Archive for the ‘Random thoughts’ Category

The past week was pretty uneventful, I accidentally burned myself with cooking oil and wrote a “class” for an SL/LSL project. Christmas is approaching, I will probably get one or two special things ready by then 🙂

I had to redo all the texture renders for the bit today, turn out I forgot a few things, there was a pair of rivet missing from the model ( !!! ) and none of the eyelets for the chin strap were done.

As i was reuploading the models i had an idea and toyed quickly with a few prims to add a pair of bit burrs.

Now for those that don’t know a lot about horses, bit guards and bit burrs are basically washer looking pieces of hard rubber or sometimes leather that are slid on each sides of the bit’s mouth piece.

The bit guards are used to prevent the horse to bite on the bit shanks instead of the mouth piece, bit burrs usually have little rubber teeth or stiff bristles on the side that face toward the horse and are used as a discipline device for horses that resist the action of the reins.

Now personally I’m a big fan of overkill looking ponyplay bridles, with lots of straps, metal pieces, blinkers and all kind of things that gives off a feeling of strict control, so I guess I could make a set of bit guard/burrs that could be attached and detached from mouth pieces a bit like the blinkers on the bridle.

The following pictures show bit guards and bit burrs. This is shown on the rubber bit because i do not have any other mouthpieces ready yet, but it would normally be for metal mouthpieces only, the rubber bit is just too thick for these. Also keep in ming the burrs would be real meshes, not prims, this is only a mockup.

I’m adding a poll on the side to see what everyone thinks.

Things have been going well for the most part, drawing chains is now handled from the root prim along with a primitive implementation of LockMeister V1.

I removed the “inversion” code which allowed two objects to “invert” the order they have been clicked, it felt like a good idea but it was way too confusing to use when the chain direction would reverse for apparently no reason.

I also ran out of memory. Which is bad…

Because of this, I’ve spent a part of the afternoon re implementing a lot of the code I had removed initially, (tell me about wasting time…). It wasn’t an entire loss tho, now all the “visual” aspects are handled by a child script now, so I have about 16k to play with.

That’s not much considering I still have to re implement the limb database and the animation code.

This little break was much-needed, ( I forgot to say in my earlier post that is was only going for ONE WEEK! ) sadly i didn’t enjoy it as much as i wanted, because i had to reformat my computer (backups, format, fuckups and reinstalling everything) which took about 3 days.

Since monday my time was spent on two things:

• Some changes on ethernia.net, let’s face it, this website is slow (EDIT: MUCH FASTER NOW!).
• More work on TouchBound.

On this second point i started the quite ambitious task of converting the TouchBound base code so an object can draw more than one chain, this is a very “hairy” task because 90% of the code only assume that you have the lock on one side and the chain point on the other.

Those changes would allow items like the chastity belt to exist ( I made a very nice sculpted one and simply shelved it when i realised how complex the script was going to be.

The initial goal hasn’t changed, I’m still working on reducing the differences between all the TouchBound items script wise, and relying more on lists and not if/else stacks.

It’s a pretty daunting task because I will most likely have to rewrite every single TouchBound objects in the end.

I want to thank everyone for their patience while I take care of this… and fail to release the new pony bridle…

Due to several events, my birthday, the french president elections, various trip to my closest relatives and some boring RL things I am obligated to do, I think I’m gonna take a little break.

Of course it doesn’t matter if I suddenly have an irrepressible urge to code.

I need to do some house cleaning in the TouchBound code and then propagate it to all the accessories before i get on with writing the bridle code, here is a sneak peek in no specific order:

1. DONE Move back from the satellite scripts all the code concerning setting prim appearances, there really is no reason anymore to have this in secondary scripts since llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast().
2. DONE Uncap the maximum number of allowed visible locks.
3. DONE Trash the old “Find link number by name” code and replace it by a plain list.
4. TODO Finish LockMeister V2 and implement it.
5. TODO Get rid of at least one satellite script.
6. TODO Propagate all the mentioned changes to all the TouchBound products.

I found this today in my Tweet list, granted I’m not Texan, nor do I plan to play BattleField3 (unless it’s really that good), regardless, I do have an opinion on the subject.

A large launch party for Battlefield 3 … women disallowed from attending to protect them from misogynistic insults http://bit.ly/pfoPHE

This actually brings a pet issue of mine that isn’t so much about this kind of events, but the women representation in video games. There seems to be a vocal player community opposed to gender parity (mens and women in equal proportion) in FPS shooters, especially those who slide toward the “military simulation” type of game.

Everytime I made a request, either for a mod, or for a future sequel of a MilSim game to include the ability for the player to pick his gender, I met some enthusiast but also a lot of hostility which could more or less be summed up into the following “bulletproof” arguments:

Female Addon for ArmA 2 OA

• Women are not allowed in active duty positions.
• Just because it is realistic doesn’t mean it has to be included in the game for the sake of realism.
• You can’t see your soldier anyway so it doesn’t matter.
• Being able to play as a girl do matter for girls.
• It’s a waste of time and money to create twice the amount of characters.
• In most cases it’s just a matter of creating an extra set of heads.
• Women don’t care about playing their own gender.
• I know a lot of girls who won’t buy a game that doesn’t let them play a girl without a valid reason.
• Games that allow you to shoot women are the kind of games mens do not want to play.
• An enemy player is an enemy player,
  

  Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

  why would his gender choice matter to you?

• Women are statistically less fit than mens for being soldiers.
• A lot of mens are unfit for active duty too.
• Random misogynist comments (women’s place is in the kitchen, etc…)
• Do i really have to answer to this one?

A few sordid facts on the state of the US Army

I cannot help but wonder if this is the kind of society that we are pushing left and right across the world? In the end is it really this much better than the treatment of women in religious extremist countries? Ultimately by allowing this sort of discriminations we only show that our so-called “gender equality” is only some sort of “gentleman concession” where we only allow it because it’s not causing problems.

Why does the US Army get to pick the rules they have to obey to? The law of equal opportunity should just be the same whether you are the department of defence or the department of education.

There is some fundamental ground work to do to reconstruct the standards under which the US Army lives, currently engaged women are pressured not to report when they are submitted to sexual assault or rape in their own unit for fear of being demoted or removed from their unit.

It’s no wonder that women do not want to engage in the army when the second pass time of soldiers, after killing people, is beating off all day. The pentagon estimate that 80 to 90% of the sexual assaults go unreported and on all the veterans sent in Afghanistan and Irak the number of female soldiers who admitted being subject to sexual assault where up to 25%.

A female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. – Representative Jane Harman

What does this has to do with a LAN party?

Nearly nothing, other than in this case, one of the role models of realistic FPS players are those same soldiers, the US Army may have trouble to calm the sexual urges of its troops because of a hyper masculine ideology but it doesn’t mean that simple gamers have to copy this mysoginistic system simply because they are playing games that mimic a world whose chain of command decided that women have no place in.

There is a very well-known effect called “group of ideas” where the mind tend to more easily accept an idea that is unacceptable if it is bundled in a group of more acceptable ideas.

That’s pretty much what we are seeing here, Peoples admiring a specific ideology (enough to play video games that are all about it) who also accept the more “noxious” ideas that are bundled with it.

Denying access to women because they will be subjected to misogynist behavior is such a backward view, you should encourage good sportsmanship by sanctioning the person who is obnoxious, not silence the potential victim. Peoples who cannot comport themselves as evolved human beings in front of a woman will never realise that their comportment is inappropriate if you remove the person they are offending from the equation, if anything, this reenforce their belief that they are right. Taking such preëmptive actions is never a solution because you deny to an already small part of the community from sharing an event with the others but you also comfort obnoxious sexist jerks in their own beliefs.

But i could be wrong, maybe the organisation team actually believe that women have no place in this sort of event?

Sources:

Powergaming BF3 launch party informations
(It appears they replaced the content of the post entirely as I am writing this)

Sexual Assaults on Female Soldiers: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

The private war of women soldiers

Female US Soldier for ARMA2 OA (v 3.0)

Here is the result of a little visit in the Wasteland sims, I hadn’t been here in a long time.

Performance wise, even without the shadows enabled, this is a fairly busy sim when it comes to visuals, and because of it, my FPS where abysmal (i apologise for not using anti aliasing for the pictures).I suppose all the jagged buildings blend the borders between the parcels more than would classic/neat builds. I spent a little time visiting some of the various builds, especially Penny Patton’s little shop/warehouse. There was a few underground tunnels to visit too.

I visited this place a while ago and it seems to have evolved for the better in general.

I do have some criticism about the project although. In my opinion the sims are really densely packed, it almost feels a bit unnatural for a wasteland themed sim, unless you’re thinking about , lets say the DC area in Fallout3 , but i think my frame rate would say thank you to a less tightly packed layout.

This is the kind of projects that would probably benefit from being hosted on OpenSim, the whole “Sell products to pay the land it is sold upon” pressure, even if it isn’t as obvious as the rest of SL is still very present and tend to spoil the experience a bit. Again a grid solely dedicated to the project would offer better performances and a more unified experience.

Another thing i feel the estate is missing is a cohesive soundscapes, most of the radios are nice but the changes of style and mood are very aggressive, where you would expect a very discreet musical ambience like you would get in Fallout3’s desert. (Although some are actually quite nice and fitting)

Happy Bivouac – The Junkyard
Ruined Prim tower – The Junkyard
The Atom Outpost – The Junkyard
The Wastelands, Post Apocalypse in SL : Fort Stygian
The High Mesa, Cormac
Air China cargo flight 281A, + The Abyss Bar , The Great Fissure
Kronbelt

That’s it i’m officially 7 years old in SL!

I always found strange/funny/sad that, while I, and a lot of small/independent developers can correct a small bug or carry out a small feature request, and deploy it in only one hour or less. On the other hand i find sad examples like these:

Actalogic / UIG Entertainment

They seems to be unable to provide even a single patch since the game release ( 3-4 months ago ) despite a lot of empty promises from the forum staff the game is in the same state since it’s release with a multiplayer that barely qualify as an alpha and many bugs left and right that result in lost implements or corrupted saves.

I know that patches hae to go through QA in a company before being released but… seriously, on steam the game is advertised as being multiplayer!

Timegate Studio

While i can only applause them for taking upon themselves to release a sequel to their own game without the support of a publisher, I can’t help but wonder why they still haven’t patched elementary problems ( 1 month since release ) like the FOV stuck at 75 (this is a real problem in a game where a few weapons like the knife and the shotgun require engaging other players at point-blank range.

Also, what kind of sick  joke are they trying to pull by making dedicated server (ranked or not) only available through a single game server provider (have they never heard of players who host their own servers?) I don’t really know if they are actually trying to drive their game into the ground on purpose, but I know that the Peoples who could be running their own servers on their own hardware don’t like being double dipped “just because”.

It makes you wonder what is the point of becoming an independent game company if you’re going to behave even worse than under the heels of a producer…

Now do not misunderstand me, those games, in my opinion are good. The companies making them however are… well they are terrible.