www.cavw.de
美其名曰 德国魏德玛中国学生学者联合会，不过既然决定为奋斗过的地方做点什么，就力所能及地做做论坛吧

「以下是普通用户组等级徽章」
  Lv.0 社区游民 
  Lv.1 正式用户
  Lv.2 中级用户
  Lv.3 高级用户
  Lv.4 铜牌会员
  Lv.5 银牌会员
  Lv.6 金牌会员
  Lv.7 白金会员
  Lv.8 钻石会员
  Lv.9 太极
  Lv.X 虚无

「以下是特殊用户组/管理组等级徽章」



  学生会正式会员
  学生会特别会员
  版主
  超级版主 / 白金董事会员
  学生会常务理事
  管理员
  学生会主席

「以下是用户组图标」

学生会主席      
白金董事会员      
学生会常务理事     
管理员     
超级版主     
版主     
注册用户     
等待验证用户    

「以下是兴趣小组徽章」

  海食团（美食）
  观影团（电影）
  美剧社（美剧）
  电玩迷（电脑/电子游戏）
  短片剧组（创作组）
  短片剧组（摄制组）
  短片剧组（演员）
  短片剧组（后期组）
  光融摄（摄影）
  暴走团（旅游）
  菜民营（菜市场）
  咔啦讴歌（唱歌）
  Heal the World
  琴棋书画（中国传统文化）
  汽车人（汽车）

「以下是星座徽章」

这是 VW 课上 Hans, Sean 和 Jesse 的 Final project

The FLOAT is an architectural project in SL, which is a modern designed virtual exhibition hall and art gallery. It is a 2 storied building plus an underwater hall. The sum practical area is approx. 10625 square meters ( F1: 3100 qm; F2: 4325 qm; B: 3200 qm), so that it is large enough for holding a medium large exhibition in SL.

:: Design ::

1. The Triangle Shape and Floating Balcony
   
   
   
   The first floor is basically a triangle shape, the goal is to make a large balcony expanded out of the land and floating over the sea. The balcony is just on the sharp angle of the triangle.

   The second floor with a unregulated shape overlaps the first floor at 45 degree angle. Some part of the second floor go over the outline of the first floor, and it make them floating on the ground.

2. The All Glass Coverage and Double Wall Structure
   
   
   
   The whole building is almost completely built of glass in order to keep an excellent transparency. The Wall is double layered, the inner wall is a half transparent glass, and the outer is vertical shutter or louver shaped wall. There are 2 reasons for this design:

   A. The default 3rd person view sometimes causes display issues when an avatar is too close to the wall indoor - the camera goes outdoor and you will see the outside face of the wall full filled your screen. The double wall design keeps a safe space between inner and outer walls, so that the camera won't be able to penetrate 2 walls by error, the transparent inner wall makes sure that you can always see your avatar in default view in this situation.

   B. The outer wall design is mainly for decoration, meanwhile, it becomes a selective transparent medium, which prevent from seeing through at specific angle range.

3. Glass Floor and Roof
   
   
   
   The transparency of floor and roof are in purpose of letting visitors enable to see anything at anywhere of the building, so that they can find exhibits that most interests them. On the other hand, they can never get lost because of this. Meanwhile, all the glowing effects can be seen anywhere in the building, it makes the decorations on the fassade not only be seen outside.

   For the floating part of the building, thanks to the glass floor, visitors is going to go through an experience of walking over water or walking in the air.

4. Dive Underwater
   
   
   
   There is another hall hiding under the floating balcony in the water. It is purely for cool, and making full use of anywhere. The glowing neon is the outline of the underwater hall, just like the foot neon on other floors, it is a sign of the limitation of walking area, letting visitor know that hitting their head on the glass wall is not fun at all, even in SL.
   
   
5. Fassade and Decoration
   
   
   
   As mentioned above, the outer walls do the decoration. They variant themselves at some place, glowing with colors. It improves the visual effects, especially with the reflections on water surface.

   Another thing is the rotating "wings" on the top of the building, they are a good decoration too.

6. Entrance and Exit
   
   
   
   At first floor there are one main entrance, and one back entrance. The back entrance leads to the stairway to the underwater hall (The start of this stairway is on first floor). There are also stairways for going up to second floor or go down to underwater hall. And it is always possible to fly in/out through the skylight or from the balcony. And the complete roof of underwater hall is phantom so that visitors don't have to go down/out of there through stairway if them don't want to, just use the fly ability. The two wings are phantom as well, so it won't bother while people flying.

:: Data ::

• Project codename: FLOAT
• Project type: Architecture
• Used Prims: approx. 730
• Practical Area: 1st Floor         3100 qm
                                2nd Floor       4325 qm
                                Underwater  3200 qm
                                Total              10625 qm
• Floor Height: 7m
• Usage: Exhibition, Gallery

Modeling is easy, mapping is hard.... Luckily I gave up doing Abbott Hall or Center for the Arts, which are originally my target. This time I drew almost all the texture by hand, UV them, adjusted them, and tested them... I've already lost patient to do the glass windows at entrance separately, So I left them like a wall painting. Anyway, I'm going to sleep now...

The group that I am doing research on is a Chinese community called Jianghu.

Jianghu is the milieu, environment, or sub-community, often fictional, in which many Chinese classical wuxia stories are set. The term can be translated literally as “rivers and lakes”. Jianghu is an alternative universe coexisting with the actual historical one in which the context of the wuxia genre was set. (see more in Wikipedia)

The Chinese Jianghu fiction is actually very similar to the western sword and magic of Middle Ages fictions. It refers from some aspect the ancient Chinese culture and history. Therefore this group brings some Chinese traditional culture to Second Life.

1. Locations

The first place I visited is the design studio of the owner. Because the time difference I didn’t meet anyone there, but still I could find the cultural mark of the group.

<<YanYi>>Design  chinese  china , Tenjin (124, 51, 40)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tenjin/113/51/41

Here seems to be a personal place from the group owner FlyKnifeModelsDream Oh( FlyKnife for short). Obviously the building is a half Chinese half modern stylish house. FlyKnife owns some fashion and construction business in SL, YanYi is just a place to show some of his works and of course people can buy some for themselves.

2. Group Members

Although the group welcomes people all around the world who are interested in chinese culture, I think almost all of the group members are chinese, and most of them are living in China. The member number is 318 when I just join in. It is probably one of the largest chinese groups in SL.

3. Aesthetic Memorials

As I mentioned above, FlyKife owns his SL business, and he made lots of stuffs about chinese traditional culture.

There are traditional dresses from different times in chinese history, some of them are remarkable and already famous all around the world, like Tang Dynasty Dress, Han Dynasty Dress, Qing Dynasty Princess’s Dress and the most famous Qipao, which is considered by the world as the traditional Chinese female dress.

Beside clothes, traditional furnishing, architecture and even some very famous ancient characters (avatar) are exhibited in YanYi, extremly recognizable. Some of them are available to purchase.

4. Hierarchy

Actually I didn’t find any hierarchy in the group. Instead of ranking titles, there are lots of factions, which are the key elements of the Jianghu society.

There’s an old saying: There comes a Jianghu, where there are people. So everyone joining the group is entitled “People in Jianghu”. In Wuxia stories, “People in Jianghu” are normally people who can Wushu/Kungfu or have some very unique abilities.

A member can then freely choose a faction he inteseted to join in. The factions come from the most famous Wuxia stories, and most of factions actually exist in history. Some are very famous, like Shaolin Monks, where all Wushu/Kungfu originated from; Begger faction, which were the largest faction of all time, and all its members were poor people who was begging in street.

I think it should has separated hierarchical systems in each faction, so that the whole Jianghu is more like a complex sub society. Then the group could function more like a RPG.

5. Activities

Because of time limitation, I haven’t had any research result about the actual activities. One thing is simply clear, that most residents in SL are westerns, they build things belongs to their own cultures. Because of this culture difference, the Chinese residents need a cultural environment that they are familiar with. If say, western fiction background are always about Middle Ages like Knights and Castles, Fantasy like DND, Sci-fi like Star Wars and etc, Chinese fictions are all about Wuxia and Jianghu. That’s just simply why people are here, they want to be a hero of their own culture.

如果我被允许能用更多贴图，而不是仅限制于一张 1024 x 1024 解析度的贴图的话，结果一定会更好（毫无疑问）。

贴图部分的不足是，当初没有考虑导细小部件细节的表现，例如车鼻和车尾的 BMW 徽标。于是你看到的轮胎、轮毂、头灯、尾灯等都有足够的解虚度，可车标（包括 M3 的徽标）却是低解析度并模糊不清，尤其是与其他部件对比。

不过毕竟，作为我 Maya 的第一个作品，我自己已经对这个结果很满意了。再接再厉吧！

[DATA]

BMW M3 E90 2005

Low-res modeling for real-time rendering
No interior modeling

1930 polygons
single UV texture with resolution of 1024
no bump mapping
real-rendered in Maya

i

我其实并没有飞利浦的 Senseo 咖啡机，但我就是喜欢它的设计，所以就选它了。

当开始建模的时候就发现了，圆柱体的外形耗费了几乎全部的多边形数量，于是我只好放弃主体上的细节部分了，尤其是低质量的版本（限制最多80个多边形）。不过做这个咖啡机总比做微波炉、电冰箱或者一个碗要好玩的多，毕竟300个多边形限制的版本还是表现出了它的大致外形的。

实际多边形数量：
A    80 Tris
B   284 Tris

（控制多边形数量，是为了在即时渲染的时候降低显示负荷。用最简单的结构来表现物体，细节则留给贴图完成。）

OGame is a text-based, resource-management and space-war themed MMO strategy browser game. It was created and maintained by a German company since 2002. Until now it already has 28 different language versions and an English international version.

Each version of the game has several independent servers, which are called Universes; Each Universe has 9 Galaxies, each Galaxy has 499 Solar Systems and each System has maximal 15 Planets. Instead of a “virtual world” I prefer calling it a “virtual universe”.

:: STORY

The background of the game is nothing special. Just like the most space science fictions, it’s about the space odyssey in the near future of humanity.  Resource exploiting, technology advancing, colony development and then the endless war are everything in this universe.

The player start out with just one undeveloped world and then later turn it into a mighty empire.  Improve his economy and military to support the technological spring. Meanwhile lend a hand to his weaker alliance as well as to receive help from other stronger ones.

:: DESIGN

The World

Like I mentioned above, it’s an enormous universe consisted from galaxies, systems and planets. Each player starts with a mother planet, and later has his own colonies, each of which has a unique coordinate from 1:1:1 to 9:499:15 (Galaxy : System : Planet)– the great number of planets offers a large space for great number of players. So there is where everything begins. Because of this grand scale of the world, there’s no particular character, since it is not a RPG after all. Player stand for all his people on his planet and colonies, and of course he is his empire itself.

The Elements

Like other traditional strategy games, economy, military and technology are three key elements of the whole game. Player establishes the resource production at first; with enough economical growth to build naval fleet and planet defense; with advanced technology researches to reinforce both economy and military power.

Resources

There are actually 4 kind of basic resources and another resource for premium player.

Metal: the basic resource for almost everything, especially for constructions of buildings and fleet. At the beginning of establishing economical production, metal is always needed.

Crystal: mainly used for technology research. When you begin to develop your technology, you need large amount of crystals.

Deuterium: needed for fuel of fleets and some of technologies.

Energy: supply all buildings that need power.

There are different constructions to produce each kind of resources.  You need to upgrade them in order to product more resources. Besides you can collect resources from fleet debris in orbit or have some surprise discoveries in adventure to outer space.

Dark Matter: this is a resource to recruit officers, which can add some additional functions or abilities. Player can get very few of them during game, but mostly need to buy them with real money.

Units

Buildings are constructed for different purpose: resource production, military production, production assistant, resource storage, technology research, missile launching, and alliance depot. There are also different kinds of defense buildings helping to defense the planet.

Fleet can be also produced in specific production buildings. There are cargo ships, colony ship, espionage probe, recycle ship and lots of military ships. They play different roles in the game.

Technology

Technologies help to raise production rate, help military actions, and some are the requirements of new buildings, new units or new technologies. Technology becomes very important in later stages. It affects almost all aspect of the game.

Real-time Counting

It is the funniest part of the game. I actually played OGame before EVE Online so it astonished me when I first saw this concept: everything is counted in real-time, no matter you are online or offline. Building construction, units production, technology research and fleet activity, they all need time and the do their work in real-time. In later stage of the game, you will find a higher-level building or a higher-level technology takes days to construct or research. Basically you can only wait exactly long in real-time for its setting done.

Formulas

The game are all set based on data, then data with tons of numbers are depending on mathematic formulas. For example a level 1 building takes you only about 1 minute and hundreds of resources, but the upgrading time and spends of the building grow geometrically duo to a specific formula. Say, a level 20 of same building may probably cost you hours or even days and billions of resources!

The something happens to the fleet travels. The further the fleet travels, the longer it takes.
Some technologies can speed up these things, because they are factors in these formulas. That’s why technology research is so important in later stages of the game. You probably have lots of resources, but you can’t buy time.

Things like battle depend also on formulas. What you have is the type and numbers of the units, after both fleet meet each other, a battle result pop up immediately, which is calculated base upon specific formulas.

Social Content

The personal social activity is base on simply text message and a buddy list duo to its browser form. Of course off the game you can use whatever you want to contact other players.

But what a player can interact with others in game is that you can basically attack their planet in order to raid their resource. As a friend you can trade with one kind resource for another or just kindly give your friend a financial aid. What you do is just to send out your fleet for different missions: attack mission, scout mission, transport mission, explore mission, recycle mission, or colony mission.

Another thing is alliance function. Joining an alliance doesn’t mean you decorate your planet and colonies with a tag on them. It affects you and you take advantages even in the early stage of the game. Theoretically you get far less raid by others after you joining an alliance, especially a stronger alliance, which is famous and with higher standing.

Basically alliance works like in real life, the relationship between alliances is not restrict by game, but follows the rules that player gave them. Signing a friendship lease, peace lease between alliances, making internal rules for members, are all made by players themselves, usually the leaders of the alliance. Everything would be fine if it doesn’t violate the game rules. Only declaring a war between alliances needs to be announced publicly in game official forum.

There is also some in game function designed for alliance joint tasks. The alliance depot is a building that supplies fuel to friendly fleets in orbit helping with defense. In early version of the game when there was no alliance depot, defending a single planet against a massive alliance joint task force was an impossible mission. The alliance depot gives a opportunity to defend alliance joint attack with alliance joint defense. It balances game, and makes alliance more useful to its individual members.

:: GAMEPLAY

As a browser game based on mainly texts, the Gameplay process of OGame can be summarized as clicking, waiting, calculating, clicking, and waiting. The interface is so stupid compare with common games, but it clearly and simple to operate.

Since time is a main factor of the whole game, so waiting is the thing that every player experiences the most both in game and off game. You won’t notice this because at the beginning everything is counted in minute. But later time grows, and will be counted in hours, and even days.  But at that time, you should have plenty of things to do during that wait time, scout some other planets, make some plan, or manage other colonies.
In mid stage of the game, resource production will not meet your demand for fast development. Then you need to build your fleet to raid other planet, mostly weaker than you. Because there are plenty of abandoned planet, whose owner gives up his account or leaves game for too long. They will be marked with an “i” stand for inactive for 7 days, or “I” for inactive for more than 14 days. These planets are the main targets by low-level players, because they normally don’t need convoy, and take no risk for revenge.

But after you become stronger, the recourse production on these underdeveloped planets will be not enough for your appetite. Then you probably need to begin some real offensive actions to real people.

Consider of the reputation of the alliance, you won’t attack members of allied alliance, alliance with peace lease and stronger alliance. It’s not you can’t do, just you’d better not. The trouble will be big if you do, it probably causes a universe total war, or at least you will be punished by alliance if there’s slight dispute.

Most time the best target would be player who is offline, because they won’t have time to react to the attack. (Attacking fleet takes time to arrive the destination) If they react, like evacuate his fleet with all his resources right at the time you attack the planet (which called FS, Fleet Save, in the game), you won’t get much reward and lose much time and fuels. Not worth it. Of course there are other tactic for defender to ambush (called Ninja, defense fleet arrives right at the moment when attacker reaches the planet, with great advantages to defeat attacking fleet, and then collect debris in orbit as reward) or counter-attack. They need lots of calculation, and of course with the help of higher technologies to gather information.

To prevent from terrible things like above, contact before attack becomes more and more common. Normally attacker will send a message to defender, politely inform him the attack action. If defender replies to prove his online status, attacker will probably abort attack to prevent time and fuel loss, or even worth result. But of course, both sides are possible to trick each other. That is another funniest part of the game.

Because there are a lot of calculating works in games, and lots of intelligence work in further stages, players made lots of off line tools to help calculate, for example the upgrade cost of a specific high-level unit, the fleet fly time from A planet to target planet, or a possible result of a battle. There are also tools for keeping espionage data used for personal or alliance intelligence. There used to be some powerful tools to help player ease the operation of the game, but later they were banned because they broke the balance of the game, and they contained some premium function of the game.

Actually OGame is quite addictive, in mid-stage of the game, when you are offline for study or for works, you’ll find yourself completely fallen into the game and no matter when and where you will always think about when your technology will be finished, if you have done FS today, and what’s your next plan and etc.

:: PRESENTATION

The visual presentation of OGame sucks a lot compare with other games, because it is a text-based browser game. But the illustration helps a lot to make people have visual imaginations. With help of pictures and lots of detailed data, sci-fi geeks and strategy fans can build their own illusions in their head.

OGame supports skins modification, so that players can create their own game interface with pictures made by their own. So it is possible (actually it exists already) to have a Star Wars theme skin to make OGame universe become a long times ago in a galaxy, far far away…

Since OGame is one of the very first MMO strategy browser game, and almost the most famous and successful one. It inspires lots of new MMO browser games with the same idea but different backgrounds. With the simplest form of a browser game it offers the wonderful strategy gameplay and interesting social experience. It is not a perfect form for future development of virtual world and MMO games, but it a masterpiece and defines the concept Virtual World from another aspect.

话说这回可好，继 3DS Max, Cinema 4D 之后，我终于又开始学 Maya 了……

第一个作业的要求很简洁，仅用立方体和三个基本修改工具（移动、旋转和缩放）来建模一个物体。

我最开始是想做一辆车的，但是太平常了。然后决定做个 U-Boot，不过好像有些奇怪，毕竟潜艇体积较大且细节不多。最后想起做坦克来了，于是 Tiger I 当然不让是首选——但后来考虑到 Tiger 仅用立方体制作较为复杂，尤其是它炮塔的曲线，于是换成纳粹模式战车 Maus，更多棱角，更富巨人的气派。

(http://adiyahu.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/back-to-sl/)

I remember I probably registered my SL account about 2 years ago, when I knew the concept of SL at the very first time. But that was the time when I just came to Germany, I had only this poor laptop which can’t run SL properly. Then I didn’t continue to explore the SL world until now.

But sadly I have the same laptop as poor as 2 years ago, because this time I just came to the US. My old account is still there, but when I logged in I found my avatar was a girl… That is not the only reason that I registered a new account, I just need a fresh new start, since  last time I probably have already done with orientation island.

Therefore I began with a new avatar named Indigo Braveheart. And do everything all over again.

After finisching the orientation island, I just followed a billboard to begin my exploration. Then I was teleported to a place, where I didn’t remember the name. Going around the small town and I found another billboard, which had a sexy girl in bikini on it. Aside there were 3 pandas in different sizes.

No wonder why I came to a bikini shop when I opened my eyes again. Unfortunately I am a guy with no money in my pocket. The shop is located here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sistiana/109/216/29.

The next stop I used ingame search engine. I found an exhibition of our master program Media Architecture in Bauhaus University Weimar. It located in European University Island, and is hold in an unfinished main building of Bauhau University, where made me felt so familiar. The unfinished building has only the lobby, spiral stairway, Oberlichtsaal(skylight hall) and another unfinished room, but it was still amazing, because of the appearance of this famous historical building in SL (although not completely). Here is the coordinate: http://slurl.com/secondlife/European%20University/40/104/25

After visited Bauhaus Uni, I jumped to a Sci-Fi Mall called SCI-FI WORKS, where people can purchase items from famous sci-fi franchise like Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. Some are really well made and seems can work pretty well, especially the vehicles/starships. It’s interesting. If you want to go around, just follow this address: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Thunderbird%20Island/25/237/312

As a WWII naval fan I tried to find a historical battleship to get on board. But it seems there are nowhere like this. At least I didn’t find any. What a pity. Maybe it could be the objective of my next exploration.