Jump to content

jaq Seriman

Resident
  • Posts

    15
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by jaq Seriman

  1. Hello bigmoe. We've been racing in SL for many years and have seen great changes to how drag racing has evolved. We at Phoenix understands frustrations with not only SL but each persons ISP. What we've tried to do is give all racers a chance to win no matter if they are on a $3,000 gaming computer with a 200Mbps connection, or like some of our Brazilian racers on a very poor connection. Many scripted tracks place emphasis on Reaction Time off the line which gives people with faster connections an advantage. At Phoenix we have allowed anyone to be competitive by tuning according to their connections capabilities. We've had many podium winners where their RT was much slower than others but tuned to compensate. We feel we have created one of the most competitive drag tracks for anyone to enjoy and win. We've had races in many of our classes decided by 1/100,000 of a second or less time after time. True, SL and RL can affect anyones experience in a timed sport but we feel we've done as much as we can to allow anyone to be competitive. Come by sometime and watch a race or talk to some of our racers if they are at the track. You'll find many things have changed in the sport.
  2. If you love racing and have wondered about racing in SecondLife let me inform you. There are as many forms of racing in SL as in RL. I have been drag racing for about ten years in SL. It's come a long way over the years and the cars are extremely detailed with smoke from the tires during burnouts, belts and pulleys running and even wheel stands on some classes. There are several drag tracks at this point but I can only speak about the track where I'm race director. Phoenix International Speedway was created a couple of years ago by a couple of dedicated racers. I won't go into details about why but suffice it to say we saw a need for a drag track that was inclusive of anyone and drama free. Phoenix sits on a full sim with now stores or clubs to interfere with the racing experience. We only ask our racers or visitors to limit avatar scripts to 50 or less. Over the years we've leaned of ways to limit lag as the cars race down the track. It's amazing how hard your graphics card has to work to redraw all the pixels of moving objects even though they are standing still but you are moving past them. The cars themselves are varied as well running several different racing scripts. We allow all types of racing scripts but some are more popular than others. In the end it is what script you become used to and are comfortable tuning. Yes, tuning. This is somewhat similar to real life tuning of cars. There are menus with the cars, some in a notecard and some from an onscreen menu. You control two main settings for Power and Acceleration. These two main settings are used to set up the car or Tune it for whatever class the track is running. By using power and acceleration you tune for the class ET or Elapsed Time. These settings allow very fine tuning of your car up to 1/1000th or three decimal places. I know this all sounds Greek to many of you but it's not really that hard once you work with it and there are many veteran racers that are more than willing to help you out if needed. I watched several races before I became brave enough to enter a race. Surprisingly I won that race and was hooked. Drag racing in SL is fun, fast and exciting. We've have many races decided by one one millionth of a second. And yes, just like real life you can red light at the line. At Phoenix we pride our track at keeping almost all races to two hours or less which includes qualifying rounds and the main race. We know everyone has other things to do in SL and keep things moving along and not keeping you waiting. If you'd like to experience drag racing in SL come over to Phoenix International Speedway and watch the fun with a great group of people from all over the world. We race three nights a week, Wed, Sat, and Sunday. Qualifications begin at 6:30 pm SLT when we lock the sim and start our fun. Or contact me inward for more information or a tour of our track. Jaq Seriman
  3. If you love racing and have wondered about racing in SecondLife let me inform you. There are as many forms of racing in SL as in RL. I have been drag racing for about ten years in SL. It's come a long way over the years and the cars are extremely detailed with smoke from the tires during burnouts, belts and pulleys running and even wheel stands on some classes. There are several drag tracks at this point but I can only speak about the track where I'm race director. Phoenix International Speedway was created a couple of years ago by a couple of dedicated racers. I won't go into details about why but suffice it to say we saw a need for a drag track that was inclusive of anyone and drama free. Phoenix sits on a full sim with now stores or clubs to interfere with the racing experience. We only ask our racers or visitors to limit avatar scripts to 50 or less. Over the years we've leaned of ways to limit lag as the cars race down the track. It's amazing how hard your graphics card has to work to redraw all the pixels of moving objects even though they are standing still but you are moving past them. The cars themselves are varied as well running several different racing scripts. We allow all types of racing scripts but some are more popular than others. In the end it is what script you become used to and are comfortable tuning. Yes, tuning. This is somewhat similar to real life tuning of cars. There are menus with the cars, some in a notecard and some from an onscreen menu. You control two main settings for Power and Acceleration. These two main settings are used to set up the car or Tune it for whatever class the track is running. By using power and acceleration you tune for the class ET or Elapsed Time. These settings allow very fine tuning of your car up to 1/1000th or three decimal places. I know this all sounds Greek to many of you but it's not really that hard once you work with it and there are many veteran racers that are more than willing to help you out if needed. I watched several races before I became brave enough to enter a race. Surprisingly I won that race and was hooked. Drag racing in SL is fun, fast and exciting. We've have many races decided by one one millionth of a second. And yes, just like real life you can red light at the line. At Phoenix we pride our track at keeping almost all races to two hours or less which includes qualifying rounds and the main race. We know everyone has other things to do in SL and keep things moving along and not keeping you waiting. If you'd like to experience drag racing in SL come over to Phoenix International Speedway and watch the fun with a great group of people from all over the world. We race three nights a week, Wed, Sat, and Sunday. Qualifications begin at 6:30 pm SLT when we lock the sim and start our fun. Or contact me inward for more information or a tour of our track. Jaq Seriman
  4. Okay. I've gotten this to work although I don't understand why yet. The grid I placed on the car in SL I opened in Illustrator and found much the same issue as the test one. Even though the grid was named 1024x1024 it was not that size. I had to adjust the page to 1024x1024 manually even though when creating the document I told it to be 1024x1024. Very odd and I will attempt to find out in an Adobe forum why this is happening. I'm still not happy with the fuzziness of the text so I will try some other things to make it look better. Thank you for all your help and if I get this corrected I will post here.
  5. I haven't found any settings in Illustrator that would crop content on export. If I'd export at a higher resolution it would change the resulting texture to a larger size.
  6. Thank you all for your help with this. I am posting some screen shots that sort of shows what happened. At least in this instance. Bear with me as I try to explain what happened. When I opened the maps file in Illustrator and checked the document page size it said it was 512x512. It showed the maps in the lower half of the page which you can see in the first shot. I drew a box and made it 1024x1024 and it filled the whole page area so somehow it did not measure the image correctly as it opened. I then made the page the maps were on 512x512 and repositioned the maps to fit inside that area, image 2. When I exported this and placed the texture in sL it came out as it was supposed to, image 3. I'm not sure why the maps opened with all the white space at the top other than it was saved this way. So this mystery has been solved. Now I have to figure out why my project is doing the same thing. You've all helped a lot even though I've done this many times sometimes you overlook the obvious. I'll post some screen shots of my project once I figure out where my glitch is happening.
  7. Here is a simple test I did on an object sent to me by a reader of this forum. I took the maps given and placed a simple color box on all four corners of the object. Then I exported this (from Illustrator) as a 72 DPI PNG file. As you can see when I placed this texture the drivers side red panel fits perfectly but the others are all well off with only the rear panel showing near the bottom of the passenger side rear fender and the panel on the nose of the car barely visible near the bottom edge. This puzzles me. I've had some textures where upon placing were a bit off but nothing like I'm experiencing now. Thank you to our forum reader for your object to test.
  8. Being a printer I've dealt with DPI for years. My experiments with uploading textures shows that when I export an image from Photoshop at 300 DPI the resulting upload looks much better or sharper than if I export that same image at 72 DPI. The sad part is most content creators or the people that create the cars in Blender or whatever 3D program of choice, do not create the UV Maps for those cars. This means we must use painting grids for positioning. As I stated it seems using this grid system is not infallible as my uploaded image is not fitting the face of the car as should be the case. That's why I asked the question if resolution would affect the image upon uploading to the viewer. I've uploaded many many textures into SL and sometimes I have to resize the image once placed but this one seems to be a bit different. I just want to find that magic formula where I can create a texture in either Photoshop or Illustrator and get consistent results. Especially with text as Photoshops raster imaging tends to cause blurry text. I may be older but I still embrace learning something new.
  9. I use Photoshop and Illustrator to texture for SL. I've been using textures to paint cars in SL. I've done this before with good success. I'm working with a car now where I've placed a painting grid on each face of the car then placed the same grid in Illustrator (it handles text much better and crisper than Photoshop). I've made the page in Illustrator the same size as the grid (actually I've tried several sizes from 1024x1024 down to 256x256. I place some text on the grid exactly where it falls on the car in SL. When I bring the test texture into SL it does not fit the car. I have to resize the texture on the car to make it appear on the car and when I do this it makes the text look lower resolution. I've tried exporting the image as a PNG at 72 dpi, 150 dpi and 300 dpi. The higher the resolution the crisper the text but sometimes I get a message that I cannot import higher than 1024x1024. Since the original page in Illustrator is not larger than this the only thing I can figure is the resolution is too high. So I lower the export resolution and it will upload but again it lowers the resolution of the image. I've tried about everything I can think of, even uploading the texture as the same grid as I've placed on the car in SL which looks like it is in the same position. This is becoming very frustrating as I've had great success before using mainly Photoshop. And I know some cars created for SL have the faces tortured so badly you can't really do much graphics wise to "paint" the car. Short of just placing the text and graphic and rescaling and repositioning it once on the car I'm about out of ideas. I'd much rather place a graphic and upload the texture and place on the car. I hate spending hours working on textures then not having them come out looking good on the cars. I've attached two images of the same car I did recently in Photoshop. It looks good but Illustrator just handles text better and the car I'm doing now will have a lot more text than graphics. Any suggestions are welcomed. Thanks.
  10. Since I first posted this I've become more knowledgeable about textures and "painting" objects in SL. Most vehicles you buy in SL, either the completed car or a shell, almost never has the UV maps included. Why? Laziness on the creators part I'd say. Many create the objects/cars in Blender which can create the maps for you. So, since I seldom get maps (twice so far) I use the grid method or the trial and error method. I've done some pretty nice textures for cars among other things. Now the problem I'm trying to solve is having the text I create in Photoshop or Illustrator displays in SL as sharp as the original. Yes I know Photoshop doesn't handle text as well as Illustrator but Photoshop handles gradients and special effects better than Illustrator. It's a trade off but what can you do. The text when imported looks decent at a distance but if you zoom in closer it looks fuzzy and a bit out of focus. I've been experimenting with different methods but so far nothing seems to keep the text crisp and clear. It seems to be a common problem as others cars text looks fuzzy too. Perhaps there is no solution to this and I'll just have to live with viewing from a distance and not being bothered by the visual blur. Attached is one of the cars I've painted. I've also am including the Slurl for the sim I race in. Most of the textures for the buildings and such were created by me for our track. Visit sometime if you're interested in drag racing for some great fun. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Phantom Isle/20/63/3301
  11. Thanks for replying. I have tried different things to sort of cheat to find a way to determine placement. I tried taking a screen shot of the car and bringing it into Photoshop. The problem is sizing the object properly. I suppose if I had nothing to do all day but play around with this I might find a way to create properly fitted textures. Having the UV maps would help quite a bit I would think. Some of the people I bought cars from say the person they bought the shell form didn't include the UV maps. Quite convenient. I can't say I blame people from trying to protect content. It's not like I'm trying to steal anything from them but just alter what I already have for my own use. I suppose I'll just have to trudge on.
  12. I'm not sure if this belongs here or not. I race cars in SL that have scripts in them to change gears, steer and other functions. I've bought already set up cars and can sometimes change the color easy enough. Although many have textures on painted areas that have parts manufacturers logos much like in real race cars. I've had limited luck in adding my own personal logos which I created in Photoshop and placed on a prim to add to the car. I know this is not a great way but it's the only way I can get it to work, at least on some cars. I do not have the UV maps for the cars so I cannot work that way. Also on some cars when I add the prim it messes up the scripts and they do not work or work in odd ways. I've tried unlinking parts and many other ways but most times I have problems with the scripts. On some brands of scripts I can turn off the script and get it to work. With other scripts this does not work. Since I'm not a builder nor a scriptor I have limited knowledge. I've asked people in SL that build cars and can add graphics but with limited success. It seems if they have the knowledge they either don't want to give it up or maybe they really don't know as much as they think. I'm pretty good with Photoshop and Illustrator but that only takes you so far. I need to know how to work with objects already built and scripted without screwing them up. I'm sure the best way is to have the UV maps for each surface and create a texture to fit it. Seems very few things in SL are sold with the UV maps included. Any help or where to look for help would be appreciated. I've searched the web but without much luck with regard to my specific need. Thanks.
  13. This really makes SL fun doesn't it? I'd say it is borderline stalking even if they don't harass in the normal sense. It is just knowing that every time you log in they know you are online. And according to this person they can even tell where you are in SL and the people that are close to you. Kinda creepy if you ask me.
  14. I know someone that is having a problem with passive stalking in SL. This person is using Red Zone to know when my friend is online or their alt. Their relationship ended in SL due to this problem. Red Zone was giving out IP addresses and this person was accusing my friend of having many alts which they do not. Now this person is still watching online when my friend logs in and even knows when others friends are online. Is there any way to prevent them from "spying" on my friend? There is no viciousness at this point but my friend feels they cannot log in and feel any sense of privacy.
  15. This issue recently happened to me too. Twice now. Once I was able to do the base avatar reset and it worked. This time I have tried that (twice), switched to three different viewers on two different computers. On my screen I appear dressed in what I put on and my inventory says I am wearing it but to everyone else the only things that show up are prims. Hair, shoes, and maybe a piece of a skirt or bow. I've cleared cache and all the normal things you might try. As of today I've been naked for almost two days. Hard to enjoy your time when you can't really go anywhere.
×
×
  • Create New...