Making a Skybox

Having acquired a set of textures for making a warehouse I decided to adapt these to make a skybox.  My first decision was how big to make it, did I make one about 20 m. by 10 m. which would easily fit above a minimum 512 sq. m. parcel of land ( 32 m x 16 m)  or did I go for a bigger box perhaps 20 m x 30 m?  The maximum size I could make, while still allowing it all to be linked together, seems to be limited by SL to 30 m x 30 m. You may wonder why I am setting sizes in multiples of 10m, this is to allow the maximum size for the fewest number of prims as the land on which the skybox will go is unlikely to have a large number of prims so the fewer the better.

Another look at open life

Had another go on Open Life yesterday to see if I could make some simple clothes and dress my avatar without having to go to a sandbox area.

I followed this procedure:

• upload three textures to my inventory,  jeans, tennis shoes and a t-shirt;
• create a new pair of pants and wear them;
• create a new shirt and wear it;
• create a new pair of shoes and wear them;
• go into appearance mode and edit each of these putting the textures I had uploaded into the clothes;

I ended up with a passable looking set of clothes on my avatar  but the whole process was vey slow, the new clothes taking ages to rezz.

I then chatted to a new resident and gave her some jeans to wear. We then teleported to Pawpaw region to look for freebies but I crashed crossing a sim boundary [nothing new there then] and had to relog.

Finally I gave up thinking that open life is still difficult to manage and not really ready for prime time.

Building in opensim

I thought I would try to build a simple beach house in opensim to see how easy it was.

I managed to produce a house but there were one or two issues/points which occurred to me as I built it.

• The base of the house can be a single prim because they are not restricted to 10 metres;
• There are only a few textures available with the default server so I had to download some from second life and import them into opensim – fortunately at no cost lol;
• Things go together easily as long you set the base prim to simple coordinates and make sure that it’s rotation is set to zero to provide a base set of coordinates to allow all the other parts to be lined up easily;
• There is no issue with using a lot of prims as the region will allow 45000 so together with the possibility of larger prims this makes life easier.

Creating trees on open sim

First try at a papaya tree

I wanted to create a simple tree using a tree texture set up on three prims.

The first time I followed the following procedure:

• create a prim 10m high 10m wide and 5m deep
• set all the sides to transparent using the texture tab in edit
• locate a convenient texture – in this case a papaya texture comes in the default set-up
• in the texture tab select a single side and put the texture on the two 10×10 m sides – once “select texture” is selected and a side identified by clicking on it, any texture picked up only goes on that side
• change the depth 0.01m leaving a very thin prim with textures on the two main faces
• in the edit object tab place the prim in an easy to remember location e.g. 94m in the X direction
• drag out a copy of the prim along the x-axis to give two copies, three prims in all
• rotate the last prim by 60 degrees around the Z-axis from the object tab and change it’s x-coordinate back to 94m (or what ever it was in your system)
• rotate the other prim through 120 degrees and move it back
• link the three prims together by selecting them all together in edit (edit one and shift click on the others to pick them up) and using link in the tools menu

You now have a papaya tree to grow on your region.

I noticed that the client would not allow full transparency to be set and this can result in some ugly lines around the prims.  To get round this set the intial prim to transparent by using a clear texture rather than setting the transparency.

Setting up Opensim on my own machine

I have spent a little time ove rthe last month trying out various opensim servers for local use.

I tried the openlife 3DX server and found it worked reasonably well. I was able to edit everything, build objects and change the terrain.

However I did have a few problems:

• I could not add more than one region. When I followed the procedure by setting up further xml files in the regions folder, taking care to follow all the instructions such as using different ports, the regions appeared on the map but I could not go to them or see them in world.
• I set up a single region and placed a number of objects on it and at first all seemed to be going well. Then when I logged in all my objects were missing from my inventory. They were still there on the sim but when I tried to take them or a copy of them the system did not allow this.

I then took a look at the opensim standalone server which I set up with no real issues and managed to get four regions working in world. Again I could do most of the things I wanted to do such as build and terraform.

However there were two issues with this system:

• when I moved from one region to the other I ended up walking in the ground. Although I could solve this my doing an “appearance” it was still very irritating.
• perhaps more important was the problem with the physics which mean that I could not walk on objects as they did not detect my impact. Effectively everything was phantom.

I thought about this for a while and looked around for some help on line and finally came across Zonja Capalini’s excellent post about setting up opensim using MSQL as the data base.  The instructions were very clear, I only went wrong once when I failed to do as asked. In less than hour I had a server up and running and four regions loaded and terraformed. Moving between regions was no problem and the physics issue seemed to have gone away. I am not sure whether these issues were solved by the use of a better database, a more recent server version, neither or both but it seems OK.

An added bonus was that the data was persistent over server resets and my carefully crafted avatar (lol) looked the same when I relogged after mounting the server again.

Early days yet and I suppose the next step is to try to get the server onto a network but that is work for another day.

Putting together an advertising board

I wanted to put together a picture prim that would do the following:

• show a picture in a frame;
• advance the picture when the frame was touched (slideshow);
• give a notecard on the first touch by a person but not later touches;
• store the name of the person touching;
• allow me to recover a list of names;
• allow me to reset the list from time to time;

I started with a script which allowed me to take a simple prim shape and shape it so that it had a frame around it without adding any additional prims. This is done by using the side, top and bottom faces of the cube as the frame. I am not exactly sure how this works so I need to look at it in more detail.

[ The free script to make a frame can be found at Crystal Gadgets the home of some cool scripts, some of them free including an excellent Radar HUD.]

Having done this I had to determine the number of the front face where the picture was going to go as I only wanted the slide show script to change the one face. It turned out that this face was 0 (zero) of course I forgot that numbers start from zero not one so I tried all the others first (lol).

Having created the prim I needed to set up a slideshow script which:

• counted the number of textures I had in the inventory [Note that it would need to be reset after the textures have been changed ];
• displayed the first texture – no problem as it was already on the front face;
• wait for a touch and then move to the next texture and for the first touch add the name of the toucher to a list and send them a note card;
• Finally, for this script,  I needed to set up a way of letting the owner read the list of touchers and reset it if required. Having been reset it would send a card to the same person if they touched again.

The final script was a simple hover script which used \n to take a new line between phrases.

Plymouth and Bluesky

I have made a swing using a rotation script and setting it in an axis and linking a swing to it. Here is a picture of me and my friend Bluesky on the swing.

Fitting houses to plot sizes

I have been building some house and the idea has been to make them as low prim as possible and also to make them fit onto standard plots. To do this I need to remind myself about plot sizes and the prims they allow.

For the smaller plot sizes:

Plot size (sq. m.)	Maximum prims	Typical Dimensions
512	117	32×16
1024	234	42×32
2048	468	64×32
4096	937	64×64
8192	1875

If you only have 117 prims available then you don’t want a house that will use all your prims even if it fits on the plot.

My medium beach house will fit comfortably onto a 32 x 16 plot leaving enough space to climb the steps. It is 35 prims so there are plenty left over for furnishings. It includes a lockable front door which sets itself to the owner when rezzed. The owner can then add other users to allow them access or simply unlock the door to allow all inside.

Building a low prim house

As I have very few prims on an openspace island I am always looking for ways to save prims. I have tried building a small house in as few prims as possible.

The roof consists of one cube narrowed at one end to provide a triangle cross section and then hollowed to give a roof space. Two more rectangular prims textured to look like a wall make up the ends of the house.

At the back of the house are two prims, one for the wall and one for the window. The house front needs four prims – the wall and the window – the door and the small widow above it.

The base of the house was one more prim.

Finally I needed to make four steps which I  made from two cut cubes giving me two more prims.

Total for the whole house 12 prims. I then textured the various parts using free textures. Brown stone walls a tiled roof and a wooden floor. The base was grey stone. The windows and door were white textures.

The most difficult thing about building the house was to line up the sections and to avoid editing the wrong parts of the house. First thing I did was to set the base so it was level and lined up with specific rotations and positioning and it’s dimensions were a little smaller than the roof to allow a roof overhang.. Then I set the rotations of the all the other parts so they were lined up with respect to this. I then built the walls making them a little smaller than the roof so they lined up with the base. I worked out the X and Y positions for the parts, moved them almost in place by eye and then typed in the  final coordinates to round off the values and get things fully lined up.

Once I had positioned a section I locked it so that I could not edit it by mistake. I tried to join all the parts into one object and this worked for the most part except for the door which refused to work properly.

Making my trees flexi

Having made some trees I thought i might like to make them move in the wind and a little research on the matter showed that I needed to make the prims flexi. So I went into SL and selected a tree for edit. It was at this point that I found I could only change the position, rotation and size of the object and any other changes had to be done on the individual prims.

I did not want to destroy any of the trees so I made a copy, using edit and shift move. I then unlinked the prims and pulled one of them away from the rest of the tree. I could now work on making this prim flexi.

To do this i needed to open the features tab in edit and click the “Flexible path” box which opened a series of categories that I could set values against:

• Softness – which controls the rigidity of the flexible object – 0 is very hard and the object acts as if hinged at the base and 3.0 makes it very floppy – my trees needed to give a leaf and small branch movement so i found a value of 1.0 worked well. Higher values made the tree bend over like a floppy bush – not what I wanted.
• Gravity – is a measure of how hard the prim is pulled down when it is flexed – 10.0 gives a massive pull downward – 0.0 has no pull at all – -10.0 pulls it upward with a large force – I wanted a moderate downward force so I settled on a value of 3.0. Initially I set to high a value here and the tree just bent over and stayed there.
• Drag – gives a sort of friction effect which slows down how the prim reacts to a force – 0.0 allows an instant response to a force – I settled on a value of 3.0 .
• Wind – provides a force to bend the prim which simulates the effect of the wind. Wind is a measurable quantity and the higher this value is set for the prim the more it will respond to a given wind. It is wind that I want my tree to respond to and i found a value of 0.2 worked well.
• Tension - sets a value governing the way the prim straightens out after being moved – a value of 10 causes rapid snap back and 0 will allow the prim to stay bent. I found that my trees needed to snap back fairly quickly so I gave this a value of 8.0.
• Forces - which can be set in the X,Y and Z directions and act much like the wind but can be set to a fixed value so the force is not weather dependent. I wanted my trees to react to the wind so i set these all to 0.0

These values were a little hit and miss and I need to explore how they affect things in a little more detail as their effects seem to interact to some extent.

Finally I used this “flexi-prim” to build a 4 prim tree as before.