What happened to my house?!?

Hi all,

Well I am supremely bummed. Im sure Im not first but...anyway...Ive spent the last few days building my first real house, a perfect recreation of my FL house in SL. Then I realized it was too small so I linked it all together to try and scale it all up a bit. After linking, I tried to scale but it kept snapping back to its original size. I tried unlinking, then linking again and scaling....After a few more attempts at this....the SL program seemed to spazz out and my house was destroyed!!!

Well, not destroyed but it suddenly flashed a few times and then disappeared entirely and then I got a billion error messages saying my prims had moved off my land and had been put in the lost and found folder....all separately!!! not linked!! ARGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!! I swear I didnt translate it/them, I was just trying to scale it all up a bit...oh agony! damn my clumsy hands and this freaking program!

...<sniff>

Ok, enough crying..now for the serious questions....Im gonna rebuild it and I really do need to do it right this time...

1. Why, when I build my house to scale (1m SL = 1m FL), is it smaller than it should be in SL? Granted my avatar is somewhat tall, but even if I shrink it to the minimum possible height Im still too tall to fit through the doors. This doesnt seem right..?

2. Why do I have to use meters? I know most of the world does but unfortunately I live in the US, and the plans I have from the original FL house are all in feet and doing the conversions is a pain.

3. This is a mid-century modern house so Im using almost entirely scaled cubes for most of my building. To do a wall with two or three windows in it I have to build an upper wall flattened cube, a lower wall cube, and cubes for the wall bits inbetween the windows. Ugh. Isnt there boolean operations or some kind of subtractive modeling? OK I know theres not but there really should be....anyone have any other helpful tips for walls with multiple windows?

4. When/why do I need to link everything together? Do I need to do it to save the house in my inventory as I complete each stage? This is a very big deal for me because I need to do "backups" as I go along building, Im petrified now of a repeat where I do alot of work and then it all gets blown away somehow...so how do I backup? do i need to link everything together for it to work as a single inventory item? can I keep saving incremental backups with different names so the inventory items dont write over each other? Does this make any sense?

5. Why did it spazz out when I tried to scale up my linked house? is this not permitted? or was it because some of the house prims were already at thier max size (10m) in one axis?

6. Any other tips on building safety?

Thanks in advance, Im getting ready to do it all over again but I want to do it right....

Octal Khan

I don't know that m = meters just because it uses the same first letter. Maybe it stands for medium length?

if you click on the "options" button in the Edit window, it says the building grid unit is meters.

Ive seen in other posts to the effect that there is no way to have anything but meters.
No feet.

but thanks for the thought...anyone else?

You may not be able to link everything together. I kept getting errors about the pieces being too far apart" or some such.

Eventually, I discovered that you can select everything in your house (and linking helps there) then "take copy". That puts the entire thing in inventory as one object that you can then rez when you want to work on it some more.

I've had things spaz out like that before. Even simple things, like trying to move the Linden Basic Door.

My solution is to constantly be taking copies, as described in the post above. Then, if something keeps spazzing out every time I pull out a copy and try it again, I give up on trying to do that particular maneuver.

coco

P.S. I save (as described in the previous post) rather than linking until I have done the texturing. (Or even sometimes just unlink to texture.) This is because it is too easy to accidentally retexture the whole house rather than the piece you are texturing. Which is another good reason to have those frequent "takes" in inventory. It takes me a long, long time to make a house, if that's any consolation to anyone, by the way!

If your AV is 2m tall, it should fit easily into a house constructed to FL scale. Maybe when you shrank the AV to minimum size, it still had overlong legs or something?



Hollow the cube The window opening will be smack-dab in the middle of the cube (there is no possibility to move the hollowed out portion up or down) but you can always add another row of cubes underneath to pad the height. And no, there are no boolean operations available, only the "hollow" feature.



I guess every builder has their own backup philosophy. There was a thread in the "Building" forum a few weeks back about how to package a house for sale, and some good advice was given there about linking large sets etc. For the question of how big a linkset can be: /111/62/11883/1.html

If you take the same object twice to inventory, it will not overwrite the first copy, you'll just have two objects with the same name. Using some kind of version numbering is helpful, however, if you don't like having an inventory with dozens of objects namend "Object" or "house backup" or whatever

Some backup tricks I find very useful:
1. use "align to grid" (or build by the numbers in the first place) and take backup copies of essential building elements. If the building gets wiped, rebuilding is not too much of a hassle as you only have to know that, for example, the north wall consisted of building element 1b copied 5 times and set up at 3m intervalls.

2. If the building is too big to link in one, link in as few sets as possible and then link every set to an extra root prim so that each linkset's root prim is at the same coordinates. Take a backup copy of each linkset; when rezzing them place every linkset at the same coordinates and voila, they magically line up correctly Unlink the root prims individually and delete them, and everything is peachy. (If the building is too huge to be able to have a root prim in the same coords for every linkset, try spacing the root prims 5 or 10m from each other in one axis, and note that in the object description - after rezzing, adjust the linkset coordinates accordingly.)



Did you perhaps grab and move the house by mistake while rescaling?



Save early, save often, use the number input boxes.

thanks all, thats good stuff! here i go again....

Good points made about backup along the way. Before doing anything "risky" with your creations it's good practice to "Save Copy", and a linked copy if permitted, in case you rezz it into a tangled mess of other prims and then need to separate out the pieces.

As for making walls with window and door openings, I avoid actually building all that in with prims, and instead cheat it with texturing. For example, to make an office building, I'll make one 512x512 texture representing a single door, and another for a single window, with the surrounding wall surface, and save it out as a Targa with partial alpha transparency for any glass portions. The window texture would then map onto a 10mx10m square surface, tiling 3 times vertically and 3 times horizontally, yielding a 3-story modular section, three windows across. For the door, you can size a single prim so that the texture maps properly at 100% along x and y on the prim surface, and work it into the wall.

I then create a second set of wall textures for window and door openings, but with only alpha cut-outs for the fenestration. I map these onto an outer wall layer so the first wall layer with the actual windows and doors shows through. This gives the illusion of recessed fenestration, with the only drawbacks being possible z-fighting if the wall layers are too close (as they both use alpha transparency) and the fact that the voids between the layers are visible upon close inspection and at certain angles.

ok Im back in it...but heres a question. Ive been linking and Save Copy as I go along. Worked great the first couple of times but now when I try to do it, Save Copy is greyed out...?

Sounds like you have something in it that doesn't want to be copied.

Often this is a texture that doesn't have permissions set on it allowing it to be copied.

And sometimes - this one tripped me up for AGES until April Firefly flew to my rescue and discovered it: For some odd reason, a couple of the walls had a bunch of textures IN them.

This was determined by clicking on "content" on each of the wall pieces. And they were random textures, too, not ones I would have put on (or more accurately, "in" by accident, like grass.

This happened to me again just a few nights ago. Sure enough, I checked the individual prims and found two that had for some reason taken on about 15 textures each in the content portion of the edit thingie.

Sometimes it is because you are STANDING in the way when you try to take the house, and I guess it can't copy your clothes, but tries to.

coco

thanks! indeed I had un un-copyable object in the selection....

everything is much better now that I can make incremental backups!

ok, heres a new poser...

Ive been working on the house for several hours straight, and now whenever I try to Shift-Clone and object, it does it, but then the cloned object disappears as soon as I try to move it anywhere. Also if I try and rez something from my inventory, it makes the right noises and such but nothing appears. (Forgot to check if the prim count was going up or not)

This happened earlier and I quit out for a while. When I returned I found all my "missing" objects piled up in the living room near where I was trying to clone or rez them originally.
(Im only using about half of the land's allotted prims.)

Smells of a bug, but I dunno....anyone experienced this before?

Well, I figured it out on my own...apparently if you are standing close to the border of your land without moving for a long time while you are creating/editing, strange things start happening! (like what I mentioned in my previous post)

All I had to do was walk around a bit and go back into edit mode and presto, there were all my missing objects.

Weird eh?

Sounds like lag.

Rezzing seems to be very clunky lately for some reason. One day I came in and had to wait literally five minutes for everything to rez. All that seems to be happening in your case is that the objects are taking so long to rez you are getting impatient, trying again, and then leaving, and then they all obediently rez for you.

Part of the joy of sl building.

I wish you had discovered that one minute earlier.

me too!

To speed things up, try deleting the contents of the cache folder.

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\SecondLife\cache

Brian

That seems ironic. Aren't caches supposed to speed things up?

wow, my cache file was 1.5 gigs!! I deleted it but after I opened second life and went back to my house again it was back up to over a gig...does that mean my house has over a gigabyte of data...??? can't be right? its only about 600 prims and ten textures...?