Posts Tagged ‘Second Life’

Adventures Back into Second Life

I popped back into SL about 5 weeks ago after being gone for years. Not sure what got me to log in – but I did. Bought a new skin that I had a demo of sitting in my inventory from a year ago, and enticed Jokay to pop in with me and grab a new look for herself too. While we were there, I saw an unusually tall girl walk by and I, being my shy, anti-social self, sent her message saying that she looked rather good for her height, as many avatars I have seen in the past just looked so wrong. We chatted a bit and have kept in contact ever since. Her name is Sera and she is a fashion model in SL and doing quite well. (more…)

Back into Virtual Worlds

Peeking at my blog I notice I haven’t talked at all about getting back into the Virtual World building scene. Sooo, I’ll do it now!

The being of July, I got a message from Second Life from a person that owns land around the land I own. They wondered if I would be willing to sell my land so they could connect some of their property. I thought about selling and totally moving out of SL, but my Safety Girl store does pretty well, and pays for all my SL needs, and I have relocated too many times already. So instead – I set up a land swap with him, which turned my T shaped property into a straight line, and it let him connect his property. Win Win.

It gave me back my urge to create something…so I started messing around some. Then I noticed that my long time SL friend Jokay, happen to have recently started up her own personal Grid – JokaydiaGRID – I signed up and popped in to see what she was up to. A few days later I caught up with her to do a little catching up…and she handed me my own Sim to play with and mentioned she would like to have me come help her out with some projects if I felt like it.

A little bit of background on Jokay – if you look back in some other posts about SL, I mention her a few times. She is one of the first people I really talked to in SL. We were neighbors for about a year. She works on projects in which educators use virtual worlds to teach students and hold workshops. Something that is starting to snowball into something really cool and I think will evolve into the latest and greatest way to teach…instead of sitting at a desk copying notes being bored to death.

So now I have a new home in the Open Sim world.

Mirinesse Campus of Labs

Welcome to Mininesse (Also the name of my Swashbuckler on EQ2) My own little island with a hypergrid smack dab in the middle. jokaydia.metaverseworlds.com:9000:mirinesse if you want to hypergrid to me.

The current project on JokaydiaGRID is a build for training students in the hotel and travel industry. So we are making a role play environment so they can demonstrate and act out situations and meet up to learn in an engaging way. Below are some of the builds going on and you can also check out some screenshots at my Flickr Site.

Brownlow's With Furniture

WI - Pool after furniture

Second Life Land Sold

Azzura is officially landless in Second Life – She still has 448 squ left in some obscure spot (I have that for sale too). It was just a bunch of 16m squares of land that were for sale and I merged them into one plot before ad spots got put up in them.

Safety Girl, Azzurave, and evolv are all gone. Maybe they will return someday, but by that time there will be soo many new things that what I have will be like stone tools. I do miss SL for the most part, it was a great creative outlet for me.

Looks like I will need to redesign the blog header! Any ideas?

Blog/Podcast Spot on Jokaydia

Jokay asked me to freshen up an old spot on Jokaydia I so – we present to everyone…

The Resident Blog/Podcast Spot!
Loading URLs into the blog images

After Brainstorming a bit and knowing what was needed, I decided to make a communication tower as the focus/landmark. Not quite as dramatic as I had originally wanted…I at first wanted an easy landmark to spot if you were somewhere else on the islands…like the lighthouse, or the Edublog Awards building. You can still pick it out while looking over the landscape since it does sit higher than the rest of the items on the Sim. I made the tower on my Sim in Rust Spot. It looked tall, it is over 30 meters high, but when I got it back to Jokaydia, it wasnt visible at all. Plan B! Stick it on the roof of a building!

Top of the Tower

Time to build! I started by removing all the old wood of the existing deck, and removing the ponds and plumbing, I recreated the same basic layout Jokay originally had in place. It has the same pathing as before with the layers a little different. I knew I wanted the build to be about 15 x 15 so I created an area to fit that size while not blocking anyone’s access. Jokay has a style she usually follows with all her builds…I tend to not have a defined style, but I usually go techy, metal, rust, neon, and I like to have open air spaces. The modern techy style wasn’t going to go well here 🙂 It turned out what I hope is a mix of Jokay’s and my style mixed…letting it fit easily into the island setting without being so different that it becomes an eyesore!

So this spot will be used to showcase any of the residents blogs, podcasts, or websites. An added value of making Jokaydia your home in Second Life!

How to move your shop to a new location in SL

Safety Girl and Azzurave are now set up and have their Landmarks all reset. I learned from the last move how to do it right. I’ll pass that onto everyone now!

1. Do NOT, bulk select your shop and take it into inventory! This is a bad thing to do! Almost all the time – you will not grab everything. The tiny pieces of your displays will not be selected and will sit there floating in the air….and you may not even know it until you set up again. Plus there is a limit on how many items you can select at once. 256 I believe. Just don’t try.

2. What you should do! Clear out everything in your OBJECT general folder – Make a new folder in your OBJECT folder and call it Current Objects….put all your loose inventory from your OBJECT folder in there for the time being. Reason to do this is, everything you pick up from your shop will automatically go into your OBJECT folder…and when you grab chunks of your displays, they may end up with strange names. This way you know everything you see in the folder are pieces of your shop!

3. Face a wall of your shop and highlight-edit your items on that wall only, then take that group of items into inventory. Do Not Link These Items! Do not take the shop itself yet. If you have alot of items – take that wall of items into inventory in sections. Keep grabbing chunks of your shop until your store is empty.

4. Now you can try to grab your building – I would suggest linking it if you can, ONLY if it is a small building. If you have a large shop with over 80 or so pieces or it is spread out past the linking limit….you want to link it in sections and go buy a rezzer. The building rezzer I use is called Rez-Faux. You can buy it here in game or here on SLExchange . To use one – link a few sections of your building…to make it easy, link the North, South, East, and West sections. You then drop a script into each of the pieces, then take a COPY of those sections and put them in the Rez Box. Now you can click the box and your building will pop out perfectly lined up, and you can turn and raise and lower until you are happy, then lock it in place. Its a great tool to have! Just test it to make sure it works before you destroy your main building. You never know when something might have not been selected.

5. Now go to your new spot, rez your building…set it in place, and start pulling out all your chunks of your shop! Before you pull out each section…click on the floor so you are in edit mode, then pull out the chunk…this way all the pieces are selected and you can move and rotate them. If you are not in edit mode when you pull it out of inventory, you will have to select all the items you just rezzed and you might not grab them all. The reason you didnt link these chunks was to make sure all the prices you set before will still be the same…you will not have to go around and reprice anything at all or set items for sale.

6. The most time consuming of all these tasks is putting new Landmarks in all your items. I am still behind in the times and don’t have my items in a database. Someday!