Tutorial Zone complete?
…so I got to thinking about the overall “sense” of the tutorial zone – never a good thing when I have lots of other things to do, but the new procrastination plugin kicked in and I ignored my streaming head cold symptoms and began tweaking…
Object market re-worked
It seemed to me that the tutorial “shells” were facing the wrong way (they faced the road and had their backs on the internal lawn area) – by rotating them 180 (and re-arranging the foliage) it feels a lot more inclusive, like the tutes and the object market relate to each other – they are ALL about the art of building so that was settled (at least in my own fevered brain).
I added a campfire talk circle, with a “cone of silence” around it so private group discussions can go on there, re-jigged the guided tour a little so it made sense and I think I am pretty well done here.
Tut Zone overview
Looking at it from above, it looks like there is very little here, but I know how long it has taken me to make, and feel pretty proud of it.
In the one compact u-shaped area we learn how to make, move, rotate, scale, colour, texture, script and select objects, how to film them afterwards and share our plans for doing so – nice, compact, accessible and … yeah, I know, talking to myself, you get that.
What is missing? Suggestions gratefully received.
…iObject 0.9b
…so we had an immediate need to provide an in-world object catalog for builders, and the conventional “object yard” is not something I want to so, so we are looking into database solutions
Object Mart
For weeks, LP staff popped objects and screen captured images, carefully naming them. I then (laboriously) categorised them and eliminated duplicated (historical collections of objects had spawned many copies), creating a categorised collection of objects.
Info Panel closeup
To provide punters with an idea what the category is all about, I included some screenies of typical assortments. Each panel links to the category in the in-world browser also, which is sort of cool. Not sure if there is a simpler/more intuitive way to do this but I think this approach should work.
Catalog in-world
I used a gallery script that automatically creates thumbnail-index framesets from a folder of images, and this will later morph into the consultant-built database solution (after I can convince someone to do the data entry).
Next up a couple of panels on builder work-flow and they should be away.
