Another SL presentation tool: Slide Wheel
Posted by Peter | Filed under Programming, Virtual Worlds
My supervisor (Daniel) and I were giving a SLOODLE presentation at a conference in Second Life today. When we were discussing it earlier this week, Daniel suggested a really novel way of presenting the slides… and since I’m never one to back down from a programming challenge, I built it!
The result is the Slide Wheel. All the slides in your presentation are displayed in a big wheel in mid-air. When you want to show a particular slide, the whole wheel rotates, and the current slide jumps to the foreground. I’ll upload a video of it soon, but for now, here’s a screenshot:
Slide Wheel screenshot
You can get this item free on XStreetSL, as I am releasing it open source. I am sorry it is not perfect yet, but the requests for me to make it available tell me it’s in high demand! Please give it a try, and contact me if you have any questions or if you find any bugs.
Happy presenting!
OpenGL gotcha: my particles are too small
Posted by Peter | Filed under Programming
As far as graphical effects go, a particle system is one of the most versatile. It can be used to simulate things like electrical sparks, dust clouds, smoke, fire, and water. However, there is one problem which I have been annoyed with several times in the past, but until now I hadn’t really bothered to fix it.
I would spend ages programming a particle effect, tweaking all the parameters to get it just right, and it would look fine at first. But then, on another computer, or on a different screen resolution, or even just with a different size of window, the effect suddenly wouldn’t look right. All the particles would be too small or too big.
You can see this problem in the image above. It shows a particle effect for a rocket thruster — the one on the left is how it should look, while the one on the right shows what happened when I roughly tripled the size of the game window.
OpenGL gotcha: remember GL_LIGHT0
Posted by Peter | Filed under Programming
In my experimenting with some simple scene geometry and lighting today, I stumbled into the same pitfall I’ve strumbled into several times before (you’d think I would have learned by now!). While moving around the scene, I found that the lighting on surfaces appeared to change depending on my camera angle — if I looked at a polygon square-on, it seemed much brighter than if I was looking slightly away from it.
There are two common reasons for this problem…
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PHP4/5: Object orientation and compatibility
Posted by Peter | Filed under Programming, SLOODLE
Some compatibility problems were reported following the release of SLOODLE 1.0, and they largely appear to centre around the object-oriented plugin system I developed for the Presenter module.
The idea is fairly simple. The SLOODLE core or 3rd party developers can create plugin classes to extend the functionality. These will all belong to a structured inheritance hiearchy, and will be automatically detected and loaded by the SLOODLE framework. However, it has been a big challenge maintaining compatibility for both PHP4 and PHP5, given that the object orientation of the language has changed so much in that time.
After considerable efforts, I think I’ve finally found the solution, and it’s infuriatingly inelegant.
Epidemic security flaws
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
Automatic updating is becoming very widespread on the Windows platform at the moment, particularly with security software such as firewalls and antivirus. I will wholeheartedly agree that many users simply don’t have the time and/or inclination to learn how or why to initiate updates manually, so they are at risk without automatic updates. Additionally, the average user probably wouldn’t know or care that an update is going on. Even if a popup appears saying “update complete”, many users have tunnel vision or myopia, so they just won’t notice it.
Unfortunately, painting all users with the same brush leads to a big security flaw…
