A Tour of the CDS

[Rose Springvale]

interesting, i thought they were phantom. You do have the power to take those down Sonja.

[Sonja Strom]

Yes, I was able to take them down, and put up new ones in their place that allow the tour to go through. There were three of them in its way.

I took the tour to be sure it worked, and stayed on it all the way through. WOAW, it is fantastic now!! Great work!! One thing either new or that I had not noticed before is the explanation of the boat in the river in CN - interesting!

Locus Amoenus is starting to *really* look good!! I love the way the river ice gives out to the ocean near the beach - very striking and beautiful.

One small thing to maybe correct sometime in the future: the spelling of cabaret.

[Sonja Strom]

Are there any plans to extend the tour, so Minerva-the-Owl would fly over Monastery and Al Andalus? I really like this tour, and it would be nice to include those areas.

Maybe in the interest of keeping the tour a reasonable amount of time there could be two separate tours that joined in the middle, or something like that. Just an idea.

[Claude Desmoulins]

A tour of Alhambra and Generalife leaves from the Alhambra courtyard. As I remember it's a shade over 20 minutes.

[Rose Springvale]

Yes, i updated the Minerva tour to take out the references to the monastery in Alpine Meadow and mentioned it's relocation. Because of Avatar limits in homesteads, it's probably not a good idea to make the tours enter the homesteads; there will also be script limits eventually and that could kill the tour completely... we've had that issue in Al Andalus when the tour went over private land.

Al Andalus has a Magic Carpet Guided tour that originates in the Fortress.. (that's also where Bart the Bull is and where you can pick up AKK Arabian demo horses to ride... those demos are very nice black horses.) The Carpet ride still needs to have it's text updated a bit, but we have it in English, Spanish and German, so updating the text is a little more complicated. Also, when you ride the carpet alone, you need to sit on the front seats, otherwise the carpet has a tendency to hang up on structures. I've not had the complaint when there are passengers in the front and the back, only when they choose the back seats alone. (The carpets seat five.) I haven't looked to see how many times Minerva had been used lately, but the carpets seem to be in constant use (i get 'whisper text') when they fly by. Seems like it was over 175,000 when i last looked. I'd estimate at least half of those are errors, but still a lot of tours!

For those curious, a major difference in the tours is that the Al Andalus tour talks about the history and stuctures of real life Al Andalus. We do that some with the Minerva tour, but more of the structures of the original sims are our own creations. The history of the sims as sims may not have as broad of appeal, particularly with educators. There is some factual history in the tour, particularly in Colonia Nova, though.

What i foresee is a landmark giver with landmarks to the two tours from the respective info centers in the sims. We also anticipated a balloon tour, originating from the LA beach, which would be a shorter, overview tour. The prim crisis in LA put that project on hold, for now.

[Sonja Strom]

Tor Karlsvalt and I are not able to find Minerva the Tour Owl at the Neufreistadt School. Does anyone know if something happened to Minerva

[Rose Springvale]

Sonja, please feel free to im me with these questions, probably makes more sense than posting on forums.

The minerva tour is still there, right where it has always been. Sometimes SL is not as reliable as we'd like it to be and the scripts in the rezzer needed to be reset.

It has been taken care of.

[Sonja Strom]

I see the owl is back now. Thank you for taking care of it Rose

[Sonja Strom]

Is Minerva the owl still there for tours in Neufreistadt I don't see her there now again. Maybe it's only me who doesn't see her.

[Anna Toussaint]

I don't think it's there any more, Sonja.