Monkeh Visit

Brad Lupis came to visit me in the new Fate Gardens sim this evening.  He’d not logging in for a year!  That’s just unimaginable to me as the longest I’ve ever not logged into Second Life was a couple of months.  Brad was an original Slate Land Holding agent among the crew that bought, rebought, sought and fought for parcels in Slate to piece the sim together into a cohesive whole.  That was finally accomplished with the purchase of the SouthWest corner from The Griefer Apfeljung Longwell mid-2008.  Jopsy Pendragon now holds the sacred honour of maintaining the land and I trust he’ll enjoy along reign over the wealth of history and prims.

Brad Lupis in Fate Hall's Map Room

It was so nice to see someone from the old days pop in and say hello.  Brad couldn’t be with us the night we hosted our first open house in Slate.  Those events were billed to highlight the joy of individual parcel owners working together in a sim to create inviting atmosphere while maintaining some privacy and view.  Not to be left out, Brad scripted his house to rez RoboBrads at various points to guide people through the rooms and chat features and jokes to them.  He’s quite innovative and fun to be around.  I hope he has the time and interest to come back inworld on occassion and chat some more.

Moving to an Openspace

Moving Fate Gardens to an openspace sim affords me the luxury of estate tools so that I can declare a covenant, work with ground textures, manage the script load, and restart the sim when necessary.  The Fairchangs are willing to trust me with these tools as they’ve known me for nearly five-years, met me in real life, and observed my interest in maintaining borders and views with my neighbors.  Come to think of it, that applies to several Lindens as well, however, they can never afford to trust a resident to manage a Mainland sim.

Primarily they refuse to fork the corporation (Linden Research) into a software development  company (Linden Lab) and a land management company (Linden Land Ltd).  LLL being an estate management customer of LL would grant invaluable feedback to the software development and grid management firm.  As it is, has always been, and always shall be, the programming side of the house wins all arguments and treats the Mainland as nothing more than a giant sandbox.

Five years later, I’ve given up and am in the process of selling Mainland parcels and rebuilding the gardens in the Fate Gardens openspace on the Fairchang continent.  It’s nice to finally be working with people that aren’t having to work under the Tao of No.

The sims’ performance has been phenomenal compared to warnings and predictions. I’ve been careful to maintain a prim count below half the allowance. Keeping an eye on the top scripts has helped quite a bit as well, especially when placing an item. I can clearly see if a script is eating cycles for breakfast or if a prim is causing crippling collisions. It’s a whole new world for me. LL could program the space server to group openspace sims so that they were always assigned to processors in those sets; in fact, offering that service to regular estate sims per server would help continental managers guarantee better uptime. They won’t; but they could. It would be a wonderful improvement for a minimal amount of effort.

Still, the new arrangement is working wonderfully for me and the gardens. For the first time in a long time I’m logging in and looking forward to the future. Oh heavens now I sound like Sarah Connor, better move on to the next post.

Producing Tree Textures

Fate Gardens’ tree textures are built in Bryce where hundreds of prims can be used to render the images.  The software can also be used to add decoration and lighting before snapping an image and rendering a black and white alpha mask.  One trick to the mask is setting all of the materials on the tree to flat solids to avoid greyish edged.  Another alpha trick is rending the original tree image on a background colour comparable with the bark and leave colours to avoid a halo effect.

The 512×512 textures are then ported into Paint Shop Pro where the alpha mask is shrunk a fraction of a hair, again to avoid a halo, and applied to the image.  Any number of filters, always a bit of sharpening, are applied to the image.  This is highly experimental; one never knows what might make the image pop.  When I’m happy with the result, it’s exported as a tga file to preserve the alpha layer and be compatible to the grid’s file system.

Being able to film the original tree on a flat background and as a mask solves loads of alpha problems I experienced early in my career.  Never having to resize the image very much helps the clarity compared to the first round of trees I built inworld.  The most important aspect of the process though is being happy with the results myself rather than desperately concerned that people will appreciate and purchase the finished product.  My work has been much more satisfying and lucrative when treating Fate Gardens as a hobby rather than a corporate necessity.