Editing your Estate Raw File

Over on the new Primdig Electric Sheep Blog is a good description of how to edit the terrain file for a private island. With lots more people getting these its handy for people to know the quick way to terraform.
My original attempt on Hursley island , way back in April, led to a massive earthquake and lots of objects getting returned.
The reason, well I got my Raw file, edited it, then when I went to save it Photoshop asked – “Interleaved order or non-interleaved order”, I thought I was being clever and changed from the default of interleaved. This meant all the mapping of the Raw channels was basically corrupted. As it applied the raw file I got some very very high mountains and very very low valleys. The high ones pushed objects up, out of range and returned them to the users.
Luckily we had only just got started, but I still shudder when I attempt a terrain file change on a live island. I am sure we still have some buried treasure on Hursley becuase of this too.

Things happen so fast even when they are slow in Second Life

This evening Yossarian, Jessica and I had a bit of a relax shooting the breeze and solving the worlds problems. We decided to hang out back on the plot in Austin that I rent from Jessica.
Whilst we were just gathering Timeless Prototype sent me a camp fire version of his multi gadget chairs. This fitted very nicely with the organic look I have going on Austin and added to the ambience.
camp fire
Picture from Snapzilla – that I notice now is also able to push to Flickr too which is great.
Whilst we were chatting I had the TV on, and BBC 1’s imagine (arts programme) with Alan Yentob started to go down the web 2.0 root. Blogs, wikis, myspace, youtube etc.
It then finished on, the obvious one for us all now, Second Life. It looked like the Alan Yentob AV was flying around millionsofus. Its certainly getting more mainstream when it features in an arts show like this. It was odd to be in Second Life, shooting the breeze and also explaining the program as it happened to Jessica.
The whole session, and interlinking of so many threads should have been confusing, but somehow it all made perfect sense.

Alliance Navy Operation Peartree giving back to the community

Our friends over in the Alliance Navy have had a great idea of doing flyovers of public areas delivering presents to people. It is written up very well over here at the Second Life times.
I really love the idea that you can fly a large ship over areas and give something back.
Some members of eightbar are also members of the AN.
This is not a one off event, so keep an eye out for the anti-griefers delivering goodies in your local sandbox.
This is a mini photo cube of the drop ship and some happy residents from snapzilla
peartree
The alliance navy were there for our 3d Jam way back in September as this picture from Judge Hocho on snapzilla shows
AN