Reading RSS feed titles in Second Life: my new gadget
One of the main attractions of Second Life too me is, besides the social interaction, exploring the possibilities of Real Life to Second Life integration. With real life I mean the Internet of course.
In my house on Our Virtual Holland I intend to feature a number of tools that portray some kind of RL<->SL integration.
So a few days ago, I went shopping and found a very nice Feed Display tool created by Dedric Mauriac (a very nice blog by the way!).
Although the sale via SLexchange went perfectly, during my first rezzing of the box received, something went wrong and the item was lost from my inventory, apparently due to a small period of heavy “package loss”.
After mailing Linden Lab about this (still awaiting their reply), I decided to IM Dedric Mauriac, the creator, to ask if he would be willing to provide me a new Feed Display. To my surprise Dedric reacted graciously and provided me a new copy. Thanks Dedric!
Then about the Feed Display itself. It looks great and configuring it is as easy as it gets. Just enter your feed on the dedicated notecard. The display will show you the titles in the particular blog (or other source’s) feed. The display also provides a link to the source and to the individual articles. The operation speed is reasonable, although sometimes a bit laggy. The script appears to render each letter in the titles separately. Unfortunately I cannot see the script. Would be interesting.
So, what tool is next? Video? Photo’s. Any tips?
After rezzing the item Dedric Mauriac sent me: a nice looking parcel
Jolanda, our OVH community manager, and myself taking a first look
After some easy adjustment: the feed to my blog visible
(Disclaimer: I am employed with a subsidiary of ING Group)
Related: all my Second Life articles
Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING, ING Group, Our Virtual Holland
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posted Apr 18, 10:01 pm on Apr 18, 2007 |
category: Second Life
/ OurVirtualHolland
Thanks for the plug. The script can render pairs of letters on each face from an image. All images are set on each face at the same time. Each image contains 99 pairs of letters. I could enlighten you to the process sometime if you are interested.
— Dedric Mauriac Apr 20, 07:33 am #
Hi Dedric,
Thanks for stopping by here. Your method sounds quite interesting. Is it the only way to get text on prims in SL so far?
I am very interested to learn about the text rendering process in your script.
— Marcel Apr 20, 09:40 pm #
Text is limiting. You can have text floating above prims (very quick, can get annoying with lots of text), you can also create an image with all the text you want (loads ok, need to upload a new image for each change), or you can show portions of text on different parts on a prim (loads multiple images, can appear a bit laggy). Many of us are waiting for the day when you can display a URL on a prim. Once this happens, we can just show websites with the text messages ready for us.
I created a program to write out every combination of letters on 256×256 sized images. I then uploaded 92 of these images and created an algorithm to determine which image had a certain pair of characters, and the position on the image that the pair could be located. This process took a long time to figure out. Over time, the methods that I used to do this have also been tweaked and optimized to perform faster and with less resources. If you would like to see examples and perhaps have some questions answered, contact me in-world about it.
There is an alternative text rendering script that most people use called XYText. I haven’t looked at it much, but most people who create prims with text on them use that. Unfortunately, I didn’t find out about it until after I had my process down.
— Dedric Mauriac Apr 22, 11:38 am #
Hi Dedric,
Thanks so much for this small “tutorial” on using text in Second Life.
Hope to meet some day in SL.
— Marcel Apr 22, 02:49 pm #
Dedric,
By the way, the parsing of the RSS feed in LSL is something that sounds interesting as well. Did you write that part of script yourself? Or is there a good source?
Thanks.
— Marcel Apr 22, 03:07 pm #