• Metaplace Masters classes for learning worldbuilding

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 2 Comments

    1-btbuttonWe’ve worked hard to make Metaplace as easy to use as possible, but there’s still people with different learning styles and who prefer to be shown something rather than learn from tutorials or experimentation.

    Users Chooseareality and KStarfire are running interactive classes on basic building, using the Behavior Tool (one of the coolest Metaplace features, IMHO), editing the map, etc. The next one is on Friday, and is about

    …how to use the tools under “Shape The World”, such as resizing and coloring your map, place properties, tiles, camera settings, and terrain tools.

    btyoutube_2
    The Behavior Tool, on the YouTube behavior page

    Upcoming ones are on the Behavior Tool on the 23rd and placing objects on the 24th.

    You have to sign up for these in advance, because these guys have made very cool interactive classrooms for them, where each user gets their own “workstation” to try stuff out.

    I don’t think I have written about the Behavior Tool before… The cool thing about the Behavior Tool is that it gives an easy way for non-scripters to add behaviors to objects without needing to code. Not just stuff like “play YouTube video” (though that’s in there, of course!) but also things like AI behaviors, web integration, game system stuff — whatever.

    What’s more, many of the scripters create behaviors for this tool and put them on the marketplace. So you can buy something like a movement system, or an aggro behavior, or a dialogue system, and attach it to objects this way. Scripters can decide what fields are exposed for casual users, and they show up as simple sliders, type in fields, color pickers, that sort of thing, so the behavior can be easy to use. There’s a nice Wiki tutorial on using the BT here, and Lunarraid, one of our users, has been adding tutorials for each of the standard behaviors.

  • Toby Buckell Q&A log

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 1 Comment

    If you didn’t show up for the Tobias Buckell event in Metaplace, you missed out. We had a great hour-long conversation, along the lines of “Inside the Actor’s Studio” only with a writer. 🙂 The full chatlog is up on Posterous, but here’s a sample:

    Sunchaser: You were born in the Caribbean, and now live in the US. How does your childhood in the Caribbean influence your story telling?

    tobiasbuckell: Well, one thing I didn’t find much of in the science fiction I was reading were positive portrayels (sp?) of people from the developing world
    tobiasbuckell: so I set out to bring more of that
    tobiasbuckell: the Cyberpunk writers really inspired me to feel comfortable about being an SF/F author, as Bruce Sterling set 1/3 of a book of his
    tobiasbuckell: in Grenada, where I grew up
    tobiasbuckell: so I wanted to infuse my SF/F, a genre I adored, and add this aspect to it
    tobiasbuckell: a lot of people act as if multiculturalism is a burden or ‘PC’ thing, but it seemed to me that the future is cosmopolitan and aried and mixed, so I wanted to see more of that

    Sunchaser: I’m sure you get this question all the time, but what led you to science fiction in the first place?

    tobiasbuckell: SF/F became my love when I started reading very young, I remember reading Clarke’s Childhood’s End at 6 or 7
    tobiasbuckell: blew my little mind
    tobiasbuckell: so I wanted to recapture more of that, and looked for that genre after a while

    Sunchaser: I felt that way the first time I read about the red planet

    tobiasbuckell: it’s the heroin addiction theory of Literature

    We’re running this Creative Series biweekly, so stay tuned for more…

  • Tobias Buckell event on Metaplace

    Hours Categories Game talk, Reading

    Toby Buckell, author of Crystal Rain, Sly Mongoose, Ragamuffin, and the sixth Halo novel, The Cole Protocol, and lots of other work, will be live on TheStage in Metaplace tomorrow at 2pm Pacific as part of our Creative Series. I’ve written before about his books, so you know I am excited about this. 🙂

    Here is his blog post about it.

    To attend, just click this link (register first, so you don’t go through the newbie tutorial at the last minute). TheStage is linked off of the theater in Metaplace Central.

    Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. He is a Clarion graduate, Writers of The Future winner, and Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer Finalist.

  • Paul O. Williams, RIP

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 1 Comment

    Locus reports that Paul O. Williams has passed. Seems like many of the authors I read as a teen are leaving us. He’s best known for The Pelbar Cycle, which is a seven book post-apocalyptic series that can be somewhat hard to get into, but was still kind of mindblowing for me when I was a kid. It’s rather obscure now, but well worth reading. They are set in a clearly recognizable America well after some sort of nuclear holocaust, and are remarkable for their characters and the emphasis on describing cultures and rebuilding, rather than destructive aftermath.

    Start with The Breaking of Northwall, and work your way through all seven. Heck, I remember building a Lode Runner level based on The Fall of the Shell…

    He apparently only wrote one more SF book (though many of poetry), which I now have on order.