Floppy bits

I have been spending my lunches getting to know the basics of the SL building tools, and while I know my way around the basics of a couple of building tools, this is quite a different story. Since the tools are in-game, there's no real way of getting a proper top or side perspective (though I see there are builder hud attachment tools available for sale from third parties which I assume do just that). I learned pretty quickly that the best way to do things once the actual primitives had been 'rezzed' was to 'build by numbers', fiddling position and size values in the modification dialogs instead of trying to gauge the stuff visually in a perspective view. Having to pay to upload textures is a bit of a dirty way to do things, but I suppose it's how they avoid their system being overrun with zillions of textures, and encouraging builders to be as economic with their texture work as possible.

Anyway, the first couple of things I've built are all dead simple-and all aimed at 'Tinies', knee high avatars like my little orange cat. The first I did was a booster chair for such small avatars, to bring tem up to 'biggie height'. Around the seat itself is a 'flixi' prim that behaves like cloth, in this case simulating a comfy blanket thrown over the chair :)


Next up is a two prim tiny tie I did, which was tougher than you might expect. The combination of working in a perspective view, and tiny hight not being the intended default height for the camera make getting a good view on things a bit challenging. This took quite a bit of tweaking to get positioning correct.

And finally, just for the hell of it I threw together a floppy top hat. Just call me the cat in the hat:


I'd like to do some actual clothing, particularly a nice waistecoat for my little guy, but I'm a bit uncertain about how to do the texturing for something like that with no template. I'm not about to go the trial and error route when I actually have to pay to upload a texture! I'll have to make some kind of plan..

Split personality

Well, here are the new shots from SL I wanted to Post. There are more similar ones on my flickr, but these get the point across :) They were all taken at an incredible location in SL called 'The Lost Gardens or Apollo'.
The first is what my 'normal' avatar has basically settled down to. Besides the funky 'prim' hair, I got a really cool set of hi res eyes (yes, you can replace your eyes, and yes there are some unusual variations-I just didn't want to go for them) and 'flexi' wings that are scripted so they can do things like quiver, flap and enfold. The 'flexi' bit means they react to my own movements, basically like cloth.

Next up is the cel-shade black devil cat I got when I decided to try and view the world from a 'Tiny' perspective. It turns out I didn't read the description as well as I should have, because it's actually only a little smaller than a 'normal' avatar at about five feet. Still, it's nice to have as an alternative to 'normal' me, and it's just so comical to watch.. I shall call him squishy!


And finally, the tiny avatar I did get. Yeah it's cute, I looked at other tinies, but all the 'non cute' ones are really badly made and look rubbish. I even looked at a mogwai one (being a tiny Gizmo would be awesome) but they looked really lame. So I went for an orange cat, kind of in 'tribute' to my old cat Carat. It's been interesting to see people's reaction to the new avatar. Social barriers totally disintegrate when you're a knee high furball ;)

Siemens is EVIL

I am so tired of this pathetic phone of mine. Never mind Siemens’ dodgy implementation of transforms that makes Abyss look totally crap on it, the damned thing now flat-out refuses to attach photos to emails I send. No matter how I try to attach the photos, they never actually get included. The same methods that used to work now don’t anymore. So you’ll just have to wait for me to get a chance to MMS them to Natz phone, connect that to my PC (because of course the CX65’s infrared is incompatible with all non-built-in infrared adapters and I’m not about to spend a couple of hundred bucks on a proprietary connector for the damned thing), and upload them from there.

 

Connected

On a more positive note, having ADSL at home really is turning out to be awesome. I finally cut some shorter lengths of cable from the 40m one I still have lying around from varsity days (we used to run that between my flat and my buddy’s five floors up :)), about the right length for my and Natz pc’s to connect from the study. I wish I could run them along the ceiling or something, but I don’t want to have to pay for holes to be filled in when we move out. It’s a real pity that WiFi equipment is so damned over priced. Anyway, we’re all wired up and surfing and gaming and life’s great!

 

Little green yellow men

The one game I have most been waiting for on XBLA finally arrived last week-The Behemoth’s Alien Hominid. I absolutely loved the flash version, and not getting an Xbox version was a big disappointment. As an 800 point arcade download, it’s a great buy, and a shining example of what the arcade should be used for. Another long awaited arcade title is out today, the 2D turn based classic Worms. I haven’t had a chance to check it out, but it should be great. 800 points does seem a bit steep for a port of such a simple-and quite dated-game.

 

And that’s about it for today. Hopefully I’ll get a post in soon with those photos I wanted to post, I also want to get a shot with my SL avatar up (he’s sort of stabilizing now), as well as the extra ‘tiny’ avatar I got hold of.

Got me some new hair..

LukeSlaterParty, originally uploaded by FlintZA.

And took it to a party. Complete with streamed music, strobes and smoke effects. Lunch breaks will never be the same again..