Penny Patton
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Posts posted by Penny Patton
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Another vote for Berlin Project. It's not only interesting from the historical or role-play perspectives, but it's really interesting to see how much more you can put into a sim when everything isn't oversized to SL's usual standards.
If you're looking for role-play, you should check out Doomed Ship. There is pixel bumping there, but it's not the theme of the place. What poseballs there are tend to be tucked in side rooms and darker corners of the ship. It's probably the only other "to scale" build in SL besides Berlin, so the camera adjustments above will help here, too.
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Doomed Ship tends to get updated pretty regularly. I think the last big update was around November when a whole bunch of air vents and a few new areas you could only get to through them were added. The older areas tend to get re-done pretty regularly, too.
Forgotten City was recently added to the Destinations Guide. Was the first I'd seen it, not sure how long it's been around. It reminds me of a location you'd find in a Miyazake movie.
I forget the name offhand but an underground martian complex sim was added to the showcase, too. seemed like they jumped the gun a bit because construction looked like it had only just begun, with very little there to see and lots of incomplete stuff. It looked like it was shaping up pretty well. Saiwa Red Mines was the name. It shows up in search but won't let me get visit or get the location to post it. Weird.
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I won't buy any hair that isn't moddable. If any hair I bought did have scripts, the first thing I'd do would be to remove them entirely. Keep a copy in my inventory with the scripts intact if they're used for something like texture changes, but otherwise I've no need for scripted hair.
i just logged out for bed so I can't check to see how many prims my current hair is, but most hair I've owned has been well under 200 prims. Well made hair seems to be even lower in prim counts with the introduction of sculpts.Since I get all my hair at the same handful of shops I'd be surprised if my most recent hair is any different.
Judicious use of flexi and alpha textures definitely helps. Would help even more if LL would just give us 1-bit alpha like content creators have been begging for since the dawn of the grid.
Things like flexi and alphas don't really contribute much to lag anyways. Framerate, sure, but not lag. There's a difference between these two things and the fact that few people make the distinction makes it very hard to reduce either problem.
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There are two issues here. First, older residents need to not think of new resident "usernames" as "avatar names". LL has deliberately divorced the two, and that's a good call.
The problem as I see it, having gone through the new resident sign up process to see how it differs from previous incarnations, is that Linden Lab does not make a clear distinction to people signing up for the first time. On one hand, they do not let you know that your username will always be visible (having lead to many people using their private e-mail address as their username without the knowledge that this would be visible to all, and they don't do enough to prompt new users into creating a display name.
New residents basically choose a username, then get dumped into the grid with that as their display name until they learn to change it on their own.
Everything about the new user sign-up and orientation process is poorly thought out and this is no exception. New users should be put through an agressively interactive tutorial/orientation process much like you'd find in a well made videogame. During this usernames should be given the spotlight. As a new resident rezzes for the first time a box should pop up in the middle of their screen prompting them to create a display name. Some examples should be given, driving home that they are choosing a name, not an AOL screenname. Once chosen, they should be shown how to change it and told what limitations there are on this.
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I've been exploring a lot lately. Here's some favourites of mine along with some brief impressions.
InSilico - Sci-Fi megacity. One of SL's most impressive builds. Suffers from a lack of fleshed out locations to explore (places like hospitals and dance clubs tend to be one or two rooms and lacking in details), but the overall build is overwhelming and full of detail. Some of the best textures and use of sculpts in SL. One of the few sims to make excessive use of bots for NPC avatars, although non-interactive and almost all in the form of robots.
Forgotten City - Ancient ruined city filled with rusted out clockwork people frozen in time. A mix of neo-classical and high fantasy architecture giving a very "Miyazake" feel to the sim. It suffers from some really bad scaling issues (tabletops higher than your head, chairs that make you feel like an infant, inconsistent scale amongst buildings) but, to be fair, these problems are common throughout SL and are largely due to several design problems with the SL viewer itself and LL's starter avatar selections.
Doomed Ship - Alright, so I'm maybe slightly biased with this one.Very immersive build, full of sound effects and interactive elements the likes of which you'd find in videogame environments. Extremely atmospheric, especially if you make use of the sim's custom windlight settings and use an improved camera view. A much larger build than you'd expect in a single sim, mostly due to being one of possibly only two sims on the grid to make good use of scale. You could seriously get lost for hours here. On the down side the older sections of the sim are immediately apparent with the lack of sculpts and drop in detail. The textures and sculpt work, even in the newer areas, aren't as high a quality as sims like InSilico. It's also a popular RP sim, which means lots lag and lots of sim freezes as people come and go.
Hosoi Mura - Gorgeous sims based on Feudal Japan and China. Amazing level of detail. It has the same scale issues most sims have, but otherwise the prim and texture work is fantastic. The use of sound can be a bit out of place. Wander into an empty marketplace and you're surrounded by the sounds of a bustling, crowded street. Walk into an empty building and you hear a room full of people. It kinda makes for an unintentionally creepy effect.
Bentham Forest - Fantastic sim for Halloween adventuring, or any time you feel like taking a stroll in a creepy, haunted forest. Great use of sound, very detailed. It can be difficult to tell whether the forest is supposed to be gigantic, or just some elements in it, but otherwise an astounding sim everyone should see at least once.
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Now, are you talking about the "Depth of Field" effect LL recently introduced with the mesh beta viewer? Kirsten's has it too. the one where the camera focus makes foreground and background items blurry?
Or do you mean the camera angle effect you can adjust with ctrl+8/9/0 to narrow your view to tunnel vision or widen it like a fish-eye lense?
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The shape height displayed in the appearance editor is still broken. Kinda funny, kinda sad (mostly the latter) considering this was acknowledged as a bug before the feature was even added to 2.1 last year.
Also still cannot change tabs in the object edit window while dragging inventory or textures.
There are a couple nifty, minor features, like mini-map in the "Nearby People" window added and some really long over-due fixes, like the texture chooser appears to be fixed. I've only tested it a little, but if the texture chooser is really finally fixed that's fanbtastic!
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This is in the old Blogorum archivem but the community search doesn't seem to find those so I'm reposting this to keep it more visible for all residents.
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Camera placement is important. In the videogame industry this is common wisdom. Game developers spent decades experimenting, improving and pretty much perfecting the art of camera placement in 3D videogames.
Unfortunately, the SL camera does not take advantage of any of that experience. As a result, the camera sits way over your avatar’s head, angled down. Not very immersive or engaging. More like you’re watching a character from afar rather than interacting with the world through them.
This has also affected how we build. It’s common knowledge that avatars are generally oversized, often close to 7 or 8′ tall, some pushing almost 9′. And yet, the environments we build and explore are larger still, often fully double scale compared to real life. 5m high ceilings instead of the more typical 2.59, 20x20m rooms instead of 10x10m or 5x5m rooms. We need to build so much larger to compensate for SL’s camera.
Some will point out that you need to compensate for any third person view. This is correct, however with a proper 3rd person view you’d only really be affected by a room as small as about 2x3m, like a bathroom or walk in closet. You’d easily be able to navigate a 5x5m apartment with a typical 2.59m high ceiling.
The irony of all this up-scaling is that it makes SL smaller. We can’t re-size our land to match, afterall, so we either need to buy more or settle for a “smaller” build.
These up-scaled builds also eat more of our alotted prims. A 20x20m room might take 16 prims where the same room done to 10x10m scale takes up only 1/4th the land area and can be done in a mere 6 prims (or even 3 prims if you build as efficiently as possible) because you don’t bump heads with that 10x10x10m prim size limit.
So here you are. Alternate camera settings you can easily enter into the viewer’s debug panel to get a better look at Second Life.
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CameraOffsetDefault (In Viewer 1 based viewers, including TPVs like Ascent/Phoenix/Imprudence)
CameraOffsetRearView (In Viewer 2 including TPVs such as Kirstens, Starlight and Catznip)
X: -2.000
Y: -0.400 (Make positive for a left shoulder view or keep 0.000 for a centred view.)
Z: -0.200
FocusOffsetDefault (In Viewer 1 based viewers, including TPVs like Ascent/Phoenix/Imprudence)
FocusOffsetRearView (In Viewer 2 including TPVs such as Kirstens, Starlight and Catznip)
X: 0.900
Y: -0.700 (Make positive for a left shoulder view or keep 0.000 for a centred view.)
Z: 0.200-----------------------------------------
In addition, Viewer 2.1 on up supports multiple camera presets in the form of "Rear View", "Front View" and "Side View". The settings I name above are to overwrite your rear view, which is the default setting SL will always revert to. You can also overwrite the Front and Side views with whatever camera settings you find useful.
To find the other debug settings replace the "RearView" portion of the name with "FrontView" or "GroupView" to alter the front and side view camera presets. In your View window in the SL viewer you can switch between these views with the press of a button.
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Having a proportions guide handy is a good idea regardless of the apparent age you're going for, and regardless of your skill level at shape making.In addition to familiarizing yourself with age appropriate proportions I recommend manually measuring your avatar's proportions for the best possible shape.
Ideally you would take a pose stand with a good arms-outstretched pose and use prims to do your measuring.
Here's an image to illustrate what I mean
;You would take a prim and first measure your avatar height. Do this by stretching the prim from the soles of your feet to the top of your skull (remove shoes and hair, first). Using the height, neck, hip length and leg length sliders work your height down to the general size you're looking for. Don't worryt about being exact, many sliders affect your height so you'll wind up having to fine tune this again after tackling your proportions.
When you're more or less the height you want take a prim and measure the size of your head by stretching it from the very bottom of your chin to the top of your skull. Once you have that measurement apply it to all the dimensions of your prim. That is one head unit. You will likely re-take this measurement several times so don't worry about being super exact the first couple times.
Copy the head prim to measure yourself from the top of your skull to the soles of your feet. Loki's proportion chart features "idealistic" human shapes, closer to what you'd find in comic books than real life, if you want to be more natural you have some wiggle room. Average for an adult is actually about 7-7.5 heads tall. You can use heads tall to stylize your shape (make yourself more cartoonish by being fewer heads tall) or to make your shape appear younger as displayed in Loki's image. At the other end of the scale, if you'd prefer a larger, bulkier looking body go for a smaller head. Comic book hero's are usually 8-8.5 heads tall. Further than that and you get into the realm of the extreme and comical body shapes, like The Incredible Hulk or The Heavy Weapons Guy from TF2, respectively. Coupled with more average looking proportions and you just look like you have a tiny head.
Your initial measurements will probably reveal you to have a disproportionately small head, the default avatars LL throws at all new users have very poor proportions, generally around 9 heads tall. Scale your head up, measure your head again, and repeat this process until you're happy.
Then move on to upper body to leg ratio. As Loki's diagram shows, from about ages 10 on up your upper body to leg ratio should be about equal.. There's some lee-way here. Give your legs a few inches over your upper body to get that "leggy" look with a female avatar. Give your torso a few inches over your legs to emphasize your upper body as a guy. Again, stretch this further for extreme/comical shapes.
As the proportion image shows, younger humans have shorter legs relative to their upper body, something to consider when making very young child shapes. Teens will often have that lanky "growth spurts" look.
Remember, a difference of a few inches can have a huge impact on your overall appearance. You don't need to give your legs six inches on your upper body to look like a super model, you'll just look like something is wrong with your torso. Look at the huge variety of body shapes you see in every day life, it may be a shock but almost everyone conforms pretty closely to artistic/scientifically accepted body proportions. It's those differences of only an inch here, two inches there that give us so much apparent variety.
Once your upper body/leg ratio is where you want it you'll take your head unit prim again and measure the width of your torso. Now, Loki's chart doesn't really go into this but the average adult man is about 2 heads wide. A comic book/idealized shape about 2 and 1/3 heads wide. Remember, you have some wiggle room here, a few inches less and you'll look more slender. A few inches more and you'll have broad shoulders and a barrel chest.
My avatar, pictured above, is about an inch, a little less, shy of 2 heads wide.
Finally, once you get all that checked you'll want to check your arms. For an adult avatar, arms outstretched should measure more or less equal to your height. Measure your height again, soles of the feet to the top of your skull. Centre that prim with your avatar and rotate it on its side. More than likely your arms are way too short. Again, the starter avatars LL provides everyone have bad proportions, with freaky short arms. The women avatars were about six inches, a full half a foot too short for their bodies.This is more a problem for women, likely because the arm sliders for women are so muchmore skewed towards the small end of the scale, but it's also a problem for many male avatars. Arm length is mostly independant of the height slider, too, so the taller your avatar is the more difficult it can be to make your arms proportional to your body (which is also displayed by LL's starter avatars as they tend towards 7' tall).
Of course, for a child avatar you'll want to adjust this proportion appropriately. As Loki's chart, again, shows, a 3 year old has vastly different proportions from a 15 year old.
Now, I know this was a long post, and those who didn't give up and go "tl;dr" just seeing it are likely thinking, "Wow, that sounds like a lot of work!", but believe me, it's worth it. You get some fantastic body shapes when working with good proportions, and as a result you really stand out well from the crowd.
Like everything else in life (Second, or otherwise) what you get out of it is only as much as you're willing to put into it.
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Are Avatars getting Shorter?
in Your Avatar
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Definitely a growing (pardon the pun) trend towards shorter avatars. It's a slow movement, but it's definitely happening. I suspect a part of that is due to most TPVs displaying avatar height in the appearance editor. For the longest time hardly anyone on the grid had any idea how tall they were and few people realized they could measure themselves with a pose stand and a prim.
The official viewer shows height now, too, which contributes even more, since that is what most people will see when they first go to customize their avatar. Unfortunately, the official viewer displays incorrect height, telling you you're much shorter than you actually are. Still, where most people used to be 7, 8 or even close to 9' tall, being 6 and a half to 7' tall is still shorter.
I do think a part of it is social, too and that's why you see scaling down done more by women, who aren't insecure about their height, as opposed to men who may get insecure about being a midget compared to the 7-8' tall giants wandering around. Even women get insecure about this, in large part due to the "age-play" hysteria of years past. Few of my friends would shrink smaller than myself when I was 5'10". When I shrunk down to 5'7" many of them shrunk down, too. A couple even mentioned that they felt odd being taller than me so that's why they shrunk. These days you see more and more shorter avatars, so more and more people feel comfortable making their own avatar that short.
The biggest non-social obstacles to shorter avatars are attachments made around large size bodies, a difficult and obtuse appearance editor and the fact that the starter and default shapes LL provides are all around 7' tall and very poorly proportioned. As far as attachments go, any content creator should be designing attachments for the smallest body shape they can manage. It's extremely easy to scale a small attachment up for a larger avatar, but it can be practically impossible to scale an attachment made for a larger avatar down without forcing the person to practically rebuild it entirely. Not to mention I've seen maybe one or two shops selling properly scaled shapes. I've seen plenty claiming to sell shapes at 5'5"-6' tall, but upon buying the shapes or trying the demo you then find that they're either half a foot taller, meaning they were measured incorrectly, or they are the same typical 7'-8' shapes we're used to, meaning the creator didn't measure them at all, but just made up a number (why would anyone do this?).
These days, when I build an avatar, all of the attachments are made around a shape that's under 5' tall. I then scale them up for the shape I include with the outfit. The exception being things that shouldn't be scaled. Things like guns only come in one size. If a small person is holding a large handgun it SHOULD look oversized!
I also only know of two full sims designed to scale. Berlin Project, a historical recreation of early 20th centure Berlin and Doomed Ship, a sci-fi/horror roll-playing sim. These two sims do demonstrate how much "larger" a single sim can be when everything is build "smaller".