SL Designer Notes

This is a new kind of post for the blog, where I talk about some of the tools I couldn't have done without in designing and building for SL. Today I want to talk about texture changing scripts. Anytime you want to offer more than one texture option for your build, a texture-changing script is a good way to do it—it allows you to include all the textures in the same version, rather than making a unique version with each texture option. If you have more than one variable texture, this becomes necessary more than just convenient. For home and garden at least, there are a few ways to go when you want to offer texture-changing options. For some things, a HUD may be the best option. It's not part of the build itself, but is set up to interact with the build and provide the various texture changes you want/need. In other cases, a script that enables the build itself to contain the texture changing options is ideal. I tried out multiple options for both kinds before arriving at the one

Salacity History, Part 14... My friend Phen had stepped in to help with store management for a while, but had been forced to cut back due to RL circumstances (the story of my life), so I went a while without a "store manager" and worked through it on my own. But in light of my newfound determination to take Salacity to the next level, a new store/brand manager was in order. Enter Melly, whom I had known for a while due to her excellent work with Love To Decorate. After a staff shake-up with LTD, Melly was available for work and she started out by helping me re-vamp my vendor ads—a much-needed area of attention. After working with me and Salacity for a couple of months in that capacity, Melly took on the role of store/brand manager in full. This ended up being a particularly fruitful time, and I give Melly a ton of credit for the progress Salacity made during this era. Besides significant improvements on the vendor ads, Melly worked with me in setting up the store in a new bui

While we're on the subject of "original mesh" we may as well take on this issue. Frankly, it's one of the things I'm most glad to be free of now that I'm no longer "in the game." The issue is this: people in SL obtain 3D mesh content from somewhere, rather than creating it themselves, and then upload it to SL and pass it off as their own. That's the ethical problem—so-called "designers" lying about the fact that they didn't actually create this object that they are presenting as "original" mesh.  Most of the time, there is a legal side of it too: the source(s) they got the mesh models from do not allow use of such things in SL. ALL of the 3D websites where you can buy (or on some cases download for free) these models have legal terms of use—a license, if you will—that stipulates how and in what context their products can be used. All of them prohibit USE (let alone re-sale) in "virtual worlds" such as Second Life