The Brochure: Maero Arcis is a direct descendant of my most popular build, the DarkRayne Fortress. It’s slightly smaller in length and is much more intimate with a layout that includes a master suite on the second floor, a see through dance floor, a dining area downstairs. And best of all a fully secure wine cellar with lockable storage for those special vintages. This isn’t a small build at 30×40 but it does fit on a relatively medium sized parcel and is beautifully textured. When you tell people it’s 159 prims they will be shocked. As always it is mod/copy so you can change textures as you wish.

The Story: The DarkRayne as you know is my very first castle. It holds a special place in my heart being the first product I came up with, however, people keep asking for something a bit smaller and I wanted to see what I could do with what I learned. So I built this. The windows are better as I finally got an understanding of how to avoid flash in different viewers. (Hint: 1mm isn’t enough of a difference to prevent flash in the most recent viewers.) I also used sculpted stairs instead of ramps in this one to give it a bit more realism. It’s a simpler build, not as spread out with small cloisters as the DarkRayne, instead having a ‘master suite’ upstairs and a decent dormer downstairs. But the real crowning achievement of this build is the ‘wine cellar’ basement. I managed to use my prim torture techniques to make that dungeon while still keeping it low prim. It’s really a gorgeous build and has become one of my favorites.

By the way, the name means Fort of Sorrow in Latin, or my closest approximation thereof.

In a day or two I’ll show you the other flavor it comes in.

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?