Month One in Fantastic

It's been one month since I moved into an empty Fantastic. A lot has happened since then. Lots of building, new skills learned and a few adventures.

I want to document the changes so that I can look back on them at my leisure in a year or two. We remember the highlights and often forget the details which gave the days their nuances of color.

Statistics:

Prims used: 4199
Monetary System: no
Groups: no
Player: R 16

In Review:

This month I started out with the kiosk I build on the sandbox, added a premade building (later abandoned as I made my own) and imported a lot of clothes textures. Then, we had an important permissions problem which made all goods given away or sold "public domain". A not so nice person could import them into other grids as their own with all rights using Second Inventory . Not good. So with lots of time and no rush, I went to work on other projects like making new shoes, shops, an art building, FLOWERS (one thousand prims worth of them) and later, the village shops and apartments.

I found some free sculpty trees and remade them adding more leaves and in some cases more branches and new textures. They have added a lot to the landscape here. And the landscape is changing. eku (missing for the last ten days it seems) has her Japanese temple and village in the works, Osiris has started on what appears to be a HUGE spaceship. The other neighboring sims remain sold or for sale but empty. They may be investment properties. It's nice to have the empty vista whatever the reason.

I dipped my toes into both skins creation and animations. While the skins was a good learning experience and turned out exceptionally well, I find I like the animations much more -- sort of like revisiting my Flash days with avatars instead of 2D graphics. Enough time has passed to make that enjoyable and I am having a great time. AND, on the last day of my first month, I finally figured out how to add animations to furniture without a pose ball (yeah). So all that is well and good.

People have been stopping by to chat. There are a few carpetbagger types around but mostly just nice folks.

In World:

While the blogs and forums were VERY busy for a couple of weeks, that all slowed down tremendously around Thanksgiving. I'm not sure if they all finally got their lands and are building or if real life holiday things are taking up time.


The biggest achievements this month that come to mind include the 45,000 prim challenge answered by Osiris. You can read the full article here.

The first viewer for MACs was released at the end of November, so that was a milestone too.

On the not so good news, there was a miscommunication problem and Sakai "went missing" for a couple of days. This did NOT sit well with some folks. Hopefully lessons were learned. Promises were certainly made and we can go forward with new insights.

The 3DX offices moved and new tech support -- promising 24 /7 is on the way. There is a Founder's Meeting scheduled for this weekend. Fingers are crossed that it happens this time.


Plans:

This month's plans for Fantastic include finishing up the Village with furniture, a fountain, some other fun details. LOVE THOSE PRIMS!

I also want to finish up the shoes. One style of high heeled boots for ladies, plus three styles for the guys are on the drawing board.

Filling the clothes vendors is NOT FUN but needs to be accomplished so I can do that between other -- more enjoyable -- projects.

I have one empty store at the moment and I think I will put animations in there -- mostly because I enjoy making them. We don't know if bvh files will be incorporated into the new avatar forms. We actually don't know when the new avatar forms will be viable. So for now, animations are a nice addition to our worlds.

I have one 10,000 meter area empty at the moment and I am thinking I will put furniture in there -- a much upgraded version of my Home and Garden store at Phil's place. I am making all that furniture for the apartments anyway, so why not.

And as we know, life has a way of changing our plans.

Until next month.