From the Wyverns nest

Abalus rises!

On the 18th of June a new sim rose from the waves, west of the new Equus sim (soon to be the new home of Lone Star Ranch).

Abalus, also known as the Island of Amber, is an Open Spaces sim. The sim is shared between the Purple Wyvern group and the Caudra Draconis group. This will soon be the new home location for the Purple Wyvern outlets. Jsindo is staying, alas delegated to second fiddle. This means that the Avendale Ruins location will be for sale soon!

Open Spaces Sims

Open Spaces sims are meant to be “void” sims used to provide ocean or open space areas. On a sim host, four Open Spaces sims occupy the space normally occupied by a normal sim. This means that an Open Spaces sim has much lower capabilities then a conventional sim. The most visible difference is that the sim has a limit of 3750 prims instead of 15000, but load up an Open Spaces sim with avatars and scripts and the other limitations become apparent too.

The benefit is that an Open Spaces sim costs a lot less than a normal Sim, but to own one you must already have a normal sim. Fortunately, Isle of Wyrms owner, Daryth Kennedy is starting to rent Open Spaces sims for residential use and is allowing commercial use in certain cases.

Terraforming

Terraforming a sim is an art that requires patience! The easiest way to do it is to use external tools to generate the RAW file and upload that. However, only the estate owner can upload RAW files on to the sim. As a tenant, I hold the Estate Manager roles, which allows me a lot of things, but not major terrain works.

The standard Land Editing tools are best left to small scale land terraforming. I tried to do a major change and had to revert it since everything just looked too blocky. Here are some useful tips for terraforming!

• Use select land and “Apply to selection” with care. This is the easiest way to end up with blocky terrain.
• Make small quick brushes with the selector for best effect, and use the smallest selection brush you can get away with.
• Using the “Flatten” tool and sweeping from higher to lower land seems to be an effective (but slow) way of extending hills and land into the sea (but mind, you could end up with a flat terrace if you don’t change your starting pont each time).
• Using the Flatten tool the other way around is a good way of cutting a channel or river
• The “Smooth” tool doesn’t smooth to a flat area! (It’s a bit weird).

Estate Management

Unfortunately the Estate Management tools are fairly undocumented in what they do and what are valid settings combination’s. The first thing I came across is teleporting, telehubs and landing points. As an Estate Manager I can by-pass a lot of the teleport limitations (I’ve not tried going into a banned parcel, but pretty sure I can). However, a non-estate manager can not.

Out of the box, the sim was set to not-public (which means you have to be on the named access list) but also with no direct teleport allowed. As I didn’t have a telehub set, any user on the access list who tried to teleport in were denied (had I been connected to a sim that was public, they would have ended up there). They were not actually barred, it was just the sim was redirecting them to the nearest telehub. That was in the next door sim, which was non-public. OK, allow direct teleports problem solved…

Telehubs

We wanted to initially add a telehub at our Stargate. Telehubs make all incoming traffic land at the telehub (except Estate Mangers, the Estate Owner and Officers in the group that owns the land). If you don’t mind that all your traffic lands at one spot, then they are the thing to use.

However, if you are going to cut plots and want to allow people to land at those plots, then you would use plot landing points instead. After some training by Onix Harbinger, I was ready to make my own Telehub. The instructions to do so can be found at the Second Life wiki under Estate and Private Region Telehubs and Direct Teleport. This particular wiki page isn’t the easiest to find!

A couple of bits of excellent information given to me by Onix were:

• You have to have at least one Spawn Point.
• Telehubs and Landing Points are mutually exclusive - if you set both then who knows where people could rez in!

The Future…

Abalus presents the opportunity to present the purple wyvern products plus it allows space, so the vendors no longer need to be crammed together. The fact I need to make a few dragon orientated items for the sim also provides a few new ideas for products…

So watch this space… and Abalus…