Putting together some low prim stuff

Our island is an openspace island so we do not have an inexhaustible supply of prims. This means that any structures we build must be low prim. So I have had a go at producing low prim garden stuff e.g. a three prim gazebo , a three prim bench seat and a two prim raised bed or planter (if you change it’s size and re texture).

This got me into the swing of linking objects together and finding that if i wanted to edit the combined objects by changing one of the dimensions I needed to unlink the prims or edit them separately.

Talking about swings, I obtained a script from the Free Script Library which allowed me to set a back and forth rotation through a given angle. I chose to rotate 20 degrees back and forth. I created a narrow wooden cylinder and placed the script in it. Then I added a narrow hollowed out rectangular structure to hang down as the supports of the swing and gave this a steel texture so the supports looked like steel wires. Finally I added a seat at the bottom of the support, gave this a suitable texture, linked the whole thing together; rotating support last and hung the swing from the gazebo.

The three prim swing operates by touch, first touch sets it going and next touch stops it. I have found that sometimes you need to right click on it and choose touch from the pie menu as it does not always respond. I need to take a more detailed look at the script to see if I can sort this.

I was surprised at how relatively easy it is to get going with building and using scripts in SL thanks to the generosity of people who have written basic scripts and made them freely available to others. In this spirit I have mad all my stuff free to copy, not that anybody would want it

Building Trees

I have obtained some free textures for trees and tried building a tree. I made a thin prim which was 10m x 10m x 0.01m. I then textured using one of the tree textures back and front on the 10×10 sides but this left the other four (thin) sides still showing. To deal with this I wrote a simple script which set the opacity of each of the sides, the two large sides to full opacity and the other four thin sides to full transparency.

I set the sides by trial and error. I found that the opacity did not reset itself back to opaque if I removed the code which set it transparent. I needed to explicitly set the opacity for each side. This left me with a flat surface textured either side with a tree.

Next I copied the prim by going into edit, holding down shift and moving the prim. The I superimposed the prims on top of one another and rotated one through 90 degrees and finally selecting both prims (edit left click for the first and then ctrl click for the second, finally using Tools: Link) and making them into one object.

This gave me a two prim tree which was OK but it was too easy to look at from edge on for one of the prims so it could not be seen properly. To remedy this I copied the tree as before, superimposed it on it’s copy and rotated one through 45 degrees. Finally by linking these I had a four prim tree which looked fairly realistic from all angles.

Once I had done this I could use it as a template for further trees. It was just a matter of choosing a different texture and replacing the old textures with the new one. It was easier to do this if the two trees were different in colour.

I finally ended up with three light green bushy trees and two dark green bushy trees. All of which are fully modifiable.

Some useful information on scripting

I have been taking a look at an interesting post about scripting animations on “A View From Another Life“  blog. I have been having a go at setting up a small waterfall and a stream across the beach. These are looking ok with the animations I have so far but this post may help me to add some additional material and make the water look “more real”. I am going to try out the scripts and report back on this post.

Building a waterfall

I have put together a waterfall which consists of a cliff face, jutting out from some boulders at the end of the island, and a moving waterfall with two pools. One at the top of the cliff and one at the bottom. I just need to excavate the terrain below the bottom pool to give more depth to the water. Both pools also have some mist and spray generated by simple scripting.

Simple scripting

I have been taking a look at the many free scripts available in SL. One of these responds to a voice command to cloak or uncloak an object. I have used it to cloak my visitor counter which previously appeared as coral rock stuck in the ground.

I have also been experimenting with a script that writes a blue menu giving buttons to control the script. This will be useful for a number of applications particularly if I want to set up a problem environment and might be used in conjunction with an auto rezzer so that the environment can change as a result of a choice made by the user.

Building pools

I have been experimenting with building pools out of a single object to keep down the prim count. The techniques I have used involves hollowing out a prim and placing the water within it.

So far I have made a:

• semicircular pool with some additional boulders and a mossy finish to go under the trees near the landing point
• rectangular pool using a cube hollowed out and given a rocky texture
• a circular pool made using a torus and hollowing out the centre

In doing this I discovered that I could make the mossy boulders look completely different from one another by changing the pattern repeats in the textures.

I intend making a large pool as the base for a waterfall so I need to experiment with these shapes to see which might be best for this purpose.

Setting up a visitor counter

I have been looking through a book by Jeff Heaton called “Scripting Recipes for Second Life”. It has some excellent stuff and one of the programs sets up a visitor counter which resets itself every 24 hours.

As well as keeping a tally of visitors and sending them a greeting when they come near it there is also a facility to send an IM once a day of the names of the visitors that have been greeted.

I have set up a greeter in a little coral rock on the less busy end of a LOW SIM island, so that visitors are offered the opportunity to look around and are warned about the  security orb at the residential end of the island.

I am in the process of fully commenting the program to ensure that I know how it works.

Using blogs from within Second Life

I have been experimenting with a script that allows you to post your blog posts to your blog from within SL. However it only works with Blogger as you cannot post to WordPress (or so I think).

On balance I prefer this system because it allow categories so I think I will stick with it despite not being able to post from within SL.

My solution is to keep a record of what I am doing in a notecard which I can then paste into the blog and make amendments.

Ideas from the SL Conference

One of the presenters is going to create a variety of resources and make them available to others as open source e.g rezz on demand boards which will allow an environment to be changed at the click of a button. This is something that might be very useful as a tool for teaching where the environment can change as a consequence of the learner’s interaction with the environment.

Other resources:

* MIT debating board
* pandorabots.com who have chatbots and are engaged in AI research

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A second presenter had some good ideas for doing PBL in SL using two types of scenario:

1. Information driven – which would have some info e.g. a picture and a set of questions using the blue box which would trigger further events – possibly linking to the rezz on demand
2. Avatar driven – where the students interact with avatars which are RL people. There are possible issues with this as it is person (avatar) intensive.

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A third presenter had an interesting idea about setting up a sequence of events e.g. writing a report; as a set of interlinked objects to show the structure visually. Each object would give information when touched. [Could be in chat or in the form of a note card ?]

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I need to follow up on all of these.

Starting a blog

Hi I am Plymouth Harbour and I am starting to get a personality of my own so I thought it was time I had my own blog so that I can talk about the things I am trying to do online. At the moment I am getting to grips with building using standard shapes and textures and I have found out how to link prims (edit the first prim, shift click to include all the others and then choose link on the View menu) and copy objects (edit the object and then shift drag using the position arrows to create a copy).

I also found out how to put a partly transparent texture on to a prim by copying the prim, applying the texture to the copy and moving it slightly so it’s surface appears.When I just applied the texture the prim partly disappeared. This could be used for building the waterfall where a number of layers are needed.