New real estate

I'm a happy landowner.  Recently I purchased two new parcels in the Academy of Industry sim of New Babbage.

The first is an old cemetery on a triangular lot.  Several ideas for the plot crossed my mind, but I think I will just leave it as a cemetery. It adds to the atmosphere of the sim in my opinion, and it's off in a corner anyway. Anything I build there wouldn't really get any traffic. Besides, a cemetery doesn't use many prims, and I can use them otherwise.

The newest parcel I bought last night.  A small lot opened up near my house, and I've been giving it consideration over the last week. After deciding that I want to keep the cemetery as a cemetery (prim farm), I knew that I wanted another spot to build on.

My plan is to build something more steampunky than my house. A heavy industrial build would be out of place in Academy, so I'm thinking just a workshop of some sort is in order. I found a model that I like and sketched it out in prims on my mainland parcel earlier last night. I'm really excited to build it now.

I definitely want this build to have some moving parts. At the moment I'm thinking a roof that opens on a hinge like a greenhouse, but we'll see. This will challenge me to work on my scripting skills a bit, which I haven't used much since coming back.

Sometimes I am SUCH a noob

Like tonight, when I found an old Linden-made squid gun on Marketplace and thought it was the best thing EVER.  Since it's full perms I spent the night tinkering with the script to see if I could make the squids bounce when they hit something, but no luck.  The best I can do is get them to not just go right through something.  Now they kind of stick and wiggle, which I suppose is almost as good as bouncing.

Also, they are now orange, so they can be baby air kraken. 

Because blue would be a stupid color for a kraken.

Stick and wiggle, baby air kraken!  Stick and wiggle!

More work on the New Babbage drink

Tonight I did some more work on my particle script, stuck it into my drink, popped in a toggle function and tweaked the particle script relative to the sample drink animation script.  Now that it's all working smoothly and I like the drink itself, I can devote myself to other things.  Namely, Blender.

I downloaded and installed it tonight, and am reading through the newbie tutorial for making SL animations in Blender.  If things go well, I think I can create a custom animation for my drink and enter it in the contest without being ashamed for using the sample scripts and animations.

Here is a teaser pic of my drink!  Bet you'd like to know what makes it glow, wouldn't you?  (Other than PSYS_PART_EMISSIVE_MASK, I mean...)

National Drinking Month contest

Apparently June is National Drinking Month in New Babbage, and there is a contest to mark the occasion.  Mr. Tenk has invited participants to create drinks, drink servers and vintage ads that can be used by bartenders.

I created an ad almost immediately after he posted the notice, but I've been waffling on whether to try to enter the drink contest.  It requires building a beverage, scripting it and animating it.  Some sample scripts and animations were given out to anyone who wants to use them, but it seems kind of a cop out to do that.

There is an idea that has been floating around in my head for a new drink, so I experimented a bit last night. I built a glass, textured it, and played around with the sample scripts and animations. They're rather plain, but I might use them. I'm not sure that I can come up to speed on Blender again before the June 25th deadline.

I also spent quite a bit of time toying with particle scripts, because particles would really enhance my drink idea. I had forgotten just how tricky particles are.  Gah!

Anyway, I'm still mulling it over.  I'll keep working on it before deciding whether or not to enter the end product. I don't have any expectation of winning, but at least participating would be fun. It seems like good practice either way.