11 posts tagged “second life”

For no real good reason other than to build, I decided pretty muchly on the fly to build toony squad cars for Taco's otherwise be-statued and otherwise unfinished police station.

It's trickily complicated in its seeming simplicity, which, is basically how everything in Taco strives to be in one way or another.  Too bad the level of detail sorta munched up some of the rounded edges for my photos.  Zirnitra says that the spheres need better geometry, but I'd be happy if I could just adjust how harshly LOD effects my display a bit better.

And of course, I couldn't take pictures of a police car without including an officer of the law in uniform...  Now I just have to make some logo-type graphic for the Taco Police Department, and pin that onto the sides, and we'll be in business.

I went to SLCC and missed all the panels.  GO ME!

I've been working on a bit of private land way, way outside of Taco recently as sort of a break from the area.  It's nice to build something somewhat more realistic than the matte-flat cartoony designs I've been staring at pretty muchly all the time, lately.

Here are a few snaps taken from what I felt were interesting angles prior to actually furnishing the place.  Of course, since I'm pro-DIY over will-bobba-for-furni, I'm sure the house'll stay fairly empty for a while longer, until I get around to building such from scratch.

The Phoenix, a physical, actual, factual, and real newspaper in Boston, not only recently printed an article on Second Life, but went so far as to mention Taco.  You can read the about it on page three.

It's not a very big mention.  But it is a mention.  And that's totally awesome with me.

Also, I've been trying to post a comment asking why Taco is the only location without a link, but their server has been giving me strange errors all night, and the entire site seems to be rather sluggish right now.

Joshua Linden, via the Second Life Forums (announcements) sez:

* AGP enabled for additional graphics cards

This is actually both frustrating and awesome at the same time, as my card happens to be one of those that were not previously enabled.  However, frustrating because I never knew that it was actively disabled by SL's code, and always assumed something was wrong with my card's instalation, or my global graphic settings.

* Stars are back!

I've actually spent the last week trying to figure out where my stars had went; after shooting several snapshots for Taco, I became aware that the sky was unusually featureless.  And once again, like the APG thing, I actually thought I had screwed up a setting personally.

This is likely a good hint for me to go wade through the forums more often.  That's a scary thought.

I was standing around watching a handful of visitors either standing around, or sitting on the otherwise featureless foundation, and realized that Taco had no real place to just sit and chill.

So a few days ago, I started work a little coffee house, filling the otherwise blank and featureless foundation along the edge of the park.  And today, while lacking anything better to do other than stare and realize how flat everything looked, I decided to fake a bunch of shadows.

Yay for baked lighting.

Broken Rocks Out

Rockin' out in Taco with my friend Neyo. One of these times, I plan on posting some more indepth pictures reguarding that particular guitar I'm holding.  I need to finish the script work for it, then I think I might open up a music store, ala DS's Dai Gassou! Band Brothers.

I just happened to be 600 meters up into the air when I looked down and realized how cartoony or video game-ish the blue of the water appeared in contrast to the island itself.

Unfortunately, SL crashed between the first picture, and me turning the cloud layer off, leaving the second shot's water a bit more realistic in tint.  But it's still a good aerial snapshot.

The way the water stretches on forever is pretty lovely.  It makes me wish that SL was written with a flight simulator's engine so that the vanishing point wouldn't be so harsh in other, more horizontal angles.

A few interesting enhancements in the new previews, including the fact that there are two previews at once.

Lee Linden, via the Second Life Forums (announcements) sez:

...

In the red corner, weighing in at version 1.11.0.0, we have a look at several new UI features, with more to come! Check out Zoomable UI (no more squinting at high resolutions), improved snapshots (freeze the world and place the camera as you see fit, take shots at custom resolutions), color pickers, pie menu gestures, tear-off menus, and more!

And in the blue corner, weighing in at an impressive version 1.12.0.1, we have a tag-team of features: Covenants; Estate Land Sales; Group Enhancements; Group Notices (no more calling votes to talk to your members!); Group Roles (replace "officer" and "member" with ten roles that you define) ... more improvements to groups then you can shake a prim at!

...

Most of 1.11.0.0 seems to be cosmetic, at least to me, and while neat, doesn't hold as much interest or value as the group roles and other such improvements in 1.12.0.1.  Maybe when I'm off work tonight, I'll grab Zir and poke around at them.