The WEB home of Kayaker Magic

Last updated July 2020
I go kayaking (of course) in RL in places like the wilderness of Alaska for long periods of time. If I don't respond to an IM on Kitely (a good way to get my attention) I may be out of reach.

Links to my places in the Metaverse

I got tired of updating links in my product descriptioins. So now I point all of those at this page which will have more up-to-date links to the demo regions that are currently up. Unfortunately there is no standarization on how to store a hypergrid link, so some of these links will take a little tinkering to get them to work on your viewer.
Great Canadian Grid and InWorldz Grid before that:
IF YOU EVER BOUGHT ANYTHING FROM ME IN GCG or INWORLDZ, SEE MY UPDATE POLICY BELOW!
My heart goes out to people who invested a lot of time building in the Great Canadian Grid. While I was away kayaking in Alaska in RL for a long trip, InWorldz imploded! I go kayaking in the wilderness for just a month or two and everything changes! I lost a few important scripts I was working on that had not been backed up. But everything else I had there was also on other grids so I am mostly fine. Like in SL, I was not making enough in IW to pay my tier. I was considering several options like downsizing or retreating to the inIW.net WEB market (also defunct now). IW going offline made the decision for me.
Discovery Grid
I have set up a store that accepts Gloebits in Discovery Grid. See the blog about this below. Scattered around Discovery grid are demo versions of waves, surfboards, white water rivers, kayaks, horses, dune buggies, race courses, Pandoran items, weapons, dinosaurs and more! Teleport pannels in my Gloebit store will take you to all these places.
Kitely Grid:
I have split my demos into two regions in Kitely: A water region and a land region. Both were terraformed with my Fractal Master script. Both are 2x2 var regions that now feel small and cramped to me for sailing around!
~ The water region Panthalassa has all the water based demos: Surfable waves, surfboards, kayaks, windsurfer bodysurfing and even an inner tube to ride the waves. A small island has docks with demo sailboats to try out. A timed racecourse starts here for racing around the big island. Under the docks the water is swarming with fish and other swimming critters. Some of them bite! The air over the small island is teeming with flying critters like seagulls, pelicans, dragonettes and bats. The large island has forests of different species of trees, and a white water river to ride canoes and kayaks down.
~ The land world Gondwana has a heard of dinosaurs to hunt with the guns available at the Lost World Safari Lodge. Don't touch the electric fence! And don't get the T-Rex mad! Nearby is an archery range to practice with several other weapons, including cannons to fire at the Pirate Town buildings nearby. Rental horses (free demos) are waiting for you in the barn, or try out a QUAD all-terrain vehicle.
~ I don't have an in-world store in Kitely, for now you have to go to my WEB based store in the Kitely Marketplace, which can sell products for export to any hypergrid enabled grid.
OSGrid:
I have copies of Panthalassa and Gondwana in OSGrid to show everything working on just about any grid running OpemSim 0.9.1. These two regions are hosted on a server in my barn in RL! Nearby on the same server are several other var regions used to test my Terrain Tools, almost 200 original region equivalents of land to explore!

Links to Documentation Pages

I have discovered that keeping documentation up-to-date is taking lots of time that I would rather spend writing scripts for new things. One way to make this easier is to just put links in items to a WEB page that only needs to be updted once instead of many notecards. So lots of my recent projects have WEB pages and I should put links here where more people will see them and find out about other things I do:
Mechanical Broncos OpenSim finally has mechanical broncos for your venu! There is a horse, shark and even a bucking R2D2 for SF venues. Exclusively available at Discovery Grid's Pop Up Market until July.
Alpha HUDS for Mesh Bodies Alpha HUDs for several mesh bodies that save and load transparency sets and let you share them. Not available at Kitely yet.
Terrain Tools I have a Bulldozer that actually modifies teerrain as it moves, a stick of dynamite that blows holes in your terrain, fractal and cubic island terrain generators.
Horses I'm selling a series of horses: bareback, western tack, and war horse (takes damage from Magic Bullet weapons). The original horse sculpt these are based on was made by Gregg Legendary and the appaloosa textures were made by Modee Parlez.
Race Course System This is a race course system that can be set up across multiple regions in the same grid. You put up a Start Gate, up to 9 Check Points and a Finish Line.
Magic Pose System This is a script that will help you set up poses in your furniture. It builds a menu of all your poses, helps you edit that menu, move each of the poses around on the furniture, save the resulting menu and set up your furniture to sell to your customers.
Magic Color HUD This is a HUD that you can add to your products to enable color/texture/size change options in objects that you can then sell. It can change colors in objects set up to listen with a supplied color setter script. It can also change the texture on any face of the object and change the objects size.
Surfboards How to set up, configure and ride my surf boards.
Sailing and Boat building Help for building sailing and motor boats built with my scripts and help for how to sail them.
Flying critters The larger flying critters, Pelican, Albatross and Pteranodon, now bank when they turn! And several other upgrades.
Small Swimming Critters The smaller swimming critters have their own WEB page now. Shark, clownfish, goldfish, guppy, herring, squid, zebrafish and stinray.
Sea Turtle The Sea Turtle can get a list of safe SIMs off the cloud now, and has Web based documentation.
Nessiosaur Nessie the Plesiosaur can get a list of safe SIMs off the cloud now, and has Web based documentation.
Sea Turtle The Ichthyosaur can get a list of safe SIMs off the cloud now, and has Web based documentation.
Giant Manta The Giant Manta can get a list of safe SIMs off the cloud now, and has Web based documentation.
Bow and Arrow Bows and arrows that work without physics and can be set up to work in regions that do not allow rezzing arrow prims. (This allows having battles without opening your land up to griefers).
Rifle and Pistol Rifles (long guns) pistols that work without physics and can be set up to work in regions that do not allow rezzing bullet prims.
Locator Originally written for InWorldz, I'm currently working on getting it up on DiscoveryGrid and other places in the metaverse. I build things that can fly off and get lost. Many modern grids have huge seas made out of var regions. InWorldz had the I'zStraits. A Flying Dutchman ship or a Pelican can fly 1000's of meters away in these places. I want to be responsible and keep track of my own things, so I wrote a transponder script that sends position updates to a database. This WEB page displays the contents of that database so I can check up on my creations.

Update Policy

Originally to try and help Second Life residents consider moving to the Greater Metaverse, I offered to update my products free for them in their new OpenSim home. I have expanded this to giving free updates to anyone who moves from one grid to another. (Some people seem to move quite often, if this gets bothersome I may start charging a moving fee!) If you bought items from me, and you have moved, contact me at Kitely (where I usually deliver from) and I will get your stuff to you in your new grid. (Some restrictions apply: I have to be able to HyperGrid there to make deliveries!)

Gloebit Store on Discovery Grid

Kayaker Magic, March 4th 2018
Gloebit is a new virtual currency that works on many different grids. So you can hop around the Metaverse and buy things without having to create an account in each grid with local currency. I set up a store on the Discovery Grid where you can buy my products and take them back to your home grid. Unlike browsing the Kitely Market, this gives you an in-world shopping experience. My store there has two floors with over 100 items for sale: Kayaks, surfboards, waves, sailboats, horses, swimming critters, PayPal vending machines, terrain tools, Pandoran products, dinosaurs, weapons and more. Here is the HG link to Discovery Grid's Gloebit Island. In my store are teleporters for taking you all over the grid to different places where I have demos set up for you to try my products out before you buy.

End of an Era

Kayaker Magic, January 2018
In 2017 I let my tier expire on Second Life. I no longer have a store there where people can try out my items. I still have lots of items for sale in the WEB based SL Marketplace. And of course I have many places in the Metaverse (listed above) where you can demo items. I used to have a whole region on SL, which was enormously expensive. I downsized that to a small store on 1/8th of a region some time ago. It was a parcel on the corner of a region so I could have waves, surfboards, kayaks and critters moving around up to 50 meters offshore in two directions. Sales in SL have been slow for a long time and have not quite made enough to pay tier. My savings in SL slowly dwindled and I debated whether or not to subsidize a store. Finally I must have deleted the late tier messages as SPAM and the lease ran out while I was not looking. Decision made.

New Release of the MPS Magic Pose System

Kayaker Magic, August 2014.
One of the bug fixes in Open Simulator version 0.8 enabled my Magic Pose System (MPS) to work in OpenSim based grids at last! This is a script that will help you set up poses in your furniture. It builds a menu of all your poses for you, helps you edit that menu, move each of the poses around on the furniture, save the resulting menu and set up your furniture to sell to your customers. I decided to get rid of the helper prim and position avatars with "3d widgets" in a HUD. There are no pose-balls in your final product. This even works on single-prim sculpt or mesh furniture. As few as one click and you are sitting in the chair. For more information, go to my MPS page, watch the tutorials and read the complete documentation.

Living Sails for Sale At the Chandlery

Everywhere you go in virtual worlds you see giant pirate ships parked in the water. These look like sailing ships, but they are mostly just static props. I have a vision to bring all these ships to life! I am now selling a sailboat script kit that can turn many of these props into moving vehicles. And "Living Sails" that work with the boat script to turn with the wind and behave in a realistic way. Of course the same system can be used to build new boats from scratch.

My first sailboat was a sloop with a single mast, a Bermuda sail behind it an a jib sail in front. I considered making my sailboat script more complex and adding more code to handle more sails. But I found a simplifying way to do this: The boat script became simpler, and the sails all became smarter. Just link them onto a boat and they start behaving realistically. You can link as many sails as you want into a boat build and they all come alive. I now have many different kinds of sails available: Bermuda, Jib, Gaff, Square, Junk and more. These sails started out as sculpts, but have all been upgraded to single prim mesh objects with the parts like the boom or yardarm built into the prim. The Junk sail is a gracefully curved rectangular sheet that you can paint any type of sail on. It ships with a photo-based picture of the sail from a Junk ship in Hong Kong Harbor.

To learn more about Living Sails, come to one of my demo locations (see links at the top of this blog) and try out a boat or two built with them! Available in the Kitely Market, and my gloebit store in-world on the Discovery Grid.


The Chandlery, a Marine Supply Store for Builders

I am selling intelligent scripted instruments for boat builders in Virtual Worlds. Compasses, a beautiful brass ships binnacle, speedometers, tachometers, anemometers, propellers, throttle levers, a beautiful brass ships telegraph, outboard motors, paddle wheels, brass pipe fittings, sails, brass ships horn and whistle. Several build-it-yourself boat kits that you just link these instruments into and they start working together. Clicking the throttle makes the propellers spin faster, the engine noise increase, the throttle handle rotate, the tachometer needle rise, the boat move faster. When the boat moves faster the speedometer needle rises and the anemometer turns to indicate the apparent wind. I have a few of these items for sail\\\\sale in the Kitely Market., but the entire inventory was only available on InWorldz which is no more. Now that there are several places like DigiWorldz and Discovery Grid that have huge oceans for sailing in, I hope there will be new interest in boat building. I will get all the chandlery items up on the Kitely Market soon and start a Chandlery store in-world in Discovery Grid. If there is some boat part that you need that isn't available yet, let me know and I will move it to the top of my priority list. Boats that demo many items from the Chandlery are still demoable in Kitely, OSGrid and Discovery Grid.

Accepting Major Credit Cards in Virtual Worlds!

In the Kitely grid you cannot sell your credits back for real money. You can accept PayPal in the Kitely Marketplace but not at an in-world store (until now). In grids like the OSGrid where there is no economy you cannot set up donation boxes or vending machines at all. I am working an a solution for these problems.

I have a PayPal Donation Box that accepts PayPal donations. It acts a lot like (and looks like) a PayPal donate button from a WEB page. It takes to you the PayPal WEB site on your browser to finish the transaction. I have it for sale in the Kitely Market and several other places.

I have a PayPal Vendor Box that accepts PayPal payment. It acts a lot like a PayPal "buy it now" button. (So far I do not have a way to add items to a shopping cart reliably from inside a virtual world). Now available in the Kitely Market, I first tested this in My Chandlery store in Kitely, so the Chandlery had the PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Discover logos on the door! That store has been shut down for now, but I have a few PayPal enabled vending machines scattered around with my demos in the Disovery Grid.

Finally I wrote a PayPal Rental Box that manages propery rental of parcels in OpenSim. Also available In my store at the Kitely Market.

The donation box just sends people to their PayPal WEB page with the information to make a donation. The vendor and rental boxes require information back from paypal to make sure that payment was made and how much. There is no way to do that in-world, so I have a server running on the Internet to process these PayPal messages and pass them on to the in-world boxes. To help fund this server, I charge per transaction for using the service. Since there is no good way to do micro-payments on the WEB, I hit on the idea of selling "Sales Permits" in advance. You pay me in advance (via PayPal, what else?) for a certain number of "Sales Permits" and then the vendor works that many times for you. These permits cost you USD$0.20 each, and all the vendors you set up in a grid draw from your pool of permits. (You don't need to by separate permits for each vendor you set up). Compare this to the USD$0.30+2% that PayPal charges you!

Many people have concerns about privacy and using PayPal in virtual worlds. This is because PayPal uses email addresses to identify accounts. If you buy something using PayPal the recipient will see your email address on their PayPal transactions list. It is possible (but not easy) to use this to connect RL email addresses with in-world avatar names. It would be even easier for a script to make this connection, so I assure everyone that I am NOT writing my scripts to do this. But the possibility freaks some people out, especially in grids that have other ways to exchange their currency for RL money. But this may be a viable way to do business on the OSGrid where there is no currency.


Ocean Engineering expands into more grids.

Kayaker Magic, April 2013
The time came for Ocean Engineering to expand into other grids. I am opening a store in (Virtual Highway, Avination and InWorldz are no more -- updated August 2018) Discovery Grid, Kitely and demonstrating products on the OSGrid.

Ocean Engineering is best known for a wave and surfboard that have been working in Open Simulator since 2012, and in Second Life for several years before that.

See the perma-links at the top of this blog to find my locations in several grids. I have regions named Panthalassa, Pangaea or Gondwana in several places. (Most of them are var regions now, ideal for sailing!) In SL I no longer have land/water to demo on. In the OSGrid I have a LOT of land for testing terrain generation tools. The links at the top of this blog should be up-to date and get you to the surfing/sailing region. I'm currently not selling anyting in OSGrid, but the surfing and sailing is always free on my SIMs there.

Ocean Engineering is the name of my store specializing (mostly) in products for the water in virtual worlds. The waves and surfboards were originally made in Second Life to work off-sim, like off-sim extenders except they move and take your avatar with them. (My motto has been: "Don't give up valuable land to make water to surf on, Surf Off-Sim!") In 2012 I was approached by Tiffany Magic and Marianna Monentes from the Virtual Highway grid. They wanted to bring surfing to their grid and I was able to get my waves working there. Due to missing features in OS the waves could not work off-sim, but land is cheeper in OS based grids, so a wave that only works inside the SIM borders is OK.

The waves and boards move smoothly without SIM physics, so they work reliably in almost any grid. (For the technically curious, I use llSetKeyframedMotion most places. That was originally not implimented in OpenSim so I used llSetLinkPrimitiveParmsFast inside not_at_target). Because I do my own physics, the waves work anywhere. Even if installed thousands of meters above the ground. So you still don't have to give up valuable land to make water to surf, surf next to your skybox!

Everyone seems most interested in surfing on boards, but I also have kayaks, windsurfers and body surfing on the same waves. I have a build-your-own whitewater river, a river raft, inner tube and canoes made for it. The vehicles all work the same way, so the kayaks can ride the river, and the river vehicles can surf the waves. Surfing an 8 meter wave on an inner tube is a blast!

See my video surfing in mouselook mode. Or just go to my YouTube channel to see all the video demonstrations of all my products for virtual worlds.



The WEB home of Kayaker Magic

Four decades of experience writing code in Real Life results in innovative virtual products that exibit complex behavior in Open Simulator based grids and Second Life.