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Fresh-roasted computer

I have two computers — a laptop and a desktop — and normally I logon to SL with my desktop. It’s the one with a gig of memory and a kick-ass graphics card. Tonight, however, my ISP decided to screw up and deny me access to everything but IRC for some reason. This means that my access to SL is only from my laptop if I (gasp) connect via a neighbour’s wireless.

Alright, so I managed to log into SL. A short timer later, my laptop is so hot that my hands are uncomfortably warm on the keyboard and the fan is roaring like a leaf blower. This is not good. SL is definitely more CPU intensive than my poor laptop can handle — it’s almost toasted from less than 10 minutes logged into SL. Someone suggested immersing it in ice water, but I think I’ll just unplug the thing. Something tells me that water and electronics don’t go together all that well. :)

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But what is it called?

Over the last few days, I’ve worked on an upgrade to the old drop ship. I’m sure you’ve seen it around — it’s the twin-hulled, seven-seat skydiving ship. As usualy, I added a few new features, like the ability to land at high speed after dropping skydivers at high altitude. That seemed like a good feature after going 4 kilometers up in seconds, then finding myself stranded up there with nothing but regular thrust to get back down.

It also has a slightly redesigned model. The pilot now sits in a centrally-located cockpit instead of the left-hand pod, and it’s more compact in general.

Version 3 of my skydiving drop ship: now dubbed 'DS3'.

The biggest question on my mind is this: what’s it called? When I made it in 2004, I just called it the “drop ship”. No name, just… “drop ship”. But that doesn’t seem right. After all, my other vehicles have names, so why shouldn’t this one? I thought about “Icarus” after the ancient Greek guy who flew too close to the sun and burned his wings. But since Icarus fell to his death in that incident, I think maybe a more positive name might be appropriate.

I considered naming it H.A.L.O., a military acronym that stands for High-Alititude, Low-Orbit, but when you consider that no SL vehicle can go any higher than 4096 meters, it didn’t seem very much like “low orbit”.

In the end, I took my cue from Sony. I’m calling it the DS3. Drop Ship version 3. It’s sort of a name, isn’t it?

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I am a complete, blithering idiot

In a startling revelation today, I suddenly understood why my Cormorant and Tigershark suffered from a strange bug that I’d been unable to fix. The fix was so astoundingly simple, but the results so dramatic, that I can’t believe this never occurred to me before.

The upshot of this all is that 1) Tigershark and Cormorant are both available in version 2.0.1 and they fly smooth as silk now, and 2) I am a complete blithering idiot.

I’ll try to send out the fix to everyone who bought a copy of 2.0.1. If you don’t receive one today, please IM me.

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Better, stronger, blimpier

Once I start revising old aircraft it’s just so tempting to move on to the next one. I’ll update one plane with all the latest gadgets and gewgaws I know, then I look at the plane next to it and think… well, it can’t be that hard to fix up that one too. And when I’m finished that, I’ll start eyeing the rest of the lineup. Before I know it I’m on a rampage, ripping apart my old stuff and plugging in new and interesting bits and pieces of script, textures, and sounds.

Remember the Cormorant? That was supposed to be a minor upgrade. Weeks later, I have two completely revised planes. That would have been the end of it if someone hadn’t reminded me how much work the airship needed. So for the last couple of days, I touched up the airship and added some nifty new stuff, slimmed the hull, retextured, and streamlined the scripts. The result is Terra Airship 4.

Terra Airship 4... better, stronger, blimpier

So that’s my weekend gone.

On another note, I was happy to learn that I won the draw for a pewter Second Life pendant. I’m looking forward to getting that in the mail. I hope it has a good bling script in it. Does pewter count as bling?

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Virtual birthday

A conversation about birthdays in the #secondlife IRC channel reminded me… as of next week, the avatar “Cubey Terra” is two years old.

Few people know, however, that I didn’t start in SL as “Cubey”. I started as “Tillman Terra” two years ago this week.

Tillman Terra as of September 5, 2003: my first SL account
Tillman Terra as of September 5, 2003: my first SL account

I didn’t really like the name Tillman — I borrowed it from a character in a story that I was writing at the time — so I cancelled Tillman Terra and created a new one. “Cubey” was a nickname that I’d previously picked up on another blog. And so “Cubey Terra” was born.

Sniff. Ah memories. Seriously, it hardly feels like I’ve been part of Second Life this long. Time seems to zip past. If you asked me what I did in the last two years in SL… well, my mind would go completely blank. It’s all a blur. Then when I get past that initial confusion, I’ll think of Abbotts Aerodrome, of course. That’s been the single biggest project I’ve worked on.

There are other things in SL that stand out — sometimes just details — some significant, some not. I remember things like in my first week of SL, when I was actually afraid to go into Jessie because I thought dying might wipe my inventory and reset me back to the start, like a game. I also remember my first experiments with building in Morris. I took the Linden flamingo, stretched it really huge and put it on a pedestal with a lantern in its beak. I also remember hanging out with the michievous Lola Bombay and being so very impressed that she could make Trent Hedges’ Harley not only drive but fly!

Back then, Show and Tell was a well-attended, regular event at Stage 4 (where the Welcome Area is now). All of the top designers were there to show off their latest creations. In fact, there were so few people in SL that it was possible to meet almost everyone just by going to events at Stage 4.

I also remember the thrill I got from contructing my first theatre in Natoma, on Delerium Island. I couldn’t, at that point, script my way out of a wet paper bag, so my main interest was running events at “Theatre Terra”. The world was a swath of “Public” land with patches of private land scattered across it, so finding a patch was as easy as picking your favourite sim and moving in. Crushing taxes, of course, made actually keeping any amount of land a difficult, if not impossible, proposition. Without GOM to buy L$ from, we had to earn everything through events and sales.

This blog entry is turning into the clip show episode, isn’t it?

Why, remember when… [insert wobbly flashback transition]…

  • Public land was everywhere.
  • Any objects left on Public land “decayed” over a period of time until they too were public and anyone could claim them.
  • The welcome area was a grassy hilltop with a wide, grassy road down to Stage 4.
  • Events were listed not in a window, but on a billboard near Stage 4.
  • The Linden Liasons (well, mostly Jeff Linden) hosted weekly Avatar of the Week contests at the Linden-owned amphitheatre in Clara.
  • Bingo at the Boardwalk
  • The Linden-owned Avatar Central shops in Natoma and Aqua.
  • Bhodi Silverman’s art gallery in the northwest corner of Jessie.
  • A green — not blue — interface on SL.
  • Objects cost L$10 per prim to rez, so if you spent all your money on a 50-prim pair of wings, you’d have to save up another L$500 just to be able to wear them. Shooting a gun meant your L$ balance went down L$10 per bullet. If you lost your bullets onto no-script land (no temporary prims, remember), you’d be out a whole whack of money.
  • There was a weekly tax on pretty much everything: land, light objects, and objects in the air, just to mention a few. “Born free, taxed to death” signs abounded.
  • The drama of 1.2, where land would be payed for with real cash, and you could buy L$ from something called GOM. I was adamant that bringing US dollars into the game would ruin it.
  • Tan was the centre of the world, and Public land was very expensive there… L$2 per sqare meter!
  • Federal was the eastern edge of the world and was a pain to get to because you had to either pay for point-to-point teleport (if you had a landmark already) or fly there!
  • Flight scripts were rare and extremely difficult to write because LL hadn’t introduced vehicle physics yet. Most planes didn’t move anything like planes.
  • There was only one island sim — Cayman.
  • Americana.
  • LindenWorld amusement park.
  • Poetry events hosted by Garth and Pituca (before their SL wedding) at their posh seaside home in Clyde.
  • My weekly bad poetry improvs.
  • Market events hosted by Lynn Lippman in Immaculate.
  • The arrival of those mysterious hat-shaped things all over SL called “telehubs”.
  • When Linden Lab brought new sims online, it was HUGE NEWS and everyone flocked to see them.
  • Snow sims! Wow!
  • The world getting so big that even longtime SLers could get lost without looking at the map.

[wobbly flashback transition]

And stuff like that. It’s been a fun and horribly addictive two years. Here’s to year three!