Whimsy Entry Area

Rickety!

Pele's Back Side

Written 10 April, 2008

Whimsy Entry Area

My brother Peter Stindberg dropped by Whimsy yesterday and left me a message: “Wow. WOW!” He was impressed at how much we’ve done and how good the sim is looking.

It’s easy to get lost in developing a place and not really see it, so I took a moment last night and just walked around. Then it was back to work.

I’ve been busy on Whimsy’s entry area. It was initially on the top of Mr. Tiki, since we plunked him down first thing, but then I moved it to the flanks of Pele. Avatars rez now on a little platform that’s suspended above the ocean on rickety-looking wooden pilings—tiki style, of course. (Wish I could figure out a way to make it sway in the wind). From there, a rope bridge leads to a landing, where they can go to the left along more rope bridges to sea level, or right, up to Pele.

Sweetie and I are scheming, trying to come up with the perfect platform for the entry area—hopefully some sort of antiquated, steam-powered lighter-than-air ship—but for now, it’s a precariously balanced platform.

When Whimsy Kaboom arrives whatever platform we wind up with will provide entry to both sims.

The back of Pele is open these days because we cut away the mountain. We’ve been working on sculpted cliffs, but it’s difficult because the distance is great, about 60 vertical meters. And the gardens and waterfall that will grace Pele’s lower reaches are not yet begun, and we’ve not yet placed the house—but Whimsy’s beaches are complete and the property owners are doing a great job on their parcels, and the path from Mr. Tiki to the top of the second largest and as yet unnamed island is a lovely walk. Things are coming along on Whimsy.

I’m a jump-on-it-and-do-it person. Sweetie is more of a plan-it-before-you-do-it-Chey-you-big-dummy sort of person. So I have to sometimes tear things out and redo them to her specifications, but she has far better taste than I and nine times out of ten I acknowledge she’s right because she is right. The tenth time, I acknowledge she’s right because she’s Sweetie.

Sweetie hated the first walkway down to the Pele flats, and so I took myself to Svarga and bought four rope bridges (sure wish there was a copyable version) and redid the path. She loved it, but I wasn’t happy because all of a sudden my viewer has slow frame rates and I was walking off the paths. Fortunately, the rope bridges are modifiable, so Sweetie and I increased their width from about .8 meters to about 1.5 meters and all was well with the world.

The virtual world, at least.