Building

Ich erlaube mir mal, nachdem die Rezzer-Herrlichkeit um sich greift, einen kurzen Hinweis auf ein Produkt von Caspertech mit dem schönen Namen “Rez Free.”

Rez Free, was ist das? Das ist nichts anderes als ein Rezzer (genau!), den man dazu benutzen kann, alle möglichen Bauten in ihn zu stopfen und bei Bedarf einfach wegzupacken. Für den Hausgebrauch ist die kostenlose Variante völlig ausreichend, wer damit aber später bauen will und Produkte vertreiben, für den gibt es eine erweiterte Variante, die 549 L$ kostet. In dieser ist der dann per Skript steuerbar und zu Rez Faux API-kompatibel. Caspertech selber hat bei vielen einen sehr guten Ruf, das Teil wird auch ständig weiterentwickelt und ist mit den diversen weiteren Produkten vom Hersteller wie dessen Vendoren und dergleichen mehr kombinierbar.

Manchmal findet man beim Lesen anderer Blogs ja kleine Perlen des Wissens, die viele aber nicht kennen, nicht beachten oder sonst nicht finden. So geschah es mir heute, als ich bei Tateru Nino einen Hinweis auf einen Post namens “A matter of scale” von einer gewissen Penny Patton vorfand.

Penny Patton erstellt Content in Second Life und geht detailliert mit vielen, vielen Bildern auf eine Sache ein, die manche schon ahnten, so fundiert auf den Punkt gebracht bisher nur wenige ausgedrückt haben dürften. Es handelt sich dabei um die Tatsache, dass die durchschnittliche Avatargröße in Second Life im Laufe der Jahre viel zu groß geworden ist und das nun einen ganzen Rattenschwanz an Problemen mit sich bringt, angefangen bei den Designern über Hausbauer bis zum Avatar, der mal kleiner als der Durchschnitt ist. All  dies wird mit sehr vielen Bildern eindrucksvoll untermauert und ist extrem lesenswert.

One thing that’s always been a quite controversial topic in SL is the creation and usage of megaprims. SL itself imposes a limitation on the physical size of any prim, which is 10x10x10 m at maximum.

Due to programming gaps and errors though there’ve been people around in the past, which created found ways to overcome that limitation and created bigger prims than that. Since you are unable to create those prims by normal means, those have been sold or just been given away in big packages for free and still are. In the times of Havok I being the physics engine running all over the grid one of the main argument against the usage of megaprims was that it creates unnecessary lags.

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.

This is a feature that’s been missing since ever: the ability to backup the content of a whole sim externally.

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.

The official Second Life blog has today an entry about so called megaprims (greater than 10m at one side at least). Megaprims where never intended to be, but they happened some while ago and they are in use in different buildings, you can either get them just so or buy them at stores.

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.

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.

There’s a nice beginner’s tutorial in Natalia’s Second Life Diary Blog about how to make clothes with The Gimp! It shows some of the underlying principles in a very convenient Howto manner and the Gimp is open source. So, if you ever wanted to give this a try, you should definitely check it out and give it a try!

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