Watch SL cyberpunk doyenne Ayla Pants and her pink particle-spewing pet drone (previously on NWN here) take you on a personal tour of a new scene she recently created. It's mostly cobbled together with existing assets from other vendors, but working with 1400 land impact, she's fashioned a moody cyberpunk environment rich with implicit stories.
Click here to teleport and visit yourself (until end of September).
Her favorite element is something that's often missing from SL builds: Ambient sound.
Specifically, as she tells me, "[T]he music I was able to have playing in the little bar. I really liked the idea of localizing the music without having to separate that square of the parcel from everything else. Also being able to hear the music grow louder as you approached the bar was a really important element of realism I was trying to attain. You can't get that by having streaming music on the parcel, or separated square. The best you get there is silence to full volume once you cross that border."
Hopefully other SL creators are inspired by this to add more ambient sound. Speaking of which, here is Ms. Pants' general advice to builders on creating a great scene while working within land impact limits:
Don't be afraid to explore all the ways you can edit an object. Sometimes you're blocked from changing the size or texture of a whole object, but are allowed to edit all the linked objects within it. Pretty much all of the rooms and buildings you see in my video were altered in one way or another; whether stretched to add more depth or textures swapped out, etc.As far as land impact struggles go, most objects don't actually have the full land impact value SL's editor says it has. An object that has 5 land impact may actually have only 4.6, and another that says it has 1 land impact is only 0.3, but SL will always round up. You link those two together and now you have one object that is still only 5 land impact, where was before, the two separately added up to 6. This trick doesn't work all the time, sometimes an object is so complex that linking it with any other shape explodes the land impact to ridiculous numbers, so experimentation is the key.Likewise, if there's an object you like that is too complex, see if there are any linked objects within in it that you can unlink and delete to reduce land impact.If there is some feature you want to add that requires a script and you don't know how to write one, Google is your friend. For example, I searched for "SL script play audio on loop" to find an example of the script I needed to get the bar's music loop to play.Above all, make sure you have an unmodified copy of all objects in your inventory before you start editing. Just in case you need to start over.
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