Builds: Sky Fortress 1

I think I've already mentioned that one of my big peeves is Second Life is skyboxes that don't look like they have any right to be floating in the air (or in space).

So here is another one of my solutions to that: a large retail skybox patterned loosely on old Chinese fortresses. The real fortresses wouldn't have the towers and would have small windows scattered about on the face, but I work within the limits of Second Life and the intended uses of the build.

The other thing lacking, which would be found in the originals, as as will be found lacking in later pictures, is that the interior should be a honeycomb of apartments running around the edge and ringing either a central courtyard or covered commons space. That would have increased the size considerably. This already has a 50m square footprint (2500sq.m.). To make it fully featured in Second Life would have at least doubled that and made it a full quarter sim build.

By the way, my other pet peeve is people who build entirely flat sims that aren't supposed to look like Kansas farmland. Flat just means I'm too lazy to deal with imperfections and the landscape and work them into my design, so I'm just going to flatten everything and give it the personality of a mall parking lot (though I must confess, none of the real life malls around me have parking lots that flat either ... even Phoenix isn't that flat).