If you were worrying where was I last week, I was stuck in sandbox, building. Nothing new, but this one was different. It tore my nerves apart, spammed the public channel with tons of curses and swears towards Lindens (yes, I was actually typing most of them without anybody around to read them, just for my own satisfaction) and made a list which I am going to share with you now. If you ever tried to build something that is not thought-out inside second life, that is, something that might resemble an object from the meatspace, you know what I am speaking about. It is completely other thing than building from the scratch something that is genuine second life object. It's a nightmare.
- Linking As you probably know, you cannot link objects that are more than 10 meters away from each other. Nice if you make furniture, but what about houses? Then you link parts of it, teake them all as different objects and try to assemble them again next time you are back to work. Do a bit more complicated building and you'll spend hours in that puzzle. Why? Because walls and floors and everything are usually aligning…
- Aligning And when you are try to put all those walls to be next to each other you are with no toolls. Only thing you have is snap to grid thing. But, that works only for centers of the object. So, sides of two parts of your object will align if they are of the same size. Why not having some real aligning tool?
- Handles But,until we got an aligning tool, we align our objects manually. Zoom very close to the critical point, grab one of those handles and drag. Deselect, check from different angles, find that you missed it again, repeat. Oh, have I said that works for not so big objects only? 'Cause, if you have to move 10 meters object a few pixels up, you have to zoom close to the edge. And if you zoom in so close those handles you have to grab are out of your screen. They are in the middle of the object. So you zoom out, grab the handle, but now you're too far away to see what you are doing.
- Torus One of my favourite and very used prim type is torus. You know that one, like a cylinder that is bent in a circle? Yes, that one, also called a doughnut. I will never understand why is it defined by its radius and the size of the hole in the middle and not by the radius of the whole object and the radius of the cylinder that is bent. One of the nice things to do with tori is to cut them and align them (yes, aligning again, what else to do with prims) with some cylinders. And the first time you try that, you find out that it is not so easy to make cylinder's radius big or small as you need just by defining the hole size. Once again, it is trial and error game.
- Boolean operations After I used the word aligning a dozen times it is time to move to something else…. Ops, there is no something else. What can you do with prims? You can put them one beside the others and (if they are not too far away) to link the. That's it. No, so called Boolean operations over them. No substracting, intersecting and the like. Why not? If you want to cut one prim out of the other, that counts like two prims on the sim. And processors will have a bit more work to do to count which faces are visible, but that's not too much. It is lagging already, let's make it look interesting then.
My previous building adventures were different. Most of the times it was kind of a puzzle to do something with what is given. It was a challenge. You have cubes and spheres and tori, let's see what you can make of them. That's nice and fun. But that is not serious building. It goes just like the rest of the second life. It feels that somebody should finally decide if this is a serious platform or a funny toy for geeks. Are we going to make this world an important part of the internet or is it just for fun?
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