Ivory Tower Library of Primitives

Honour has been suggesting to me for a long time now that I should visit the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives and learn some building fundamentals. Hmmm. Perhaps she phrased it more strongly than a suggestion. 🙂 I kept insisting that I am a scripter. But lately I’ve needed to do a lot of building-type things – offices, graphs, malls. So I finally decided that Honour is right and I need to learn some of this already. Ever lazy and always enjoying company, I coereced Dale into joining me. I figured Dale would give me fellow-scripter support. We’d both been playing in our respective inventories, so I may be sporting a bit of a different look in these pictures. 🙂 Trust me – I sure did my best to crop them.

We made it to ITLP uneventfully. It is a very pretty sight, even for one dreading what she feared would be an ordeal. *grin* That would be me. We wandered from the landing site to the entry. There was an adorable whatever there to greet us and explain how the ITLP worked. I’m cheating. I’m too lazy to write up a description of ITLP – I’m going to steal relevant information from the first notecard. ITLP is an on-going project by Lumiere Noir. At this time Linden Labs has underwritten the costs of the sim.

I made this tower in the hopes that it would give you a substantial headstart on your arrival here. It contains a lot of tips and tricks of the building system that have taken a good while to develop and collect. Over time I’ll include a vehicle tutorial on building and scripting vehicles and a website (both in the works as I write this, go to http://ivorytowerlibrary.com for the website), a module on sound, animations, avatar customization and attachment building. That’s in planning for the forseeable future…maybe a month or twelve away (this was written July 10, 2006). Long term I’ll include an extensive module on scripting, script building, weapons making…and…more advanced building techniques. Don’t hold your breath, all of that is still just the gleam in the milkman’s eye for right now!
What the tutorials are: The tutorials are a thorough grounding in the properties of the different primitive types (building blocks), and the editing tools that are used on those primitives. Several techniques to make building with prims more easily are described in detail.

Far from being an ordeal, the tower is actually very interesting and informative. I was pleased to realize that I knew most everything in Module 1 (the first floor). Things got a bit more complicated as we went up the tower. I knew a good bit of Module 2, but certainly not everything. So I began collecting the notecards and reading the exhibits a bit more carefully. At least ONE of us was paying attention to the exhibits. One of us was playing on the exhibits. I don’t really learn this way – by reading. That’s why I have Hell as my scripting teacher. I learn by doing things. By having actual goals that I need to achieve. That’s why I keep throwing myself under that darn bus. 🙂 I’m not going to learn building by reading note cards either. That’s why Honour gave me a building assignment (yes, yes, yes – I KNOW I owe you that box…. 9 prims… I remember). But these cards and the exhibits will definitely be handy when I need to remember where to find various edit commands, and what kind of functionality is available.

Everyone comes to the ITLP. Do you think the horse (yes – that horse is an avatar) is building a barn or a race track? Or something else entirely?