Building of a new sword has begun in earnest

The post is cross-posted from http://www.daikonforge.com/webtab/2007/12/28/building-of-a-new-sword-has-begun-in-earnest/

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Amazingly I was able to work in Second Life almost all day yesterday, from about 8:00AM to about 2:00AM with only three crashes.  I must have logged in no less than 30 times, and uploaded no less than 50 textures while trying stuff for a new approach I’m working on.  Building proceeded without too many hiccups, and I experienced only a few of the reversions that had been plaguing me for the last few months.

With Ayame and Esprite coming out with new swords recently, and having taken so much time off from swordmaking, I find that I have become highly motivated to come up with something new, and more excited by the new sword I am making than perhaps any of my previous swords.

Ayame especially helped to get me fired up, though I’m reasonably sure that it wasn’t something she planned.  Ayame has been doing a great deal of very cool work with sculpted prims, using them in a large variety of products ranging from motorcycles to furniture to swords.  [NOTE: Did you know that she makes and sells that many different types of products?  Lots of people don't.  Look in her profile picks, go to her store, check out all the cool stuff]

I have to admit to being EXTREMELY surprised when I first found out that Ayame used sculpted prims to such good effect on the new Dynasty Flame sword, because when sculpted prims were first introduced I must have spent easily a couple hundred hours exploring their use and researching how they might be used in swordmaking, and ended with the conclusion that while they were very cool and possibly pretty useful for organic-looking items their utility in swords was extremely limited.  Boy did she prove me wrong!

While I do still think that there is a lot that sculpted prims can’t do any better than "classical" prims, I’ve figured out some extremely cool things recently that I can do with them that will (in my opinion at least) enhance the build quality of my new sword.  It’s hard to resist the temptation of trying to use a new and exciting tool like this for everything, even when it’s not necessarily the best tool for the job, but I’m loving the fact that this kind of exploration and research has got me truly fired up about creating a new C:SI weapon.

I still have a very long way to go with both the animations and the actual primwork, but I figured that with all the people asking when I’m going to make a new weapon I had better at least post an "I’m alive and working on something new" message.

Okay, that’s enough, back to work for me!

Whoah! Over 1 Million Duels!!! (Updated)

The post is cross-posted from http://www.daikonforge.com/webtab/2007/12/23/whoah-over-1-million-duels/

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Last September, while writing my "How many people use C:SI?" post, I privately wondered how long it would be before I could announce that there were now over a million recorded* duels fought using the Combat: Samurai Island combat system…

I’ve been basically ignoring the official C:SI forums lately, and I’ve felt bad about it, but between working two RL jobs and some personal issues it just hasn’t been something that came up in my thoughts a lot.  Today I decided to take care of that, in true geek style.  I dug through the administration interface of the new CMS and figured out how to create and publish an RSS feed for the forums, and then subscribed to that so that I’d be able to know whenever someone made a new post on the C:SI forums.  Yeah, pretty nerdy of me to do that, but now I’m automatically notified rather than having to remember.

Not satisfied with that, I decided to also put the 10 most recently created C:SI Forum topics on the sidebar of my blog, so that they’d get a little more exposure.  And that’s when I looked up and saw it…

Some time in the recent past, C:SI has recorded OVER 1 MILLION DUELS!  Woot!  Not only that, but check out the difference in the number of users since September 9, 2007:

Since then there have been nearly 3,000 new members, and over a thousand new sims where duels have been fought.

That’s some pretty decent growth, if you ask me

* Not all duels in the history of C:SI are recorded here.  This is only the count of duels fought since the grid-wide scoring system was implemented.

[UPDATE] Esprite has made an official announcement on this, and has included more information (see the announcement for the rest of what he had to say) :

Though we’ve been developing C:SI for much longer, we first began keeping track of scores on our beta scorekeeper October of last year and just recently we surpassed over 1,000,000 duels gridwide! Overall pretty sweet, and almost half of those came from the last 4-5 months.

Ashes Ninjaken v1.0 Released

The post is cross-posted from http://www.daikonforge.com/webtab/2007/12/23/ashes-ninjaken-v10-released/

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Esprite finally recently released a C:SI-compatible version of his ninjatou!  The official announcement can be found on the official Combat: Samurai Island website, and it is also listed on the SL Exchange marketplace.

I haven’t had much chance to use it in "real world" situations, as I’m horribly rusty at fighting now, but I’m pretty interested in trying it out.

One of the things I find most interesting is that with this sword Esprite is continuing the trend of trying new things and expanding the combat system.  This new sword is somewhat faster than previous swords, but does less damage per hit.  At least in theory this will balance out overall so as not to be out of balance with other C:SI weapons, though Esprite did mention some nervousness about that, since he knows (as all developers know) that once it’s in a lot of user’s hands then (and only then) will any balance issues or any other kinds of subtle issues come to the surface.

I have heard some people mention that they are not big fans of the special attack style that stays in one place (the Musashi Sizuka naru Shi does this as well), because people can avoid it easier.  I think there is definitely some validity to that, though there is an aspect to it that I really like.  I also believe that it’s good to try new things, and perhaps more than anything else that’s what I’m most jazzed about in C:SI lately.  Obviously, if C:SI just keeps putting out the "same old thing", it will stagnate and our long-time members will lose interest.  You "old timers" know who I’m talking about, too, don’t you?   

This means that we need to keep trying out new ideas, and it’s highly likely that not all of those new ideas will be popular with everyone (heck, many people don’t seem to like special attacks at all, let alone new styles of special attacks).  This is at least one of the reasons why you are now seeing dual-wield katana from Musashi, and the new Ashes announced above.  Even the new Dynasty Flame from Musashi has a slightly different style of special, and Archanox has been working on some very interesting twists on the combat mechanics in his dual-wield daggers.

On a semi-related side note, I am actively working on a new weapon.  I had toyed with the idea of making a ninjatou, as I kind of like that style of weapon, but at this point I’m thinking either a wakizashi if I do a short blade or a regular-sized katana with a dramatically different set of animations.  I have been playing with some concepts that fit the larger sword better, I think, and if I can manage to pull this stuff together I think the result will be very cool indeed.  I guess we’ll have to see which of these ideas work and which don’t, but I’m very excited to be trying some new stuff.

Aimee Congrejo’s C:SI Combat Vids!

The post is cross-posted from http://www.daikonforge.com/webtab/2007/12/15/aimee-congrejos-csi-combat-vids/

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I’ve always liked watching someone more skilled than I am fight, and there’s something especially interesting in watching the fight from their point of view.

Aimee Congrejo has put up several such videos for all to see in a handy YouTube collection, demonstrating matches against people like Cody Tripsa, Djinn Holiday, Fransisco Jessop, and Xamida Heron.

Freakonomics says : "Ask Philip Rosedale"

The post is cross-posted from http://www.daikonforge.com/webtab/2007/12/07/ask-prince-philip/

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Philip Rosedale, called by some as “God-King of Second Life” and by others as simply “Philip Linden”, is the subject of one of today’s Freakonomics blog posts.

Freakonomics doesn’t have much to say about him in four short paragraphs, basically reiterating all of the same points that most Second Life users already know, but.. But! It does have a pretty good offer for those who have always wanted to ask him a question and actually get an answer back :

Rosedale has kindly agreed to answer questions from readers of this blog, so fire away.

I only recently began to follow Freakonomics, but when they gave the same opportunity for readers to question Bruce Schneier (probably not of interest to most SL’ers but of tremendous interest to me) I knew I was going to be hooked.

Hopefully we will see - as with the Bruce Schneier Q&A session - some very good questions being posed rather than the simple hate and sarcasm we typically encounter on the official Second Life blog, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

Got a question you want answered by Philip? Click on the first link in this post.

Age verification and C:SI

The post is cross-posted from http://www.daikonforge.com/webtab/2007/12/06/age-verification-and-csi/

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I’ve gotten some follow-up from a few people and wanted to post it in reply to yesterday’s post about the grid-wide Age Verification Beta.

Esprite replied via IM last night about the issue as it relates to the Samurai Estates sims, some snippets of which I’ll post here:

Esprite Xavier: Overall I don’t know what’s going to happen in the SI sim … I don’t think the SI sim will be effected but there are more mature themes in Tokyo specifically ones that sell animations … In the combat areas however we are going to take a different route, though I’m not sure if we’re ready to say publicly what our plans are, but its pretty simple … The goal of these ideas is to increase traffic while better controlling griefers, and most of all to relieve clans of the the population that just wants access to sims rather than the clan community which I’ve gotten some opinions about, and to focus more on joining clans just to be a part of clans.

He did have more to say about the issue, but I think the key point there is that it’s not a simple problem with a universally simple solution, and requires careful consideration of how to best protect both the investment in the land and the interests of the communities that use it.  I was relieved to read that they are also focusing on how to make things work in a positive way.

For those who didn’t follow the comments on yesterday’s post, Colin had this to say:

I think there’s a good possibility the Tokugawa sims will only allow age verified members. Domo apparently had an incident of child avatars having sex in his sim and now bans any child avatar on sight if they don’t change their shape, even if they just want to duel. I know that child avatars have nothing to do with age verification, but I think Domo is concerned about keeping his sims as legal as possible.

Domokun has an pretty large investment in SL sims, and I can understand why he’s very concerned about that.  It’s pretty lousy to be in a situation like his where any random stranger can, with malice or just in ignorance, do something that puts your investments at risk.

Although I did get a chance to log in this morning before work, and saw that Domokun was online, my available time was too short to really get an opportunity to ask him about it directly.

Age Verification available Grid-Wide

The post is cross-posted from http://www.daikonforge.com/webtab/2007/12/05/age-verification-available-grid-wide/

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Just announced on the Official Second Life Blog:

The Age Verification feature (now available in beta) will be included in our release candidate today. This means that estate and parcel owners can now voluntarily flag their land if it contains adult content, and Residents can choose to access these restricted parcels by verifying that they are, in fact, adults. Age Verification is the latest of a number of tools and services to help Residents control and manage their own Second Life experiences.

I’m a little more concerned about the issue than Colin appears to be, but since Age Verification is for the time being voluntary, I don’t intend to verify my age. And I do tend to agree with Colin that it provides a little CYA for land owners as well as Linden Lab.

My unease has more to do with the way that personal information is mishandled by third parties than any other factor, and is not specific to Second Life. I’ve simply seen too many instances of identity theft and personal information shopping to be comfortable with the idea. Anyone interested in verifying my age can spend 10 minutes talking to me, or quiz me about the software development industry if you are still unsure

I’ve not heard KatanaBlade or any of the other C:SI devs display any strong opinions on the subject, so while I can’t say so for sure I don’t (at this point) believe any of the C:SI sims are going to be marked as Adult Only. For that matter, I’ve not heard about any other C:SI-themed sims owned by anyone else that are planning on requiring age verification, which should be encouraging to those that don’t choose to participate.

I’m very curious how this is going to play out, and honestly hope that it turns out to be as effective and as painless as Linden Labs seems to believe it will be.

[EDIT] Reading the comments on the SL blog, I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) in how many people are reporting a failure of the system and are unable to verify.