Making Lights

 Written 1 December, 2007

Making Lights

While back Sweetie was bothered by the tiki lights along the walkway from the Pele Gardens to East Beach. They were too bright, she said, and their illumination carried too far-- all the way across the Forsaken River, which is rather wide.

By clever investigation (I just looked inside the prims) I discovered the light script was made with Outy's Fire and Light Scripts. I was able to grab the config card, but couldn't edit it in the prim or put it back in after I had taken a copy.

Now, I had spent a lot of money to get a copyable version of the tiki lights, and now there was a problem. I IMed and dropped a notecard on the maker. No reply.

So I got busy and made a credible set of tiki lights on my own. And rather than just setting the light to a suitable intensity, I worked up a script to allow avatars to ramp up the light by touching the lights.

I called it Chey's Six-Way Light Switch because there were five levels of light intensity and an off setting. I put it in the tiki lights, and all was well in Forsaken.


As I was stuffing servers last night, I came across a little streetlight I made early on. I thought, why not? So I gave it a base, and I added a beam of light projecting to the ground, and I put in my light switch.

Woo hoo! But I wanted the light beam to disappear when the light was off. It didn't make much sense otherwise.

I stuck in a show/hide script that allowed me to hide the beam, but it had to be done separately.

I first tried to alter the show/hide script (which was written by someone else), and got for my efforts a big headache.

So I just added commands to my own script. Now the beam switches on when the light turns on and switches off when it switches off.

And Chey has a new product to put in her servers.

Well, not one. Nine, for there are three varieties of the light pole and there are 3-packs and 6-packs for sale as well.

Photos: Lights on. Lights off.