SLCC 2009

Have finally decided I WILL be attending SLCC 2009 in San Fran! I finally decided I enjoyed the last one too much and life is too short. Hope to see many of you there!

--DrawDweeb Latte-

Megaprims

For a long time I avoided using megaprims. These are the large (huge) prims from the past that came to be due to a loophole in Second Life. Used to be that the client was the one that enforced the prim limits of 10 meters. So that means that if a modified client allowed the user to go beyond those limits, the server would happily accept them.

Linden Labs corrected this eventually by putting the checks in the server. So no new megaprims could be created. But there was still the problem of the existing ones. Should Linden make them disappear? Many people had used them in builds. And people hate when the walls of their hard worked builds disappear. Or the floors! So Linden came to a compromise. No new megaprims could be built. But existing ones could stay.

Now megaprims could also be a nuisance. If I didn't like you as a neighbor I could put a huge prim on my land that blocked your path around your house in the next lot. Maybe even in the next sim. Or blocked your view of your own beach. Or they could be a wonderful tool for the griefer, sending huge wheels to run down everyone at your event. In addition, there were cases where really huge prims could cause problems for the rendering or physics engines.

So Linden made a set of rules that went with the prims. The main ones are:

1. You can't change the size of a megaprim. If you do, the regular rules apply again and it's truncated to 10 meters max per side.
   
   
2. Any part that's off your land becomes phantom.
   
   
3. You can't link them with other prims.
   

Some others, but those were the biggies The rules made me kind of uncomfortable using the megas. In addition, I felt that Linden merely tolerated them rather than supported them. What if policy changed in the future?

But one day I was browing through Xstreet and came accross a free set of megaprims. I figured no cost and it might be fun to try. This was the Huge Prims set from Paola Delpaso.

I was so impressed! I immediatly chided myself for not trying them before. What a great building tool. I had specnt so much time in the past lining up many, many (,many!) prims in a row to create areas that were really in my mind one object, just broken into 10 meter sections. I was hooked in no time.

I went back to and picked up 329 Megaprims from Ceera Murakami and Parcel-Sized Prims Collection 0.5 from Day Oh, both also free.

If you haven't played with megaprims, give them a try. You'll be glad you did. And stay awake for any plans to remove them so you can put in your $0.02.

I erected a single very tall prim on my dock. here's some shots to try to give a sense of scale. I start standing by it on the dock. Then go and stand on the top in the clouds. One prim!









--Drawdweeb Latte-

So I'm really pissed that I haven't been blogging. It's not that I haven't been doing Second Life work. I've been sitting down almost every night as a wind-down before heading to bed. But I've been miserably bad about documenting it. One of the fun things I've done is finally set up a place to preview my houses. I've wanted that for a while, but had not gotten around to it. I hated giving up part of my land for commercial purposes. And I picked my land for my own purposes. I loved the mountainous slope to the water. Great for me. Not so great for showing off "normal" houses which kind of call for flat land.

So I finally joined the many other merchants in the sky. That really worked well for me. I had the section of land that was in water. I wanted to keep it so that I kept the view. But I certainly didn't want to build in the water. And I had as many prims over the water as I had on dry land. But I could use those prims up in the sky. I keep my water view on the ground. I use my water prims effectively. And I get my "flat land" for house displays.



I started with 36 10x10 slabs of grass. Boring, but a good base to work around.



Added some walls, a path, some trees, and started adding the houses. I had some fun with the house and bought some inexpensive furniture to put in the houses. They really made a big difference in the presentation. I need to work on that more and keep it up.



And at the end the Dweeb rested and viewed his work!



--Drawdweeb Latte-

The meeting table

I made my first serious try at building furniture, This was a meeting table with chairs. I made the carpet afterwords because the table looked lost on al that wood. Still needs some tweaking, I think



I really need to start working more on animations. I liked that the bean bag chairs had a casual pose for the sit. Now the default animations are really looking lame to me.



-- Drawdweeb Latte-

No integrated video!

I finally decide to do my first video. So I find the SL client no longer supports capture video to disk. Arggghh! All the reasoning is cool (much better third party software). Just hate that as soon as I decide to use a feature, that's exactly when it''s removed!

--Drawdweeb Latte --

New Building

I finally got tired enough of the fish-tank building to get rid of it. Finally realized how much I didn't like it.

Once I got rid of it I felt the same way I do when I clean out a closet (a rare experience). It was good to have the mountainside clear again. I got all turned on and started building a new one right away.

This is the first "sketch" with blocks. I wanted to get a something modern yet open and light. I didn't take pictures, but this was actually like the third iteration of moving the blocks around. But it felt good and I went with it.

When the first set of windows went in the views started looking good. The overall scale of this building is smaller than the previous, but this seemed to have much more usable spaces. Large areas rather than several little ones.

The view of the ocean was great from here. It's almost 100 meters up so a lot of structure kind of tend to fade away leaving the feeling of being out in the country.

I went a bit crazy with the trees. I looked at my prim count and I had lots and lots left. I was being too stingy. I figured the best way to use those wonderful prims was in trees. At one prim each they're really one of great deals from Linden Labs. I don't think I'm done. There may be more coming!

And finally a well deserved rest looking out at the ocean. I go these bean bag chair form Sara Designs Furniture . They have a single animation and an ad if you click instead of right-click, but you can't beat them at L$1 each! She has much nicer stuff at very reasonable prices. I think I'll be back there when I seriously get into decoration such as that is.

--Drawdweeb Latte--

Technology convention for non-profit organizations

I attended a technology convention for non-profit organizations and they had a session about non-profits on Second Life so naturally I attended. The session was good, but the presentation was awesome. There was one presenter on site, but both she and the other two presenters we in Second Life form across the US. In addition, the presentation was geared both to the real audience sitting in our room and the virtual audience sitting around the presenting avatars. It was a situation which would take more guts than I would have to do a presentation myself.









But I think it was very worth it. This presentation was to a group of people that were mostly not Second Life literate. Probably more than half the audience had not been on to SL at all, and many of the others were at the “I signed on once” stage. The fact that the presentation was on SL communicated a feel for the world that I don’t think would have reached the same lever even with a “demo” of Second Life (“Here’s how you walk”, “here’s how you chat”, …)

It was great fun at the end where all the audience questions had been answered and the in-room presenter asked if there was anything the audience would like to see. One guy immediately asked if we could go see dancing since he couldn’t picture avatar dancing. Instead of taking us, the presenter asked the in-world audience if they’d indulge us in dancing and several of the onscreen avatars gave a great show and a great close to the presentation.

--DrawDweeb Latte-