Category Archives: Tips

Bits & Pieces SL 2014-8

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Fabulously Free is a blog I recently started following. It has interesting stuff most every day. They mention the Cherries on Top hunt, running until Feb 28, Free SL Couture, Fab Friends – Advice on SL things, Nail Me – free fashion, and Princess Rose Hunt.

Having watched the blog for a couple of weeks now I have decided this is a good site to recommend to those new to Second Life™, free stuff, advice, and how to’s. And much of the free stuff looks really nice.

The list of hunts Fabulously Free provided this Friday is a couple of dozen long. They list both grid-wide and in-store hunts.  Continue reading →

Making Videos in Second Life

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There are lots of tutorials on this subject. This article isn’t a tutorial. It is a collection of tutorials and information about making video using Second Life or any virtual world. I saw that Hypergrid Business has an article up titled: 5 tips for video tutorials and 3D simulations. The article is written by Ann Cudworth.

Image by Honour

Image by Honour

She manages to write the whole article without using the word Machinima. I’m not that much into Machinima so, there may be some nuanced difference between the terms machinima and video tutorials. But, I don’t see it.  Continue reading →

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Debugging a Second Life Region’s Lag

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I suspect many of us have visited a region and had our FPS (Frames per Second) rate drop to low single digits. Innula Zenovka is managing a region that has the problem and started looking for help figuring out what was wrong with it. I suppose managers like Innula get handed some real messes to deal with.

Innula says her viewer usually runs at about 30 FPS. But, in the problem region it drops to 2 to 3 FPS. I hate it when that happens.

See the thread: Advice, please, on reading consoles and debugging a laggy sim.

There is some good information and tips in the thread.

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out

One tip is to select an item you think may be using a number of large textures. A simple right click on it will do. Then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T. This will send a series of notifications. You will get a list of the textures used in the item as a list ordered by each object in a link set. The notifications tell you the size of the texture and which face it is applied to.

You can see the result in the image: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out.  Continue reading →

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Second Life Graphics Crashers

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You probably know there is a griefers tool known as a graphics crasher. What you may not know is there is a defense. The blog The Green Lanterns has an article on how to defend against these crashers. See: Debug settings to make graphics crashers obsolete.

I have yet to try these settings. I have not been running into crash problems. So, you are on your own.

The The Green Lanterns site is mostly interested in griefers/anti-grifers and what they and the Lab is doing related to griefing. I have yet to decide if this is another vigilantly group or a responsible activist group. I tend to avoid griefer and anti-griefer discussions considering both sides mentally unhealthy. But, The Green Lanters blog seems oriented towards helping people, at least that’s my first take.

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Moving Your Avatar

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Strawberry Singh is well known for her personality and gorgeous pictures. She has a talent for posing an avatar and composing a great image. In the blog post Moving your own Avatar! she explains how to position your avatar. I mean to actually move the avatar.

Singh Logo

Singh Logo

One of the ways to move an avatar into just the right position for a photo is to sit it on a prim, play the pose, and make the prim invisible. You can edit the prim and move it wherever you want. Of course the avatar goes with it. But, things get much more complicated when you are in a no rez region.

That is when Strawberry’s tips will come in way handy.

Second Life RAM Disk

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You probably know that most of the data in our computers is saved to magnetic media hard drives that have spinning disks inside. The disk has delays as the read heads must wait for the disk to rotate the wanted data under the read/write heads. It can take the heads 4 to 12ms to find the data. Then the data can only be read as fast as the next bit of data comes to the read/write head.

Inside a Typical Hard Drive

Inside a Typical Hard Drive

Newer solid state drives (SSD) have no moving parts. So, there is no delay waiting for disks and/or read/write heads to rotate into position. So, rather than waiting several milliseconds the data is available in less than a millisecond. If you put your Second Life cache on an SSD, you will have a faster more responsive cache… places you have previously visited will render faster.

While conventional hard drives are cheap and can store terabytes of data on a single drive, the SSD’s are expensive. The cost per gigabyte of storage is about 100 times more than for conventional hard drives.

Continue reading →

Mesh Building 2013-3

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Drongle McMahon is into mesh and does lots of experimenting. When I see his posts in the SL Forum I usually check them out to see what he has to say. I learn a bunch. The more I learn the more I cut from the cost of my mesh objects. So, while this article may get geeky it can save you Lindens.

Second Life Mesh Physics Problem

Aquila Kytori’s Illustration of Drongle’s Experiment

Recently he has been seeing oddities in the physics model’s cost affect on items using prim type physics, which you may need to use for some objects like walls with doors. There is a thread titled: Triangle physics weight – Cautionary tales, episode 2.

His post points out some problems with physics models and how one of his went from a Land Impact (LI) of 7,671 to 0.5… why is worth knowing and understanding.  Continue reading →