Hey, I don’t completely suck at this

Following Kenneth Grahame’s advice, I’ve been “simply messing about in boats” quite a bit lately. It started with trying to make a sculpty hull for my Barsoom Express project:

That hull led me to making hulls for actual sail boats using an old public use version of the amazing Flying Tako scripts by Kanker Greenacre. I also played around with a prim based boat but… Well, it stank on ice as my sainted old father used to say, so I abandoned the idea for a while.

Recently some friends were looking for a boat large enough to live aboard, yet which would still be navigable – I think the idea was to simply sail the public waters for together time rather than having to rent or buy a place. Sneaky, I like that

I nodded politely and continued sorting my ever increasing Clothing/Historical/Dresses/Formal inventory folder, until they mentioned some prices, which – greedy capitalist that I am, piqued my interest and I found myself once again making the rounds of the boatyards of SL, this time looking at some of the things that hadn’t struck my interest before (I’m a sail girl, motors are for people with way too firm a schedule).

Some of the yachts out there are amazing. Some… Aren’t. I found one boat which was over 1000 prims and which obviously didn’t move.  In fact lots of them didn’t move.

The only thing is that nearly all of them that are large enough to live aboard, even for just a couple of people, aren’t very boat-like. They look more like the casino “riverboats” that one finds along the Gulf of Mexico. Essentially they’re buildings built in the water.

So I started fidgeting around with prims again, and managed to come up with a not too bad basic hull shape. I didn’t bother making it too hydrodynamic since it won’t be heeling like a proper boat (sail chauvinism, don’t you love it) and the only time anyone will see the bottom of the hull will be if they’re in the water. The horror began when I started trying to build on it. The hull shape had enough curves and angles to it to hide any prim drift that might cause problems, but when I started trying to add the cabin and upper deck I was reminded just how awful I am at prim building and was about to go sulk and make more sculpty hulls when I remembered that someone had told me about Skidz Prim in glowing terms.

I’ve got to give huge, massive kudos to the Skidz Prim tool , because either I was visited by the talent and skill fairy a few nights ago, or it’s made a giant difference in my ability to put things together. With the exception of the hull bottom which I built by eye, everything else was positioned and aligned using Skidz Prim. And the majority of the work was done in one day. Compulsive fidgeter that I am I’ve made several changes to the layout so the total time from purchasing Skidz Prim to this point has been three days.

The general idea is a SL friendly – meaning high ceilings, operating – meaning it moves, and luxurious yacht that still looks like a boat. I based the design on the overall look of the long low fan tail yachts of the 1920s, and call her the “Gatsby”. At the moment there are no scripts, poses, animations, or anything other than walls floors and ceilings, but I want to keep a sort of builders journal of the process so here I am.

Some photos:

This is actually before the final round of changes. I’d not yet added the forwards railing and I’ve since modified the top deck somewhat to accommodate the gangway up from the main deck.

This is me standing very saucily on the unfinished foredeck. Behind me you can just see the main companionway leading aft. There are two smaller staterooms on either side of is, and the master stateroom is at the end.

Here’s the Gatsby as I left her last night – floating 720 meters over Caledon, God help us all if gravity suddenly kicks in . As you can see I’ve got the forward railing and prow on there. Note, the prow actually looks much better than this, wither the angle or the shrinking I did to avoid bombarding everyone with 200 MB of unedited BMP files seems to have made it look as if it’s twisted.

Here’s a better view of the bow. I also raised the walls around the salon somewhat since it looks sort of unfinished with floor to ceiling glass walls.

And here’s a view from astern. The stairs are a sculpty with a transparent ramp on top, and work well going up but the invisible bounding area seems to cause me to walk on air about half way before I drop when going down, so I may opt for a ladder using prims instead.

Now that the shape is there I’m going to start playing around with the scripting. Obviously this isn’t coming in at 31 prims – she’s 70 right now, and adding furnishings will put her over 100 in no time. The plan as it stands now is to do the “old split the vehicle into two items, a rezzed part which people ride, and a worn part which gets attached to the owner and consists of all the structural components” trick.

In addition to that I’m planning on a discreet dance floor on the upper deck, assorted boat-y poses, the large seating area on the aft portion of the upper deck will also convert into a hot tub (and yay for SL physics so that the I can put 900 gallons of pixel water that far off center and not cause the boat to pitch backwards and sink).

And of course, doors, beds, textures, sound and particle effects, the list goes on and on…

In retrospect perhaps those other boats aren’t that expensive after all