Back. And on the Hunt.

:: looks around, knocks down cobwebs with handy broom, blows away the dust ::

ka-CHOOOO!

Ahem.  Yes.  Back.  Still not getting the inworld time I'd like, but back.  Shall we talk about many and varied RL misadventures?  Best not.

Shall we talk about things that have happened in my absence, such as specular maps (good idea) or the new Terms of Service (bad idea)?  Or things that have signally failed to happen in my absence, like any movement on the mesh deformer or the issue of second names?  Perhaps.

Or perhaps I should begin with a more traditional sort of post, by my standards.  Yes indeed.

See, two things that lure me back to SL time and again are creativity and Free Stuff.  And both of these may be found in some quantity on the Steam Hunt.  I managed to get in for the whole of Steam Hunt IX, and have even managed to complete it (apart from two stops which are Not Ready Yet).  And, in accordance with immemorial tradition (well, immemorial if your memory is as shocking as mine is), I present, herewith, some of the accumulated loot.

Starting with number 1, which is the Steampunk Information Centre where the very excellent Mr. Perryn Peterson and his invaluable assistants provide all the setting-out info for the Steam Hunts.

The gift here is this eminently practical little bracelet with a copy in miniature of the Hunt item (the traditional Steam Hunt gear).  Why eminently practical?  Because it means the sculpt for that item is pre-rezzed for you when you enter a new sim, so you don't have to spend ages waiting for it to rez before you can even start looking.

 

Moving on to stop 2, Lantian/Flox, which did sort of a mini-hunt, during which I acquired several little necklaces, including that rather nice Celtic one in the second snapshot.  The main prize, though, was the... thing... in the first snapshot.  It's a very nice... thing.  It has revolving hearts and emits heart-shaped puffs of steam.  Still, I'm unable to come up with a more descriptive term for it than... thing.  Maybe if I could work out which way up it went?  Never mind... thing, what does the maker call it?  Ah.  Apparently, it's a "Gadget".  And here was me calling it a... thing.

 

 

Stop 3 is Play Dead, although it still uses Pop Tart and Urban Assault carrier bags for its gifties.  The one here is a little clockwork top hat, with an attached animation, so be warned.  No, I am not giving further details.

 

 

Stop 4, Unrepentant, gives an interesting take on some Steam Hunt staples, namely top hats and pulsating brains in jars.  You don't often see them  combined, as here.  There is a gents' and a ladies' version, the ladies' one being smaller.  I think it is just saying that women wore smaller top hats in the old days, and is not a comment on the size of women's brains.

 

Stop 5, Sinful Temptations, tempts us with this tray of nachos and guacamole dip.  It gives you a nacho if you click it.  I must reluctantly declare it Not Steampunk, however, as the designers have inexplicably failed to glue a superfluous cog onto it somewhere.  The decorative avocado is very nice, though.

 

 

Stop 6, Goddess Fantasies, offers two outfits, one for ladies and one for gents.  I'm standing next to the boxed gents' outfit, and wearing the ladies' one.  Kind of old-school SL, this, though the floofy skirt works rather well.

 

Stop 7, Steam Kitten, gives us this steam-driven winged hat.  I am so out of practice with SL that I forgot which buttons to click, and so wound up wearing nothing but that hat, for a panic-stricken and rather chilly couple of minutes.  Still, it's a hat and a half, that one.  You can't see it in a still piccy, but the wings flap and the eyes blink.  Just the thing for a formal reception, this.

 

Stop 8, Lindy Modern & Retro Shoes, give us... shoes.  Which I needed, being barefoot at this time (see mis-clicking misadventure, previously alluded to.)  Men's and women's mesh boots, the women's ones pictured here.  And jolly nice too, I think.

Stop 9 was Zeitmesser, and the distinctive look of M. Villain Baroque.  This Cupid's Clock gives you the time in two time zones, so you can know when to wake up your long-distance significant other in the middle of his/her night.  It's a very nice piece, actually - fully functional, well scripted, positively gorgeous high-definition textures and a convincing fussy-Victorian visual aesthetic.  Even if you're not into fussy-Victorian (and we all know I'm more of an art deco gal myself), it's still pretty darn gorgeous.  Nice one, M. Baroque.

 

Number 10, Tamiron Forge, and some jewelry from this designer with a barbarian/Gorean touch.  This is the ladies' Heavy Heart necklace, so God alone knows what the men's version must weigh.  Lots of detail, and cogs.  You could not accuse this of not being Steampunk, my goodness me no.

 

In the next one, I'm having my head and my chest poked by some elegantly detailed hatpins from number 11, Amaranthus.  Shows the fine work which I've come to expect from that store.  (Because I'm shamelessly spoiled, of course).

 

Number 12, Eclectic Stars, gives us a necklace with a heart-shaped locket you can open up to display a portrait.  It's editable, so you can add your own picture (or that of your significant other - yes, that might be better), which is nice.

 

Number 13, Hatpins, has ignored the pins and gone straight for the hat.  And quite a hat it is, too.

 

Stop 14, Surface by c.Loon, gives us a texture pack (assorted linen textures).  Well, we all know by now that I'm a sucker for texture packs.

 

(Ahem) Another outfit-switching misclick with number 15, Cog & Fleur, with their lovely rose-tinted goggles for viewing the world through.  And why not?  Male and female versions, the ladies' one pictured here.  I am nothing if not a lady.  Sometimes an accidentally naked lady, but always a lady.

 

!! Never Ever! at number 16 gives us this Radio Hat.  I'm sensing a sort of hatty theme emerging for this Hunt.  Anyway, this is a nice example of the breed.

 

This Specimen Prep Desk from Belle's Cabinet of Curiosities (number 17) comes as a linked set or as a coalesced object (for ease of rearrangement, I guess).  That's a nice touch from the maker, and it's a good-looking piece of furniture (and not a hat), besides.  It would have fitted neatly into my old place on Steam SkyCity (my new one has curved walls, unfortunately).

 

 

Number 18, Dragons' Designs, gives us two straightforward SL system tops, one corset for ladies and one "vest" (it's American for waistcoat) for the men.  You are seeing the men's version here, on account of it doesn't show my boobs.  I said I was a lady, dammit.

 

Number 19, Aster's Builts (I thought they'd closed at some point during a previous Hunt, and am pleased to see I'm wrong about that), offers this imposing and slightly eccentric piece of Steampunk furniture.  You sit in it.  As I am doing there.

 

Number 20 is the ineffable Grim Bros., and they provide this most excellent Steam-driven Skateboard.  OK, so I rode it off the island and down to the sea bed by accident, but that's not the skateboard's fault, is it?  Anyway.  Well up to Grim's standards and its... interesting... design aesthetics.

 

So there we go.  I have boxes from more than a hundred more stores to open, so I doubt not that there will be many interesting finds along the way.  And hats.  I bet there will be more hats.

I don't have a thing to wear!

Well, no, that's not strictly true.  All my clothes are still there... there have even been some additions to the clothing folders, what with finding some mesh items that (despite the evil that is Standard Sizing) can be made to work.

What I don't have any more is my varied and extensive Outfits folder.  Let me explain....

I have mentioned, in previous posts, what I called the "blue limbo" problem.  Basically, this means that when I log in, it's in a semi-disconnected state - I can't move, can't communicate, my ping time is pegged at the maximum value, and the world around me is partially or (more often) completely unloaded - nothing but blue sky and blue sea.

This happened enough to be annoying, was fixed for a while, but has been back with a vengeance since my return to SL.

So, I went to the lengths of filing a bug report... but, more pertinently, also went to the lengths of examining my log files.

The thing is, when you log into SL, a whole host of things happen behind the scenes to get you inworld (or not).  And these things are recorded, by default (on my Win7 box) in C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Second Life\logs.  (The AppData folder is invisible by default, you may have to Take Steps to see it.)

Studying the text file in there called SecondLife.log... well, it is long and complex, and if you're not intimately familiar with the viewer's source code (and I'm not) it's not all that meaningful.  But, as I scanned the lines of text with my jaded eyes, a few things leapt out at me.

One of them was the fact that errors were being returned relating to outfits - specifically, "broken links" in the outfit folders.

Now, as we know from previous witterings on this blog, outfits are individual folders containing, not actual items, but links to items in the inventory.  However, those links are, themselves, entries in your inventory, and in SL's databases... and, if something has gone agley with them, things can go wrong.

Was it possible, I asked myself, that the system was spending sufficient time and effort chasing its tail, following invalid entries in broken links, that it was timing out on completing other, more important tasks?  Yes, I answered myself, this was certainly a possibility.

So... track down the broken links and remove them?  I thought about that.... I could get which objects they referred to, after all, from the log file.  But I had a lot of outfits.  (How many?  We shall soon see.)  I rather blenched at the idea of trawling through them individually.  Besides, many of them needed updating anyway - they used old skins and old eyes, or something equally naff.  So.  Time, Glorf, I said to myself, to bite the bullet.

So I selected every outfit I wasn't actually wearing at the time, and deleted them all.

I crashed, of course.  But, when I logged back on... some 13,000 items lighter in the inventory... I was logged in properly, straight away, and had a darn sight better performance than usual.  Whether this was down to the elimination of broken links, or simply to the reduction of my inventory by something over 20%, I don't know.

But things worked, for a time, and I was a happy Glorf, though a Glorf who had to trawl through actual inventory folders to find stuff to wear... Then the viewer sent through its automatic update, from 3.5.0 to 3.5.1 - and, next time I logged in, blue limbo again.

So it wasn't that... or it wasn't just that.

Well, I shall persevere.  But all this demonstrates, I think, just how many cans of worms you can open, trying to fix a software problem.

It also raises several other questions, such as why those darn links got broken in the first place.  The items they linked to are still in my inventory, and haven't been moved out of the original folders they came in, nor have they been edited or otherwise fiddled with, by me at least.  So what happened to get them unlinked?  (The main culprits seem to be two pairs of boots - one a freebie set I could happily dispose of entirely, the other a Steam Hunt prize of quite excessive sexiness which I should be sorry to sacrifice.  What's so problematical about them, though?  Answers on a postcard please.)

Fantasy Faire 2013: The Adventure Concludes

This covers the remaining three sims of Fantasy Faire, and by this time I was hammering the snapshot button rather a lot, so bear with me.  On the plus side, the further I got away from that troublesome top-right corner, the better my performance.  (My viewer's performance, that is.  I continue to perform superbly, and will happily scratch the eyes out of anyone who disagrees.)

Lumenaria (sponsored by Solarium) is in a comfortable quasi-Mediaeval idiom, and contains some old favourites among its stores.

From that sort of central courtyard, old-fashioned streets wind out across the sim.

It's not spectacular.  What it is, though, is solidly well-crafted and consistent in style.  In its unspectacular way, it is a really nice build.

Moving West, we come, oddly, to the Mystic East: Lotus Valley Dream is a build in a Chinese idiom, and I have to admit, I was smitten with it.

It starts out with those elegant houses on the margins of the sea, rising towards the central castle.

I took a snap of the interior of one store - Hoof It - with their hippocampus avatars on display.  They are stylish!  I liked them.  Not enough to buy one - I don't know how often I'd want to be a seahorse - but I liked them.

It's maybe not as daringly imaginative as Titan's Hollow, but I think the attention to detail - the buildings, the touches like the Zen garden or the ponds, that marvellous dragon and lotus in the bay - makes this one my favourite of all the Faire sims this year.  (Sponsored by The Looking Glass.  Did I mention that?  I should have.)  The lighting effects make it, too, that wonderful twilight sky.  Crepuscular.  I don't get to use the word "crepuscular" nearly enough.

And so, on to the final sim, Ravenshard.... where we are greeted by chocolate waterfalls, candy-cane trees, a screaming psychedelic sky - in short, the, ahhh, distinctive visual stylings of Mayah Parx and the Epic Toy Factory.

 

 

After two peaceful and rather demurely decorative sims, Ravenshard hits you with a blast of in-yer-face outrageousness.  Still pictures don't do it justice, really.

 



You can't see the chocolate rippling, or the colour-changing clouds scudding across the sky while the hands on that clock spin rapidly backwards.... Anyway, there it is.  Ravenshard.  And you sure as heck can't help but notice it.

So, as I conclude my tour around the great circle of the Fantasy Faire, I ask myself: have I learned any lessons, discovered new and vital truths?  And I answer: no.  But I had a pretty good time, anyway.

I have commented about how comparatively tame it seemed, in some places - the comparison being with last year's do.  Now, this might not be entirely fair.  Even the builds I've been a bit sniffy about are still streets ahead of the average look of SL - in terms of gosh-wow factor, there is plenty of gosh and no shortage of wow about.   Perhaps I'm just being spoiled.  Perhaps, having seen the sorts of things these designers can do, I expect even more gosh-wow than I'm strictly entitled to.  The fact remains that Fantasy Faire is showcasing some genuine talent and innovation in SL, and this sort of creativity is what, for me, SL is about.  So go take a look, and don't be put off by my carping... or by my misadventures with the viewer, which are surely peculiar to me alone.

I did, along the way, pick up a number of items from various RFL vendors, at least one in every sim, usually rather more... so there may be a future post on what the loot was like.  Consider yourselves warned.

Fantasy Faire 2013: The Wrath of Glorf

When last we saw our glamourous blonde heroine, she was advancing perilously into the top right hand corner of the Fantasy Faire, menaced on all sides by strange black flashes and ominous drops in framerate.  What dangers await her in the caverns of The Dragonspire?

Well, OK, if you don't have my idiosyncratic computer setup, it's probably not all that perilous.  What it is, though, is gem-studded tunnels carved out of the living rock of a gigantic mountain.  Which means, I suppose, that you are actually inside a lot of large objects, and there are a whole bundle of complicated textures around.  Hence, much taxing of my client.  This whole business of the client will probably get spun off into another post, in which I will rant and rave to my little heart's content.  For now, let's get on with Fantasy Faire.

After the misadventures at the edge of Titan's Hollow, I relogged, and used the portals at Fairelands Junction to go directly to the Dragonspire's hub, next to the sponsor's store (magic and HUD specialists The Arcanum).

Much hittage of the snapshot button here, too, because the build is pretty gorgeous.  If it is killing my client, well, at least it died in a good cause.

Hello!  What's this?  A tunnel mouth leading downwards?... Irresistibly tempting to dumb blondes in bad B-movies.  I am not the dumb blonde to defy tradition, and so I set off to explore.  Which is all very well, but - remember those lag problems?  Pretty soon, I was freezing solid at random intervals and quickly lost all sense of direction.  At one point, I messaged Tali that I was "in a maze of twisty passages, all alike".  (NB. if you actually get that reference, you are very old.)

There is, as I mentioned, a Faire-wide hunt going on, and I think some of the sub-surface tunnels relate to that - eventually, I found myself before an impressive door to a "grotto", which has got to have some uses I'm not aware of.

Eventually, I found my way out, and into the next sim, to the south: the Valley of Ish'Nar.

Now, this one is something to do with the Faire's hunt, and isn't a shopping sim at all.  It's very atmospheric, though, and if my equipment was cooperating, I would investigate and uncover its mysteries.  I would even go so far as to encourage those with cooperative equipment to go and do that themselves!

South of the Valley of Ish'Nar, we come back to shopping, in the quasi-mediaeval setting of Lumenaria.  Or, at least, you might.  I found myself lag-walking helplessly through the sim before vanishing off the Grid with a sickening snapping sound.  So, the rest of my Fantasy Faire adventures will have to wait for the next post, I think.