Gadget Guy – Cloudy Visions

For my first tool selection, I’ll talk not only about the tool itself, but a common outcome of tools with creators that lack staying power in SL.  If you haven’t yet run into a tool that started out with a bang, and ended with a whimper when the tool creator either left SL or decided he didn’t want to be in the gadget business…  be thankful.  If you buy tools as frequently as I do, it’s bound to happen eventually.

The tool I’ll focus on today is called Virtual Builder Studio (VBS for short).  This gadget, created by Iron Perth, really blew me away when I first saw the demos of it, and then later purchased it.  If you watch the videos for the tool, which are available on YouTube (one of them can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbreulcG2aQ), they’ll have you believing that you can build any building structure you want in seconds.  And they’d be right…  with a number of limitations…

VBS is really designed to be a fast building constructer.  Don’t expect to be creating jewelry with this; it’s not designed for that.  The tool is divided into several construction “studios” that are HUD and command-line controlled:

• Floor Plan
  this is the main component of the tool. It allows you to create a floor plan in either a “Regular Floor Plan” or “Triangle Floor Plan” style. Regular in this case means all corners are at 90 degree angles. Triangular Floor plans allow more angular freedom in your floor plans, but this comes at a cost: prims. In both modes, floor plan construction is quite simple… you start a new floor plan and the tool rezzes a floor plan “peg”. You then move the peg to a corner, and place duplicated pegs to all of the corners of your design. Once you have a peg in all corners, you tell the tool to rez the floor plan, and it rezzes floor, walls and ceiling (if you request it). Obviously, this is a little bit of an oversimplification, and there are parameters to set such as wall thickness and height, number of floors, etc… but you can derez, reset the parameters and re-rez the floor plan as many times as you like until it’s the way you want it. Once you have your outer walls up, you can use the inner walls tool to create your internal floor plan.Once you have your building rezzed, you can texture the whole building by simply choosing a singular prim of the building a texture and all of the rest magically retexture themselves with no seams.
• WinDoor
  the WinDoor studio rezzes a window or door template prim. This is just a wood colored block in the general shape of a door or window. You place the template on a wall and resize it to fit your needs. Once you have it in the right place and size, you touch the wall it’s attached to, and then touch the template prim. The scripts in the VBS wall prims then cut out and recreate the wall around your template, and voila, you have a nicely cut place to set your window.
• Stairs
  the stairs studio will make both spiral and straight staircases in whatever size you desire. You simply create your buildings floors and leave an opening for the top of the stairs. When you tell the tool to create a new set of stairs, it will give you a template that you can resize to fit and the tool will rez the stairs with whatever parameters you need.
• Roof
  like the Stairs studio, this studio is relatively new to the tool, so many ideas you might like in the studio aren’t there yet. It makes a somewhat limited type of pitched roof, but it can save you time with all of those angles if your needs aren’t too wild. Based on the same concept, this studio also uses a sizing template that you can move around and resize until you have the roof shape you like, and then tell the tool to rez it.

So that’s the general description of the tool… I should mention that it also comes with a big box of textures, and another with furniture in it.  But how well does it really work?

When I purchased it, it was a quick infatuation.  The stair and floor plan studios are a lot of fun to watch.  For a builder, it’s almost magical to watch a house or stairs build themselves so quickly.  In the first few weeks after my purchase, it seemed like there were a few bugs where the studios would kind of get wonky, and there seemed to be no way to fix them easily, other than re-unpack the VBS HUD.  But at that time, the creator was terrifically responsive and even had a website with forums (ironperth.com) where he would answer questions about all of the products he offers.  And then rather suddenly around the end of 2007, Iron Perth vanished from the forums and Second Life in general.  No further updates appeared for the tool, and the bugs began to mount as SL changed over time.

Now, the tool still works, and is still available from XStreet SL (aka SL Exchange) for $2499L, but… I can tell you that when I’ve used it lately, it is so frustratingly obnoxious with bugs that I rarely touch it any more.  Here are just a few:

• When lag is bad, or the script goes wonky (especially while using high prim mode), it will often throw prims across the sim rather than constructing them correctly. This made me very unpopular with my neighbors, as they found my prims strewn across their landscape.
• One of the things that Iron had talked about fixing was that the seamless texturing is very simplistic… choose one texture and the WHOLE house gets textured… inside and out. How many houses have you come across that have the same texture on the outside AND inside walls?
• Some nights I have to de-rez/re-rez a house half a dozen times to get it to include all the walls.
• Cutting windows and doors is very much hit and miss. Sometimes it takes several tries to get a window cut correctly.
• The triangular floor plan is called “Very High Prim Mode” for a reason… the more complicated your floor plan becomes in this mode, the hungrier for prims it becomes. The algorithm it uses for construction of the floors seems to assume that everyone has unlimited primcount. As a builder who has seen the “light” of prim conservation, I’d say that for all but very few cases, you should simplify your design and not use triangular floor plans, use another tool, or do it the old fashioned way… manually.

Sadly, Iron Perth probably still makes money on this tool.  The videos make it look very cool, and it IS a fine accomplishment of scripting.  I’m sure some that have $11US sitting around burning a hole in their pockets will go out there and buy it.  But chances are that you’ll be so frustrated in the first couple weeks that it’ll be relegated to the back corners of your inventory, never to be seen again.   It’s really too bad that Iron never realized the full vision he had for VBS.  Unfortunately, he’s not the only gadgetmaker who has wandered off to “greener pastures” (aka WoW).

Gadget Guy – Welcome!

Hey there tragic hipsters!  First, I’d like to thank Khali for the space to drop some lines about my favorite (and unfavorite) SL toys.  I’ll try to keep this going, as there are a bajillion toys to be had in SL, and I already have a TON of them.  If you have suggestions for toys you’d like reviewed, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

This blog will cover building tools, weapons, and every miscellaneous tool you can think of.  I play no particular favorites, I love them all.

I hope to have the first post up very shortly.  The first tool I’ll look at is the Virtual Builder Studio… a tool that definitely fits in both my favorite and least favorite categories.

See you then!