The Word Made Real: bringing Cory Doctorow's new novel (and Cory Doctorow) to SL!

er...I've done this already, with two different interfaces depending on the book organization (and length). Importing the text is a PITA though. Are you going to make a set of notecards available in-world?

- C

OMG I'm sitting waiting for 1.6 to go on-line so I go to boingboing.net to read and wait.


Am I seeing things? An SL avi in a ad for... SLAP?

OMG.. it's an SL site!!!

My RW and SL are mixing... noooooooo!

http://secondlife.com/slap/wings.php

Prototypes for Cory's novel-- First Expo round due May 1st!

While we'll have a public expo in early June, I'm planning to run an entry showing off existing prototypes in early May. So if you're working on a prototype you want featured in that entry, send a screenshot of it to my inventory by the end of May 1st, and I'll interview you about it the following week.

The quest to create a Doctorow Book Prototype continues!

I'm still looking for Doctorow Book Prototypes, and to make life easier, I've texturinzed the first 10 pages of *Down and Out*-- if you wanna copy of them, just IM me, and I'll send to your inventory.

That way, all you have to do is figure out cool creative ways to display those pages in a readable form. And when the time comes to select one of those prototypes for *Someone Comes*, I will do the hard work of converting the entirety of that book to textures, as well. (Unless someone volunteers.)

What's the process you're using to do this? I'd like to help if I can!

Excellent, thanks! Let's see if some folks step forward to work on a prototype, and if so, perhaps we can divide the book into sections each of us texturize. (Or more sections, if other folks want to volunteer, and get suitable props along with Torley.)

Far as the process, it's nothing so complex as converting Cory's book to a .doc file, getting the format fairly decent, then copying and pasting a page's worth into Photoshop, and saving that as a .bmp. It's grunt work, but once I got the hang of it, it takes about 30 seconds per page. (Of course, the uploading process will take awhile, too.)

Hmm, here goes a suggestion for Mac users to convert the whole document into uploadable images...

1) Get the .doc inside Word, Pages, AppleWorks, or whatever text editor you use.
2) Tweak with the page settings so as to have the proper dimensions you wish (you may have to do a test run of this procedure first, to see if you got the page size as you want).
3) Print the document as PDF.
4) Get the GraphicConverter shareware program (some Mac users are lucky to have that already bundled with their system software, eg. recent PowerBook users)
5) Open the PDF in GraphicConverter.
6) Select the Convert & Modify menu options, make sure the top dropdown is set to "convert", open on the left tab the PDF, and (making sure that in Options you have "Single Page File" selected) select a destination format and a destination folder. I usually select TGA as the "preferred" input format into SL.
7) After a while (depending on the CPU) you'll have your destination folder filled with TGA files, one for each page. Now launch SL, and use the "multiple import" feature.

Setup time: less than 10 minutes (including the initial tweaking until you get the correct page size) if you're a talented point-and-click expert
Converting time: your mileage may vary, but assume 30 second or so per page if you have an old CPU. The good thing is, you don't need to be at your computer, or doing anything manually. Just let your computer do the work for you

I'm sure there must be similar solutions for the PC as well.

Just my L$0.02...

I like Gwen's method.

Me too! Any Mac stalwart wanna try it out?

Can I get a tally of folks who are creating a book prototype right at this very moment? If you are, please IM me or e-mail me soon as you can, to confirm...

I had an idea, I used a notecard.

Can I submit that?

Please do!

Sure, Hamlet, if you wish, I can do the conversion for you

As I'm a terrible scripter myself, I won't be "competing", but I'm always willing to help in any other way...

Thanks, Gwyn, though actually, I think another Resident stepped into the breach, and converted *Down and Out* into several hundred .jpegs! Will have those available to pass out tomorrow, hopefully. Of course, we may need volunteers for *Someone* when that comes out...

Ok first a quid pro quo. I am MEDIOCRE at building and CLUELESS at scripting but I understand conceptual stuff VERY WELL. take this information with the knowledge that I have NO IDEA "HOW" to do this stuff or if the SL system is even capable of it.

First it should not take more than 3 prims. each half of the book and the spine.

the trick is content. this should be VERY easy in theory. is there not a way of displaying TEXT content in SL ? a simple notecard with the entire text of the book in it ?

now scripts can also change VIEWING angle etc.. I see this when I get in some vehicles

when the person CLICKS the book there "viewing" angle should alter so that they are in mouselook and the "book" is consuming the majority of the screen. that takes care of the readability aspect. this position is locked till they stop reading.

the smallest screen res likely to be encountered in SL is 800x600 design accordingly (make sure it scales though for those like me that work in high res 1880x1400)

it should be that simple. have it "take over" movement keys like any other vehicle does. up down zoom in or out (alters the size of the text to suit monitor resolution and eyeballs of users) and left right cycles through the pages. for the USER there should not be any page flipping its waistefull to some LOOKING at the user it should look IRL style tey are holding a book and the av animates and changes pages like IRL (that would be cool!) agian not sure if this is possible. it should be when I get new animations it gives me the option of playing locally or in world so it seems like the system is designed to do this (different animation locally compared to in world ???)

script some SEARCH abilities in. how about a text to speech (built into XP) engine ? etc..

THis really should not be too difficult for an experienced coder AND assuming its even possible to do. (I can not imagine that the lindens did not devise and built in awya of viewing text content in world. having to make a TEXTURE for each page is ludicrous and archaic.

this would be cakewalk if we could view life HTML content in world

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

I believe that feature is "on the works", but the question is if it will be ready by the time Cory Doctorow's book is presented in SL... so we shouldn't count on it.

- Gwyn (also a mediocre scripter)

I should have a NWN posting soon which may help with this effort...

First prototype in NWN:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/05/the_word_made_r.html

i there seriously no way to to display raw text in world ??

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

Well - no not in the Quantities needed to render a whole page in a decent Font. Discounting the Font issue there are two more feasible ways to render a book in world - one is a notecard and the other is useing llSetText. I am working on an implementation useing llSetText tho i do not know if i will ever bring it to a prototype state. It all depends on how readable the first mockup will be.

You can get your copy of the Texture UUIDs for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from a dispenser at secondlife://Louise/177/176 (Louis 177,176). You can also take a copy of the dispenser if you like.

Actually, I have a dynamic text display system that is quite readable for a page of text. It uses a prim for 2 characters of text, and a single texture that is offset around to show glyphs of a font, much like XyText. I've created a 600 prim book reader prototype that looks great, but is very slow to page and two of them will bring a sim to its knees.

When we get the XHTML-on-a-prim feature, doing text display will be easy. But Hamlet did some checking and says that won't be available in time for the expo or publishing the novel in SL. Once we do get it, I've got a lot of ideas about presenting books in a 3D space. I still can't imagine reading a whole novel in SL, but there are some cool things that could be done.

Yes, It was you I was talking about when Hamlet quoted me in his newest NWN article - Tho I am not quite sure if he understood me correctly. I was talking about the communication overhead such a system incurs, he about the actual size of the Book- Now there is one thing i do not get - Why are you limited to 2 Chars for every Prim?
It is easily possible to render up to 6 Chars on every prim.

Yeah, but try and make it look readable with even 3 chars per prim. My text display system uses a single character glyph per prim face, so that you only need 1 texture. You could do 2 per face, but then you'd need a whole slew of textures, as many as 100 to uniquely display every digraph. XyText uses a flat box with an x topsize of 0.33 to give 3 faces. That's is flat enough to look good for large tringo displays, but the minimum prim height of 0.01m looks noticably bumpy and bad when working at the scale necessary to display a whole page of text in only a few square meters of space. I tried many different prim cuts, but I was never able to find one that gave more than 2 faces that looked good enough to be readable at that scale.

Ah - I see I figured it couldn't be that simple - Thats why i didn't even attemp to use XYtext for my prototype.