But Wait!

First Land in Huntsman. Notice I've Made it Into a Park

Huntsman is Butt-Ugly

P20 Skybox Over Huntsman

P20 Skybox, Retexturized and De-Ramped

Walking Ramp, Walking Away

(I had meant to post this before my series on the volcano warming, but I had an oopsie moment).

Written 23 January, 2007

But Wait!

Wait! Wait! I forgot something!

I forgot to tell you about what I’ve done with my First Land!

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It’s a madhouse on the mainland. There are no covenants—not at the places I’ve checked, anyway—and confusion and ugly construction abound.

It didn’t take five minutes for my next door neighbor Aardvark-almost-spelled-backwards to raise his land a good 10 meters, leaving me with four options: 1) raise my land to match his, passing the problem on to the neighbor on my other side; 2) live with an ugly cliff; 3) waste precious prims (only 117 on 512 sq m!) to disguise the cliff; or 4) get rid of the ugly cliff by making the land into a steep hillside.

Grrr.

So, how did I resolve this?

By making the land into a hillside park and hanging a skybox.

Film at eleven.

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I learned about small apartments by visiting my friend Kal Mannock. His place was not unattractive, but he had a ridiculously low prim allowance (30) and it was hard to keep perspective while inside it because of its small size.

I shopped for skyboxes that would provide the most possible space while fitting on 512 land. I found several.

The first was the Kokopelli house.

Kokopelli

The Kokopelli made a lot of sense. It weighed in at about 55-70 prims, depending on whether the teleporter, kitchen cabinetry, Kokopelli ornaments, and tintable windows were installed.

It had two levels and a flat roof which served as a patio.

It had a built-in landing ramp.

It could be easily set up as two apartments, or even three.

It was copyable.

And it came with Rez-Faux, which made it easy to set up.

All of this meant that I could hang it on my First land and rent it—maybe to two or even three different people.

There was only one problem.

It was butt-ugly.

Sweetie pointedly told me this when I took her to show it to her. She immediately began plans to retexturize it.

I’ll have to admit, it looked like a starter home for Rob and Laura Petrie on the old Dick Van Dyke Show. It was made of pale blue 60s-looking bricks, with a bay window design that would have been considered avant-garde in 1962. And the carpet! OMG! Ug-ly!

But the Kokopelli house resides, still in ugly blue, in my inventory, for I discovered that KumiKorp now makes a 512 skybox.

The Dragon Skybar is a KumiKorp P20 skybox, 20x20 meters, with only 18 prims. It’s a big roomy box that looks and feels like loft space—and so does the new P512.

The P512

The P512, weighing in at only about 20 prims, featured large touch-operated lockable industrial-sized hidden doors that made for easy landings, a loft with voice-operated ramp, a carpet with changeable textures, a dance machine, and a mist machine. And it was really big! Way cool!

I picked up a couple, hung them on my first land, and furnished them (sparsely) with a four-prim color-changing bed with single and couples sleep poses ( I sleep on the same bed myself), a couch and chair, and a carpet and table. In one of the skyboxes, I placed a Wurlitzer jukebox and a DVD player and made a big flat-screen tv so the renter would, for a premium, have control of the media on the land.

I even used three prims to put a little park—a bench and a tree—on the hillside.

My rental property was perfect.

Slumlord Thinking

I figured I could allow 30 prims unfurnished to each of the two renters, or 20 prims if they took it furnished. I would ask $150L/week for the skybox without media control, and $225L/week for the unit with.

That would add up to $19500L, or about $73 US per year, provided the units remained full. They would generate enough income to pay the annual premium for paid membership in Second Life—and the $400L/week allotment would be gravy.

I would make $73/year from my premium Second Life account.

If the units stayed full, that is.

Still, my rental property was perfect.

Enter Sweetie

Thank goodness for Sweetie.

Sweetie approved of the new skybox. She immediately began tweaking the one I had shown her, changing its floors and outside walls from maple paneling to a dark brown on which I could determine no texture whatsoever.

“I even saved you a couple of prims,” she said proudly.

“How?” I asked, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

She had taken out the ramp.

The voice-operated ramp. The really nice feature voice-operated script-equipped ramp. The how-the-hell-does-a-gnubie-without-flying assistance-get-up-to-the-ramp-without-it really nice feature voice-operated script-equipped ramp.

I’ve not managed to get it working correctly since. No matter to which prim I link it, it tends to walk off into space whenever it’s operated. And I still can see no detail whatsoever in the texture Sweetie applied to the floors and outside walls.

I’m sure Sweetie can. But I can’t. I just see a big dark brown uni-colored blob hanging in the sky.

Sweetie overhauled my little park, too. She built an enclosure of irregularly-shaped rocks, and I linked them and then put in a group of linked trees.

And I one-prim rezzed it all. (Or, rather, I two-prim rezzed it, because all of the objects wouldn’t link as one unit. So I made them into two groups and rezzed each group as a single prim.

Meaning that I used the DAPSI, a device that will maintain linked objects as a single prim; it does this by setting the objects as temporary and then re-rezzing them as new temporary objects whenever SL recalled them.

I had removed one of the P512 skyboxes (no, not the one Sweetie had retexturized; the other one) so there would be enough available prims to build the park.

The rezzed park looked great. But when tried to rehang the second skybox, it wouldn’t rez.

There were insufficient prims.

It wouldn’t rez because—or so SL said—it would exceed the land’s prim count.

Meaning, I guess, that the one-prim park was somehow counting as more than one prim.

So I erased the one-prim rezzer (and with it went Sweetie’s wall and all the trees) and rematerialized the skybox.

Or tried to.

There were now plenty of free prims, but SL announced that the skybox hadn’t rezzed. I could see nothing, and I couldn’t capture an object in Edit, but there seemed to be a huge invisible house sitting crossways across my land, infringing on two of my neighbors.

I IMed friends asking WTF and found out it was an SL bug.

And so I left my first land with my original park destroyed, the replacement park inoperable, a damaged skybox hanging in the sky, and its replacement lost, invisible, and preventing access to my First land.

And it had all been so perfect before.

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Rethinking

But I’m glad it happened. Sweetie did me a favor because I re-evaluated my plans and decided they were mean-spirited. I mean, who would want to live with only 30 prims?

The new skybox was autoreturned that evening. Hooray!

I went back to the land and reconstructed my little 3-prim park. I had taken a copy of Sweetie’s rock wall, but I didn’t want to cause problems for the renter with problematic one-prim rezzes.

And took out the lower skybox and all its furnishings, then flew up to the skybox Sweetie had tweaked. I took it out and, using the same location and rotation numbers, hung a replacement unit I had just purchased. The house went to position perfectly, meaning the furniture and audiovisual equipment were placed just right.

Now the land was perfect again.

Thank goodness for Sweetie, for now I would not be trying to maximize profit and in the process making life difficult for two renters.

Now there wouldn’t be two renters, one with access to radio and movie controls, and one without.

Now there wouldn’t be two renters, each trying to wisely use an insanely low budget prim.

Now there wouldn’t be two renters living side by side, having to listen to each others’ private lives in chat.

Now there would be a single renter living high in the sky out of chat range with everyone else, with the ability to select his or her own radio and television URLs, and with a comfortable 75-prim budget.

My First Land would (assuming occupancy) be making $225 Lindens per week instead of $375, but I would be providing a high-quality enjoyable environment for someone. I was no longer a slumlord.

My First Land is perfect.

And I have my Sweetie to thank for that.

But please don’t tell her. I’d rather her think my innate sense of fairless prevailed.

And just maybe it did.