Things

Although There, Inc. has been clear about not doing new development for the There consumer service, they have made the decision to put some of the things that were already “done” into the live world. The Tyr housing is starting to appear in auctions, and both the PortaHome units and the new Bacio vehicle type we’ve we’ve been hearing about for ages will soon be released into the There shop.

I’m sure the major practical effect of these changes will be to soak up a lot of the surplus There currency that is sloshing around. This is probably good for the community, because the currency market is frankly nuts right now. It will be good for the long term survival of the world, too, as the sooner the “panic selling” overhang is removed the sooner people will go back to buying currency from There, Inc. and the sooner, therefore, that they will be able to judge the true revenue potential of the world in its “no development” phase.

In the short term, though, having some new toys to play with will cheer everyone up, and the Bacio is definitely a fun new toy. I got a chance to play with a very indirect loaner today: as you can see, it is basically a two-person hoverbike but with a more upright posture for the riders and different sound effects. The avatar animations are excellent, particularly in turns and jumps; the main limitation seems to be that as the passenger’s hands are gripping a bar at the back of the vehicle, they can’t hold a paintball gun or a drink.

Yes, they do come in more “manly” colours.

In the real world, if you came across a couch and three seats with some of your friends, sitting down next to someone on the couch would be a social signal: one of status, alliance or attraction depending on context. I’ve therefore always been slightly uncomfortable with the 5-seater groups in There, so I was really interested to find that Paradise Island’s new clubhouses are outfitted with these rather nice 4-seater groups.

At first I thought they were just four chairs and a table, but you can soon disprove that by observing that you can zoom in on the faces of people in the other seats. That doesn’t happen in ad hoc seating groups made up of individual chairs.

It turns out that although these new groups have four places to sit, their “experience” is the same as the old 5-seater groups. So, there are five zoomed camera angles, two for the chair that is really a “couch” and one for each of the others.

Even more amusing (at least to me), the 5-seater experience is so fully replicated that one of the chairs has the infamous “no emote” behaviour. Once you locate the “couch” chair, try sitting in the chair to the left of that and issuing an emote like 'tu and observe that… nothing happens.

These clubhouses have some other nice touches, too. The seating group next to the (animated) fireplaces works like a team platform, with an MC slot and enough room for an audience of 14 avatars (seven seated with another seven standing behind). The general style is a lot more realistic (or at least less cartoonlike) than we have been used to in the older Tiki islands.

I’m feeling smug again, as my second design for There was accepted today and is now in auctions. This one is a banner painter object designed for a very specific place in There, which is to say the Oasis Camel Trading Company near Sirocco. The wrinkled sacking background gives a kind of disreputable feel to it that I’m quite pleased with.

I have just listed my first designer item for sale in There auctions. This is a freestanding picture object for use in a house or zone. It is based on a photograph of mine that I previously used for my 2003 Christmas card in the real world.

Monochrome work in There turns out to be harder than you’d expect, because most places in the world have environmental lighting with a strong colour cast. This doesn’t matter much for colour artwork because the human eye is good at compensating; for monochrome, though, it can produce very ugly effects. My solution to this has been to arrange for the picture and frame textures (but not the ones on the back) to be “unlit” and thus retain their neutral colour and brightness wherever the object is placed. The down-side of this is that the picture glows in the dark, but that seemed like the right tradeoff.

The basic frame model is by Kirmeo, and is one of the free models available from the There Museum of Art. I’ll be donating a copy of the picture to the TMOA’s collection.

The image (click on thumbnail for larger version) shows me looking insufferably smug at getting my first design acceptance.

[Updated 20040312: added additional object texture fixes]

V2.03 of There was released as an in-place update on the 10th. The model used for the Gothic Group Seating changed again, apparently breaking all the Gothic Group Seating even worse than the problem seen in V2.0.

The good news is that this time the texture problem seems to be a simple matter of the updater not removing the old broken configuration files. If you log out from There, delete the appropriate files yourself and log back in, everything will magically return to normal. Presumably, this will happen automatically in another few days when There release their next update. In the meantime, if you are desperate to see your Ladie_Di Palm and Hiero seating, locate your There client’s Resources\gamekit\epobs\fu directory and delete the following files:

• Ladie_Di Palm seating: 71551021.ts
• Ladie_Di Hiero seating: 71552241.ts

The bad news is that if you pick up a designer gothic group seating object and put it back down, it floats above the surface you tried to place it on. I’m guessing this is a broken model file, but for the moment the suggestion would have to be not to move your furniture around if you can help it.

Fixes for some additional objects also involve deleting appropriate files (this time in Resources\gamekit\epobs\converted) and logging in again:

• marisa9 beer 2: 1037408.ts
• Randra_Loqqet hammock: 1037460.ts

[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.

Designers are doing all sorts of things with the new “shop” builder objects. Some designers are making delicate confections you’d be happy to live in, others are producing things a bit more on the eye-popping side. I found these two shops by KayCee_Cow on display near Karuna Plaza the other day along with their matching floor sections.

Yes, the holes in the cheese shop are transparent; you can see through each one.