Dawn breaks over Shengri La Spirit, and lo, system trees sway in the daybreak, particles drift on the breeze, and life is good. We’re now up to 11,500 prims on Spirit, which has introduced a whole new level of agita for all concerned (Don’t build anymore till we back it up! I canna help m’self, cap’n, I MUST build!) I’m going to get an extra special database build behind Spirit which should help with some of the issues I’ve encountered along the way. I did notice that some of the more irritating quirks have resolved themselves to a degree, but I am still occasionally smacking Spirit’s server to its knees.
One of the IBM team, Dale Innis, popped in one fine aftenoon earlier this week, and with a simply stunning display of legerdemain, popped out a functional particle script! yay, Dale! Given the End of Time nature of Spirit, I was pretty impressed, especially since I now have a fine tower of pretty blue particles pulsing in the air. We uncovered an interesting quirk, too….’take a copy’ seems to be mapped to ‘take’.
Implied Rez took another pass at the terraforming and brought the mountain up higher, and dug a moat around Castle Queen Pea. It’s hard to see in the pictures, but right now the terraforming is really rough, pending the addition of a smooth tool to the OpenSim interface. Or, for that matter, getting the flatten tool to be a bit more functional. I’m looking forward to that day, along with the system ferns. My planters await system ferns. And fire.
The bridges I added to Spirit are particularly lovely. I did some fancy prim twiddly work which glistens in the sunlight, and the bridges themselves have a sort of otherworldly elegance. Completely unworkable IRL of course (my Dad, who built bridges for a living, would have a conniption with canaries over said bridges). But they are gorgeous, and once the terraforming is tweaked around them, they’ll be sort of functional, in a gravityless otherworldly sort of way. Here’s an interesting feature: I have to make the two ends of the bridge phantom and then put a transparent nonphantom tilted prim over what would normally be the walkway. OpenSim still doesn’t handle cut and/or hollowed prims with any degree of understanding that when you take stuff OUT or AWAY from the prim, that means there shouldn’t be anything there. Technically, that is. Instead, OS still treats the prim as though it were all there. So the bridge ends, if left physical, are big blocks to Spirit’s server, making it just a touch difficult to walk up them.
End of Day Seven, Shengri La Spirit. Building is slowing down a bit as we approach higher prim levels. We really want to get a good snap shot of what the servers can do, and the best way to build the asset server. As soon as Team Leader Zha Ewry gives me the go-ahead, the bulldozers start in again. For now, moderate tweaking. I’d like to add another course to the castle walls, and I am working on vines dripping with greenery (all primwork, of course). And of course Castle Queen Pea will need a guardpost protecting her eastern shore, and the Queen’s carriage, too. In time, gentle reader, in time.
