maybe a land-purchase bot? and Fountain!

I'm still puzzling over the appearance of the Bot or Person.

Quite a few hours after seeing it (and unrelated to seeing it) I decided to reduce the price of one of the less-attractive parcels on the first US$ parcel I'd bought a few days ago. I figured it would be good to have one of the parcels appear earlier in the Search Land listings---that might bring people to look who would decide they might want to upgrade a bit to one of the parcels on the water.

Well, apparently I put it just a shade too low--someone did buy it, and turned it around. No improvements. The person will make about two bucks US more than he or she paid me, so it's not as if I'm seething or anything. Heck, if the person promotes the parcel, that will bring potential buyers to my parcels, too.

It will be a learning process to figure out if I can use the 'price one less-attractive parcel fairly far below the rest' technique in such a way that I don't trigger the bots, and/or the speculators. It's all interesting, so I'm happy to learn.

Anyway, before this occurred, I'd been thinking about what I could place on all my parcels to make them more attractive--something to throw in for free. I'd tried one of my 9-Prim Houses on one parcel, but frankly I'm still refining the House to make it more compelling to buyers. I wanted something that wouldn't take up a 10m x 10m chunk of a 512, too.

(Though I think one of the main potential virtues of the 9-Prim House is that it CAN be used on a 512m---it will save the owner so many prims that the 117-prim limit will be less of a burden--there's no doubt that it looks kinda big on such a small plot. And when selling a parcel [in Second Life or in real life!], you don't want to make it look small.)

So my idea was to make a nice low-prim fountain---with sound.

I respond to water features, and I feel safe in assuming I'm not unusual in that. I also love good sound in SL--it probably motivated me to buy my first piece of land. (And as it happens, the ambient sound in that part of that sim WAS part of a sales-come-on...from the big, expensive parcel next to mine. I just got to enjoy the benefit of it for all those weeks that the parcel remained unsold, and the nice waterfall and bird sounds were audible to all in the area.)

So I ended up making a 4-prim fountain that I think looks pretty good. But what I'm proudest of is that I figured out how to make a Looping script and put the Library water-flow sound into it....and it worked!

I stayed up way too late doing all this---the time just vanishes when engaged in building. It's a kind of fun I would never have predicted I'd find compelling.