In advance of the island’s opening Veejay Burns over at the excellent Mindblizzard Blog posts some screenshots (like the one above) and keen observations on Capozzi owner and Pinotblogger Josh Hermsmeyer’s approach to brand creation as transcending the ‘Wine 2.0′ movement.

To help keep track of Capozzi Winery Island on the web I have been using a combination of Technorati Watchlists and RSS alerts from other blog search engines tuned in to various keywords and phrases. The result until recently has been the need to sift through numerous feeds, weed out duplicate and self-generated posts and sort it all by date to find the newest references. While the task is certainly manageable (not to mention exciting) it seemed that there had to be a way to automate the more tedious aspects of the process.

Enter Yahoo Pipes. Admittedly a bit late to the party given the initial crush of users and reports of intermittent stability woes, I was nonetheless intrigued by the relatively friendly web-interface to a longstanding Unix convention for filtering and concatenation. Moreover I continue to be impressed by the cool things people are doing with it, including Max Case’s Babbler, a language translation tool working inside the Second Life client.

So while I’m really just incompetently scratching the surface with my pipe called “Capozzi Island on the Web” the resultant feed which you will now find in our sidebar has proven to be very useful, and if I can do it, you can too. Feel free to clone it as the basis for one of your own and perhaps help figure out why the date sorting doesn’t always work and/or confirm my suspicion that it is related to different RSS standards.

Personally Pipes is much more useful than Microsoft’s Popfly, whose primary function at this early stage seems to be for Redmond to drive installations of Silverlight and Virtual Earth.

Previously it was mentioned that we were making some adjustments to the signage on the island to improve readability. The need for this was underscored in screenshots taken by the author of this post covering Capozzi Winery Island for the Second Life Business Review. Here is a hybrid before/after image showing the changes. Text appearing just above the horizon line seems to be much more legible now by making the engraved letters opaque instead of transparent. This also allows the background to be slightly more transparent and reveal more of the surroundings without compromising contrast between it and the lettering.

Earlier this week these high-res screenshots were sent to Réussir Vigne, a French magazine covering viticulture and wine marketing. They are prepping a story on wine in Second Life featuring Capozzi Winery Island and owner Josh Hermsmeyer.

The first shot shows the addition of the Event Stage and Wedding Arch. Aside from some adjustments to the signage in order to improve legibility the build is essentially complete! Among the few remaining next steps is the integration of the wine game script developed by John Plevyak of Metaversatility. John’s colleagues and co-founders Adri Saarinen and Peter Newell discussed Capozzi Winery Island on Episode 5 of the Second Life Insider Podcast.

Just a quick screenshot of the tasting room with the bar shelves and other details added.

Few things are as evocative as an unopened bottle of wine and the palpable anticipation of the sensual joys within. One might suggest it represents the highest expression of the grape in its virtual state, playing upon the imagination to fill in the gaps and act as portal between the idea of wine and its physical manifestation.

Our intention has been for Capozzi Winery Island as a whole to act as extension of this relationship, and to reflect not only the quality of the experience but the quality of the product itself.

To this end the creation of the bottles seemed worthy of a little extra effort, and to help illustrate the final stage of the winemaking process five different versions of the bottle have been prepared including empty, filled, corked, foiled, and labeled.

Fighting the onset of a drowsy tryptophan-induced afternoon of turkey aftermath (tempered by unregulated chocolate consumption), with this, the final post of the day, we find ourselves almost up to date on the progress of the island. With the exception of the event stage and the wedding arch all of the winery structures are now complete, as well as all of the equipment to be found at various stages of the wine making simulation:

While the internet connection at my locale for the holiday weekend does not seem to let me log in to Second Life, upon returning attention will now be turned to the more ‘tactile’ aspects of the visitor experience - bottles, cases, glassware, and tasting room details. We’ll attempt to update more often.

As mentioned in a previous post, one of the more common issues a person deals with in the texturing of objects is the resolution of how materials meet at their edges. This is especially acute when the materials are dissimilar. In this example we are attempting to express the soil of the cellar roof as being contained within a rigid box container, however simply applying a different texture on the sides of the cellar roof doesn’t yield the result we are looking for.

A remedy involved the preparation of eight new grass textures, each with a slightly different combination of borders along its sides to cover off the four corners and the four cardinal directions. As a gradient was utilized on the border simply flipping or rotating the textures would not have been sufficient:

The result is that the edges of the cellar roof are now perceived with a certain thickness and mass, achieved without the need for additional prims.

While still undecided on the issue of whether or not to keep the sun position on the island static or to let it follow the default cycle, provisions have been made for the experience of the island at night. The above photo shows the use of openGL lighting at the stages of the wine making simulator. The fixtures have been scripted to turn on and off automatically by adapting a script graciously provided to the SL commmunity by Ordinal Malaprop.

While artifacts associated with the rendering of the vine texture are being accepted as a given, Second Life’s set of Estate tools allow us the opportunity to alter the ground textures from the default set. The tool enables the utilization of four separate textures, for the highest and lowest elevations, as well as two additional intermediate levels. The default island set utilizes stone textures at the peaks, sand textures at the valleys, and grass textures in-between. The interesting part is that the lowest elevations by default are represented by some of the lightest tonal values, when intuitively the lowest areas might in fact want to be darker by virtue of the fact that they are perceived as getting less daylight than the higher elevations.

The image you see above is from a diagnostic process to see which of the four images were being utilized in specific circumstances. Based on this a new custom set of ground textures have been utilized on the island to provide a greater degree of consistency with the color and tonal value of the vine textures, darken slightly the lowest elevations, and establish the highest elevations of the vineyard as being composed of soil instead of stone (and the improbable growing conditions that go along with it).