Land of NoR XRPS Tutorial

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Land of NoR WARPS/XRPS

Land of NoR (LoN), a Second Life RPG, has been working on an improved combat and RP system meter. The one in use is called WARPS, standing for Weapons and Role Play System. In July use of the experimental XRPS version of WARPS started. There are several changes being tested and several questions have come up.

You can follow the discussion in the Land of NoR forum.

Update 7/31

If you have not noticed, going into SPAR (/9 spar) forces a save of meter stats. That is important to know as the meter only saves every so often. A SL or viewer crash or other forced relog can possibly force your meter back to the last saved status. Going into spar and back to combat status does a save and reload of meter stats.

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Skin Design Tutorial

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Base Skin Color

This is a research and learning project for me. It will be a multi-part series as I work my way through it. The series will have the best of the information I find and the information I feel is important for a new skin artist, much of what others have left out as they covered the basics in their tutorials. The first article on skin design is: Skin Design – The Windlight Age

For a skin design it is often easier to work with a larger canvas/image. A 2048×2048 is reasonable. The templates others have made are mostly 1024×1024. You can save yourself some effort on you first attempt working at 1024. The larger sizes are easier to paint, IMO, and mistakes and paint strokes are minimized when reduced in size for use in-world. Reducing can help.

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Second Life Rubberbanding and Problems

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Rubberbanding is what Second Life Players call it when you are walking along and suddenly snap back along the path you were walking. It seems you have to walk parts twice. This is caused by lag, I think in this case mostly server side lag. Whatever the cause it is annoying. In combat sims it distroyes game play.

There is a JIRA report on the problem. Vote for a fix here: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-3001

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Skin Design – The Windlight Age

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Skin Design – The Windlight Age

Nomine SKin – Raw Viewer Picture

I recently got interested in skin design… well facial tattoos really, that sort of forces one to look at skin design. This article is about the basic concepts and where to find great information on skins. It is my basic research work and learning as I begin to explore skin design.

When it comes to understanding skin there is the Ruth skin, the default skin one has when they first come into SL. It is pretty bland. The Ruth skin makes one look very cartoony. There are enough free skins around that anyone that cares about AV appearance can upgrade. Just takes a little looking around. Some great free skins are older models made by top designers. So, you can look good for free. Check out Freebies Beach for a good free or cheap skin. For those that want an anatomically correct skin look around Zindra. Many of the dance clubs have good free skins for their dancers and new patrons.

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Facial Expressions Tutorial

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This is something I found interesting. I’m sure many of us in Second Life have facial expression HUD’s (If you are new that is Heads Up Display – the control panels one attaches to their screen). Those work for some situations and photographs.

If one wants more expression, and sublte expressions, that can be done with changing your shape. Sound a bit scary? If you have tweaked your shape like I have for over a year now, making changes may not sound like fun. However one can back up their shape. There are several ways to do that. The two easy ones are copy the shape in inventory and via Appearance save it as a new shape. I use a name and date so I know which is the latest.

If you want to expreiment, check out Melanie Kidd’s tutorial on Grid Expectations: subtle facial expressions for Second Life

Snowglobe 1.1.0 Update Review

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SnowglobeIcon
Snowglobe Viewer

It is always nice to know how many residents are using new beta software. It gives one a sense of how well people like something, assuming they continue using it is a sign of preference and satisfaction. For Snowglobe they have published some of that information. Snowglobe Meterics show about 3,500 Second Life residents using the viewer as of 6m/29d/09.

Torley has a video showing the new map zoom features. In the same blog post as the video they talk about under the hood changes. Snowglobe Features There are new texture download methods in this viewer. They say one won’t likely see much performance improvement for those changes just yet as they are only used in the maps. However, the maps do update much faster so there is promise.

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