Saturday, January 8, 2011

Furnishing Usher: The Haunted Desk Drawer

Not so Empty
Location: Nevermore Sim

Getting over the loss of SL's House of Usher is easy when I have a new house to build. The outside has been mostly finished for a week.  Little details such as gargoyles and gutters remain to be added; the downspouts got imported from SL a few days back.

I want to build some furniture that has sliding drawers, so explorers of the simulation can sneak around behind the actors' backs and find hidden clues. I began with Madeline's writing desk. It features a desk body as one set of prims, a sliding drawer as another.

Finding the drawer-open script was not too hard. Modifying Bob Sutor's script, licensed under Creative-Commons for non-commercial projects, was not hard. All that needed to be done was changing the X or Y vectors after the desk ended up in its final location.

I built my desk out in the open, so I would not accidentally select parts of the house when linking or moving prims.  Then I took the desk into inventory, as two pieces, and found my spot inside.

The ghost appeared as soon as the desk was in place.

I clicked the sliding drawer and "BLAM!" it shot through the wall and ended out outside the house near the position where I'd made the desk. I rezzed another drawer, clicked it, and "BLAM!" off it went.

The exorcism was simple. When I rezzed the third drawer I reset the script and it worked beautifully. I'll soon give away full-perm copies at the Newbie Dome in Jokaydia Grid, with a note containing a link to this post and Bob's Web site, as well as a note about the conditions of his CC license. I'll toss in some TGA images of Victorian clutter: letters, envelopes, and invoices, for the right effect.
Writing Desk
I have aggregated my posts on building in virtual worlds here. Happy home improvements!

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