Category Archives: Community Tools

Second Life’s Helping Haven Gateway

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In the forum, someone was asking about DJ classes. The name Timothy Scarborough and Helping Haven came up.

Helping Haven Gateway is a region in Second Life™. As a gateway, it has a website: Helping Haven. People can open a Second Life account and log into SL on the website. When they use the website they land in the Helping Haven reception area.

Helping Haven Gateway Avatar Selection

When I went there 3 or 4 people were on ‘duty’? They had the answers to my questions on who was doing the DJ classes. They didn’t know the when nor did I find that answer in my exploring.

The region very much reminds me of Second Life in 2008 when I came in. There used to be places with helpers… mentors hanging out that you could ask questions. They were usually circular areas and people landed in the middle with helpers scattered around the edges. One asked a question local chat and someone would chime in with an answer. Continue reading →

Second Life: Introduction/Beginner Tutorials

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I like to have a collection of tutorials to which I can send new Second Life™ users. Every so often I update my in-world note card list. I give that to new players I meet.

Strawberry Singh has a series of introductory(?) videos and she is adding to and updating her collection. Her post Introduction to Second Life is pretty much an outline of those videos. She has done a good job of answering questions new users have. Including signup, downloading, and installing the viewer, something often missed by tutorial makers.

I find 1 or 2 posts a month in the Second Life Forum asking how to get into SL. These are people that signed up but somehow didn’t realize they needed to download the viewer. It has been a while since I signed up a new avatar. So, I don’t really understand how they miss understanding they need to download the ‘game’. I just know they do. And these are people that write well when posing their question. So, they aren’t mentally handicapped or simpletons. Continue reading →

Second Life: Animation Tool – Free

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Tapple Gao is providing a free tool for those doing movement animations, e.g., walking. You’ll find a copy in the marketplace here: Walking and Turning Test Treadmill. It is free.

Animation Tool

Animation Tool

The idea for the tool was to provide a way to eliminate skate from animations you create. With some walking and running animations my avatar appears to skate across the floor/ground.

With this tool you can play the animation, as opposed to wearing and having to ‘move’ to play it, stand in place, start the treadmill, and see if your feet and the treadmill are in sync. If not you’ll need to adjust the time scale of your animation.

Handy.

I’m  into math. So, I think it would be nice to have a control that would let me speed up or slow down the treadmill by a known percentage. While there aren’t any buttons for that. Apparently I could do that via the chat interface.

By knowing how much to speed up or slow down my animation I would be able to eliminate a lot of trial and error testing.

How to: AvaStar Following & Vimeo

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Gaia Clary has been putting more of the Machinimatrix/AvaStar videos on Vimeo™. There are good reasons for doing that. Vimeo offers better monetization and distribution control. Unfortunately Vimeo has to compete with YouTube.

Vimeo Following

Vimeo Following

As best I can tell, not that many of the Second Life™ community use Vimeo. If I search on ‘secondlife’ at Vimeo, I find 6,373 videos. Doing the same at YouTube I get 572,000 hits or about 90 times more videos.*  Continue reading →

Second Life: The Conspiracy to STOP Ghost Town

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As I scan through the posts in the Second Life™ blogosphere I find more and more articles are about places. The blogosphere is becoming a tour guide. It seems Second Life is fashion and tourism. Fashion makes money, tourism doesn’t.

Ghost Town?

Ghost Town?

Whatever the case, Inara has an article on Ghost Town. But, her story is not about tourism. Ghost Town is a training area in the Firestorm Team’s regions designed as a game by MadPea. The area opens today (12/19) at 14:00 SLT or 2 PM SLT/PST. They will have entertainment from various people/groups. They are expecting the 4 regions to handle about 200 people.  Continue reading →