Seams between prims - building in Second Life

Submitted by scott on Thu, 02/03/2011 - 13:00

I've been working on this mural of Tenaya Lake trying to learn the ins and outs of SL construction. This mural is actually made up of eleven separate prims or blocks. I did this both because there is a maximum image size allowed in SL and because I wanted slightly different animation in each of the blocks. The water in the distance needs a different ripple effect than the water closeup. The major problem I've had in assembling these blocks is the seam line between each of the blocks. In some of the joins there exists a dashed line, depending on viewing angle.

My First Construct in SL

Submitted by scott on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 13:53

It's been my idea to learn how to create objects in Second Life. My first attempt is a mural from a photo I took of Tenaya Lake. The mural is a construct of eleven (11) prims, or primitives. Each has a portion of the photo on it's front surface. This is referred to as a texture. You can't see it in this photo taken in a "sandbox" in SL but the lake has animated ripples. I did this using the Gimp, an open source suite of image processing utilities similar to Photoshop. The ripples can be seen when this object is viewed in SL.

Streaming audio on Second Life Achieved

Submitted by scott on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 13:02

I'm not sure how I was finally able to enable streaming audio for Second Life, but I was. I'm glad I did because this virtual world offers a very rich selection of venues, sound tracks and live music. One of my favorites so far is Cafe Casablanca, inspired by the movie. The cafe does not actually resemble Rick's but given the possiblities in SL, it could. If you have a Second Life account you can get there with this URL http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dating/217/218/23

This is from their profile:

Experimenting with a virtual world: My entry into SecondLife

Submitted by scott on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 11:18

I had heard that there was legitimate academic interest in the online virtual world of SecondLife. I had previously downloaded a copy of the program but found my system to be inadequate. I now have a newer box running Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) with a NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 173). There was no installation required, I simply down loaded the latest version of SecondLife for Linux and unpacked the bundle in a Desktop directory. The executable is already there.