New Style of Transport in SL

Second Life is a wonderful place for people to use their imaginations to the full. You can be a superhero if you want to be, riding around in rocket ships, jet fighters, speedboats, flying saucers and supersonic cars. Well in order to do this you need someone who is really gifted at designing and making these fantastic vehicles. You also need that person to be a genius in the scripting department as well, to make the vehicles into working models.

Alphonso Pidgeon is just such a person, inspirational and very talented, he has been a builder in Second Life for some time now. Alph would always turn up at our meeting places with a new awesome spaceship or airplane that he had just created and on one occasion gave us all a set of different coloured motorbikes that we could all dash around the SL landscape on, his work is always amazingly detailed and looks incredible. Of course Alph doesn’t only make vehicles, he is extremely experienced with SL building as a whole, and a natural at it!

Well now Alph has come up with a new design, a new mode of SL transport, it’s compact, looks very stylishly ‘cutting edge’ and is easy to use, with just a little practice. It’s called a ‘Slea-Z-Boy’ and basically it is a jet-propelled chair that moves at speed following where you point your SL camera. If, for instance you saw an object in the distance that you wanted to get close to, you simply hold your alt key down and use your mouse to aim at the object or location and next thing the chair has taken you right there. I’m not very good at driving anything in SL, but I found this very smooth to use, as long as I didn’t try to cam too far into the distance, I moved with ease, and it’s a really classy vehicle to be seen in too. It has colour changing jets and lights under the seat that you can alter to suit your mood.

I tested it in a sandbox at first till I got the hang of it, then I took it to Virtual London to see if I could manoeuvre it through the little streets and it worked a treat. Whilst in the sandbox I tested the built in cannon that fires seven different types of bullets, this was real fun as I aimed at an abandoned prim and sent the bullet spiralling towards it, exploding on impact with flames and clouds of smoke. This again is easy to use and you can get a good aim by using mouselock view. There’s a feature that lets you build a sky platform and it also has a built in bar so that you can offer your friends drinks as well!

I asked Alphonso to tell me about his life in SL as a builder and also about the Slea-Z-Boy invention. He told me “I've been around Second Life since the end of 2006, and spent most of my time in-world building and scripting various items, from space ships to shopping malls, jewellery to whole sims. Quite often while building I'll use a script for something minor, and I just get a feeling that there's a good product somewhere in it, waiting to be built. This was the case with the SLea-Z-Boy chair. I had used camera follower scripts before, and I knew there was something groovy in them.

I began by making a tiny UFO camera follower, which was nice, but not right. There was still something better in there. So, one day, out of boredom, I sat on the UFO, and started to zoom around the sim. Following this epiphany, I started work on the "Magic chair" as it was called to start with. I wanted it to look stylish and comfortable, but mostly I wanted to make it practical. Something people would want to use again and again. And now it's finished, I think I succeeded. The finished chair is easy to use (with a little practice), convenient, thanks to the HUD to rez it, and I have included a few utilities, such as a platform rezzer, a colour changer to allow users to customise it and the ability to rez a round of drinks for your friends.

However the biggest advantage in my experience so far, is the fact that when sitting in "hold" mode, the user is practically griefer proof. You cannot be pushed, bumped, orbitted or any of those other fun things griefers like to do. The only thing left they can do is particle attacks, and if you turn off particles, griefers soon get bored and move on.

I have included an updater script in the HUD for the chair, so I can keep tweaking, and any updates can be automatically sent out to any current users. I already have one or two ideas, but I'd like to see how it's received first. Most of my builds have been a little unconventional, but this one is a genuinely different approach to flying in SL.

It also has the added advantage of making you look like an evil genius, bent on world domination!” (I rather like this idea Alph!). Alph continued “My gift to Second Life. Well, at my prices, it's practically a gift.” It is a great price too, Alph is selling it at just 250 Linden dollars which is within everyone’s reach.

The is a great new concept for getting around the Second Life grid, you need nothing more, and on top of that, I am told that Jason Linden has a Slea-Z-Boy already, and I should imagine that he only chooses the very best of what SL has to offer. You can contact Alphonso Pidgeon in-world or visit his store Genius Inc.

Thank you for talking to me about your unique and wonderful invention Alphonso!

Janey Bracken