Embedded Files
The "Church World"
I cut my 3D teeth outside of Second Life. I used a basic free program that was undemanding of bandwidth but crude in terms of everything else.
The clunky nature of my 2003-2004 efforts at design were a good training field, however, for Second Life building, which is easy-peasy by comparison.
My intentions on Worlds were twofold: to find a suitable easy and free program for building in 3D, a program that I could use and that others could download in order to join me in my quest for a Virtual Church.
Log Cabin Home on Worlds
After having fun with all that, I decided to create a home for myself, and decided to go for the most difficult option, which was snow-drifts, a log cabin and even falling snow, which according to the program's makers was "not possible".
But as you will see, the effect worked almost perfectly, although it was technically "cheating".
Here is a photo of the "church world complete with gardens and mansion house that I created on "Worlds", an earlier and cruder version of SL
Struggling with each and every hand-written parameter of each texture, placement, position and orientation took up hours and hours of time, and a lot of concentration. The only building block was square or rectangular, so creating the illusion of pillars and curves took enormous expertise.
Additionally, textures were saved in an unknown format that no commercial graphics program catered for, leaving nothing but trial and error for graphics work. Changes to textures could not be viewed until they were uploaded, and were often too large or two small.
For those of you interested enough to know, it was achieved using a transparent graphic looped into a circular animation. It worked as long as you didn't stray beyond the edges of the snow-sheet.
The entrance to the log cabin looked like a little shack. Inside it was a picture that you clicked to get music playing. But the door inside that shack led you to a balcony overlooking the rest of the house, which was a large vaulted room with an authentic log fire, and a kitchen and bathroom, with a hallway that led to a snowy back yard.
Each block had to be textured individually!
All work on graphics had to be accomplished by command-line in DOS, as the program had not yet moved on to the Windows environment.
Thankfully, I did find some Christians already within the Worlds community, and spent a little while befriending and chatting to them, including the man who eventually became my husband!! So it wasn't all a loss.
After I began, I contacted the scattered members of the old destroyed Forum and tried to interest them in becoming Virtual. Sadly, the concept of 3D interaction and having to download a program in order to do that, scared off even the most hardy and I was then left to my own devices in my empty Church World.
Thus, with the goal in mind of recreating the fellowship world that we had enjoyed in the forum (but only in a textual form), I set about building the church, the houses, the little Inn, and all the places we had invented in our chat.
And also to create a visual representation of a Forum I owned and ran up to a year or so before that had been a lot of fun and fellowship for a small group of Christians, but which had been overrun and ruined by conspirators who suspected us of all kinds of heresies.
The Fellowship Universe
Despite all this I managed to create an entire "Fellowship Universe". It consisted of:
a water garden
a Grand Mansion with a sweeping staircase and marbled halls
secret passages and a ballroom
a traditional ancient stone church with a cloister, green lawns, and grand houses surrounding them
a balcony leading to the tower room and...
underground rooms, consisting of the vestry, and a creepy cellar complete with animated huge spider that ran out and scared everyone!
That yard in turn was going to lead you on a walk through the snow to a high mountain where you could warm yourself in a hot tub to the sound of music. There was also a sauna! But at that point I had come to the end of my interest and wanted to move on to something more up to date.
I looked around the Net and found Second Life.
** That part of the story starts HERE
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