SL Wierdness: Sculptie Lag

I love how the small section of folks I know and half-know in SL and SL Blogsville know so much useful stuff! Thank you to Emily Orr for this great comment reply about sculpties and the lag they cause (which even on my slightly old but still powerful desktop PC can take many many minutes to rez).

 

HBA Island: A New Wave Sweeps In

Thanks to a post I saw on NWM (via the ever brill Bettina Tizzy, a one woman dynamo who keeps the wonder of SL alive for many, many people) HBA Island now has some pretty amazing waves washing about just off shore. They are the best I’ve ever seen and have been achieved using animated textures on sculptie prims*. The only downside is that sculpties do slow rez times down on older machines – please let me know if HBA Island becomes unusable and I’ll take them off. In the meantime, please swim carefully as the rocks that sunk the Telesto have a nasty under-current…

* I’ve no idea what that means. I mean I know what it means, but I don’t know why that is a good or bad thing when it comes to building. I’ve no idea why a V8 engine is more powerful than a V6 or a GeForce 8800 card is better than a 8600 – these are all things I guess I do not need to know, just accept. Wouldn’t it be terrible if people took that same blind faith and happy ignorance and applied it to say, ohhh, a religion or government or something important?

 

HBA Island: Building a Sculptie Cave

One of the things I find annoying about not owning my own sim (ha! like I could afford it) is the fact I can’t raise and lower land enough to make caves. I’ve seen others in SL and some are better then others – it depends on the skill of the designer and this is a skill I fear I am not gifted with. So imagine my squeal of joy when I came across a pack of sculptie cave building blocks in SL exchange – hoohah! I bought it and began at once to play about with them on a sky platform above HBA Island – here’s the photo record

Here’s the bits I decided to use – tunnel/entrance, back and wall sections. The black around them are prims that can be set to transparent so the sculpties can be set to phantom to walk into, but not through.

This is the finished cave, but the whole thing (sculpties and prims) kept going to phantom to I had to split them apart and then drop the phantom sculptie cave in first and then the prim solid-but-invisible cave in second.

Here’s a top down view of it in place under the sea.

And here I am stood on top – this is why the prims are needed, they make the whole thing solid.

But beware… something evil lurks within…