Copying an Object [Level II]

What seems to be one prim...

... is actually four. These were made by turning on Copy Selected in the Create menu. Whichever face of the target prim you touch will align perfectly with the new prim. Be sure Center is turned on and Rotate is turned off. You can copy entire houses this way.

Copying An Object [Level II]

Second Life’s permissions system allows yourself to make infinite copies of any object you create—and many object you’ll buy or get for free will have copy permissions.

When you pull a copyable object from our inventory to the ground or (if it’s transferrable) give it to another person, it will remain in your inventory—so there’s no need to keep more than one copy in your inventory. If it’s a non-copy transferrable object, however, pulling it to the ground or giving it to someone will remove it to your inventory.

To make multiple copies of an object you can, of course, pull it multiple times from your inventory—but there are two easy ways to duplicate it. Both are simple.

Find some land where you can build and rez a prim or pull a copyable couch or airplane from your inventory. Then right click it and select Edit.

With the object selected you can, of course, use the red, blue, and green arrows to drag it about—but try holding the shift key and dragging the selected object 5 meters or so. Voila! You’ve moved the object, but yet it remains where it was. There are two now! You’ve made a copy!

We’ll leave it to you to figure out which is the original and which is the copy!

Now let’s try another method. Rez a simple prim cube.

Now right click it and select Create.

If you look carefully, you’ll see a box that reads Create Copy. Check that box. Be sure the box that reads Center Copy is also checked. Now touch the top or one side of your cube. Presto! A copy appears!

But not only has a second cube appeared, the side that touches is perfectly aligned with the first prim!

If you’re like me you’ll be jumping up and down with excitement about now. So THAT’S how builders are able to line up their prims! You’re smiling, thinking of how much easier it will now be to build a wall or a floor.

When you’ve finished playing be sure to uncheck Copy Selection; otherwise, when you try to rez a prim nothing will happen—unless you have a copyable object selected, in which case you may find a second copy of your house intermeshed with the original!

Property Lines [Level II]

Property Lines [Level II]

Looking at buying or renting and want to know where the parcel starts and ends? Riding a motorcycle and wanting to avoid straying across the sim line?

Drop down the View menu and Select Property Lines. Turn them back off when you're finished.

If you own property, your lines will show in green. So, too, will your sim lines, if you own a simulator. Lines of property owned by others seem to show in red. But there are orange and blue lines, too. For the life of us, we can't figure out their significance?

Anyone?

Workaround For Caspers [Levels I-IV]

Workaround for Caspers [Levels I-IV]

Caspers are avatars who appear to you as clouds of gas. I say TO YOU because they may not be caspered to me. It seems to be largely a client-side problem. This means the problem lies with the software on your computer and not the server at Linden Labs.

Usually caspers resolved into avatars, but not always. Occasionally a cloud of gas will hang around seemingly forever.

There's a workaround when this happens. Go the Edit menu at the top of the screen and select groups. Select a nonactive group and activate it. Then activate the group you just left.

More often than not, casper will be gone.

The above is called a workaround. When the Lindens seem unable or unwilling to fix a problem; some citizen somewhere usually discovers a way to resolve the problem.

A Discussion of Textures [Levels II-III]

Photos: Two textures from the web, texture for upper template of avatar skin.

This article was writtenat the request of WhiteRaven Slade.

A Discussion of Textures [Levels II–III]

 Textures—we all know what they are. They’re images that either wrap around an object in world or appear as particles or make up your skin. Snapshots are really textures and textures are really shapshots. Take a look at that photo you put in your profile. Now think about it wrapping around a sphere. That’s what a texture does.

Without textures, all of Second Life would look like the default plywood. Not bad so far as plywood goes, but plywood can go only so far!

And so Second Life is rich with textures—cloth, wood, metal, terrain, stone, vegetation, building facades, signs, leopard spots, dragon scales and fairy wings—all of which were created by someone.

A few basic textures, like those you can find in the Library in your Inventory—were made by the Lindens. Most, however, were created by people like you and me.

Getting Textures

Second Life is full of free textures, some of which are quite good (and some of which are merely copies of the textures you already have in your Library). You can also find free and almost-free textures on www.XstreetSl.com and www.onrez.com.

There are any number of texture stores where you can buy sets of textures from everything from Egyptian tombs to argyle socks to Victorian doorways, but you can make your own textures as well.

For $10L, you can upload an image from your hard drive—a snapshot you took in Second Life, an image of a buddha you found on the web, or that nice tweed you scanned from last winter’s real life coat. You can paste the texture on a prim, and voila! You have a buddha, or a nice prim tweed skirt.

There’s more to it, of course. Images come in different sizes—and size is important. For that reason it’s handy to set the image size out of world. You can also make the image seamless out of world. Otherwise, you may wind up importing the same image three or four times before you’re satisfied with it. And those 10L charges can add up!

Hint: You can use Google to find free and inexpensive programs to set texture size and make your textures seamless. The free image manipulation program GIMP (www.gimp.org) has a filter which makes textures seamless. The great free image program ifRanview makes it easy to change the density of your images.

Hint: Many designer do preliminary uploading of textures on the beta grid, where importing is free. They import, tweak the original, and re-import until they’re satisfied. The images can’t be moved from beta to the main grid, but it reduces costs when you’re working with multiple textures, since you know the images you’ll be importing will be right the first time.

Texture Size

Images in Second Life come into world with dimensions in powers of two. The minimum size seems to be 32 and the maximum 1024—so the smallest possible texture size is 32 x 32, and the largest is 1024 x 1024. (I hear rumors of 2048 x 2048, but I’ve never seen one).

It’s important to understand that the textures one views take up memory space on video cards, and that the size of an image grows exponentially with a linear increase in size. A 1024x1024 texture takes up as much memory as four 512x512s, and as much memory as 16 256x256 or 64 128x128 or 256 64x64 or 1024 32x32 textures. Sims with small textures, and not too many of them, tend to load quickly. Areas with lots of large textures can take a long time to load. I’m sure you’ve been in shops where the signs were still gray after fifteen minutes!

To be a good citizen—and to improve your OWN Second Life experience—don’t bring textures in world any larger than you have to to keep them sharp. 1024x1024 and 1024x512 textures are necessarily only on the largest builds—huge prims. 256x256 and 512x256 sizes are sufficient for most things, and small objects will work at 32x64 or even 32x32. Particle scripts work best with small textures, which rez quickly. You’re probably familiar with particle scripts with big textures; they’re the ones responsible for that annoying gray fog when someone activates their poofer.

Hint: Whenever possible, reuse the same textures within a setting. Use one single granite texture, for instance, in place of four or six different rock textures.

Texturing a Prim

You can apply a texture to a prim by simply dragging it to the prim from inventory (or from the texture’s image, when it is open) to one side of a prim. Presto, there it is!

Hint: Hold Shift while dragging a texture to a prim, and it will be pasted on all sides of the object.

You can also apply textures by dragging a texture from inventory to the texture window on the Texture tab in edit. Or you can click the texture window and choose a texture from the mini inventory window that will pop up.

For textures to work correctly, you must have full permissions. Otherwise you must drag them to one side of a prim, and the prim will yell in protest. Ouch!

You can put different textures on different sides of a prim (torii have only one side, so of you can get two textures on one, let me know about it!). You can even put a texture on the hollowed-out inside of a prim.

Adjusting Textures

Once applied, you can stretch the x and y dimensions of a texture so only part of it is on a prim face or so it tiles multiple times across the prim face. You can rotate the texture, flip it along the x or y axes, and offset it vertically and horizontally. You can also make it partially or almost totally transparent. And you can do all this on the entire prim, or only on the faces you have selected.

Hint: To make an object completely transparent, you must use a pure alpha texture. You’ll find one in your library. After you’re made it alpha, you’ll then need to use Ctrl-Alt-T (Cmd-Alt-T on the Mac) to see it!

Hint: Here’s how to work on one side of a prim: click the Select Textures box on the General tab in Edit. Then shift click on the prim faces you want to work on. (You can click faces on other prims at the same time. Most handy!)

Hint: Tiling a texture (increasing the texture density to be more than one repeat), will increase its sharpness. Tiling works nicely for stones, fabrics, and wood.

Hint: If you increase texture density too much, your eye will dislike what it sees when there is a grain, as in wood. If you see the repeats and they annoy you, just back down the texture density a bit.

Organizing Your Textures

If you don’t organize the textures in your inventory, you’ll soon find yourself overwhelmed. You can make subfolders for wood, metal, and other categories, and sub-folders within those (Metal > Gold > Patterned).

Textures can soon clutter your inventory, however, and for this reason, most people use inventor organizers. Organizers can be HUD-based (meaning they paste to the inside of your screen) or rezzable (meaning you pull them out on the land). And these are divided into single-frame and multiple-frame organizers.

Single frame organizers are handy for storing textures with limited permissions. Multiple frame organizers can accept only textures will full permissions, but are handy because you can have as many as sixteen categories of objects. (Chey’s Building organizer, for instance, has categories for, among other things, bricks, doors, windows, interior walls, exterior walls, floors, ceiling, and tiles.)

Organizers will not only get thousands of textures out of your inventory; they will help you find the textures you want by letting you view sixteen or so of them at a time. If you do much texturing, an organizer will be worth the price. I use the multi-texture organizer sold by K.R. Engineering. It has worked flawlessly for two years. And it’s copyable, meaning I can have organizers for any number of categories. And I do! I even store my photos in an organizer!

You’ll soon see that textures can transform that plain plywood cube into almost anything you can imagine.

-----

Notice: Because limited-perm textures are pretty much unusable in Second Life, texture stores sell their wares with full permissions. They are licensed for YOUR USE ONLY. Please support content creators; don’t give their textures to others.

Object Chat Trick! [Level IV]

Object Chat Trick! [Level IV]

Chey discovered a neat little trick when objects chat: they respond to /me pretty much the same way avatars do.

You know the /me trick.

type in Chat /me says hi

And others see "Cheyenne Palisades says hi" instead of "Cheyenne Palisades: says hi"

If you make an object say something, /me will make it say its name in the same way-- and if you make the object's name a blank, it will say only what follows /me.

So, you can have an object say something like "Do not enter!" without its name apeparing.

Try it! Make an object, make a script, and add /me after the opening quotes in the lines with llSay. 

Cool, huh?

-----

default
{
  state_entry()
  {
  llSay(0, "/me Hello, Avatar!");
  }

  touch_start(integer total_number)
  {
  llSay(0, "/me Touched.");
  }
}

Remove Particles [Level III]

Remove Particles! [Level III)

In Second Life, smoke, mist, rain, fireworks, flame, and other things that aren't solid objects are comprised of particles-- think of them as sort of loose, flying textures.

Particles are produced by scripts that reside in prims.It's important sometimes to be able to turn them off.

If the script in your particle-emitting object doesn't give you a way to turn the particles off (for instance, by touching the prim or saying something like bling off or /bling off or /1 bling off, or if you've deleted the script and the object is still emitting particles, here's some code that will remove the residual particles-- for, you see, once a prim begins to emit particles, it will continue to emit them forever, or until the prim is delited-- unless the particles are turned off.

Please note-- some objects-- usually the ones you purchase, but sometimes freebies-- won't allow you to modify them. If that happens, you may be stuck with the particles. So be sure you can modify the prim's contents before you delete any scripts in your valuable items. If you can make a new script in the prim and if it stays there, you're golden.

So if you have a prim that is blinging, smoking, burning, or otherwise being obnoxious, and if you have permissions to modify it, follow these steps:

1. EDIT the prim.

2. If the particle-emitting script is in a prim that's part of a linked set, check the EDIT LINKED PARTS box in the GENERAL tab and touch the individual prim that is your target. Be sure only that prim is highlighted.

3. Delete the offending script if you're sure you won't need it, or open it by double-clicking and uncheck the RUNNING box at bottom left.

4. Click the CONTENT tab.

5. Choose NEW SCRIPT.

6. Double-click the script to open it.

7. Erase the code that is inside the script.

8. Paste in the code at the bottom of this blog entry. Be sure to select everything within the dashed lines (but not the dashed lines themselves).

9. SAVE the script (and be sure the RUNNING box at bottom left is checked).

10. Name the script something like "Particle Eraser" and drag it to your SCRIPTS folder in inventory. That way you'll have it for later.

As soon as the script runs, the prim will stop making particles. It may take a few seconds for them to dissipate. So...

11. Right click your Particle Eraser script and erase it from the prim. (so it won't consume system resources).

That's it!

-----

// particle erase script

default
{
  state_entry()
  {
   
  llParticleSystem( [] );
  }
}

-----

Getting Rid of Objects When Asset Servers are Down (Level II)

Sometimes Second Life's asset servers get into trouble. When that happens, you can't do much. Teleports are limited, you can't open notecards or scripts, you can't import textures or photographs,  you can't rez objects from inventory, and you can't delete objects on the ground. You zap them, and a minute later they're back, along with a "object returned to the simulator" message. Frustrating!

There's a way to get rid of objects, however. Chey discovered it last night. 

Just turn them temporary. After a minute or so they will disappear. Permanently.

To turn an object temporary, just edit it and select the Object tab. On the left side of the edit box, just below the horizontal row of tabs, check the box that reads Temporary. End of problem.

Be careful with this! If you turn your valued living room set temp, it will disappear permanently, with no warning. You won't find that couch and its cushions in your trash, either. It will just be gone.

It's good as a rule to set ONLY copyable objects to temp. But remember, when you just can't seem to get rid of a prim or linked set of prims, Temp will do the job.