Natalie’s Blog

Today my group and I mainly spent our time taking pictures and discussing how we would write the upcoming paper together. I also spent some time exploring. As my previous blogs have explained, about a week or so ago my group was abruptly evicted from our store and given a piece of land situated in a small valley instead. We were asked to begin rebuilding again, only this time without a building. Since I have frequently been called the architect of the group I quickly put together a three wall, plain, black structure so that my group could begin reloading clothing. However, my group expressed extreme displeasure at the look of the store. So I spent some time traveling around and looking at other stores nearby. After flying around for a bit I returned to our store and made some adjustments. I put a wood floor down, gave the place a glass roof, and changed the walls from plain black to a pattern texture. These things, as all things I have done in Secondlife were purely guesses that I put into action. For example, I figured I could use a texture for the walls so I went online, found some pattern that I liked, saved it in Powerpoint as a .tga and then uploaded it to Secondlife. The pattern came up in my textures inventory and then it was just a matter of placing the texture on the walls. My group was pleased with the improvement to our store and I was sure to take before and after pictures. For now, I think my work on Secondlife is for the most part done, next week I will probably spend most of each class period writing.Oh, one side-note. I was transported to one of those locations high in the clouds, a floating builing of some kind. This was my first encounter with such places although I have read about them in the textbook.

Today my group and I were assigned our new land on which to build. Within the first five minutes of being on the land I was able to build three walls to act as the walls of our new store. After our old store was destroyed, over Thanksgiving break, I gave some thought to the way in which my group could construct a new store. Luckily for us my theory worked. I simply used the principles of manipulating the boxes (as I have done while putting up the shirts) and changed the size to fit our purposes. The end product was a fairly simply but working store which I was delighted with. My group memebers, however, were less than pleased with the look of the new locale and I spent a good portion of the period today trying to come up with alternate accomodations. At the end of the period I was flying around our new area and found a similar store not too far away. This store, although somewhat nicer than ours, was only 5 walls placed together. It basically looked very similar to the store we created. I was somewhat impressed by their color scheme and have resolved to change our store so that it is more attractive.

I think this is a better choice than trying to make one of the pre-made stores work. There are several probelms with using an already made store: 1. There is not enough wall-space (at least not in the one my group wants to use) 2. The ground is un-even so the store will not sit flat. We would have to raise / lower land to get the building to work 3. we don’t have adequate space to comfortably accomodate an already created building. Since there are only 2 weeks of class left I’m hoping to convince my group to stick with the new store that I have created. I’m hoping once I spruce it up a bit they will be more receptive. From my standpoint, I am most interested in Secondlife as a tool for research, particularly with building and performing self. Therefore, I am not all that interested with the cosmetic aspect of our store.

While I was writing my last wall post about my experience in Second Life I logged into Second Life so that I could give details about my experience. However, then I moved on to writing about Chapter 8 in the book and forgot that my Second Life was still on. When I realized I was still logged onto Second Life I noticed that I received an IM from Sam1177 Alito asking me for information on CC Jewels. After a moment or two he and I came to an understanding of our relationship to CC and he asked me to pass along information to her about our store. In this message was some information that my group had been wondering ever since we received the message yesterday. I did not expect to have an interaction such as this during my short time logged onto Second Life.I found that I was more comfortable talking with Sam1177 Alito both because he initiated conversation and because the conversation was for me spontaneous. I didn’t have time to formulate well thought out questions I simply asked him what I wanted to know and vice-versa. I could not remember how to save conversations in Second Life, however I had the presence of mind to copy and paste our conversation into a word document so that I could save it. The past two times I have logged onto Second Life on my own time I have had interesting interactions with new people. I will try to find more time to log on outside of class, I feel it is imperitave to my research to do so.

This has been a fairly uneventful week for me in Second Life. On Wednesday I showed up in the Music Lab as always and found out from other members of the class that we were unable to log onto to Secondlife. I tried several times as well but was unable to log on. Later Wednesday night I was showing my friends Secondlife and while I was wanding around my shop I got an IM inviting me to a another place in Taste of India, some sort of a dance club. I accepted the teleport and observed the place for a while. Everyone there was very inviting. My computer runs very slowly when I am on Secondlife, however, so I decided to log off and explore that area again later. On Friday I mostly has a meeting with my group while we were all on Secondlife. Once again I was logged on to Secondlife from my home so things were a bit slow, however we were able to discuss the progress of our store. We received a message about our store moving. None of us were really sure what it meant but none of the other shops that used to surround our store were still there. My group discussed what this may mean for our business but we decided to try to wait it out and learn more about what’s going on. I went on Secondlife today breifly and the store still looks as though it is in order.

After many days and weeks of my group stuggling to make our clothing store accessible to potential buyers, we have finally figured it out (with MUCH help from our professor). It turns out that my methods for posting the clothing were in fact correct. I uploaded “targa” files which I saved in our “textures” then made the textures into “new outfits” that avatars could wear, and finally I places these new shirts into the “contents” of the wooden boxes and manipulated the boxes to fit on the wall correcly. All of these steps (which I had been questioning for the past several days) were correct. The mistake I was making was coming when I was trying to acutally put the clothing on my avatar. After I put these shirts up for sale and bought them, I was trying to simply drag the shirt from “objects” in my inventory onto my avatar’s body. However, when I did this a box would encompass my avatar rather than giving my avatar a new shirt.  Dr. Gajjala pointed out that after I bought the shirt and I was in my inventory, I needed to drag the box out of my inventory, place it on the ground, and then retrieve the shirt that way. I’m glad that this problem is finally resolved. Now, I can turn the bulk of my attention towards creating more shirts rather than trying to problem solve.

The clothing group I’m in has been working non-stop on creating clothing to put up in our store, however, we have run into one fundemental problem.  Whenever someone buys one of our shirts and tries to drag the shirt fron the inventory onto his or her body the entire box engulfs the person rather than just the shirt. Originally we were instructed to upload the shirt as a targa. However, the targa clearly wasn’t working. Rather than placing the shirt we uploaded under “clothing”, it placed the shirt under “textures.” On Friday I was trying to figure out a couple different ways to solve this problem. I found that if I clicked on my avatar and “appearance” I could choose the texture I wanted and manipulate it so that it became a shirt my avatar was wearing. Then, I saved this work as a new outfit. Once I did this the shirt saved under “clothing” so that I coupd upload it and place it in the box. This discovery took the better part of the period. Near the end of class I tried to re-purchase a shirt using this method and it didn’t work. However, I was also useing an old box which my have contributed to the lack of activity. I feel my group and I have made steps in the right direction. We are continuing to create clothing and in the meantime I (in particular) am working towards finding a solution to this problem.

The majority of today’s class was spent trying to problem solve for my group. Kacie, Shea, and I were all having difficulty making clothing accessible to potential buyers in our store in Secondlife. At first it seemed that the problem was that the files uploaded were ‘.jpg’ rather than ‘.trg’. However, even after these files were converted and re-saved they were still not cooperating as we would have liked. Although figuring out how to finish our store set-up is a tedious process, problem solving today allowed us to work as a group rather than seperately as we have been doing recently (we are all working on clothing individually). The rest of the class period today I spent reformating my clothing and creating more. I plan to bring 2 new designs to class for clothing on Wednesday 🙂 It seems our store is nearing completion!

I spent the majority of today’s class finishing up a t-shirt I have been working on as well as trying to upload a shirt for Shea. In the end I was unable to successfully upload a shirt for Shea because the file was a ‘jpg’ not a ‘tga’. In order to successfully use a piece of clothing in Secondlife the object must be uploaded as a ‘jpg’. Our group isn’t sure what to do about this unfortunate turn of events because Shea says that she does not have the clothing saved anywhere. This may end up meaning more work for her. There wasn’t much discovery done today. I spent most of the period finishing my shirt, trying to upload Shea’s shirt, and assisting Kacie in Photoshop. Our group is really starting to come along as far as merchandise. We are also expanding and begining to explore other templates besides simply t-shirts.

Today my work on Secondlife was different from any other day thus far. I spoke briefly with a group that was having difficulty getting into a freebie house they had picked up. The group figured out how to place the house but they couldn’t get inside. The house appeared to be inaccessible, of course, it was not. Fueled by curiosity, and the desire to help, I found a copy of their building and began attacking it from a variety of angles. After about 20 minutes of fighting with it I was finally able to get the house to open. Most of the group left class before I had a chance to talk to them about my discovery but I plan to share it with them on Friday. I suppose that I didn’t really enhance my own groups progress during Wednesday’s class but I think I was able to help another group and I did receive the landmark to my groups’ new location. Therefore, I believe today was very productive 🙂

While working with my group on our project, one of my main jobs has been to build a staircase. Originally I found an explaination online about how to make a spiral staircase and followed the directions until I understood the basic building concepts and then played with the dimensions a bit. After many alterations I was finally able to create a functioning spiral staircase. However, after I completed the staircase and placed it need the building my group was planning to use I decided that the staircase was too large for our purposes and wouldn’t work. I was slightly disappointed because of all the time and hard work I put into creating the staircase but I decided not to give up. I hypothesized that a normal staircase with rectangular stairs would work better for our purposes and decided to apply the knowledge that I had from making the spiral staircase to this new idea.

Here is my methodology:

1. place a box on the ground

2. manipulate the size so that the x: .5, y:1.0, z: .1

3. hold down shift and click on the blue “up” arrow

4. slowly drag the arrow up until you see a second box

5. let go of the shift key and move the new box using the green and red planes until your second step is positioned correctly

6. repeat steps 3-5 until your staircase is complete

After I had completed all these steps (which took me about 10 minutes to come up with and get the measurements correct) I held down shift and clicked on each step. Then I went to “object” under “edit” and locked the pieces together so that I could take them as one unit into my inventory. The staircase is working out fairly well in my building. I still need to work on it a bit more but for the most part it is done. One should note that once and object is locked you will need to unlock it before it can be changed in any way. This primarily what I worked on during Friday’s class and I thought it was interesting how I applied previous Secondlife knowledge and used practical application to create something new.