Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Game Art Module in Second Life

Newish Term, Newish module to use Second Life, where we are introducing 1st years to explore Virtual Environments.

Zoning up the Collective Island

So far, using Megaprims to divvy up the college's island, using scaled floorplans of their project to determine the size of their building zone. The students have been introduced to the basics of second life, from texturing and modelling with SL prims and Maya for Scuplties to customising and creating animations for their avatar, concurrently as they've been developing concept art / and schematics for a prototype of a game level / virtual world space.

The students choose from several environment option, which was to give a breadth of different ways an online 3D world could be used.

1) - a Cthulu-esque Sunken Temple - "At the Mountains of Madness" - designing concepts for a Tomb Raider type puzzle quest area for a single player

2) a floating Steampunk Island village - for a MMORPG

3) a 3D virtual walkthrough of a future Internation Space Station in the year 2050

4) an educational collabrotive game to teach Electricity (keystage 2/3 ) with the theme of Frankenstien's Castle.

The reasons for choosing these's types of environments, was to take benefit of working vertically on the Second Life island. So Cave Temple on Ground, Floating Islands 200ms up - Space Stations 500ms up - so there was less overlapping of building projects.

Anyway , early days, hopefully over the next few weeks start seeing stuff appear.

Friday, February 05, 2010

Slideshow Presenter on Reaction Grid

Slideshow Presenter in Reaction Grid

Finally, got round to copying a version of my whiteboard across to ReactionGrid.
This version lacks the overlay tools, but now has a nifty touchdetection control for the pointer instead.
One of the advantages of ReactionGrid (or other Opensims) is that this slideshow board can be resized beyond Second Life's usual 10m prim limit - the version in the image is 30ms wide ... with nothing stopping me making it as wide as the sim :)

( gee that's powerpoint on terrifying scale! )