Category: Tutorials

  • Creating a Slideshow Viewer, Part 2: Reading the Inventory

    This is the second installment in my small series about creating a slideshow viewer (based on my new texture vendors). In this one, I’ll be showing you how to add images to the viewer. In my original texture vendors, the prim which displayed the images was responsible for creating a list of the images available,…

  • Creating a Slideshow Viewer, Part 1: Buttons

    Recently I decided to update my Texture Vendors. If you have seen my stores inworld, you will know that the Texture Vendors display one texture at a time, with buttons to let you cycle through the different textures in the set. The current version of the vendors was created quite a while ago, and uses…

  • LSL Scripts: Scrolling floating text

    This is one of an occasional series of small but (I hope) useful pieces of code. Floating text above a prim has a lot of uses in Second Life, and here is a script which might add even more possibilities. This takes advantage of the fact that you can display multiple lines of text and…

  • Second Life Prim Lights – 3

    Full-bright and Glow This is the last article in my short (and rather infrequent) series about lights in Second Life. I’m going to take a look at two elements of textures which are often used in conjunction with lights, and which are also widely misunderstood and misused. Let’s start with Full-bright. This can be switched…

  • A Not-So-Brief Guide to SLurls

    This started out as ‘A Brief Guide…’, but I found that there was more to say about them than I thought! If you are familiar with SecondLife, you will certainly have come across SLurls. In-world, they appear as hyperlinks (you can see them as such in chat or in notices, amongst other places). They look…

  • Second Life Viewer 2.0 — Some Brief Tips

    I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but LL is determined to force it down our throats. There’s plenty of discussion elsewhere about the pros and cons of the new Viewer 2.0, so I won’t pick that up here. Instead, I’ll just bring a few tips that might make your experience a little bit…

  • Second Life Prim Lights – 2

    After the previous introduction to prim lights, let’s look at some technical (but not too technical!) background, and a few things about the lighting system which are not immediately obvious: The graphics system which Second Life uses (OpenGL if you are interested) only allows 6 lights to be visible at any time. If a new…

  • Second Life Prim Lights – 1

    In Second Life constructions few things are more misused and misunderstood than lights, full-bright, and glow. In this post, I’ll start looking at lights (!), and I will cover full-bright and glow in subsequent posts. To begin with, let’s create a simple light. Start by rezzing a sphere, which will act as the light source.…

  • Not An Introduction to Second Life Prim Lights

    This is dedicated to those knowledgeable and helpful folk over on the SL Universe forums, without whom this post might never have been written. This is not the post I was going to write. I was going to give an introduction to using Second Life prim lights. Because I needed some illustrative snapshots, I created a simple…

  • Textures – A Few Quick Tips

    Some hints and tips that might make working with textures quicker and more efficient. 1. Instantly apply a texture …without even opening the Build dialog! Simply drag a texture from your inventory onto the surface that you want to texture. The texture will instantly be applied to that face. Obviously this will only work on prims that you…