizarre advanced settings looking for this magical string that might identify CDB Barkley via URL."
And this is really cool. I was intrigued and decided to play with this. And I will illustrate with my profile (Simone Gateaux). Go to www.secondlife.com and put an avatar's name in the search window in the upper right hand corner of the SL home page:
A new search window will open with a drop down menu. From there select SL People and run the search. Here are the results for my avatar, Simone Gateaux:
The first link that appears works like a SLurl and clicking it launches the SL client just like a SLurl. For those non geeks who are completely lost, the SLurl is a web link that loads the SL map and opens it to a specific location to which you can teleport if you have the Second Life Client.
The second link opens up the same sort of modified web version of the avatar's SL profile that is used in the actual Second Life client. So here is mine:
Grab off the page's url from your browser, for instance for me the link is
Anyone who scripts in Second Life knows that the scripting language has a pretty steep learning curve, especially if you are not used to event driven programming. So it would be nice to have a code generator-maybe something a novice could use. Well today a post on SLED, the Second Life Educator's list, had a brief mention of a system called Scratch for Second Life (S4SL).
S4SL can be down loaded for Macs and Windows machine. I tested the Windows version on my home Vista machine and hope to test the Mac version on my iMac at work later this week.
S4SL is developed by Eric Rosenbaum at MIT, using Scratch . Scratch allows you to program graphically by snapping together little "modules." It sounds like a lot of fun in itself! But getting back to S4SL, the program has 8 classes of modules including one called pen which apparently requires an extra set of tools. Here is the opening window loaded along side the Second Life client. The left hand part of the window shows the eight modules, and the shapes associated with motion commands.
Click on the image to go to my Flickr stream to see a large version of this screen. The basic idea is to snap together modules in S4SL. Then you press the copy code button. This copies the generated SL script into your clip board. So all you need to do is to rez an object SL, and paste the code in place of a new script.
S4SL is loads of fun and I spent a delightful evening making little Second Life "pets" that follow my Avatar around. The next image shows a Scratch program for a pet that exhibits random motion, but then attempts to find my avatar if it gets too far away.
The "modules" are color coded based on function and notice how the "modules" can be snapped together. This sort of approach ought to be appealing for novice programmers including biology types who are of course used to thinking of shape as related to function.
There are some limitations to S4SL. First, since it is in development, only some of the capabilities of SL's language are implemented. The code is fat, meaning there is a lot of non functional material in the code depending what sorts of features are enabled or disabled. Also the resulting code, because not everything is implemented may not work the way the user expects.
Originally I pasted the script into a cube prim for testing but it so happened I had a flexi prim representation of a phospholipid hanging around and I thought it would make a cool bacterium complete with flagella. So here is a brief movie (A still is here) of the resulting "bacterial cell:"
I think S4SL has a lot of potential as a learning tool. For instance someone interested in behavior could use the system, as my example suggests, let students design bots which mimic different sorts of orientation behavior. Students without any programming experience can give their simple prims behaviors and there are good pre-made S4SL projects that come with the down load to show how this can be done.
S4SL, a neat learning tool and lots of fun and it doesn't require any scratch for the fun.
While browsing my Flickr contacts I ran across this photo and entry posted by Prad Prathivi, a designer in Second Life. Apparently a copy bot exists now that will duplicate a Second Life Avatar, including major features of the Avatar profile, and and at least some of the Avatar's attachments.
According to Prad, Second Life allows copy bots for legitimate purposes-backing up inventory for instance but using them to copy other people's stuff-including their avatars is against the Second Life terms of service.
Indeed, according to Second Life'sKnowledge Base entry on protecting copyrights, using copy bots to "infringe" on someone's content is a violation of the Terms of Service. However, SL also notes that residents are allowed to have Copy Bots for legitimate reasons.
When I asked Prad how one could tell the real Avatar from the copy he said this:
"I wouldn't have been able to tell them apart, aside of the rez date, quality of avatar and the No payment Info on File. But even that wouldn't have given me a second thought.. your avatar could be duplicated without you even knowing it, as well as content creator's work being stolen."
By the way I have a query to the person, whose AV is allegedly Kulton Short, who was reported to be selling the copy bot, but I have received no response.
Not everyone responding Prad's post feels there is a problem, several SL users didn't think there is much merit in duplicating avatars. Caliburn Sustanto says basically who cares, noting that it is already possible to make a copy of someone's avatar by tracking down all the attachments and duplicating the appearance of the avatar. Besides "Thousands of avatars already look pretty much the same already".
It is not clear to me how big of a problem copy bots are but I think there is at least the potential of a problem. The analogy is of course phishing in which users are lured to false websites in order to steal passwords. IN the old days an alert user could generally spot phishing sites after all. Once before phishing became widespread I got a message about my AOL account that said to go to the AOL website and enter my account and password because of some security issue. The site looked official but the URL was clearly not from AOL. So I called AOL security. As a reward I got several months of free service.
At the very least, these sorts of copy bots might have the affect of undermining confidence in Second Life's security and users ability to protect their avatars and original content.
By the way these bots don't seem to reside in Second Life but are external programs orginally developed for debugging purposes. Also they cannot get at account information so the avatar show up with no payment on record.
