Confusion

For those who don't play Eve: many of the action in Eve takes place in asteroid belts. These belts provide ore to miners, but they are often protected by game generated enemies, which are nicknamed 'belt rats'. These belt rats show up as little red crosses in the distance. If you notice them, you'll usually fight them or get out of the belt, if you haven't got the firepower. One thing is clear: red crosses in the sky means an enemy, and, quite probably, battle.

Yesterday I was at a garden party - one of the very few this year, the summer hasn't been that great unfortunately. Standing in the dark I looked up to the star dotted sky, where even the milky way was faintly visible. Suddenly, my eyes caught a plane passing overhead, a little red light blinking away in the night. And for a second, that red light triggered a response in my subconscious: a belt rat! Lock on target, dispatch the fighting scout drones and open fire with the 125mm rail guns! And then, a fraction of a second later, I realised that it was just a plane. I wasn't playing Eve Online, I was standing in a very real garden watching a normal plane passing overhead..

My guess is this must happen more often to those engaged in immersive virtual worlds or games!

Still relevant after all these years: Arthur C. Clarke

It was a summer somewhere in the 1980's, I was twelve or so, and I needed books. This summer holiday we would be traveling a lot with the camper, meaning I had days and days to read while my father drove - so I needed quite a bit of reading. One of the volumes I ended up taking with me the local library was a book called "2010: Odyssey 2" by one Arthur C. Clarke. Its' cover intrigued me, and being an amateur astronomer, all things space travel fascinated me anyway. And it turned out to be very fascinating indeed! Even without having read part 1, which was not available, the story gripped me.

I'm still trying to find out what it was that appealed to me. The bits of dry wit, a fascinating future of space travel, the characters, new perspectives on time and space..all that and more, I think. Over the years I kept reading his books, bought several of them, watched him on TV and read articles about him, and I was impressed and amazed on more than one occasion.

Again it was summer, and I needed something to read for the holiday, and Arthur had just passed away. It seemed fitting to buy something from him again: The Collected Stories. It's almost a thousand pages and contains Clarke's short stories, written between 1937(!) and 1999.

Unfortunately it came too late for the holiday, but I have read a sampling of the stories, and again I was surprised by how relevant much of it still is. Many of the concepts found in Star Trek for instance, can be found in these short stories - but these stories often date from the 1940's or 1950's. Many of the stuff taken for granted in current scifi, can be found here - in writings fifty or sixty years old. And much of it is still science fiction even today!

Of course, some of the material is dated. Clarke couldn't, for instance, foretell the shape of the current internet in the 1940's, even though he wrote about reading the paper on an electronic device and over a network, in the late 1960's.

And, a disclaimer: it's possible that Clarke got some of his ideas from other, older writers. His bio on Wikipedia for instance mentions that Clarke, as a kid, read cheap US scifi pulp magazines - who knows what ideas found their humble beginnings in these mags?

But still. The man who has given us the communication satellite left us a great body of literature; food for thought for many years to come. I wouldn't be surprised if some of his stories are still relevant as SciFi stories in another fifty years.

Choose your life - real and virtual

I've been doing EVE online for some time now; about eight weeks I'd say. During that time I have chosen several EVE careers.

Solo or ..
At first I was content with flying solo, doing a bit of mining and shooting the incidental Serpentis belt rat. No real need to worry about skills and skill training, so I more or less neglected it, randomly choosing skills to train, without a real plan or goal. In hindsight, this was very shortsighted. After two shooting incidents I noticed I was too vulnerable, all alone in EVE's large universe, with only minimal protection and almost zero offensive capabilities; I needed to train skills to be able to fly a bigger, stronger ship, and I needed a corporation where I could learn and grow. I have been lucky to join TRACE, the Trade Association Corporation, which is a great corp - and not only for n00bs like me. I really learned a lot there, and the corp members are really nice.

Skills and changes
While working on skills for bigger ships, drones and guns, I needed to do missions too. They bring in money, train your combat skills and help you grow. These days, I don't even have a miner fitted on my ship anymore - what's the use? I'd rather fit an extra gun there! So without really noticing it, I switched from being a 'solo miner' to a 'mission runner within a corp'. Consequently, my skill training plan has changed too; I've been working on drone, cruiser and some weaponry related skills first, followed by skills needed to operate salvagers and tractor beams.

Mid Year Review
Today I had a mid year review at my current job. My manager and I discussed, amongst other things, my longer term prospects within the company: where do you want to be, two or five years from now? The answer to this question does have immediate consequences for the choices you make in everyday life - now! What training to choose, which people to link up with, what to read.. And then it struck me that reality doesn't differ that much from gaming in this perspective. The career path you choose has an impact on the skills you train, and this is true both in real life as well as in the gaming universe.

Time wasted
The lesson for me is, that I wasted valuable time when I first started out in EVE Online. I had no real goals, other than to enjoy myself a bit. Yes I trained some skills, but it was aimless, there was no structure, no comprehensive plan to it. I've wasted a lot of valuable skill training time this way! After todays Mid Year Review, I have decided I won't let this happen in real life too, as the time lost in real life is, obviously, infinitely more valuable than those skill training hours in EVE.

Do you know where you want to be five years from now? What's your five year plan?

The male office dwellers' guide to finding the right toilet

Something off topic I need to get off my chest: the male office dwellers' guide to finding the right toilet.

Usually, a man doesn't have to go through a lot of trouble to get rid of the waste his body produces. Liquid waste especially is easily disposed of - sometimes a tree is all a man needs.

But things change when you're locked up in this huge office building you get to spend your working days in. Especially for those of us who work in technical professions, finding a nice, clean toilet can be quite difficult, as offices occupied by the IT department tend to have a larger than average male population - young, geeky males I might add. This does have a distinct, noticable, negative impact on sanitary hygiene in bathroom areas in the immediate surroundings of said offices.

So what's a civilized man to do? Again, disposing of liquid waste is still not difficult, as long as you can hold your breath for, oh, 30 to 60 seconds and can find a dry spot on the toilet floor to stand on. But the real problem arises when you, a hygiene conscious man, need to get rid of the solid waste your body produced. You are definitely not going to sit on those toilets used by the IT dept - that would be beneath your human dignity, and you would need to take a shower afterwards, which is, even if possible, highly unpractical.

So here's how to go about this business: the male office dwellers' guide to finding the right toilet!

First off, locate those areas in the building where, on average, more women than man seem to work. Target your search; look for the HR or marketing department to begin with.

Once you've found such a location, locate the male toilets in the area, and execute a quick visual inspection of those premises. Also, use your nose. No need to sniff explicitly, just take notice of what signals your nose sends up to your brain.

If the visual and nasal inspection leaves room for doubt as to the level of hygiene at the site, repeat the steps above until you find a place that passes this first, initial test. Once you've succeeded, proceed with the steps below.

If no one is at the scene, proceed to inspect the available stalls, executing a more thorough visual inspection. If someone enters during this procedure, you're supposed to do like you were just entering the stall; enter, lock door, wait until other person leaves again and proceed as necessary. This should not be difficult, as males tend to ignore one another in bathroom areas anyway.

The nose plays an important role in this second, more thorough examination of the site. As you're not the only one looking for a suitable place to sit and relax a while, some of these stalls may have been used recently. No matter how clean they look, these should not be used unless you can hold your breath for many minutes.

By now, there are probably one or two choices left. Choose the one that has the least visual contamination on the installed hardware. After all, you need to sit on it. Ideally, there's no contamination at all, but you can still wipe the thing down a little with some toilet paper, just to be sure. Be careful to keep a couple of layers of paper between said hardware and your hand; no moisture should be able to penetrate the layer between the moment you wipe and you throw it away.

The best choice is the stall that has little dust particles floating in the water in the toilet bowl. This means it hasn't been used for some time, probably not since it was cleaned last night, and it's the best result an office dwelling man can hope to achieve in his quest for sanitation and hygiene. Sit down, let out a deep sigh and relax. You're safe.

Time to do OpenSim again

Last year, I spent many an evening on installing and running versions of OpenSim on Linux. The blog items I wrote about that, still get a lot of hits - apparently many people still have the problems I encountered then. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot, but some of the early issues with OpenSim prevented me to really do something with it. Not that I blame anyone for it, it was alpha or very early beta software! But after a while I stopped updating the install regularly, and recently I wondered if I, perhaps, should just deinstall it and stop paying rent for an unused Linux box..


Intergrid
But just before I went on holiday, something very interesting happened: a couple of IBM and Linden Labs engineers succeeded in teleporting an avatar from OpenSim to a Linden Lab Second Life simulator, essentially breaking down the barrier between the two simulators. I'm quite sure you read about that!

It looks like this was more than a proof of concept, as Linden Labs has opened a beta program for repeating and expanding on this first experiment: Open Grid is the name of it. I will apply, as did many others; but Linden Labs is giving precedence to those who will be able to bring up an OpenSim region. And I already have one, I just need to update the install and make the connection!

Soo.. time to dust off the cheap rental Linux box, update my OpenSim install, and hope Linden Labs will allow me to participate in this beta. Of course, I will keep you posted.

More information on this whole intergrid teleporting can be found on the Metanomics site. A good list of recommended reading is at the bottom of this page.

All about the..
As for Linden Labs' revenue model, my quick guess is that the Lindens see OpenSim as a good way to expand the reach of Linden Labs compatible technology. After all, anyone using an OpenSim simulator will have a viewer that's compatible with Second Life. This way, SL-compatible technology may be a bit closer to becoming a standard of sorts. Plus, Linden Labs gets to claim the moral high road in the interoperability debate by openly collaborating with an open source competitor to their main product.
Linden Lab could also position itself as the trusted, known grid provider with the most interesting, enduser generated content (products, entertainment) available. But they could also claim to be the most legally compliant or regulated grid and hence (perhaps) safe environment - not sure about that, but it's a thought. These are just quick guesses; I'm sure there are more thorough analyses out there. I'll see what I can find when I have the time.

Just a quick note..

Saturday, I have returned from a nice holiday in Austria! More specifically, we visited the Stubai Alps. A beautiful part of Tirol, with lovely flower filled fields punctuated by fierce mountain ranges and grim gletschers. Tomorrow it's back to work, and virtual world stuff will resume shortly, too!

Twinity update

It's been a while since I last blogged about Twinity; time for an update!

Real? Really?
Let's start with the good news. Metaversum is putting a lot of effort in digitally recreating parts of Berlin, especially the Hackescher markt district. But that's not all: Metaversum announced plans to add other metropolises as well . From the start it has been Metaversums' intention to create a mix of the real and virtual world (hence for instance the realistic daylight cycle in Twinity); bringing these cities online really adds to that vision. I have never been in the real Berlin, but I already know my way around the Neue Schönhauser strasse and the Hackerscher Markt; I easily recognized the streets on Google Maps as well. It would be interesting to check out Berlin in Twinity, and then see the same area in Google Streetview; would you still recognize it? As Berlin is not yet added to Google Streetview, we can't tell - yet!

More outdoor
Plus, one of the complaints I had during the early beta is really being solved this way: more and more outdoor areas have appeared in Twinity. Not only that, they have been given a more prominent place too! You are no longer confined to a list of available rooms, much as Google Lively is today. Glad to see that improve.

User created content
Another aspect which deserves attention, is that more enduser created content is appearing in Twinity. Blogger Tinsel Silvera for instance has a room at the Bitropolis area where he exhibits art like items he created. To be honest, I haven't paid much attention myself, I'm not much of a content creator. But for a real virtual world to be viable, the ability to create content and to subsequently sell it is, in my opinion, an important one. It is one of the things that sets a real virtual world apart from a 3D chatbox.

Resources
So what's not to like? Well, there are a few things that might need improvement before Twinity is ready for mainstream usage. I still have issues with stability and resource usage, for instance. Memory usage can run in to the hundreds of MB's of RAM - over 450 yesterday. After doing an ALT-TAB to switch to another app (say to Gimp to save a screenshot) it isn't always possible to return to Twinity; you sometimes need to stop the process and restart. Generally speaking, the application sometimes just feels clunky.. But, it's still beta, that obviously accounts for something. Nevertheless, I'd really like to see some improvements here. I will download a new fresh copy of the software, perhaps that helps.

Finally, performance remains an issue of concern. The overall world operates at satisfying speeds without much lag, but startup, search and teleporting to certain places take a long time. I understand that loading the virtual city of Berlin takes time, but a lot of users won't tolerate a delay of five to ten minutes to access a certain place. Perhaps it's a good idea to ship some of that content with the download package? Or provide it as a separate download? Eve Online does something like that too, both with regular and premium content, perhaps Twinity should too.

Oh and another feature of Eve Online which I really like: once you press the print screen button, a screenshot is automatically saved to a default directory - in high quality .bmp if desired. Very handy! I'd like that in Twinity too!

For all you EVE Online fans out there

..it's an asteroid themed Lively room. Now if I could get a decent ship and some belt rats in here, this could be fun :)

Google Lively - the aerial view

Google Lively, my first room, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

A standalone room like this makes perfect sense to my eight year old daughter, who's very much into Habbo hotel and the likes. It has less appeal to me, I'd rather take a walk in a virtual city, fly my Sopwith Camel over Caledon, or my Catalyst through Eve's virtual universe..

This does not mean I don't see any value in Google Lively, but I am perhaps not the kind of user that's attracted to this sort of thing. I think I'm going to spend more time on Twinity instead. See how their virtual Berlin is developing!

No comment

Further thoughts on Google Lively

It's obvious that I need to spend more time on Google Lively before being able to make an in depth assessment of it. In the mean time, here's more thoughts on Google Lively.

Virtual yes - world no
First, I wouldn't call it a 'virtual world'. It is not. A 'virtual world' should, in my opinion, have certain properties in common with the physical world. A geography, maps, places, buildings and inhabitants, a currency and/or an economy, to name a few. One should be able to freely wander/fly/drive/swim around in a physical environment that could be real - in this or an alternate universe. In this regard, Second Life is a virtual world; Eve Online is a virtual universe. Metaversum is expanding Twinity to become a virtual world, too; their virtual rendering of the city of Berlin is interesting in this regard. Google Lively doesn't have the properties I expect in a virtual world, it is a flat list of separate rooms one can choose to visit. Lively is a virtual environment, a 3D chatbox, but not a virtual world by any of my standards! The comparison with Second Life is, in my humble opinion, an unfortunate one; it is comparing apples to oranges.

Lively, a new default browser plugin?
For those of you who haven't tried Lively yet: it runs in the browser, but it requires a small install. Once installed it can display all Lively rooms, and rooms can be embedded in web pages, as you can see in the blog entry below. It looks like Google created a 3D platform for the 2D internet with Lively: adding a 3D element (the Lively room) to an existing website is really easy, and I expect a lot of them to pop up in the coming months. In the near future, having Lively as an addon or plugin to your browser may be as common as having Adobe's Flash player or Sun Java are common plugins today. If I were an MSN executive, I'd be very worried about these developments, because why muck around with a 2D text message service if you can have a 3D room just as easy?

Marketing
This opens up all sort of interesting marketing perspectives as well. Going 3D suddenly doesn't require much; basically it's just a Google account you need. My room was ready in five minutes! I don't know yet how easy it is to brand a room; I know you can put advertisements up, but that may not be enough for all prospective Lively customers. My current employer for instance, a large bank, has a distinct visual identity, which must be used in all internal and external communications, but also in the layout and furniture of offices. Being able to sufficiently brand a room would be critical to management acceptance of a Lively room as a suitable solution for corporate communications. Disclaimer: I am, at time of writing, not involved in any 3D efforts my current employer may or may not deploy.

Safe
A Lively room is a relatively safe 3D environment too. A room does, for instance, not share anything with other rooms: you can't see you neighbours' smut store or gothic SM cave through your windows of your room! Something like this happened to us in Second Life. Two female (former) colleagues of mine were once confronted with a couple of girls having 'lots of explicit fun' on the lawn of our companies' test site. The couple said they chose the site on purpose, in order to piss off corporate users of Second Life. Lesson learned: SL mainland is not suited for corporate presence..

Important step
Google Lively may not be full blown virtual world (and hence not be of much interest to me, personally), it probably is an important step in the emergence of a 3D internet, by dramatically lowering the bar to an entry 3D presence on pretty much any 2D website. Coming soon to a website near you: the 3D internet.

A couple of minutes after writing the above, I stumbled upon an interesting interview with Google's Mel Guymon. It contains useful extra information: "Feature: Lively - Google's Contribution to the 3D Social Web?"

Lively - first impressions

Yesterday I signed up for Google Lively. It reminds me a lot of the early (not the current!) Twinity beta, where the environment consisted of just a bunch of room, without a real world to access. Lively is the same; it's dressed up 3D chatrooms. It's not an immersive environment either, because you always run in windowed mode as far as I can see.

Avatar editing is quite limited, you can't tweak your avatar as I'm used to in SL. The result is an avatar that doesn't look like me at all. Avatar movement is done by mouse, which requires you to keep the mouse button pressed down if you want to move the avatar. I think this may be quite hard on your hand muscles if you stay in Lively too long.

All in all I spent fifteen minutes in Lively, which is obviously too short for a thorough analysis. More to come later!

I've created a new room, put in some furniture. Feel free to check it out or add to it!

Even more boom

My thirty days EVE account is about to expire. I've got a bunch of things to blog, about Second Life, Twinity, Google Lively and other stuff; I'll try to get that done early next week.

In the mean time, I need to make good use of those EVE hours left. Here's a sequence of screenshots of an explosion. It nicely illustrates how Eve depicts such an event: the initial explosion, the expanding shockwave, flying bits and pieces, and finally the fading fires afterwards. Larger pictures available here.

Bits of boom from the depths of space!

Dogfights in Eve Online

It's been a while, but I have participated in several dogfights in Second Life, with the Royal Caledon Air Force. Always lots of fun and lots of crashes (meaning: I got shot down a lot!) No problem, just teleport back to the airfield, rez a new plane and back into the fray you go!

Yesterday I found out that the same happens in Eve Online, too. A couple of corp members joined up for a pvp fight in the Mormoen system, and I joined in. We gathered at the Federal Administration station, where our corporation has a hangar. We were issues identical ships and ammunition; after that we headed out to a deserted part of the system where we fought each other. Unfortunately, just like in Second Life's RCAF dogfights, I lost, again due to lack of skills! With one difference: in Second Life I just didn't have the skills and the hardware to outmanouever the other players' aircraft, but in Eve I didn't have enough skillpoints to be allowed to use the armor repair set which was fitted on the ship! My opponent however was able to use that facilty; this meant that while my armor, once damaged, didn't repair itself, his did. Obviously, this made my ship more vulnerable, and so I lost my game. As in Second Life though, this didn't have negative effects on standings or points!

Five ships, almost ready for battle, orbit a cargo container containing a whole lot of ammunition:

"Journal of VIrtual Worlds research"

Yesterday, while looking for scientific data on Second Life's Linden Dollar, I stumbled upon something new: the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, facilitated by the Texas Digial Library. Their mission, in their own words:

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is an online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research.

Well, that sounds impressive, doesn't it? To be honest I was a bit sceptical at first, but the first issue does indeed have a couple of very interesting articles. And, I also note that Edward Castronova is an advisory editor. For those with more than a recreational interest in virtual worlds, this may become a good resource of information.

Old and new

In Second Life, several of my parcels at Timandra and Fortimus have been rented to tennants. We're still developing the land further, hopefully we'll be able to show some of that later.

Meanwhile, I've bought a new ship in Eve Online: a Gallente Catalyst, a destroyer class vessel. More firepower, better shields and armor. One thing I've noticed in Eve, is that ships are rarely 'just perfect'. There's always a tradeoff to be made! In case of the Catalyst, it's speed and medium power slots.

But still, with the added firepower and shields I was able to complete a certain mission without suffering any real damage. When I did the same mission with the Incursus frigate, I had to go back to a station for repairs - twice!

My trusted Gallente frigate, an Incursus:




The new Gallente destroyer, a Catalyst:

Even more bang for your buck

A sequence of three snapshots,showing another deadspace explosion in Eve Online. I should have been closer for more detail, but it's quite difficult to catch the moment of these explosions. Once you hide the interface to get the best snapshot, you can't tell when the explosion will occur!

The smugglers' habitat module begins to explode..



..the pieces fly through deadspace..



..and the aftermath.

Bang for you buck

Bang for you buck, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

A huge explosion marks the end of a smugglers' complex somewhere in Lirsautton space. Actually, it's deadspace - special areas for missions, only accessible to those involved in the mission.

Blowing up stuff in deadspace can yield some nice visuals, even with the relatively limited ATI card in my laptop.

Second Life and Eve: raw materials

One of the similarities between Second Life and Eve Online is, that both have an internal economy. CCP, Eve Online's creator, even employs a full time economist to monitor this aspect of the virtual universe, while Linden Labs maintains web pages with all sorts of interesting looking statistics concerning economical activities. Both worlds have their own currency, which can be bought or sold in world, but also on independent web sites - although in case of Eve Online's ISK, this is deemed illegal by CCP. In both economies, large quantities of currency change hands (between players) over the sale of goods: land and luxuries in SL, ships and hardware in Eve, mostly.

There is one big difference however between the economies of SL and Eve: raw materials.

In SL, objects are built from prims. They are the basic building blocks of SL! Prims can, literally be created from thin air. Any user can create prims, just like that, by rightclicking and choosing 'create'. Existing prims may easily be copied as well (under normal circumstances, depending on the rights you have on the prim of course). This means, there is no way Linden Labs can control the amount of prims (and, hence, objects) that can be created. The only limit I can come up with, is the physical limit to a given SL parcel: the maximum amount of prims the land is allowed to carry.

Creating objects is possible in the Eve universe, too. You just need a blueprint (which you must buy on the market) and raw materials in the required quantities. This is an important difference between SL and Eve: Second Life does not require raw materials for content creation in world, but Eve Online does.

And CCP does have some control the amount of raw materials available in the Eve universe at any given moment. Raw materials are usually acquired by players mining asteroids for ores, as depicted in the snapshot above. These asteroids are obviously programmed by CCP, who can control what ores and what amounts of them will be available for mining. This gives CCP control over an important part (the source) of the raw materials market.

Another aspect of Eve's economy, is loot. When I destroy an NPC ship (a game generated 'enemy'), the resulting wreckage has a cargo hold, that often holds one or more objects: ammunition, devices, goods, drones or weaponry for instance. These objects are (part of) one's reward. You can tranfer them to your own cargo hold, keep what you need, and sell the rest on the market. Mind you, some players loot dozens of objects like this on a given mission! You can also choose to reprocess objects, instead of selling them. This breaks the objects down into their individual compounds which can then be sold off as raw materials again. Again, CCP controls the contents of NPC ships (they are game generated, remember), hence CCP has control over the amount and types of objects that will flow to players on a given day.

Of course there are limits to the bandwith of control that CCP has. If one day asteroids would turn up empty and NPC wreckage would no longer contain loot, a player revolt would probably ensue. Players are used to certain amounts and types of ore or loot. But CCP could, by gradually turning the dials - a little more here, a little less of that there - definitely finetune or shift the economy.

To determine whether CCP actually does that I would have to read the Eve quarterly economical reports, and frankly, they don't interest me that much. But it's an interesting difference between the two in game economies.

Defeated

Defeated, originally uploaded by seredwoollahra.

In Eve Online, battle occurs every now and then. Player versus player if so desired, but player versus game generated enemies is very common too. Here, such a non player corporation (NPC) enemy ship (a typical 'belt rat') explodes after I have pummeled it with several guns and a scout drone.