Chandra’s Page

As anyone who still has this site in an RSS reader is no doubt aware, I haven’t updated Chandra’s Page in a long, long time. Some of this is due to the usual laziness that afflicts most would-be bloggers. It’s tough to maintain interest in the activity if you haven’t made it part of your regular routine.

The other problem has been Typo, which is a fine piece of blog software, unless you’re running it on shared hosting. In which case, it sucks harder than vacuum through a puncture in a space capsule. So, I’ve settled on WordPress as the engine that drives this site. It’s pathetically easy to set up and use, doesn’t crash my Dreamhost account, and has enough plugins to keep me in nerd heaven for the foreseeable future.

Things will be a bit wonky here for a bit while I get all the images and graphical goodness back online, but then I hope to be more regular about posting. I’m sure both of you who read this will be ecstatic about my return.

I’m almost beginning to see Second Life’s tendency to blow up while operating vehicles as a blessing rather than a curse. After buying some lovely aircraft at Boyoma Field, I planned to fly one of my purchases home to Drawbridge. I only got two sims from Fundama when I was violently hurled from the plane, face-first into the dirt of Georgiana.

I looked up and my jaw dropped. Rezzing in front of me was an insanely detailed starship, docked and hooked up to fueling tanks in front of an entire spaceport complex. I had just discovered the R.S.S. Impulsive and the port of Breaker’s Folly, a labor of love assembled by a team of roleplayers and artists.

As most of my discoveries of new places in SL happen, this one was the result of crash landing a vehicle. I caught air in my car, flew for three sims, and landed in the midst of a delightfully run-down waterfront called Broken Cove. This little area is marvelously detailed, with all the look and feel of a small rural business whose customers have long since moved on.

I started playing around with OGLE (OpenGL Extractor) the other day, and it’s so far proven to be a marvelous tool. The basic idea behind OGLE is that it grabs geometry from inside Second Life (or most other OpenGL-based 3D applications, for that matter) and spits it out as a Wavefront .OBJ file, a format understood by many 3D modeling programs.

Setup was fairly simple. OGLE relies on another tool, GLIntercept, an OpenGL extraction and debugging tool, to do most of the heavy lifting, so that needs to be installed first, but the whole installation process was all of five minute’s work. OGLE comes with a default configuration file that works quite well for capture in SL, so after coping a couple of files to the Second Life directory, it was all ready to go.

The Forest of Kahruvel covers much of the sims of Stinson, Rodeo, and Cowell, deep in the heart of the oldest portion of the SL mainland. Its primary caretaker, Salazar Jack, has led a team in replanting trees and discovering ancient ruins in the area, making it one of the most beautiful and interesting regions of Second Life.

I found myself returning to Kahruvel the other day after a long motorcycle ride, and it was obvious that Salazar and his crew had been busy. Since my last visit months ago, Kahruvel has sprouted newly unearthed ruins, a lovely meadow area facing the lake on the north border of the woods, and even weather; a furious thunderstorm was brewing when I arrived, making me glad I’d parked the bike back in Noyo and set out on foot.

A few days ago, I made a motorcycle trip from Drawbridge to the start of the Linden road system on the main continent. I like to make this trek now and then to see how things have changed on the mainland. It’s a pilgrimage of sorts, a journey back to the origin, a struggle against lag and common sense that culminates in a little parking lot in Noyo.

Due to an accident of slow rezzing, I spotted some graffiti beneath the major intersection in Gama. Governor Linden himself has been tagging the causeway supports, expressing opinions both favorable and derogatory to Linden Lab.

I’m sure this bit of scenery has lain here for ages, and I’ve just missed it in the many times I’ve driven through the sim. It’s always nice to see bits of tongue-in-cheek humor from the Lindens now and then.

While testing the limits of Second Life physics and my own patience on a motorcycle ride, I ran across an eye-catching store in the sim of Bishop. Had geometry not been rezzing in at its usual slow pace, a common problem when speeding down the roads of SL, I’d have easily spotted this place from a long distance.

Simtropia (SLurl link) has an iconic and attractive design, making good use of vertical space both to attract the eye and to provide surface area for product display. The architecture is clean, simple, and functional.

The TGA sail template for the Flying Tako allows for some wonderful customization of this lovely little sailing vessel. Alan Kiesler has made it even easier for users of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro; he’s created files for both graphics apps that include all the alpha channel information and a layer for your own graphics, greatly simplifying the process of making your own custom sail.

I’ve replaced the template download in my original article with Alan’s template package; follow this link to download his generous efforts.

The recent 1.11.1 version of Second Life shifted from the older settings.ini file to a new, XML-based configuration file called settings.xml. It’s great to see progress toward an end-user-modifiable XUI-based interface, but it does play havoc with clever hacks like displaying arbitrary web pages in the F1 help browser.

UPDATE: Alan Kiesler created fabu Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro versions of the template, which supercede the original TGA-only version I posted on this site. See below for the download link. Thanks, Alan!

First, the bad news. Due to recent snafus on the Second Life forums (SL account required), the sail template Kanker Greenacre provided for customization of his lovely Flying Tako sailboat disappeared. The topic in which the file was posted on the forums seems to have fallen into a digital black hole, and not even the mighty Torley Linden was able to retrieve it.

The good news: I talked to Kanker, and he mailed me a copy of the template, which I am now hosting.