That’s a great point.
Ok, first up is my projct.
DarkLife
DarkLife uses the SL world as an environment to run a MMORPG in. We have been rented a sim (a server which is a square of land about… I dunno, 10 acres??) by a player and are currently filling this with the content required.
The 15,000 lines of code for the game are largely written by a guy i know in Denmark and now we’re just finishing the building (which is extensive). The zone we are using will have a village, a castle, a mine/temple to Cthulhu (hehe), a swamp and a graveyard to adventure in. Some pictures can be found at my blog.
DarkLife will work a lot like Diablo in that it’s fairly simple but still a lot of fun. We know it’s a real winner with players too as our first pass at this system got a LOT of attention.
SpaceThinkDream
A beautiful sim I visited last night, matched by an equally beautiful web page at http://www.spacethinkdream.com. Functional, beautiful, slightly minimalist and very nice. Not the huge busy arcades that seem to be everywhere else. Each of their limited range of products a real work of art.
It’s fascinating how much collaborative, almost corporate entities are springing up in Second Life. The STD team, me and Mark Busch, the people who built Sim Horror… and others.
Sim Horror
Check out my blog for a picture from this amazing amazing insallation. Two entire sims built to last just two weeks before they were torn down. The theme, halloween and a town where zombies have killed everyone and players must puzzle out how to stop it. The AMAZING look of this sim was largely missed by many people because getting past the maze was so hard.
The artist behind a lot of it all, Jimmy Thomson, creates custom textures for each wall, lights those textures as they will be in game and creates shadows to apply to objects that appropriately match what’s going on in-world. Oh, he’s also created a way to do waving grass. A real step-up in the look of the game and entirely player created.
Schizophrenia Simulator
Mentioned in my blog, this is a simulated hospital ward. As you walk through it you have an ‘insane’ badge on that produces all kinds of weird voices “kill yourself, you’re worthless”, similar to what schizophreniacs experience. Visual and other hallucinations take place as you walk through the ward and there are notes about each and the person who experienced them. Quite frightning but also, quite fascinating.
The XXX side of life
I should mention it because… it’s fruity! Not necesarily good, but it seems popular… Yes, SL has become the most adult game available. Custom animations mean that anything is possible! From home-made strip routines, to… Well let me explain. I wandered into a shopping district the other night and found a shop full of ‘adult’ material. From sex toys, to beds which would animate your body in… certain ways (much better if someone else is there to animate with of course)… through to A frames… erm… and other things to lie on that I don’t exactly have a name for. These things sometimes had other things that … well, ok, i sat on one of these to see what would happen and … it was disturbing!
One bed had colored balls (to indicate a position) for four different people. Argg!
Did I mention that you can buy ‘realistic’ naked skins and… erm… the appropriate genitalia to attach? Of course, this genitalia is scripted to ahem… repsond appropriately!
Assorted
Other cool things. Cubbey Terra’s aircraft (beautiful and functional), roller coaster rides, ingame to out of world email possible (thus you can have in-game stuff feed through to a web page), import animations from Poser, if you don’t own land the game is a one-off $9.95, Skydiving - a sport generated from a love of going up high and falling: You can buy parachutes and sky boards that create custom animations while you fall… and on and on :)
If I remember other good stuff I will post it.
Peter
