[Vladimir Kayor]

This is more of a journal rather than a show-and-tell, but whatever

First off let me state that I'm a total SL newbie, so chances are this won't work out very well but we'll see how it goes.

I was originally planning to make a giant Pacman avatar, but I soon discovered that making a realistic avatar with all the animations and action overrides and all the other fun stuff is not a fun project to tackle as a newbie.

So I spent some time thinking of something I could build at a large size that has a variety of basic shapes to help me learn. I ended up picking a chess set. Aside from the fact that I love the game, it has a huge variety of shapes to make things interesting.

There's 2 parts to a chess set - the board, and the pieces (let's just pretend there isn't 32 game pieces for now so I don't get scared lol).


Building the Game Board

I started with some basic layout considerations:

A chess board is an 8x8 grid. To keep things simple, I decide that each square will be 1mx1m, which will result in an 8mx8m board. I'm also adding in a 1m frame around the board as every chess set has a nice frame

My first step was to construct a 10mx10m flat board to serve as a base:



My original idea was to then construct a wall around the frame, but I thought that was silly and I kept coming up with different ideas. After a while I got frustrated and deleted the board.

The idea I settled on was to create a 10mx10m flat board like above, duplicate it on top of itself, and then hollow out the duplicate by 90% (10m x 90% = 1m wide frame, which is what I want).

So I played around with it, and after swearing at my screen for a while (apparently I selected Physical, which caused gravity to kick in and make it bounce about for a few seconds when it hit the ground, which threw off it's alignment...grrr).

Anywho, it took a few attempts but I managed to create the base frame out of 2 prims and link them together, and here is the finished product:




That's as far as I've gotten, but it looks pretty neat for my first major attempt considering I've only been in SL for 3 days now. My next step will be to create the 64 tiles (1m x 1m each) and drop them into the board.


Squard Grid

My next step was to create a playfield, which was pretty straight forward as it was just copying the same prims several times and lining them up:






Now I know that prim count is a big thing when it comes to lag, so a question I have right now is this - can anybody think of a way to do the checkboard pattern with fewer than 64 square prims?

I'll post more updates here as I move along

[Carter-Madhu]

Welcome to SL!

The simplest solution would be to make a chessboard texture in your favorite image manipulation program, import the texture into SL, apply it to the base prim. That is, your texture would have all 64 squares - like an overhead image of a chessboard - you get the whole chessboard but just one prim.

By the way, the reason the 64 prim board would be disfavored goes beyond lag - when someone buys or rents land, what they are really getting is the right to have a certain number of prims rezzed in a certain space. That's why there is a premium on reducing the number of prims you use - the fewer prims each item takes up on someone's land, the more stuff they can have.

Good luck!

[Vladimir Kayor]

Hmmm...alright. Is there a size limit on textures? I thought they were all very small, wouldn't it be quite large if I made an 8x8 checkerboard grid on one?


Here's where I got so far:




From another angle:





65 prims for that version though which kinda sucks.

[Gabriele Graves]

Tip:

If you make a texture of the whole design unfolded (including all the squares and the wooden border) in GIMP, you can then apply that single to just one prim stretched to 10mx10mx1m for the same effect.

[Carter-Madhu]

Textures can be up to 1024x1024, although such large textures are very slow to load and thus discouraged - 512x512 is usually enough.

You can make the texture the larger size in your image-editing program, and then resize and save at different sizes to upload and see how they look in world.

[Aki Shichiroji]

Also, if you're not going to add any baked lighting and just need the repeating texture, you could feasibly just do a 2x2 square, and apply that texture to the prim, specifying a repeat horizontally and vertically (IE: 4 across, 4 down).

[Aki Shichiroji]

errrrr. i should clarify. when i say 2x2, i mean two squares by two squares, not 2x2 pixels.

Using only 2 by 2 squares means you don't have to use a huge texture at all. You could probably get away with using a 128x128px graphic repeated in SL and still have it turn out fine.

[Ayumi]

Just make 1 marble texture, and darken it on alternating squares?

Unless you're doing the whole checkered thing as one prim, and the just make one 2x1 (one light, one dark) square texture. like 128x64.. and have it repeat 4x one way and 8x the other?

[Makoto]

One thing i learnt which saved me soooo much time and effort was using the Prim copy function.
Select a prim for edit,
Select the create tab
Tick the copy option and make sure the center copy option is also ticked,
Click one side of the prim
a new one is duplicated exactly aligned to the first one.
means I can make a plain skybox in about 10 seconds
This also works with linked prims.
(apparently this also works if you shift click the Arrows)