Interfacing Your Human to Your Avatar, Part 2

Many months ago, I posted an article on how to use a Saitek game controller to control your avatar in SL. Well, toss out recycle that P2900, because very soon (ie: this month) you'll be able to go one step better and use a 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator with SL...not just for controlling the joystick flycam, but for moving your avatar around as well! I don't know about you, but I'm placing my order for one of these now =)

(Story reported in Massively.com, title link takes you to the article, with video.)

New NON-Linden SL Grid Opening!!!

I don't know about you guys, but I find this very, very exciting! Especially considering the improvements they've made to the avatars and object system...it's all mesh-based!

Read about it here on Massively:

http://www.massively.com/2008/02/10/new-non-linden-grid-opening/

and check out the offical Openlife Grid blog here:

http://openlifegrid.com/

Woohoo!!!

Interfacing your human to your avatar with a game controller

Saitek P2900 Wireless

The gamepad pictured above just may be a godsend to those of you who are interested in controlling your av without having to use the arrow keys. I purchased my Saitek P2900 last week, after doing a lot of research on controllers that could possibly be useful in SL to control avatar movement. Every button, the two joysticks and the D-Pad are completely programmable and can be mapped to keyboard presses (even combos) or mouse controls. In fact, all of Saitek's "P-Series" controllers are fully programmable. I opted for the P2900 because I wanted the convenience of a wireless controller. That way, when I go to type in chat, the wire will not be in the way. Now, all of this sounds fantastic on paper, but how does it work in the real world (and more importantly, in SL)?

Well, I only just got around programming it yesterday, using the "FPS" setting as a template to start from. The D-pad is mapped to arrow keys, the left joystick works as the wasd keys, the right joystick acts as the mouse. I have set up various buttons for pgup, pgdown, left mouse click, right mouse click, esc, m (mouselook), and ctrl+r (running). Then, I decided to try it out in-world.

First, let me start by saying that it works...quite well, in fact! The left joystick works extremely well for controlling avatar movement and is much smoother than using the button keys, and this is coming from someone who always uses "advanced walking" (left mouse clicking on the av, using the up arrow and steering with the mouse). Using the buttons took some getting used to, as I had to remember which button did what, but obviously that would become second nature in time. Some tricky things: If I forget to get out of chat mode, it fills the chat with things like "wwwwwwdddddddddddsssssssss", so that will take some getting used to, and using mouselook is a bit more complicated than usual. While in mouselook, the left joystick will still control avatar movement, while the right joystick will control where your camera is looking. Coordinating the two can be very, very tricky, but this will probably be of concern only if you use mouselook a lot.

I think some of my settings need a little bit of tweaking, but in the meantime, I can honestly say that trying out one of these controllers is certainly worthwhile for someone sick of using arrow keys. When you also consider the low cost of these controllers (they start at around $7 US for the P220) they really become a tempting purchase.

I should mention that there's some other options available other than the Saitek controllers. Here's some links to either DIY projects or controllers that are known to work with SL, at least in some degree:

DIY Controller Box
Using a Wii Controller with SL
Making a SL Controller
3DConnexion's SpaceNavigator

If anyone knows of any other DIY solutions or commercially available products, please leave a comment and I'll add it to the list of links at the bottom of this post.

MySpaced

Don't ask me why, but I made a myspace page for myself here:

http://www.myspace.com/octoberhush

It's a band profile because I plan on uploading my music too. I already have a myspace page for my "other" music...but you don't get to know that one ;-) Heehee.

Feel free to add me if you also have a myspace page! RL avatars and SL avatars welcome!

I'll add photos, music, and info very soon, I promise.

A new dawn, a new day

Well, as we're all acutely aware, the latest version of SL was released yesterday (v 1.15.0.2). Amazingly, this version seems to be running better on my work computer than the last version, though not without its bugs of course. (My work computer is an Apple G5, dual 1.8ghz, 2GB ram, ATI Radeon 9600 XT w/ 128mb ram.) Some of the bugs I've experienced seem to be pretty common: friends list issues (hippos??), lag, slow-rezzing textures, and surprisingly...the reappearance of the rainbow noise texture bug. Yes, I have the "open GL vertex buffer" option deselected, and it's still there. I'll file a bug report about that the next time i'm in-world on my work computer.

Amazingly though, I was able to go to Midian City last night without too many problems once everything rezzed completely, which took a while. However, the lag did make me splat against the sides of buildings as I was trying to leap from rooftop to rooftop =P

I haven't had the chance to install and run the new client on my home computer yet, but I'm expecting it to run much better than my work computer, since it always does. It's a much newer and beefier system than my work mac. (My home computer is an Acer motherboard-based PC running XP and also now Ubuntu. It has an AMD64 3500+ processor, 2gb ddr ram, and a Nvidia G-Force 7950GT w/ 512mb ram) I'd like to try installing SL in both XP and Ubuntu to see which one runs better, but I first need to get the drivers for my video card for Linux before I can do that. I know next to nothing about Linux, so that may take a while =P

The right tools

As most of you probably already know, I like to chronicle my SL experience with photography. It's a natural extension of my own photography skill and experience irl; I went to school for photography and worked as a professional photographer for a while, then moved to the graphics/printing industry with prepress production, graphic design, and most importantly, scanning and photo correction and retouching, which is my forté. At work, I have a very nice, top-of-the-line 22" Mitsubishi CRT to do color correction on, but at home I never had anything even remotely as nice. Until now, that is.

I recently purchased a very nice Acer 22" widescreen LCD, which was a huge improvement over my cheapie X2Gen 19" non-widescreen monitor. The only problem I've had is that LCDs seem to be more difficult to manually calibrate than the CRTs I'm used to. I got a reasonably good calibration out of it manually, but if I wanted to be serious about doing photoshop work at home and taking consistent SL photos, I had to bring in the professionals. So, I bought a Colorvision Spyder 2, which arrived on my doorstep yesterday.

For those of you who don't know, the Spyder 2 is a combination of software and hardware. The hardware portion is a sensor that mounts on your monitor and plugs into a USB port. The process takes about 5 minutes and is easy enough for even the most novice user and requires a minimum amount of input during the process. Once it's finished, it gives you example images that you can view "before and after" with your old settings and the new, calibrated settings. You can use the Spyder 2 on a CRT, LCD or even a LCD projector.

Let me tell you, after calibrating, the difference is striking. There's no way I would have been able to calibrate the monitor this accurately manually. I highly recommend this to anyone who is into SL photography, using photoshop, or regular photography or scanning. The model I bought was only $57.99 from Newegg.com (whom I highly recommend for computer parts). At that price, there's no need to struggle with inconsistent color. Just buy it, spend a few minutes calibrating once a month, and you're done. I might bring it into work to see what it can do on my "pro" monitor since it did so well on my reasonably high-end LCD at home.