park life

please come out to support relay for life

the home, garden and patio starts this saturday, may 3. i will have a spot in the north of the map, and will have some custom items you won’t find for sale anywhere else, including a new house and a clock design. come check out two sims worth of builders, donate some lindens and get some great stuff

location: rhodium 100, 180

…to make these:

i enjoy designing and building clocks, and definitely something i want to do more of. makes me feel like an eccentric shop owner hunched over a desk full of obscure little tools, chuckling when the customers are startled by the cuckoo jettison which i don’t even notice anymore. stay tuned for more!

i finished a set of furniture the other day, and i’m going to start photographing and boxing it up for sale. it’s a beachy chair/couch/umbrella table set, which i envision going on outdoor decks. it’s called “breezy” for now, and if i don’t come up with a more imaginative name, we’re stuck with it! i’ll post pics when i get some.

also, recently i started working on clocks. the script is done and i have two or three models in various states of progress. the first one (which is just about ready) is a black, white and red wall clock called “futura.”

i enjoy working on these. making clocks has been something i wanted to do in real life, but haven’t really had the time. a clock is such a simple device, with just a few constraints to keep the design real. there is a lot of room for creativity and opportunity to dig into the details. so far they have been made of four prims, relying more on textures. i can do it in three, or i could go the other way and make them more dimensional with more prims than i’d normally use. why not? after all, my houses are low prim so you can fill them with all the primmy personal things that make your space unique.

this is a 1024m sized house made of stone and wood, for L$750. available now, get more details here
  

every once in a great while i run across a bug in sl. rare, i know :p but me being a good citizen, this is one i haven’t heard a lot of people complain about, so i decide to report it.

second life used to have a bug-reporting feature built into the client. it popped up a little window where it asked you a few questions, and you could automatically include a screenshot of whatever you’re doing. then it whisked it off to a big labratory somewhere with lots of blinking lights and you went right back to your pixels.

but not anymore. now they have jira! a comprehensive end-to-end proactive solution for your bug reporting needs. it’s basically an issue tracking web app for quality/testing departments. i assume. it is clearly aimed at programmers, those working on sl; but not actual users of sl.

and off i go…

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

sorry it’s been so long since my last post. i’m going to post all my new houses here, including one i did recently, and i plan on posting more often.i finished  up a 1024m sized house called danic, which is anchored around a big brick column with a little skylight at the top.

right now i’m playing with some wood and stone textured house ideas for something warmer. i don’t feel inspired quite yet but i hope to have something done soon!

i’m currently working on a three-story house, similar in style to the cabri, that includes several decks and a pool. i like how this one is working out it has a central tall glass entrance area, and sprouts horizontal planes like wings, with lots of windows.it should be done by the end of the month so keep an eye out for it.