Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
strokes to create a prairie or little touches to create a small plateau. The Strength button on the slider
below Size will change the power of the bulldozer and how much the land will move with each
mouse click or the duration of your click-and-drag action.
5. Below this is the Parcel Information, letting you know the land area and who the owners are. Also
included is an About Land button, which is a good reminder to go back to About Land and make
sure the terraforming option is not checked, and no one else can edit the terrain on your parcel.
6. Under that is Modify Parcel, which allows you to Subdivide and to Join selected land parcels. This
tool is very powerful and will allow you to divide land for the purposes of setting music and media
streams, rental properties, group access, and other property-related attributes. When dividing or
joining land, you should always check the About Land settings and the Region/Estate settings to
make sure that they are where you want them to be on that parcel after you have completed the
changes. The resulting combined parcel inherits the properties that were assigned to the last parcel
selected to be joined. Also, these Modify tools may make landmarks and landing points invalid, so
you should also recheck those.
7. And inally, the Land Transactions buttons. Obviously, if you are in a world that uses currency, and
you desire to own the services provided by buying the land, this is where you do it. You can also give
up all ownership to the land, and in Second Life the ownership will go back to Governor Linden.
5.2.2 T
esTing
The
f
unCTionaliTy
of
The
B
uilT
-
in
l
and
T
ools
Let's take the Land Tools out for a test drive so you can get the feel of them. In Second Life, Torley Linden
has provided a terrain testing ground (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Here/173/165/23), or you can try this on
your own land in an OpenSim region.
First, let's try selecting an area about 20 meters square. You can check your dimensions by laying out a
20 m × 20 m × l m box, making it hollow and using it to frame your terraform area.
Practice selecting the terrain inside the box, and practice selecting the terrain outside it.
Note
: You cannot
select anything but a square shape, so you will have to work section by section around a center area. You will
also see by just clicking on the land that the minimum size of a section is 4 meters square.
When that feels comfortable, select an area. Make the bulldozer about 25% of its full size and set the
strength at 50%. With Raise selected on the Edit tool, hold the left mouse button down and circle the bull-
dozing patch over the selected area. You should see the ground start to move and raise itself. Do not hold
the mouse on it too long if the reaction is slow. Give the server time to make many calculations for you; this
is a complex command for it. When the ground stops moving, use your camera to look at it from all angles
(holding the Alt key down and using the arrow on Page Up and Page Down keys). Note how it changed and
what it felt like to do that change. Good terrain sculpting is a tactile as well as a visual task, so you need to
learn how it feels and how long you should run the bulldozer tool over the land to obtain the effect you want.
Try the rest of the tools and see how they work on that patch of the terrain. You will notice that by chang-
ing the sliders for size and strength of the bulldozer you can greatly affect the look and the speed of the terra-
forming. See Figure 5.5 for comparative images of how these tools work.
Another factor to be aware of are regional limits on terrain settings. For instance, on the Second Life
mainland, the land cannot be elevated or lowered more than 4 meters. Elsewhere in the Metaverse, land can
be elevated or lowered plus or minus 100 meters unless the owner has set limits on the terraforming in the
Region/Estate/Terrain menu.
How you design with these parameters in mind is a decision related to the needs of the environment
you are creating. Making really tall mountains over 100 meters high on a relatively small patch of ground
(one region or less) will probably not look good. Overly high terrain looks unnatural and disproportionate,
