park life

just about all of the houses i make are modifiable, which means you can tweak, bend or completely renovate your house to fit your piece of pixel paradise.

it also means it can break.

the problem usually comes from unlinking the house. the windows and doors rely on and expect the house to be linked the same way it was when it was fresh from the factory-packed cardboard box, and unlinking is the exact kind of thing you or i would do before modifying.

so the house is broken right off the bat. well, not really. it just can’t communicate with itself, and doors forget which way to open. if you have try to open a door and it skitters across the floor and opens out on your deck, unlinking is likely the culprit.

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i was reading about avatar height in one of the forums, and the discussion seemed to go the way these normally do. people start to compare their heights, measured by one of the scripted height detectors, then someone pipes in and says that those aren’t accurate. it’s a bit of a downer for the conversation, but that is true. they only measure up to the avatar’s eye height (i think), and don’t account for things like non-human avatars. the only real way to measure your height is by standing straight, without shoes, and rezzing a prim to match your height. however tall the prim is when it meets the top of your noggin, that’s how tall you are.

it got me thinking that there must be a better way to do this. not everyone can build, and it’s really not that convenient. if i were to build something (and i just might some day!) it would need to be:

• simple to use. once it’s rezzed you would ideally do as little as possible. there shouldn’t be any setup or configuration. the current height detectors just require a click, and with what i have in mind i don’t think i could make it that simple, but that’s the goal.
• going along with the previous line, as with all good software, don’t add unnecessary features. get the height of anyone who uses it, and say what that height is, in metric and imperial.
• combine scripted height detection as a best guess with some human interaction to get it accurate. the LSL guess might be way off. so you need a chance to get it right.

so here’s my basic concept of how it would work. it would be a doctor’s office style device, with a place to stand and a bar to rest on top of your head. when you first stand on it, it guesses your height and puts the bar there. it might be through your face or way above it, so you click an up or down arrow a few times to get it right, and click the big green button to tell you what the height is, which will be chat in both meters and feet/inches. and it unseats you so the next person can use it.

that is actually more clicks than i would like, and i have to wonder if it’s really that much easier than rezzing a prim. but i find design exercises like these fun, and won’t mind trying to build it

i get quite a few requests for the textures used in my houses. unfortunately, i can’t give away many of them. most were purchased or created from other sources and modified, so i don’t have the copyright to them and can’t distribute the textures by themselves.

but if you want to build a wall, extend a deck, or build a complimentary structure to match a Park Life house (also works with any modifiable prefab, such as Ace’s Spaces), there is a way to do it. you can copy one of the prims from a house.

first pick a prim which has the texture on enough faces for you to use. then follow these steps to make sure you don’t break your house (careful if you’re not skilled at editing, and be prepared to re-rez your house if something happens)…

1. right-click the house and choose “Edit…”
2. click the “More >>” button
3. click the “Objects” tab
4. check the little box next to “Edit linked prims”
5. click the prim you want. only the one prim should be highlighted, not the whole house or section.
6. choose “Unlink” from the Tools menu
7. shift-drag the prim away from the house. make sure it leaves a copy in place.
8. select the copy, then the section of the house it used to belong to, and choose “Link” from the Tools menu
9. the prim you dragged away is the one you can use. you can then copy it again as much as you like

have at it