By popular request, the Terra Wind Rider hot air balloon now includes "group mode". While in group mode, any group member can board the balloon and fly it. This means that you can park your balloon on group property for any member to enjoy at their leisure.

If you already own the Wind Rider and you would like to have this feature, please contact me for a free upgrade.

Update: I've never mentioned this before, but the Wind Rider has an "easter egg", as programmers call it. If you say "drop" while flying the balloon, your av will throw a penguin over the side. The penguin, of course, falls to the ground because it's flightless... and then goes splat. This is surely the sign of a disturbed mind.

On a whim, I dropped by the ever-popular The Shelter, a club for new arrivals to Second Life. At the side of the lounge area there's an age detector. Various people clicked it... "6 days old!", "13 days old", "10 days old!". Then I clicked...

Age Detector: Cubey Terra is 1242 Days Old!

The room fell silent. then...

Renee Roundfield: Cubey will have to the be host of the SL Antiques Roadshow.
onionpencil Musashi: lol
onionpencil Musashi: he may BE the antiques roadshow ;)

My avatar is officially an old fart.

Here's another intresting link I found via BoingBoing. Apparently Sweden plans to set up an officially-sanctioned "embassy" in Second Life.

Already several large corporations have entered Second Life, including Toyota, GM, BBC, and NBC, to name only a few. This appears to be the first real-life government representation in the virtual world. It's certainly unprecedented in Second Life... although maybe not an entirely new concept.

I'm reminded of government websites on the web, way back when the web still had that "new net smell". Governments had text-only informational websites in specialized domains. The United States, for example, has the ".gov" domain. Canada has the ".gc.ca" domain.

I imagine this "embassy" will be much like early government websites but less useful. Unlike a website, for example, you can't read or download official government documents from Second Life. SL doesn't have the ability to display more than plain text.

And here's a question. If Sweden has an embassy sim, will that server be considered Swedish soil like its real-life counterparts?

Link: Sweden to set up embassy in Second Life

It's the end of an era in Second Life. I am forced to ground my autopiloted blimps, along with the cargo planes, jets, and light planes. I had hoped to keep all of my AI aircraft flying out of Abbotts Aerodrome, but it's just no longer feasible.

What led me to this? At first, Linden Lab introduced a small change to how a parcel of land handled incoming objects -- if the land was already full, the object would be returned with an error message. That immediately swamped my email inbox with forwarded error messages -- hundreds of them per day -- and filled my inventory with returned copies of various AI aircraft.

But... I worked around that by making the AI aircraft into "temporary" objects. They could still fly over full land, once Linden Lab had removed the error message for temp objects. So the airships flew again.

Then Linden Lab introduced a new option for landowners -- the ability to prevent objects from entering their parcel. At first, it seemed like a brilliant idea to me. Nobody could litter your home while you're offline or shoot at you from your neighbour's land. It could be a fantastic peace-keeping tool that thwarts malicious, gun-toting kids.

It's a fantastic "anti-griefing" tool, but the no-object-entry option has a serious side-effect on all vehicles. Try this: Hop onto one of my blimps that depart from Abbotts. Eventually, you will get dumped unceremoniously to the ground as you hit parcels that don't permit object entry. You may even have to restart SL to continue. No-object-entry parcels are like invisible, impassible walls that reach kilometers into the sky. If you could somehow make these walls visible, you could look across the mainland and see nothing but a forest of towering barriers.

What happens now? It used to be possible to fly across the mainland, but now we can fly only in special areas, like private islands and the six vehicle sims (Balance, Fame, etc). Now I'll have to stop my automated flights -- the airships, light planes, the cargo planes -- because I'll never know if the route will remain viable or if a landowner will block flyovers. Now we have to re-think plans for events like balloon races between airports. We have to give up flying between airports entirely.

I hope Linden Lab will reconsider the design decisions that have led us to this point.

• We need to keep the skies open for air travel -- no more booting people from aircraft for flying into invisible barriers.
  
• We need to see significant reduction of border-crossing glitches. The situation has deteriorated badly over the last year or so.
  
• We need to see banlines on the minimap, so that we can avoid them instead of getting ejected or crashing or being thrown off-world.
  
• We need to see a significant improvement in the handling of physics objects -- less time dilation, fewer sim crashes. Even the dedicated vehicle sims can barely handle more than a couple of vehicles at a time.

I hadn't intended to post a manifesto here, but I have to say something. It is incredibly disheartening to finish a new aircraft -- weeks of effort -- then crash out of SL on its first flight because I hit some kind of invisible barrier.

I just want us to fly across SL the way we used to. I want to log into SL without an avalanche of error messages that caps my IMs. I want aircraft in SL to be fun and reliable everywhere again -- not just in private sims. Things have to improve soon, or there won't be much left to do in SL but stand around and chat about how laggy things are.

Here's something that seems like it escaped from Second Life: Personal Blimp.

While testing my latest biplanes, I've engaged in a lot of dogfights lately. My planes all use the Terra Combat System (TCS) -- a sensor-based combat system similar to laser tag. It's a lot of fun, but what I realized is that TCS really needs a scoreboard.

So yesterday I started work on a team-based scoring system. I thought it would be a quick, easy gadget to cobble together. But then of course it evolved into a horribly complex system that uses email for client-server communication. It's now day two and I've put at least twelve hours into the thing... and I'm only just getting started.

I'm absolutely serious when I say that the TCS Scoreboard could revolutionize wargames in Second Life. The scoreboard can handle several players per team ("RED" versus "BLUE"). After each player registers and the battle starts, TCS combat itself can take place absolutely anywhere on the grid and hits and kills are recorded on the scoreboard.

TCS works in both vehicles and attachments, so we can have all kinds of RED vs BLUE engagements all over the grid -- planes, tanks, artillery, infantry... ninjas even. You don't have to keep your battle be near the scoreboard.

Here are more examples of games you can play using the TCS Scoreboard:

• A lasertag arena using TCS-enabled handguns.
  
• A dozen players with TCS lasertag handguns spread out over the grid. The objective: locate and assassinate every member of the opposing team.
  
• Arial TCS dogfight pitting one squadron against another.
  
• Large-scale TCS wargames between two armies across several sims.

I already have the basic registration and scoring in place. I just need to work on the interface and do some testing, if I can dig up some volunteers. It should be done within a week or so.

OK, so I became a little obsessive about working on the Nieuport 17 and finished way ahead of schedule. It's now available at Abbotts Aerodrome, SL Exchange, and SL Boutique.

I have finally put away the virtual cans of paint. Here are a few glimpses of my version of Billy Bishop's Nieuport 17 while the pixels are still wet.







Next step... make it fly!

In 1917, Canadian Fighter Ace, Billy Bishop, flew his Nieuport 17 in combat against German pilots, including an engagement with Manfred von Richthofen -- the infamous "Red Baron". By the end of the war, Bishop had shot down 72 enemy aircraft. Among Allied aces, he was second only to René Fonck, with 75.

As a follow-up to my replica of the Airco DH.2, I am now working to create a virtual replica of Billy Bishop's distinctive blue-nosed Nieuport 17, with Bishop's tail number B1566. It has been a difficult task, as the Nieuport 17 shape is particularly hard to achieve in Second Life. Prims just can't be cut, twisted, hollowed, and otherwise tortured into the precise shapes needed. It is close, though.

I'll have to do more research to confirm the shade of blue for the nose cowl. As the story goes, after Bishop's fifth kill, someone brought out a can of blue paint in defiance of official regulations, which prohibited the custom paint schemes that were common among German squadrons. I would assume that the blue they had on hand would be the same colour used for the insignia and tail. In some depictions that I found, the blue was much lighter.

During my search for reference photos, I also found "Mark Miller's 3-D Nieuport" -- a page of exquisite computer renderings of the Nieuport 17. Some of it may not be accurate, however. I notice that the upper wing structure in these renderings has no hinges, and photographs from the time clearly show that the Nieuport 17 had hinged ailerons. It's a minor detail, I suppose, but it indicates that a certain amount of creative license was taken. Regardless, they greatly helped my understanding of the Nieuport 17's internal structure.

My own Nieuport 17 will be complete in a few weeks. After I finish building and texturing the model, I begin work on the scripts that bring it to life. After that: testing, testing, more testing, and then a couple more rounds of testing.

Over the last couple of years, I've had many requests to install vendors at private airfields and skydiving facilities. So many, in fact, that I was unable to manage the network of vendors myself. It struck me that there had to be a better way to get my vendors out there.

Then... while I was in San Francisco at SLCC, someone gave a brilliant idea -- give my vendors to people. Let someone else manage all the sales, and make sure that the vendor is up and running. In return, they'd get a cut of each sale. It seemed like a bright idea, but one that I kept procrastinating on, due to the complexities of supporting a network of vendors that are owned by other people.

To cut a long story short, I went ahead and built the vendor system and it has been in testing for weeks. It's now ready to go live.

Here's how it works: I supply you with the vendors. I can also provide kiosks, shops, hangars, and signs, if you need them. All you have to do is set them up and you have your own instant business. You get a cut of each sale, which is currently 10%. So for example, if you sell a L$1200 plane, you get L$120.

Naturally, you'll earn more if you promote your shop with advertising and word-of-mouth. I'll leave it up to you to work on the marketing side of things.

So, what I need are volunteers. I want aircraft enthusiasts and sales people. If you have a shop, you can add a Cubey Terra vendor. If you want to start your own business, I can provide everything you need (except the land) to get you started.

If you have a head for business and you want to try your hand at selling (arguably) the most popular skydiving gear and aircraft in Second Life, send me an instant message in-world and we'll chat.