Sunset

So it's still not the world's best picture, but I cranked my draw distance up to suicidal levels to get it.... Me and Tali standing on top of the tower in Burroughs, watching air krakens playing in the setting sun, while the Iron Cloud hovers over everything.  (If you look close, you can see Dear Ophelia, the white CAT airship, coming in to dock at the Cloud.)

It was, as Tali pointed out, a very Caledonian moment.

Well, except for that mini-skirt, which is not Caledonian at all.

Topping out

The basic structure of the tower is now complete!

There is still work to be done - that big globe at the top is supposed to revolve and shoot out mind controlling rays harmless sparks, for a start - but the fundamental structure is all in place.

It is a hundred and twenty-eight metres tall, roughly, and looks nothing like what I originally had planned.  Never mind!

Of course, the most important thing to do next is to find someone with a much better graphics setup than me, and badger them into taking a beauty shot of it.

Progress report

I haven't done a piccy of the tower in a couple of days.  So here it is.  Nearly finished!

Note the presence of the Morgaine sky mountain, indicating just how far up I've had to turn my draw distance to get all of it in.  (I am the small peroxided dot on the water-level jetty, right down at the bottom of the picture, if you were interested.)

Haunting

I was delighted to see, on logging back in today, a message that read, simply, "The Ghost has walked."

Why?  Well, because it's a ghost I made.  It adds to the atmosphere down in the underwater area in Burroughs, you see.

You might recall the pictures of the airlocks from yesterday's posts.  These things, basically, have two iris doors - square prims that develop a large round hole in them (through judicious use of llSetLinkPrimitiveParams, natch) when you click on them.  (Of course, there is a sequence, inner door opens - inner door closes - outer door opens - outer door closes.)  I was adding sound effects to these, yesterday, and found a sound in my inventory which is a short, low burst of hopeless sobbing.  Not much use as a door-opening effect, but very atmospheric, in small doses.

So I modified the script, a bit.  At a random but fairly lengthy interval (somewhere between one and five hours, resetting randomly each time), the sobbing sound will play... and the airlock doors will cycle, all by themselves.  As if someone has gone out, and isn't coming back.

At least, that's the idea.  I have set it up so it sends me an IM whenever this happens, so I will know, I hope, if it goes wrong.  So... we have a haunted airlock in Burroughs, right now.  Tell every parapsychologist you know!

Down at the bottom of the sea

Sudden fit of creativity, last night, has resulted in the underwater section of the tower being mostly completed.  Having Tali around to throw out ideas, rig up some fancy particle effects, and haul me up when I was going wrong helped a lot.  Having Tali around in general is pretty much fun, actually.

Here's the base, as it stands, now.  The lift car is docked at the right hand end.  In the bottom right corner you can just see a patch of seaweed; there is a wrecked submarine in that, just out of shot.

Once you step out of the lift, this is where you find yourself.  (The portholes, by the way?  Steam Hunt prize.  It comes in useful, you know!)

The corridor is pretty dark and moody, with odd bits of junk lying around, and (courtesy of Tali!) a leak near that airlock on the left, which I hope should prove bloomin' worrying to anyone walking down it.

Down the far end of the corridor, there's another airlock, and the open door to the main living area.

Here's that main living area, complete with weird apparatus displaying goodness knows what, a big lever for switching on an external floodlight, and... generally, signs that something has happened here.  But, one might ask, what?

Anyway.  I'm pretty happy with how this is going.  It still needs some sound effects, I think; clangs as doors open and close, and vague creaking and dripping sounds.  And there are ... things ... that have yet to be installed, outside.  But, overall, I'm fairly pleased.

Viewer attack

The viewer decided to hide my favourites and empty my block list today... it is getting above itself again.  (This sort of thing really needs to be reported, I suppose.  If I could reproduce this behaviour reliably - and if the JIRA wasn't full of snotty little trolls - I would file a bug report.)

Anyway.  Construction in Burroughs continues; I have sneaked some "Flannan Isle" references into the undersea base part of the tower, because there is little I love more than a literary reference most people won't get.  (My Linden home contains what is probably the most obscure such reference ever, being accessible to precisely two people, one of whom doesn't do SL.  Never mind.)  I may also have been roped into another project of a Caledonian nature, of which more, if it happens, anon.

The Case of the Phantom Lift Car

I've been building some stuff on the sea bed at the foot of the tower in Burroughs, and it occurred to me that there should be some way of getting down there to see it (all right, besides just falling in the water.  A dignified way.)  So I built a lift... you get in, touch it, the door closes, it descends (or, if it's already at the bottom, ascends.)  So far, so straightforward.

Then I added some visual detail.... a crane-like affair which hangs over the side of the tower platform to dangle the car on a sort of cable.  The problem now, of course, becomes one of how the cable is going to work when the car is in motion.  Eventually, I decided on a system involving two "cable" prims, one hanging off the crane, one rising out from the top of the elevator car.  When the car is at maximum height, the two overlap,  more or less seamlessly.  When it's at minimum, there's a gap between them, which I bridge with a particle stream - the sort of thing dubious types use for sending chains out to collars and suchlike.  Basically, a continual stream of particles is emitted from the lower length of cable - this being the one that moves - and targeted on the upper one.  Since the particles have the same texture as the cable prims themselves, the effect is, roughly, that of a continuous length of moving cable.  ("Roughly", because a) it's SL, and b) it's SL on my clapped-out machinery, so it's never going to look entirely consistent, is it?)

I decided to make the cables themselves flexi prims, for three reasons: it's a simple way of making them insubstantial (so they don't get in the way of things like sea monsters and submarines moving around the sim), it's a handy way to get the control handles at one end, which helps when you are pointing long narrow prims in various directions, and I figured I might want them to flex in the wind or bend under load or something like that.  So, I set these things flexi, admired my handiwork for a while...

... stepped into the thing, and fell straight through the floor.   The whole assembly, it turned out, had gone phantom.

Now, this might be one of those random glitches that make SL so much fun, and also so wet, but it might also be a genuine problem.  The thing which worries me is, the lift car uses keyframed motion to make its descent... and that requires it to use the prim-equivalency system, i.e. for some part of it at least to be set to "convex hull" or "none", instead of  "prim".  So what I am worried about is whether this is incompatible, on some level, with part of the build also being flexi - if the addition of the flexible cable was enough to confuse SL into making the whole thing insubstantial.  If so, you see, this has serious implications for my plans to ferry people around Burroughs on the back of a tame kraken....  More experimentation is needed, I fear.

Towering inferno

Work is continuing on the tower in Caledon Burroughs, believe it or not.  Currently, the construction is around ninety meters high, and the lower levels are reasonably well-equipped with Stuff To Fiddle With, although there is yet room for more.  The last few shots of the build that I have are these:-

(I've cleaned the icky plywood off the top floor now, don't worry!)

The last interesting thing I've done is add a gallery of "portraits" of my "illustrious ancestors" (or, in other words, me in a variety of historical costumes).  Meanwhile, Tali is using her programming skills, and harpo Jedburgh his expertise as a musician, to provide the area with an ambient sound system of quite staggering awesomeness.  Sometimes I wonder why talented people like that let me hang out with them.

Construction continues

... so, not a lot of posting here - remiss of me, I know, but I have time to talk about building or to actually do some, and I know which I'd rather.

Anyway.  Bits of tower in Burroughs continue to go up, and there is now a stairway between water level and the first platform.  I can negotiate it with reasonable safety, so someone with a working laptop and a decent connection should have no trouble.

Admittedly, some visitors might have more trouble with that stairway.

(I'm sure Callie is perplexed by all the goings-on, bless her.)

Construction has begun

I did threaten some pics of the tower in Burroughs under construction... At the moment, it is just a platform supported by four (admittedly, fairly complicated) legs.  Here's how it started out...

And, with a bit more elaboration to hide the joints between those arches and those legs, and the metal mesh platform on top, it currently looks more like this:-

If the landscape behind looks strangely bleak and empty, it's because my lousy computer obliges me to run, most of the time, at a minimum draw distance.... It's only on those rare occasions when I turn it up that I really realize how busy Caledon is.  I tend to think of Burroughs as somewhere isolate, remote; in fact, with Morgaine to the north, the Cay to the south and Mayfair to the east, it's more like a sort of small lake in the middle of a substantial city. 

Building the tower, of course, pretty much obliges me to turn my draw distance up... which means I will have to forgo luxuries such as moving around while I'm working on it.  Oh, well. 

(And, yes, I am dressed for Mainland adventuring in both those shots.  Never mind!)

What's been going on

I said I'd been busy, right?  Since the various i's have been dotted and t's crossed, statuses assigned and groups created and parcels divided, and (mostly importantly) the first tranche of Lindens paid to the Guvnah, I may as well come clean; the lovely and talented Tali Rosca and I have taken on one half of the Caledon Burroughs sim.  It's only half of a half of a homestead, but it's still the largest slice of SL I've had my teeth into (is that a mixed metaphor?  I don't care), and I am excited about the prospects.

We will, of course, be developing Burroughs in consultation with its current Duchess, my dear friend Turley Hallenbook, and our general aim is to make it a sort of steampunk beauty build, not a commercial enterprise.  So, we are both thinking about our own ideas of the steampunk aesthetic.  Tali is talking about building romantic landscapes, with reference to the art of Caspar David Friedrichs, and I am designing an enormous tower full of sparking generators and tentacle monsters.  There's room for both, that's the fun of it.  Working with Tali, I suspect, is going to be enormous fun.

(Assuming SL cooperates... I logged back in today and found myself wearing a sort of combination of the last two outfits I had on last night.  And, indeed, my discussions with Tali on the future of the sim were thrown rather off track, last night, when she experienced a distinctly embarrassing bake failure while trying to change outfits.  Details will not be forthcoming, because this is still Not That Sort Of Blog.  Somebody, though, needs to feed the hamsters that power SL's asset server, I think.)

(And now I shall shake off these parentheses and retire to SL, to import some sculpted structural members and otherwise prepare for Massive Constructions.)

On the catwalk

It's London Fashion Week or something - or maybe it was last week, I forget.

Anyway, that spurred me to revisit an old project and make some progress on it:-

I know, it's just too sexy for words, isn't it?

Not quite finished yet - I want to script that flashlamp along the left arm so it actually lights up, and some particle bubbles for the air tanks wouldn't go amiss, and I think I need to tidy up the alpha layer around the feet a bit.  But I progress.  Oh yes.

(I tried it in an off-the-peg male shape, too - seemed to work OK, though I don't know how well it might fit the muscly man-mountain avis that are so common.  Oh, well, it'll all be copy-mod if I sell it, so that's not really a problem, is it?)

All very unmilitary

An idea or two is revolving inside what passes for my brain, and part of it involves making a bunch of quasi-military uniforms.

Now, I may have mentioned previously that clothing design is not really my thing... so, to make my life simpler, I have been off trawling inworld stores and Marketplace for some appropriate template images.

And, after some hours doing that, I have reached some conclusions:-

• I am going to have to do the damn things myself from scratch.
• It is one whole heck of a lot easier to find skimpy crop-tops than it is to find complete coverage jackets or tunics.  Either the military is under-represented in SL, or it is under-dressed.
• I will never understand product pricing in SL as long as I live.  There is no discernible link between price and quality... and, presumably, someone must be out there buying the expensive tat.  Who are these people, and how can I persuade them to visit my shop?

The Name Game Blame Game

The naming of avs is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you an av must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES...

To wit, your User Name, Display Name, Full Name and possibly Legacy Name.  Wait, that's four.  I'm confused already, and so are a lot of other people.  And it may be about to get worse.  Let's recap....

Prior to the late-middle of  2010, avatar names were actually quite simple.  You signed up for SL, and you picked yourself a first name, which could be any sequence of ordinary letters, and you then chose from a list of allowable last names supplied by Linden Lab.  This was not popular with everybody, but it worked OK, it created a weird sense of community among people with the same last name (I have wandered over with a cheery "Hello cousin!" to the odd other Bulmer I have encountered, and some of them are very odd, let me tell you), and in general people got by with it.  So, all right, some people picked silly names like, for example, "Glorf" and were then saddled with them, but that wasn't really all that much of an issue....

... well, except for two or three classes of people who wanted some ability to change their names.  The first group consisted of people with a legitimate reason for wanting a permanent name change.  These might be business people who wanted to use their RL names in SL, or it might be people who, for example, had taken SL partners and wanted to change their surnames to reflect their SL family status.  (A third example, of people who just had rubbish names and wanted to upgrade, can safely be ignored; they should have known better than to call themselves "Glorf" in the first place.)

The second group consisted of roleplayers who wanted to be able to shift between multiple personas as whim (or RP need) took them.  After all, if you start off in a Roman RP sim and drift away a bit and get invited to take part in a Star Trek RP, it'd be pretty grim if you had to keep an inappropriate name like "Tiberius".... wait, bad example.  But my point stands.

Now, it may be apparent to you that these two classes of people actually want different things.  One of them wants a permanent name change, one time only (or at least one time for the foreseeable future only).  The second group wants a whole constellation of different setting-appropriate aliases that they can change between at will.  Can you see the difference, there?  Well, that makes you smarter than Linden Lab, then!

In the latter half of 2010, LL announced a completely new and different approach to names, and fur has been flying ever since.  The whole first-name-last-name thing would be gone; you would have a single user name that was just one single string of letters.  But, people said, surely people would soon run out of coherent and sensible things to call themselves, and would be forced to resort to things like "33434434" and suchlike?  (Genuine example, btw, I know the guy.)  That doesn't matter, said LL, because no one will ever see these names.  All they will ever see is the brand-spanking-new Display Name, which can be anything you like, can include all sorts of funky Unicode characters, and can be changed whenever you like!

Astute observers will have noticed that that's not the system we've got now; it was pointed out, with some force, to LL that a setup where anybody can change their name to anything is as close to a full-scale griefers' charter as one could possibly imagine.  And so, after some hemming and hawing, the current system was adopted, whereby:-

• The basic User Name is always visible,
• If you do bother with a Display Name, other people can choose whether or not they see it
• You can change your Display Name only once a week
• There are some protections against impersonation - especially in the case of the Linden last name, for pretty obvious reasons
• Because a whole bunch of existing scripts, and even the login screens of third party viewers, would get broken by the change, a setup was introduced whereby the word "Resident" was used as a placeholder for the last name in the case of a new, single-named avatar.  This is where the idea of "everyone now has the last name of Resident" comes from

Clear as mud?  Right.  But this is where the three different names come from.  I used to be called "Glorf Bulmer", but that is only my Legacy Name now, only it's sometimes also referred to as a Full Name.  My actual User Name is "glorf.bulmer".  I don't bother with a Display Name, normally, though I did once call myself "Brian Spartacus" just to make a point.

I sometimes wonder if the Lab could have come up with anything that so singularly failed to meet anyone's needs or expectations.  You want to change your User Name to reflect your in-world marriage?  You still can't.  You can change your Display Name, of course, but many people won't bother with it, and anyway it isn't the permanent change you were hoping for.  As for the roleplayer communities; well, I just hope you enjoy playing the same role for a minimum of a week at a time.  (Actually, you can change from your Display Name back to your User Name - well, OK, your Full Name - I think - any time you like, but you can't take on another Display Name for another week once you've done that.)

(Are you still mixed up about these Full Names?  So am I.  It might help to think about a newer, single-named avi; if their User Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom" - again, not a made-up example - then their Full Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom", but their Legacy Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom Resident".  Clear as mud, I know.)

Ancillary problems have, of course, developed.  Gibberish User Names very quickly became the norm, as new users discovered the names they wanted were already taken, couldn't think of an acceptable alternative, and settled for adding on random strings of numbers and letters until they found something that worked.  The option to include Unicode characters in Display Names allowed many non-English users to have names in their own alphabets, a triumph! - except for English-speaking users who had no idea how to type in those new names.  (And if someone's Display Name is in Chinese ideograms, and their User Name is something like "ituweds7533dkfteq", one's conversational options are pretty much limited to "Hey, you over there with the face".)  The whole "Resident" marker became synonymous with "newbie" in people's minds, leading to discrimination and distrust, leading to resentment and further distrust.

And let us not even talk about the problems for scripters, or for merchants (LL made the boneheaded decision to use Display Names in transaction logs, the one place where you absolutely have to have a clear record of who you've been dealing with), or people with obscene or otherwise unacceptable Display Names and even User Names (like "affordablecustompcsdotcom" and his wife "mrsaffordablecustompcsdotcom", lovely couple that they were)....

Now, it would be fair to say that this state of affairs has attracted adverse comment.  Granted, pretty much everything LL does from breathing upwards attracts adverse comment, but in this case it was fairly well deserved.  A change request (SVC-7125 ) was officially made, and it has attracted thousands of votes and a comment trail a mile long.

And, now, Linden Lab is moving on this.  And I just hope they're moving in something like the right direction.

Granted, I am more confident about LL these days; under the direction of its new CEO, things seem brighter and happier than they were.  Rodvik Linden has not been afraid to listen to SL residents and introduce improvements (the new V3 viewer answers pretty much all the genuine criticisms levelled at Viewer 2, for instance) and even to reverse his own mistakes (the much-touted and thoroughly horrible "Basic Mode" was quietly dropped once its Bad Idea-ness was amply demonstrated).  So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some effective change on this issue.

Except... the latest messages we've had on the topic indicate all sorts of odd things being considered, "user-community-granted titles" being among them.  And I am dreadfully worried that this might mean they are thinking of some new system of Byzantine and wonderful complexity - and that this might prove to be even more of a dog's breakfast than the current system.

So... all I can say is: please, Lindens, don't eff this one up again.