Before We Go Our Separate Ways

Please critique Fate Gardens' trees. This is not a praise thread. I know how wonderful they are ha ha. Tell me what you don't like about them, how you'd rather they be built or scripted. If'n you were the Khamon, how would you change them to better suit your needs? Be Fierce, Brutal, Mean! Let me have it <POW> right in the kisser to the moon Alice.

Have them change seasons automatically, one season per week so it slowly changes.

A "forrest fire" option would be kewl. Each tree checks its neighbours for "on fire" status and responds by catching fire if the correct conditions are met.

Burning trees would emit flames and smoke for a while, shed their leaves and end up a burnt, smouldering stump which re-grows after a few days.

Fire breaks could be made by spacing the trees apart, or building walls between them.



"Forrest Fire" (c) Surina Skallagrimson, 2006

What a /hot/ idea

And because its a /forest/ fire ... density matters ... if you only have one or two trees .. it really couldn't be a forest fire ... so there would have to be a citical mass of trees and maybe contributing undergrowth, before the "fire" mechanism can even start.

Talk about /Burning SL/ ...

Seriously I love your trees. I have ALL of them. The only thing I don't like about them is that if you put a lot of them out they are terribly laggy due to the script and the different textures. I don't know how you would change that.

The only other thing I think I would like is if they were larger. Like huge. I like big trees, weeping willows you can crawl under and hide, big knarly huge oaks, that sort of thing. Very few people make really large trees. Julia Hathor makes two -- an apple tree and an orange tree but they are like 100 prims each and not copyable. Your forest tree is almost there but hte rest are tiny in comparison.

I've always really enjoyed your trees and plants. Mainly, I like the ability to choose the different textures and sizes at a touch. I do like what another user said, which would be the ability to have the tree change according to season, but I guess that wouldn't work for Australian users Still, it's not much trouble just to change it myself, and it's a cool way to get multiple plants in one. Especially the rose bushes!

My sentiments exactly. There isn't a tree Khamon makes that I don't love, but if I had a wishlist:

-Bigger Trees! My favorite is the Forest Tree for this reason

-Give us a way to 'Freeze' the tree (make the settings permanant), and then autodelete the script inside to reduce lag.

-A Fate-Planter to help us rez lots of Khamon made trees to create a forest easily on rough terrain.

That's all I can think of - its hard to criticize something already near perfection

For me, bulk packs of no copy/transfer versions of your trees. I have two islands to build, and I want to use your trees in the landscaping. The trees themselves, wicked, love the features, especially the texture and colour change. Could we have some new ones ?

Oh I know... you have fireflies, what about some birds?

You trees, my little green friend, really do rock. Higbee's too.

Automated seasonal, even random, changes and a freeze option are doable. I'll have to dwell on the catching fire option. That might generate to much laggy code; but we'll see. Thanks for the input.

Yes Fade you can have some new ones. I'll have to figure out a way to package no copy/trans versions so that people realize the difference. Perhaps a vendor that lets you add to a shopping cart and finally check out will work. Maybe I should just list those on a shopping site that already has such functionality built in.

Oh and Flipper, Higbee IS a tree.

How about big trees?

Can you will you do that too?

I'd like you to make some trees that disguise advertisements of themselves as discussions in the General forum. That would be cool if a tree could do that.

My trees will do that for you very well. They know how. Just buy a few and set them out. Then post about it here and mention how well they look planted next to whatever store, item or rental land you're hawking at the time. What are they gonna do, not let you post anymore?

I think you should make your trees pay me 100 lindens to accept them. That would be cool, I would take all you have.

hi khamon
fate gardens= lovely. the only suggestions i would have for the trees are:
1.) you might try splitting the cards you are using into 4 prims rather than two- and match the joins in the middle up to where they touch, but dont actually intersect. it doesnt get rid of the zbufferclippystrobing issue entirely, but it does help. whether its 2-extra-prims worth of help or not is debatable, but seriously that's the only thing i can think of that might improve the look of them.

2.) for the slow-loading issue- especially if you are having the trees change thier color by swapping out the map. you might consider laying out your leaf-change images 4 to a tga and working with the offsets. the advantage of this is, if you have loaded the first image, you'll have loaded all the images. in theory, the change of texture should just flip over, and not really even have to re-rez.

these are both rather silly nitpicky suggestions, because thats all i can come up with in the face of what a good job you've done out there. again, its absolutely gorgeous.

PS: how on earth are you getting these images? photos? are you using a plugin of some sort to render them out? PM/IM (nephi or scarlett butler) me if you feel comfortable sharing it, im really curious to know. Also, wisteria. the garden needs flexy wisteria. <3

(Fierce. Mean. Brutal. just isn't me, apologies )

The trees are constructed and rendered using Bryce5. This allows me to build trees with hundreds of prims and render the meshes from any angle in any conceivable lighting environment. Bryce also renders the alpha masks for me though I always use a compatible background colour to accomodate the odd fuzzy edge.

The final renders are touched, and alpha channels are added, using Pain Shop Pro 6. It's ancient technology; but every bit of my technique was hammered specifically to produce flora for Second Life, so it's most comfortable to stick with what works. Never upgrade anything electronic until the new version offers a feature or service you absolutely don't have and absolutely need right?

Khamon --- I met you at SLCC; I'm too busy to notice these things in world since I get zero time to explore or see anything these days, but can you please IM me some stuff about these trees? Where to get them? How much they are, what they look like, are all models referred to as "The Larch" ?

We are all about trees, we need trees, and without using the term "get wood" we'd probably be interested in this stuff. So please IM me in world and I absolutely will check these out as soon as I'm allowed to come up for air.

I love them Khamon! It had been a while since I'd visited Fate Gardens but I went over the weekend after seeing this thread. I bought several of them and they are wicked. No ideas nor criticism here at all.

Hi Michi, Ulrika might be upset with me if I openly advertise in the General Forum. You can find the plants at Fate Gardens in the NE corner of Taber, just a hop and a skip from Clara. Be careful flying through Natoma; there's this giant tower you might smash into.

The plants are all low prim texture-based so might not be useful in Luskwood. They seem to mix well with prim-based models except that the large, semi-transparent prims sometimes get between you and your av, or whatever you're trying to click. I wish we had an option to phantom something to the point that it required a double click to select and was otherwise "click-through."

Hmmm, think the devs will entertain that suggestion? Anyway, I'm working on some larger prim-based trees. It's new territory for me so it's slow going. I'll keep you guys posted though. BTW I keep a small garden of freely copyable plants, from all over the grid, in the NE corner of Boardman. Y'all might want to wander through there too. If you do, there's a kiosk on the veranda that hands out a notecard listing plant shops around the grid.

I'm glad y'all are sticking it out on the Mainland. Wonder when we'll hear back about suggestions made at SLCC?

Plus I forgot to say...