Day Seven: Bridging the Past and Future

Dawn breaks over Shengri La Spirit, and lo, system trees sway in the daybreak, particles drift on the breeze, and life is good.  We’re now up to 11,500 prims on Spirit, which has introduced a whole new level of agita for all concerned (Don’t build anymore till we back it up! I canna help m’self, cap’n, I MUST build!)  I’m going to get an extra special database build behind Spirit which should help with some of the issues I’ve encountered along the way.  I did notice that some of the more irritating quirks have resolved themselves to a degree, but I am still occasionally smacking Spirit’s server to its knees. 

 One of the IBM team, Dale Innis, popped in one fine aftenoon earlier this week, and with a simply stunning display of legerdemain, popped out a functional particle script! yay, Dale! Given the End of Time nature of Spirit, I was pretty impressed, especially since I now have a fine tower of pretty blue particles pulsing in the air.  We uncovered an interesting quirk, too….’take a copy’ seems to be mapped to ‘take’. 

Implied Rez took another pass at the terraforming and brought the mountain up higher, and dug a moat around Castle Queen Pea.  It’s hard to see in the pictures, but right now the terraforming is really rough, pending the addition of a smooth tool to the OpenSim interface. Or, for that matter, getting the flatten tool to be a bit more functional.  I’m looking forward to that day, along with the system ferns.  My planters await system ferns. And fire. 

The bridges I added to Spirit are particularly lovely.  I did some fancy prim twiddly work which glistens in the sunlight, and the bridges themselves have a sort of otherworldly elegance.  Completely unworkable IRL of course (my Dad, who built bridges for a living, would have a conniption with canaries over said bridges).  But they are gorgeous, and once the terraforming is tweaked around them, they’ll be sort of functional, in a gravityless otherworldly sort of way.  Here’s an interesting feature: I have to make the two ends of the bridge phantom and then put a transparent nonphantom tilted prim over what would normally be the walkway.  OpenSim still doesn’t handle cut and/or hollowed prims with any degree of understanding that when you take stuff OUT or AWAY from the prim, that means there shouldn’t be anything there.  Technically, that is.  Instead, OS still treats the prim as though it were all there.  So the bridge ends, if left physical, are big blocks to Spirit’s server, making it just a touch difficult to walk up them.

End of Day Seven, Shengri La Spirit.  Building is slowing down a bit as we approach higher prim levels.  We really want to get a good snap shot of what the servers can do, and the best way to build the asset server.  As soon as Team Leader Zha Ewry gives me the go-ahead, the bulldozers start in again.  For now, moderate tweaking.  I’d like to add another course to the castle walls, and I am working on vines dripping with greenery (all primwork, of course). And of course Castle Queen Pea will need a guardpost protecting her eastern shore, and the Queen’s carriage, too.  In time, gentle reader, in time. 

Day Six: Boats, Pillars and Lotus, o my!

We’re now at 10,500 prims, due to a minor OCD moment with the lotuses, chains and such like.  I located an Open Sim tree (see pictures) and shortly the sim will be greened.  I discovered a feature – the ground cover seems to flip back and forth between grass and forbe, depending on several factors.  Well, hopefully, I will get ferns soon. Also particle scripts.  And dare I ask it, a rotation script? Scripting R Not Me, so I am hoping that one of my collaborators who CAN script (not-so-subtle hint here, guys) will magically make a rotation script appear in inventory. (er, one that works, k? thnx.)

Today I continued building out lotuses in the harbor – now truthfully, odds are that lotuses would not be growing in saline water.  On the other hand, they’re gorgeous.  So I have lotuses in salt water. Or the world’s largest fresh water lake surrounding Shengri La Spirit….

I also added a few boats.  They even have flexi banners on top!

 

And the colonnade around the harbor – not done yet, of course, yet, but we get closer.  I need fire. And particles.  And fish.  And kelp…maybe a wreck in the bottom of the harbor?  with sharks….definitely sharks….

 End of the day on IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit.  Please note that this build is not being created in Second Life.  The Fashion Research Institute does maintain five Second Life islands, Shengri La,  Shengri La Joy, Shengri La Peace, Shengri La Hope, and Shengri La Love. Our sims in Second Life have just been completely renovated to prepare them to act as a community gateway for apparel industry personnel, fashion design educators, and fashion design students.  I’ll blog about this development project as we get closer to launch.

Although our Second Life sims have a similar look and feel to Spirit, Spirit remains at this time a testing ground while we push the limits of what an ideal OpenSim configuration will be.  Right now, we’re load testing the prim limits of the sim.  Hence, the focus on the number of prims it is carrying.  Going “first” can be a little lonely sometimes.  But well worth the beauty…

Day Five: In which I redecorate

 So when I logged in again, I wasn’t….enamored….with the textured keyholes.  Plus, of course, the mandate is to push Spirit to its illogical capabilities.  so I swept off the old walls and replaced them with these new, improved primwork keyholes.  I’ll likely go back and rework them yet again because after all it is a woman’s perogative to change her mind.  At least, it’s mine.  

In addition to primwork gates, Queen Pea also had her central pool renovated, and replaced with a much more interesting pool that is symmetrical and pretty. 

 Then, I went through and added a range…nay….a veritable  plethora! of prim work lotuses.  It’s hard to see them here, but each of these little darlings has three shades of pink plus curly golden stamens.  I have requested one teeny, itty bitty rotation script so I can link and rotate groups of them. 

 

So, after this day’s work, we now have 6,700 prims on the sim.  And, we have 43 Gb of work logged, which caused Spirit’s server to start gasping by the end of the day.  I’d learned to work around the limitations of Open Sim to some extent – I can’t push it as hard as I would push in my Second Life builds, altho I’ve brought my own sims to their knees quite often when I’m on deadline and need to get something built out. 

 So next, I am going to work on some vines and things.  I’ve been in a total vine mood lately, I put tons of them all over Shengri La.  So Spirit needs a few, with perhaps some roses added to the mix. I also put in a request for some particle scripts and the OpenSim library of landscaping objects.  I love those ferns!

 It’s interesting ‘going first’ as my IBM Team Leader, Zha, reminded me last night when I was checking in.  Spirit is an interesting experiment for all concerned.  Eventually, we’ll get all the wiggles worked out, but in the meantime it is actually pretty fun to be the pioneer out here driving stakes in the ground.  Personally, I live for the day when we can have our first party on Shengri La Spirit.  Our next one, though, will be held in Second Life on IBM’s ThorneBridgeTown sim (the research sim with the ‘really big molecule’ on it).  It’s a rave, and we’ll be having a mer party in a giant aquarium.

See you there! 

Day Four: Castle Queen Pea starts getting her Groove On

 Day Four: OpenSim challenges start to become more evident as I dig into the details of my build.   Stuff I’d normally be able to do pretty easily fights back and delays the whole thing.  Simple links and deletions find me dumped unceremoniously from the sim.  And I’m not even half way to the goal yet.  Still and all, after four days, the sim is starting to look really beautiful.  Implied Rez has been hammering the server with lots of terraforming and it shows.  I think we’re going to be very proud of the finished product, at least till the next sim emerges and we get to tackle THAT.

 After dithering awhile, I decided to rip out the top wall and replace it with a cut and textured keyhold wall.  I liked how the light played through it.  Here you can see the canal running into the seagate at an early stage of the build.

Here we are in closeup, coming into the courtyard from the seagate.  There’s a lot more to go yet.  But the sunrise is stunning on the water.  Eventually I ended up ripping out all the upper walls and replacing them with the grill and keyhold walls. I figured what the heck, odds are the Saracen won’t be attacking us this millenium.

Here you can see the apron has been laid and the columns set.  The red loop is my chain guide.

The first chain drop created.  This particular feature caused me to seek intervention, since I repeatedly tried to copy this monster and I repeatedly crashed the sim.  I can’t imagine why one lil’ ol’ 53 prim chain would cause such agita.

 Finally.  Chains around the critical aspects of the canal from the seagate.  And way at the back, I dragged my sculpti pony in.  He needs some TLC (like a real main and tail texture?) But he’s adorable at the back of the courtyard.

The details of Castle Queen Pea are starting to emerge.  Tomorrow The Bulldozer promised to whomp the courtyard so the land is appropriately flattened.  And the seagate properly dug out.  And tomorrow, darlings, we’ll start digging in on barques and boats.

Some of the cool details on the build…makes you want to live there, right?

And finally, the build. We now have 5,600 prims in the sim, and climbing.  Today we added flowers in the planters, a gazillion prims chains throughout; a horse; some flowers; and the apron for the canal at the seagate.  Tomorrow….the bridge. Or the boats and barques. Or more horses.  Whimsy is a rare and wonderful thing.

O, and I brought over my fashion and some skins, so we’ll be fashionable as soon as I get attachment capabilities and persistence.

End of Day Four: castle, horse, chains, seagate, flexi banners. Happiness in a mere 5,644 prims. 

Shameless plug here: Did I mention how great my tech partners at IBM are? If I haven’t recently, let me mention that again.  The opportunity to alpha test Shengri La Spirit, after all, is courtesy of my technology partners at IBM.  They rock.

And here we see, Castle Queen Pea and Shengri La Spirit in all their glory. See you later!

Day Three: Castle Queen Pea Gets Her Walls

Day Three – Castle Queen Pea gets her walls, and Shengri La gets terraformed (poor dear).  After getting flung into outerspace last time, I return to discover interesting anomalies.  For whatever reason, the sculptis have become full bright, or maybe they were full bright and I didn’t notice them.  Eek.  Despite the obvious need for assistance, I focus instead on walls.  The first set is laid:

 The courtyard detailing presents challenges:

 After some really annoying linkage issues (link, and one prim goes haywire. Always one prim, never two, or three.  But that one is a doozie, witness the prototype plant hanger.  It fights me all day, with that one stupid prim rotating.  After the fun and games yesterday, and knowing these things need to be copied in multiples, I don’t dare unlink.  the lamp presents a challenge all its own. I plan to fix it once I get a nimbus script that works. 

One wall with lamps and plant hangers.  The crenellations are being developed. 

Shengri La Spirit gets most of her landscaping ‘bones’, with only moderate squabbling.  The process of terraforming really hammers the server, which means I can build, or Spirit can be terraformed.  Check out Spirit’s fjord.  At some point, I’ll throw a span over it so we can visit the light house from the castle.  If only we had a smooth tool in OpenSim!

At one point, I wander back to Second Life to Shengri La to work on our community gateway for the fashion industry, only to get distracted with arcane questions like ‘how do you know the coordinates of the island on the world map?’

Despite these distractions, eventually the bulldozers get tired and I return to work on Castle Queen Pea.   

 Still some fullbright on the stone swags.  Since we’re not making these swags out of radium-rich granite, I begin the process of ripping fullbright out of them.

Full bright completely gone.  Ready to assault the walls.

Details of the courtyard at sunset.  Check out those FINE lamps, will you?

Details of the crenellations and stained glass.  I definitely will crank up Illustrator tomorrow.

Details of the seagate, at sunset and midnight:

Finally, after trials and tribulation, we present Castle Queen Pea, with WALLS. And Lamps. And non-full-bright stone swags.  By moonlight (so romantical) and by sunset, here are her bones. Tomorrow, the sea market begins to take form. And maybe she’ll get those 400-prim flower arrangements I’ve been considering.  Prim count at the end of Day Three, a paltry 4,000 prims. 

Day Two on Shengri La Spirit

Day Two, and another round of building.  Day Two saw the completion of the four towers of Queen Pea’s castle, with the foundation of the walls laid down.  The castle turrents are huge – each base is 10m in radius with a 8.25m base, on an octagonal base.   The walls are 60 meters long facing the sea (where the sea gate will eventually go) and 50 meters long on the ’short’ sides.

Today we tackled the turrents -  we’ve found the shift-drag to copy is really challenging to the servers when it has to deal with massive prim sets. Each tower has about 500 prims in it  Some of those prims are sculptis and odd cuts.  I don’t know if the different cuts make any difference to the server or not, but I figured what the heck when I started to build.  So the castle has a ton of moderately tortured prims, sculptis, a few alpha textures, and heck of a lot of basic prims.  

Sometimes the server just couldn’t handle the load – this picture is what I found after I relogged after a particularly difficult server moment.  Shift-drag to copy caused a bit of consternation for the server.

 We’ve found that terraforming at the rate we like to move is challenging to the server.  It’s made very, VERY challenging when the terraforming is being accomplished in conjunction with massive builds.  I personally managed to bork the server at least 6 times.  It’s a good thing it’s my role to bork the machine or else someone would get really hacked over the fact I’m so effective at doing so.  Our IBM Team Leader, Zha, for our Yellow Zone sim, is really patient about kicking the machine back to life.  

 Which is good.

 And let me finish Day Two with 4 completed turrets and the ground work for the wall foundations.  Day Three we hope will see the completion of the walls, altho I am dithering about how I want the inner walls to be. Do I want closed walls, or open walls with columns supporting the upper walk ways? What about crenelations?  And of course, flexi banners.  You can never use enough flexi banners.  I think I need to fire up Illustrator and crank out some unique stained glass textures for the turrets.  Since it seems we have a marine theme going here, it would be cool to have seashells incorporated into the stained glass windows.  Not to mention nautilus shells & sea horses to replace the sculptured flowers on the stone swag sills.  The mind boggles at the possibilities, since my instructions are to build massively and up to the prim limits of the Shengri La Spirit.  We don’t actually know where that is, so somewhere past 15,000 prims or so, things should get…interesting.

You can see my little tiny avatar hanging in the sunset between the two sets of turrets:

Day’s End, Day Two, on the IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit:

Daybreak on a Brave New World

Shengri La Spirit emerged from the waves this week, courtesy of my tech partners at IBM.  Shengri La Spirit is one of my OpenSim islands hosted on the IBM yellow Zone.  It’s a little lonely being one of the few people wandering around, but we’re all pitching in to make it a showpiece, complementary to my islands in Second Life(Shengri La, Shengri La Joy, Shengri La Hope, Shengri La Love, and Shengri La Peace).

I’ll be posting pictures of Shengri La Spirit as I alpha test our OpenSim installation.  Sometimes things go really wrong, and sometimes things go really, really right.  Having Shengri La Spirit to hammer on and alpha test is one of those things and I have our Team Leader, Zha Ewry, to thank for that. 

 Here’s some more pictures from our first day on the sim:

   Sometimes things didn’t quite go as planned….building the first castle turret was a little on the challenging side.  Unlinking, for example.  Not so good.  But everything came right in the end, as you can see from Turret #1. 

 

The turret setting the corner of Queen Pea’s castle, and the sea gate foundation:

 And finally, after a few restarts, day’s end on Shengri La Spirit’s first day of life, complete with terraforming and turrets: