Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

Contact me!

Bio / CV

My Patreon Supporters

Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.

“TV POWWW!” by Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman. Read about the first televised videogame here.

The Fitting Room: Try out new SL fits in a secure, private space. Click here to teleport.

  • What Does It Mean for Game Devs When GPT-4 Can Quickly Create a Ten Part World of Warcraft-Style Quest? (Comment of the Week)

    ChatGPT MMO writing Adam Frisby sinespace

    Spinning off from MMO developers' thoughts around using AI for virtual world creation, Sinespace lead developer Adam Frisby shared his own recent experiences:

    [I] asked GPT-4 to design a quest for World of Warcraft; the results are no worse than the human output actually in the game; and certainly better than the 'radiant quests' in Skyrim or Fallout 4. I bet with some better prompting you could get pretty decent results (e.g. adding the word 'unusual' or 'outlandish' to the prompt for spice).

    Here's the prompt he used:

    You are a quest designer for World of Warcraft, write me a ten step quest including a description of the characters involved, and their dialogue.

    And here's what GPT-4 output in response — along with some of Adam's takeaways on using a process like this in real MMO development:

     

    (more…)

  • Latest Top Posts Including: SL’s Default Avatar Comes to Unity, ChatGPT Comes to Second Life, and a Game Designer’s Advice for Industry Novices in the Era of AI

    Crystal Frost Unity ruth bento avatar PatreonSL's Bento avatar skeleton in Crystal Frost

  • ChatGPT Comes to Second Life! Inside a Giant, Humanoid Bunny.

    ChatGPT Second Life bunny avatar

    At long last, the world’s most talked-about artificial intelligence has made its way into the world’s longest-running metaverse platform. Yes: In recent weeks, ChatGPT has become embodied by an avatar in Second Life.

    Second Life being Second Life, ChatGPT’s incarnation there is a giant humanoid rabbit. With what looks like a dancing tampon in its mouth.  

    Meet BunnyGPT, a bot who mans (rabbits?) the store of Moon Bunny Inc. on the island of Penny Lane. [Click here to teleport]

    The bunny was imbued with the “mind” of ChatGPT via the AI’s API.

    “BunnyGPT runs directly from Second Life’s Linden Script Language,” creator (and Moon Bunny co-owner) Scribzy Daxter explains. “Using ‘http_response’, the response then connects with the bot program to make him talk.”

    The original plan was to have Bunny GPT help greet customers and run the retail store, but ChatGPT being ChatGPT, that hasn’t quite worked out.

    “We did initially give him a role of, ‘a store clerk of a shop in Second Life called Moon Bunny that sells quirky items’,” as store co-owner Moon Brite puts it to me,  “but he kept trying to sell items that were not for sale!”

    Also, she adds, he gets into highly inappropriate conversations with customers:

    “For some reason, BunnyGPT decided to ‘break up’ with someone talking to him, and gave this speech of how the relationship wasn’t working. I’ve also seen people get him to take on the persona of various characters and reply sarcastically!”

    That sounds right. He got distinctly snarky when I asked if he read my blog (above), but then, rather shy when I asked him about virtual sex:

    (more…)

  • SL Fashion Friday: High School Styles Plus a Fun Pillow Fight Attachment

    52830248166_e92d066666_c

    Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    “The Halls” is the most recent post in Toxzen OwO’s Flickr Blog. I like the letterman’s jacket with the school uniform. Seeing the Class of ‘85 patch, I am guessing he’s wearing his dad’s letterman’s jacket. His knuckles are badly bruised, something explained by the title of the book.

    Yes, you have to look, not a subject I recall. I wonder if someone could make a texture change letterman’s jacket that would allow you to change the numbers to any year?

    I am really taken with the clothes. The set is made for Legacy+Athletic, Belleza, CZ Slim, Anatomy, and Kairo Fit

    • Jacket Fatpack includes: 3 Jacket and Metals, 4 Tie and 2 Shirt HUD textures, as well as Long and short ripped and a Hide/Show options
    • Pants Fatpack include: 5 Pants, 4 belt, 3 metal and 2 boxer texture colour HUD options, as well as Hide/Show Boxer options.
    • Shoes Fatpack include: 5 shoes, 2 laces and 3 metal HUD potions.

    For a fun pillow fight toy, click here:

    (more…)

  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Passionate Images of Avatar Love by Skaya

    52818779756_fcd27e908b_cCajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    Skaya’s “The Hug We All Need” captured my attention in part because it’s such an unusual framing of a picture of a hug. It’s shot from a distance. The couple and the dog are small and centered on a slightly askew horizon. There’s something about the vastness of the land and ocean and the smallness of the couple that makes this very appealing. This photo was a collaboration and her partner did a very compelling, much more intimate, picture of the same scene with excellent use of depth of field. 

    For more of Skaya’s unique perspective, click here:

    (more…)

  • Crystal Frost Update: Default Second Life Avatar Uploaded for Free Use in Unity-Based Projects & Games!

    Crystal Frost Unity ruth mesh avatar Patreon

    Here's a pretty major new update to Crystal Frost, the Patreon-funded project to port Second Life to Unity 3D: Not only has lead developer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 in Discord) uploaded the default SL avatar to Unity, this month she's going to make that avatar freely available for other Unity projects.

    "I'll be releasing it as a separate thing, entirely open source, for people to use Second Life Linden Lab avatars in Unity projects, under LGPL same as the avatar files themselves," she explains.

    "I figure it'll make a great resource for small time indie devs. I mean, the mesh isn't the best. We all know that. It's why almost everybody covers it up with something more modern like a Maitreya or a Jake or something else. But it's very mobile friendly and extremely flexible.

    "Also it would be hilarious if someone used the package to replicate the Ruth avatar that's in the SL library in the inventory and raided VR Chat with it." ("Ruth", of course, is the SL community's nickname for the ancient female avatar model that usually resides deep beneath many layers of mesh enhancements, like in that giant mutant fly hidden beneath a layer of Jeff Goldblum.)

    "But anyway with the flexibility of the asset, small, independent developers could easily churn up unique characters for their Unity games." 

    I suspect this could be a big boon for indie devs in need of a basic avatar model. It could even become a way for SLers to "export" (kinda sorta) their avatar into other Unity-based worlds:

    (more…)

  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Stunning Virtual World Rat Pics. Yes, Metaverse Rats.

    Golden Hair 07

    Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    With all the stories about New York City’s first ever “Rat Czar” I realized that there aren’t very many rats in Second Life. Maybe New York City should have hired a Linden staffer. In an effort to track down Second Life rats, I went to Flickr and found a few pics with rats. For some reason, there aren’t a lot, but they are excellent.

    Take “Golden Hair” by Vivena (above), isn’t it extraordinary? I love her use of diagonal lines – the tree, the line of rats, the river. That river water is extraordinary. She used the Singularity viewer and played with depth of field settings. She was dissatisfied with this picture, but I love it. 

    For more virtual rats, click here:

    (more…)

  • Veteran MMO Designer Damion Schubert on Using ChatGPT to Help Create Virtual Worlds — And Advice on AI for Novice Game Designers

    ChatGPT game designer MMO tips

    Intriguing reader comment by veteran MMO game designer Damion Schubert (BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, among many other titles), discussing the potential uses of ChatGPT and other generative AI for designing games: 

    AI is really good at generating ideas but none will be better than 80% of the way there. That being said, that's not nothing! That could be a huge head start to work from and could result in a net gain of quality quests.

    As an example, I asked Chat GPT to generate a whole bunch of names for swords from me.  [See above] 80% of the names from ChatGPT were crap, but a designer could probably get a pretty good list of names if they were willing to (a) curate the results and (b) take the time to further train the AI so that its next version is better.

    Creating 10,000 sword names is a terrible, soul-crushing task that MMO designers hate and could take us two weeks.

    I could definitely see AI being used to make a list of better names in only a day (where that day is basically multiple iterations of the task). Menial tasks like this being more automatable means that designers have more time to spend on stuff that matters more.

    "Basically," Damion tells me later, referring to the list of swords ChatGPT gave him, "most of those are 'fine' for non-exceptional stuff (i.e. grey, white or green weapons in World of Warcraft). Which is good — creating the boring background items and NPCs is actually both incredibly boring and incredibly time-consuming."

    I have done some writing for MMOs, and can personally confirm the tedium: The first hour, you start editing the item database with a childlike, "I can't believe I get to help create a whole new world!" zeal. By the fifth hour, you're grumbling to yourself, "Holy shit a robot could do this."

    And now a robot can.

    With a program like ChatGPT however, the human game designer can work at a higher level — the fun stuff, where someone with a really ambitious vision can imagine a whole alternate world — creating a large "bible" for the virtual world that includes historic lore and even special language (i.e. like a few hundred words in ancient Elvish or whatever), and then train ChatGPT to create weapon/character/etc. names from that knowledge base. 

    Schubert concurs, with some practical advice:

    (more…)

  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Skippy Beresford Creates Virtual World Stories With Real World Relevance

    Screenshot (294)

    Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    “If we don’t stand up for children, then we don’t stand for much” is a stark challenge for all of us in the United States where we ban books and ideas, not guns.

    Skippy Beresford is a storyteller. Every picture from the little student avatar tells us a story about him and the real world. In this case, his picture reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. The quote from Marian Wright-Edelman challenges us to do better. So does Skippy.

    For more stories, click here:

    (more…)

  • Making a Metaverse That Matters: Pre-Order Links & Info for My Book Here!

    Making a Metaverse That Matters book Wagner James Au thumb

    Excited to start promoting my book, coming out this June on Second Life’s 20th anniversary!

    Please pre-order my book on Amazon here

    Or on Barnes & Noble here

    Or on Bookshop.org benefiting indie bookstores here

    I’ll try to keep the plugging down to a dull roar for the sanity of regular New World Notes readers. Pre-orders are super important to helping encourage getting the book in stores, so I’d be grateful if you consider putting an order in.

    Some logistical background and answers to fairly frequent questions:

    Yes, an e-book / Kindle version will be available starting in June.

    Yes, it will be available for international Amazon customers, also starting in June.

    If you’re currently in the media, yes, I can send you a review copy now. Hit me up on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

    Yes, there’s a discount for bulk orders and I’m fairly available to do speaking/signing appearances over the next few months, especially in the greater LA area.

    Some book highlights include:

    (more…)