Ok. Huge ranting post ahead. Beware of a not-happy Sai. I woke up to a not happy morning, and it continues to get worse. Anyway. My rant:

I bought a skybox..... yesterday. After being in the sky for a while - I began to like the privacy, the lack of client lag, and I loved not being able to worry about what the neighbors decided to pop up overnight. It was probably less than a week that I moved back to the ground that one of these things popped up overnight, which is nearly impossible to block out from my land. So, I went skybox hunting. Bought one, decided I didn't like it. Bought a second one today, which I've been eyeing for months - and was probably one of the most expensive things I've bought in SL, at $4999L.

I've visually taken the demo apart many, many, many times - deciding if I liked every piece of this skybox, considering the majority of it is no-mod. I wanted to be absolutely sure I loved the skybox enough to dump that much money on it. This morning, I decided to go ahead and get it, so I bought it, and the $500L scenery add-on pack as well.

Took it home, rezzed it, and immediately hated it. I'm not sure if it was because Kamian points these things out to me all the time, or something different, but I immediately noticed flickering textures. EVERYWHERE.

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I thought: "Hmm, maybe it just rezzed wrong." Derezzed it, rezzed again - same result. Alright. Maybe it's the sim? Took it to my store's land on Glenn - same flickering textures. Maybe my graphics settings? Nope. Did the demo house have these textures? I TP'ed there TWICE to check - both times (and all the countless times I looked at in the months before), I seen absolutely no texture problems. It is the house I bought.

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I am extremely sad about it, because I really loved this skybox. I can not modify it to fix the problems - the skybox is no-mod, which is why I was so reluctant to buy it in the first place. And I'm really kicking myself for it now.

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But other than that, the skybox is really, really beautiful. Because $5499L is a huge amount that I have trouble allowing myself to spend, I've dropped the creator a notecard explaining the problem with included pictures. I really, really, really need to get *some* kind of use out of this, and I do hope he can either fix it - or give me a mod copy, so I can fix it myself. Seriously. WHY MAKE NO-MOD HOUSES!?!

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The plus side is that I was able to get a pretty cute looking picture out of it. Kamian showed me some new, spiffy photoshop thing, and I've been playing with it. I also made a shadow - which turned out to be epic fail. It doesn't even match the shadows from the floor. But meh, I tried. ^^