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Cubey’s last ride: a challenge to Second Life aircraft makers

As a lot of my customers and friends have figured out, I’m not going to make any more planes for the metaverse — or anything else. It’s been an adventure creating so much content for Second Life and meeting so many extraordinary makers of virtual aircraft, but all good things, et cetera.

Over the years, I’ve shared content with the flight community. Flight scripts, airplane kits for newbies, complete vehicles, and more. Here’s my last offering.

Quad view in Blender.

Terra Twin is my last plane. I designed it with a nostalgia for the early days of racing planes: flowing lines, muscular airframe, and cockpit jammed so far back, the pilot can’t see where they’re going. Terra Twin exaggerates the most eye-catching features of mid-century aircraft beyond realism. It is my favourite design of the lot (and I made A LOT of planes), but I simply ran out of steam.

Rather than let it gather dust in my inventory, I’m going to send it out to the Second Life flight community where it might be useful.

The Terra Twin in Second Life, about to take off.

You get:

  • Blender files – the model and component parts in various stages of completion.
  • Texture files – the original textures. Some are in Paint Shop Pro format, so you’ll have to find a converter or just do your own.
  • Scripts – the main scripts that make it go, including the flight script, UI script, and more.
  • Rights – you get the right to use anything in the package for absolutely anything you like. Just include a prominent credit with my real name (Steve Cavers) and a link to this website.

DOWNLOAD

Enjoy!
Cubey

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What’s half an Atom? An amazing deal, that’s what!

Have you always wanted Cubey Terra’s best plane, but couldn’t dig up the Linden dollars? Now’s your chance to add it to your aircraft hangar with all the bragging rights that go with it.

For a limited time, the Cubey Terra signature sport plane, Terra Atom, is on sale.

Get the Terra Atom for 50% off the regular price (for a limited time).

Get your Terra Atom before the sale ends. Visit Terra Aeronautics on the Second Life Market place.

Terra Atom is an agile and powerful single-seat plane designed with a mid-century feel. It’s flowing lines are inspired by the Supermarine S.6B, P-51 Mustang, and Bugatti 100p. Even parked on the tarmac, it looks fast.

Here’s what’s under the hood:

  • Mesh design with a paint menu that lets you choose from several paint schemes.
  • The instrument panel in the cockpit shows real flight data if you fly in first-person (“mouselook”) view.
  • The HUD attachment includes speed indicator, altimeter, artificial horizon, compass, vertical speed indicator, fuel and temperature indicators, and several switches and buttons to control your plane.
  • Optional hovertext info display on the tail.
  • Optional collision damage: prop strike, wing strike, tail strike, water landing.
  • Optional overspeed wing shear.
  • Optional engine damage and fuel use (uses free Terra Aircraft Fuel).
  • Terra Atom’s handling can be modified to your preferences: adjust roll, pitch, and thrust.
  • Flip a switch for a smoke trail.
  • The product updater gets the latest available version.
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Second Life, I demand names!

So I’m doodling away in Blender adding bits and bobs onto other bits and bobs, and before I know it, it starts to look like something. Yes… something. But what?

It glows. What is it?

I don’t know!

Instead of figuring it what it is, I want to give it a name. That’s right. I have no idea what it is or what it does, but it needs a name. Send your name ideas to me, Cubey Terra, in Second Life. My panel of judges (coincidentally all named Cubey Terra also) will review the entries and pick a winner by March 15, 2117.

The winner, if they choose to live into the 22nd century, will get a copy of the first airplane I made in Second Life*. How can you turn that down?

(*Offer only applies if both Second Life and Cubey Terra still exist one century from this date.)

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Visiting InWorldz — the free virtual world based on Second Life

Cubey Terra in InWorldz on a Terra Xplorer

I’ve been in and around virtual reality for a long time now. I’ve seen world-building tools and shared worlds come and go. In the early ’90s, I played with something called Virtual Reality Studio, in which you could construct mini realities from 3D primitives, script them for interactivity, then share the world as an executable that ran on any PC.

The end of the ’90s brought ActiveWorlds and There.com, and by the early 2000s Second Life sprang into being. Since then, SL has spun off countless replica worlds — some public, some not — among which is InWorldz. Just like SL, it supports a large number of square region simulators that are designed and built to their owners’ tastes. And just like SL, anyone can drop in and start building right away. The difference is that, unlike Second Life, InWorldz doesn’t charge you money to upload content like mesh models, images, sounds, and more. It’s all free!

Given that I’m a cheapskate, I thought I’d see if I could bring one of my Second Life creations into InWorldz. I started with something simple: my Terra Xplorer hoverpad. Even though I created the Xplorer myself, Second Life has many restrictions on what you can export for use in other worlds. It’s meant to prevent IP theft, but it’s mainly just a pain in the ass, to be honest.

Cubey Terra in InWorldz on a Terra Xplorer
Cubey Terra arrives in InWorldz riding a Terra Xplorer hoverpad

For example, today I discovered that some of my scripts and most of my textures couldn’t export from SL — mysterious reasons. What arrived in InWorldz was scriptless, untextured models. That meant hours of work copying and adapting my scripts to InWorldz, re-creating textures, and sometimes even rebuilding from scratch, as I did with the Xplorer’s heads-up display (HUD).

So three hours later, I produced a working replica of my Terra Xplorer hoverpad in another virtual world. Done.

Now what? InWorldz seems to have play money like Second Life, but I don’t know if it can be exchanged for US dollar credit as SL users can do on SecondLife.com. Given that I’m not especially interested in earning a new kind of play money, I started giving away Xplorer copies for free.

So that’s today’s experiment. If you log into InWorldz, send Cubey Terra a message and I’ll make sure you get an Xplorer.