New shop coming soon!

I’m delighted to announce that thanks to the generosity of the wonderful and extremely talented Mistress Midnight i’ve recently acquired a property in the fabulous sim of Midnight City!

Advanced Immersive (Ai) will be opening soon with a fun, fantastic and probbably rather small opening sale party, selling things from full scale prefab architectural solutions for home and business, fixtures and fittings, lamps and lights, all the way down to cool badges your avatar can wear to look even geekier than you (possibly) already do!

 

She’s a bit of a fixer-upper as you can see, but with a little TLC and a lick of paint i’m sure I’ll be able to transform the space into a shop so cool you’ll hang out there just to er.. hang out there. Oh yes.

Check back soon for updates as we go!

Roundhouse

So, this is the first thing I’ve built for a while that wasn’t a commercial development for another company. I did this originally as a club for a friend, but then realised that if I retextured it, it could make a pretty nice space for general living, conferencing, or just hanging out. Fast forward a few hours and presto – The Roundhouse, for your perusal.

So there you have it.. I’m planning to sell this via my new OnRez store, priced at L$3500.. it has a full auto-rezzer system so its super easy to put out on your land – just rez the box, click, choose rez and then move the box and the build will auto-reposition..

I tried to go for a mashup of two styles I’m really into at the moment – I’ve fallen in love recently with some of the bali/tiki/tropical style residential places I’ve seen some designers doing at the moment, so I guess it has a bit of that in there, but I didn’t want it to just be another ‘me too’ type creation, so I injected a bit of oriental simplicity with the textures and layout – for me it kinda has that zen like tranquility to it inside.

I think it’ll be good for anyone that wants something a little bit special as their ‘virtual home’ – the open plan layout creates a light, airy atmosphere, with plenty of space above (so no nasty camera problems), as well as making it ideal as a club, conference/meetup space, or just a cool skybox to have fun in. That central grass/water combo is just waiting for your favourite tree to create a fantastic indoor arboritum feel, or pave over it to give yourself access to the centre and chair your meetings in style!

Oh, one other thing, I don’t actually have any ‘virtual land’ to display this one on, so if anyone wants a free copy, give me a ding in-world (Neil Robinson) and I’ll hook you up with one, if you let me sell it from there too.

See you on the metaphysical side…

NPR.

nb – the cool polaroid effects are courtesy of Nylon Pinkney and available from her store on the island of Tableau..

Grid down again : Might as well blog..

Well, the title says it all.

Hmm what to write, what to write..

Ok, here’s one. Some time ago, about the middle of last year, I noticed a blog post Cory Edo had written about her Logitech MX1000 laser mouse, and how all the buttons could be set up to work with SL to speed up building by putting a lot of the shortcuts under your fingertips. I was working at RiversRunRed at the time, and we all had MX1000′s there, so I installed the software and had a bit of a play about. I guess the grid must have been down that day too. The first thing I found, is that she was right. You can really increase connection with the virtual world by configuring the hardware of your interface, it makes sense when you think about it. Anyway what I’m getting to, is that I found that for me, a different setup to the setup she had posted for each button worked better. I’m not saying it IS better, I’m just saying I liked it more, having played about a bit and refined, so if you’re using an MX1000, maybe it’ll work well for you too.

The added bonus here is that pushing the alt button (scroll wheel toward the left) and one of the other buttons gives you the same as pressing ctrl shift on the keyboard, and the same with the control shift + alt combo.. basically giving you full camera control from the mouse. Pretty handy!!

At first it may seem that these shortcuts dont actually add much to your experience, but as you grow used to them, the novelty wears off and it becomes the interface you expect to have and use, going back to a regular 2 button mouse feels like putting down your precise graphics pencil in favour of a childs chewed up crayon..

Enjoy and good luck!

Hobbits!

One of my Super Favourite Designers Cory Edo has just released this lovely little hobbit cottage thingymabob. Its everything I love about Corys work, well detailed, really inventive and new, and her texture work has an element of simple purity to it that i’ve always really been a fan of and tried to get into my own work.

You have to see this thing really, to fully get how nicely put together it is. Which is why later on I’ll post a direct teleport link (forgot to get one first time around!)

Until then, you’ll have to make do with these pics

Product Review – Jextone EasyRez 1.25: First Look

There are times, when working on a project, that you may find it beneficial to work in a location other than that which will be the final installation space for your finished designs. For example, right now I’m building a small virtualtown, and I’ve chosen to do so up in the sky, because when placed the town won’t be aligned to the grid – so i’ve created it up in the sky, aligned to the grid, with the intention of moving the whole thing down afterwards, into its final position. Or, you may wish to sell your buildings or products, in which case you need an easy solution to enable your customers to rez and position their new acquisitions in-world.

There are many ways to achieve this, but by far and away the simplest and most straightforward answer is to use a ‘Rezzer’ – a device/box which stores the linked segments of your build/project, and then on command will ‘rez’ for you in a location of your choosing.

There are many rezzers on the market, but in the past they’ve always had their limitations or been quite difficult to use. So I was intrigued when talking to a friend of mine in Secondlife by the name of 10khz Tone, he mentioned that he had recently scripted a very simple to use yet extremely powerful rezzer, that could retain an entire sim’s worth of content, and rez it without difficulty irrespective of distance (within the confines of a sim)

Using the Jextone EasyRez is simple enough, first you link your build together, then drop a script into the root prim of each linked object, then rez the box, then the packer. Click the packer and it copies all the info regarding your project into the box, then pick up the project either as one inventory object or just piece by piece and place it into the box. Pick the box up and thats it, you’re ready to go.

In trying it in a fairly empty private sim, I found it easy to set up, and easy to use. While the build I was packaging wasnt exactly superhuge, it was nearly 700 prims or so, and yet I found it easy to dragselect bits of it and link before putting the script in each root prim. I’ve heard some people talk about how difficult rezzers can be to set up, but this really was a piece of cake and if you’re one of those that do feel like you spend too much time packaging your products for sale after the already hard task of creating them, I’d definetly reccomend you contact 10khz and ask for a demonstration of his product.

I havent so far had a chance to test out rezzing a huge huge (several thousand prim) project in a super super laggy place (cordova sandbox? (or whichever of that set it is that allows active scripts)) but based on my experience with other products created by 10khz, I’m confident that when I do, it’ll work just as well and easily as it has done so far. In as much as its ease of use, which is what I was trying to establish at this early stage, Its about as difficult as making toast

You can pick up a copy for yourself here on SLexchange , or here in secondlife

For those of you wondering what the hell this secondlife thing is, signup for free here

Torley lights the way

I’ve not been bothered that much until now by all this windlight stuff. As a designer, I like having control over my colors and the way people percieve them, but having seen some of the pictures and movies people have made with the windlight client, I decided to have another look and re-evaluate my position on it.

Step 1 for me was to look at the Nicholaz viewer website – always my first port of call whenever a new client or whatever comes out. Nicholaz is one of the few who since the opensource viewer came out have really made the most of the potential, and using his modded version I generally get about double the framerate and none of the crashes I’d experience on the standard viewer. And as luck would have it, he’s coded a mod for windlight. So, success.

Next up, I was never really that keen on the standard settings, and didnt really fancy spending ages messing about with creating my own, i’m new to windlight, so I want a test drive, right? But luckily and thanks to the ever-helpful Torley Linden, I found this page which has 120 presets for sky and water. And super-simple to install! Thanks, Torley! The only problem now is choosing one!

So, newly equipped, I now have a stable, fast client that has a whole bunch of presets for effects ranging from fantastic to frightening! I still dont think its that well suited to building, even with the new settings i’m not terribly content with the way it handles color temperature, and most of the time I really need to see clearly what I’m doing, especially with some of the advanced texture creation/mapping – but certainly for regular recreational use or any sort of film or stills, i’ve got a great new toy to play with

Parsec

(Woo first proper post. Go me.)

So I was working away on Visit Mexico when my friend Dizzy Banjo sent me an IM to tell me about his new project, called Parsec.

Its kind of half art instalation, half multi-user musical instrument half social experiment (I know..) – but a fantastic creation, and a really innovative use of a 3d space like the one on offer in Secondlife. The basic concept is that 7 users get together to create music and sound using Secondlife’s voice capability and the instrument (Parsec) to solve a puzzle. Hard to explain perhaps, but lots of fun to experience, and the reward is pretty spectacular too. I won’t post pictures of it here to preserve the surprise and effect for you, but its worth it, especially if you have windlight enabled..

I highly reccomend checking it out, for those of you who are already Secondlife users, you can click this link for a teleport, for those of you who arent but want to be, I suggest heading over to www.secondlife.com/join to signup (its free).

Once you’ve done so, just join up to the parsec group, and send an IM to Dizzy Banjo. Viewing is by appointment, as this project really does need a group of people and a bit of event managment to get the full experience. Alternatively you can send an email to Parsec@DizzyBanjo.com

 

Come one come all..

    Welcome welcome, roll up roll up.

So, I’ve decided to start keeping a blog of all the things that interest and amuse me in and relating to virtual worlds, immersive spaces and Secondlife in general. I’ve had a crack at one of these things before, and kinda let it slip, but this time I’m pretty focused and dedicated to keeping it going and up to date, with at least one or two posts a week. I’ve met some pretty interesting people and seen some really cool things during my years in Secondlife, from being a total noob to todays (hopefully very) professional immersive space designer, and now I’m happy to have a place where I can share those experiences and places with you guys, the three people that will probbably ever read this.

So, watch this space and hopefully soon there’ll be plenty for you to come back and read