Random Search

Second Life search is fun. By "fun" I mean interesting values of "fun", of course.

Earlier this morning I needed to search for Whiz Wonder (the CEO of The Whizical Hunts) because I had a couple of questions about The Naughty Bunny Hunt (I was doing the final work on being ready for it starting). Problem was, she wasn't showing in search. That seemed odd given the position and purpose of that avatar. So I find them by other means and point this out.

Quickly we realise that quite a few avatars, and locations, that should be in search aren't. I quickly noticed I wasn't!

That's annoying. I'm very open about being in search. I make and sell things so I need people to be able to find me. One thing I pride myself on is being available for questions and help and not being listed in search sort of messes that up.

Fast forward an hour or so and...

Okay.... Oh well, I guess this random nature is all part of the new search system's charm, right?

PS: I'm going to have to check out Twink's Art Gallery (look at the classifieds in the above images). No idea who they are but if they show up for a search for me I'm sure that's an omen. ;-)

Aim to Misbehave

I've been meaning to put something like this together for ages. I finally caved in this evening and did a little bit of shopping.

It's a combination of this and this and, I think, they work pretty well together. The coat obviously has a bit of shading that suits a female avatar but, I think, it looks as much like a crease as anything on me.

Now, has anyone seen Inara around these parts?

Firestorm 4.0.1

Well, I've done it. Having just got really used to using Firestorm 3 I've wiped it from my system and gone with 4.0.1. The main motivation for making the jump was the impending need to access the merchant outbox (doubtless to be a facility that'll feature in future blog posts; hopefully in a good way, although much of what I'm reading so far isn't good news) and this overrode my reluctance to jump to something still marked "Beta" when I'd got used to 3.x.

So far, I'm impressed. I've made a point of not using the recreation of the Phoenix interface (having seen a video of it I was surprised to find that I found it looked a bit ugly now -- I think I've got very used to the default Firestorm look) and, in going with the flow, I've managed to get a very workable and very uncluttered view of Second Life:

I've not done any scripting or building in it yet so I don't know that it's as good as Firestorm 3, although I imagine it won't have changed for the worse in that regard. If it's generally stable (I've had one crash so far, while trying to unbork the bridge) I think I'm going to be very comfortable with this.

Play sounds when walking

I know this has been done before and done so many times before -- goodness knows Miss Vila owned enough pairs of shoes and boots that made footstep noises, and I might have at least one pair of pony boots in my inventory that do the same. ;)

But, anyway, after having been asked a scripting question this last weekend and not knowing the answer right off, I couldn't resist having a think and a read. I found the answer and, in doing so, realised that it was easy to write a script that plays a sound when an avatar is walking. Which means I could finally make myself a subtle barefoot walking sound thing.

Which I did this morning.

This script is the result of my experimenting and I offer it here in case it's useful to anyone else. Just create a prim and drop this script in, along with the sound you want to play. Attach the prim to yourself (either as a HUD, or to some part of your body -- I've got it attached to my right foot, and made invisible) and you should be good to go.

This probably isn't the most elegant way of doing this. It probably isn't the most efficient either. But it was a fun experiment and it seems to work just fine.

Evolution

You can read the full announcement for this over on the Z&A blog.

Well that's been a fun week. I'd planned on having a fairly quiet week, making final tweaks to builds for two hunts we're taking part in next week, and perhaps pushing a couple of new products out (oh, yeah, and having a proper look at this direct delivery lark). But it didn't quite turn out that way.

I found out that our neighbour, who had the other half of the sim we live on, was moving on. So, there we were, faced with the other 1/2 of our sim coming up for rent again. Zardia and I had a good long chat about he pros and cons and what we'd do or not do and, long story short, we cracked and grabbed it.

So, what looked like this just the other day:

now looks like this:

And, as you can see over on the Z&A blog, we're renting plots out on the other half.

It's been quite the adventure, putting it all together the last three or so days. While I have taken charge of letting plots on the sim before, I was essentially doing it on behalf of someone else. This time it's all our doing, all our design. That feels very different.

Hopefully we'll have a great little community grow here over time. We're off to a great start given that Evelock has opened a studio here.

It's a curious evolution for us, and another in a long line of things we've not aimed to do but have simply grown in to.

Scripts in the side bar

Regular readers will know that, any time I knock up a handy general-use script, I try and throw it up on gist and post a link here in case it's useful to someone else. Of course, the problem with doing that via a blog (especially given I've not bothered created a label for posted scripts -- perhaps I should) is that the scripts fall off in the post stream over time.

So I've decided to add a link box in the side bar:

That'll make them easier to find.

Om nom nom!

Last night I wrote my first "add on" script for our cell code. Worked well. Anyone who cares to know what it does will find out next month. ;-)

Z's laptop

I've written before about the laptop on my desk in my house, and what's on the screen. Obviously, on the screen on my laptop, is some code:

Z's got the same laptop now, out at her house. She, of course, needed something on the screen of hers. Given she's not a scripter using the texture I used made no sense. This is what she came up with:

O_o

On the map

A couple of days ago Zardia and I decided to have a go at this "slap a logo in the sky so it appears on a map" thing:

It turned out better than I expected:

It could be bigger, of course, but that's not really us. It's big enough to read and, I think, subtle enough to not turn the map into one huge advert (maps should still be useful, I think). Having seen what's possible I might try and tweak Z's Z so it's more like the Z in the Z&A logo but, on the whole, I think it's a reasonable match given that it's done in just a few prims.