tonyagudo.net

In a previous post, I talked about my Parcel Web Browser project, and alluded to another ambitious SL creation. That creation is PriMover, a GPL'd LSL script that allows builders to manipulate prims via chat commands instead of using the Edit window. Currently, PriMover can manipulate positioning, rotation, scale, color, texture and alpha. While it's sufficient for manipulation of single prims, the goal of PriMover is to minimize use of the Edit window to a point where it's not needed at all. While it's curently on sale at my store as well as SLX and OnRez, I have it available here since it's GPL'd for any interested LSL hackers.

Yesterday I came across a blog post by Dedric Mauriac, a Second Life resident whom I recently met. The post talked about a sim called "Greenies Home Rezzable". Greenies is without a doubt the most creative sim I've seen since Robbie Dingo's "Watch the Worlds" endeavour. You arrive at what appears to be a cave. When you get through the cave, you see an entrance to a big house. The real surprise is when you get out of the house. The entire sim is a like a giant apartment house. It's as if you got transported into the movie "Toy Story", but with little greenies instead of toys roaming around.

Coincidentally, it was St. Patrick's Day, and the people there were celebrating in style, complete with a giant green cake. There's even a store past the giant bookcase where you can get a themed greenie avatar(I got the Jedi greenie, but now I wish I got Darth Vader instead). Greenies Home Rezzable is a great place to explore, play around, and just have a lot of fun. I'll definitely be going back there soon.

As of the Second Life 1.19.1.0 RC client, a couple of new, yet very useful features has emerged. First, there's a new in-world web browser that pops up when you clck a link from chat history, IM or even from a llLoadURL function call. While that in itself would make things like my in-world scripted laptops much better, Linden Labs actually manages to top that with enabling parcel owners to now be able to set webpages as parcel media on prims with an owner-specified texture applied. They were careful with this as to make it so that only static pages can be rendered(no clickable links or multimedia), which is a reasonable restraint. However I believe with a little script-fu it is possible for parcel owners to overcome the limitations and implement a crude, yet fully functional in-world web surfing device.

In fact, I will soon start coding up a sample GPL implementation of such a device. My implementation will use the "webprim" feature as a safe page preview function, and offer the user the choice to load the page with the in-world browser.

However, making an in-world web device isn't my only project as of late. I've also released a script that allows prim manipulation via chat commands. I'll talk more about that in my next post.