Tips – Page 3 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Moving Your Avatar

2013/12/192013/06/14 by Nalates Urriah

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

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

2013/02/27 by Nalates Urriah

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.

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.

Mesh Building 2013-3

2013/01/152013/01/15 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Save Some #SL Prim Count

2012/12/212012/12/21 by Nalates Urriah

Indi on Plurk pointed to an article by Bryn Oh, a well known artist in Second Life™ sharing tips on saving prim count (Land Impact) cost. Check it out: Prim reduction trick.

This is about redoing prim counts for prim objects and mesh objects.

Plus: Bryn Oh’s blog is pretty awesome and worth checking out.

Second Life Viewer Statistics PING

2012/10/14 by Nalates Urriah

If you have looked at the Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1), you have likely looked at PING. The term comes from the use of echo location in submarines and other marine uses. The active echo locators make a distinctive PING sound as the send a sound wave out. Electronics hear the echos coming back and create picture for human use.

mknowles_2fc9a74424 — Lots of PING – Image by: mknowles Flickr

When testing network connections we use a ping. It is actually a command to send a network data packet to a remote location and request a packet be sent back. The travel time tells us how well the connection is working.

What most people likely don’t think about is whether the Viewer’s PING is the same as the PING our operating system generates. For your information it isn’t.

#SL Advanced Modeling Tips

2012/09/06 by Nalates Urriah

3D modeling is sort of a new think in Second Life™. Now that 3DS, Blender, Maya, and SketchUp models can be imported we have a whole new realm of knowledge and learning to deal with. One of the tough areas is finding ways to handle the Level of Detail (LoD) aspects of modeling. LoD has a huge impact on Land Impact (LI) costs. So, we have lots of incentive to understand the concept.

lodTips — 3D Modeling Tips: Level of Detail

I watch for ideas and tutorials that will help me with that challenge. Indigo Mertel Plurked about a modeling expert giving out tips on 3D modeling LoD. So, I’m down with that. Her article and link to the tips is here: Expert games tips: Generate more effective level of detail models.

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