Fantastic Inspiration

In Spaceport Bravo is the most amazing build I've seen in Second Life so far: a detailed reproduction of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module. I thought I was obsessive about detail, but the scope of this build just awed me.

Lora Chadbourne, the creator of "Snowflake" (as she calls it) tells me it comprises 2370 prims and took her a month to build. And it shows, from the bracing on the inside of the hatch right down to the prim bolt heads.

A view of the exterior, compared with a picture I took of the real thing at the Kennedy Space Center:

Looking in through the front hatch:


And the control panels at which the astronauts stood (again compared with the real thing):

Utterly amazing, humbling and inspiring.

Easily Amused

I like to stay logged into SL while I'm at work. (Addicted? Me?) With friends in different time zones, it's nice to have the option of hearing the IM chime if they want to talk to me. But of course while I'm working in RL, my avatar just sits there doing nothing.

So I made a stone pillar with the "birth-of-venus" animation in it, made a set of skins with the same texture as the pillar, and park myself on it in the Rockcliffe University arts center when I know I'm going to be away for a while. Of course I still breathe and blink, and my name still shows up above my head, so it's obvious that I'm an avatar and not a true work of art like you can find at Second Louvre — but it's a more amusing (and decorative) way to go AFK than just standing there slumped forward.

On a completely unrelated topic, while the main grid was having asset-related issues yesterday, I logged in to the test grid and explored the sewers and tunnels of Nexus Prime. I don't know whether or not it's under active development as a game-within-Second-Life, but what I found there reminded me quite a bit of Deus Ex (which is still my favorite computer game, even all these years after its release). But with so many twisty dark passages, all alike, I'm sure I haven't seen the whole thing. Even the "always turn right" method doesn't work when you've got passages going up and down as well.

Nifty Find

Sometimes I'll just look around on the map to see what interesting-sounding sims are nearby. While doing benchmarks for the First Look viewer, I saw some interesting — but unfortunately inaccessible — sims with names like TextureTest, Bug Island, Island for Misfit Toys and Danger! Danger!

Looking to the west of First Look Isle, I saw a block of six sims with German names, one of which looked like it had a fort on a promontory of land.

I had to check it out — and I'm glad I did! Sitting atop a large hill, surrounded by a lush trees, was a haunting ruined castle, like one of King Ludwig the Mad's notorious projects fallen into disrepair.



As I walked upon the broken stones, avoiding the sporadic rubble, I espied some familiar objects. Glowing hands atop pedestals. A parrot. An eye-chart. In a courtyard at the bottom of the castle, a sign read Willkommen in der Orientierungs Burg, which even my pathetically rusty German could recognize: Welcome to Orientation Castle.


I've heard mention of a new Orientation Island; I wonder if this is what they will look like. It's certainly a lot more compact than the existing ones, taking up maybe a sixth of the sim. And the beach ball has been replaced with a well, into which (I think) the notecard says you're supposed to drop a large rock. There is a "physical" rock on a nearby staircase landing, but it's locked; I can't move it.

I've been looking around for a similarly upgraded Help Island, but so far haven't found one. There is a cluster of German-language, standard Orientation Islands just to the south of Frisch, though. I wonder how many other languages have their own Orientation Islands?

In sadder news, the Dynamic Reflections option has been removed from the Client->Rendering menu of the most recent First Look build. :( I can still enable it through the Client->Debug Settings dialog, but it crashes the viewer on my Windows machine immediately. (It still works on my Linux box, but that's not as powerful.)

It looks like most of the rendering improvements will be put into the official viewer soon! :) Get ready for smoother motion!