Pulling Down the House of Usher, Part II

Location: The Painful Part

Well, it's half-done. In fact I rather like the effect of seeing the demolition in slow-motion. I began with the outer walls, linking parts I'd missed the first time around, then taking them into inventory.

Next I began to delete prims not made by me that were simply textured flooring and other easily replicated bits. I could remake them later. Then copies of things already in inventory were deleted. Slowly I'm returning Beeble Baxter's prims from the House. I'm concerned that some of his non-shared items may be destroyed with the Richmond sim vanishes.

When the demo is finished I'll run a Koinup slide-show of the process here.  Still, it's not the most fun thing I've done in SL.

I know some of you have read Poe's story and have a question about how I might have ended things.

I'd been tempted to make the whole build physical, then unlink the sets. That would replicate the drama of the end of Poe's tale.  At the same time, I wanted a copy of it as it stood in inventory, just in case we ever set up Usher again in Second Life rather than another grid more amenable to educators.

Maybe I'll rezz the shell again from inventory, make it collapse into the water, and burn any remaining rubble: good way to say goodbye to renting server space from Linden Lab.

Looking Backward: Spending Money The First Time

April 05, 2007 4:00 PM

Location: Mauve Sim, Wynx Whiplash’s store

Baldness can wait. I’m about to make my first purchase in Second Life.

Following a lead from the ever-vigilant Ida Keen, who writes Baedaker, a tourist’s guide for SL, I’ve come to see what Wynx has for sale.

I understood, since getting to Orientation Island, that most players have multiple avatars, each available in the player’s inventory. All it takes to change from buff toyboy or sleek partygirl to, say, a tiny bunny-rabbit is a few clicks.

And all it takes to buy one of these alternative identities is a few hundred Lindens (at about 270 Lindens to the US Dollar).

So, why not? Now, thanks to Wynx, I have solved my hair problems, forever.

Q to self: What to be today? Iggy? Ol’ Putty Head? Or Monkey-boy?

A to self: Monkey-boy.

Now I can go, in style, to investigate that giant statue of King Kong in one of the SL Sims. It’s in some sort of deserted theme park.

I will also be more than ready for next year’s “National Gorilla Suit Day.” I need something to take my mind off reality for a while.

This week’s reality check is too painful. With the daily grind of nut-cases posturing and sabers rattling, I’d bet that Second Life will soon be full of new avatars, each in need of a little down-time in a gorilla suit.

If you are not in a gorilla suit yet, you are not paying attention. GOOD bumper sticker.

Iggy's Note: My "Looking Backward" posts are aggregated here, if you want to see the fool I made of myself in 2007.  

Pulling Down The House of Usher, Part I

Location: Second Life House of Usher Visitor Center

It began with the Visitor Center. I'm not quite up to bringing down the House today.

When the walls returned to my inventory, I took a last look at the fireplace.

I think I've done a decent job with my own in OpenSim. Goodbye, fireplace. Get into that folder, ravens! And take that skull and bones with you. Slide show and student projects, in you go!

I think I've done enough. I'll leave the House up a little longer if you want to see it. TP to the site of the Visitor's Center, hop in the balloon, and look around. I'll be pulling down the House next week. The entire island will vanish by the end of the month, as our university ceases any operations in Second Life.

After that, you'll want to visit Jokaydia Grid to see the new version of this simulation. I plan to set up a little center for pedagogy on Nevermore Island, dedicated to the hard work my students in SL did. In 2011-12, after a pause caused by Linden Lab's price hike for educators and the resultant rebuilding, I'll return to OpenSim with a batch of first-year students.

My first-years this semester will have the option to explore a game or virtual world for final projects, in a class about the history, culture, and future of cyberspace. But there will be no required work in SL. Never again, I anticipate.  If a student chooses to explore Linden Lab's grid, I'll be on hand to mentor him or her. But beyond that, my efforts will be elsewhere.

Home Improvements: Random Prim Drift in a Large Build

Location: Caulking Seams

It's ironic that I talk about this on a day when, in real life, I need to caulk a seam between our house and a not-so-well-made addition. The building settles unevenly, and mortar joints love to crack. Good-quality exterior masonry caulk stops those cold drafts.

But there's no HGTV for avatars (though Prim Perfect comes closest). Even that fine magazine focuses more on style and design and not repair and renovation.

Renovation? In a fake building? Should be as simple as deleting prims or moving them, right?

Viv Trafalgar and I were touring the Second Life House of Usher in the guise of Madeline and Roderick, in order to shoot Viv's machinima I featured here a few weeks ago. I noted a rather large gap in a wall, and Viv, ever the master builder, noted that large builds do that. Elements creep apart over time. I don't know the reason; perhaps it's an infinitesimal rounding up or down when linked prims overlap ever so slightly. There's a JIRA at the Linden Lab Web site about this.

Torley Linden, who cares and knows a lot about technical issues in the code, asked a resident to give examples or reproduce the problem so Linden Lab could investigate. Here's a technical but vexing reply from Khamon Fate:

 It's a floating point error that is seen nearly every time one edits a prim's location, rotation, cut et al by the numbers. Type 35 degrees Y rotation into a prim and watch it magically adjust itself to 34.97 degrees. Doesn't seem like much really, but when that same calculating error occurs as the sim places, and replaces prims, they seem to drift. Those same miscalculations cause textures to be suddenly offset. The list goes on to include misplaced telepoints, odd ground configurations and really just anything the server has to manage mathematically.

It's a deep, fundamental problem in the server code and really must be fixed for these types of problems to be resolved.

I have not noticed the math error in our SL or Jokaydia Grid build, but I'll try an experiment of noting the position of some prims and then checking with my next log in. And, yes, it happened at Jokaydia Grid too. I found that a linked set of prims for Usher's interior walls had crept away slightly from some unlinked parts, including doors and "headers" over them.  Fixing that was easy--I had to realign the doors' headers and match the texture to the main wall's settings. Then I linked them.

As I did this, I was reminded of another "101" lesson: don't link scripted items to the linkset. I know that when I blogged about making a fireplace; the scripted prim needs to be the root. So I left doors and chimneys unlinked and floating free, as the rest of the House drifts.

My fix is to link the entire House in a few segments: roof, interior walls, exterior walls, crypt. I can then tweak each one a few hundredths of a meter to re-align the ancient manse.  If only it worked so well, on a cold December day, on a brick-and-mortar home!

My posts on building in virtual worlds are aggregated here. Happy home improvements!