February 2004

[Update 20040311: these seating groups appear to be even more broken in V2.03, released 20040310. The fix described here doesn’t work in V2.03; see this article instead.]

In V2 of There, all of the designer 5-seater “gothic” seating groups reverted back to looking like the basic red variety from the There store, as shown in the left-hand side of the image above. As I hang around in the desert round the Oasis a lot, I see plenty of Ladie_Di’s Palm and Hiero seating and this effect was annoying enough that I decided to investigate.

It looks to me as if There have had two models for this same seating group, and tried to perform some kind of automated conversion of the .ts files that control the application of textures to the objects. However, due to a difference in the names of the textures on the two new models, this is failing with the result that designer objects appear using the default textures for the model.

With a bit of tweaking, I was able to make the two seating groups in question look right again, as shown in the right hand side of the image above. If you would like to do the same, download [link removed] and un-zip it into your client’s Resources\gamekit\epobs\fu directory. If that sounds too daring, wait for the fix from There.

Caveats: This only fixes things for you, not anyone visiting you and admiring your furniture. It doesn’t help with any furniture other than Lady_Di’s Palm and Hiero seating. If you want a fix like this for anything else, compare the original and tweaked files for one of the products in the download and work it out for yourself, or cross my palm with Therebucks. This fix might not be compatible with There’s own fix for the problem, if and when that arrives. It probably voids your warranty and may frighten the horses or scare your cat.

I have reworked the archive hierarchy on this blog (again) to make it (even more) future-proof. One side-effect of this is that all the individual article links have changed. So much for “permalinks”.

My apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this; the good news is that it was a lot of work, so I am unlikely to do anything like that again soon.

I found this strangely broken seating during MJC’s recent “Romantic Spots” quest. It has four “Sit” buttons rather than the normal two, and two people can therefore sit at each end of the couch. Much good clean fun can be had with combinations of the different seating poses; I provide images of a couple of the least racy variations.

I’m pretty sure that what is going on here is that two identical 2-seaters have been placed in exactly the same location. I’ve put this in the “Eggs” category because it seems to me that this isn’t likely to be completely accidental.

What I’m unsure of is whether this is really MJC’s idea of romantic…

There is something just a little Escher-like about this one. Maybe if we can get some Roman builder sets and enough people on hoverpacks, we can do a full version…

I picked up my first ignore today. I don’t know when, and I don’t know who, but at some point someone in There decided that I was so annoying they never wanted to see or hear from me again.

Or, they just hit the Ignore button by accident. Or, there is someone around trying to beat Jopy’s record. Or, randomly ignoring people is someone’s idea of fun.

All of the people I actually want to talk to still seem to be able to see me, so I am not going to fret about it. Still, I have to admit to being a little unsettled by this.

Above the door to the tomb in (There) Egypt, an inscription in hieroglyphics caught my eye. Being a suspicious kind of person, I wondered whether this was perhaps not some ancient language, but rather an English phrase transliterated using an ancient alphabet (people do this kind of thing for a laugh all the time, even in children’s books).

Assuming the black dots were word boundaries, a bit of work with an alphabet chart from the Royal Ontario Museum gave me “TUMB UF UR AXPAKT?TEUNS”, or more smoothly “Tomb of Our Expectations”.

I’m not sure whether this is some kind of morbid joke about a project that went wrong, or an uplifting statement about the kind of visual detail and quality There’s art team can produce when appropriate. Either way, the inscription sounds like it is a quotation from somewhere, and if you have any idea where it might originate I’d be interested to hear from you. Google, usually my friend in times of need, came up with only one hit for the phrase in an article by the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Spokane…

It doesn’t make sense to try and document every change in a place like the Oasis village, but over the couple of weeks since my last overview pictures, it is interesting to see what has been stable and what has stayed the same.

Perhaps the most obvious thing that has happened is that the village is now larger, with more builders and more portazones. It is no longer possible to take a picture of the whole area, so I have taken three to form a kind of panorama (unfortunately, normal panorama software doesn’t work very well with There screenshots).

The center of the village has opened up a lot, so that there is now building on both sides of the road (the light-coloured area) that leads to Sirocco Heights to the west. The spaceship you can see straddling the road has since flown off to another part of There. Since these pictures were taken, one of the shop units in the central “L” has also been converted into a bridge to allow easier access from the ruins on the western side. The tent at far left was originally part of the central garden area; it is now off to one side and provides enough seating for large groups of people to talk at one time.

At the eastern end of the central area (right hand end in these pictures) you can see that a brown tower has been erected; this is actually made by two separate builders working together.

Out of the picture to the right (east) are at least another three portazones at the time of writing. The images were taken from the top of Dark_Viper’s tower bar before it was replaced by the Viper Pit Bar.

I saw this Happy Vertical People Transporter the other day in a portazone outside Zephyr. It is made of a stack of the lowest angle “kick” ramps carefully tweaked so that when a male avatar walks in, There’s collision algorithm pushes the avatar up through each successive layer. As I understand it, a female avatar (being slightly less tall) needs to keep walking forward to make this particular elevator work, but it is possible to tune the stack for different heights.

I don’t really count El Templo del Pollo as an “Easter Egg” in There because it is not really hidden, just a bit off the main map. The “Demand Chickens” room pictured, though, is a little less well known and requires use of the hoverpack trick to get into. Plus, it has more eggs!

I got pointers to this from one of Josie2’s recent quests. I have obscured some details of the image so as not to spoil the fun too much for people who want to find this by themselves. You can easily see that it is in one of the Monkey Crater paintball zones, though, and if you went looking in one of those for a big stone structure with no apparent entrances, you’d be looking in the right direction…

An avenue of cherry trees is blossoming in the Edo (Shearin) frontierzone on southern Motu Motu. There are benches to sit on under the trees, and a sorihashi bridge and a model of Edo castle to admire at the end of the avenue.

This is marisa9’s frontierzone, and I think all of the objects in the zone are her own design; most are available from auctions. You can’t buy copies of the Edo castle design, but I think that’s right: it’s based on a place in the real world (Edo is the old name for Tokyo), so there should only be one Edo in There.

Dark_Viper’s original bar for the Oasis area (see my earlier post) had to be torn down because he picked up a lower floor by accident while working on a higher one…

I actually prefer the new building: the ground floor and upper floor both have two sets of group seating in the “wings” and there is a bar with a nice view over the desert on the upper floor. My only quibble is that the bar stools are in the form of two 2-person sofas instead of four individual ones, so people at one end of the bar can’t see the chat bubbles of people at the other end.

These artful ruins were created to the East side of the Oasis village some time ago, but I’ve only recently managed to get a clean image of them (even this one needed a little retouching). The ruins are partially visible from the main plaza and help to break up the eastern edge of the village.

Constructed by villager Terrapin, you can see a half-buried deck used as a sand-covered ruined floor. This is possible because the ground is uneven here and when placing a deck, only the very center of the object is used as a height reference. Thus, while the center of the deck will always be above ground, the edges may be partially obscured. Rocks and plants are by marisa9.

By popular request, here is a snap of my buddy Kobby showing off his new pink fluffy bunny trousers to his (female) fan club in the Old Waterin’ Hole. SONofBOB refers to the ancient Greek story of the KOBotaur.