Well, it’s me again. My last item for a while, as we are having a rough time in real life at the moment, but Aunty Audrie will be still around, I’m sure. This is just an update on the Pacific estate’s experiments with AI pets, including the sionChickens and my Aunt’s infatuation with turtles.
Our sionChickens
I actually thought we had our sionChicken problems sorted for approximately one whole day. After getting frustrated with finding the scarce female had again killed off her mate (yes, group checked, no apparent lag, and over a dozen sionChicken toys in the pen with them), I freaked out and deleted both of them. I could have tried to sell them off to people who possibly could have had more luck than me, but they were costing me too much money already, in food and medical kits every day to revive them, and our other ten chickens hadn’t produced eggs for over a week.
And this came at the time Aunty Audrie called me back to see her cute little turtles just hatched out.
So, I deleted them.
The next day I went to delete some other chickens, and there were three eggs out – two from the original scarce pair who had always been good producers until this unfortunate week, and another from the new wave couple.
Ah hah! we thought. So, somehow it was the now-killed-off scarce pair who had been the culprits. They were V12 eggs hatched out two weeks beforehand, and had just obtained mating age when all of this happened.
So, I left the rest of the chickens be for a full day.
On returning the next day there were no more eggs, but there was a dead scarce again. Now my original scarce couple were killing each other! And there weren’t any more eggs coming either.
Frustrated I put in a dozen sionChicken toys into their cage, and revived the dead bird, promising this would be the last time.
That was yesterday afternoon. I then went and took a look at the turtles again, set out some new habitats (I blogged about these on the day) and sorted them out female and male. I also tried out some of the boxing features for the turtles. It was actually fun. However, there were some oddities going on which the turtle developers and I finally agreed might be due to SIM specific lag. Plus it was Sunday in Second Life, and SL itself was having asset server problems all weekend.
That evening as I was working with the turtles, a notice came through from our estate agents. They were having problems with sionChickens, it said, but rather than taking the decision to outright ban them, they might be contacting those of us who had them to work with us towards reducing the lag caused.
Today, all the chickens are so far still alive and there were a couple of eggs out, which was good news. However, the writing is surely on the wall for the chickens now. Looking around, I took the big heartbreaking decision to kill off a 2nd Gen Ancient, an old version Killer (who was only there for sentimental reasons) and a New Wave is also walking around with a noose around her neck.
All of our chickens are V11 or V12 lagless, and honestly, they never collide with anything as they are in round pens, and they never appear to stop themselves due to region lag. However, perhaps appearances are misleading, and my sionChickens are causing the estate owners some concern, or perhaps others sharing the homestead sims are keeping old versions of laggy chickens.
But there comes a time where the positives obtained by keeping such pets is demolished by the stress and concerns, and certainly the ongoing expenses for little reward. We are still to see how many chickens we may end up with. But I hope we can keep a couple of breeding pairs, solely because I like the cluck-cluck noises, I find them oddly comforting.
Our Turtles
Okay, so actually they are Aunty Audrie’s turtles, although she went and renamed them with the front initials AA (for Aunty Audrie, I hope, and not alcoholic anonymous or the road service) after getting rid of my suggestion – PBH. So I’m pretty sure she’s claiming them as her own.
We have six of these now. One red, two green and the rest are blue. Only two males, though. And we now have them separated into male and female habitats – the males got to go into a turtle soup bowl with a spoon that you can sit on.
There’s not that much you can do with the slow-moving turtles, other than await their mating, and try to play the odds to get a glowly turtle from certain pairings. Aside from that they walk around – slowly – and eat, and sleep.
As there doesn’t seem to be a huge lot of accessories out there, but certainly a market for them, I’m currently having to create some kind of spreadsheet where I can document each turtle and their statistics – all in the hope I can somehow work out what pairings may give me the glow or shine of a rare breed. However, it’s all quite fascinating watching this from the start, and the turtles don’t give me the lag concerns and cost worries that sionChickens do.
sionCorn
I bet you’d almost forgotten we’ve got some of the corn. Like many planted out there at the same time, our corn is roughly now at 50% maturity for bottom cobs, much less for top cobs on the same stem. Colours and variants are still fluctuating also.
I never had much problems with colours of the stems, but obviously didn’t hit on the combination of water and fertiliser which would have produced more or quicker. As I planned to plant a couple of cobs just as an experiment, I am waiting rather impatiently for the maturity – over a month is a very long wait.
I don’t intend selling the corn, but in feeding it to the chickens. However, if I can’t keep chickens, what is the point? sionChicken enthusiasts are waiting for the first lot of corn so that they see those new mysterious race appearances in the chickens. In my case, I can’t even get eggs let alone have any statistical chance of getting a new race, and the corn doesn’t look any rarer than anybody elses.
The corn is highly scripted apparently, whereas the chickens are high collision prone. But at 18 prims per plant, I know which ones will be going before the others unless some miracle happens with the corn.
We’re Featured!
I noticed this one haphazardly. I say we, but it’s really featuring my Aunt. Sorry, but I simply can’t put up with her ego at the moment, so I’ll be saying goodbye for a while. Once she get’s over herself for having her picture shown elsewhere, I may come back. By then, I’m sure she’ll have humping turtles and perhaps even a hatchling or two to keep her mind off the size of her swollen head.
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