Sunday, January 21, 2007

Stats

Pele Lava Pool
Pele Lava Pool, Deleted
Pele Lava Pool, Replaced
17 January, 2007

Stats

In Second Life, objects have coordinates in three-dimensional space; they can be positioned quite precisely—and, once placed, they stay there. That’s why houses hang in the air. SL gravity doesn’t affect them.

They also have rotation along three axes. In other words, they point somewhere.

And they have a size, also in three dimensions.

There’s an undo function for changes to objects, but it doesn’t always work, so if you move something—and especially something important, it is VERY difficult to return it to its exact former location. SL’s crummy perspective makes it even harder. I frequently rez objects which appear a half-meter or more above the floor, and don’t realize it. When I lower them, they appear to change location as well.

It doesn’t really matter how far your sofa is from the coffee table, or just where a flower is placed, but there are things that require exact replacement.

My shower, for instance. It arrived with the doors unlinked, and when I managed to move the shower, the doors didn’t budge. That meant I had to rotate and align the doors with the shower’s new location.

Because the shower’s walls are transparent, and because the shower was sitting at an angle, I couldn’t—and I tried, believe me—get them linked up. I ended up IMing Susan Ramos of Ramos Designs, the shower’s creator. She came with her husband and had the doors in place in seconds.

And houses—you don’t want to have to fiddle with everything in your house because you accidentally deleted it instead of that couch you didn’t like.

Something like that happened recently to Veronique (her blog is linked). She accidentally linked her counseling office to another object, and when she took that object into inventory, her house went with it. She found herself falling to earth.

I’ve done that myself. It’s a pain in the—

Some time ago I started making notecards that note not only the position, size, and rotation of objects, but, if they were linked, the position size, and rotation of each piece.

I’ve put the name “Stats” in the names of the cards, so all I have to do is search for Stats in my inventory and the notecards come up.

I can delete the House of 1000 Pleasures, pull another out of inventory (it’s copyable) open the Stats card, enter nine numbers, and presto! The new house is perfectly in place.

It’s imperative, of course, that you don’t make mistakes in your transcription. Measure twice, cut once.

But if you have the numbers right—and if you remember to take copies or your own objects-- life can be good.

2 comments:

Veronique Lalonde said...

Chey, this is really anal. :) But I have to admit, it's also a really good idea, one that I will follow through on soon.

Cheyenne Palisades said...

V,it might seem anal, but it sure beats having to reposition every single item of furniture in a house! These days I can delete the House of 1000 Pleasures and have a copy perfectly in place within 30 seconds. An hour of work to map the major things on Pele has saved me many hours of frustation and hard work.