Builder's Buddy

Having spent four days over Easter learning how to make a holodeck scene, then being unable to share it and so feeling generally pretty bad about it I was really pleased to attend an in-world session on the Builder’s Buddy run my Daffodil Fargis on Thursday evening and learn how to make a simple holodeck very easily.
Daf demonstrated the Builder’s Buddy and we all created a scene of two cushions on a rug. The builder’s buddy is a set of two scripts, one in the base unit and the other in each item of the scene that one has built. As soon as all of the components are packed into the base unit they can be rezzed into their proper position by the touch of a button. They can be given away and so shared with anyone!

My first thought was to create a couple of shells similar to the ones provided with holodeck software. That was not as easy as it seems, using megaprims brings up the as yet uninvestigated offset setting for textures – wow!! I managed to get doors and windows in the right places both sides of the megaprims eventually but it is not intuitive and I guess I am lacking the necessary math’s skills to do it any other way than by trial ad error!

Being able to share that successfully spurred me on to build a two story basic construction and I managed that last night. It is not exactly the proportions that I wanted but I was working with a limited set of megaprims and had not heard of the SALT HUD which enables one to send out for other sized megaprims which are delivered to you if they are available. For more info see: http://tidalblog.blogspot.com/ and http://tr.im/jKlS.

I wondered about the possibility of creating language teaching scenes which all language teachers could share! With a few basic shells to start people off I imagine that would be quite easy. However, in the middle of the night another thought struck me – why did I need to create basic shells, why not use the many free buildings already available? So today I am creating Builder’s Buddy boxes of freely available buildings which could be set up as offices, cafes, shops etc. to inspire language work.

So - the two buildings photographed were built by someone else but can be easily shared and added to through the Builder's Buddy, the little garden scene is made up of freely available bits put together.