32 of 52 - On the move

Lately, I have felt a little lost, living alone in a skybox above some crappy mainland. Some new neighboor at the place where I kept my shop and skybox home also started to pollute the area with tasteless particle effects LOL. So, I decided it was time to move again. Somehow, I keep dropping by the Winterfell estate, so when a search showed a free parcel there, I took the leap and started to move. Rezzing the skybox was rather painless, but moving all the artwork took a bit of time, jumping back and forth to get a few and putting them up on the wall at the same place. Cat and Fuschia in particular have made works that are not grouped, so moving them took a little careful prim manipulation.

Down on the ground it is beautiful green, with a wood and a seafront. My closest neighboor, Princess Ivory, has a cute little castle on the ground, and even has a nice blog! Hope to get to meet her some day:-)

For now, this means tirering down a bit in in SL, but since it's summer and lots of other stuff to do anyway that's OK. Not sure what to make on the ground yet, but I guess some idea will pop up soon enough!

13 of 52 - Send in the Clowns

Four of the olympic games last amateurs are ready for the final against Canada, and that's really cool. Yes, it's a joy to watch the girls win the cross country skiing relay, but somehow the taste is a bit dry in the mouth, because we know the size of the support organization behind it, and all the money spent just to gain those few extra seconds to get a medal. Our clowns had to pay for their own trousers:-)

Viewer 2.0's tight http/media integration promises great possibilities. But to really make use of those you actually have to have access to a web server. And you need a server that is running 24/7, communicating with your vendors or whatever gadgets you use in your store.

Even worse, if you plan to sell anything with an HTML-based GUI or HUD, the end user of your products will be dependent on you keeping that web server running. If you make a glitch, the great menu driven bed with HTML HUD you sold a lot of may die under their naked avatar skins - just imagine how popular that will make you:-)

In short, any product that is dependent on an external server is no longer a self-contained product in-world, but more of a service. This has two implications:

• A service should not be sold as a product with the customer expectations that it should run inside SL forever. Instead, it should be licensed as a service with periodic payment to cover your hosting costs. That's the only fair way to treat the buyers of your products.

• A larger percentage of SL's gross products will be services, instead of ever-lasting products. This will counter the problems of ever-lasting items that is slowing down the economy (if you perceive that as a problem)

Finally, since a lot of the best products will actually be externally hosted services, it will be even harder for amateurs to compete in SL. Just as it is in the olympics. A lot of us will avoid establishing a responsibility to run servers for our in-world customers, leaving those markets to the professionals.

I do wish that LL would start a kind of hosting program for HTML pages and images; they do host our textures now, why should they not host our media based content based on the same model: Pay once for the upload, LL provides the hosting for the common good of all SL inhabitants. I guess the answer is simple: LL really would prefer most content to be sold by professionals. They no longer care for our world - our imagination. Sad.

But I guess in the end, a clever SL amateur creator with a good idea may still succeed in this world - just as our guys in their genius idea of an outfit. So please: Send in the clowns!

Dominos in Old York!

I was working a little with my booth in Old York when Roland Francis, the creator and owner of the city, came by. He seemed to like my dominoes; he actually bought a set and started to fill the open space with bricks. They will be standing there for demo purposes for a week now; I hope people will like them:-)


We got help from an attractive girl in gorgeous white leather boots to test the cannon; it worked fine, but when asked "what is this?" I really had problems knowing what to call it. A game? A decoration? A toy? Any suggestions appreciated!

Anyway, the bricks are now available in Old York, in my shop and on xstreetsl.

5 of 52 - Domino Play Time

Finally, I declare that my Toppling Domino game is ready for the shop and on XStreetSL!

I have been working on this game for several months, and it has been mostly fun, although making things in SL really is a pain sometimes.

I got the idea from an old promotional video for SL, where a Linden set up a circle of bricks using manual editing. The toppling bricks was kind of cool, but I thought the process could use some help. So, I made a simple script for a domino brick that would go physical and topple when collided with, and started working on a menu-driven rezzer.

The result is a box that will set up any number of bricks in rows and arcs. It can start the rezzing from any brick in the pattern. There are 3 options for the height of the rezzed bricks: Rezzer height, follow terrain or sensor (which is a process where the brick actually drops a ball to determine the height of the prim flooring beneath).

The process will start with the box rezzing 5 small pieces under the lid, and the lid will open. The first brick will fly out of the box, move to the correct position, increase its size and set itself down on the ground. The other bricks in the box will move forward, and the process repeat it selves.


Doing the arcs was really a revival of my old maths knowledge, using Sin and Cos functions to determine where the next brick should be positioned.

The bricks themselves contains textures for all the possible combinations of dots. When rezzed, the brick will choose a face value randomly. Indeed, the simple script has grown to almost 1000 lines of LSL code... (not to mention all the LSL in the rezzer, in total the kit contains about 2500 lines of code.)


The kit also includes a small Cannon that can be fired to start off the toppling. The cannon has sound and smoke particle effects, and does some physical recoil when fired.

There is a lot of safety built into the kit to make sure the bricks do not bother any neighbours or other people in the SIM.

It will be fun to see if anyone else thinks playing with dominoes in SL is cool, or if it was really only fun for me while making them:-)

Message Box in store

New product in shop and on xstreet: My offline message box recorder:-)

Available in all metal or wood sided, it allows people to record messages you may listen to at your leasure. The recorder will blink a red light when someone has recorded a message.

Honour has been using this in the Drama Dolls store, and as it has not blown it up yet I presume it's safe to use:-)