SpaceNavigator, Mighty Mouse and Second Life on the Mac

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Mewsic Bing
on May 8, 2008
in How-To, Machinima and Second Life
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It’s happened, finally!
Second Life now supports the wonderful 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator series of 6-axis controllers. It’s like a mouse but for navigating in 3D. 

Now natively supported in the latest Release Candidate of the Second Life viewer you can use the SpaceNavigator to move, look and build in a more intuitive way within Second Life. 

There’s one caveat though, if you happen to use a Mighty Mouse on your Mac as well as the SpaceNavigator, Second Life will fail to recognize the SpaceNavigator.

Simple fix: unplug the Mighty Mouse and use a different mouse until this issue is fixed. And should you not have any spare mice lying around, it’s probably a good idea to switch to a better mouse than the Mighty Mouse anyhow. 

Now don’t get me wrong, the Mighty Mouse is wonderful, especially the scroll-ball but the resolution and accuracy leaves a lot to be desired, alas, the Mighty Mouse is still using traditional optical technology instead of the newer, much more accurate and less jumpy laser technology found in newer mice. 

So, machinimatographers rejoice, finally we can get those awesome, smooth, through the wall, hover, spin and floating camera movements without wasting time setting up paths using scripts within Second Life - on the Mac!

And apart from that, the SpaceNavigator just looks really cool in the dark too! ;-)

Now if Linden Lab could fix the freezing viewer problem … but I guess step by step is the way we’re going here.

Sun Microsystems event a huge success

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Mewsic Bing
on May 2, 2008
in Events and Second Life
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This past Tuesday I had the great honor to be hired by Sun Microsystems to stream and record an internal corporate event that they held within Second Life. 

Thousands of Sun employees attended this over 12 hour long happening, with talks by pretty much all of the high execs at Sun Microsystems including the CEO and the Founder.

At one point, 320 people were watching the video stream simultaneously, while there were approximate 200-400 in Second Life. Overall more than 1700 people saw the live stream on UStream that day. And thousands visited the event live.

Sun Microsystems used four Class 5 sims that were closed to the public to run this event. With the stage in the center of the 4 sims to spread load amongst the server and the seats for the audience arranged within a 20m circle around a circular stage where the presenters stood. The talk was streamed into Second Life via music stream and at one point we reached the servers maximum capacity and later had to up the capacity of said server to 450 slots. 

There were ample of support crew and concierges available to help everybody and the team who created this event did an awesome job handling all the logistics. 

The building in which this event was held spanned all four sims and this makes it the single largest structure in Second Life albeit not (yet?) accessible by the public. I was only able to view the entire complex by setting my Second Life viewing range above “ultra” to 512 meters.

I chose UStream.tv for feeding the video to the Sun Microsystems intranet and captured at the same time using IShowU on my 8-Core Mac Pro. There was a chatbridge installed on the Sun intranet site that allowed the viewers watching on Ustream interact with the presenters and audience in Second Life.

Second Life only crashed once (but it didn’t just smoke, it burnt) which is pretty good for this application but still I hope that maybe Sun will get to write a viewer (java based?!) and show Linden Lab how it’s done ;-)

In total I captured about 3.5 Terabytes of video that will also be shown on Sun’s internal TV station and the day ended with a party at Sun Microsystems’ Club Java. 

It’s been an amazing day and it’s been a great honor for me to work with Sun on this massive happening!

This is the future!

Havok 4 causing Havoc

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Mewsic Bing
on April 29, 2008
in Machinima and Second Life
. 0 Comments

Yes, I admit. I was one of the many people longing for better physics in Second Life since, I don’t know, version 0.3 or so. And while nothing has really changed in the points that matter to me (vehicle physics for planes and cars, tighter object boundaries around sculpties etc.) I welcomed the move to Havok 4. 

Until last week when I started work on another machinima project:

Here I was, with several actors, a scripter, extras, builders and other people, as I was getting ready to set up my shots using Filming Path, a hud driven camera path tool, ready to shoot some nice, pans, zooms and orbits. As I got up in the filming seat after having set up everything and started the movement, something odd happened. Camera shake!

Now I’m used to camera shake in RL, you get it from wind and cheap tripods, bad rails for camera tracks, uneven wheels on the tripods etc. etc. but in Second Life? What the?!

At first I thought it was just a little bug related to lag or the sim being slow, so I reset the path, compiled again and went for take 2 … again, my view was shaking to the point that it was unusable.

The very talented scripter Ryozu Yamamotu was with us at the shoot and with him I went through a few troubleshooting “ideas” such as making all objects near the path phantom, recompiling the path, reducing the numbers of nodes etc. etc, but in the end nothing helped.
Next I tried the free and excellent Alt-Zoom Cam which failed me completely (it wouldn’t even move). Damn!

Alternatives? Well, since my 3dConnexion SpaceNavigator isn’t working properly in SL (I’m on a Mac), not even with the amazing ControllerMate application and Second Life no longer detects my Logitech Freedom 2.4 Joystick (it used to …) I had to shoot everything without movement. A pain since this clip is pretty static itself and a little camera movement would really freshen everything up. 

Now how do I know that Havok 4 is causing this? Simple, the sim was just recently update to Havok 4 and I shot at the exact same location about 2 weeks earlier, without any problems of course.

I really hope that the makers of these great filming tools will be able to fix this issue but right now, Second Life to me is a nightmare for Machinima. 

Click here to watch a short clip showing the camera shake from left to right. In this clip it’s relatively subtle and I might have accepted that for the shoot but back at the shooting where I first encountered it, I got a wild up and down shake …

I welcome any suggestions or if you know of a camera path tool that still works, please leave a comment! I’m desperate!

Making Windlight look even better

Published
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Mewsic Bing
on April 28, 2008
in How-To and Machinima
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So as per request from Willow Caldera here’s how I got the Twiller Video look the way it does. 

First of all, in Second Life itself I set the time to sunset and since I was in a hurry … nothing else. I captured at 1280×720 (smaller than that and you loose detail although for most stuff 640×320 is still fine. 

Now in editing (this is in Final Cut but any video and graphics app has these filters) I applied a blooming and a soft focus filter.

This is all a bit over the top but for this particular video I thought it to be appropriate. 

Check the screenshots below for the exact settings (click to enlarge): 

Final Cut Filter Settings:

Before:

With filters:

Showdown at the Statehouse Corral

Published
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Mewsic Bing
on April 28, 2008
in Machinima and Second Life
. 1 Comment

In this production ran by Popcha! for the Poker Strategic Thinking Society I did the filming, editing and sound design. It’s been out for a few weeks now and the next one in the series will be out soon! 

SL Twitter Meet-up Dance Video

Published
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Mewsic Bing
on April 27, 2008
in Events and Machinima
. 3 Comments


Saturday night, 10pm, the air is still warm when a group of twitterers come together in Second Life. After a few hours the group more or less fades until later when some people return to dance. Harmless at first until Kitty pulls out her line-dancing machine and before anyone realized it people were doing the thriller dance, in (almost) perfect sync, without any prior practice. 

Coincidentally I happened to have my little virtual camcorder with me and as I stepped out of my body to film us all doing this mesmerizing routine the following happened: 

(Please be advised that what you see here is improvised, has never been practiced and certainly might never be seen again in this form ;-) )

Watch the small version (13MB)

Watch the full HD 720p version (42MB)

To save you can either, when Quicktime Pro is installed, click on the small triangle on the lower right then select “save as source” or select in your browser, File / Save as … (Thanks to @TimothyL for mentioning that!)

GDC Day Three

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Mewsic Bing
on February 22, 2008
in Events
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Friday already and it’s been the last day of the GDC ‘08. 

My overall impression of this conference is “awesome”, I only wish there had been more time to visit the expo and more spread out sessions, there were so many non-audio related I would love to have attended (you should have seen the people lining up for the game design session on “Portal” …) but there simply was no time to see it all.

So, today I spent roughly 1 1/2 hours on the expo floor, looking at all the audio related stuff as well as alternative input devices for better camera control for my machinima projects. 

I’ve had a chance to talk to the guys from Vivox who do the voice chat client in Second Life (amongst others) and heard some pretty interesting news about in-client recording coming up as well as the ability to call in and out of the game and send text messages. Yes, your avatar is getting her or his own number! 

Some of the sessions I attended was “More Tales of Audio from the Third Dimension” which was a followup to the same speakers session at GDC ‘06 and covered some interesting new developments in interactive audio.

Next up was “26 Slick Tricks for Game Dialog and Other Voice Bits” which was given by DB Cooper and Patrick Fraley. Very informative and educational! Learned a lot here that I’ll be applying from now on to all my voice work.

Last but not least was a session called “Interactive Music Systems: Planning, Producing and Executing an Adaptive Score” which introduced and explained the creation and techniques for creating adaptive scores, with plenty examples demonstrating the discussed techniques. Again, lots of things learned that I can apply to my own work from now on!

So, that wraps it up, Sound’r at GDC 2008. It’s been extraordinary, lots of fun and extremely helpful to hear from everyone discuss their techniques, ideas and developments and wow is it going to be an exciting year for games and more so game audio! 

If you have any questions about the GDC, want more information, go to www.gdconf.com or simply leave a comment. 

See you in Second Life and yes, I’ll definitely be at GDC 2009!

GDC Day Two

Published
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Mewsic Bing
on February 21, 2008
in Events
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What a day! 

Day 2 here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has been awesome. Absolutely awesome. 

The first session I attended was “Dynamic Zone Emitters, Improved Spatialization of Large Regions” and I really took away a lot here. The session showed several examples and techniques for creating realistic sounding, large areas such as for example a river, jungle or spreading wildfire. This gave me several cool ideas for use in Second Life using my “secret” surround sound techniques and combining them with dynamic zone emitters. I can’t wait to get back to Second Life and try this out because I believe it’ll be exactly what Second Life needs as the next step to a much better audio experience. 

Next I went over to Moscone South to see Ray Kurzweil deliver his Keynote, titled “The Next 20 Years of Gaming”. Now I’ve been a big fan of Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions and of course his unrivaled series of synthesizers but this Keynote was a real eye opener. His main point, that he proved without a doubt, was that most things around us aren’t happening in a linear but an exponential way and how predicting future technologies can allow for great timing in product development. I would recommend that you go to the GDC website and download his slides and the video recording of his Keynote because it’ll definitely change the way you see, well pretty much everything. 

Next up was the Audio Post-Mortem on the video game “Heavenly Sword”. Again a top notch presentation giving insight to the whole sound production process from a to z. Lots of stuff to learn here and good news for us sound designers: Sony believes in outsourcing to sound designers. Excellent! :)

Last but not least was the G.A.N.G. (Game Audio Network Guild) Sound Design Demo Derby. Unfortunately I was not able to enter my sound design demo this year due to simply not having the time to downmix my demo reel to stereo as required but listening to other peoples entries and hearing the feedback from the very top in sound designers from this industry was very inspiring and educational. 

Now it’s 11.15pm and I just got back from the 6yth Annual G.A.N.G. Awards. Everybody was there but there was one clear winner. BioShock. BioShock. BioShock. BioShock. BioShock. BioShock. In all but one categories where BioShock was nominated (7 in total), they won. They had some tough competition like HALO 3, Flow, God of War 2 and other top notch games but they won over and over again and I gotta say, rightly so! They took a huge risk in their decisions regarding sound design and they definitely deserve this for taking those risks and for helping stir up the industry quite a bit!

I’m logging off, looking forward to the unfortunately already last day here in San Francisco at the GDC 2008 but I’m just as eager to get back to my own studio and putting all this newly learned knowledge into practice!

GDC Day One

Published
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Mewsic Bing
on February 20, 2008
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There’s no second chance for a first impression. That being said and this being my first time at the Game Developers Conference my first impression is a pretty darn good one. 

The sessions I attended today on game audio were all of the highest quality, starting with “Audio Post Mortem: BioShock”

Now I have to say I’m a huge fan of BioShock. To me it’s the first “new” game in 5 years and I don’t say that lightly. It was a great honor to me to be able to listen first hand from the audio folks at 2k how they approached BioShock, what there intentions and ambitions were and how they achieved their goals. 

The second session of the day that I attended was “Sound Design Tools on the PS3″ … well actually the official title was “Better Tools for Sound Designers on PlayStation3 through Open Architecture Designs”. It was an interesting insight into the world of sound design for the PS3, a look at their tools and some info on the upcoming  iXMF standard introduced by the IASIG. 

My last session that I visited on this day was “Audio Post-Mortem: HALO 3″

Another very interesting session, that this time described some of the challenges and advantages of sound design on the XBox 360, with some great insights on the “how they did it”. 

I was amazed at the detail the presenters were willing to give away on how they accomplished their goals and their openness about the pitfalls and problems encountered. The value of learning from other peoples mistakes and more so their successes is incredibly valuable especially for people new to the game sound industry. 

Check back tomorrow for more from the Game Developers Conference 2008 here in San Francisco.

Sound’r at the Game Developers Conference

Published
by
Mewsic Bing
on February 15, 2008
in Events
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The bags are packed!

On Friday I’ll be getting on the plane to San Francisco to attend the annual Game Developers Conference. 

I’ll be visiting several presentations focusing on game audio and music and of course on Virtual Worlds. I’ll be posting daily updates here on this blog.

If you too are attending the GDC and would like to meet up, send me a quick email or comment. I’ll be in SF from the 15th until the 24th.