Reflection on glass

I've gotten the fish bowl to have a little more depth to it. I now have a texture that makes it appear that a light source it hitting against it. I'm not quite satisfied with it, but it is better. I was able to use AvPainter to figure out where to paint the object to simulate light. Transparency doesn't work so well with it as a default texture lies underneath my own. I've also updated the texture on the business cards so they are more generic. I only added 1 prim to make the drawing ball into a fish bowl filled with business cards (only a 100% increase). I'll have to spend more time learning about glass and reflecting light sources later.

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Posted via email from Lewis Moten's Posterous

Horrible Fish Bowl

I was able to make a fishbowl and some business cards with just two prims. The problem is that the fishbowl looks horrible. It's flat and dated and has a bit of alpha clipping going on. What I really need to do is to get some textures painted on to make it look highly reflective and transparent. The transparent cyan just makes it look like it's a semi opaque piece of plastic. I'm thinking AvPainter may come into play here, but it looks like I'm going to need some kind of texture baking with actual raycasting, such as Blender - yet I feel totally out of my league.

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Posted via email from Lewis Moten's Posterous

Drawing ball manual entry

Soft Vollmar contacted me regarding the drawing ball that I sell. The request was to allow the owner to manually add names to the drawing while preventing everyone else from entering on their own. I was able to make the quick change as well as added the ability to remove the name as well. She also needed a version that could be transferred. That fix was easy enough. However, I'm thinking that the drawing ball needs an update. I'm debating on making it look like a fish bowl of business cards. The downside is that the prim count would probably go up.

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Posted via email from Lewis Moten's Posterous

Tech Office

I've been expanding a bit on the light blue glow color scheme I came up with the other day when trying to create a vendor spot that had more than just a networked vendor. I've got a service desk and a pillar of some sort with my logo above me. I was thinking about setting a few things out on the desk, but haven't come up with any ideas that I want to run with.

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Posted via email from Lewis Moten's Posterous

Mesh on the grid

Mesh has made it's debut on the main grid yesterday. The price to import a simple cube (12 triangles, 24 vertices) is 11 L$ and it counts as 2 prim equivs. A sculpty would only cost 10 L$ and a cube prim itself would be free. Mapping textures seems to be really wierd especially with organic shapes. For the default blender cube, you would set your mapping to planar and face repeates to 0.5 and 0.5. However, this applies to the whole cube rather than to each face. Mesh is going to be big because of the find detail and control it brings. A lot of stuff will probably look odd from far away unless the creator mucks about the upload options with a fine tooth comb.

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Posted via email from Lewis Moten's Posterous

Themed stalls

In the past, I really didn't bother with making my rented stalls look all that great. I just threw up a networked vendor or static boxed vendors and left. I'm trying to change how I work with rented stalls. I'm finding that each one seems to have a creative look, and that there are no two stalls that look alike. Regarding sales, I don't know if it will help either way. It doesn't seem to be having any affect just yet, as my in-world servers still read as zero sales each day. Perhaps I need to restrict the number of products for sale to be those that fit within the areas surrounding theme - but I haven't caught on to what that is just yet.

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Posted via email from Lewis Moten's Posterous

Unmanned Traffic Jam

I always get a kick out of these unmanned traffic jams. There are scripted vehicles (without any passengers) that have been directed to travel on roads within the virtual world. The world itself is many servers representing squares on a grid. When you cross from one server to the next, that's when all the problems come up. These three vehicles were unable to compensate for the problems. Well, one of them could. It soon cleaned itself up and another one came along and crossed without a problem. If you right-mouse-click the other vehicles (altering how physics affects them), they disappear.

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Posted via email from Lewis Moten's Posterous

More JEVN API commands

Esmay Rand and I worked out a solution to my problem. Rather then displaying the menu to the end-user, we worked it out so that a message tells the JEVN scripts to send the note (card, url, demo, etc.) to the end-user. I now have a 2-prim JEVN vendor with plenty of options for the end-user to choose from visually. I'm almost curious if I can make a 4 prim vendor to display 10 thumbnail images. For now, this will be fine.

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Posted via email from Lewis Moten's Posterous

Viewer Update 2.7.4

A new update came out today for 2.7.4 (235167). "What's included" you may ask? In my opinion ... Nothing. A few bug fixes, language fixes, and some crash/performance fixes. This feels like its becomming a bit stale with what is available. I want to see something new.

Personally, I'm eager to see Mesh come through. I expected it to come through at the end of last month. They even have a few bug fixes concerning mesh. I wonder what the hold up is.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Undocumented JEVN API commands

I've been in contact with the creator of the JEVN vendor systems trying to get the info menu working by clicking on a mapped area within a child prim. I've learned about an undocumented call to send the root prim a message to display the menu. The problem I run into now is that if the person who clicked "info" clicks on a button within the menu for information, they aren't always the person who gets that information. It's like the scripts in the root prim need to be told that the person clicking the button is the one that should receive that information as well.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Make 50L$

I'm having a tough time. I'm not one who usually shops, so I'm not sure where to look for small rental spots on the grid. I'm offering 50 L$ for each referral that I start renting. I have a few conditions though.

Must be less than 100 L$/week
Group that is free to join and rez objects
No adult regions
Rentals must be automated
I shouldn't already have a vendor in the region

Drop a landmark on me titled "Rent Referral (your name here)".

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Spotted my creation

I was running around the SS Galaxy Cruise Ship and saw a familiar sight. I inspected the object and sure enough, it had my name on it. My old, old street light. The oldest copy I have in my inventory is from June 2007. I made this when I was living in the south-west corner of Higgins. I'm running around different places to find some really cheap places to rent. I just need about 2-3 prims to setup a kiosk. So far the areas to setup don't look that great on the ship, but I'll keep looking.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

JEVN? Hippo? Bah!

I thought I would setup a quick vendor system with JEVN. Problem is the vendors stop responding a bit too often when I start modifying them. I tried out hippoVEND, but the system requires textures to actually be in the servers. On top of that - it's all web based. Many wouldn't see that as a problem. My problem is that I already have all the data. It's very hard to sit down and import it all into web pages. With JEVN, I just create a web page to export all my data and JEVN loads it up quick. I still have a few ideas for JEVN. Maybe all hope is not lost just yet.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Vendor development ideas

I'm starting to work out how my vendors will appear. I'll have 10 thumbnail images displayed at once. Users click them to see the image in the center of the screen. Since I have more than 10 products, I'll offer the end-user a way to navigate through "pages" of products. The problem is that I think this will confuse a few people. I need to get this one just rite so it's pretty intuitive. Maybe I'll move all 10 images on the right and put the arrows directly under them. I tried hunting for some other vendors that did something similar, but haven't had much luck. I've incorporated a few solutions to problems I've had in the past such as renaming the vendor for each diplayed product.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Marketplace Web Vendor

For starters, it looks like I was able to get a marketplace vendor setup. With the ability to display media on a prim, I was able to show each product's marketplace page. I was even able to go through and purchase an item on the market! For anyone without the media browser, they would only see a static image of the product (similar to how most vendors work in-world today). This vendor is only 3 prims. It uses touch based mapping to figure out if you want to go back, forward, or to my home page. The price tag at the top is 1 prim, but changes from 0 to 999,999 L$ as well as telling you what permissions the product offers. I still need to make this work for people without media enabled.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Strided Lists

I've got about half of my inventory into my database and have begun work on an actual web-based vendor. To cut down on the amount of data sent back and forth, I'm going setting both my individual entries and fields to be delimited with the same pattern. To parse that information in-world, I'm using something called strided lists. I haven't used them before and thought I would give it a go. I couldn't quite get the hang of them at first, but then I realized that I needed to chop off the first entry in my list before I could get the correct value in the second field for all my items. Chop off the first two for field 3, and so on. It would be ideal if this was easier to work with.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

The future of light projections

I'm curious to see what light projections will bring. They seem like a hidden feature that will sneak up and astound everyone once people start mastering them. Shadows is ok - but light projections will add depth, atmosphere, and refined detail. I've updated my flashlights to use light projections. Due to the way that the prims are in front of my light with a transparent falloff for the "cone", I get something that really looks similar to how a flashlight lights up a wall in real life. The center is bright, then a ring of not-so-light and then a final ring around that falls into darkness.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Dragracing counts

The owner of C&D Drag Racing Systems, zFaDarkness Yue contacted me regarding my countdown timers. We have formed a relationship that will enable my countdown timer logic be used within his drag racing system. The drag race product runs the length of an entire region at 256 meters long. The countdown logic will be part of a subsystem for a "brackets system". It will assist with drivers leaving a race to allow those left to win and let the racing events continue.

Check out his Drag Tree on the marketplace.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

An amazing shopping experience

I dropped into this store and was taken aback by the quality. The lighting, displays, music, and general feeling of the environment makes you feel as close to an actual store as possible. Just about every product is on display, or close to it. Easy to find areas by the signs hanging above for belts, apparel, boots, etc. Even the stores look pretty wild. The use of colored lighting in various places (while not overbearing) is perfect. They are only used to accent a product rather than drawing attention to the lights themselves. Once you remove lighting and shadows, the place looks washed out and empty. Amazing how much of an effect this feature has.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Setting up demonstrations

I'm attempting to setup each product for display in my store. There are plenty of them, so I am concerned about my available resources. A few of these are pretty dated and could do with an upgrade to use less objects. Sculpties come to mind with quite a few of them. I've got some objects setup so that people can interact with them live to see how they work. I may have to do some research to see how other shops are setting up demonstrations.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous

Populating Inventory Database

I've got the inventory servers updating my database to identify what object has items to be delivered. I also have setup the web-based portion to allow me to start saving details about my products. Populating this data will take a long time. I started looking at vendor designs, playing around with lights and different shapes. I'm assuming that many malls may have issues about lights and the idea of lag, so i'm still working on other ideas. I'm not certain if I will go with a 1-prim vendor or add a few more for related information. I was also considering displaying web pages on the vendors to have more details, but I'm assuming media on a prim could lag people down.

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Posted via email from dedricmauriac's posterous