Construction Junction Session 3: Building Supplies and Groups

Our third session of the Construction Junction workshop showed me how little I know about building in SL. We began the session looking at a tool called a Prim Finder or Rezzer (shown below).












Mali Young, Jeff Kurka and other Construction Junction participants learning about a Prim Finder/Rezzer. (photo taken August 12/08).
A Prim FInder/Rezzer is a very useful tool that allows you to search through a variety of prim shapes and choose the one you would like to use. This is useful because you do not necessarily have to know how to create the shapes in order to build items out of the prim shapes the rezzer provides. Mali said that one can be purchased for approximately 250 Linden which comes out to about $1.00.

Our next agenda item was to play a game called primtionary, which is a SL game that helps to develop and refine your building skills. The host IM's an object to be created by one of the game participants. That participant tries to construct the object out of prims while other members try to guess what the object is supposed to be. Once someone guesses...they win 20 Lindens and then get their turn at building.












The Construction Junction group playing primtionary. (photo taken August 12/08).

In the past I have always struggled moving around objects in my inventory. As I am moving items from folder to folder, I have folders expanding and collapsing which make it difficult to put items exactly where you want them. Well Mali taught us a trick when working with inventory items. All you have to do is go into file>open new window and a second inventory window opens allowing you to drag and drop items much easier. Mali provided us with this tutorial by Torley Linden to view to help understand the process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z19DHCrQVIM

Another trick we were shown is how to use inventory filters to find items in our inventory. Take a look at the following Torley Linden video to help understand the process:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XLpcjhbQRdc

Our building project for this session was a material dispenser. It is a very useful object that has a script allowing it to give out items. For example I can put notecards, landmarks or other objects into it and when someone clicks on the dispenser it will give out the items. Mail uses it to give out all our supplies for each session. I put the latest version of the ECMM t-shirt into the dispenser and I might use it to give out the t-shirt. Shown below is the updated version of the ECMM t-shirt.












Updated version of the ECMM t-shirt. (photo taken August 12/08).

Although this was a very informative and well organized session, I believe people are having difficulties understanding what chat to use. For example when I first arrived at the sky box we were using local voice chat. We were told to go over to group voice chat which worked fine. Many of the group members were initially using local text chat during primtionary but then the chat seemed to switch over to group text chat. This was confusing for some of us as we were trying to figure out what text chat we were to be using. Also when the speak easy HUD was used, the text chat transferred back to the local text chat. This was a little confusing for some as they did not know where to look for the instructions coming from the speak easy HUD. I understand certain chats need to be used for certain tools or in specific situations but it seems to be necessary to identify when chats are switched from local to group or vice versa.