The construction of the town of Navora for second life continues. It is taking time but there is a lot to do. So far the mockups are looking fantastic and we are all looking forward to seeing the town ‘live’, as it were.

This discussion over at the Second Life forums is about a situation where a player seems to have accidentally sold some land for $0 to another player. This player ‘pounced’ on the land sale, probably with a script, and then immediately sold the land on to a willing buyer (or alt?). With the Linden Dollar being valued at around $1.20us per L$250 that represents for the player a loss of around $380us of virtual property.

Is it so hard to imagine a future when these games become popular enough for thieves to make a nice sideline income from scamming players. As the real virtual value of goods becomes more accepted and acceptable will games companies be done for aiding and abetting if they don’t work very hard to track and stop these kind of exploits? Should the police, or the small claims court be involved? Maybe one day. For now we just have forums and a rather accommodating Linden Labs to keep us happy.

DarkLife is reborn! The amazingly fun experience Mark and I first created in Second Life is coming back. You can read all about it on the Second Life forums. We can’t wait to see it all happen and we’re looking forward to launch day in arond 6 weeks (maybe less). We have a huge area devoted just to DarkLife, imagine what we can do with it?

I had a good bit of time in Second Life just now, waiting for my collaborators to appear online. While I was hanging around I went off and did some exploring. Finding some plane shops I picked up a couple of units. This beauty works both underwater and in the air and has extending wings when in flight and so-on. Clever work and fun too! Thanks Cubey Terra for a great plane!

It is looking quite likely that we’ll see some action on the DarkLife front. This is exciting for Mark and I as the project is a lot of fun and people respond very well to it. I’ll post more news when I can.

Phillip Linden, one of the Second Life founders, has a nice blog entry on “aLife and sLife”. Emergent systems are already being seen in Second Life and they are a fascinating part of the code being written by users. To date most of these systems have been fairly one-dimensional (objects that wander around and act like vacuum cleaners, or objects with simple talk scripts), however the potential for objects that interact with other objects and with users is nearly unlimited. I hope some coders are inspired and we see some fun experiments!

Second Life is a unique world created by Linden Labs. It’s a world with content and purpose entirely defined by the players. Last year a friend, Bram, and I worked on a project to make and build a working roleplaying game inside this world. Titled DarkLife it was one of the few really strong interactive projects and we had a lot of interest and support.

In the end we both got too busy to support it and we let things slide before we completed the project. However, we’ve both got a bit of time again (more importantly, Bram does, as he’s the coder!) and we’re getting back into Second Life to get Dark Life going again. It will be an interesting experiment!