Another day :)

I figured out the one little glitch remaining with the Armillary's - so you'll be relieved to know I'll stop posting about them. :)

I thought I'd share the obvious - we all have different definitions of snow attire.

Yay!!

They work!!! It's always possible that something will go wrong over night ...... but right now, they work. :)

New Week - Scratch Start

The island looks like a junkyard for armillarys. :) However, I'm really close to either making them work the way I want them to.............or abandoning the idea that they will be anything more than decorative. I've had some weird things happening where prims are rotating away from where I left them (and no, there's no script in them). I think what I have to do is move to another part of the island, start from scratch and build another base model. Once I've made sure all the prims are rotated in the correct direction and the cut lines start at the correct spot etc., I can make an improved dial texture. If the numbers on the dial are proportional it doesn't keep accurate time all day - so I'm going to have to spend time in the photo editor constructing one. :)

I'll just keep taking aspirin for the SL-bow. :)

Really, Officer... it was an accident!

Most of the past week has been spent working out some problems with the armillarys (there was a brief shopping trip, but I don't want to talk about that). The hard work has been done by a talented scripter - I won't name him or her for reasons which will become obvious.

We went through a number of iterations of the script - and most of the need to rewrite was a result of me being stupid. There was one little hiccup though for which I can't claim credit - it was one of those serendipitous moments that occasionally happen during the voyage of creation and discovery. You know, when you try to create a ploughshare and it turns out to be a gun?

Really Officer, I was trying to script a paperclip........the nuclear weapon just happened!

That genius of a scripter accidentally created a potential time bomb. I'm standing there yelling at the prim saying "you're supposed to be moving dammit" when unbeknownst to me (or that scripter) he or she had created something very different than intended. Just lucky it didn't kill me.

Now I have the script I need (thanks to that scripter who shall remain nameless). The only problems that remain are with prims, rotation, cut lines and non-proportional spacing. These are issues I'm willing to tackle - I will build important character by steadfastly refusing to quit. And it's much safer than yelling at script that might really want to disembowel me.

It's alive!

Well sort of - it tells time anyway. And since it tells accurate SL local time and I did the scripting - I'm very proud. :) I found an open source clock script (couldn't find it the normal way so I went looking for one of those jerks that resell free script and found it). The script would rotate a texture to real life time based on a 12 hour clock - so I changed it to sl local time, based on a 24 hour clock and added script so that it would adjust it every second. And voila! It works! A minor triumph I know, but I'll take what I can get. :)

This one still has issues but, with help of friends, I'm hoping I can convince it to also tell time.

Mostly I'd like to just go back to building and leave this script stuff to those (frankly weird) people who like it. :)

ROI

I got a lot done last night and today. But there's a point at which you really need to decide you're not making progress - no matter how much effort you put in. I swear I've changed the textures on the base of this thing 87 gazillion times. I still don't like it. But I think it's time to leave it alone - I'll come back to it later. Maybe by then my brain will have restarted.

Experimenting with time .....

I'm experimenting with showing the passage of time on the sundials using a shadow which is supposedly created by the gnomon. The problem of course is to reflect the "actual" passage of time. Since I have 24 hour markings on the dials I guess I'll stick with a 24 hour clock and try to make it as close as possible to sl time. lol You just know this will end in disaster right?

This is a plate equatorial. I'll have to package it in a rezzer I think - although they aren't very precise when they align things. I'll have to do more experimentation. :)