You'd probably look at the above photo from Second Life and say, "Oh, look, an unfinished building."
Um, yeah... about that...
So Sunday afternoon Ricky and I decided to meet up with the folks from University Campus Suffolk who have been gracious enough to host this year's Machinima Expo. And I, the so called Second Life "expert" of the group, confidently begin leading the land owner through the procedure of dividing the land into parcels and then deeding them to a group so we Expo people could help administer the various video streams used for the event.
Well, it turns out that, under certain circumstances, when you change the ownership of land, if all of the primitives in that land's build are not in proper alignment ownership-wise, they will be returned to their owner's inventory in the Lost and Found folder.
You may have already guessed how it was we discovered this behavior: about 300 parts of an extremely complex replica of real world architecture were returned to the pocket of its builder, a student who had spent weeks constructing it for part of his dissertation. And while on the surface, the parts being returned to their owner might seem slightly better than having them flushed down the nearest commode, it is in fact only SLIGHTLY better than that. Because there is no way to "undo" in Second Life, and no way to return those pieces from inventory to the structure from which they came. Not without doing so one at a time, repositioning and realigning each and every one.
And all of this happened because someone followed the explicit directions straight out of my ignorant mouth. In the resultant nausea, I thought surely that Sol Bartz (my avatar) would have to spend his last few hundred Lindens on a good seppuku animation.
Linden Labs to the rescue! It turns out, there's a little-known (to me) benefit in place for owners of private islands... a backup and restore procedure performed several times daily. While LL doesn't perform what they call a "rollback" every time they are asked (for security reasons), when Eddie explained the situation to Linden Support they had the island restored to its former condition in a matter of a few hours. The destroyed building is restored.
I don't really have a life lesson or moral to close this story with... it's just a tale enabling you to live vicariously through my moment of dire anxiety. Needless to say, we decided to just let the land permissions stay as they are, and have Eddie help us set up during the week of the event. An event which is shaping up very nicely, by the way! Looking forward to seeing you there.
Comments
Wow, good thing they did that backup thing. I learned when I was building my "Little House" to save the building to my inventory, and do it often.
ALL SHALL TREMBLE AND BEAR WITNESS TO THE MIGHT AND DESTRUCITY OF...Phil. :p
Oh my, poor Phil, you must have broken out in sweat... what a good thing that there was a way to rescue the building!!
And to think you had invented 'subtractive architecture'.
No undo, no undo..how many times have I chanted that to myself right *after* the moment I did the wrong thing, and how much worse of a feeling when it is someone else's build. The permissions system in SL (and open sim) can be something of an obstacle. Very glad you managed to get it sorted, or you may have had to use the story at a future ephmeral media conference.
man, it's almost a shame they had a backup, imagine how great you guys would feel after reassembling a 300 piece 3d jigsaw puzzle
I could not help but laugh at the picture of people just floating there staring at the destroyed building in despair! It is impressive how quickly your body can break out in a cold sweat isn't it? Glad it all worked out. :)