Monthly Archives: February 2008

 Day Four: OpenSim challenges start to become more evident as I dig into the details of my build.   Stuff I’d normally be able to do pretty easily fights back and delays the whole thing.  Simple links and deletions find me dumped unceremoniously from the sim.  And I’m not even half way to the goal yet.  Still and all, after four days, the sim is starting to look really beautiful.  Implied Rez has been hammering the server with lots of terraforming and it shows.  I think we’re going to be very proud of the finished product, at least till the next sim emerges and we get to tackle THAT.

 After dithering awhile, I decided to rip out the top wall and replace it with a cut and textured keyhold wall.  I liked how the light played through it.  Here you can see the canal running into the seagate at an early stage of the build.

Here we are in closeup, coming into the courtyard from the seagate.  There’s a lot more to go yet.  But the sunrise is stunning on the water.  Eventually I ended up ripping out all the upper walls and replacing them with the grill and keyhold walls. I figured what the heck, odds are the Saracen won’t be attacking us this millenium.

Here you can see the apron has been laid and the columns set.  The red loop is my chain guide.

The first chain drop created.  This particular feature caused me to seek intervention, since I repeatedly tried to copy this monster and I repeatedly crashed the sim.  I can’t imagine why one lil’ ol’ 53 prim chain would cause such agita.

 Finally.  Chains around the critical aspects of the canal from the seagate.  And way at the back, I dragged my sculpti pony in.  He needs some TLC (like a real main and tail texture?) But he’s adorable at the back of the courtyard.

The details of Castle Queen Pea are starting to emerge.  Tomorrow The Bulldozer promised to whomp the courtyard so the land is appropriately flattened.  And the seagate properly dug out.  And tomorrow, darlings, we’ll start digging in on barques and boats.

Some of the cool details on the build…makes you want to live there, right?

And finally, the build. We now have 5,600 prims in the sim, and climbing.  Today we added flowers in the planters, a gazillion prims chains throughout; a horse; some flowers; and the apron for the canal at the seagate.  Tomorrow….the bridge. Or the boats and barques. Or more horses.  Whimsy is a rare and wonderful thing.

O, and I brought over my fashion and some skins, so we’ll be fashionable as soon as I get attachment capabilities and persistence.

End of Day Four: castle, horse, chains, seagate, flexi banners. Happiness in a mere 5,644 prims. 

Shameless plug here: Did I mention how great my tech partners at IBM are? If I haven’t recently, let me mention that again.  The opportunity to alpha test Shengri La Spirit, after all, is courtesy of my technology partners at IBM.  They rock.

And here we see, Castle Queen Pea and Shengri La Spirit in all their glory. See you later!

Day Three – Castle Queen Pea gets her walls, and Shengri La gets terraformed (poor dear).  After getting flung into outerspace last time, I return to discover interesting anomalies.  For whatever reason, the sculptis have become full bright, or maybe they were full bright and I didn’t notice them.  Eek.  Despite the obvious need for assistance, I focus instead on walls.  The first set is laid:

 The courtyard detailing presents challenges:

 After some really annoying linkage issues (link, and one prim goes haywire. Always one prim, never two, or three.  But that one is a doozie, witness the prototype plant hanger.  It fights me all day, with that one stupid prim rotating.  After the fun and games yesterday, and knowing these things need to be copied in multiples, I don’t dare unlink.  the lamp presents a challenge all its own. I plan to fix it once I get a nimbus script that works. 

One wall with lamps and plant hangers.  The crenellations are being developed. 

Shengri La Spirit gets most of her landscaping ‘bones’, with only moderate squabbling.  The process of terraforming really hammers the server, which means I can build, or Spirit can be terraformed.  Check out Spirit’s fjord.  At some point, I’ll throw a span over it so we can visit the light house from the castle.  If only we had a smooth tool in OpenSim!

At one point, I wander back to Second Life to Shengri La to work on our community gateway for the fashion industry, only to get distracted with arcane questions like ‘how do you know the coordinates of the island on the world map?’

Despite these distractions, eventually the bulldozers get tired and I return to work on Castle Queen Pea.   

 Still some fullbright on the stone swags.  Since we’re not making these swags out of radium-rich granite, I begin the process of ripping fullbright out of them.

Details of the courtyard at sunset.  Check out those FINE lamps, will you?

Details of the crenellations and stained glass.  I definitely will crank up Illustrator tomorrow.

Details of the seagate, at sunset and midnight:

Finally, after trials and tribulation, we present Castle Queen Pea, with WALLS. And Lamps. And non-full-bright stone swags.  By moonlight (so romantical) and by sunset, here are her bones. Tomorrow, the sea market begins to take form. And maybe she’ll get those 400-prim flower arrangements I’ve been considering.  Prim count at the end of Day Three, a paltry 4,000 prims.