Saturday, August 4, 2007

Greenies

I stumbled across Pavig Lok when I inspected an absolutely clever little magnified flea (I absolutely adore the mechanism, and had actually been considering the same type of exploit but hadn't decided on what yet), and wrote down her name for later to browse her picks, as I was still in my first exploration of New Babbage (and still haven't seen a quarter of what's there as it is). It is exactly along the lines I've been thinking myself- turn a weakness of the system into a strength, and she did it dead fabulously. I'm sure I'll eventually steal the idea for this exact mechanism too, it's just perfect.

Aside from sending me to the hobo railroad, which I desperately wish I'd known about when I first started (or, more accurately, when I restarted) because it's got all sorts of useful information for newbies (as well as some freebies I'm still sorting through), I also found Greenies Home, which is apparently a new build of hers. This place is great! You are the same size as these little green aliens, who are about mouse sized, in a gigantic house.

They're all over doing various and sundry things (everything is frozen in place with no movement, including a spilt drink, which I'm sort of on the fence about- on the one hand, I'd like some movement, on the other with figures you've either got to program AIs for all of them or they look even more out of place, and within the limitations of not only LSL but sim load and computer processing speed due to inefficiency of not being designed exclusively for that, it really isn't practical), and there are proximity teleports up to the mother ship. That's right, cameraing around doesn't cut it. I camera around most of the time, because I find movement to be difficult at times, especially with lag and all, but I've been flying all over the place instead (and I totally respect and love the idea, even though it is somewhat awkward for my computer). The ship has a shop, in which you can purchase one of the little green alien avatars for your very own, as well as other merchandising (let's face it, they have to pay the sim fees somehow!), including a pj set with a stuffed alien and alien slippers, see-through bags which contain little aliens, odd alien inspired accessories, particle effect perfumes (!). It's all truly adorable.

It's on such a vast scale that flying is generally the way to go about it, not only is a lot of the action happening above your head, but with the greater movement speed you aren't walking across an expansive floor forever. There are some fabulously built models, of particular interest to me were the cat, which is sculpty free and a little (huge) feline marvel (but that may be in part due to having 5 cats, so, er, I tend to be drawn to cats. Also, I think it's actually an old model, and I love history, as well as it being very well done), and the bronze of the ballerina, which is all sculpty and amazing- this is one of the examples of what sculpties can really truly do (sadly, we've seen a lot that sculpties really aren't necessary for as well, I don't think I can count how many sculpties that could have been made exactly with only two regular prims- and while this may be a way to get around your prim limit, I think it is harder on the system). Amusingly, it looks like all the alien ships and tech are textured with sculpties as textures- it's all that rainbow gradient (they probably are not, but they are certainly reminiscent). There's also a great big movie screen (tiny black and white TV if you were to scale to the house) with assorted shows playing, if you want to sit and stay a while.

Interesting sociological experiment though: while I was there, the majority of the people were in the dollhouse, which is build to our size.

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