History

StoryMachine was originally conceived as a way of illustrating gene expression in Second Life and consequently first named GenomeThing. It soon became clear, however, that it could be used to represent anything with a temporal dimension and could be viewed as an extension in that direction of Eloise Pasteur's spidergram tool. The story is written as a series of commands in a notecard placed in the controller. When the user selects a story the nodes are rezzed and connected sequentially by particle streams, much as in the spidergram. The StoryMachine can also chat explanatory text as the story unfolds.

Use

The value of the StoryMachine probably lies more in giving students a tool to construct dynamic models rather than as a replacement for PowerPoint. However, it might play a useful role in summarising a complex topic, especially if space is at a premium. I certainly found it helpful in scoping some aspects of a proposed build. However, I can imagine other strategies that might ultimately be more effective (and varied) than StoryMachine. Its use also highlighted some ongoing issues, e.g. use of textured particles, ability to change the shape of the nodes and, indeed, to hide or shrink them.

Known limitations

1. Commands cannot exceed 255 characters total. There is no warning if this limit is exceeded. The output is truncated.
2. Commands use CSV format though the implementation of CSV in LSL is broken. As a consequence, if you want to have a comma in a command, you must replace it with a double semi-colon.
3. Prim titles that are involved in links must not use spaces or punctuation apart from underscores which can replace spaces.
4. Sounds cannot exceed 10 seconds.
5. There is no guarantee that display of media will be synched for all avatars or, indeed, with playback generally. It follows that playback of video, etc, should probably occur at the end of the story.
6. There is presently no pause function. Interrupting a playback will restart the system for all avatars.
7. All chat is whispered which means that avatars must be within 10 metres to see chat text (apart from that above the displays) and that StoryMachines must be separated by 10 metres to avoid interactions. The green particles rezzed on starting stories flag a 10 metre distance.

Instructions

These are on a separate page.

Availability

Version 0.21 is available for the princely sum of L$0 from International Schools Island (by kind permission of shamblesguru Voom). It has the scripts demonstrated at SLEDcc2008.

Issues, bugs and feature requests

See separate page.

Blog posts about StoryMachine

Blogs: TidalBlog