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Clever Zebra Assets Review

Austin Tate's picture
June 5, 2009 - 21:55 — Austin Tate

Notes from Austin Tate on using the Clever Zebra buildings on Vue in Second Life and in Openvue on Opensim.

Galleria.  this is the main building we use for exposition pavilion, posters, media screens for student projects, etc.

The curved shape and positioning of the posterboards /media screens, means its tricky and time consuming to split up the galleria along its length into separate plots with their own media URLs as we require.  The 4x4 metre blocks that are allow in plot delineation need to be set up with zig-zag /diagonal edges which takes time.  Suggestion for the new assets: we take account of plots split on a 4x4 cell basis.

The current galleria is split into 3 elements to keep under the 255 prim limit for individual builds, with the central part being the smallest but having one outside flag attached, which is easy to miss in selections, etc.

The seating area is integrated with the rest of the building, so the whole building is selected when someone right clicks on a seat to sit down.  It may work better if seating elements are separately installed as their own object.  The order of prim section before linking to allow for suitable order of seating where right click is not specifically on a specific seat pad would be worth thinking about.

The auto-rez box is offset below and rotated wrt the main building.  This makes positioning at precise angles awkward.  The position below the building also makes movement to ground level difficult as the position box will not go underground.  It is sometimes necessary to "dig a whole" to position the building where desired.

Moving to Opensim.  We were able to take the 3 parts of the galleria separately over into Opensim and reconstruct the building there.  The auto-rezzing scripts do not yet work in Opensim.. though current LSL functionality should mean they can so do so... perhaps with some minimum changes.  The recreation of the building was awkward due to the root prim of each part being (I assume) quite arbitrary in position and rotation.  A single root prim on the floor with zero rotation adjacent to the next element for the other part(s) would assist in precise and simpler alignment.

Suggestion... that the Galleria is in future made in FIVE parts:

  • centre - smallest element just for central part, and with root prim being a floor component with zero rotation.
  • left  - root prim being one floor segment to left of central element root prim.  Ideally zero rotation wrt central root prim.
  • right - root prim being one floor segment to left of central element root prim.  Ideally zero rotation wrt central root prim.
  • seating - root prim in carpet/logo.. kept separate and centred exactly over the central part root prim. Ideally zero rotation wrt central root prim.
  • auto-rez object - should be relative to the central prim with a simple whole metres X,Y,Z distance and with no rotational difference.

Other CZ Buildings.  The office buildings and so on all look fine, and we should talk about which of these are already suitable for the sorts of needs most users have.

  1. When I unpacked the Small (Branch) office on the same island as an already paced Galleria, the movement box moved the Galleria as well.  Maybe I had forgotten to delete the build scripts before I deleted the attachment box.  I wonder if a separate channel for the objects to listen to from the movement box for each building could be wise.
  2. The branch office is labelled as small office when built we ought to be consistent in naming boxes, build objects and final building.
  3. The Large Office has VERY many prims.  Perhaps excessively so?  We ought to try for a reasonable level of prims in buildings and landscaping/furniture where it does not detract from the look.
Lecture Theatre and Meeting Style Areas.  These I think need discussion to see what is wanted.  Lets have a separate discussion there, as we have some ideas that your designer may wish to take into account.  We are keen on a single main lecture theatre space that can be used stand alone... but which is easily extended with extra seating areas to accommodate added capacity across multiple sim (corners).
Round table style meeting/collaboration room.  We have adopted an "8 cell" design and feel it has some merit. It might be nice to try to use this for the new asset set and to style this into the visual style we adopt, but keep the basic shape so we have continuity with our own work on "I-Room" shared collaborative spaces in the new asset set.  We have an extended design that will be better for the 4mx4m rectangular shape basic selectable plot element as the current I-Room overlaps the space being based on a 10mx10m square grid design.
Central Plaza Impressive Feature.  This needs some creativity. We would like to stay lowish if we can and not build into the sky.

General

We should try to keep the core building prim counts down... And where it warrants it add on "extras" though an additional object which should have its root prim relative to the central prim root of the core building.. Again with zero relative rotation.  Other multi-part objects in the asset set should have their auto-rezzers adjusted this way too.

Rich textures, e.g. for the play glass windo detail, rather than using detailing prims may be worth considering.  We have detailed dark glass modern window textures created by us for an Informatics Forum style build in Second Life and Opensim which can be used if desired.