Windy Weather

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.

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.

wwv

Built some swords and a display rack in Max and imported to SL.

This is the way the neighbor likes it. The yellow boundary is her land. Click for a large image.

I didn’t decorate my house this year for Christmas, but I did decorate in SL. I visited a Azure Isles [development where I live in SL] Christmas party and picked up a tree and the candy canes. Made the balls myself :roll: just needed to apply color and shine them up. My video card does a very nice job of supporting the shine and bump. Or should I say that SL supports the modern standards for shine and bump. Anyway, they look pretty good. No light strings – which I could have done. And no garlands… Took about 10 minutes… But the tree sways in the wind, and the balls stay put, sooooo… Click for the large pics.

Continue reading “Merry Chistmas in SL”

I accidentally typed a key and got “Wireframe mode” in Second Life today… This has been discussed at length here. And of course, now I know how to get out of that mode without rebooting the SL client. Turns out that my Screen Capture takes CTRL/SHIFT-R as “Region Cut” so somehow it got through and SL caught it. It’s usually trapped by the Screen Cap program. Anyway, here are a couple of pictures you might find interesting. And as always, click on a pic for a full size image:

Continue reading “Wireframe Mode in SL”