This just in:
panthar: I love when blogsandthings take little quotes out of context.
SL ate my SkyLife instructions!
I have just discovered that Second Life mangled my illustrated assembly instructions for Noir SkyLife sky home kits. Many images appear in the wrong place, and some images have been replaced by a question mark. In some places, the image is replaced by a landmark, which is especially confusing because clicking that inexplicably sends the hapless home builder to Abbotts. This could take hours to fix.
UPDATE: I have posted the SkyLife assembly instructions on my support page (click here).
Explore the streets of San Francisco virtually
Google now has an amazing new feature where you can take a virtual walk through the streets of some major cities. Here’s Linden Lab’s illustrious headquarters in San Francisco, for example.
click to view the Google street view
You can use your arrow keys to move the camera and rotate left/right.
WindLight puts the ceiling too low: please vote
Yesterday Linden Lab revealed an alternate Second Life client that contains WindLight technology. WindLight is a sky generator that produces breathtaking photo-realistic virtual skies. It means the end of greenish sunrises and puke-brown horizons, at the very least.
There is, however, a pretty big trade-off. Our current sky is “untouchable” — that is, no matter how high you go, you can never reach it. With WindLight, the sky is less than a kilometer above the ground. It’s at about 750 meters actually, which means that you can very easily fly above the sky into nothingness.
This totally destroys the illusion of flight, ruins skydiving, and in your sky home, the sky is distorted as you view it edge-on.
Please vote in JIRA to correct this bug and either raise the sky surface thousands of meters higher or make it “untouchable” like the current sky. Here’s how:
- Go to jira.secondlife.com and log in. You have to log in first before viewing the issue page or you can’t vote, for some reason.
- View bug VWR-923 and click the “Vote for this” link on the left of that page.
If you enjoy flight and skydiving in Second Life, or if you own a sky home, please vote. The WindLight sky is very nice, but it must be implemented correctly.
Stearman, redux
What’s special about a Stearman biplane? It’s one of the most used biplanes in history. They have been used as trainers, scouts, crop dusters, and stunt planes, among other uses. Between 1930 and 1945, Boeing built around ten thousand of the things, and there are still about a thousand air-worthy Stearmans today.
When I was still new to Second Life, one of my more popular planes was a biplane that looked vaguely like a Stearman. Eventually, I had to take it off the market. I had created it using a kind of hack that let me build a high-prim, physical model, and that hack apparently had the ability to crash a sim on occasion. Oops.
Now, about three and a half years later, I’m revisiting the Stearman with everything I’ve learned about making virtual vehicles. This high-prim, two-seat replica has taken many hours, but I’m close to the finish now.
Give me another week, and you too can take to the skies in this icon of flight history.
Stearman links:
Warbird Alley: Boeing / Stearman PT-17 “Kaydet”
Wikipedia: Boeing Stearman