Penny Patton is one of those people that think, which usually gets me in trouble. She has an article out titled Virtual Space/Infinite Space. Her paradigm for conceptualizing land in Second Life™ is different from how I suspect most people think of SL land.
Gift of a friend
If you are looking for land or feeling confined by borders or just looking to reduce the cost of tier then her article is something you will be happy to have found.
Virtually free land…
With the coming of Materials, being able to use normal and specular maps, how one builds is more important. Knowing or not good building practices is going to determine the experience in Second Life™. Poorly built items, whether clothes or objects, have a detrimental effect on our frame rates.
Penny Patton Efficient Building
The SL Wiki has a page about Good Building Practices. There is lots of good information there. But, a significant number of creators ignore the guidelines or don’t know about them. Or… it may be they don’t understand them.
Penny Patton has a new article up titled: Building a Better Second Life – Tips for squeezing both better performance and more detail out of SL through efficiently made content. This article is something that every person building in Second Life should read and learn.
Penny covers using textures and scripts. She gives examples of what efficiently built things look like. Her M&C fantasy build (some sections are NSFW) is an example of efficient building practices. Penny does get to her ubiquitous near mantra ‘build to scale.’
I believe her points are keys to a better SL.
Update 2015/10: Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is replacing Webkit, the engine MOAP uses. Media should now be HTML5 compatible. Avoid Flash & QuickTime. Click the CEF Tag below this article for more information.
I’m just learning, so this is not the most complete tutorial on Media On A Prim (MOAP). This is what I have learned in my first few steps. Hopefully it will save you a few gotcha’s. Also, this is not a newbie’s tutorial. I’m assuming you know basic building. But, even if you are new, you should be able to stumble through this tutorial without much trouble. Continue reading