A poem, and a painting, come alive

It’s been my pleasure and privilege to be part of another of Karima Hoisan’s amazing Kitely sims, based this time on one of her lovely poems.  (See previously The Hudson Line, based on the Hudson line, and In Your Head, based on your head (well…).)

The poem is here, and the artist’s own posting on the sim is here; I urge you to follow both those links, and then experience the Kitely sim for yourself, if you do the Kitely thing at all. (And if you don’t, maybe you should; it turns out you’re still allowed to use SL, too! /grin ).

And in the meantime, here are a couple (more) pictures, as further incentive:

Doing the scripting for this sim was great fun, and I hope there is at least one thing that makes you scratch your head and think “How did they do that?”.  Most likely it is the result of Ms. Hoisan and I racking our brains for a few days trying to figure out how to get a particular effect, and then when it seemed impossible her saying “I don’t suppose we could…?” and me smacking my forehead.  :)

… And a star to steer her by

One of my very very favorite Solstice-time presents this year was this amazing Tall Ship; the Tradewind from Trudeau Classic Sailing Yachts.

It’s really an astounding ship, big and grand and detailed and authentic. It has many many prims, and in fact most of the ship is worn as an attachment because of that; the part that you rezz on the water is just a basic (invisible) outline, and the sitting poseballs. (It holds the captain, and I think up to three crew / guests.) It has an optional-rez cabin with a bunk that sleeps two, and you can change the color scheme, authorize other people to sail it, and do lotsa other stuff that I haven’t tried yet.

I liked it so much that when I got some RL cash for Christmas I converted half of it to Lindens, and used a fraction of that to buy a little daysailor from the same place; the Trudeau Twenty. It is an incredibly sweet little boat:

Here I am moored next to a recreation of a Piranesi drawing:

(I love Piranesi’s dark fantastic work, but I was having too much fun sailing to stop and give it a thorough lookover; will have to go back there sometime.)

A wonderful feature of the Twenty is the boom tent. You can drop anchor and rez the boom tent, which includes a mattress with sleeping poesballs, for a nap or an overnight:

It’s practically a houseboat! (Now I have to play with the Tall Ship more, and see what surprises it has that I haven’t found yet.)

(Oh, and that’s an automated airship in the background, just pulling in. Have to take that tour sometime, too…)

Wind and Sailing in Second Life

Speaking of sailing in SL, a v good friend suggested that I say a word about how the wind works, for SL-sailing purposes.

The simplest sailboats, like my Skipjack “Indolence”, just go wherever you point them, as fast as you tell them to go; they are actually powerboats with decorative sails, and don’t care about the wind at all.

The Trudeau yachts, on the other hand, use a pretty sophisticated model of sails and wind, and have HUDs that tell you where the wind is coming from, let you raise and lower and take in and let out and reef the sails, and so on, and the behavior of the craft (including really nice water and sail sounds) is directly related to how the sails are set compared to how the wind is blowing. For some value of “wind”.

There are at least three kinds of wind in Second Life that a sailboat can use: the “built-in” SL wind that scripts can detect, a custom wind as specified by the sailor (it’s really nice, if you don’t want to tack painfully upwind in a narrow channel for hours, to just tell the boat “pretend the wind is coming from right behind us”), and “racewind”, which is a shared wind for an area that is broadcast by a scripted object, so that all the race-compatible boats around can see the same wind, and race fairly.

All these kinds of wind are described in more detail on the Wind page of the Second Sailing Wiki, which I recommend to anyone interested in the details.

All of which shouldn’t scare anyone off from SL sailing; it’s not actually hard at all, just lots of fun. I haven’t sailed in RL in years, and even then it was just simple one-sail boats on little lakes; but figuring out the controls on the Trudeau craft didn’t take me long at all (once I figured out which arrow was the wind-direction indicator!), and I’m finding sailing with an actual wind (of whichever kind I’m in the mood for) to be a lovely soothing thing to do.

Try it, if you haven’t! Maybe I’ll see you on th’ waves. :)

Eat at Joe’s!

No, no, wait, that’s not it, hold on… I mean: buy boats at Dale’s Motorsports! :)

I have finally finally finished populating at least the first set of products (“products”) on the tiny parking space in Busy Ben’s Vehicle Lot that I won six months of lease on in the lottery, as previously mentioned. Here it is all set up:

No more “Coming Soon” signs! I’ve had the first three products (the basic boat, a really cheaup nomod limited-time demo version, and a lifetime subscription to future upgrades) out for quite awhile, but the last product (the one at the top there in the picture) took a bit longer. It’s the most complicated, since what you actually buy is a device that lets you and anyone else who comes by your land rez temporary boats to use; so it’s a product within a product, and required lots of testing.

And also I am really easily distracted. :)

(In case you are wondering, the complex pink texture in the left side of the picture there is from the quite large and flashy boat-selling display in the lot next to mine. Their boats look much more realistic, but higher prim!)

Then, due to great good luck and great good friends, I got the opportunity to set up another store in a place with quite a bit more space, in Waterway West New York, which is one of a whole bunch of sims run by Southern Tier Health Link New York.

My piece of pier is quite a bit bigger than the parking space at Busy Ben’s, so as well as the four Seaspray products, I’ve got a few of my photographs (appropriately water-themed) out for sale, and some places to sit an’ stuff, as well as a boat-rezzer so people can zoom around completely free.

I should do a whole weblog posting just on the NY HealthScape sims, ’cause they are cool. While I’m getting around to that :), here’s a Chestnut’s Choices from back in August, that talks about the place a bit. And here’s the Snapzilla photos of Panacea Luminos, the head honcho. And here’s a Second Citizen thread about the opening of a marvelous art exhibition there. Come by!

My commercial empire!

I mentioned last time that I won a spot in Busy Ben’s Vehicle Lot, in the Boats section.

Monday was the first day we could move in, and I’ve moved in!

Well, sort of:

Right now the only thing you can actually buy is the Preview Version of the Seaspray 1.1; a nice 1-prim 1-rider zipping-around boat with no fancy features, for a mere 25L. (What a deal!) That’s a model of it spinning around in the middle there; it comes in red. :)

(But it is mod.)

Soon the Basic Version will be available, which will have lots of customization features (125 colors, nine textures, shine and glow and light), locked and unlocked modes, fast and slow modes (the current one is pretty fast, and not hard to lose control of while zooming), and like that. That one will be 50L.

And later there will be an auto-updating version, and a rezzer so you can let your guests produce their own auto-cleanup copies, and, and, and…

Unless I get distracted. :)

Busy Ben’s (I’m in slot 44).