Building the orientation area of my Philippine History game project

The biggest problem that I have seen in the virtual worlds that I have visited is the emptiness of the world. It's not that there is nothing there, sure there's lots of prim buildings and signs. But there's no avatar around.  Sometimes one would teleport in or fly around but would immediately teleport out again.

This is the reason why NPCs are important. They could alleviate some of the loneliness and stress associated with being alone in a world. Unfortunately the NPC module of Open Simulator 0.7.x is broken. And even the functioning module in an earlier version needs a to improve, especially in the persistence of attachments.

The only solution that I was able to come up with is to create cut-out figures and use greeter scripts as a temporary substitute. What I did is I created my character avatar, then took a snapshot in green screen.

Greeter cut-out

I then created a texture for a prim by adding alpha channels. Then used it on a simple box prim.  Btw. any resemblance to anyone living or dead is not intended. I just played with the appearance sliders to come up with a look that differs from the default avatar Ruth.

Then I combined the Who_touched_me.lsl and VERY_SIMPLE_GREETING_Script_by_Jester_Knox.lsl greeter scripts. So whenever an avatar comes close or touch the cut-out it will say something. Greet, give info, or a quest.

Landing zone of the Orientation plaza

In addition to a greeter I put HyperGates in the orientation plaza that will serve as a time machine that will teleport students to the themed regions. Textures for the rings are from the Astria Porta Stargate. I replaced the scripts since I'm only using a standalone sim (and have no need for hypergrid teleportation) with a simple teleporter that uses OsTeleportAgent().

The booth near the greeter is a Sloodle Enrollment booth.

Hopefully when the NPC module is fixed I can replace these cut-outs.