A question from a friend who has been in SL some months reminded me how many little things are hidden away in the menues along the top of your screen. one of these is very useful when you seem to have invisible prims around, or have lost a pose ball because you made it transparent.

Go to the top of your screen, choose view, and then choose highlight transparent in the drop down list. This makes all transparent prims show up blood red, and allows you to select items like pose balls which you may have thought were lost forever.

The downside is that everyone’s transparent attachments turn up red, sometimes multiple penises in various states of erection, which gives an odd appearance. So I’d advise you to switch it off if you don’t want to be looking at everyone in a new way.

I will never forget the day I learned to use highligh transparent. I was working on a team build and was taught how to switch on highlight transparent, as we were using transparent prims to help people avoid falling off the build. We actually used remarkably few transparent textures in that build though, and so when I moved around for the rest of the day, I forgot I had highlight transparent turned on.  I teleported home, at that time to Dore, and thought I had been the subject of some sort of griefing attack. My particle fire jars next to the door had turned blood red… the windows were red… the trees and plants were red. I IMd a friend to come quick, believing I had been the subject of a virtual paintball attack, puzzled as to how they could have done it. Of course, everyone laughed like a drain when I realised that I had highlight transparent turned on, and turning it off set everything back to normal.

I have found this trick particularly useful if you want to move poseballs around while seated on them… highlight transparent enables you to click on the poseball and edit and reposition it, even though transparent while being sat upon.

Hope it helps!

And I know that it’s a skill that some have gone through the painstaking documentation(s) to learn. Fortunately for the rest of us noob, we don’t have to do that anymore due to some of the basics being covered by others in nice easy formats. SlTutorials provides a nice one-stop shop to finding your basic design and development fundamentals. Not everything is in video format, but there are a couple of prim basics and advanced tutorials that are done and compiled in flash based videos (aka YouTube).

While the development bug hasn’t bit me yet, this definitely peaks my own interests lot more due to the ease of finding information in one source instead of parading myself all over the Internet to find it.

Have you been curious enough to learn, but haven’t had the inkling of where to begin? Perhaps here’s your chance.

On Thursday I was supposed to have a telephone interview with Rich “Tisirin” Weil, Community Relations Director for Kaneva, but I had several conflicts come up and couldn’t participate. I had sent Rich a few questions to give him some idea on what direction I wished to take the interview, and he kindly emailed me answers to those questions along with the suggestion we have that phone interview next week. Rich I appreciate your working with me.

I had suggested to Rich, that Kaneva’s changing the economy where credits became reward credits, which could only be used for personal items (because the items bought with the reward credits can not be sold, traded, or given away) had hurt the creative innovators inside the World of Kaneva to the point where those innovators were leaving.

We absolutely want to do whatever we can to facilitate innovation, creativity and fun in Kaneva.

As we continue to develop the Kaneva service, and add new features for our members, we have had to temporarily tweak or alter some systems. The Rewards / Credits changes are a good example of that. Because we plan to sell Credits to users to enable them to buy things in the Virtual World, we needed to make sure that there weren’t any holes in that system where people could just get unlimited Credits for free (by creating multiple accounts, for example). However, we also wanted to be able to give new members some starting money. The result of those two needs was the Rewards system, — an alternative currency in Kaneva that can be used in a similar but limited way as
Credits, but also gives our members starting money and gives us the ability to safely hand out “free” money for various reasons.

The transfer of built-up homes and spaces in Kaneva is actually a different matter. We have temporarily disabled this because of some issues that came up around moderator / owner privileges that were potentially exploitable. We’re reworking that and will have a new system of owner / moderator privileges and home/hangout transfers in at a future date.

When we roll out the Credit Purchase system, then members will see fewer restrictions on items purchased with Credits (as opposed to Rewards). The Credits / Rewards system, once fully implemented, will help encourage all those things and give Kaneva and our members maximum flexibility.

What are the plans to allow user created content in Kaneva? Will in world tools be available or will users have to use outside programs? Any idea of a time frame for allowing user created content?

We’re not ready to talk about our plans in this area at this time. But, again, we recognize that our members can be very innovative and creative. We want to make sure we enable, encourage and reward that.

Now there is no control over texturing items in Kaneva…. Unable to determine the repeats, alignments of the textures etc. Will that be something for the future?

I’m not sure I understand the question here. Members can still texture items in Kaneva as they always could. Witness the Pizza Restaurant hangout, for example. It’s a marvel of texturing creativity.

O.K. Rich, let me see if I can get you to understand with a couple examples. This is a texture of Spanish Tile with one repeat per face horizontal and also one repeat per face vertically.

These faces are the same size and this is that same Spanish Tile texture — only this time it has 5 repeats per face horizontally and it also has 5 repeats per face vertically. Starting to see what I was trying to ask you?

Again this is the exact same Spanish Tile texture on the same size face, only this time I have there repeats per face set at 0.023 horizontally and 9.642 vertically with a rotation of the texture at 37 degrees. Again these faces are the same size and in the same alignment orientation to the virtual world. This thumbnails are linked to larger images.

One of the wonderful things about virtual worlds is they can become so “real” when there is a level that them mind can fill cogitative gaps during virtual immersion. The level of immersion into the 3-D environment of Kaneva seems to be lacking …. One reason is the inability to control your view … will there be attention given. to that aspect?

We are constantly working to improve all aspects of the Kaneva experience, so improving immersion and perspective are both things that are on our list. We haven’t received a lot of comments on the camera system thus far, but I’d be very interested to hear what our members had to say on the subject.

There are many complaints about not being able to create folders to hold textures, items, etc. I mean when you upload a 1000 textures to build with…. Scrolling through them all is a pain in the ass.

Your wish is granted! Our new media library upgrade allows our members to categorize all their media on their profile page, including textures/patterns, and it’s live now!

Here is a comment from one of our readers… Give me your thoughts about her comment.

I am pretty sure I am the one you are talking about in Kaneva with the Real Estate office and the Cemetery. I have actually pretty much left Second Life at a chance to be in on the beginning of what I felt like would be a good opportunity. I joined Kaneva on March 7th and now 3 months later it feels like we took 2 steps backwards.

I saw one great update and that was with them fixing the alignment problems, I dont know what it was but THANK YOU!

We still all look alike, we still have the same clothes, we were given a plant but that was taken away, then we were given a new light but that turned out to be the plant. LOL
A few small bugs were fixed but that wasnt something we could have functioned without.
The profile pages have been loading extremely slow the last few days and I noticed today that each page was loading around 200 invisible gifs…. hmmmm food for thought.

I have a very little money and it is impossible to “earn” any money in Kaneva right now….
I have people still sending request for communities to be built but without the ability to even transfer the community to them when finished, I cant even build them one for free!

Rich seems to avoid the question ReneeM asks in her quote with his response:

We have already implemented an avatar art change that gives our members more choices in differentiating their avatars. As I addressed above, we are aware of the issues around transferring Hangouts, so we’re taking a look at that system overall. We do want our members to be able to build and transfer Hangouts, as well as have a robust Owner/Moderator system.

I attended a class at Teazers Isle on how to do a dr. seuss type of hat that using a flex prim. The hat sways when I walk around and it looks quite funny. That was the first object I made with flex prims but wanted to create something by myself and play with the settings a bit.

So I figured out how to make a scarf which moves with the wind and when I move around. I don’t think it looks that great or sways correctly but for my first clothing type thing it’s ok for me. I also tried using the light feature on my scarf so I can see everything around me when it turns dark. The lighting is very easy to understand. Intensity for how bright the light will be. Pick a color for the light to show and the radius it will expand to. I am not too sure what the fallout option means so if someone can explain them or any of the options in the flex it would be very helpful! One thing I noticed is when I sit down my flexible scarf wants to go up sometimes. I’ll have to try some stuff to figure why it does that later.

I found a video that Tao Takashi did for his blog/vlog. Episode 2 shows off the flexible prims and lights in the preview grid before the update was done. He also has a new video of how the lights look inside the main grid after the update at his main page. ]]> http://www.vtoreality.com/2006/flexible-prims-and-lights/176/feed/ 0