Bart in SL

The old fashioned votebox made by Alberto Linden

Some things in Second Life just die hard or not at all, even if they don't serve any purpose anymore. For example, this vote box to the left was in former days quite a common sight in Second Life.

It is a scripted device, made by Alberto Linden, and consists of 13 prims. It was used in times before traffic (aka as dwell) was invented to measure the popularity of a parcel. People just voted for it, all boxes where polled once a day and that's how they got their measures in former times. Parcel owners got some stipends out of it, if it was a popular place (or something/somehow like that). You could just take of a station standing somewhere a copy, so it was really easy to get one.

At least it had a task its existence. But when traffic was introduced, the old mechanism of getting traffic was disabled. So those voting stations don't serve any real purpose anymore, besided doing some nice sound effects when you touch them and eating away your prims.

Newbies still tend to believe those stations are useful; they are wrong. There are, though, some newer objects around, which mimic the design and look of the old station to a certain degree, but just act as counters, telling the owner which avatar voted for them at which time and date and that's it, then. But since old habits die hard I expect to see them still for quite long on the grid in many clubs, belonging to owners, which don't know better or are fond of them.

For example, if you are a builder and building a whole sim from scratch (or with other stuff) and a forced to put the sim down, since you don't have the money anymore to sustain it - or your customer, whatever - taking down the sim means taking down all the labour cost, all the work. If you want to put the work up later, again, you've got to start more or less from scratch.

In this case it would be very nice to have the ability to backup a whole sim and store it somewhere for possible future use. At the moment this isn't possible, to this is a big, missing feature in the portfolio of Second Life.

They are rumored to have a negative impact on the physics engine and to cause lags and such, but none the less many builders have adopted them very fast and used them in their buildings.

So there's a discussion about it they should stay or not; at the moment they are only tolerated by Lindenlab, but they don't really like them.

So what's the sensible approach? Are they needed or not? I guess they are needed, because they fit into a gap. I mean, why would you use for example 9 prims (10x10m) to make a floor that's 30x30m wide when you just can use one prim? Because they are needed, they've been used and there's a market around it.

But of course too big megaprims are not right, so they should not be bigger than a whole sim, meaning 256x256x256m. In those parameters they could really enrich the building experience.

Over at Sleeds.org is an interesting movie how they made a building, the process started with PDF, exporting it with Adobe Illustrator into SVG, this was processed by a script to get LSL snippets posted into a notecard and then got finally rezzed in SL.

This looks much like e.g. blender to prim, but it's impressive, none the less, though I guess if you really want to build good things you need so stuck up with the client. Period.

If you ever want to live somewhere in SL or make business, better choose a region with a tight covenant on it. While standard "anything goes"-attitude on most parts of the mainland first sounds like real fun, it can for sure fast enough turn otherwise.

And now I've got a very good example for the necessity on a good, tight covenant. A friend of mine lives on the new continent in the east of the old mainland in the mature rated region Carrion that's without covenant at all. They're having a business there, but she lives there, too. It's been mostly a nice, quiet sim. Until some days ago a new neighbor showed up in the region. This new neighbor's business was making signs, he had a big enough parcel to upset the whole sim.

First he made his building very high compared to the other building, second he put some animated signs on his building and third he put some naked penises at display, too. This caused him an abuse report, the building is not there anymore, so this time it went good for the other parcel owners in the sim. But if he would have been a little bit more clever, his building would still be there.

Well, to take a look at how it was, just click on the two thumbnails here to see two screenshots of this now gone building, the mature content has been edited out, by the way. Ah, and yes, the mountain was an instant countermeasure from the neighbors to cover up this butt-ugly building and hide it. It's fascinating how one wrong building can ruin the whole region!

Ok, more advanced topics like working with the alpha channel are not mentioned there, but that's ok.