Pictures and Progress

Progress is being made on both online fronts. For the deeply confused, such as myself, here’s the rundown.

Second Life: Bowler Hat needs some love, but I think I figured out the final few steps to finish the meshing of it and I reviewed how to do an Ambient Occlusion bake (again) with another project. I keep having to look it up to catch all the “gotcha” settings. I wish there was a way to just “blammo” the settings for AO test and AO final bake (or is there one…).

Haleakaloha: Definitely making progress. It’s really only “up and running” when I happen to be working on something (or wandering about hypergridding) so the link to it won’t be available yet. But soon.

It’s within sight…

I have a total of 8 regions that are stable on my desktop. I may be getting a dedicated machine for running Dreamworldz/Dreamgrid now that my partner Rock Fall has expressed geekly interest in the project. If this comes to pass, Haleakaloha may be running 24/7, but that won’t happen soon.

The “Castaway” narrative will be starting up again. After reviewing a sh*t-ton of OAR files, since I had blown away my original terrain/RAW file for the “shipwrecked AV making her own survival stuffs” story, I finally settled on a modified 4×4 region file that is already beautifully landscaped and just needs some storyline props, buildings, and terraforming done (and this time, will try not to terraform the ENTIRE REGION while playing around with the northwest corner, which will become “Shipwreck Beach”).

Shipwreck Beach will be the landing point for the entire region of Club Castaway – some of the party/club area will remain although I dumped the somewhat tacky disco features. I will also use some LK content but replace it gradually with mesh, but some of her Western buildings are actually pretty good analogues for the French Polynesian shopfronts I need. Fortunately, I also have a sh*t-ton of photographs (some I took myself) of the real-life setting for the story, Kauai. I have plans for scripted gadgets – lei givers, gift givers, radios, etc.

My “home region” currently is Haleakaloha 1, where my workshop is. Next to it is a region-sized sandbox, and on the other corner is Garden by the Sea, a pretty and charming beachside home. On the NE corner is a region that is subject to change without notice, as I use it to test 1×1 OARs for useability. So it’s called “Scwondinavia” because why not?

All of these regions, though, are literally chameleonic: if I decide to build an entire sim’s worth of content and put together an all-original OAR eventually, I could offer it to the OS/Dreamworldz community. I could even put together an inventory archive (IAR) with useful items I make.

Marketing on OS is, well, more like HEY FREE STUFF, and care needs to be take to either provide “hey free stuff” that’s either entirely original, or has good open-source, CC0 or similar license info. I can see that I’m going to have to keep “open source OK” textures and content separate from “walled garden” content and assets (especially if I try to set up a shop in either Inworldz or Kitely, where marketing for some form of compensation is possible).

Open Sim is highly distracting (in a way that’s either good, or double-plus ungood, for productivity. It’s tricky getting around, it doesn’t always work as planned, and not every instance is running the same version of Open Sim software, so whether driving a fast vehicle across a sim boundary, or “hopping” to another grid with all your attachments, your virtual mileage may vary.

For example, the other night I decided to hop around looking for better hair, since making my own is way above my very particular set of skills.

I bumbled around looking for someplace that was mentioned somewhere that I couldn’t remember other than it was supposed to have nice hair, and then I went to the Hyperica hypergrid/blamgate village and got stuck “between.”

Basically, it’s a whole town full of entryways that either show “active” with a Stargate-style pool of elsewhere, or a starfield that uses an empty box to force perspective and give it depth. I started to go through, but the teleport failed and I was stuck in the box, hairless and bootless and footless because I had alpha images on my lower legs. I grumbled and made the obligatory “My God, it’s full of stars” comment, and then got more and more frustrated when I couldn’t get back out, and couldn’t go forward. Usually the trick when trapped is to “cam out” and sit somewhere outside the box or jail, but coudln’t find anyplace suitable. Finally spotted a chair with an old-style poseball, and THAT did the trick.

Speaking of poseballs, they’re really a thing in OpenSim. I struggled for 90 minutes a week ago trying to use an old pose-setter script to adjust a simple chair/barrel asset (it’s a common item that’s in many OARs as I think it was originally an LK item (and so they really need a little tweaking to make them different from all the rest). It took forever, and then today I found out that there might be a great alternative that’s now officially open source. Yay?

So there you go, 20 minutes or more lost to looking around for the scoop on the AV Sitter program, downloading, and cleaning old stuff out of my download folder. Time to get inworld and take some pictures.

(TWO hours later…)

Well, no new pictures, got distracted goofing around with inventory, sorting, and what-not. I did a little landscaping at Shipwreck Beach, and tried to download my maps for planning purposes, layouts and such. And I worked on a hat for a gift-giver. So much for productivity!

So then I went inworld and played around with Ruth 2.0 (not the final version, a tester).

More on THAT later…


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  1. Pingback: Pictures and Progress | Chameleonic Possession

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