Category: virtualreality

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?