What: Gala 7th Rez Day Celebration for My Mysterious Sweetie
Where: Whimsy Dance Platform
When: Saturday, 29 June, 2013, 5-7 pm Linden Standard Time
Attire: As You Wish
Music by Sparrow Letov-Meredith
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Above is a perfectly ordinary shot, taken at sunset on the Whimcentricity sim. In the foreground is a rusted-out boat by Wagnhorne Truss. Far away, in the background, is a lava flow on the volcano Pele.
Nice, shot, but wait. Let me zoom in my camera...
Click the images to zoom.
What the...!
Callie! Get out of my picture! Your eyes aren't rendering and it's creepy! Move along!
Click READ MORE to learn how to zoom your camera in and out.
As in real life, zooming the camera in foreshortens; objects in the background looks closer to foreground objects than they actually are. This can create a great deal of drama with landscapes and even more when taking closeups of avatars.
Compare the above, which I took at a concert, to the unzoomed SL snapshot below.
This shot of Netera Landar is from her interview in SL Newser - People. It's a good photograph, but zoom would have removed much of the background and allowed readers to get a better view of Netera.
You can also zoom the camera out. This creates a fisheye effect.
It's not such a great idea to zoom all your photographs, but it's one of the most powerful features of the camera. It's good to know how to use zoom-- and when.
So, how to zoom? It's simple. But before I continue, let me just say-- with extreme zoom you may need to increase your draw distance. 250 meters will usually work, but depending on what you're photographing, you may need to go even higher. Don't forget to turn it back down when you finish your phototaking.
CTRL-0 will zoom in. From the default view, the camera will step in fifteen or so times.
CTRL-8 wlll zoom out. From the default view, the camera will step out three times. It used to zoom out more, with the last step giving a strange and sometimes useful effect, but that's been removed.
CTRL-9 will return your view to normal.
When zoomed in you can back slowly out with CTRL-8, and when zoomed out you can pull in with CTRL_8, but remember CTRL-9. When you lose your focus (and you will) when zoomed in, it's easiest to return to normal, refocus, and zoom in again.
So just remember, CTRL-9. CTRL-9 is your friend. And so is zoom.
My thanks to Torley Linden, who pointed out the power of the Second Life camera in one of his early vidtuits.
Sweetie and I loved this humorous display on the history of invisiprims.
Above, leftomost, you can see the prototype-- a regular plywood primitive. Then it's gone (hence, invisiprim) until 2009 (in the distance), when you can catch a glimpse of it due to a supposed glitch.
As you no doubt know unless you're relatively new to Second Life, until the introduction of alpha masks with Viewer 2.0, invisiprims were used to hide parts of an avatar's body. They were widely used in furry communities and by makers of high heels.
Invisiprims worked fairly well, but they had a difficulty-- objects with alpha, including the waters of the seas of Second Life, are rendered invisible if they are behind an invisiprim. That's why there appears to be a hole in the water when you hover over the oceans in your legacy 7" CFM pumps.
I didn't know this until I read the wiki above, but there are two special invisiprim textures, "38b86f85-2575-52a9-a531-23108d8da837" and "e97cf410-8e61-7005-ec06-629eba4cd1fb", which can be set only via script. No wonder I was unsuccessful at my shoemaking endeavors!
Invisiprims were rendered obsolete with the advent of alpha masks, but still worked. Deferred rendering (enhanced light sand shadows) breaks them.
A lot of legacy furry avatars and shoes use alpha. In the case of the furries, I should think, simply wearing a full-body alpha mask would fix the problem-- except I'm sure the invisiprims are attached to the various body parts and would require some degree of skill-- and modifiable body parts-- to trick up. Ditto for shoes.
I now include an alpha mask with my robot avatars. I didn't use invisprims before (mainly because I didn't know how to make them. Instead I used a body crusher animation to keep arms and legs inside.
I suspect a lot of my shoes will be broken when the new materials rendering system comes online (and I believe it just did). That's sad.
Monday, June 24, 2013
About a year ago, Anthony had gotten mad at her, because she’d told him he shouldn’t have turned the cat into a cat-rug, and although he had always obeyed her more than anyone else, which was hardly at all, this time he’d snapped at her. With his mind. And that had been the end of Amy Fremont’s bright eyes, and the end of Amy Fremont as everyone had known her. And that was when word got around in Peaksville (population: 46) that even the members of Anthony’s own family weren’t safe. After that, everyone was twice as careful.Jerome Bixby's short story "It's a Good Life" is a gripping tale of a three-year-old boy with the ability to do anything he wishes to anything or anyone. People in his small town of Peaksville, Ohio are rightly terrified of him because if for some reason he were to become irritated with them...
Despite his powers, Anthony Fremont isn't an evil child-- and that's what makes Bixby's tale so gripping. He's an otherwise normal child with a normal three-year-old's emotions and understanding-- that is to say, he's far from mental and emotional maturity. One wouldn't want to live in Peaksville. In fact, those who do live in Peaksville desperately desire escape-- but there is no escape because their world ends at the city limits signs. They're unsure whether Anthony moved Peaksville off somewhere by itself or whether he destroyed the rest of the world. Scary.
In 1970 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "It's a Good Life" one of the twenty best science fiction short stories ever-- and it appears on other short lists of best stories.
"It's a Good Life" was first published more than sixty years ago in paperback by Ballantine Books. Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2. would be difficult to find, and probably expensive if you could find it, but fortunately you can read Bixby's story here.
The late Rod Serling had a great eye for powerful fiction, so it's no surprise he picked Bixby's story for the third season of his television show The Twilight Zone. Starring a young Bill Mumy as Anthony, and with Cloris Leachman as his mother, it's a great episode.
Click READ MORE to see how and why "It's a Good Life" played an important role in the early years of Second Life.
When Anthony experiments with animals ("I ain't never seen a three-headed gopher before, Anthony!") or turns one of Peaksville's residents into a jack-in-the-box monstrosity, his mother asks him to send the unfortunate results to the cornfield on the edge of town-- and he does.
Second Life's Cornfield sim was where, in the early days, misbehaving residents were banished. They were sent there and couldn't leave until their suspensions ended.
I can only imagine what it must have been like to be locked up with SL's first crop of griefers, bigots, and scammers; rather like Robert A. Heinlein's Coventry, I imagine. Or, as Sweetie puts it, it was like the Phantom Zone in the Superman comics and movies.
And then, I suppose, the number of suspended avatars grew too large to be housed on a single sim and Linden Lab began to simply suspend offenders' abilty to log in.
The Cornfield, past its usefulness, no longer served a a prison, but apparently remained on the grid. In past years I've seen it on the map, but I've never been able to actually get to it. Last night was an exception. There it was, on the western edge of the SLB10 sims. I simply walked across the sim boundary and into SL history.
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| "Damn it, I knew I shouldn't have told Rodvik Linden he looked like a grown-up Bill Mumy. Now look where he sent me!" |
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| "Sure, I can tell you why you're here, but it's a long story." |
The Second Life 10th Birthday Celebration closed today. Featuring 22 sims crammed with citizen-based art, performances of all types, and, because it's the Decennial, a heavy dose of history, there was too much to do. Sweetie and I settled for a sampling.
Marianne McCann (who points out in her blog her being denied involvement in SLB5 because she has a child avatar, was a sim coordinator this year and did a marvelous job tracing the history of Second Life from its conception to its beta through today via billboards and objects dating all the way back to the beginning of the world. I was so immersed I forgot to take photos. Fortunately, the sims were open when, just after midnight, I jumped back to take the photos above and below this paragraph.
Here's a recent interview of Marianne by SL Newser. She tells DrFran Babcock she was inspired by the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago:
I have to wonder what Marianne's inventory must be like for her to be able to produce objects like these, from the earliest days of SL:
So, kudos, Marianne! You did a great job. The graphics were wonderful, the objects amazing, and the feel of the build captured what it must have been like to have been alive in Chicago in 1933.
Friday, June 21, 2013
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| Before: 18 Prims for the Lava, and the Seams Sometimes Showed |
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| After: 3 Prims, No Seams. That's a New Texture on the Solid Lava at Right |
The biggest change was to the lava bed. It was made before we could stretch prims to 64 meters. Each of the three semi-transparent layers of lava were comprised of six prims, for a total of 18, in total. I removed five of the prims from each layer, saving 15 prims, ta daaa!
I had taken pains with the original layers, making the edge transparent and aligning them perfectly via mathematics, but the seams sometimes showed-- especially with all the smoke particles. Now the entire pool is without seams. Yay!
My final post about the volcano will be about the temple, which I am now preparing to rebuild. I expect it will take a while to meet Sweetie's strict specifications.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Our little colony of drawfins on Whimsy Kaboom ran out of food and have turned to stone!
The end of the beginning was when Sweetie bought a ham that should have fed them for two weeks. It wasn't delivered, and so we didn't put out food to replace the nearly-consumed ham on the land.
The result was predictable.
It's time to declare our little experiment over and take the critters back into our inventory.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Scripting is a bitch!
I mean ONE little typo and...
The scripts I write aren't full of the estoteric database calls the whizbang kids use, but they're complex. My scripts create sounds, particles, and movement, and only when they're supposed to. Before, every prim that needed to act required its own simple script. Since Linden Lab introduced the llSetLinkPrimitiveParams and llSetLinkPrimitivePramsFast commands, I'm using one script per linkset-- and it has to talk to its child prims and to other linksets as well.
It's complicated to, say, script a broom that grabs itself and sweeps the floor or a rocket that blasts you into the stratosphere or a giant electromagnet that grabs a robot, moves 80 meters, and drops that robot into a bin, then moves back to its original position, ready to do it all again.
I do use listens when linksets are far from one another, as in the electromagnet, which is is a couple of dozen meters from its controller. I used quite a few-- twenty, maybe-- at the robot sanatorium, but then it's one of the most highly interactive places in Second Life. I used, I think, four for controlling the volcano Pele.
Pele has four modes-- extinct, inactive, active, and erupt. The rocks and lava have a distinct texture for each mode. The lava is solid when the volcano is inactive or extinct, and phantom when she's active and erupting. Pele creates hissing and rumbling sounds when active (and a huge roar when she's erupting); inactive and extinct modes are silent, with no particles. Active calls little puffs of light gray smoke, and erupt mode makes huge clouds of black smoke.
Above the caldera, five tiki masks hold stones in their mouths, letting onlookers know their function. Touch the tiki, and you change the mode. The mode remains set for three minutes, then Pele becomes active again. I like her best in active mode.
The fifth mask makes Pele throw huge smoking, steaming boulders dozens of meters into the air. It functions only when Pele is in active or erupt modes. The launchers, phantom and invisible, are inside the lava pool and the rocks can't escape when the lava is solid. That's why the rock launcher is turned off in active and erupt modes.
Touching a mask makes a number of things happen. First, the lava in the caldera is set accordingly, and smoke and sound turned on or off, as appropriate. Texture animation is switched on or off. Liquid lava moves; solid lava doesn't. The rocks lining the volcano also change texture-- and as of the other night, the lava flow that falls 60 meters to sea level changes mode accordingly
Scripting all this required a lot of attention to detail, and it was complex, but not all that complicated. By that I mean a lot is going on, but I'm really changing only a few characteristics of the prims-- color, texture, texture movement, transparency, brightness and glow, and switching sound and particles on and off.
When a mask is touched, it chats a command word. A script in a sixth tiki mask hears it and relays the command the three linksets that change the rocks and lava. Then it sets its timer to zero. If it hasn't heard another command by the time the timer reaches 180 seconds, it sets the lava to active mode. Three linksets-- the lava in the caldera, the rocks in the caldera, and the prims in the lava flow, listen and change the prims when they hear the command to change mode.
In Pele's initial erupt mode on Whimsy, I didn't include the relay. Poor Pele grew confused when masks were repeatedly touched. Each mask did its own counting, so if a visitor selected inactive and then, 160 seconds later, extinct, Pele would go active just 20 seconds later. Now the modes last the full three minutes, unless another mask is touched, in which case the mode will change immediately and the newly selected mode will last for three minutes.
I'm happy to say the scripting is all done-- it took perhaps four hours, but then the already existing erupt mode provided much of the code. Barring weirdness like solid rock moving or liquid rock not moving, smoke where there shouldn't be smoke, and silence where there should be sound, Pele has a new and improved erupt mode.
I mean ONE little typo and...
The scripts I write aren't full of the estoteric database calls the whizbang kids use, but they're complex. My scripts create sounds, particles, and movement, and only when they're supposed to. Before, every prim that needed to act required its own simple script. Since Linden Lab introduced the llSetLinkPrimitiveParams and llSetLinkPrimitivePramsFast commands, I'm using one script per linkset-- and it has to talk to its child prims and to other linksets as well.
It's complicated to, say, script a broom that grabs itself and sweeps the floor or a rocket that blasts you into the stratosphere or a giant electromagnet that grabs a robot, moves 80 meters, and drops that robot into a bin, then moves back to its original position, ready to do it all again.
I do use listens when linksets are far from one another, as in the electromagnet, which is is a couple of dozen meters from its controller. I used quite a few-- twenty, maybe-- at the robot sanatorium, but then it's one of the most highly interactive places in Second Life. I used, I think, four for controlling the volcano Pele.
Pele has four modes-- extinct, inactive, active, and erupt. The rocks and lava have a distinct texture for each mode. The lava is solid when the volcano is inactive or extinct, and phantom when she's active and erupting. Pele creates hissing and rumbling sounds when active (and a huge roar when she's erupting); inactive and extinct modes are silent, with no particles. Active calls little puffs of light gray smoke, and erupt mode makes huge clouds of black smoke.
Above the caldera, five tiki masks hold stones in their mouths, letting onlookers know their function. Touch the tiki, and you change the mode. The mode remains set for three minutes, then Pele becomes active again. I like her best in active mode.
The fifth mask makes Pele throw huge smoking, steaming boulders dozens of meters into the air. It functions only when Pele is in active or erupt modes. The launchers, phantom and invisible, are inside the lava pool and the rocks can't escape when the lava is solid. That's why the rock launcher is turned off in active and erupt modes.
Touching a mask makes a number of things happen. First, the lava in the caldera is set accordingly, and smoke and sound turned on or off, as appropriate. Texture animation is switched on or off. Liquid lava moves; solid lava doesn't. The rocks lining the volcano also change texture-- and as of the other night, the lava flow that falls 60 meters to sea level changes mode accordingly
Scripting all this required a lot of attention to detail, and it was complex, but not all that complicated. By that I mean a lot is going on, but I'm really changing only a few characteristics of the prims-- color, texture, texture movement, transparency, brightness and glow, and switching sound and particles on and off.
When a mask is touched, it chats a command word. A script in a sixth tiki mask hears it and relays the command the three linksets that change the rocks and lava. Then it sets its timer to zero. If it hasn't heard another command by the time the timer reaches 180 seconds, it sets the lava to active mode. Three linksets-- the lava in the caldera, the rocks in the caldera, and the prims in the lava flow, listen and change the prims when they hear the command to change mode.
In Pele's initial erupt mode on Whimsy, I didn't include the relay. Poor Pele grew confused when masks were repeatedly touched. Each mask did its own counting, so if a visitor selected inactive and then, 160 seconds later, extinct, Pele would go active just 20 seconds later. Now the modes last the full three minutes, unless another mask is touched, in which case the mode will change immediately and the newly selected mode will last for three minutes.
I'm happy to say the scripting is all done-- it took perhaps four hours, but then the already existing erupt mode provided much of the code. Barring weirdness like solid rock moving or liquid rock not moving, smoke where there shouldn't be smoke, and silence where there should be sound, Pele has a new and improved erupt mode.
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| The Lava Pool of the Volcano Pele at Whimsy |
"There? You want to put me there?"
Pele the volcano goddess was not happy with my first snapshots of Whimsy.
"It will be great, I promise. First we'll raise the land."
"High? Really high?"
"Really, really high. And then we'll create the caldera."
"Will there be lots of lava?"
"Lots."
"Really lots? I'm thinking I should maybe stay here at Forsaken."
"Thousand of years of Polynesian history will be squashed flat as a pancake if you stay here. The first idiot who buys the plot will level the land and put up an ugly cabin. And on Whimsy no one can throw up a vampire castle next door that's taller than you are."
"For real?"
"For real."
"Good. I can't see myself living in an ugly cabin."
"I can't either. We're going to treat you right on Whimsy."
"Will I have a lava pool?"
"Of course you will. Hot and red."
"Will I have an erupt mode?"
"The best ever."
"I liked the last erupt mode. It will be difficult to beat."
"Trust me."
"Will there be a lava flow down the mountain?"
"Sure there will. Two if you want."
"And a temple?"
"Yes, a temple. And I have something special for you."
"You're not going to try to make me accept sacrifices again,are you? You know I'm not that kind of volcano goddess."
"No, no, nothing like that. The knife and bloodstain on the altar are, er, just for show."
"What special thing do you have for me?"
"How would you like to have the ability to throw hot smoking, sizzing boulders eighty or ninety meters into the air? Dozens of them."
"Are you kidding? I'd love that! Please tell me you're not talking about particles."
"No, no, prims. Big prims. The smoke particles just supplement them."
"I like the idea of throwing boulders. Can I start now?"
"Not quite yet, old girl. Let us build the volcano first. And let me tell you about the best thing of all."
"What's that?"
"When everything is finished we're going to blow out the back side of the mountain. The entire back side."
"I'll be hollow again last last time?"
"Better than that. An entire flank will be open to the air. Your backside will be gone."
"I'll feel naked."
"No you won't. You won't even notice."
"I get right to final approval. It's in my contract."
"You'll love it. I promise."
I gave Pele everything I promised.
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| Erupt Mode on Whimsy |
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| The Erupt Mode Generates Thick Smoke |
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| Throwing Boulders at Whimsy |
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| The Temple to Pele at Whimsy |
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| "Hon, I think we need to lower the land here a bit!" |
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| Lava Flow at Whimsy |
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
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| Cheyenne Does Acrobatics Above the Volcano Pele on Whimsy Five years and two months ago we purchased our sim, Whimsy. We had our choice of default terrain designs, from perfectly flat to mountainous. We chose mountainous. .jpg) |
We spent two days rezzing every stupid high-prim object in our inventories...
... and then returning them.
On a little platform one hundred meters or so above the land, we created a grid and pushed prims around to simulate terrain shapes.
Once the design was fixed in our minds, I flattened the sim and terraformed it to approximate our vision. Then Sweetie used the Mac program Backhoe to complete the design.
Our goal was to create a tropical archipelago much like the Hawaiian islands. In fact, Hawaii was our ideal. Here's a photo of one of the island with the newly-terraformed Pele volcano behind it.
We were, of course, working on a hugely smaller scale, but I like to think we got the feel of the islands just right.
Sweetie's idea was to have the highest spots on the western side of the sim, with decreasing elevations as we worked westward. This would, we hoped, make for stunning vistas. When we started adding prims, we got just what we had hoped for.
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| Dramatic View Inside the Hollow Volcano Pele, Whimsy |
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| Whimsy. Viewed From the Far Side of Whimsy Kaboom |
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| Whimsy, Viewed from Whimcentricity |
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| Whimsy and Whimsy Kaboom, Viewed from Whimcenetricity |
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| View from Upper Gardens, Whimsy |
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| Whimsy's Terrain Adds Drama to This Photo |
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| Whimsy, Shortly After its Creation |
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| The Volcano Pele, as Viewed from a Hanging Bridge |
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| View of Whimsy from Path to the Upper Gardens |
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| Looking Southwest from Sim Center, Whimsy |
Next: The Volcano Goddess Moves to Whimsy
Monday, June 17, 2013
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| The Caldera of the Volcano Pele at Whimsy: Active Mode |
I first made Pele's acquaintance back in 2006. She looked like this:
I found Pele in a little volcano on Ahshe Chung's Forsaken sim. Her mountain was split into three parcels.
My 4096 square meter parcel encompassed the caldera of the volcano and the west (bottom) and north (left) flanks of the mountain. Idiots of different stripes owned the west and south sides of the mountain. Eventually I acquired their parcels, and more besides.
There wasn't enough flat land to place an ordinary house, so I had a design commissioned. I paid Sweetie $500L to build a house no more than ten meters wide. She was practically blind because she was using an ancient MacBook, but still managed to deliver something extraordinary.
It didn't help that I not only had requirements about size, but design. I wanted a blend of Asian and Island elements.
If the three photos above seem washed out, well, that's the way Second Life skies looked before Windlight arrived.
As you can see, Sweetie's house sat catty-cornered on the edge of the sim, with the volcano rising just behind the building.
The inside was especially beautiful.
I absolutely loved-- and still love-- these window elements.
I had no idea how to build, but before long I had managed to make a pretty good lava pool in the volcano. Pele liked that.
Then I added a temple...
... and a lava flow...
... and a path that ran from sea level to the caldera.
Next, I created a beautiful pool in the hollow interior of the volcano. If you found juuuust the perfect spot in the lava you would fall through into the room.
There was even a room below this one!
Finally, I created an erupt mode. I could turn Pele's eruption on by asking her to pop. Her displays were awesome.
When we moved from Forsaken to our new sim Whimsy in April, 2008, we asked Pele if she would like to come along. She said she would, and we obligingly built a volcano for her.
Next: Whimsy Arrives
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