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My ultralight works again!

Terra Starling is a two-seat ultralight that's great for exploring SL from the air.
Terra Starling is a two-seat ultralight that’s great for exploring SL from the air.

One of the best collaborations I worked on in Second Life was an ultralight plane — the Terra-Kojima Starling — designed by Reitsuki Kojima then scripted, bashed, and cajoled into flight by me. It was one of my absolute favourites to fly because it instills the feeling of the freedom of powered flight without insulating me inside the fuselage of a larger airplane.

And then our friends at Linden Lab changed how physics bounding boxes worked so that we could use mesh objects. Unbeknownst to them, it had the side-effect of breaking the Starling so that its physics bounding box extended a couple of meters below it. Essentially, it couldn’t taxi anymore. If you can’t taxi, you can’t take off and fly. So I retired the Starling.

Skimming the surface
Skimming the surface

Today, I put my newfound knowledge of Second Life bounding boxes to use and updated the Starling model. It now taxis correctly, and I corrected a couple of other minor issues that I found along the way.

Want to fly my favourite plane in Second Life? You can find it in the Second Life Marketplace and at the Terra Aeronautics shop in Abbotts in-world.

 

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Roasted elephant garlic is my crack

20141128-roast_garlic_doneIt’s mid-afternoon, and I’m looking for a bit of a snack. I just happen to have one of my favourite treats in the world: a bulb of giant elephant garlic. If you roast this mild cousin of regular garlic long enough, elephant garlic becomes creamy and spreadable. It turns into a rich, golden cracker topping that hits those garlic notes with caramel, sweetness, and none of the harsh, acidic flavours of regular garlic.

Roasted elephant garlic is something you can put out at a party to spread on crackers or toasted slices of baguette. If you cook, try adding it to soup, rice, or having it beside meats. Elephant garlic amazingly easy to prepare and more or less safe provided you bake it long enough to avoid the inherent hazards of eating under-cooked garlic.

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This is why you should comment your code

This morning I opened an LSL script that I last worked on in 2007.

It's a bad sign when your own comments have no idea what the code is doing.
It’s a bad sign when your own comments have no idea what the code is doing.

“FORCE_WIBBLE_MAX”? Really? I know I wrote this thing, but I’m awfully confused here.

Fortunately, it works. I can’t remember how or why, but it works.

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Second Life aircraft “makers”, we need to chat

I tweeted about how beautiful aircraft were in Second Life.
I tweeted about how beautiful aircraft were in Second Life.

I took a little tour of Second Life airports recently to see what aircraft designers have been up to lately. Although I haven’t been gone from SL, I haven’t released anything new for quite a while, and I wanted to see how the advent of mesh — the ability to upload 3D wireframe models — had influenced aircraft design.

I was, quite frankly, blown away. The realism in the models and texturing was head and shoulders above what I’d seen in SL before the advent of mesh uploads. And having done some 3D modeling myself, I was astonished at the level of realism and accuracy. I saw fighter jets, World War II planes, commercial jets both large and small, and helicopters of all types — all of them faithful reproductions of the real-world aircraft. That the price tag on some of these aircraft was a hefty L$6000 (about $24 US) wasn’t surprising — until I started learning more about mesh.

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