User:Lum Pfohl/SL Trivia

SL Trivia

These are things I've noticed about SL over the course of a year. In no particular order at this time:

Avatar and UI

Pressing the SPACE BAR while you move of fly will make you go slow. A fun thing to do is to fly up, press and hold the SPACE BAR and disable flight (stop flying). You will fall and flail in slow motion until you touch down, light as a feather.
Typing /0 followed by your message text will suppress the Typing Anim. In addition to the DEBUG SETTING PlayTypingAnim, entering /0 before each message in group chat will signal SL to send your message to "Channel 0" - which just happens to be group chat - but you won't do the typing animation or have the associated clicking sound.
There is an SL glitch with the CROUCH button. Pressing and holding the CROUCH button (either PGDN or C) and tapping the FORWARD (UP ARROW or W) once will cause your avatar to "wig out." Keep the CROUCH button pressed for the entire period, and you will see your avatar move back and forth wildly until you eventually move off-sim. When you do, your hair attachment will come off!!! ahahahaha!
Linden Avatars do not show up on your Radar HUDs. Radar HUDs (and other avatar-sensing scripts) rely on the llSensor() and llSensorRepeat() functions. Linden personnel appear to be hidden from these functions, and thus would not be visible on any Second Life radar scripts. Lindens do appear on the mini-map. Because many of them hover over the land, they appear as green "T" symbols and can be discovered that way. I have to validate my claim, but so far it's proven true.
It is possible to hide your name tag from others. By cleverly placing an invisi-prim over your head, the Avatar Name Tag can be obscured from view on everyone's Client Viewers, making you "nameless."

Inventory

You cannot transfer more than 42 individual inventory items to another user at once. To transfer more than this amount, you must either break up the transfers into two or more chunks (like a folder of 80 items can be broken in to two folders of 40 each), or stuff the items into an object and transfer that one object.
You can open more than one Inventory window. Open your INVENTORY. In the Inventory Window is a menu option called FILE. Click FILE -> NEW WINDOW and a second Inventory Window will open. You can now perform independent functions on each window - drag/copy from one window to another. Great tip for managing your cluttered inventory!

Prims and Objects

You cannot enable physics for an object of more than 32 prims. There is much debate on whether this number is 32 or 31. I believe it's 32. ONE of those 32 will be a prim on which the avatar sits. Some contend that the AVATAR itself will be considered 1 prim in trying to enable physics. I will have to conduct a test for this...
Rendition of Flexible Prims is a client side only function. That is, a flexible prim such as a skirt - is rendered completely on the Client Viewer. Each person's viewer can have a totally separate experience when viewing flexible prims, depending on their PC's load and lag conditions. Of course, having 10 flexible prims and having 1000 flexible prims will give different performance (which might be perceived as lag,) but the fact is that your PC is bogging down, not Second Life.
A Flexible Prim causes less server load than a Regular Prim. When a object's "Set Flexible Path" setting is enabled, the object becomes Phantom (that is, you can pass through it without collision). Because the server doesn't have to calculate object and agent collisions with these objects any longer, the computational loads on the server is actually alleviated.
A Particle Effect is a client side only function. Similar to the argument for flexible prims, rendition of the particles is purely a Client Viewer task. Again, everyone will see different particle effects, depending on the max number of particles they are set to see, how many particles are in their field of view currently, and whether they have particle rendering turned off.
A Particle Effect is a Property of an Prim. This may sound like "duh," but people just don't understand. A particle effect, is just like any other object property (size, color, shape, hollow, twist, etc.) The only difference is that the particle effect property is only accessible by a script - it can only be set, not read. Once set with the llParticleSystem() statement in LSL, retains that property regardless of whether a script is there or not. If a particle effect is set to "die out," over time - then it will do so - but the properies are still set. Conversely, if a particle has an undefined lifetime, the only way to "stop it," is to pass null parameters to the llParticleSystem() function via LSL.
A Hover Text is a Property of an Prim. Like particles, once set - it doesn't go away when the script that set it is deleted. It must be "set" to an empty string using LSL's llSetText() function.

Object Linking

When objects are linked, the PHANTOM and TEMPORARY properties of the ROOT PRIM are copied to the entire object's prims. Here is a test: Create 4 boxes. Make one of the prims a PHANTOM object. Link all 4 boxes, with the PHANTOM box as your root prim. Your resultant object is completely phantom. Unlinking the object reveals that all 4 prims are now PHANTOM as well. Watch out when you link a very expensive no-copy no-transfer HOUSE with a TEMPORARY box as your root prim. Your house will disappear without a trace and that would be bad. :(
Objects which span more than 32 meters (from center to center of the extreme prims) cannot be linked. I'm sure there is some sort of workaround for this - like sub-linking objects such that their geometric centers are no more than 32 meters... Need to test more around this claim.

Land and Sims

There are 16 Help Islands. Ten of them are accessible by new residents. Help Islands 11 - 16, I have no idea what they're for.
There are 2 Help Island Publics. Help Island Public2 is situated immediately West of Help Island Public, and serves as an overflow site for HIP. It runs on a newer, faster hardware. However, when Help Island Public crashes (as it often does), residents trying to teleport there do not get rerouted to HIP2. Instead, they'll simply be told the region is not available. As such, HIP2 remains relatively unpopulated.
The two HIPs are not identical. The freebie store's vendors are configured differently. Also, if you view two two HIP's on the mini-map - you'll see a large black box over the sandbox in HIP2 that does not appear on HIP. There is also a black box over the freebie store in HIP that does not appear on HIP2.
There are sims which show up as icons in the MAP and www.slurl.com. When viewing the map, there are sims with recognizable features. The Star of David, Map of Texas, the words, Please Fix SL or Doctor WHO. It is actually amazing to think of of how this technology works. There are thousands upon thousands of sims. Each sim's object location (and even colors) are rendered quite accurately in the MAP and www.slurl.com sites. It's also great fun to browse the world map.