New Beach House in SL

I’ve designed a new beach house for Second Life. This one has three “floors” to accommodate my photo studio, a lounge for dancing and parties, and of course, a bedroom. All the views are 360 and unobstructed. The “physics” of SL does not require actually supports, so one is free to design without regard to engineering reality. The house is about 60m high and the lower Studio floor is about 16x20m.

Beach House
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Nixie Tube Clock in SL

Here’s a nixie tube clock I built in SL. It is keeping time in PST – time of the SL servers. No time zone adjustment yet.

Nixie Tube Clock

Each grid has a script that receives the decoded time and reads its own description to find out which digit it is. And the base board sends all the grids a string of the time.

The objects were built entirely in SL. The textures were built in max since that was an easy way to get glowing text and alpha textures.

It is a pain in the butt to align objects in SL. Since you only have one view – perspective, which of course distorts alignment – and no alignment tools other than entering 6 digit positions, it is very hard to align things. Also it is impossible to select a prim that is inside of another prim. So, the tubes have to be moved to edit the grid objects. The grids change the texture on one of their sides to change the digit. But since there is no way to refer to texture files in the other objects, all the grids must have copies of the textures. Perhaps his could be saved by using the UUIDs of the textures. I may check into this. Perhaps no copies of the textures are required at all.

Still much to learn about the internals of SL.

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