Illusions

I've been working on a new store model the past couple of days. The old one was starting to really bother me, more and more as I spent more time in it. It's been a long and lovely time having that beautiful citadel, but I have plenty more reasons to swap it out than I do to keep it.

If you're wondering what a few of those are, here:

There are anti-aliasing glitches in the walls, it has asymmetrical prims, inefficient wall space, raw edges, areas of poor texturing, and when I made it I was no where near as good a prim slinger as I am now. The store was designed for just a few vendors like the main mask one, and I didn't think I'd need more than a few spaces for a few vendors. Obviously that changed.

But on the other hand it has lovely ivy, a wonderful open air feeling, it's full of light, it has my favorite colors, it fits the character of the island and who doesn't love pillars? So I set out to making a new store design that will fit that area of land, as well as fit my wall space needs, have better shopping flow, and have everything that I loved about the first building. I think I've accomplished that!



This build doesn't mean that the old one is gone, not yet anyway. It's actually hovering above and behind the old one, and curious minds are definitely encouraged to come up to the new one and take a look! Before I settle it in and delete the other, I want to make sure no one will miss the old one. Ok, well a few people will miss it, but hopefully they'll like the new one enough to be able to get over it. It's much better inside.

The new store has quite a few beautiful details, like figureheads on the fluted pillars, fun keystone stonework and a quasi-feasible infrastructure. Feasible if, maybe, the stone I made the building out of weighed about as much as... wood. But I had a lot of fun problem solving... roofs have always been an issue with me and definitely a trouble, but this is the only one I'm actually extremely pleased with and don't see myself ruing in the future.

The shopping flow I feel goes a bit better in this building, rather than being a straight shot down, it leads you in a meandering circle around. I found from Candy that either people come for the masks, or they come for the "everything else". So I've made it so that browsers there to see the masks and cloaks will be led in a circle around the masky-ness, and then they can continue to the other yummies if they please, or the people after the other yummies can browse the masks if they please. Also, there's a couple of chairs for lounging in, and the fountain has a home again. I placed a carpet down in the sort of entrance area in order to break up the pattern of the floor, which can get very overwhelming in such a large space.

Did I mention I have wall space now? When Munchflower gave me a spot in Nomine, I had a nasty realization when setting up there that she had given me about 3 times as much wallspace as I had in my main store. That, and of course my own productivity was very encouraging to make the new build ^.^

I'll be making it official sometime later today, after I've finished setting up the inventory and when there's a lull in customers. I'm definitely open to any and all feedback and I'd love to hear what your thoughts are ^.^