Tiny Pirate

Had an idea for a web ring inside second life for games. And so I made it! It’s called GameRing and the SL Games Blog has a better description for it than I’ve come up with so far:

“Pirate Cotton, one of the devs behind DarkLife, is just getting started with a new gamer’s resource called GameRing. Similar to a webring, this is a listing of games that is accessed inworld. The idea is that each game in the ring hosts a GameRing information stand. Maybe you are at a place that needs teams and you are alone – by scrolling through the kiosk you find a game suitable for one player and think, “Hmmm… I never heard of that one – think I’ll give it a try.””

I recently picked up a Nike+ kit for an Ipod Nano. The kit consitsts of a small device that plugs into the bottom of your nano, and a pedometer you put on (or in) your shoe. You then run, and the device talks to you while you listen to music and tells you your pace, distance and time. You can use the Nike+ website to check your stats when you synch your iPod, and you can set yourself goals, or your friends challenges. It’s pretty damn cool! If you’d like to challenge me, send something workable to TinyPirate on the Nike+ site.

You can check out my runs via the cool Nike+ sidebar on this site. Scroll down a bit and there you’ll see it!

Hi there. I know it’s been a while (ok, 2 years or so), but DarkLife version 2 is up! YES! At last! The first Second Life MMORPG is back on its feet!

You can go and play on Istaria Prime and enjoy a small version of the content we’re preparing for you on Navora, which is now locked and closed down while we completely remodel the place. We’re very excited to show you the new game and I think you’ll all enjoy it. It’s had significant work on the code, and includes new features like:

News reports state that there will be a player-elected oversight body to watch CCP and be available to audit CCP operations in supporting EVE Online. It’s an interesting, unique idea and I hope that it works out. But despite this enlightened approach, it seems people in CCP still do not get why their players got so riled up recently. This is evidenced by a quote from an interview CCP dev Magnus Bergsson conducted:

Ten Ton Hammer: Ever since this story was released, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the reasoning behind a player base as large as Goonsquad willingly undermining the foundations of the company that created their game. Why would a group of people do that?

Magnus: They refuse to admit that they’re losing to another alliance, and the only explanation that they can figure out is that those guys are cheating. Not just that they’re cheating, but that they’re cheating in cooperation with employees at CCP. That seems to be the only logical explanation that they’re coming up with.

Saw an amazing video for Photosynth, which is a clever piece of technology put together by a company bought out by Microsoft. Imagine a piece of software that reads every public photo (eg, off flickr), and links them all together to create seamless 3D models and environments. Spread that across the world. I don’t know whether to be excited, or scared! You can also try a simpler demo yourself.

EVE Online’s developers, CCP, have produced a formal, written reply to the community about the recent accusations of developer collusion with players and other problems. Before I begin to nitpick I would like to applaud CCP for going to the effort and it’s a good start. Note, I say start. This is the second controversy to come from EVE Online, the first being referred to in an earlier post here and in many other places. They handled the first complaint so poorly back then that players are going to have a hard time swallowing what is a better effort by CCP to engage with the community.

There’s more developer controversy around EVE Online. An open letter to CCP has been penned by the SomethingAwful alliance, Goonswarm, where various claims of impropriety are put forward. Most troubling is the accusation in the letter of a direct coms line between a Band of Brothers (a large, powerful alliance) player and a developer, where the developer, on the player’s word, banned a member of the EVE Online customer service team.

Sadly, the Game SLave Wiki has died, and this time it’s not likely to come back. Johan tells me that the database has crashed and he’s been unable to repair it, and worse, the backups had been failing as well. It seems unlikely we’ll see it back. Meanwhile, you can try and keep up to date with games content in SL by reading the useful SL Games blog Onder Skall, Osprey Therian and Seeker Gray publish. It’s a good read!

Second Life is an interesting, challenging, unique environment. At least, that’s what I try and tell my friends, game-devs and some journalists I know. But what do they actually see in-world? Porn, shops, fetishists and casinos. Where’s all the potential of an alternate universe? Where’s the joy of creative human creativity unleashed and without limits? And I’m not talking collars, chains and whips!

Frankly, I find the casinos, clubs and porn of Second Life tedious and dull and I know there’s better content out there, if only I could find it! But the simple fact is that finding anything interesting, stimulating or challenging in Second Life is very, very hard. Hell, just searching for something ‘funny’ can produce some fairly odd results. Click the picture to the left to see an example from Second Life of the search results for the ‘funny’ search. Note, ‘mature content’ is not ticked! I have had to censor the picture to make it moderately safe for work!

I was checking the blog stats and discovered something interesting. I’m convinced Google thinks I’m a very strange, twisted, if not sick individual. Next to ‘tiny EVE’, the top result to produce a click-through to my blog was ‘group masturbation’! You can see the full list of searches that resulted in click-throughs to my blog below: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just treated myself to a lovely new digital camera. A Cannon S3 PowerShot. My older digital camera was looking very long in the tooth, with no zoom, low res images and generally poor quality (especially indoors). This camera, however, is perfect! The price was good, the image quality is excellent and it’s brim-full of options. It has a great zoom, great optics, and I don’t know how else it could be improved. Expect to see my flickr sidebar widget update a lot as I go out and use it!

I’ve been working on a video for EVE-Online for a couple of weeks. It’s a comedy music video set to the Electric Six tune “Gay Bar”. You can read about it on the EVE-Online forums, with links and replies from forumites: “Gay Bar – A Tribute to SirMolle”

• Now with a YouTube Link!

Onder Skall has a great blog on games in Second Life. He has lots of excellent reviews and overviews of content and games built in Second Life and highlights some of the more creative and interesting aspects of the world.

Me and my lady, Laura, have started a blog on food in Wellington. We both enjoy eating out and we both have strong opinions about the range of great, and not-so-great restaurants in Wellington. Also, Laura loves to take pictures of her dinners! Yes, it’s a strange habit, but I figured, why not put it to good use! Hence, a blog about food. You can go read our blog at Foodgasmic Wellington! I hope you enjoy it.

The good news is that Linden Lab has started to investigate the theft and hacking attempted by our little crook. Meanwhile, the event got some coverage on the Second Life Herald (with some interesting debate in the comments) and the legal angle was debated on the blog Virtually Blind.  As it stands now we wish Linden Lab the best of luck in their investigations and we hope the thief wasn’t as smart as he’d like to think he is!

Today I logged in to DarkLife to see a disturbing message from the coder, Bram (aka. Mark Busch in game). The post describes how we’ve had $400us stolen from our main ‘account’ holding our cash in Second Life for the DarkLife game. Read the rest of this entry »

Few things annoy me more than bad web site design. I want to give people money, I want to buy their products, but if I can’t research the product on your website or I can chuck it in a shopping cart and order it, chances are I will never bother spending money with you and will be annoyed your web site for wasting my time. And then I’ll blog about it because I’m angsty.

Harvey Norman New Zealand – A terrible website that tells you to download their catalog or you can flip through a scanned pop-up copy that does not even show enough detail to read the text of the ad! There’s no online ordering facility at all. Completely and utterly awful.

Overclockers – A nice company based in New Zealand offering good computer gear. Shame about the website. Red on black text? Hello, MySpace want their 13 year olds back! At least the shopping cart works I guess.

Reading Cinemas – For a long time this site was completely broken in Firefox and IE. You could simply not get film listings or times to display. Now, they’ve repaired it (took a couple of months) and have a great scheme where you can sign up for ‘rewards’ in return for most of your personal information. Hmm. What makes this dubious offer worse is that when you do sign up, they send a confirmation email which includes your login and password in plain text! Now, I don’t use the same password for everything, but I do use the same password for ‘junky’ things like signing up to crappy websites. It’s good to know any bored admin can access mail logs on the many servers between here and Reading and check out my password too!

ASB Bank – Their login page involve a simple one-step login process. In the UK many banks moved to a two-step process involving a user name and password as well as a drop down asking you to select a letter from your user name. This step was designed to defeat key-loggers, which are heavily used by East European criminal gangs in particular. No such sophistication for New Zealand banking customers.

I feel there’s an echo in here! Again, we’re pushing to get DarkLife updated to the next version, with a complete rebuild of the sim in Second Life. This time we might be able to do it though, Bram has his code about right and Crash and Logan seem keen on getting things squared away. We have most of the art ready, and we have what looks to be a good contractor available should we need someone to do some emergency building or texturing.

Phew! Fingers crossed we’ll have something more to report, as well as the new web page, in the next couple of weeks.

DarkLife is currently looking for artists and builders to rebuild around 3/4 of the sim for the next version of DarkLife. I wrote up a post about our request for tenders and I hope we get a few quality submissions! I think the chance to get paid for the work and the great publicty it presents artists should be a good draw. DarkLife gets a lot of coverage out there in the world so the boost to ones portfolio should not be underestimated!

Looks like I got l33t hax0red the other day, well, all of my host, Neosurge did. All fixed now, back to the joyous fun of TinyPirate!