It's been awhile since I've typed some notes in this blog... but that does not mean I have been absent from Second Life... But even in a constantly changing digital Universe you sometimes have to pause minute before doing anything drastic.. Building an educational Second Life Island is uncharted territory.. One of the major difficulties of building the IML SL Space is looking from the perspective of someone completely new to Second Life and probably new to 3D environments in general. I scripted the prims for the floor of the IML using a color coordinate script that changes the prims color based on it's location on the Island.. This created a gradient on the floor that people used as a reference for flying around the Island... that's IF THEY COULD FLY... I've also learned that most residents even if they are quite capable of flying PREFER TO WALK... sooo.. I added ramps to all of the different areas... This was fine if they could SEE the ramps from a distance. I've had students prefer to login to Second Life with their laptops instead of a desktop and use wifi... this greatly reduces the users graphics rendering capabilities. So I had to take into account someone who is new to navigating a 3D space and has limited draw distance... so what I did is actually delete some of the gradient grid and make prim paths to the specific areas on the Island.
Other Changes... I removed the ceiling. I find the idea of walls in Virtual spaces odd. Why is this wall here?.. Is it blocking me from an area that I shouldn't be in? To have a ceiling when regions don't have an actual height limit seems unecessary. It also allows the user to see other projects from almost anywhere on the Island.
I changed the texture of the ground/DIRT (dirt, trees, water, etc..in SL are also baffling to me)..so now all of the base height is textured and says 'IML'... it's even viewable from SPACE (or the map that is)... working with .raw files in photoshop I was able to change the floor level to be even (much more accurate than working with the land terraform tools).
I blocked out the OCEAN... I constructed walls around the edges of the Island using the same color coordinate script of the floor up to a height of 256... this gives the full color gradient.. Walls on the edge of the island do not bother me because you can't actually fly off the Island... the large expanse of the Ocean is a LIE!!! You cannot go swimming out there... no virtual fish..NOTHING. So to replace this view with one that shows you that there are boundaries and can be used as a navigational tool I feel is worth the extra prims.
