What’dya know, there’s a script funtion that does exactly that called llSetTexture. The example in the wiki does all sides of the object, well, that won’t work because I don’t want the back of the cylinder inside the telescope to show the stars, I want it mostly transparent so that if someone is being silly and looking through the wrong end they can see who’s looking up at the stars. So, since ALL_SIDES is the variable that obviously controls that, let’s try telling it which side to rotate textures on… trial and error time.

I finally figured it out and created a workable slide show frame! I put that in my back pocket and I sell it in my shop as a photo frame. It takes the inventory of the object and cycles through the textures. I uploaded a bunch of images from NASA that are in the public domain and built the ‘lens’ of my scope. After that it was just a matter of building a cool looking telescope around the frame. I used textures I really like, made em shiny and had a working telescope. Time to put it in a dome for the building. Which I did with the ’small scope’ first. Well, yeah, that worked… but I really want a scope that rotates, so that it would look cooler…. how do I go about that? I think I saw a merry go round…..

Next time: no carousel horses for me… Who names a horse Tom?

Wait….

At the time I started building the Codex I was in a bit of a funk, I’d done the castles, I’d messed around with some modern buildings and variations of my castles by doing Tapestry and Sandra’s Place. But I hadn’t done anything I wanted for me for awhile. I was in a creative funk. Yes I’d found some amazing design partners and the ‘group’ part of my business name was finally something of a reality but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next creatively. So I decided again not to worry about my customer’s or percieved market placement and to just design what I wanted to live in. No worry about prim limits because at that point I had nearly a half sim in land holdings, no worry about pleasing anyone else with trade offs between quality and practicality, this was going to be a build for me.

One of the problems with creative people, and me especially is we are super hard on ourselves. Remember that graphic tablet I got for my birthday? (Two months ago now.) Know why you don’t see me selling clothing yet? It’s because I keep throwing my efforts out as not being high enough quality wise. One of my jobs as the ‘manager’ of IDG is to convince our designers that it’s “good enough to release” and in turn have them tell me the same thing. It’s part of why I like having the loose confederation of really good people that I’ve got. Besides the fact that many of them have become family.

So why the aside? Because this build is really about making it so I didn’t see anything that jumped out at me as needing ‘fixing.’ Now this is truly impossible, but most of my builds, even the ones everyone loves, when I put them down, my eye jumps to something I need to ‘fix’ or improve upon, even if nobody else will notice. This build I was going to take my time on and not worry about any deadlines or anything else, it was going to be realistically ‘perfect.’ I didn’t know what I really wanted to build but my favorite genres of writing have always been sci-fi and fantasy, (No they aren’t the same thing.) and one of the series that off and on I think about is one that puts a naturalist (early scientist) in a fantasy setting. (The name of the series escapes me at the moment and I’m not near my storage facility with my books so you’re all out of luck.) This appealed to me and I thought about a mix of science and magic. Maybe something along the lines of the early alchemists? I was at the time also reading QuickSilver by Stephenson (Amazing series, highly recommended.) which influenced my thoughts I’m sure.

So an early alchemist would be interested in the stars and formations and such. So they would be using telescopes. I started looking on SLX for telescopes and to my surprise there were not many, and none were functional. Aha, an opportunity! I started messing around with LSL to see if it was possible to take control of the camera and zoom it far away when someone sat on something as a proof of concept for the telescope. Turns out it is, but you have to know the region coordinates of the place you want to zoom to, and since I didn’t know where I was going to rez this that wasn’t workable… o what to do what to do?

Turn in tomorrow to hear part 2…. dum dum dum.

(That’s what we call a cliffhanger. Snoopy would be proud.)