Friday, June 29, 2007

Two Builds





Written 27 June, 2007

Two Builds

I’ve built two things lately.

The first is a television cabinet which I built in the Pele Gardens. It’s now installed in the House of 1000 Pleasures. It’s equipped with a roll-up cover (courtesy of Outy’s Curtain Drop Script). I even added a nifty light industrial sound to it so it sounds rather like a garage door opening.

I favor hanging a huge screen on the wall, but I understand perfectly why Sweetie prefers a cabinet. I modeled mine more or less on a cabinet we saw in a furniture shop priced at $450. The original has doors that slide open to the left and right, but I was too lazy to figure out how to reorient the curtain script. I can live with a rollup.

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Sweetie and I are both big kids. If you can swing on it, bounce on it, revolve with it, climb on it, or slide down it, we are soooo there.

When I showed Sweetie the West Greenwich Village sim (which is home to our friend Kat) we wound up at the park there, spending more than 15 minutes (which is like half a day, Second Life time) on the slide.

After that I looked at playground equipment, but it was all sized for children—and worse, butt ugly. I’m still hoping to hear from one of the makers about the possibility of getting a modifiable slide, but I decided to begin work on my own kiddie toys.

My second piece of playground equipment (I consider my little balance my first) is a merry-go-round—it much like the real life model pictured.

It was easy enough to throw together the prims for the form and link them and add a rotation script. Then I added four pose balls for sitting and modified the script to start at a touch and play (at low volume, so those not actually on the slide won’t hear it) a little tune.

The merry-go-round starts out slowly and gradually picks up speed until it’s really flying. Finally it winds down and stops.

It sits five avatars.

For a while I had the merry-go-round say, as it reached its peak speed, “I’m sorry, Captain Kirk, I canna get more than Warp 7 out of this rustbucket,” but for now it’s commented out.

Sweetie wants me to script the MGR to throw avatars off when it hits its peak speed—sort of like our well of death. So far I’ve resisted, probably because I’m not sure how to do make it do that.

But I am finally learning to script. Film at eleven.

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