Changes along the road

For pretty much three years I’ve been taking care of the Fermi Sandbox in Second Life, one of the major sandboxes that are around. Starting as normal visitor, pulled in by a friend, I worked myself to caretaker and Retail Operations Manager, which I have been doing with all the love and dedication I could find.

In the early days all retail-changes were kept on an Excel-sheet, but since there are so many transactions that turned out to be too much of it. To make life easier I was able to develop a nearly fully automated system, together with the help of Arthur Fermi (the owner of Fermi Sandbox) and hours of google.

As things go along on their own, it also brought me to a point of being stuck, not able to do something else besides all the hassel. For that, together with the feeling not fitting in their team anymore and having to justify myself for everything I do, it brought me to my decision to resign from my job at Fermi and look abroad for new challenges, inspiration, but mostly the ability to take things easier.
This I have found at the Little Blue Sandbox, where they gave me the well known warm family feeling, something I have been missing the last months at Fermi. I am Gillian Carthage and her Little Blue team very grateful for their warm welcome aboard their ‘ship’. Special thanks also goes to Arthur Fermi for giving me all those opportunities at the Fermi sandbox, together with being such a wonderful person to work with.

In the fast lane: Shortcuts

To make your oh so tough (second)life a bit easier, I’ve gathered for you some very handy lists with shortcuts for use in Secondlife.

One is a printable document (Credits go to Kippie Friedkin for making it). Kippie’s document has even all the shortcuts for the Apple users amongst us !

The other link is the Secondlife Wiki, that contains every shortcut possible. If you feel like being a keyboard-freak, click this link.

A Little help: Scripting

For those that want to do LSL-scripting (Second Life), but don’t want to logon, there are various ways of doing that.
One could be the use of the plain notepad, but since not everybody knows every function without even have to think about it (just like me), I came across a nice and very helpful program.
It’s called LSL-Editor, which is a free program that not only helps you by showing the function and how to use it, it can also check your code and run like as you are in-world. Complete with dialogs, listens and many more functions. To download it, simply visit this address. Surely worth trying, whether you are a professional or just a starter.

My latest project: Fermi Sandbox

The last months have been quite busy for me, being part of a big project, the redesign of the Fermi Sandbox. Not only the entire sim was set upside down, also the amount of rentals was reduced from 200 to 155. This had all to do with the lag problems we had lately. Since Fermi is one of the major sandboxes around, it quickly became clear that, together with all its visitors, the items in the shops were causing a not-that-great experience for builders. Reducing on rentals when having them all rented out was also the biggest challenge. All tenants that lost their space had to be contacted, relocated or put on hold. As soon as a spot became available, we had to get in touch with them and give them their shop back, together with the saved days from their old rental.

The move was planned for Saturday the 19th of September and turned out to be a long but smooth day (17 hours for me). Together with Arthur Fermi we started on checking rentals, updating my rental system with the days a tenant had and returning their items if they didn’t respond on our calls and notices.
When we cleared out the entire sim we used a great yet tiny script that Arthur made to move the buildings from the platform high up in the sky to the ground-floor. Though we had closed access to the sim allowing a quick move, we did had a great audience watching us dropping the buildings in place.

The new design is quite a change if you compare it with the old one: Shops around the entire sim with an arrival point that is at the border of it, creating a large, undivided sandbox. Instead of just one theme we now have four different ones in each corner: A city look, one based on the “Erasmus” bridge in Rotterdam, a Ponderosa (Western look) and the corner which I made which is based on the ocean’s waves.

Now, after almost two weeks, all the hard work really payed off. Not only it is much easier for our managers to work griefers out of the sandbox, people have a greater and bigger place to show their creativity. With an increasing traffic every day and the sim being full regularly it is again a great place to Build, Shop, learn and have fun.

The Fermi Sandbox:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Fermi/80/128/24/

Scripty time: An automatic light

To make life even more easy, here is one of my popular scripts for you. This script automatically switches on/off the prim’s light feature according to the sim’s daylight state.
Feel free to experiment with it and change it to suit your needs. If you replace the light-code with a SetTexture, you can even make your enviroment change wheither it’s day or night!

Do remember SecondLife only supports the six closest lights to be showing.
For easy copy-pasting I added the script as attached document with this post (see below).

Document

Photoshop and Gimp tutorials

For those that are Photoshop or Gimp addict, I’ve found some great sites with a wide variety of subjects. Great for discovering all the features of your favorite program, or just to refresh up the knowledge.

Gimp: gimp-tutorials.net
Photoshop: photoshoplady.com

On the move

Moving back and forth from Google’s blogspot I really feel like settled now. Time to update more often on scripts, great places and such things to make your SL hours even more fun.