Building Diary

Tuesday 2008-01-29


Save your work!
After last week's disaster about loosing my work, I now always remember to 'take copy' of everything I've created in SL.

Building the tower again
Many people have asked me why have I built a 'office building' in SL, I told them that's not a office building, it's a gigantic apartment I've built for myself, anyways, I've got convinced by them, I should really make it smaller. I don't have time at the moment, but I will change it when I get time to do it. ;)

Something you may need to consider
I know that it's great to be creative, and building really good stuff requires to use a lot of prims, I've recently been told that is a limit of how many prims can be built on each island. I think it's 150,000, but I am not entirely sure about that. So if you are sharing the island with a lot of people, make sure you consider about other people before you build anything big, like my big office building, I've already been told off by a couple of people that it's taken up a lot of space.

Assigning different texture on different sides of a prim
As I am still a novice user of SL, I didn't know that we can use different texture on all available sides of prims, for example if you want to build a house, I asume that you may want to build a big piece of concrete landing and perhaps also to build the same size of wooden floor board on top of the concrete bits. If someone has asked me the solution of this scenario, I would've told them to 'shift-drag' the concrete floor and change the texture of it, but now, there is a great and easy way to do that without using more prims. I found that you can assign different texture to the 'faces' of each prim, to the scenario I've suggested above, once you are in the 'build' mode, and within the 'build' window, choose the 'texture' tab, and click on the radio button next to 'Select Texture', you will then be able to select whichever 'face' or 'faces' of a prim to change it's texture.

Scripting
As I mentioned in the above paragraph, I am still a novice user, I don't really know much about scripting at all, but in the class I've been given a very simple task to make an object which says "Hello" followed by the name of the person it is talking to. It was not that hard to do so as instruction of finding out what 'detected' does when used in script. It took me about 2 mins to figured which lldetected function I should use, I've chose 'lldetectedname' to detect the avatar who have touched the stone-like greeter I've created, and display it's name.

I've also been given another task to do, which is making an object which complains if someone other than the person who owns it touches it. At first, I thought I would just use a set of if-else statement to compare the output of "lldectedname" and the output of "lldetectedOwner", I then found that I've gone the wrong direction when thinking this through, as "lldectedOwner" only returns the key of the owner, not the name of the owner, so that will not work, after I've done a little bit of research on the second life wiki, I finally found out what I can do with the "lldectedOwner" output, I've altered the script to:

if (llDetectedKey == llGetOwner())

so it will detect the owner's key if valid, then compare to the detected object's Key, in this case, it will be the key of the avatar who just touched the greeter. I've tested it with a different account, and it works :)

I still have a lot to write about what I've learnt about SL, but this is taking too long, so I will just leave it till tomorrow :)