Yes, every Linux-using Resident of Second Life is now brimming over with love and affection for Tofu Linden, the Linux client developer for Linden Lab!

Today marks the first time the Linux client has had any sort of file upload/download capacity! Right now it’s pretty rough around the edges, as there is still no file browser/picker, but it works! (Just rename the image to upload.tga and place it in your SecondLife/your_name/ folder, then use the upload menu item.) Tofu tells us that the file picker is in the works, which is also very nifty!

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What I’m proposing here is fairly radical, in that it represents a very different method of building in Second Life. But, like everything I propose, it is not only possible, but feasible; I could devise the algorithm for it myself, with a bit of research as needed. This feature would require a more significant change to the data structure for prims than before, but the possibilities are astounding.

Throw away the Taper attribute for objects. It was great, but it will be made entirely obsolete by the feature I am proposing: section radii. Instead of describing the relative size of the beginning and end of the prim, as Taper does, Section Radius would describe the size of the prim at every point along its path.

NB: Every prim, with the exception of Sphere, can be represented as a two-dimensional shape such as a square or circle, which is extruded along a path to create a three-dimensional surface. For Box, Cylinder, and Prism, that path is a straight line; for Tube, Torus, and Ring, that path is a circle.

Take a look at my fancy diagram (to the right, click for a larger version). In (1), we are describing 5 different sections (solid lines), with another 4 values being interpolated between them (dotted lines). The gray line at the bottom represents the full span of the path from beginning to end.

In (2), we see a top-view of a cylinder with the sections that were defined in (1). Note that by smoothly interpolating between the defined sections, we can achieve a very smooth result without defining a large number of sections. In (3), we see a top-view of a torus with the same sections (or, at least, a passable representation of one; it’s hand-drawn, not mathematically computed, so it may not be very accurate).

In the example, all the sections were equally spaced, but that need not be the case. Nor need there be a set number of sections. An arbitrary number of sections could be defined, with data storage increasing linearly with the number of sections defined (i.e. if we define twice as many sections, it takes twice as much space to store the data).

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Today, a joyful reunion marks the end of an amazing true story of struggle, perseverance, and hope.

Prim, a purebreed plywood cube and the adored pet of Jacek Antonelli, was returned to his owner today after being missing for nearly two weeks. “I had almost given up hope of ever seeing my dear Primmy again,” says Antonelli. “I’m so glad he’s back. My life just wasn’t the same without him.”

Jacek Antonelli looks on as Prim stretches out for a much-needed nap outside their home in Hallasan.

Prim went missing on September 4 after he bounced away from the cottage where he resided in Hallasan (located along the south-east coast of the Most-Southern Continent). “Prim needed some excercise, so I set him on physical and gave him a script to set his llTargetOmega,” tells Antonelli. “But I forgot to put on his leash before I closed the edit window, and he bounced up into the air, right over the house! I was so surprised.”

Jacek Antonelli searched for hours to find Prim, but he was nowhere to be found. When Prim hadn’t been returned after several days, Antonelli feared the worst: “I thought he must have bounced into the ocean and drowned, or gotten trapped in a sex club and asphyxiated.”

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Mera offered a thought stream which got me thinking about deriving identity in activity—the idea that you are what you do. If you center yourself around doing N, who would you be if you stopped doing N?

(I am reminded here of the crises of people who, after working their entire lives at the same job, reach retirement and are at a loss as to how they should spend their time. The job had become their identity.)

This struck a chord with me because I do tend to derive a lot of my identity from what I do. In both Lives, I keep myself perpetually buried in projects, so that I will always have some activity to define myself in relation to.

I create, so I am a creator.
I teach, so I am a teacher.
I do, so I am.

Assuming, of course, that it is undesirable to be left in a state of doubt about one’s identity, one should endeavor to prevent and cure such a state. Defining oneself in relation to only one or two things is risky; interests come and go, and the anchor that holds today may not tomorrow. A less risky option (and the one I am prone to do) is to grab hold of as many activities as possible, so that each matters less. If one fails, the others are there as backup. But there is a danger to this too, that of spreading oneself too thin, so that there is no meaningful benefit in anything.

No matter how we define ourselves in relation to other things and activities, there is always the very real possibility that we will lose or shift away from them.

But what if we define ourselves not in relation to something else, but as being ourselves, no matter how we change?

I am myself.
I look a certain way, act a certain way, and enjoy certain things.
In the future, I will look another way, act another way, and enjoy other things.
I will be myself then, too.

(We’ll see.)

The Build window should have a tab for controlling a prim’s particle system.

That’s simple enough, yeah? But I like to hear myself type, so I’ll go into more detail.

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Textures take a long time to download, even on the asset servers’ good days. The fact is, they use a lot more storage space and bandwidth than the actual prims they cover. While moderately-sized textures will weight in at several kilobytes, a prim takes perhaps a hundred bytes (the exact figure does not matter at this point, only its relative magnitude). How can a three-dimensional object take less space to store than a two-dimensional image?

The trick is in how prims are created. Every single prim is parametric‘ or procedurally generated. Second Life has functions (i.e., procedures) which take certain parameters (e.g., size, twist, taper) and generate the three-dimensional mesh of, say, a torus based on those parameters. So you don’t have to transfer the 3D mesh, just the parameters; the mesh can be constructed by any client locally.

Textures, on the other hand, store pixel data for the image. Of course, image compression is used, and varying levels of detail are generated (so you only have to transfer the lowest level of detail needed), but it still requires much more data than a prim.

But, just like it is possible to procedurally generate 3D primitives, it is possible to generate 2D images, i.e. procedural textures. Procedural textures are common in 3D computer animation as an easy and storage-inexpensive way of creating high-detail textures. Most animation packages come with a number of texture procedures, and although the complexity of the procedures varies, they all have something in common: one procedure can generate a (seemingly) unlimited number of similar (but not identical) textures, based on the procedure’s parameters. In addition to the “standard” texture procedures which come with the program, many packages allow knowledgeable users to create their own procedures.

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