Category Archives: Tips

Second Life: Moving/Positioning Avatars

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In 2013 Strawberry Singh posted a couple of articles (here & here) about positioning and moving avatars when setting up snapshots. This was needed for those areas where you do NOT have rez rights. Over time viewer upgrades broke those processes.

Avatar Positioning with Black Dragon

Every so often I would check to see if the problems with those processes had been fixed. With Firestorm 6.3.9 (May 2020 release date) I can move the avatar again sort of with her process.

Strawberry explained the process for moving your avatar. (Ref)

  • Open the Develop menu. Top menu, press Ctrl-Alt-Q to reveal it.
  • Then enable Develop->Avatar->Character Tests->Allow select avatar.
  • Press Ctrl-3 to open the Build Panel.
  • Right-click the avatar. Move arrows appear. Move.

Here is a video showing how it used to work. If you have a mesh avatar, right-clicking the avatar likely is not going to work. Instead, you have to right-click on your name tag. Then it works.

Continue reading →

Second Life and NVIDA Update Problem – Fix

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It seems people updating to the current NVIDIA driver are having problems logging in. They crash on viewer launch.

As of April 6, there is an NVIDIA driver version 381.65. This is the one people have a problem with. The previous version 378.92, the one I am running, does not have the problem. So, some people are rolling back to 378.92.

Whirly Fizzle has posted in the SL Forum that the problem has been tracked to NVIDIA’s Shadowplay/Share feature. Turn it off and things work.

We are early in this problem fix cycle. So, we may learn more soon.

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.

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: Rendering Speed Up

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Hamlet has a tip he got from Trinity Dejavu over on Reddit. See: Simple Trick to Speed Up Second Life Rendering.

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The ‘trick’ is to turn off avatar rendering when you first arrive in a crowded place. (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-4) One press turns off avatar rendering and a second press will turn it back on. B turning it off your viewer can concentrate on rendering the ‘area’. Later when you render avatars they ‘seem’ to render faster because the viewer just has to render them as all else is already rendered.

This doesn’t make it any faster or actually reduce render time. Actual time to a final render is probably longer. But, psychologically we break the wait time into two parts with each being less than the single pass render but added together… more. Basically it is just easier on our patience.

But, I haven’t put a stop watch on it yet…

Second Life Free Language Translator

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IMPORTANT – READ:Second Life: Update on Metanomics Translator

A couple of years back Google decided to charge for its translator service. Many of the translators in use in Second Life were dependent on Google’s service.  Those translators failed.

Babelfish

Babelfish by –Tico–, on Flickr

Do you remember the Bablefish translator? That was my translator until Google changed the API.

Soon other translation services followed Google’s lead. One must now have an account of some kind to use those services in a Second Life app… or any app.  Continue reading →

Second Life Inventory & Performance

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Over on SLUniverse the question was asked about whether large inventories degrade viewer performance and cause region crossing problems.

Oct 2014 - Testing Alchemy Viewer

Oct 2014 – Testing Alchemy Viewer

Trinity Dejavu give a pretty good explanation of how inventory size affects viewer performance here. I think basic information needed for understanding inventory was skipped over and a couple of points could have been more accurate. So, I added my 3 cents worth and I’ll post it here too.

To understand inventory one needs a basic idea of how assets, the stuff in your inventory and the regions, are handled by the Second Life™ system. I’ll keep it lite.

Everything in SL is a collection of vertices and textures/images. Primitives, cubes, spheres, etc., are just some numbers; type, size, rotation, and position. The lists of vertices for primitives are built into the viewer, so no downloads beyond the parameter values. So too the avatar is built in. All that is ever downloaded for primitives and the avatars is a list of numbers, parameters. For the avatar we call the values collection: Shape. Continue reading →

Second Life Bug

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We get them from time to time. We have one that is annoying for those of us using the Preview Grid.

BUG-5563 – My Password and Inventory don’t update on Beta Grid (aditi).

The idea on the Preview Grid is that it updates your inventory to be what you have on the main grid when you change your password. This bug means that is not happening.

It is a bit confusing but the report is the Preview Grid does not get your new password. So, if your main and preview grid password was fred and you change it to Sue111, you will use Sue111 on the main grid and have to use fred on the Preview Grid.

Some find that both passwords will work on the Preview Grid for a time.

If you are confused, so are others.

Somato

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Inara has an article up on Yuzura Jewell’s Somato… a program that simplifies texture baking. The idea is to project an image you have onto a 3D shape. Then bake in shadows.

Somato

Somato

Yuzuru asked I check out the program. I’ve been spending my time on other things and just haven’t gotten to it. But, I want to let you know Yuzuru has Somato out. So, check out Inara’s article: Somato: create textures and shadows for sculpts and mesh.

Learn more and download page for Somato.