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Martien Pontecorvo on buildings past and future
It appears my User has been doing some serious soul-searching about his Gallery in Alpha Centauri, which I consider annoying. After all, not long ago the fool uprooted everything to seek what he thought were missing primitives. They were never found.
At the same time, he is also questioning the wisdom of selling decorated box primitives. While relatively easy to make, and certainly fine decor for any home, nobody seems interested in buying. If they are, my bank balance and I aren’t seeing it.
As such, the gallery is being, in his words, rethought. As well as resulting in myself spending much time in a sandbox, it resulted in an unexpected reunion twixt myself and Waihi Beach.
Waihi Beach was the second house I lived in, after I became dissatisfied with the sprawling, section-devouring Archer House of Bill Stirling. I wanted something offering a bit more privacy, and more outdoor space. The obvious solution was two stories.
However, this was back in early 2007, and sculpties were not yet implemented. The original Waihi Beach house required 50 prims, including two 2-prim doors and a 10-prim stair. I barely had enough prims left for a furniture set and a bed!
Rezzing this beast — intended as a frontage, a shop before the actual gallery — I was reminded how poky the silly thing was. Only about 8m across by 16m long, the building was small by normal SL standards, and incredibly badly built.
When rebuilding the beast for v3, I was stunned to learn that at the time, I didn’t even know how to adjust textures on a prim. To get the boards running in the right direction, I had rotated the prims! The doors… They predated my understanding of how to cut a prim in half to make it appear to rotate on its edge. The original glass texture was cringeworthy as well… and yet I happily stayed in that house for months, before I was walled in, fled to a skybox, then finally to Spinach and Butler.
Not that Waihi Beach will see the light of SL again. Now it looks too amateurish even to flog as a freebie. Instead, let us behold how my User has finally realised that Second Life, being mercifully exempt from weather and, often, physics, does not need them factored into architecture.
So what is the new focus of the gallery? Gadgets, dear reader. Gadgets. People, it seems, like gadgets that do things, even if it is only make noises or being decorative. Also there are some wonderful free items out there I would like to let people know about. And there is a range of T-shirts my User began work on some time ago, and it is high time he worked on them again.
I really must have a word with him over what else.
Posted in Second Life (Dear Diary...,) by Martien Pontecorvo 11/10/08 08:26 PM Tags: architecture, good ideas gone bad, second life
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