One of the most urgent things for us to do in Beau Belle village right now is to  set up our new retail area.  The land is costing us considerable money, and we need to get shop renters in as soon as possible!  To this end, I’ve been working on a new shop design.

The shops we have in the original part of the village were assembled speedily when we first moved in, and I was never completely happy with the design.  They were functional but rather bare and characterless, and I never felt they really gelled with the theme of the village, although they served their purpose well.  So I was motivated to try a new shop design for the new area more in keeping with the villagey feel.  Something more quaint, more old-fashioned, more pleasing to the eye (although trying not to use too many prims, or make the shop so sophisticated as to distract from whatever is being sold therein!).  I’m now almost finished with the first medium shop, featuring an old rough brick texture and bay windows.  I don’t know how prospective shop renters will feel about the bay windows, if they want to show their wares in the window; we’ll see!  Here’s a picture of the “size 3″ shop, nearing completion on my building platform, high above Beau Belle village:

An almost finished "size 3" shop

I recently went away for the weekend to the Isle of Wight, and took a lot of photos of old buildings there as source material for Second Life textures.  The tiled roof and brick textures are made from photographs I took (with a little Photoshopping to allow nice repetition and a bit of cleanup).  Here’s a closeup of the roof detail:

Closeup of the "size 3" shop roof, showing my roof tile texture

Hopefully I’ll get the chance to finish this within a day or so, then I can plant a bunch of them down in the new part of the village (which Teesa is busily arranging as we speak), and I can move onto the other size shops, and variants thereof.  But for now, bedtime…..

Hello, and welcome to my nifty new blog.  I’ve been wondering about doing something like this for a while, but wanted to wait until I had a proper subject to write about, and that day has finally come.  Let me first introduce myself.

I’m Bluebell Broome, and live in Second Life.  Around the start of the year, a new village called Beau Belle was born in Second Life, formed by a cooperative consisting of me and some friends (Teesa, Cranmillion and Share).  The village was founded on a small set of principles; to be democratic and listen to how the residents wanted the village to evolve, to strive for natural realism and high quality building wherever practical, and to do it with passion, for the love of it.

It started small, with space for a modest 15 small cottages and some trees, and gradually grew to half a sim with cottages, beach houses, shops, a mountain, and regular events.  The four cooperative membes fell into natural roles; Teesa was the interior decorator/furnisher and excelled at the business side, Cranmillion was the Devil’s advocate and ideas woman, Share was the gardener and forester (although she later left the cooperative), and I was the main builder and scripter.  Our half-sim village became almost full with residents and shop owners, and the chance to expand to a full sim appeared.  So after very careful consideration, tooing and froing, umming and aahing, and a modicum of dithering, we decided to take the plunge.

So that brings us to the present day, and we’re now faced with the task of planning and expanding the village to double in size.  We’ve always aimed to build our own stuff wherever possible, in order to control the quality, keep closely in theme, and give us full customisation ability, which means we have an awful lot of new building work ahead of us.  That was the trigger that made me finally start this blog – to document and discuss this village expansion project from the start.  I aim to share my problems, frustrations, successes, discoveries, tips, and thinking behind the building and scripting I do.  Perhaps it’ll help crystalise my own vision of the project.  And if anybody reads it, and finds it interesting, well that will be a bonus!

If you’d like to visit the village and see what we’ve done so far, do a search in Second Life for “Shadow Vale”, or follow this slurl.

The view from the lychgate, Beau Belle village (Shadow Vale sim)

Bluebell xx