TIGER TIGER BURNING BRIGHT

I finally got a chance to ride Tiger Crossing's Timeplunge, a trip through a spinning green wormhole into epochs of wonder and danger. It's been around quite awhile; Tiger originally built it for LindenWorld, a now-defunct theme park from late last year. He's kept the ride going on his property, though, and it's still one of the most popular sites in Second Life.

By the time I complete my own nail-biting ride, Tiger has arrived on the premises, to give me a backstage tour. (And those who haven't done the Timeplunge may want to skip the rest of this entry, as not to spoil its surprises.)

"The car just sits in one place while the ride rezzes around it," Tiger tells me, smiling. ("Rez" being Second Life jargon for the instatiating of a physical object in the virtual world.) "The sets are [set to] Temporary on rez... They don't last." That includes the dinosaur that comes down on you during the Jurassic segment, in a way that's genuinely startling.

"Basically," I observe, "it's the holodeck!"

Tiger brings up the Pompei set, and points to a Roman column, that totters to the ground, when the volcano gets going: "I was going to have the whole thing start to collapse, but I only got as far as this pillar." The background of each world is conveyed in 2D images displayed on a flat surface-- "textures", in game developer parlance. "The black thing is the texture preload panel," he says. "I wish I had thought of that ages ago. The ride is SO much better when all the textures are loaded before the objects are."

Crossing's next project is to give his adventure a soundtrack. "I want to make the ride [voic] narrated, with a few sound effects. I worry mainly that the sound will disturb neighbors, though. It was different when LindenWorld was around. I may end up making a small building here to get in the car, and [transport it up to] the ride high up in the sky, where no sounds will bother anyone."

Tiger turns to me, tail high in the air. "And that's all there is to it. [A] rez show. Just a couple boxes with prefab sets in them."

While he goes about the demo, I've noticed that he's added a new title to the name that floats above his avatar: Proud New Father.

"So, uh, you're a new father? CONGRATS!"

"Yup! She's a month and a day old today." In seconds, Tiger's rezzed a baby pic beneath his dinosaur's open mouth. "I've splashed her texture all over Second Life," Tiger Crossing says, smiling. "Proud Daddy syndrome."