Monday 03-03-2008

Getting Help
I am sure that most people need some form of help or assistance while you are learning something, if you don't, you will be the lucky crowd, if you do, it's not like you are a total loser. It is very easy to get help since the internet technology had enhanced over the last decade. All you need to do is search the right terms in Google, and you can find a lot of things that you may not even imagine they would exist.

I found that it's useful to learn how to use Google properly when searching something, such as when I want to know how to resize prims, by typing in just 'resize prims second life' you may find some tutorial or articles how to do it already, but if yo don't want any articles contain the word 'resize' and 'prim' in different places, all you need to do is to add double quotes around the words that you are searching for e.g. "resize prims". Then the results will be a lot more accurate.

Examples:
Results from searching 'resize prims' on Google: click here
Results from searching ' "resize prims" ' on Google: click here

You can see the differences of the search results by searching things differently. I know this is not really all about learning second life, but I think people will find this useful when they want to search for particular tutorial or similar materials to learn second life.

If you are looking for some general second life help, please look at my last post, the wiki I've post are very helpful to all different level users, if still too hard for you to understand, try to search for 'second life tutorial for beginner' or 'second life beginner', you may find some useful tips and tutorials to help you learn about second life.

Uploading image(s)
Uploading images does cost money, but not an awful lot. I thought that it would cost me a lot of money, but it turns out converting real money (in the currency of US dollars) to Linden dollars is very easy and it doesn't cost that much. I've managed to buy 300 Linden Dollars for just under 2 USD.

To upload an image to use as a texture on SL is fairly easy. All you have to do click on File at the main top horizontal menu on second life, then choose upload image, select the file that u would like to upload, after confirmation, image file should be uploaded to your inventory under textures, then u can apply it to any prim you've built.

Streaming music to area of land

There are many places on SL has their own theme music, it can be done very easily, but also can be complicated, it all depends on how you would like the music / streaming audio file to be presented. I am going to introduce you the easiest way.

First you will need to host or upload your required audio file on the internet, anywhere that is public accessible. (or find a link to a legal source of the file / streaming audio file, e.g. Radio station). Then you will need to right-click on the ground of the area (which you have right to change land settings) and choose land info. then go to the media area by clicking on the appropriate tab on the top of the dialog box. Put the file URL in the box provided.

Monday 25-02-2008

Using Dialogue type of interaction
Dialogue type of interaction are very useful when you want the avatar to know exactly what is happening instead of just interacting using touch or sit. Users may be shown a list of options when interacting with an object which is implemented with llDialog. A great example will be the bartender in my rotating restaurant.

The lldialog function display a menu like dialogue box to interact with avatar, the menu can be hierarchical, that means there than be sub-menus under the main menu, this will widen the range of options can be offered to the interacting avatar.

Gathering ideas
When I first started to learn about second life I really do not have any idea on how to create anything with scripts, I do have a very limited knowledge how to code anything even I am an IT student. Since I have try to build up our bit of the island, I have started to realise ideas is the main thing that motivate me to learn scripting properly. Once I've got an idea, I start building it, and search for the appropriate built-in function to achieve my goals.

Here are the WIKIs I use most of the time to find built-in functions:
LSL Wiki
Second Life LSL Portal


Using the function 'Listen' in Linden Script to work with other prims
It is true that an object cannot send a message using llSay, llShout or llWhisper to itself, it will not work, it's been suggested that using link_message and llMessageLinked for this matters, it will work a lot better without panalty, such as lag and perhaps receive message error, etc.
There are cases that you may want and need to use listen , llListen in conjunction of llSay, llShout or llWhisper in order to make prims / objects to communicate with each others.

An example of this type of objects communication can be found inside my restaurant. The elevator control panes on every floors and the elevator itself communicate with each others by llSay and llListen, so when an avatar touches a button on one of the elevator control pane, it sends a message to the elevator, and it will then act accordingly.

Me on the elevator with the control pane

Using 'llShout' to form communication between prims or objects that further away
As mentioned above, communicating between prims or objects, we can use llSay and llListen, but there are some situations you may want to use llShout instead, such as the objects communicating with each other are far away(>100m) from each others (But not too far that llShout won't reach the object with the llListen function in its script).
There is also other benefits for choosing this kind of object communication, for example you can make your objects to work with other people's object if you have compromise a communal channel where their objects can communicate in order to perform tasks.

A great example of this will be the advertisement board I've created, it teleport avatar who clicked on the advert to another group's land where there is a interactive voting system and instruct the avatar to vote for our group. The advertisement board sends two messages to the voting system after teleporting the avatar there, to show the board, so if the boards are hidden, they will be shown automatically.

Our island advertisement board

Marcus's Voting and Statistics board

Monday 18-02-2008

Texture Magic
As I always learn from experimenting things instead of reading all instruction first, I have discovered the 'Select Texture' option while using the 'Select' tool when building something.

Selecting a particular side of a prim for changing texture of that particular side

This really doesn't require any skills to do so, but once you sit down and think about it to generate more idea, you can do something creative like this:

Looks solid from the outside

Looks transparent from the inside

Remember you can Shift-select different sides of prim and change the textures together, even that involves more than one prim!


Building and linking Big Prims

There is a interactive version of the images below available on the 'exhibition' floor of the rotating restaurant I've made for our group project at HeriotWatt Island.

My interactive presentation on Second Life in my Rotating Restaurant

Here are the slides included (They are not scripted, so the next and restart button will not work):

Mega Prims

I am not sure if you guys have heard of MegaPrims, they are made with a certain release of some third-party SL equivalent software when it was out quite sometimes ago. MegaPrims are the primitives that were made over the size limit of building prims. They cannot be built again after the bug was detected and removed. There is no indications of Second Life will take away the things that were built with MegaPrims, at the moment, they are not going to delete them from our inventory neither, so if you can get hold of a few of them, you should use them effectively , it is because they will save you a lot of prims.

I've been showing too many pictures in this entry, so I am not going to show any MegaPrims pictures, as you can probably figured out how they looked like... just like the original prims, but they are normally in the form of cylinder or cubes.

Oscar
Our lecturer of this Second Life module had arranged a SL Oscar for us to nominate the best interactive object created on our island, I think Mira certainly deserve to have won that prize. He had created a couple of interactive games on his bit of the island, they included a Tic-Tac-Toe game and a shooting-range game. The scores we have achieve by playing those games are also stored in an archive with PHP and MySQL behind the Linden Script, so they will keep our score until we next gone in to play :)

I've really enjoyed the little Oscar Party, as other people on the course can have a glance of what we do in this module throughout this term, and they can see our Island, I have never seen so many coursemates on SL together at the same time like that. I've put on my Banana avatar just for spicing the party up. It's ashamed that we were in a special lecture room that they provided us laptops so I can't take a snapshot of that scene, otherwise it would be priceless. :)