Disappointment

Into every life a little rain must fall. Sometimes it’s a lot of rain and it rains very very hard and washes things away. Like flowers. As in, all the flowers that I planted last week in the flower beds for the conference. They are all gone. No more. Sigh. I ripped them all out last night.

Friday at noon we ran a stress test for the conference. Only fifty some people there and it was fairly laggy. Most things seemed to work, by and large. After that I continued to do some landscaping. Snuck in the swan and the ducks. 🙂 By Friday night I was pretty tired of planting flowers and trees and arranging rocks. On Saturday I released butterflies into Margie’s gardens. But otherwise I stayed away, spent most of my time in RL (whee! that can be much fun too!!!). Sunday night after my company left and I’d cleaned up, I logged in to catch Noma rocking the weekend to a close. No sooner had I waded my way into the crowded sim when J pinged me.

She said “Hi Ahuva, I really hate to ask this.” I laughed and said “You want me to remove the ducks and the butterflies?” She said “What ducks??????” Still laughing I said “Oops, shouldn’t have told you!!” But as you already know, it wasn’t the ducks. (So far the ducks have been spared. I told her I was willing to sacrifice the butterflies but that I LOVED the ducks 🙂 ) “My” flower beds were at the entry to the conference. That was why I started there and put so much effort into it – the point was to make the entry looked good. There is good and there is over the top. This was over the top, not in beauty, but in prims. Apparently 3300 prims in that sim were mine. Flowers that is, flora gold. The way J figured it, each flower is probably a 1024×1024 texture — that is 32 bits deep, so each texture is eating 4MB. I have no idea what I just wrote, except that obviously it is not a healthy situation for the sim. 🙂 X had also had 3300 prims in that area and removed them at J’s request. That improved the FPS (frames per second). So J asked me to remove mine. I gulped and asked “All of them?” She suggested that I start with some and we could see what happened.

I don’t know how to remove “some”. I tried to link flowers before and pull them out, but I hadn’t gotten very good at it (had problems getting the angles and groupings the way I wanted them). So J taught me “rubberbanding”, as she called it. This was exactly what I wanted earlier in the process. If I’d known THIS, I’d have been done in half the time, I’m sure! And the flower beds would have been identical. 🙂 Rubberbanding, should you want to know, is a form of copying. You select Tools from the menu, then click “Select Only my Objects”. Next click on an object in a corner of the area you wish to copy. Draw a yellow box highlighting all the items that you wish to take/copy. And there you have it. So I did that. I didn’t catch everything on the first bed, but I caught enough that should there ever be an opportunity, I could probably recreate the missing corner. I caught more of the 2nd bed. We simply tossed the flowers that were in the quadrants under the trees. What the heck.

So then I got my next assignment: Make it look good using only 2 plants and many fewer instances. LOL. Right. Okay, well, the world used to be black & white before they invented color photos, right? 🙂 Planting goes MUCH faster when you are limited in which plants and how many. So my gardens are gone, long live the gardens.