Sunrise over Shengri La Spirit

I finally managed to shake off my executive cares and figured I’d have time to go in and start the climb to the next 5,000 prims.  That is one must confess, a really lovely idea. But, Spirit had other things in mind and for whatever reason, the last few days in Spirit has been more like a crash-and-burn every hour or so, sometimes less.  Bleeding edge, ok, check, got it.

Nuff said!

The installation was wonkier than a high school freshman (I have a nascent one of those around the house, so I know from).  Since Zha gives me a fresh build with all the new patches and updates everytime I crash the box, I’m always assured I’m working on the most recent code with the most recent patches.  Which is usually pretty cool - I noticed, for instance, that the weird linking anomaly where the center of a set of linked prims defaults not to the combined center, but to the center of the root prim, has been fixed.  Thank you, thank you, thank you to whomever of you fabulous code Ghod/desses who fixed that particular issue.  Awesome work!

Strange anomaly!

I managed to crash the box about 6 times Friday, once so hard it even brought the Blade down (as opposed to just the OS installation).  I always feel horrible when I crash the system.  The entire process of getting it back up is time-consuming. I can’t ‘just’ hop back in after the system goes down like that.

Staging for landscaping in Spirit

On the other hand, I did manage to generate a really interesting experience.  I was in shooting a machinima (with a great deal of alt-camming and mousing around) and I crashed Spirit so hard the dust is still settling.  After getting it back online, I went in and managed to, after alt-camming a bit, crash it again (not so hard this time).  There is something about the process of ‘looking’ with alt-cam that causes the system to hang.  I look around a lot with alt-cam.  I do it more than I move my avatar, in fact.  I’m always way out away from my av, building, and doing a lot of camming.  That combination seems to be lethal after a certain amount of time/clicks/looks.  Although that may be tied in with alt/click/looks and a heck of a prim load.  Tough for me to say where the issue is or what it is exactly, I just report on my experiences out there on the thin edge of the ice and hand my notes over to my IBM team liaison, Kurt. 

Sculpti trees!

The machinima, by the way, is beautiful.  I’m not the world’s best at taking pictures or machinima, but the subject matter is lovely, and in the windlight moonlight, it’s superb.  Even with my bad camera shots.  As soon as I figure out how to edit it and convert it, I’ll post the first moving images of Spirit, complete with all of its scripts and prims.

Now, the good news: Zha managed to stabilize poor hemorrhaging Spirit and get it back on its feet.  So I was able to get back in yesterday evening and get back on track with building towards 45,000 prims.  As you can see, we’re now at 30,280 prims and heading into the ascent.   The top terraformer on my crack IBM team is heading in tonight to tweak terrain and then I’m going to go head’s down on landscaping.  15,000 prims will be a snap to consume with such features as my 600 prim bunny fountain….

600 prim bunny fountain: NPISL

Prim count star date 5/11/2008: 30,280 in IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit.  Yay!

30,280 prims in a sim: especially NPISL

Meanwhile, back on Shengri La, life hasn’t stopped.  We have a new resident on the islands, Chestnut Rau.  Welcome to Chestnut, I hope she enjoys her tenure with us.

We also have several events upcoming, including the opening of Calli’s newly re-designed art gallery, The Gallery at Shengri La.  Calli is our official photographer of all things Fashion Research Institute and we have been very fortunate to have her talent documenting the growth and changes of Shengri La.  As an FRI collaborator and Utopian, we’re looking forward to seeing what she can do in Shengri La Spirit in coming weeks, but for now, I hope you will join us Thursday, May 8, 2008 at her gallery in Shengri La. 

At the very least, stop by and check out her innovative gallery design that features the carefully sculpted hands of another of our featured artists, Pumpkin Tripsa.  Pumpkin’s work can be seen all over Shengri La in the form of gargoyles and mermaid sculptures.

Also, on Saturdays, we have our regularly scheduled vintage marketplace, where new designers can show their work, for free.  Set up starts Friday evening, prims are returned on Saturday evening at 5:15 pm SLT, and vendors are limited to 20 prims to be contained within the marketplace tents.  No adult content, no BIAB, and above all, nothing that infringes anyone else’s copyright.

Upcoming on May 17th, we’re very pleased to host Random Calliope and his legendary butterfly hunt.  Random is a longtime friend and we’re very pleased to be able to support his work by opening our five sims for this purpose.  His manager, Elizabeth Tinsley, told me she’ll be releasing 5,000 Ode butterflies on Shengri La’s sim so there should be plenty for everyone.  As a side note, to assist Elizabeth in setting up, we will be closing and locking the Shengri La sims (Shengri La, Shengri La Love, Shengri La Joy, Shengri La Hope, And Shengri La Peace) starting at 4:45 pm SLT on Saturday, May 17th.  We will open the sims promptly at 6:00 pm SLT and the hunt will begin.  Please feel free to pick up a landmark from the sims in advance of the event from one of the landmark givers.  Utopians will be unable to provide limo service.

Immediately after the Hunt, we’ll be hosting a Monarch Rave, one of our irregularly scheduled events we host for our IBM technology partners and other collaborators.  Please join us on the visually lush Shengri La sim for 3 hours of psytrance by DJ Qee Nishi. Raving music starts at 7 pm SLT.  Dress is butterfly, monarch, Monarch butterfly, fairy, or any other cool thing you care to wear to dress to impress.  Rave on in our special homage to the Monarch butterfly; visit early to the dance platform and pick up your party pack or join our event group, IBM Parties On! for up to the minute information about events we host.

Also that weekend, we’ll be hosting two new artists who will be opening their shows in the Small Gallery and in one of the other galleries located on Shengri La.  More about this as we are closer to the big day!

More information on the Ode Butterfly Hunt: Over the weekend of May 16-18, 2008, there will be a massive migration of Random Calliope’s Ode Butterflies through Second Life. Commencing on Friday, May 16 from the Science Friday sim, the Ode butterflies will wind their way throughout SL to commemorate the opening of the North American Monarch Butterfly Exhibit at the Science Friday sim and in general raise awareness of the awe-inspiring real life annual North American Monarch Butterfly migration.

The Ode hunts are done just the same way. The community gathers in a field of butterflies and tries to catch them. They may be in trees, floating around, in the grass, or anywhere a butterfly might be found. The hunts work in this way. Pieces of Ode jewelry are put in selected butterflies and then released in a pack of decoy butterflies. There is a script contained in each butterfly that allows it to fly in a random pattern around the sim. When the hunt begins the participants need to find and click on the butterflies to “catch” them. 

Ode is an 8 piece jewelry set (hair piece, earrings, necklace, pendant, brooch, bracelet, ring) which at this moment has 22 color variations. The challenge is to complete full sets of one color for your Ode butterfly collection; however, Ode pieces can only be obtained through participating in Ode Butterfly hunts and/or through trading with other collectors. New varieties of butterflies are occasionally added and some variations such as the Platinum and the Shades of Golden are extremely rare. 

To stay informed of when the Ode Butterfly Hunts are beginning please join the Ode Butterfly Collectors Subscription group by clicking on a kiosk at either Random’s WorthWhile Gallery in Ode or the Science Friday sim.

For More Information in Second LifeTM Contact:

Bjorlyn Loon, Science Friday
Elizabeth Tinsley, for Random Calliope Second Life 

No, that’s not a typo.  Oddly enough, when I knocked off yesterday, I had 28,350 in the sim, which was kind of interesting considering where I left Spirit on Thursday, at 23,582.  

I began adding statuary to the build yesterday, with enormous bronze horses in a fountain on the pad in front of the trellis house, and horses entwine with vines and leaves at the entrances to the community center. 

I also began working on “smalls”: small items that I can intersperse throughout the build to add human interest and focus to the build.  Butterflies, petit fours, tea sets, and magazines, as well as a range of odds and ends like candles and flowers in vases. 

The next big push awaits terraforming.  Right now I’m really not too crazy about the terraforming tools in Spirit.  Raise land gives you an enormous peak! which, thankfully, Flatten then mashes.  Once I have the land brought up, then I can add a woodland grove with all that entails.  By the time it is done, I may even have a foxfire script!

I have noticed that between Monday (when I started seriously banging on Spirit) and now, Spirit’s installation has gotten appreciably more stable.  Now, I’ll get a crash at the end of a serious build session of 4-5,000 prims at a time.  Up to the point where I just overload the server, it runs fine and steady and everything performs well.  The major issue with linking I was having earlier in the week is gone.  There are still areas that need to be worked on, of course, but I have no doubt they’ll come to fruition soon enough.  I can really get a sense of how hard the developers are working behind the scenes.  It is uncommon for a simple end user (as everyone on our team knows, Coding/Scripting/Programming R Not Me) who is utterly befuddled by scripts/code/programming to be so exposed to the raw, breathing development process.

This is a really interesting experience, especially for a fashion designer-turned-CEO.  Nothing I’ve ever done has prepared me for being on point with new and untried code, and to drive it as hard as I can till I break it.  I never actually see the code for OpenSim, and I don’t have to get in there and bang on it myself.  I’m a true end-user. So it’s very different to feel the code changing literally under my hands, like a living breathing animal.  I can best describe it as a kitten, all whiskers and claws and fragile, but growing so fast that everytime you look away, its gotten a little bigger, a little faster.  That’s what being cradled in the lifestream of OpenSim code is like…and one of these days I’m going to look around and realize that cute little kitten has become a tiger.

The OpenSim effort is one part of our effort within virtual worlds, and I am eternally grateful for my team out of IBM, without whom none of this would be possible.  Zha, for resetting the Blade everytime I kick Spirit to its knees, even at some truly horrific hourse of the night; Dale, for o-so-responsive scripting on request; Kurt, for stepping up as IBM’s Fashion Research Institute liaison with the OpenSim development effort, Sean for being a great development community leader of the OpenSim community within IBM and Mike, for his role as the FRI-IBM Principle Investigator on this project, without whom none of us would be embarked on this journey.  We have many more unsung folks on the team, and it is impossible to thank them enough for their hard work and exceptional efforts on our behalf.  I truly look forward to seeing what comes next. 

The money shot: 23,582 prims.

Ask and ye shall receive.  I asked, ” posestand?” and lo, Script Wizard Dale dropped one into Spirit. Yay, Script Wizard Dale! If only other requests were so easy…

 I can has posestand!

Back to hammering on the box today.  Yesterday’s little glam shoot notwithstanding, it didn’t add much to the database - a couple hundred more things in my inventory, some understanding of what’s up with attachments, but not much to Spirit’s actual asset server. 

Curly Vines over the Gazebos

Today, on the other hand, I kicked it hard enough for it to start paying attention.  We had a couple of crashes and a couple of buggish looking things that popped up.  The server still chokes when I try to copy more than 300 prims at a time, so I have to plan that out a bit.  And the code struggles with textures and a couple of other issues.  I sent my reports all off to our IBM OpenSim Liaison, Kurt Taylor, so he can get them into the fix-it queue.  Go, Kurt!

Swans in the sunset: Romantical!

Zha has been really great about putting in every new patch that comes along, so we’re always testing on the bleedingest (yes, bleedingest) edge code.  And that is, ultimately, the point of the IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit - to test the code and to see how or if  I can break it.  Having highly skilled and dedicated people right there, with their finger on the pulse of the machines, who really know what they are doing is just an amazing experience in pushing the envelope of OpenSim.  I don’t generally have a chance to talk to non-IBM OpenSim developers, who are also working very hard on getting the OpenSim code up and running, so I don’t have the up-close view I have of the IBM team.  But those of the OpenSim community who I have had the good fortune of meeting have all been great people.

A long view of the settees and vines

And the result of all this hard work on their part (I’m the one having fun here!) is that the server code is getting more robust every day.  I’m hammering Spirit as hard as I can for as much time as I can devote to it, and I can feel the code getting better every day.

A different perspective: parallax in action down the gazebo galleria

So much better, that we made it to 23, 582 prims in IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit.  We’ve set another prim record set as we climb to the pinnacle of what Spirit’s Blade server will support.  And of course, we’ve done it gracefully and with elegance.

Luxuriant arrangements of prim roses crown the settees…

Thanks again to my IBM team.  You folks just rock.

Zha and I and the company of 23,582 prims….

Portrait of the Designer and her 18,604 prim build….

Who better than a real life apparel designer to bring fashion to OpenSim?  Once I realized that attachments worked….I got busy. 

Admiring the haze of the gazillion tiny little prim leaf lights…

Very busy.

A view of the looping ‘tree branches’ of the community center

So busy that by the end of the day, in fact, I had a full outfit for myself in the IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit.  Hair…check.  Shoes…check. Necklace. Earrings. Check. Check.  Flexified prim skirt. Check.  Fluffy little shoulder trims. Check. Check.  And of course, a nice mesh outfit underneath it all, plus a nifty custom skin I whipped out just for the heck of it. 

Shoes.  You know something has really arrived when a woman can find shoes.
What woman can be complete without her shoes?

I think I look much better now…

Computerization comes back to its fashion roots…
how far we’ve come from the Jacquard loom.

Adjusting attachments without a pose stand is brutal, especially when you don’t have an AO helping you out.  Or even anything to sit on, really. 

Jewelry…ah yes.

Still, after a few tweaks, I got everything to work.  Attaching hair to the skull means you can’t edit yourself (we may want to look into this…) Digging around in one’s skull to find earrings…also not so fun.  A pose stand would help. A LOT.  No pressure, team,  I think having it by Friday would be adequate. 

Admiring the prim wax drips on the candle
(and Script Wizard Dale’s nifty flame!)

Editing your attachments ON your body is a bit problematic, as if you try to tweak a linked bit, the physics engine shoots you off into outerspace.  And the edited bit doesn’t always go where you think it should go.  This is an issue.  Another issue - well, in making jewelry….shoes…and hair…especially hair….sometimes the X and the Y coords get confused and flip.  Not all the time,  but always on the torus.  We may want to check this out.  I’ll work out some hair over the weekend and see if I can’t pin it down to something more like a bug report.

A nice view of things to come

O, and shoes - I need an invisibility script.  Script Wizard Dale? pretty please?

After all this, I think I need a drink….

Fashion has arrived in OpenSim in full twig.  From the tips of my hair to the pointy little stiletto heels of my toes, we got it.   In this case, going first meant, well, styling.  Another historic moment for the Fashion Research Institute and IBM, as we drive towards the future.  Big Blue and Fashion.  Who knew?  Buckle up, y’all and put a scarf over those curls…we’re in overdrive.

OK. I admit to feeling more than a little smug about this one. We hit the artificial prim limit sometime this afternoon (I confess I wasn’t really paying attention so I didn’t get the glory shot)…and then we went on to set a new high: 18,604 prims of beauty on IBM OpenSim Shengri La Spirit.

I had quite a lot of visitors today - Script Wizard Dale, in response to my requests for various things, came in and spent some time coding up some things - now we have running water, mists, water spray, and of course, flames. Yesterday’s experiment with the butterflies turned out to be pretty nasty…buggy bugs! ack! But, as I like to look at it, without my butterfly fixation, we wouldn’t have humbled the Blade and hence, we couldn’t fix the underlying issue. So, viva la papillons. I look forward to my butterfly swarm back in action soon. 

At one point, Zha and Script Wizard Dale were both in, fiddling about. Zha, of course, has a fixation about height. Dale, for some unknown reason, opted for a Dwarf av. Barefoot, of course. Speaking of barefoot, I was very happy to have created some adorable little slip-in platform stilettos. I keep forgetting to drag an invisiprim over to put in the transparent prims, and in any event, I am having issues with the platform disappearing under my prim floor. But! they’re cute and they attached and so what this now means is:

Stampede of the attachments! Yes! hair! Yes! Jewelery! Yes! Prim skirts! The mind boggles.

Dale said he has some poses laying around somewhere, so those are next. He mocked me up an ‘almost chair’ which may rapidly be replaced with a real pose ball (as opposed to the physics enabled medicine ball he kept chasing around the build pad…). Go team!

Spirit is coming along nicely…what I love about building in here is that even at 18,000 prims…it’s obvious this is not a build that could be done anywhere or anywhen else. Each of the teeny, tiny, little sculpted prim leaf lights on the twined branches; each of the prim petals and leaves; right down to the individual ice cubes in the lemonade glasses - all require resources that anything less than Spirit’s Blader server simply can’t provide.  I love how the tiny little prims create a misty haze around the central build…

And, we’re not even halfway into our prim allowance….

So, to make up for a picture shy post before….IBM Open Sim Shengri La Spirit at 18,004 prims.

Zha’s been tuning Spirit’s database and code, and it is really starting to show.  I pushed Spirit pretty hard - we now have 8500 prims in various configurations, and a couple of scripts running (I got my flame, thank you to Script Wizard Dale). I only managed to slap Spirit to its knees a couple of times, which considering that OpenSim is very alpha code, I thought showed a remarkable amount of resilience.

I’m increasingly finding that other than missing things like my HUD, AO, hair, and oddly enough, my gorgeous sculpted and scripted riding horse, I really do prefer to spend my time in Spirit.  To all intents and purposes, I have no prim limits, the Blade server that Spirit is hosted on is increasingly showing how robust it is, and I can get things in and out of inventory far more easily than I’m used to.  There are still issues with the alpha code, of course, but overall, the performance Spirit is turning in is just getting better and better.  I want Shengri La proper hosted on a Blade server!

My sense, based on nothing more than building hard in both platforms, is that OpenSim is growing up.  The technology is really digging in and starting to work, so I can get on about my business of designing.  I’m really looking forward to seeing what the new week brings.  I have hopes of a mist script, and some foxfire scripts, and of course, one mustn’t forget, some texture animation scripts and my fondest hope: a butterfly movement script…

This weekend, I spent planting the main build with all sorts of plants and flowers. I got the initial trusses in place on the nascent roof - I’m still not entirely certain how I want to finish the pitches yet, and I have only a dim idea of the direction I’m heading with the corner turn, but building is always a process for me anyway, so this doesn’t disturb me (too much). 

I did get the planters full of plants - a bed of gentians, some conifers plantings, palms underplanted with a lush bed of grasses waving gently in the breeze. 

I also started adding seating, against the day I get sit poses and the like.  Eventually, I’ll be adding all sorts of little touches to the seating arrangements - tables, floor lighting and the like.  Right now, I’m pretty content with my candle (note the flame) with the actual prim wax drips.  Not to mention the prim ice cubes in the glasses of lemonade…

A nice touch was adding the suspension chains to the chandeliers.  They are no longer merely suspended in midair, but attached to the new support trusses.

I also started building out a large community center.  The foundation is laid and I have a clear direction I want to take for terraforming.  The rest will evolve, just like OpenSim is. 

Spirit is becoming heart-stoppingly beautiful.  In some respects, it’s a pity that it truly is a ‘walled garden’, in that only people on the A++++ list can visit me there.  For now, that is.

The one really, really nasty thing about alpha testing is, you really do need to have the patience of a saint.  No, not me, my TEAM.  We’re tuning Spirit, and I think I crashed it 15 times today.  Hard.  Sometimes within seconds of logging in. Zha came and hung out with me for awhile and watched things progress, so I could feed bug reports on the spot.  This made things go quicker from my point of view….no less exhausting, but quicker.

An OMG moment, as I log in from what felt like my 92-millionth crash, to discover that I had lost most of an entire wall of trelli…and what was there had partially reverted to original parameters, the deadly “plywood box” unit.

What’s really interesting is how you can FEEL the box start to respond to the tuning as changes get made to

 it.  By the end of the day, I was mostly running into known bugs (linking and texturing issues, mostly) and Spirit performed admirably through a stint that brought us to 6,000 prims.  I did note something about the lack of an RGB slider when you go into the edit window - you have to use your existing palette. (this is a bug, in case my earlier comment to Zha went unnoticed)

The theme of Spirit has changed - as these things so often do - it’s moving more in the direction of a community center nestled in a large trellised glasshouse.  Today I fought with the technology all day and built trellii.  I must have rebuilt one section five times, because it just wasn’t persistent.  But, we got it worked out, and by the time I was tired of trellii, I had the walls in place.

Then I turned my attention to plants - flowering vines, some system plants potted up, and a few other odds and ends.  

A whole squadron of butterflies awaiting their flight scripts (um, guys? please?)

Script Wizard Dale made some mutterings (imprecations?) about the flame script.  A flame script would be really nice.  Also a particle script or two.  And some texture animation scripts. And, oh yes, attachments?  I miss my hair.  No pressure, next week will be fine.

In one of my interims waiting for Spirit to get kicked, our liaison found me in SL.  Thanks for coming with me to the networking event, Kurt, that was fun.  I actually had far more company today in working on Spirit than I usually do.  Zha popped in and out and at one point, retextured the terrain.  Not that this build is going to have a lot of terrain, but what there is will be lush and lovely.

Anyway, after a hard day of wrestling technology, we have a really quite lovely build.  I am particularly fond of the chandeliers, even they do just sort of prestidigitate.  They make me want to hold a Rave….

Zha tapped me on Friday and told me Spirit was ready to go again.  I, of course, immediately managed to crash the poor thing so hard it still has bruises, but Zha got it up and running again, and left me a little surprise upon log-in….a giant green prim (reminiscent of the Monolith in 2001) letting me know which sim I’m actually in (we have two.  The log-in urls get a little murky for me).

Ever the curious one, I wanted to change textures and generally twiddle the land, add media…and lookie the great surprise I found in the objects tab! 45,000 prims!

The mind immediately boggled.  I can make….grape arbors, with every grape a prim! Fuhgeddaboud texture flowers, I can have the real thing - all 400 prims worth (why settle for small when you can have grandiose?)

So I set to with great vigor.  In the middle of it all, Zha popped in to check on things.  She arrived just in time for a face-to-face collaboration about a linking bug.  Perfect! Now that we have avatar persistence, I of course promptly uploaded some of my skins/eyes/clothing textures in and made a couple of skins.  I carefully copied all the details from my usual shape and brought those over, so I could be me in Spirit.

Attachments are still buggy - I made and attached a belt and it seems to have been one of those rare anti-gravity belts, as it dragged me off to the sky.  Ugh.

Meantime, I managed to build out a boardwalk with arbors.  Lots of arbors. In preparation of those 300-prim-each grapes.  I have a clear vision of what I want the new build to look like, sort of palatial mediterranean with lots of soaring towers and so on. 

Next I am going to work on the harbor.  The terrain is a real mess under the water - a lot of polygons poking up everywhere.  I’m going to smooth out the floor enough, though, that I can start creating marine life, maybe a wreck, lots of bivalves and starfish and so forth.

I’m still quite agog. 45,000 prims! Whoa. That should be interesting.