Right, time to roll my sleeves up and get to work. Tearing myself away from the sheer virtual tourism if Second Life is quite tricky though, partly because of the clever, but lag-paralysing, streaming content system they use.

At first I hated it. Having come right from World of Warcraft, the sheer time it takes to load anywhere was something of an affront to the senses. Most normal MMOs install their worlds beforehand – hence Everquest 2’s 4GB installation and similar for other titles – it’s mostly art. Sometimes they’ll want to add bits, or change things, and this is done via the patches. What actually gets downloaded from the server during play is surprisingly small – mostly gameplay information; avatar positions, combat results and dice rolls, chat text, etc – numbers, rather than ‘things’.

Second Life has an 18MB install, and the rest is pushed at you as needed, temporarily cached while in use, and then forgotten about until the next time you go there, or meet that person. This is very slow by comparison, but what I’m starting to see now is that if you’re patient enough to be okay with that, the world itself can become almost infinitely diverse, in a very literal sense.

A good example is housing estates. Using the normal system, Star Wars: Galaxies is only able to offer perhaps 20 prebuilt types of house model, making trips through the Tatooine deserts a very bland experience. Seen one ‘Small Tattooine House (Style 2)’, you’ve seen them all. It’s faster, and much easier on the servers, but does get quite dull quickly. In Second Life on the other hand, you build houses just like anything else, in any shape and texturing you are skilful enough to model. This means that pretty much every house you fly past is unique, and the normal sterile housing estate effect is totally negated. Of course it can be like flying through treacle sometimes, and consumes an incredible amount of bandwidth, but all in all, I’m starting to learn to be patient – once you stay still for a bit and let it load, it is worth it, because everywhere becomes interesting. The same applies to people as well – plenty of people look the same as each other, but unlike WoW, that’s their fault, not the game.

This is all very well, but it does make it difficult for me to just stay put in the sandbox and get on with some creation of my own. To help, I’ve decided that I need a project – a manageable building task that will need a little bit of all the skills required to be a fully-fledged godling in this new world.

Voila: Vanu Sovereignty.Com: The Thresher (Images 4, 5 and 6)

A bit of background then. When I first started playing Planetside, I picked the Purple team; the Vanu Sovereignty. The spiel goes on about them being technology freaks, incorporating alien tech with their own, but the practical upshot of it all is that their tanks hover, and shoot ball lightning and laser beams. Neat! One of the first vehicles I tried in the training simulator was the ‘Thresher’, a two seater driver/gunner combo light-attack antigravity hovertank, and it was a blast. SOE had really got the physics of it right, and the thing was tremendous fun to drive – bumping and sliding all over the place, minor strafing, very high top speed, and of course, works over water. The passenger has control of the roof mounted turret, the ‘Flux Cannon’, which is basically a swivelling ball-lightning machine gun.

Of course as time went on, I discovered that despite being a lot of fun, it did rather suck. The driving physics, while very cool, meant it was almost impossible to control with any kind of precision in a densely populated battle situation. It had very low armour, so you had to go fast to survive, but was very vulnerable to landmines - despite being a hover vehicle. The turret was okay, but the projectiles it fired travelled at relatively slow speeds, making leading very difficult, even when the vehicle was stationary, so the best plan was just to spam the balls in a spray and hope some hit. The individual lightning balls did not do splash damage, and didn’t do very much damage per shot. When the vehicle was moving at full speed, the turret became nothing more than a suppression weapon, and tended to just draw attention. It did make a very good fast transport vehicle for two, but in general, for the certification points it cost, there was always a better choice for any of it’s intended roles, and most people went for the Magrider instead, (Images 1 to 3 in the above link) a much heavier and more fearsome hovertank, with a flat-trajectory rail-gun turret, and driver anti-infantry gun.

(In the same category, The TR got the Marauder, which was a three-man redneck pick-up truck with machine gun turret and mortar launcher, and the NC got the Enforcer, a low slung beach buggy with roof-mounted bazooka.)

Shortcomings aside, I’ve always had a fondness for it though, so I intend to recreate it in Second Life. The project has several stages:

  • Create Model: This is possibly the easiest bit, involving a few reference screenshots like the ones above, and a lot of dragging pine boxes about in-game. The main difficulty here is of scale. I have no idea how big in metres, the original Thresher is, so will have to settle for ‘looks about right’.
  • Paint Job: Picking out the colours for each body panel is easy enough, but going beyond that, to actual textures is much harder. My Thresher is almost certainly not going to be exactly the same shape model as the PS one, so merely using its textures won’t work, even if I could extract them somehow. Lot of Photoshoppery coming up there. Also, each individual texture I upload to SL, costs me 10 of their in-game ‘Linden Dollars’, and my freebie account only pays me L$50 a week, so it’s cheaper if I can find what I need already inside the game someplace. (Incidentally, current RMT rates seem to be at about L$260 = US$1, roughly. Self-discipline surrenders!)
  • Particle Effects: It won’t be the same without all the dust billowing out under it, and spray while over water. The lightning balls will need similar work.
  • Sound Effects: Again, the ‘whumm’ noise as it tears about the place is quite important, as is the gun noise. Sound files, like textures, cost L$10 a go to upload.
  • Seated Avatar Animations: The driver and gunner sit back in a sort of racing car driving posture. Hopefully, something like that exists already in there, as animations also cost L$10 to upload, and require Poser to create, which I don't have.
  • Script Physics: This will be trickier, as not having an active Planetside account at the moment; I’m having to work from memory for how it handles, etc. The basics of vehicle physics scripting are comparatively easy – there are a lot of good examples I can borrow and adapt on the SL forums. The turret itself and linking it to the passenger seat, rather than the driver one will take a bit more research. Turning the lightning balls from pretty sparkles into actual and deadly missiles will be quite a challenge.
  • Testing: I’ve already found a dedicated race-track area for this, complete with a lake! For the weapon testing, I’ll need to go visit the combat sandbox and battle areas, and try to survive long enough to get some useful feedback. There’s all sorts of etiquette surrounding SL’s PvP that I’ve yet to learn too.
  • War!: Once all that is done, I need to crush my enemies, drive them before me and listen to the lamentation of their women. And then look into military contract franchising…gotta pay all these L$10’s somehow! Interestingly, because I own the IP for anything I create, it’s possibly me that SOE would come after for ripping their tank off, rather than Linden Labs. Neat cop-out for them, particularly if I start selling it for USD. It’s unlikely I’ll get that far though, and anyway I suspect my ‘Thresher’ will be so different to the real one at the end of all this, that I’ve nothing to worry about, particularly given the number of Jedi Starfighters I’ve seen in there already.

A big list, but having poked about around the SL world a bit, I can’t see anything in it that is ‘impossible’ to do to a ‘good enough’ level with a little research. I feel confident!

Mostly though, I think it’s this kind of project that *is* the content in Second Life – certainly if like me, you find that merely chatting and rummaging though other people’s houses when they’re out isn’t quite enough to make a whole game.

Screenshots to come, once I figure out where the hell on my hard disk it’s dumping them…