Sinister Lovecraftian Formlessness

First, a little update: Land Baron contacted me last night with an actual apology, so fair play to him for doing that.  He also told me he was winding up his operations, so my "hunkering down" strategy has paid off, or will come the end of next month.  This may leave me as a single island of habitation in a sea of abandoned land... well, we shall see how things go from there.

Anyway.  Last night, the talk at Oxbridge was mostly of the new mesh avatars, which are (as previously noted) not entirely an unmixed blessing - especially from the point of view of the tutors, who will have to explain to baffled new people that their avatars do not actually look like them, they are merely piloting human-shaped skin suits like the Slitheen in Doctor Who.  I foresee confusion arising.

One part of the conversation turned to making more and better (and more ethnically diverse) mesh avatars, and in that context, Tali (who is brilliant and well-informed and I would say that even if she wasn't my girlfriend) brought up the MakeHuman program ( www.makehuman.org ), an OpenSource project for creating human-shaped meshes.  And I sat in the lecture hall in unwonted silence and stillness from then on, because I was downloading this thing and having a go.

And, actually, it is pretty darn nifty... and it includes several features which are meant not only for creating avatar meshes, but for uploading them as wearable rigged objects into Second Life.  My reputation as a mad scientist positively demanded that I try it out...

... and shortly thereafter, I appeared in the Oxbridge plaza as a cloud of shapeless protoplasm the size of a bus, the only distinguishable features being a pair of shoes.  As Tali put it, "a shoggoth in bathroom slippers".

Well, these setbacks will happen.   It may be a problem with the tool - it is still in early stages, officially a Version 1 release, and the Second Life compatibility tools may not yet be proven.  On the other hand, a mesh expert I am not, and it might be somewhat hubristic to expect a perfect result based on one evening's playing around.  So, I may persevere with this.  (If nothing else, I'm sure I can export the mesh product into Blender, and I should be able to rig it from there...)

In fact, the more I think about this, the more I am tempted to utter those words which, spoken by people like me, make sensible people blench and hide their breakable items before running for the hills: "Oh!  I think I see what I did wrong...."

Work in progress...

Things continue to develop, even when I'm not part of them.  It's almost as if I wasn't completely indispensable.

Anyway.  Among other things, a seismic shift has taken place in Caledon Steam SkyCity, my home in Caledon for much of my career.

The economy has been no kinder to that sim than to any other, and with parcels falling long-term vacant, our esteemed Guvnah was forced to downgrade it to a homestead.  This meant, of course, a substantial reduction in the complexity and number of holdings there... Some people bailed out; others, myself included, announced a willingness to stay on after the redevelopment.  So, one weekend, I packed up all my prims, threw my tentacle monsters into the proverbial red spotted hanky on a stick, and withdrew to await developments.

The developments concluded... sadly, not entirely to my taste.

The new Steam SkyCity is a visually impressive build, from the outside; a huge floating metal spheroid, supported by the requisite rotors (I for one argued, apparently persuasively, against replacing the rotors with a simple airship gasbag), hovering on high over the waters beneath.

Unfortunately - from my point of view - this is achieved by what's essentially a set of massive enclosing prims (the bottom bowl, the deck, and the dome and girders overhead) which severely restrict the physical space available for building on the city.  Furthermore, in response to commercial pressure (people like leafy suburbs, apparently), the Guv has made that deck a single big lawn, and planted trees all the way around.  In short, rather than the urban-industrial setting of the Steam SkyCity I knew and loved, this is something much more like an enclosed, suburban, gated community.  (There's no conventional way in or out except by the CAT lift.... and the structure of the build means there isn't even a view from the main deck, it's all shut away behind a wall.)

It's all just virtual anyway, yes?  Just pixels in a video game?  ... yeah, right.  This honestly, really, upset me.  So I messaged the Guvnah to that effect.

Well, never let it be said that the Guv refuses to listen to people's concerns.  Some people would have been annoyed by receiving a message to the effect that "your brilliant new build sux and I'm not going to live in it"... but the Guv took it on the chin, and we thrashed out a compromise, which involved him carving out a separate parcel, away from the city itself, where I can build, unencumbered, and in the sort of idiom I feel appropriate to Caledon STEAM SkyCITY, dammit.

Of course, now, I am honour bound to actually build something.  Which means, I suppose (since life and other realities keep on intruding on my not-so-copious free time) that this blog may get even more neglected as I bolt prims together inworld.  But I will be back, and building.  Watch this space.  Something may happen here yet.

Belt and braces

A while back now I mentioned some problems we were running into with the keyframed movement system.  While this is somewhat improved - possibly as a consequence of the impending arrival of pathfinding on the Grid as a whole - there are still issues, especially with region restarts.  The lifts running up and down my tower in Burroughs still freeze when the region restarts, and are a little erratic in resuming function.

So, by way of experiment, I rigged one to sort itself out when the restart hits.  Basically, this is run off the "changed" event, because one of the things it picks up is the starting up of the region.  (I have an explosive device in Steam SkyCity, in fact, which counts the number of times the sim has restarted.  And then explodes.)  So, this one lift, now, when it detects a restart, shuts down keyframed movement, uses the old warpPos trick to go to its starting point, and then starts keyframing going again.  In theory, then, the next time a restart hits, this thing should go right on moving as normal.

I mentioned all this to Tali, and she said, "WarpPos?  You do know llSetRegionPos is live now, right?"

Well, this is why Tali is an accomplished creator and I am a dumb blonde; yes, I did know, but it had temporarily slipped what passes for my mind.  So I turned back to the lift...

... and I thought to myself, hang on, this is an excellent moment to run some comparisons, here.

WarpPos is not an LSL function, it's a trick developed by sneaky programmer types; it works by calculating a number of steps between where you are and where you want to be, and using llSetPos to move an object along those steps - the trick being that, due to a quirk of the implementation, all these repeated calls to llSetPos are executed in the same physics frame, thus making the transition effectively instantaneous.

The newer llSetRegionPos actually does move an object, straightforwardly and simply, from point A to point B (if both points are in the same region).  So there is not a lot of use for warpPos any more, unless you're going outside a sim... but...

The much-published warpPos user-defined function has an error margin of 0.01 meters.  In the documentation, llSetRegionPos is given an error margin of 0.1 meters.  Now, this may be simply LL covering their backsides with a generous allowance for errors, but - I thought - it might be interesting to see how the two compare in practice.  So I edited a second lift and set that to use llSetRegionPos.

So, it will be interesting to see how the two compare.  The ideal result would be for both lifts to handle the sim restarts normally - but it is possible that, with the wider margin for error, the llSetRegionPos one will drift, gradually, out of position over the course of weeks.  (It is also possible, or even likely, that they will both hit an unsolved keyframing bug and fail to restart properly.  Well, we shall see.)

An experiment in progress!  I may have results in, oooh, a month or two.

An idea bites the dust... or not

I had a thought for something I could do for SL9B - a spoof "Museum of Avatar Prehistory", with faux-archaeological commentary getting everything spectacularly wrong about old video games.

Unfortunately, SL9B's published policies mean, basically, I would have to get written permission from every copyright holder of every image I used - even though it would be totally "fair use" under the most rigorous standards of copyright law.  I really don't have time or energy to jump through all those pointless hoops.

However... I may wind up doing it anyway.  I have prims spare in Steam SkyCity, it's a fun idea, and not doing it for SL9B would mean it didn't have to vanish when the birthday-party sims close down.  And I wouldn't have to do it all in a bit of a rush, too.  So.  This is one I shall add to the background list of Stuff I Mean To Get On With.  More on this later, perhaps.

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.

To Infinity and Beyond!

Back to building on the tower today.  It is to be used tomorrow as a landmark and a waypoint in a race across Caledon, and the racers will be changing over from sea to air transport here, so it seemed important that there should be some way up to the top floor.

My usual tangle of perilous metal walkways would meet the case, of course, but for the benefit of the faint-hearted, I also decided to put in another keyframed-movement lift.  So, having laid out the various stops, I rezzed a cylinder at the lowest level, intending to turn it into the lift platform....

... only for my touchpad to spazz out on me (I apologize for this impenetrable technical jargon) and the cylinder to disappear abruptly from view.

Hmm, I said to myself, this is not good news.  I had been editing its Z (up and down) position at the time, so the possibilities seemed to be three-fold (actually, they are four- or even five-fold, but only three occurred to me, I am blonde after all).  To wit:-

• It had sunk to the lowest possible point.
• It had risen to the highest possible point, i.e. the building limit of 4096 meters.
• It had risen to an impossibly high point, due to me leaving out the decimal point when I typed in the desired height, which would put it somewhere around 57,850 meters up.

(The other possibilities are: it had wound up in that sinkhole of lost items at coordinates 0, 0, 0 on the sim, or its position had got totally scrambled and it had shot off who alone knows where.)

So, I went down to the sea bed to look for it.  No dice.  So, on with the trusty flight assist, and up to 4096 meters height... took a while... no dice there either.  Cue me looking wistfully up into an infinite depth of sky.

Fortunately, there is this peculiarity of flight assists... you wear them to give you a discreet push when you are flying higher than the flight limit (which is soon to be raised or even effectively abolished, anyway, so never mind).  If you wear two of them and fly, they both detect that you are moving upwards and give a push accordingly, thus setting up a sort of feedback loop thingy where they set each other off.  This enables you to reach immense heights without wearing out your finger pressing the PageUp key.

Nonetheless, even with a freebie flight feather and my own Cavorite Personal Levitator (free from all good shops... that I own... which would make it free from one shop, and that open to debate), it takes a long time to reach 57,800 meters.

A bit shy of 53,000 meters up, not that the view changes much up here

How long does it take?  Roughly, an entire compilation album of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's greatest hits' worth of time.  Not, perhaps, the most exact measure of time out there, but what the heck, it works for me.  I passed the time talking to Turley Hallenbook, the actual proper Duchess of Burroughs (I'm just a parvenue, you know), who had various actually helpful ideas about how to look using estate management tools and such.

Of course, SL itself gets iffy when you're up that high.  The top bar in the viewer stopped registering my vertical position properly once I'd passed 4096 meters, so I had to rely on the dead-reckoning feature of my flight feather.  I don't know if it was accurate or not.  All I know is, I never found that missing prim, and I had a devil of a job getting back down.  I turned off the flight aids, fell for a few minutes, suddenly found myself crashing through the tower and into the ground... and then falling, again, from a height of 4096 meters, and being unable to stand once I'd hit the ground a second time.  I teleported out, and - to my surprise - found myself moving normally in the sim I'd aimed for.  I was seriously expecting to get logged out, there, so well done SL, I think.

But I never did find that prim.  On the off chance that anyone happens to be cruising thirty-five miles over Caledon, and spots a plywood cylinder, could they let me know where to find it?  Poor little prim; it is lost, and a long way from home.

Loose ends and games

Feeling vaguely deflated after the end of Steam Hunt and the short drived to complete Werewolf In Love (must unpack from that, too!) - kicking my heels and at a loose end, sort of thing.

I shouldn't be.  There is still a very great deal to do over in Caledon Burroughs, where another floor has gone on my tower, but there is still far too much plywood around for my comfort, and a fair amount of detailing left to do.

Also, I need to think about what sort of stuff people can do in the tower; just standing around admiring it isn't nearly enough.  There are, to be sure, some interactive parts already involved; you can fiddle with the generators or settle down with a good book in the library, and there are other odd bits and pieces scattered around.  But I want to come up with something more involving for people to do....

This has had me looking at board games; there was one of those in the steam hunt, and my friend and Steam SkyCity neighbour Sauce Sorrowman makes games, including a very stylish chess set (which Tali has been using to play tunes - a long story, but possibly worth telling at some point).  I've been looking, though, at various forms of mancala games, a style of game common in Africa but rather less well known in Europe and America.  The basic rules are simple enough; it's not so hard to script a simulator for them, even in a slightly peculiar language like LSL.  Actually physically creating a playable board in SL - well, that will call for some thought.  I can do that, I think.  That whole "thought" thing.  Well within my powers.

Still a-building

The next floor of the tower is going on, shown here against either a dawn or sunset sky, I don't know which, I only just logged on.  (Switches back to SL - oh, it's sunset.  Stars are coming out and stuff.)

A chap rather hearteningly wandered through the other day and stopped to do a photoshoot inside the cage of the mighty Actaeon Crystal (that blue thing in the middle).  It is nice to see people noticing this thing, and even approving of its aesthetics a bit.  Mind you, the tower is currently some 63 meters tall, people bloomin' well should notice it.

The tower, redux

The tower in Caledon Burroughs is still growing... it has now acquired a mystical power crystal and a whole host of dubious electrical systems.

You can play with the generator assemblies and turn the coloured lights on and off.

Note, towards the bottom right, that rectangular brassy thing.  This is a lift that goes up and down between the two platforms, and is my second experiment (and first successful experiment) with the new keyframed motion system.  My first experiment was present on the sim very briefly, before shooting off towards Caledon Mayfair and subsequently hurtling off the grid.  So it goes.  The lift is more reliable, anyway.

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!)

Seconds out, round two!

To be fair to the viewer, it is trying gamely, following my challenge of yesterday.  My paltry few new landmarks burgeoned rapidly, during my last session, with each one being copied no less than five times.

I've done a cache clear and clean reinstall, so we'll have to see what difference that makes.  

I am not letting it get me down - the end of the Steam Hunt is now in sight, and I have finally started construction work on my Tower of Science and Sorcery in Caledon Burroughs.  It is rising out of the Firth of Caledon, causing some perplexity to Callie, the Caledonian Sea Monster, who swings by that location every quarter of an hour or so.  (Meanwhile, my partner in crime sex building continues to place hauntingly beautiful romantic ruins about the islands of Burroughs.  It's a good thing one of us has class.)

There may be photographs and such, later on, as things start to take shape.  Or the viewer may murder me in my sleep.  Could go either way really.

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.)

Don't judge a book by its cover

Before plunging into the technology required to create actual working books, I decided to have a bit of fun.

As you can plainly see from the title, this is a weighty and impossibly worthy tome, giving the impression that I am a serious and sensible person.

But, if we look at it from another angle....

... we see that first impressions are not always correct.