Tutorials

On Various Subjects

Reducing Prim Count

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Some time ago I saw a forum post about reducing prim count by changing from the old prim count accounting to the new Land Impact cost accounting. Many people think the Lab was screwing residents over with the new Land Impact system. They simply haven’t figured out how to use the new system to their advantage. It is possible to use the new system and reduce your prim costs.

Prim Saving Tutorial

Prim Size

When mesh objects and Land Impact were rolled out along with them was a change to the maximum prim size. The max size went from 10 meters to 64 meters. This allows one to replace over six prims with one prim. That is a possible 640% savings in prim costs or looked at another way, you get 640% more prim coverage in a region for the same price…

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Second Life PathFinding Tutorial

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I’ve wanted to take time to play with the new Pathfinding feature now in alpha testing on the ADITI grid, also known as the Preview Grid. I took the time this weekend. I learned a few things. As you may imagine the documentation is incomplete at this stage. Not much point in writing lots of information that may change.

My First Pathfinding Bot

I’ll explain some of the problems I ran into with Pathfinding and then get into the script and how I fixed the problems. This is not a beginning tutorial for scripting. I am assuming you know about basic scripting with the Linden Scripting Language.

Simple

Writing Pathfinding scripts is way way simple compared to what was previously needed to create similar behavior. My first try was to create a follower. I have a Serge inspired character I made for OSGrid and decided to use that. My little bot is made from two prims and a sculpty. Because of the sculpties work I have to scale it to make it look right. That wacks the bounding box, which I was not over concerned with when I made it. Someday I’ll need to redo it in mesh.

The sculpty gave me my first challenge.  I needed to rebuild my bot here in SL. I rezzed the spheres I needed and put him together. Then wrote the script and tried him out. He promptly fell over on his side… 

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Blender Bad Habits

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Hibit Spad posted a link in the SL Forum to an interesting Blender article, Blender Bad Habits. There are 10 bad habits that the author, Light, encourages people to unlearn. I have a few of those habits.

I think it is well worth the look.

I think the author is mostly on about those making video tutorials for Blender. I think the bad habits were taken from tutorials. I have to say there are WAY more horrible tutorials on YouTube than there are good ones. I came to the conclusion that on YouTube you REALLY need to know the author of a video tutorial. I can go nuts as someone rambles through a tutorial.

A not so bad a habit is the attribution given by Blender.org to Domino and Gaia. See: Blender 2.62: Collada I know who Domino and Gaia are. I haven’t heard of Juha, but congrats and thanks to all three.

A Second Life compatibility option was added for exporting armatures, along with a number of other fixes related to transformations and armatures.

State of the development

There has been much discussion about the state of the Collada integration, it’s not currently working very reliable yet, and this needs to be solved somehow. A new team now started working to improve Collada support to get it more useful for integration with external tools and game engines, improving the existing OpenCollada based I/O module. Members of the team are:

  • Domino Marama (development)
  • Juha Mäki-Kanto (development)
  • Gaia Clary (Organization, Documentation and all the rest)

Other developers interested in joining development are welcome. There’s a wiki page where we collect plans, application support info, test files, and a list of issues to solve.

Moving #SL Magic Boxes

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Hopefully in the first quarter of 2012 the need for Magic Boxes will go away. Until then, we occasionally have to move them. That often creates problems with the items we have in the Market Place. But, it is possible to move them and avoid the problems.

Magic Box Move

To avoid problems you need to understand that everything rezzed in-world gets a UUID, a Universal Unique Identifier. I get confused trying to remember how an object’s UUID changes or does not change when we take it back into inventory and later rez it again. In general each time something is rezzed it seems to get a new UUID. Also, it gets confusing figuring out which things in the box have which UUID’s and how those match up with the items in the Market Place. Thinking that through is too much brain damage.

So, this is actually a tutorial on how to move objects and RETAIN their existing UUID. This process is not limited to just Magic Boxes.

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Second Life Prim Twisting Tutorial

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Ener Hax at “i live in science land” posted about a tutorial on prim twisting. The tutorial was made by Ayumi Cassini and posted in 2009 on Ayumi’s blog as: The ultimate guide to prim twisting. It and the in-world Ivory Tower Library of Primitive are the best sources of information for building with prims.

A Single Twisted Prim - Amazing

In our early entry into Second Life’s age of enthusiasm for mesh building, prims are still the primary material for most building. Understanding what can be done with prims gives one insight into which is a better choice for any build.

Check out the tutorial. I’m impressed.

How To get a Faster Second Life

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Several people in the forums are asking how to get better Frames per Second rates and why their computer is so slow running SL. Several are asking about upgrading their computer for Christmas or getting a new one. So, I decided to write a HOW TO specific to Second Life so I could avoid repetitive forum posts…

Speed Hump? - Image by TheDarkThing - Flickr

Even if you never want to open the computer’s case, this information will help you know what to have your computer tech upgrade for you.

First consider what we are working with, other games have better graphics and performance than Second Life. When comparing SL with other games, one is wise to remember that most things in the SL world are made by novice content creators. Render efficiency is not foremost in their design goals and that shows in SL frame rates. Take a look at: Typical Second Life Frame Rate Performance by Graphics Card/GPU. The page was last updated in August 2011. It shows an nVidia 470 getting about 45 FPS.

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