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If you're looking for cars and new builds here, look away. NAI Archives compiles past builds, both unreleased and unreleased, from a builder's history of playing Second Life. All items should be considered novelties which is why they are being sold 100% free, but may also serve as great learning tools for anyone interested in old items.
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Believe it or not, there was an Italia before the ones I built for the NAI brand. They weren't very good. Well, maybe except for one.
By the time the sculpted age drew to a close, I was getting pretty good at building textured cars. I think this was the best one I ever put together, and the evolution of the car really highlights that. Initially when I started building this car I was in middle school on a completely different account.
Let me just admit, too, that when you're young and this is likely the best it will ever get for you, this is something to be proud of. I think the first design I spent roughly L$40 on and got it done in a weekend, and just having a Lamborghini in Second Life was good enough for me. I'm sure I didn't get random noobs asking me for this car simply because it just wasn't that good, but I couldn't complain about that because I was driving MY self-built Lambo at the end of the day.
Back then, my brother was also really interested in army sims, so I put a car together for him that he could ride around in. Or maybe I just wanted to build a weird car like this. Whatever the case was, even the modification level for these cars was.....well.....atrocious, for lack of a better word. You get real creative playing enough NFS Underground. Either way, those two versions are in this box too.
The sculpted wing actually made me rebuild the car. About two years after I made the original, I was still thinking about how to improve the design because something didn't sit well with me in the original. I'm sure the idea of looking at something long enough to reveal its imperfections rubbed off on me well, and that it did. After a good month, I landed on the Velo-CT, the final iteration of the car.
Overall I was pretty happy with it, and even as others pioneered with mesh I'd still continue driving the car I was so proud of. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't proud of that car today.
Peak SL Nostalgia!
Before mesh, we had sculpties. Before sculpties, we had prims. Just prims. And this is the most fun I've ever had driving prims!
I'll be honest and say I'm grading this on a curve: Some SL users may not remember when this was the best driving experience money could buy, but I was there. In fact, I made cars powered by this script system too, back in the day. And...let's just say it doesn't completely hold up, especially the wonky behavior of the brakes/reverse. I didn't miss that.
However, what I DID miss is just how fun these cars are to throw around a track! Sure, it's not the most realistic handling, but realism can - and should - take a backseat to FUN from time to time, and in that regard, these are WAY more enjoyable to zip around in than a lot of modern cars. And as someone who still remembers what a pain this system was to tune, I'm genuinely impressed; I had one sports car in my model lineup, and I could never get it to handle this well!
They even look decent; back in the day, I always disliked the "picture of a car on a transparent prim" style of car design, to the point that I made a point of *not* doing that. But, I must admit that, from most angles, these have aesthetically aged WAY better than anything I ever made, and they're an excellent example of how this technique can be used reasonably well.
NAI has always been one of my favorite car makers, producing several of the cars that brought me back to SL from a long hiatus in 2014, and they're still in my stable of favorites to this day. It's both fun and instructive to look back and see how far we've come, as many of us have quite literally grown up on SL. And for that reason, I can't recommend this set highly enough: It's an extremely valuable example of SL automotive history, capturing both the good and the bad, but on the whole, I had SO MUCH FUN throwing these around a curvy track! Very well done, and I'm glad NAI is still around :)