Oy vey

Sheesh, yet another month with no significant posting. Same shit different day I'm afraid. Oh well, let me keep it simple and text based..

On the work and home life side of things, nothing much has changed. We've been very busy at work trying to finish off the project (the milestone deployment in Cape Town had mixed results, and over that week we racked up almost 30 hours in overtime). We've been very lucky in terms of going away. For our anniversary Natz and I went for a nice stress-free weekend out at my dad's place in the bush (minus Dad of course ;) ). Easter weekend was spent down at the Vaal with family and that was a great jol. It's the first time all the cousins on that side of the family have been together in a long time, and we had a great time. One of the boyfriends even brought along a couple of crayfish and some awesome salmon steaks-just the way to suck up in this family =D We actually had leftover crayfish! Then this last (long) weekend we joined Natz sister and her fiance at his house down at the coast.. that was great for the first couple of days, but a massive domestic between the two of them kind of spoiled the weekend-to the point of us all leaving early and spending 6 hours in complete silence on the drive back. Fun. Their wedding is next week, so I really hope they sort their issues out soon, the stress it's putting on poor Natz is just horrible.

Game wise, Natz is utterly addicted to Guitar Hero 2 and we're having a ball with the multiplayer. It's a great game, though the song selection is maybe a bit too samey with an excessive focus on very heavy rock and death metal. I finished GRAW 2 for review, and the multiplayer has been awesome on Live, it's just a pity there aren't more locals playing it. I've been playing C&C3 on the PC in bits and pieces, and thats really awesome. I think we have the new RTS champion :)

On the second life side of things, I have managed to squeeze in a couple of half hour lunch time sessions at work and make a little progress on things. I'm pretty firmly indented as a tiny now, and very rarely revert to my human avatar. I have a handful of items I have created and put up for sale, you can actually check them out on slboutique, though I get way more sales in-world. I also met another South African in SL for the first time ever-someone that owns two islands no less! SL itself seems to have become a lot more stable since a recent major update, though there are some lingering messaging issues. This is apparently a traditional quiet period in the year for SL, so hopefully Linden Labs will get a bit of time to bang some of the issues out and streamline things.

Right, now lets hope I dont go another month without posting.. it's just not cricket ;)

A Quickie

A Quickie, originally uploaded by FlintZA.

Wow. It's pushing three weeks since my last post. That's what nasty
deadlines and a work overload will do to you :) Don't expect the situation
to change for the next two weeks or so, but after that I'll have a monster
post on developments. It should include GRAW 2, BFME2, Guitar Hero 2 (sequel
central!), SL building and Betta Splendans .

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 ;)