My Profile

This page shows some of the tricks and techniques I use in scripting and creating objects in the online world of Second Life.

Come visit Phaze Demense (pronounced di-MANE/ or /dih-MEEN/, meaning a Lord's region), where everything I do is free. You can Teleport to Phaze Demesnes. and grab all the goodies. They are in houses and signs all over our 5 islands and undersea.

Ferd Frederix - email me fred @ mitsi.com

Remember Our Veterans This Memorial Day

Memorial day in the United States is coming up soon, on the last Monday in May on the 29th. Our national holiday honors those who fought and died to defend our country. Traditionally, we fly the American flag that day.

Here is a simple way to express your appreciation for our veterans ultimate sacrifice via Second Life, by adding a waving, animated American flag to your parcel:

mesh bird

You can add your own state's flag to the display, too, provided that it is underneath the American flag, or on a separate flagpole lower than the American flag, as required by flag etiquette. You should also fly the flag of the United States at half-staff from dawn until noon local time on Memorial Day.

Make an animated mesh frog chase and eat a bug - Best Second Life tools

OpenSim and Second Life have many wonderful artists who can sculpt and build wonderful items. Everywhere I go I see great looking animals and objects. But those objects are just sitting there! Maybe they move a head or blink and eye, but that's about all I see. It makes it far more dramatic when your critters move and exhibit animal-like behavior. There seems to be a lack of knowledge or skill on how to do simple movements, perhaps because people do not know how to script, or if they do, what tricks you can use to do these effects with.

Pets can move about using several techniques, such as prim movement, llMoveTo physics, as vehicles using physics, and with the several new path finding commands. OpenSim has a variety of poorly behaving physics engines, and I want to keep this simple. In honor of the people who found a new species of leopard frog in New York, I made a mesh frog and a moving bug for it to eat and a set of scripts to animate them This article will show you how to do basic animal behavior and movements effects using the simplest possible method of prim movement:

Movement within a bounding area
Pursuit of prey
Eating behavior
Walking effects
Prey movement
Prey being eaten
Prims: 6 for the frog, 2 for the bug

You can make this pet easily and modify it for your own uses. This is licensed so you cannot sell this frog, but you are free to make and sell any products that are based on this products scripts using these techniques.

I rate this as a simple project that anyone can build. You do not need any knowledge of making scripts, sculpts, or meshes, except how to add them to a prim. I am including some extensive notes on how you can make your own bugs and pets using my techniques, but you can skip these steps.

OpenSim users: Because this project is based on mesh, it requires OpenSim version 0.7.2 or higher

Make your own Animated frog that chase bugs

Best Sculpt Map templates for Second Life

Using sculpt templates was the only way to paint in 3-D for a long time. I finally decided to pay for Photoshop CS5 so I could paint directly in 3-D, and I figured that was the end of need for the sculpt map. However, I realized just now that I still use these sculpt maps every day, to check for alignment of meshes and mapping the textures in different ways.

I was just making a new mesh foot for my horse. I thought I was done, and it seems to look good when textured, but the UV map said otherwise.

Mesh Horse

I had issues with the hooves. The prim on the left has issues in the B2-B3 area, and the prim on the right has been fixed. The fix dropped 20 vertexes and 57 surfaces from the one on the right, which reduces lag and makes it look better at the same time.

So here are three sculpt maps including the one I use most often, from the Second Life® Wiki, Copyright © 2007-2009 Linden Research, Inc. which are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Click them to get the full sized templates, save them to disk, and enjoy!

	UUID: c595dad5-e439-fe75-1220-9dddf6cdf4b3	UUID: 11e68b89-6693-e3bf-35c9-876ae2a2e78b

My Favorite UV Checker, by TeroTeki.com	UV Checker by DanielFox Abernathy	UV Checker by Chosen Few
Best for painting	Shows the exact location of the vertexes	Good for prims in-world for aligning textures because it is in decimal and matches the offsets in the viewer.

Make a Bee fly to flowers and gather honey in Second Life

It's time to give away a bunch of my work again. I've always loved birds and bees and I love to make things that are unusual and unique. This bee was inspired by this sign I saw at the Texas State fair.

I'll show you how to make a 5-prim bee that gather honey from 1-prim flowers, and takes it back to a 1-prim beehive. I'm giving away some difficult work here! The wing sculpt alone took me weeks to figure out. Since I wanted this to work in OpenSim, too, I had to come up with a function to replace the (broken) llLookat() system call.

This project includes several neat tricks I've learned and will teach you:

1) It uses non-physical movement, so it is very low lag. Except for a small burst of script activity every 5 seconds, this script uses few resources.

2) It works in OpenSim thanks to a neat replacement for llLookAt(). If you are a scripter, you will love the function face_target().

2) This bee uses a very fast wing-movement effect that has no server-side lag at all, even for very high wing rates. This is the same trick I have used in my freebie butterflies, fairies and hummingbird projects, and now you will know how the trick works. There is a template included so you can make your own wings. I've never seen it published before. This is a zero-lag effect.

Read the post and make you own bee for collecting pollen!

Off-sim Pose Balls for Second Life

Normally avatars cannot go off the edge of a sim. But a simple trick will let you move your avatar off the edge. Even better, you can dance, walk, or fly!

I made a set of sculpts and a nice demo of this effect in an off-sim dance floor. In addition, I've modified a camera control script that you can add to existing pose balls.


This is the original photo I modeled it from.	The result is this 9-prim stairway to heaven

Read this post for more information and all sets of sculpts, textures and both scripts.

600+ Radio Stations for Second Life

Want to play music on your land in Second Life? Here is a list of over 600 streaming stations that are compatible with Second Life.

These are the Top-10 most-listened-to radio stations on the Internet in more than 60 categories.

This table of radio stations refreshes daily from the most popular stations in the world out of over 60,000 stations.

Phaze is an Editors Pick in the Destination Guide

Our sim, Phaze Demesnes, spent an entire week in the Destination Guide as an Editors Pick! We've now been moved into the Adventure & Fantasy category.

Linden Bear Hunt

Many Lindens make a bear to give out to residents. Hunting Linden bear is a difficult thing to do, since Lindens can hide invisibly and are often very busy with office hours. Some will give them out when asked, and others give theirs for good deeds.

This Valentines day will give you a good shot at collecting more Linden bears. There is usually an annual Kiss-a-Linden event on February 14. Don't want to kiss a Linden? Too yucky? You say you just want to click and get one?

Well, you can! Get ready for the easiest bear you will ever get. There is a set of SL8B (Second Life 8th Birthday) Linden bears on the Marketplace.

There are many more bears that you can get by just knowing where to look. I have seven more for you.

This post will show you seven more to hunt for.

Free Chat-to-speech translator

My chat-to-speech system is now online. I've also coded a demo so you can see how it operates here on the web.

View the Demo and then join us in Phaze Demesnes to get a free copy in the Proton Dome.

Make a Breedable Pet Robot for Second Life

Multiple blinking eyes option

They live! I have a set of living robots in the dome in Phaze Demesnes, and in OpenSim. And scripting is completed! These pets are based on the XS_Quail code (below), but are much improved and are not specfic to robots or quail or any other type of animal.

Here is a video showing how the pet Troubot Robot moves, and how the eyes change.

How to make a breedable pet robot

Open Source breedable pet script for Second Life

I just published 8 pages of an article on how to make your own breedable pet in Second Life. Xundra Snowpaw has published the source code under the BSD open source license. If you want to see what others have done with these scripts, check out Twibbles at their store.

I cannot teach you how to make Twibbles. But I can show you how to use these open source scripts to make a set of the original XS Quails. Once you have mastered this step, you can change the scripts to make your own virtual pets. The zip file includes the original code, modified code, and a re-written set of scripts for the Pet Robot project (above) that can be used to make almost any animal.

breedable quail

According to http://breedables.wordpress.com, the XS Quail and XS Cactus were first breedable ecosystem in Second Life. They were based on the open source script available from the Seid Mushrooms creator. The Cactus were developed and released first, in March, 2010.

On 25th July, 2010 Xundra handed out copyable Quail food and Cactus watering cans, declaring the end of support for XS products. The scripts were published at Google code on Jun 19, 2010 under a BSD license. This is the first article on how to make your own breedable pet from these scripts.

Free Sculpts and Meshes for Second Life

Linda Kellie has graciously donated years and years of her work to the open source community. Her site at www.lindakellie.com has an amazing amount of animations, hair, skins, textures, objects, sculpts, and even complete OpenSim setups. I've searched for years for free sculpts, and I don't think I have found more than one or two, so I was blown away by her sculpt collection. Linda has graciously donated a huge amount of work! I've examined each and every sculpt, and I can attest that she is very talented at sculpting.

Just look at this 1 prim beauty ... it's only 1 prim!!!

Her site has all this neatly arranged into zip files. But I never know exactly what a sculpt will look like until I pay to upload it, so I wrote some Processing code to show you a 3-D view of each sculpt.

My conversion process mades these into web-safe 3-D PNG and GIF images, and it also makes Objects (OBJ) and Mesh (DAE) files of of these sculpts, so you can use them as a mesh or in any CAD 3D package.

I've also added all my best sculpts for you to use.

Just click this image to get all the goodies!

Free seamless textures for Second Life

I've kept a large hoard of seamless textures since the early 1990's tucked away on various hard drives. Since Linda Kellie has graciously donated a large number of textures to the open source community, I'm combining my collection with hers and letting you pick and choose and see them as seamless tilings.

Viewer 3 now supports both Bing and the new Google translation service.

There is a new Viewer Version 3 available now that supports both Bing and the new Google translation service:

http://secondlife.com/support/downloads/

Thanks to some nice volunteer work by Vadim ProductEngine, you will still have a translator in your viewer in Second Life. But there is a catch. Microsoft is now charging Big Prices for Bing Translator.

Here is how to set up your new viewer to get free translation.

As you may already know, back in May Google announced the deprecation of the free Translate API v1 and they will drop all free translation on December 1, 2011. As a result, all viewers will require updates to continue with any translation, even paid versions. But what is really bad is that yesterday on 9/14/2011, Microsoft changed policy from a free service to the bare minimum of only 2,000 free translations a month!. Microsoft now offers 2,000,000 characters for free. The depressing part is that the Microsoft Bing translator, limited as it is, is still probably the best way for anyone to get free, useful translations in Second Life. If you are one of the half of SL that does not 'speak' English, this is very bad news.

How to make an animal and make it move using Archipelis for Second Life

I use Archipelis to make a lot of animals and birds in Second Life. In this article, I'll show you how you can easily make a moving animal in Second Life by combining the output of Archipelis from http://www.archipelis.com/ with my newest database-driven Prim Animator. The clip at the right shows one possible animation out of many. It is easy to draw and make 3-D content in Second Life with Archipelis. When you combine this easy to use tool with my easy to use scripts, you can make moving, jumping, and crawling objects in Second Life.

This is an easy project. I've gone into a lot of detail because this is a powerful technique for making anything move in Second Life.

Part 1 - Making animated animals in Second Life
Part 2 - Making a Baby Bird for Second Life using Archipelis
Part 3 - Making the Mama Robin bird using Archipelis for Second Life
Part 4 - Loading your project into Second Life
Part 5 - Animating your birds nest

Search dozens of selected web sites for OpenSim and LSL script

New! Script Meta-Search will search thousands of scripts here and at other sites for LSL or Opensim scripts.

Free Sculpt Prototypes for 3-D packages

Here is a free set of cubes, spheres, cylinders and a flat plane that can be easily imported into a large variety of free 3-D packages ready to make into any sculpted shape quickly and for free. These cost me several thousand dollars and a month of work, so take advantage of me and download the zip file of SL compatible sculpt prototypes. You can use these in almost any software package. I've tested them in Daz Studio, Google Sketchup, Wingz 3D, K-3, ShapeShop, Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, Animator and AC3D.

Cube Cylinder Sphere

Build your own Valentines Day tour bird

Here is a complete set of scripts and sculpts to make a Valentines Day Tour bird for two lovers! It can be made with as few as 8 prims. It is easy to teach routes to, and you can expand it to chat to your visitors, and play sounds.

Clothes Previewer and Free, Open Source Skins

SLCP small Here is a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to make their own clothes and skins. I've combined open-source skins by Eloh Eliot with the open source SL Clothes Previewer by Johan Durant, and I've also updated the Clothes Previewer to use high-rez open-source templates. It works on Windows and Macintosh, and runs on Linux under wine. I've also added free clothes examples and posted instructions on how to use it.

Show off your Second Life Flickr stream in style!

Now you can show off your Flickr stream in a cool 3-D view. No coding needed, and it works as a link in Facebook, Wordpress, or even an iframe. No web site is needed, so you can email the link or post it to any blog, and you can use it on a shared media prim or in your profile in Second Life!

View Full-screen Demo and then make your own Flickr URL

Make simple pipes and fences with this free tool by Mikage Boa

Pipe tool

Here is an article on a simple to use and free program to make 3-D sculpted pipe shapes by Mikage Boa. Mikage also makes a simple Block to Sculpt editor.

Make your sims into a 3-D sculpt with a free tool by Spinmass

Here is an article on a simple to use program to make 3-D sculpted sim shapes from Second Life or OpenSim grids with the terrain map generator by SpinMass. SpinMass also makes the Lathe Build tool (L$500), ShapeGen ($100L), and the Bailiwick RAW file editor (free).

A simple yet very useful sculpting tool

Thanks to Mikage Boa of slmame.com, her is a very simple yet useful sculpting tool. I made an nice set of steps in just a few seconds in this posting about it. Mikage also has a nice online tool for making rod sections.

Qarl's Align Prim tool now in Phoenix and Imprudence

The Phoenix and Imprudence viewer now supports automatic prim edge and face alignment. This feature comes courtesy of the former Qarl Linden. Qarl Fizz posted a patch in October 2010, and it's so useful it is already in the Imprudence Experimental Release and in the standard Phoenix release.

To use it, look for new selection checkbox on the build tool, just above “Edit linked parts”. With the build tool open, select a group of prims, then select the “Align” option. Click the arrows and dots that appear for each plane. Press Shift and click the arrows that appear for packing prims together.

Show your land the best way - with automatic Phoenix viewer Parcel Windlight settings

The Phoenix viewer now supports automatic Parcel Windlight land settings that send Windlight Sky and Water Presets to your visitors automatically. I've wished for this for years and years.

Here is a quick video by Jessica Lyon, the founder and manager of the Phoenix developer team, showing some of the features:

For information on setup, and on various options, check the short article at this link or the Phoenix page.

horsies

Run Open Sim on a thumb drive.

OpenSim is starting to catch on. It's a great way to prototype and build since it does not need an internet connection or any router or port configuration, so it's ideal for use while flying or traveling or anywhere you don't have a decent network connection, or any number of other circumstances.

Now you can make it truly portable by running OpenSim off a thumb drive!

It also works on your hard drive.

How to make any prim in seconds with Prim Finder

Ever needed a particular shape of a prim? Daunted by the large number of options in the editor box? Well, it's far easier to make prims with this wonderful tool by Crystal Gadgets.

This tools costs L$390 and is worth every penny . If you are serious about building, then it is a must-have item!

How to Get Free Giant-Mega Prims

Ever needed a particular giant or mega prim? You can find many mega prim packages inworld or at SL webstores. But digging through your inventory or running around and actually paying for a mega prim is a not a very good idea.

This post shows you how to get them sent to you for free, thanks to Second Life resident Latif Khalifa the author of the Radegast client, Grid Persister, and the PrimSearch web site. All three of these products are free, too!.

Noobs

Not a tool - but you have probably heard Caramell Dansen

Yes, I know this isn't a tool - but you've probably heard the Caramell Dansen dance gesture playing this song in Second Life™.

The first time I saw this in Second Life a very cute girl walked up to me, blocked my way, and played it. I was in awe. I said "Want" ... but all I got was the gesture :-(

Now you can see the English lyrics version here, and the Swedish original with mis-heard English lyrics!

Red Castle

How to make Tiny Jewelry and Impossibly Tiny Prims

The smallest you can normally make a prim is a rather large 0.1 X 0.1 X 0.1. These are too small for rings, necklaces, and other jewelry.

Rhese simple techniques will let you make tiny, tiny prims of impossibly small sizes.

Make Sculpties look great!

Wonder why those sculpties look distorted and blobby? Here is a simple fix!

Bring up the 'Advanced' menu with Ctrl-Alt-D, or Opt-Ctrl-D on a Mac. A new tool bar item "Advanced" will appear at the top.

Select the menu for 'debug settings' near the bottom.

In the blank space, copy and paste the word: RenderVolumeLODFactor, and set the value to 4 to get all sculpts looking great.

Resting

Single script Super Prim animator

This one-script prim animator is is one of the most useful scripts in Second Life™. You can now animate any object, with just one script!

Setup is very simple. Just drop the script and a blank notecard into the object, click the object, and give your animation a name. Move all the prims around, and click Record. When done, click the Animation Name, and watch it play back every move!This script uses a new and very fast command called 'llSetPrimitiveParamsFast'. This means that dozens of prims can move almost instantly.

Best of all - I've open sourced it, so it's FREE!

Ferd's LSL Script Database - the LSLDB

's LSL Script Database has a bunch of open source, copyleft, and public domain LSL Scripts. It is a user-created wiki that anyone can contribute to. It features LSL Script syntax highlighting with links to the wiki. I've just added live, real-time syntax checking with LSLEditor by Alphons van der Heijden, who graciously donated his masterpiece to the Open Source community. LSL-Editor is a standalone LSL (Second life) script editor and run-time environment for Windows. It compiles and executes LSL scripts. No Second Life viewer is needed nor do you need a connection to the Second Life grid.

LSL Editor

LSLEditor has just had it's first major update in several years, thanks to elricember and stevenlawson. You can get instructions and a older version at at http://www.lsleditor.org/. You can also get the newest beta version from SourceForge. The beta version supports the newer instruction set.

Mars Attacks Phaze!

I just finished this Mars Attacks-like avatar, with working ray gun that rezzes and vaporizes noobs! Have fun with the gun anywhere, including no-script zones.

If you have rez rights, you can skeletonize noobs 'til the wee hours. Come to Phaze Demenses, rez in and look behind you at Comic Island and grab yours while the phasers are hot!

Add 420 more windlight effects to Viewer2

Viewer 2 is missing all the great Windlight settings that were in Emerald. Now you can have them and a bunch more ... an additional 420 new Windlight effects in just a few minutes. This zip file will add 382 new atmospheric effects to Viewer 2, and 38 new water effects. If you are new to Windlight, try this tutorial from Torley:

Torley's WindLight Settings Tutorial

So download the files and install them. I've included instructions for XP, Windows Vista and 7, Linux, and Macs.

Also, WindLight notecards for WindLight water and sky presets are now tradable assets inworld !

Record Second Life Voice with Sound Leech

Want to record voice? Need to save that seminar and play it back later? Want to haunt someone this Halloween by playing back something that comes back to haunt them? Now you can record speech (or any other sound) in Second Life, or any game for that matter, simply and easily, with SoundLeech, a simple and free sound grabbing freeware app by Mike Looijmans.

Open source 3-D sim scanner

I'll show you how to use two free tools (and you get a third for free) that you can use to create your very own Sim Scanner, with realistic topography and moving people indicators. We'll be combining a free sim scanner with your sims 3-D topography with moving, mouse-stirrable flash water. Sounds complicated? It's not. You can grab a copy of mine (shown at left), and with one quick trip in Second Life and a simple crop in a paint program, have your very own land in a classy 3-D scanner. >

Introducing a free tool to make sculpted water that moves in Second Life

I discovered a great new tool by Zeja Pyle that is so simple to use I just had to make something with it. SLPrimEmboss is intended to make embossed signs... which is.... well, boring, so I made something useful from it. I've posted this article on How to make water move in 3-D Second Life. This looks great in ponds and in waterfalls since it moves up and down as well as side-to-side just like real water does.

Here's a video of it running with my finger-stirrable Viewer 2 flash water included, and without.
Bonus: Animated GIF editor included!

Make a picture talk in Second Life™

Here is something new for Viewer 2: a picture that moves and talks in Second Life! You can have it say anything you want, male or female, and you can make pets, too. Pick from over 100 avatars, choose hair, accessories, and set your own background picture for both Viewer 2 and non-viewer 2 users. So get yours now, as I expect to see a lot of scary paintings this Halloween! I've included a script that automagically frames the picture in a prim, so you don't have to fiddle with anything.

for free!

Ultimate Talking Painting in Second Life

Here is the extreme end what can be done with a tad more complicated talking picture code and SitePal for the service. I use multiple sequential WWW:Mechanize bots to translate from any of 58 languages, search Wolfram-Alpha for answers, and run a customized Alice chat bot as a back-end. There are as many as 8 web 'GET's involved, a lot of parsing with JSON, Perl regular expressions, and text to speech, and the SL version uses a long-poll AJAX with JQuery and a LSL script. It is amazing that it's as fast as it is, about 3 seconds to query just about anything. Unfortunately, the web service for the avatar movement and voices is not free, but there is a 15-day free trial, if you would like to try your hand at the Ultimate Talking Painting in Second Life. It's at http://www.sitepal.com, and is registered at http://www.chatbots.org

These are free, so ask one of my friends for a copy. Or click a pic and go for a spin with some of my friends:


Dolar Matova Tara's portfolio	Justin the Tree (He is 3-D in SL)	WavinggirlsAV Voom	Winter Nightfire C.J. Ross's Art portfolio

Filthy Fluno jeffreylipskyarts.com	Gino Rascon	Willow Halfpint	Strawberry Singh Strawberrysingh.com

How to Make Sculpted Furniture

My dear friend Wavinggirl had a small stool when she was a young girl. She found a picture of it and asked if it was possible to make a model of it in Second Life. This post shows you how to make the sculpted legs using a very simple to use ( and free! ) tool. As a bonus, I will show you how to make sculpts very smooth, like they have been sandpapered smooth, using another great free tool.

How to play MP3's in Second Life for free using Viewer 2 media

posted a article at I saw she had a wish list, and one of her wishes was for a way to play her iTunes collection in Second Life. So I spent the evening for anyone to play a collection of MP3 files for free. You don't even need to code up a script! You just make a URL and poke it onto the prim. This technique uses the new Viewer 2.0 media on a prim feature, plus a small script in Perl, hosted on this server. You can stream lots of MP3's, too, as Google will host up to 100 megabytes for free. Here is the article on how to play MP3's in Second Life.

And here is a demo:

I had to make this for our Sim

Here is something that took me a long time to make, by hand...A look back at our sim, , somewhere in time. After months of head scratching, I finally killed all the fleas and came up with a general solution.

You can now enter any sim name and get the overhead map view, everywhere in time. The raw data for your sim comes on-the-fly from Tyche Shepard @ , the best stats site on Second life, anywhere. There's more than 3 million rows in this database now!

You can also get the Topography image from this search:

Continuous Play multiple Mp3's With Second Life Viewer 2

Hate the 10-second play time limit on sound in Second Life? Don't you just hate the awful lag as 44 kHz uncompressed wav files download to a sim-load of avatars from an already overloaded Linden server? Hate the inability to queue sounds seamlessly? Did your wedding march gets broken up? Here is a darn good reason to switch to Viewer 2. The new media on a prim solves these sound and video problems, forever. Now you can easily play any compressed MP3 file with endless loop control, with music of any length, and even do an entire play list, with no pauses! Drop into a prim, and it will play two clips I have pre-loaded. Plop it into a tree, shrub, furniture, anything! Add cool ambiance music to pose balls, or use it to DJ a club. You can add multiple MP3 URL's into the list, and because it is open source, you can modify it easily to listen on chat channels for URL's, read a list of MP3s from note cards, or use text to speech so your products can greet your visitors, by name!

How to make water you can ripple in Second Life™

Just drop this script into any prim, and click it! Place your prim just under the Second Life water and it will look marvelous!

It works the same in Second Life as it does here.

Just wave your mouse over it.

The Blue Whale Project

Want to make animals move realistically? Don't you just hate it when your $$ expensive prim animator adds 0.2 second delays and the moving parts on your 'whatever' look jerky? Need a good, free, open source prim animator?

Here is a 9-part article including scripts and sculpts on How to make a fish swim in Second Life™.

Whoops! A whale is not a fish...

50 most popular Second Life™ sims

The 50 most popular Second Life™ sims visited by over 90,000 avatars using Ferds' Free Google Free Translators. Updates are coming in about one a second now. Of course, Phaze Demesne is #1, because that's where they get the translator. Now with sim stats for Time Dilation and Frames per Second from my Sim Lag Database.

Posterize your Second Life™

Hey, skip uploading pics and blog posts to multiple sites. Posterous makes it easy to cross post!

Just your Second Life™

Works with all these services, and more!:

Second Life now running twice as many sims per server

A made me look closer at the collected by the and my bot network. The Lindens have doubled the number of sims running on a CPU from the former maximum of 8, to 16 on the same IP address.

Create Animations with QAVIMATOR

Get QAvimator, an easy to use and free Second Life™ compatible animation editor.

Get the and then download .

Here is a Blue Adept and Red Adept example made in that WavinggirlsAV Voom and I used to make a replication of Piers Anthony's book cover art for the "Blue Adept", book two of the "The Apprentice Adept" series of fantasy novels. (FYI: Phaze Demesnes, our sim, is modeled after this series)

Get the animations

And here is another neat tool: Do you need a reversed animation? Like when two avatars hold hands? Trosca wrote a neat program to flip them R-L.


Original Blue Adept cover	Second Life™ reproduction of Piers Anthony Book

Ferd's SIM FINDER Database - Find that laggy Second Life™ neighbor!

Ferd's Second Life will find that neighboring sim (up to 16 of them) that may be using CPU bandwidth and causing lag in your sim. Every simulator is shared on a single motherboard with one or two CPU chips, with multiple central processing cores. There is only one disk drive and one memory bus for all sims, and bursts of traffic and heavy image use on neighboring sims can dramatically effect your sims performance.

Type your region name in and click Go!

This database uses the IP Address and sim name data from over 80,000 translators to make a 1:1 map of each sims IP address and name. This keeps the data fresh for all heavily traveled areas. No personal information is ever stored. I also use a custom bot running on a small PC made from the Metabolt and SliteChat text clients to visit every sim as often as possible.

You can even request a re-scan that takes just a few seconds.

Ferd's Text-to-Wave converter, the easy way

This text to speech tool lets you create Second Life™ compliant 44 kHz audio files of any text that you type in.

You can speak in female or male voices, too. A set of <XML> commands lets you control pitch, speed, and emphasis.
These are extremely useful in Second Life™. I used them in the Ghost of Castle Blue game extensively. Use the LSL script command ("sound name",1.0); to play them in-world.

Create animated movies in Second Life™ the easy way - Convert GIF files

Here are two handy tools to make those moving animated gadgets simple!

You can make animated gif one-prim objects like this in Second Life™ with just a few clicks and simple script. Go ahead, to Second Life™.

Make a fisheye picture of your sim

Hugin is a tool to convert camera snaps from Second Life™ into panoramic pictures like this one of Spaceport Alpha made by Amanda Vanness: (Click to zoom in, and then click again!

Get from Sourceforge.

The best method to make these in Second Life™ is to fly up to 100-200 meters, and go into mouse look mode. Aim your camera at the horizon. Press Ctrl-` to take a picture. Move your camera in a circle, with plenty of overlap, and take pictures all the way around, overlapping each picture with recognizable features in each frame. Continue all the way around in a spiral, overlapping the tops and bottom edges as you go. I used about 60 images for the spaceport. You then upload these into , and use the tools in it to stitch them into a image.

Create scripted objects in Second Life™ the easy way

What is Scratch for Second Life™ (S4SL)?

S4SL is a new easy way to add behaviors and interactivity to your objects in Second Life™. S4SL is graphical programming language that lets you construct programs by snapping together graphical blocks. With S4SL, you can snap together a few blocks to make your SL pet interact with you using chat commands, make your sculpture change size and color, or make your house respond to your presence.

Create Simple Scripts IN SECONDS with Autoscripter

Create a number of common scripts by just clicking a few choices at clicking a few choices at 3greeneggs.com