Union Micro

I’ve consolidated the two Union Micro buildings in Pigra – the store and the office building – into a single taller building. This building is 8 floors tall, including the basement and the observation deck. The basement consists of various crates and is dark for a little bit of atmosphere and is where the clearance items are kept – kind of like a bargain basement. The 2nd (main floor) is where most products are for sale, and the 3rd floor is elevators and instructional videos.

The site is still very much under construction at the moment but is open for business.

I’ve updated the elevator controller to 1.5.1, RentTrack doors to 1.0.1, and RentTrack to 1.2.0. Update your products via their updaters to get new packages from the update server.

The Quality Assurance team is doing a great job of finding and reporting bugs to me, so this should result in some more stable products.

Also, I’ve found a slight problem with the elevators and the monitoring script. Seems as though if a region goes offline while a car is in transit, it will be stuck when the region comes back up. At the moment I don’t have any way around this, so you will still need to occasionally reset your car when your region goes down.

I’ve added 2 new elevator videos – 1 for modifying your elevator, and 1 for the elevator builders kit. You can see them here.

I’ve been having some trouble encoding the videos, so the flash versions on Blip seem to be not working on 2 of the videos (the most rescent ones), but you can view the original .mov file by clicking the appropriate link on the right side. I’m currently re-uploading the video files and hopefully they will work this time.

I’ll also be putting these into SL. I have the elevator installation guide streaming into SL but it needs to be re-encoded at a lower quality as it is KILLING client FPS.

I’ve started a video section of the forum that will contain various videos I make for my products. First thing I’m doing is making some instructional videos for my elevators. I’ve already released one, so check them out here!

Well, a small arcade is here anyway! I had some empty space and some extra prims so I decided an arcade would be fun after seeing a skee-ball game on SL Exchange. This lead to me purchasing about 8 arcade games and placing them on the top two floors of Union Micro.

But wait, there’s more! The creator also made an open-source framework called “OpenArcade” that I’m looking into. I kind of need to diversify a little bit more from my mostly business related line of products, so arcade games could be very fun! I already have my first idea for a game, I just need to figure out how to do it, and how to create the artwork and sounds. I’m good at creating/sampling sounds and textures from real life objects, but not so nice at creating things from scratch – so this could prove to be a challenge. I’m hoping that my wife can help me out in the pixel-art (sprites) department!

There’s a prize counter for the arcade games as well! Although it’s empty at the moment, you can still earn tickets for use when we create some things to put inside the prize counter. Just touch the ticket dispenser for your roll of tickets, and make sure you wear it before you play any games.

This arcade is pretty exciting for me, I’m not sure why. I just think it’s so nifty, and the games are so well-done!

UPDATE: Vendors enabled.

I’ve disabled the vendors temporarily as SL is being very unreliable. Many people are paying vendors and not receiving items or refunds. I’m going to monitor SL Exchange and match when they enable and disable purchasing as it’s a good indication of grid reliability. If you want to purchase something, you can contact me to arrange a manual purchase.

I’ve released the very first set of escalators by Union Micro! You can purchase them at Union Micro in Pigra, or on SL Exchange.

These puppies have custom textures, custom animations, and custom sounds – all made by me! Textures and sounds have both been sampled from their real life counterparts.

They also have physics-based movement borrowed from the popular Union Micro Elevators. This makes the passenger’s ride up or down the escalator visually appealing and won’t give them a headache like other “jerky” escalators.

As with most Union Micro products, these escalators are designed with the simulator performance in mind. Therefor, scripts have been optimized and designed to have as little impact on simulator performance as possible – this is good news for that region-sized mall that uses many escalators. This includes the texture animations which are all client-side!

The kit comes with 6 escalators of varying heights. Feel free to modify them and build your own escalator of custom height – the scripts are designed to work at all heights and will adapt accordingly.

This has to be the biggest and best update I’ve done on the elevators to-date! Basically, the car is now capable of downloading floor coordinates from doors, it has a monitor to reset itself if needed, you can define admins, there is an event log, and there is also a maintenance mode.

The builders kit allows builders to include placeholders with their builds that users can then use to rez their elevators. At the click of a button their objects will rez out of the box and automatically position themselves where they need to go.

On a somewhat unrelated note, Union Micro now has a small presence at the Tech Expo. Come check it out!

Hopefully…

I’ve added a forwarder to my home e-mail address from the Union Micro Support e-mail address. What was happening was that people were sending support requests and I wasn’t checking it often enough. *Slaps hand*

So now that I have a forwarder setup, I should be more on top of the support issues.

Thanks!

I’m in the planning stages of the next set of elevator features. I won’t go into too much detail, but the elevator car will not need to have floors manually typed into the configuration notecard anymore. Provided you have your doors and controller installed and initialized, the elevator car will download the coordinates right from the doors.

The other feature is something I’m often asked about: “I’m a builder, can you sell me a full-perm elevator kit?” which I always nicely answer no to, as I don’t trust full-perm copies of my best seller floating around Second Life. Instead, I am going to create a copy/transfer builders kit, which contains scripted dummy objects that you build into your structure. Now, when someone buys an elevator, they simply rez it and all of the objects rez to where the dummy objects were – self installation! This of course means that the elevator installation is only as good as the builders positioning of the dummy objects.

Now, I know the first option is do-able, but I haven’t much researched the second one yet. With products like Rez-Foo that do similar things, I don’t see why this can’t be done.