I made an unusual change to the Date Simulator, it has been on the online version for a while, thought I’d release the changes  to the offline version.

I added “On mouse over” and “On mouse out” text to every link on the pictures which displays either an action (in italics) or a quote (not in italics)  underneath what Ariane says.  The idea is to give it a more comic book feel, while also making things easier to read and navigate on small browser windows (i.e. mobile phones).   Some mobile browsers still don’t work, unfortunately, but it works well anyways.

You may notice that sometimes the text below and the text on the link does not match, this is intentional. In some places the text below is random which you can change by moving your mouse over the link, the text on the link remains generic.  If the text below does not make sense, look at the link text.

Except for a couple of minor bug fixes, there is no change to game play from version 6.0.

Media, Metaverse News Dating Simulator, updates

I decided I have done enough tweaking and released Dating Sim 6.0 as a download.  I was going to release it as 5.9 and then have 6.0 be the “bug free” version of 5.9, but being bug free is likely an impossibility anyways.

Since version 5.0 I have looked over all the “places”, especially the older ones, and I have enhanced them all in some way. I took a look at version 5.8 and decided the weakest parts were the non-romantic lake beach, the boat, and the home improvement store. There were also some bugs in the nightclub that could not be fixed without a complete code rewrite.

The other enhancement I had made since 5.8 is to organize my rendering files better. The Ariane model has changed here and there over the years, and some of the older pictures did not look as good as the later ones. So I went and re-rendered a bunch of the older pics using the newer Ariane models. These pictures are “cleaner” looking and actually compress into smaller jpg files. Even though there is more content, version 6.0 is actually a smaller download than version 5.8.

The new download is here.

If you find any new bugs, post them in the comments.

Metaverse News Dating Simulator, updates

Notes from the Metaverse:

- I’ve been in a Guild Wars state of mind lately, which makes it hard to blog. Whenever you see months of no blogging, it is usually when I am playing Guild Wars.

- The Sims 3 is out now.  Have not gotten it yet, but the reviews look good. In the past I have gotten obsessive with The Sims:  1, 2, and Sims Online. Got burned out really bad at one point, not sure I’m over that.  Spore and Sim City Societies were kind of disappointments.  Apparently they are going with an online update system this time, where you can purchase new objects individually, instead of prepackaged CDs. If virtual worlds are any indicator, this could ultimately be an even more profitable way to go, especially if they open up to 3rd party brokering.

- Still waiting on Blue Mars to go open beta. I’m hearing really good things from beta testers, but they are not allowed to get specific or show screen shots per the NDA.  The Open Beta should happen later this year. I keep hearing “two months”, but I have heard that for the last 7 months.

- Also waiting for the new Second Life continent “Ursula” to open up.  The adult only continent where the rules are quite a bit more relaxed. I’m very curious how this experiment will work out, it could potentially be a disaster that ends SL once and for all, though the odds are small on that front.

- Speaking of which, SL is showing revenue growth in an other wise declining economy, just as I predicted in a post last January. Because of its low start up cost (free) more people are joining Second Life, and actually staying more, but as expected, they are spending less money per account. According to a recent interview with Phillip Rosedale, it seems the player growth rate is exceeding the spending decline rate, resulting in a net gain. Interesting.

- And finally, I released a new Dating Simulator update again, version 5.8. In the last version, I improved the swimming scenes, but noticed a “bug” that if you go to the kitchen after swimming, it goes immediately to an ending scenario. There was a very simple fix for this, but I decided the bug is a symptom of a problem in general: all the late date ending scenarios either involve sex or drinking, and if you do something dumb early in the date, all you are left with is drinking.

In an effort to open up the ending a bit, if you do go to the kitchen after eating dessert (or swimming, or showering), Ariane will suggest what to do next based on what you have or haven’t done so far. You can accept or decline her recommendations, until she gets tired of your constant rejections, or she runs out of ideas, whichever comes first.

The basic pattern of the whole dating simulator is to start out with a few basic options, explode into a ton of options, and then if you don’t royally screw up, finish with one of a few appropriate endings. Unfortunately, there are not enough appropriate endings. I needed a fun innocent ending to round it all out to add as a “bonus” to the suggestions.

The “downtown” solution to this is to find an amusement park to check out for a silly but innocent ending. I decided I needed a home version of the amusement park and came up with a “board game” ending.

Now I had the idea to have a board game in the dating simulator since version 1.0, but kept on running into obstacles. It would be silly to simulate a whole game unless I picked something easy like Tic-Tac-Toe or Nim, which are too predictable. So I decided to just simulate the ending of a game.The decision of which game ending to simulate came down to  two criteria: 1. It had to be a game with simple ending scenarios (Life, Clue, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, etc.) 2. It had to be a public domain game (Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Chinese Checkers, most standard deck card games). For whatever reason, these two criteria are nearly exclusive. It took a while to finally figure out that Parcheesi is probably the only game in both categories, hence that is what I picked.

Metaverse News, Virtual Society bluemars, Dating Simulator, guildwars, secondlife, sims3, virtual economy

I’ve been tinkering around with the dating simulator again, making some improvements to the backyard activities, especially the swimming activity, which has not been changed much since version 1.0.

Part of the reason is that the “pool” comes from The Sims 2, which does not really provide full camera freedom. Until recently all the pool shots were above the pool angles, because that is what The Sims 2 allows, which also is somewhat contradictory to the dating sim format of “first person” viewing.

I’ve had the idea for some time of doing some underwater stuff, and experimented a little with that while making version 5.5. In that instance I created a corner of the pool in Second Life, taking advantage of SL’s full camera control and water effects.

For 5.7 I decided to expand the idea, and just build a duplicate pool in Open Grid (at about double scale) giving me every above and below angle I could want. Above is the picture of the pool model in Open Grid.

So, I thought I’d tell you some of the secrets to making some of the pictures. The primary new feature of swimming is a one lap underwater swimming race. One picture I needed was Ariane tagging the pool wall. Above is a break down of the steps involved: 1.) Take a screen capture of the Open Sim at the location Ariane would be tagging the wall. 2.) Create the tagging pose (I actually used a “spider-man” pose from my pose library and adjusted it as needed) and build a set of white walls to stand in for the pool. 3.) Render a “shadow” from available lighting. Backyard pools commonly have underwater lights on the pool walls. She is too close to the right wall to get light from there, so the lighting is coming from light on the left wall. 4.) Render Ariane without the walls or shadows.

Combine the three pictures to produce a great underwater picture:

Another special effect is the above water pictures. These are simply too difficult to render realistically without some fancy expensive program. So when I started the dating sim project, I came up with a way to create these pictures that while not realistic, they get the point across, and in a way they are cleverly artistic.

Here’s my water technique:

This is the beginning of the race: 1.) Same as above. Take a screen shot of the position Ariane would be at the beginning of the race. 2.) Create a matching pose. I did not bother with a shadow this time as the lighting would be coming from multiple above water and below water angles, wiping out most of the shadows anyways. (Yes there is a shadow in this pic, but since it does not correspond to the background it will be erased.) This picture will be Ariane below the water.  3.) Position a black square to match exactly where the water should be. Also add a “wet” effect to Ariane’s skin to represent above the water line. 4.) Starting with the below water picture number 2, adjust the color to make it brighter and bluer before combining with background picture 1. Then use either a ripple effect, or just simply a smudge tool to simulate the distortion of wavy water. Get rid of the black water in pic 3 using a color mask tool, and then merge it with pic 2, then blend them together.

Not very realistic, but it looks cool.

Media, Metaverse News 3D art, Dating Simulator, poser

Back with a much anticipated Dating Sim update.

I released version 5.0 of the dating simulator a year ago, and thought it would be fun to do an update release. Since the last release I have found a few alternate “hacked” versions to the dating simulator. The general trend of these hacks were to make the game 1) easier, 2) more erotic, 3) more “Rebecca”. Two of them had the same “doin’ it twice” alternate ending, which I agree is better than my “lights out” ending in 5.0.

This is version 5.5 because for the past year I have been sneaking in minor changes to the online version. Last April I snuck in an alternative “pants” photoshoot. Last September I changed Rebecca’s annoyingly generic striptease routine to something completely ungeneric and just plain silly. Besides these changes I have been adding extra pictures here and there for better story flow, and replacing pictures I wasn’t happy with. Nothing really major.

One of the hacked versions I got came from “Rick” who did a version with sound effects, which while cool ultimately makes things too complicated. He also rewrote a lot of the dialogue, making it funnier and more playful. That I really liked enough to incorporate a lot of it. The text is now centered on every page and the text area is larger for up to 4 lines of dialogue. Instead of changing fonts of other characters, I changed the color of the text. Rebecca is in blue, all the other minor characters are in red.

In addressing the other changes people like to hack around:

Making it easier: Going from version 4 to 5, I established some rules and made them consistent. This was good until you get to the ending scenarios. Some of these were extra difficult. So I established some more consistent rules for ending scenarios. Some are a little harder as a result, most are easier. (hint: Ariane loves to dance!!)

More erotic: For purposes of keeping my website from being tagged “porn” I try to keep things R rated. There are some highly erotic moments in the game, true, but I follow this simple code: The difference between “erotic” and “porn” is in the lighting and camera angles. I did incorporate the “doin’ it twice” ending, adding two new animations to do it right.

More Rebecca: The original basic plan for Rebecca was to pick her up at the lingerie store, take her to the bar, go back to the house and swim. But what if you have already been to the club (and got thrown out)? I had to add a scenario that got you to a different club. But what if you have already been swimming? Well in 5.0 the game abruptly ends at the club, which is kinda lame. My original plan to fix this was originally big and elaborate (like 60 pictures big). Way too big for such a rare occurrence. Took me a while but I got it narrowed down to a size that only needed about 12 new pics. This is the only new “scenario” in 5.5. You still may experience the abrupt end by the way, but for different reasons (hint: Ariane loves to dance!!)

Other than that, most of the changes consist of rewriting some of the older scenarios and adding or changing some pictures, mostly for story flow purposes: “beer”, “whisky”, “truth or dare”, “skiing”, “swimming”, “park photoshoot”, and “convenience store”, have all been at least tweaked.

Since it was hacked versions that helped me out this time, I thought I’d change the licensing of the game. The game is now under creative commons: You are not allowed to make money off of it, or any derivations of it, you have to attribute the original source, and any versions you make should be open source as well. If you want to host it advertisement free somewhere else, go ahead. If you want to translate the text into other languages, go ahead. If you want to do versions on other media (i.e. ipod touch, console, flash, etc.), its OK. Actually, I’d love an ipod touch version, but if this isn’t allowed by Apple, I doubt the dating sim will.

Note: The version 5.5 has been up for a week, but I only fixed the last of the bugs (hopefully) today. If you downloaded it last week, you might want to download again.

Media 3D art, Dating Simulator

The number of Second Life builds based on TV, Movie, and Video games is rather extensive. I could spend about a month researching it, like I did for the world tour, but I thought I would just post about the cool sites I know about now and later maybe I can add a few more.

Lets start with a classic. The Blade Runner Build at Devil’s Moon. This build has been around for a few years, and used to house a popular club. Now it only houses the main store of Abramations primarily, although the wet looking streets (the streets are patially transparent, and a mirror build of the streets can be seen underneath) are still there.

Less famous is a life size replica of Serenity, as seen in the TV show Firefly and movie Serenity. This is on a mainland server, and is fairly detailed. There are numerous Star Trek and Star Wars themed worlds including multiserver RPGs. A good place to start on the former is the Star Trek Museum. I have previously blogged about the incredible Battlestar Pacifica RPG sim.

Another incredible sci-fi build is the Privateer Space build. This server has multiple levels, each a different planet environment to explore.

While Sci-Fi is a very popular theme in SL, its not the only one. One of the sillier builds I have come across is one based on Bedrock from The Flintstones.

Speaking of silly, the ship from Mystery Science Theater 3000 has its own replica build as well. Turn on your media player if you dare to be subjected to a really bad movie.

Finally, if you are a fan of the game Vampire: Bloodlines, somebody has managed to build a decent copy of the first level of the game. Check out the Vampires Santa Monica build.

If the above picture looks at all familiar, you might have been playing my Dating Simulator, and reached this picture:

Yes I used the same game as a background for the Dating Simulator club.

Virtual Society Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Dating Simulator, exploring, Firefly, Flintstones, interactive, movies, MST3K, museum, Privateer, secondlife, Serenity, Star Trek, surreal, tv, Vampire: Bloodlines, videogame

SL version of Portal’s Weighted Companion Cube by Dorky Mohr
Theater with red carpet at the MovieTickets server in Second Life

More comics at http://arianeb.com/

Virtual Society comic, Dating Simulator, Portal, secondlife

So someone sent me a fix for my Dating Simulator so it will work on Firefox. I tested it, and it works.

Here is the problem in a nutshell:

In most programming languages, there are two kinds of subroutines: functions and procedures. In javascript, its all functions. The difference being that functions can return a value of some sort. Well because there are no procedures in javascript, I use functions as if they were procedures (so does everybody), so I do not return any value at all.

In IE, Opera, and Safari, if there is no return statement, it assumes the function is false and just moves on.
In Firefox, if there is no return statement, it assumes the function is true.

So with an html code like:
<a href=”#” ONCLICK=”parent.footer.choice1()” title=”try this”> IE etc, just execute the onclick command no questions asked.
Firefox executes the onclick, then (because the function is “true”) executes the anchor link # as well, which does not exist so the page gets refreshed instead, and the simulation is stumped!

I can’t remove the href, because IE will get stumped

So the fix is to change every onclick as follows:
<a href=”#” ONCLICK=”parent.footer.choice1();return false;” title=”try this”>
now it executes correctly in all browsers.

Now who is right, IE/Opera/Safari or Firefox/Mozilla?

Metaverse News Dating Simulator, firefox

So, on and off this summer I have been tinkering with the Dating Simulator game. Some of it was game balancing, some bug fixing, and in a few places, some new content.

There were some unserved rare scenarios, like what happens if you go dancing in the club, and get kicked out, then go lingerie shopping and meet Rebecca who wants to take you to the club you just got kicked out of? Or, whats the point of the “spin the bottle” game if the four possible results you can do on your own anyways?

Then there was a problem I have been struggling with since I started making the game 3 years ago. What about romance?

Throughout the game there are little mini games that basically test your intelligence: The dress shop (memory, logic), the home improvement store (observation), the art museum (general art history), star gazing (general astronomy), etc. Is there a systematic way to test romance?

Well this summer I sort of came up with one, and I won’t spoil the fun with hints, but I believe it is the last missing ingredient to the dozens of possible scenarios in the game.

With that in mind I am calling it the end of the stand alone dating simulator. Future versions, if there are any, may (or will) include various web enhancements. For example, maybe a trip to the movies with an embedded video, or maybe that radio will play real music, or an evening playing board games with flash animation, etc. Sounds like a lot of work actually, and I have other distractions in the mean time.

Have fun.

Virtual Society Dating Simulator

Well I was forced to shut down the most popular portion of my website, the Dating Simulator. Didn’t really want to, but it was getting too popular. Yesterday, apparently the server crashed, so I decided to take it down.

The start page has all the vital statistics, showing how popular it was and how players did. The most important statistic not shown is 870,000 MB of bandwidth, a few more and the whole website gets shut down permanently. The other problem was page requests. Each click of the mouse could generate 4 page requests, and the server can only handle so many at a time. Hence the large number of service errors lots of players were experiencing. I’m hoping to find inexpensive solutions to both problems and put it back up. No guarantees though.

In the mean time, I have had lots of requests for a zip file of the whole program that people could play on their own computer. After careful consideration I decided, ahh what the hell. http://rapidshare.com/files/20699949/DatingSimulator.zip (41MB)

I know rapidshare is not the most reliable download site, and I am planning mirrors. If anyone wants to bittorent it and post a link in the comments thats fine with me too. Just leave the file as is.

Metaverse News Dating Simulator