Many of the Dark SF and Steampunk texture sets are now available on the Kitely Marketplace. They can be bought from there and have permissions set so that they can be exported a selection of other OpenSim-compatible virtual worlds (the list of them can be seen from the shopping-cart on the Kitely Marketplace).
You’ll find the Templar Creations store on the Kitely website.
This new texture set is an extension to the Dark SF Textures Set 6, and adds 35 new panel textures, suitable for both interiors and exteriors, all at 512 x 512.
Here are a some previews, but check out the gallery page to see all the textures from the set.
The set is available both in Second Life and Inworldz.
Second Life
Marketplace Website: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Dark-SF-Textures-Set-6/6561133
Templar Creations Main In-world Store
Inworldz
Templar Creations Main In-world Store: Steampunk Isle, 109/206/22
Not one, but two new textures sets this time, as extensions to the existing SF textures sets.
Dark SF Set 5 is a darker and slightly cleaner set that is partly a variant of the textures from Set 4. There are 45 textures in all, mostly at 512×512 in size.
Light SF Set 1 is a collection of relatively ‘clean’ science-fiction textures, for a more Star Trek or 2001 look to your builds. In part they are inspired by the Classic Traveller role-playing game, and some of them include a red bar motif that is intended to be reminiscent of the red bar from the Traveller rule books. There are 44 textures in all, mostly at 512×512 in size.
Both texture sets have stylistic similarities, with the Dark SF intended mainly for exteriors, and the Light SF set for matching interiors.
Here are previews of both sets, but check out the Dark SF and Light SF gallery pages to see the complete sets.
The sets are available both in Second Life and Inworldz.
Second Life
Marketplace Website
Templar Creations Main In-world Store
Inworldz
InBiz Website
Templar Creations Main In-world Store: Eole, 99/253/1200
After the previous introduction to prim lights, let’s look at some technical (but not too technical!) background, and a few things about the lighting system which are not immediately obvious:
The graphics system which Second Life uses (OpenGL if you are interested) only allows 6 lights to be visible at any time. If a new light becomes visible, one of the other lights will be disabled, so you should avoid having too many lights too close together.
(As an aside, this is one of the reasons why some people complain about facelights, and especially about facelights which make use of multiple lights — every one of those lights uses up one of the available lights.)
A light has no visible appearance. When you turn a prim into a light by ticking the ‘Light’ checkbox on the Features tab, the prim itself doesn’t change in any other way, it simply has an invisible light-source attached to it. This light source will move with the prim, but is otherwise completely unaffected by anything that you do to the prim, apart from changes to the actual light parameters.
This means that the size and the shape of the prim have absolutely no effect on the light, because the light source is always a single point at the centre of the prim. This might not be what you expect. For example, if you turn on light for a prim cube, then stretch the prim out into a long rectangle, you won’t get an elongated light-source, you will still get a sphere of light originating at the centre of the prim (well … not exactly a sphere — see this previous post if you want to know more about that).
The light is not blocked by prims. Ok, it isn’t quite as simple as that…
Lights won’t illumine prim faces which are facing away from the light-source. This sometimes makes it look as if the light is blocked by prims. Suppose there is a wall in-between you and the light source. You won’t see any light on your side of the wall, because it is facing away from the light, and it looks as if the wall is blocking the light. However, if the light is low enough, you will see light on the ground outside the wall.
This is easier to show than explain, so here is an example. The small cube on the right-hand side of the wall is the light-source. You can see that it lights up the floor on both sides of the wall, but doesn’t light up the side of the wall which faces away from it (the wall is standing directly on the floor):
Another effect of this is that the prim itself is not illumined, because all the visible sides of the prim are facing away from the light. To make it actually look like a light-source you can turn on full-bright for it, and perhaps apply a small amount of glow (a setting of 0.02 is usually sufficient).
Finally, prim lights don’t cast shadows (except as an experimental feature in some third party viewers). If you want to provide a shadow effect, the usual way to do this is by texturing the surface that you want the shadow to appear on, or by creating a thin ‘shadow’ prim with a semi-transparent shadow texture.
If you create gadgets or HUDs, it’s always useful to have an easy way of creating good-looking buttons for them. A quick search on Google for ‘button generators’ will produce a host of online generators — fill in (or select) some options, and a button will be created for you to download.
Unfortunately, (and perhaps unsurprisingly), many of them don’t work very well, or produce HTML+CSS buttons (very useful for websites, but not so useful for Second Life).
I’ve been looking through them, trying to find something decent and useable, and Cool Text seems the best of the ones that appear in the first few pages. The only catch seems to be that it only produces images in GIF format, so you might need to convert them before uploading them into Second Life:
Click to visit the Cool Text site
However, the best one that I know of is a site which doesn’t appear in the top pages of Google at all:
Click to visit Da Button Factory site
This let’s you customise your button in a myriad of ways, and produces some very good results. It’s well worth a look.
