Second Life: Introduction/Beginner Tutorials

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t3tNQ_53us

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

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

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

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

Second Life: NEW BONES, New AvaStar 2.0

This is a big deal. I’ll get into what it means and what some of the possibilities are.

For years Second Life™ users have been asking for more bones. That would let users make avatars with tails that are easily animated. Or with more than 4 arm-leg appendages. We will be able to have a centaur with 4 legs, two arms, and a tail, something that is way complicated now and pretty lame. Or a spider with 8 legs.  Continue reading

Second Life: New Animation Overrider

On my long ago first day in Second Life™ I was trying to figure out why I waddled and other females swayed when walking. It didn’t take long for me to learn about Animation Overriders, AO’s. I used ZHOA and then ZHOA II during most of my time in SL. But, there have been advances in AO tech since the ZHAO units were developed. Now we have another advance. I’ll take a look at it and whether it is worth the effort to change to a newer AKEYO NITRO AO. My review follows.

NitroAO_002

The NEW AKEYO NITRO AO

I don’t know when ZHAO first appeared. I found it 2008 when I first went looking for an AO. AO’s improved as the Linden Scripting Language improved. The Mono scripts reduced the memory load, but did little else to change how AO’s worked or their features. Continue reading