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.

The Impulsive is a life-size model of a starship for a tabletop RPG. Handy notecard dispensers fore and aft of the Impulsive have this to say about the build:

This build has been in the works since March, 2005. Primary Design is by Kamber Queso. Scripting is by Aislin Wallaby. Land ownership, design and scripting suggestions, and snide comments are by Buster Broom (we luv ya!). This build has over 40 working doors, some creative ramps, and over 1000 lovingly arranged, textured and tortured prims. The ship is also soundscaped, although more sounds emerge as more equipment is added.

The ship is designed to realistic proportions, which means its interior spaces are as cramped as you’d expect to see in a real spacefaring vessel. Mouselook is highly recommended for poking about the tight confines of the ship. Such exploration is well-rewarded by heaps of detail, from the knicknacks of the crew in their quarters, to a bridge full of irresistible buttons, to working ramps, doors, and airlocks.

After emerging from the cargo bay on the aft end of the craft, I received an IM from Talila Liu, who claimed to be in the throes of boredom. Knowing how dangerous a bored catgirl can be, I thought it best to teleport her over so she could explore the rest of the area with me. She fit right in with the surroundings in the high-tech prim outfit she’s been working on.

Finished poking about in the nooks and crannies of the ship, we moved into the ramshackle port of Breaker’s Folly. It’s obviously a place that gets more traffic than funding. Most of the port facilities themselves are in working order, but they show signs of wear and neglect by a staff who have been stretching scarce supplies for decades.

In some places, there are run-down craft left to rust. It’s probably a good thing for environmental reasons that the Port Authority hasn’t shoved the hulk of one crashed craft into the nearby river, but it almost certainly limits the amount of cargo the port can offload at once. I suspect they don’t get nearly enough traffic to worry about it, and it’s pretty obvious they’re not too concerned with appearances.

Past the hangar near the Impulsive is a little café called Esalla’s, which rests against the side of the Breaker’s Folly Port Authority building. The top of the building’s control tower affords a great view of the area.

Just up the hill from the Port Authority are a power plant and the entrance to a small commercial district. The area is home to a few small merchants, a temple, an eatery, and an ominous establishment called “The Vat.” The purpose of the last place is a mystery, but given the tanks of unidentifiable green goo and the blood-covered medical lab, Talila and I didn’t stick around to ask any questions.

I look forward to visiting again now that I’ve discovered this delightful slice of Second Life. Breaker’s Folly is utterly drenched in atmosphere, and it’s a great place to really get away from it all. It’s not hard to imagine this place being located on a distant and half-forgotten world, and while it isn’t exactly the most vacation-friendly location imaginable, it’s a nice change of pace from the clubs, casinos, malls, and residences that make up much of the grid.

Breaker’s Folly and the R.S.S. Impulsive

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.

Both primwork and texturing are superb. The whole area looks dirty, rusty, and decayed, a far cry from the straight lines and flat colors common to many areas of Second Life. It tells a story. The details make the place feel like there have been people here, possibly still a few eking out a living who are out on a boat checking the crab pots.

Friends of mine lived in next door Pimushe for a while, and I remember much of the region of Sutherland to be covered in false starts at making night clubs over the water. It’s great to see something so beautiful and thoughtful here, instead of flat platforms full of flashing lights. Broken Cove conforms to its landscape instead of covering it.

Broken Cove

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.

As you can see from the screen captures, the objects in SL are captured quite faithfully by OGLE, and Blender does a decent job of bringing the resulting .OBJ files in without mangling them. The files did require a little cleanup once inside Blender, mostly because OGLE pulls in every object that’s currently visible in the scene when you capture a frame, and a few that are present but aren’t normally visible, such as the world skybox, clouds, and even hidden HUD attachments. A word of advice: if you want to spend less time cleaning up a model once it’s in your 3D modeling program, take your pictures well away from objects you don’t want to capture, and remove your HUD attachments. I popped up to 740 meters altitude for these captures, which worked quite well.

I did find that most, but not all, of the meshes that make up the Damselfly were brought into Blender as duplicates, so I had to do a bit of deletion to further clean up the model. I suspect this might have to do with one of GLIntercept’s options that captures a pair of rendered frames for comparison, a tool useful for debugging, but not quite as helpful when capturing a single frame is all I need. GLIntercept and OGLE have a cosmic butt-ton of options to set, so there’s probably a way to avoid the duplicate geometry.

What good does this sneaky bit of geometry capture do me? Well, aside from being able to send my avatar or objects to a 3D printer, like that used by Fabjectory, I’ve now got the option of using all the tools available to a good modeling tool, like subsurface modeling, materials, and complex lighting and rendering options, to make creations from Second Life into photorealistic art.

More interesting to me for SL, tough, is that prims come through the process as their own individual meshes. I can use the UV map generation tools in Blender to unwrap the polygons that make up an object, then lay them out flat, creating a custom texturing template for Photoshop. This should make texturing some of the more tortured prims, like the tori that make up the Damselfly jet engines, a much more precise process. Anything that takes guesswork out of the texturing process not only saves on upload fees, but also on time and frustration.

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.

Just as the rain was really starting to pick up, I ran across Salazar himself. We chatted a bit, and then parted so he could continue with his work in the forest. I continued south through the forest and into the seaside village in Cowell, where I was joined by Wynne Patton, who was new to this magical place.

Not only had Salazar been busy with the forest itself, his office and workshop in the base of the lighthouse, hardly more than a table or two on my last visit, was now fully covered in projects and memorabilia. There are little details of his second life scattered about: photos, half-finished projects, research notes and maps of the region, knicknacks. Visiting Salazar’s personal space is a lot like visiting the personal space of someone in real life; I kept looking over my shoulder expecting to be caught sneaking around where I shouldn’t have been.

Salazar returned while Wynne and I were poking through his personal effects. He offered us an aerial tour of Kahruvel aboard the Aonghus, a delightful steam-powered aircraft built by Mary Edison. It was an invitation I was quite eager to accept. The flyer was a perfect platform from which to observe the forest and its surroundings, and Salazar proved a capable pilot; we weren’t struck by lightning even once, despite the storm raging around us. Wynne and I clung to the bow of the craft, flexi-hair whipping in the wind as it rushed past.

All in all, it was one of those evenings that makes Second Life worthwhile. Sharing a little of the dream with other creative souls is good for the spirit, and when all the elements fall together just so, such shared dreaming makes SL a completely magical experience.

Kahruvel is steeped in history, as revealed by the ruins, artifacts, and research notes that may be discovered throughout the region. Finding pieces of the puzzle is half the fun of Kahruvel; just enough clues are available to give it a real sense of place, as if it really predated the Second Life grid itself. More of this history is revealed on Salazar’s Kahruvel website, where you will also find his blog.

A few points of interest in Kahruvel follow.

• Salazar’s lighthouse
• Stone circle
• Seaside village plaza
• Kyyp’s Steamworks
• Phyneas Jack’s lookout

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.

Inside, Simtropia sells avatar shapes (with skins by CryoGen), eyes, and clothing for both men and women. The avatar shapes are impressive, with artfully sculpted facial features that are a welcome departure from the cookie-cutter newbie face that’s all too common in SL. Each shape comes with three variations, so you can express a bit of individual preference within a theme.

The eyes are gorgeous and realistic, among the best I’ve seen in Second Life. If I weren’t so attached to my silly whiteless alien eyes, I’d strongly consider the violet pair.

Clothing at the boutique tends toward casual, comfortable fashions in bright colors. There are blouses, t-shirts, sweaters, and jeans, all with plenty of details. The menswear is particularly good, with some sweater designs that are flattering and unique.

With the exception of some typos in the wall displays, the store oozes professionalism. Its owners have a flair for graphic design and marketing. Their website, Simtropia.com, doesn’t have much content yet, but it has the same consistent branding as the store. I look forward to seeing more from Simtropia in the future.

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

Changing the setting in the new XML file isn’t difficult, though. On Windows, you need to edit the following file:

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\
  SecondLife\user_settings\settings.xml

Add the following line to the file:

<HtmlHelpHomePage
  value="http://sl.nanoshock.net/gateway/"/>

You might also want to try the following URL for a more browser-within-a-browser feel:

http://b1.bitty.com/b2browser/?contenttype=website&
  contentvalue=http%3A%2F%2Fsecondlife%2Ecom
  %2Fapp%2Fhelp%2Findex%2Ehtml

This URL makes use of Scott Matthews’ fabulous Bitty Browser, a Javascript-based browser within the browser that offers some nice search and navigation capabilities to the F1 help window in Second Life, and can also be embedded in other web pages outside of the SL client; you know, in a regular browser. It’s not perfect in the help browser window; SL’s embedded Firefox implementation doesn’t support things like opening new windows, so some of Bitty’s features don’t work, but it’s still quite useful if you want to surf without leaving Second Life.

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.

Download Flying Tako 3 sail template
(Zip file containing Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and TGA template files, 2.95 MB)

With the help of this template, I’ve got my own Tako decked out in garish personalized glory. Thank you, Kanker, for making such a fun and versatile boat!