Fediverse/Mastadon

 A while back I created a Fediverse account. What's that? You might know it as Mastodon, the less musky alternative to Twitter.

 Seeing as how the musky boy is now banning links to other social sites, I'm just going to link my Fediverse page right here.

https://snowdin.town/PennyPatton

Applying EEP to Your Parcel

Here's a quick tutorial on applying EEP settings to your land parcel in Second Life.

First, open up your inventory and scroll down to the "Settings" folder, if you've created your own settings, or received settings from another SL resident.

If you want to use one of LL's default settings, scroll down to the Library and open the "Environments" folder.

Next, open your Land information panel (World > Land Options > About Land) and go to the "Environments" tab at the very end.

Now, let's say you want to have the default mainland day cycle at ground level, always midday at 1000m up, and a custom sky setting at 2000m up.

To set the default day cycle at ground level do the following:

In your inventory window scroll down to the Environments folder inside the Library folder. Go to Days and look for "Default".

Click and drag the "Default" day setting to where it says (region environment) next to Ground. This will change every sky setting for the entire parcel to use the Default day cycle. Always remember that whenever you apply a setting to one of the parcel heights, it will affect the heights above it.

Next we'll apply our default midday setting to 1000m and up. Still in the Library's "Environments" folder, close the "Days" folder and open the "Skies" folder. Scroll down until you find "A-12PM", this is the noon setting for the default Linden day cycle. Click and drag this to where it now says (Default) next to Sky 2 1000m. Now this midday setting will be applied to 1000m and above, but Ground will still have the full default day cycle.

 Again, the newly applied setting will affect both the sky level you apply it to, and all sky levels above. So when applying a new setting to a parcel height, you will have to re-apply your settings to the heights above that. This is why we started with the ground level and work our way up.

 Finally, let's apply a custom sky we created to 2000m and up. Close the Library folder and in your Inventory folder look for "Settings", there you will find all of the environment settings you've either created yourself or received from other residents. (If you've purchased settings off the Marketplace, or received a box or folder of settings from another resident, you will need to find the folder containing those settings.)

In this example we're going to apply the setting "Anime Moon". Click and drag your custom setting over to where it now says (A-12PM) next to Sky 3 2000m. This will apply your custom sky setting to everything 2000m and up. Again, the settings you've applied below that will remain unaffected.

 And that is how you apply custom settings to the different environment heights on a parcel.

Pixel Factory Debut!

After a long, long hiatus I am relaunching my Second Life store as Pixel Factory. I've retired all of my pre-mesh content except for my free shape set and camera HUD.

 The first brand new items are these four hair styles, designed for anime type Second Life avatars!

Each hair style is only L$150, comes in rigged and unrigged versions, including a colour HUD as well as full perm textures and UV guide for modders! You can purchase them from the Pixel Factory marketplace store now!

Blender for Beginners

Do you want to create content for Second Life but have never touched a CG modelling program in your life? Are you an SL pro, but have absolutely no experience beyond making content for SL? In either case I highly recommend the Blender Guru channel on YouTube. He does fantastic tutorials. He doesn't waste your time, but neither does he go so fast that you feel rushed. He doesn't skip steps and he's good about repeating tips to get you used to them rather than assuming you remember everything perfectly the first time you hear it. And he breaks everything up into bite sized lessons that never drag on too long.

Give the tutorials a try for yourself:

The beginner tutorial start here:

The intermediate tutorial start here:

Even if you've been making content for SL and consider yourself a pro, I do recommend you check out at least the intermediate tutorial. Making content for SL there are some important aspects to CG modelling that you're not likely to be exposed to, such as proper UV unwrapping.

If you believe you know all there is to modelling, at the very least I'd encourage SL users to check out this part of the tutorial, dealing with UV unwrapping:

I hope all of this helps and happy SLing!

The Best Building Tip Nobody Knows!

Use skyboxes for building interiors! 

Turn doors and other entrances into teleporters so people can enter and exit. This frees you up from the constraints of the environment and also makes sims less laggy by moving a lot of content out of rendering distance!

For example, if you have a house at ground level, make the door into a teleporter that takes people to a skybox 400-500m up! You'll see a huge FPS increase doing this because your computer will be rendering far less at once. And since you can build up to about 4000m up, you can space out your interior skyboxes. So if you have an enormous interior area you can split it into sections, spaced out to keep framerates high.

 And if you use an Experience key on your land, you can make it so people can just walk into the doors and be instantly teleported to the skybox, for a relatively seamless experience.

 If you have limited prim space you can also use this trick with a holodeck style rezzer system so building interiors are only rezzed when you're using them! This way you have virtually infinite prim space.

Textures and Lag

A lot of people never consider the correlation between textures and lag. Fact of the matter is, most of SL's performance issues are due to texture bloat. Videogames rarely use textures larger than 512x512, games like Crysis and Skyrim are often using 128x256 textures on surfaces SL users leap straight to 1024x1024 to texture!

Gamers know those 4K HD texture mods come at a big performance hit if your machine doesn't have enough memory to handle it, and even games running those mods are typically rendering a fraction of the amount of textures Second Life throws at your videocard.

 Many attachments, such as hair, even have 512x512 or 1024x1024 store logos plastered on a hidden root prim you never see, that texture is still eating up VRAM and SL only uses 512MB of VRAM for textures before your framerates start to crawl.

 A good rule of thumb is that unless a surface is 10x10m or larger, you should use a texture smaller than 512x512 and avatar attachments almost never need textures larger than 256x256 unless they're full body mesh.

 There's never a reason to texture hidden surfaces and you should always try to combine textures and use the entire texture map where possible.

Texture responsibly and happy SLing!

Tips for a Larger, More Detailed and Less Expensive Second Life!

Sadly the sim is gone, but this entire city fit into 1/4th of a sim. Including the trees and hills in the distance. All of the buildings are 1=1 scale instead of 2-3 times larger like most people in SL build. When you build smaller, the amount of space you have to work with is larger!

• Larger mesh objects use both more space and more Land Impact. If you pay $300/mo for a sim but you scale everything up way too big (which most people do) you're essentially throwing away $225 every month because if you scaled everything down closer to 1=1 you'd be able to fit 4x more content in your sim.
• Size is relative. If you make your avatar larger, everything around you appears to shrink. Make your avatar smaller and everything around you appears larger.
• Animations can work with small size differences, but not large size differences. Take a dozen average adults and you'll get less than a foot difference in height compared to SL where the average adult human avatar is anywhere from 5' to 8' tall. This is why your animations & furniture rarely work well.

A bunch of furniture at typical SL sizes. My 5'7"(6' in those shoes) avatar for scale.

The same furniture reduced to 1=1 scale. The prim floor is to show how much space is saved.

Here's a more detailed article about scale in SL if you want to read more.
https://tinyurl.com/yan4thme

Happy SLing!