Blog Post

Article posted on Jan 13

Finnix in Second Life

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 13, 2009, 9:35 pm

That's right, Finnix now has a home in Second Life. This was mostly used as an excuse to learn the build system. While, personally, Second Life was rather boring from a "visitor's" point of view (I think I initially signed on about 3 years ago, and came back to visit a few times per year), I quickly learned that owning land and building was actually the fun part. So on with the tour...

The Finnix Information Center is staffed by a highly trained crack team of professional shirt-wearers. From left is Kentucky Friedkin[1], Eli Nexen, and Liz Rexie.

They take their jobs quite seriously.

The first floor office contains a desk area with promotional material (Finnix CDs and clothing) and other objects. The main room contains plenty of seating room, and a propaganda projector that switches between multiple screens (currently an overview of Finnix and a screenshot).

Clicking on the CD in the laptop will give you a (virtual) copy of the CD. Inside it is a notecard with information about Finnix, as well as a landmark of the center.

The CD is wearable, and is fully copyable, modifiable, and transferable to others.

All computers in the info center run Finnix, of course.

Upstairs is the demo lab, with 5 Finnix workstations. Currently they all just give you a copy of the CD when touched, but I am exploring other options to make them more interactive.

Also upstairs is a Cray. Yes, it is on fire.

The Finnix property is located on the mainland, but is located immediately west of a protected beach, meaning the land between my plot and the water cannot be developed. I came across the land by chance, and got a great deal on it. The second floor patio provides an unobstructed view of the sunrise over the water.

The land is 1536 m², which is a bit large for my needs, but was picked for technical reasons[2]. To fill the unused space, I developed a recreation area. The campfire can be lit or extinguished (and casts a nice glow at night), and has several logs surrounding it for sitting. The natural top pool is rather deep, and includes several poseballs for floating, or sitting on the surrounding cliffs. The water flows down (again, with poseballs to let you sit in the rapids pools) to a shallow pond.

Oh, and the center includes its own man-made moon.

With hidden dance platforms.

So that's how it stands right now. The center will most likely be evolving over time, so come on by.

Notes:
[1] Yes, that's a pun.
[2] The Long Story: Second Life is made up entirely of primitive objects, or prims. Each prim can be molded, have textures applied, scripts and triggers added, and combined with other prims to make logical objects. For example, a 4-legged barstool could be 5 prims: 4 cuboids for the legs, plus a stubby cylinder for the seat. Most sims (regions) allow 117 prims per 512 m². That's really not that many, but Second Life isn't terribly efficient, and can sometimes get rather slow, even with that prim density. Layout-wise, the Finnix center could easily fit on a 1024 m² plot, and could get by on a 512 m² plot, but the prim limit would make it hard to design on either of those lot sizes. So I got a 1536 m² plot, giving me 351 prims. That way, most of the prims are used on the info center side of the plot, with the recreation area using a rather low density of prims, while still looking nice. Currently I've used 299 prims (and that's with pretty conservative planning), leaving 52 for future use.

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