Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Decripple your build tools

I recommend skimming through Tentacolor if you're a huge geek, there are some amazingly awesome things in there.

One of which is how to decripple your build tools.

Disclaimer: the TOS is sort of murky on the legality of this maybe? I don't think that's what they intended with that clause and it's more towards don't copybot shit, but yeah, I feel I need to give the disclaimer. But hey, it's all in xml files, so it's EASY to edit, if they didn't want us doing it, there are other ways they could have approached that instead. Basically, read Jacek's disclaimer, because I can't be arsed to write a decent one.

Go to skins\default\xui\en-us and open up floater_tools.xml with a regular vanilla text editor (unless you like Dazzle Jazz Hands, in which case you want skins\silver\xui\en-us. I avoid it like the plague, so if things are done differently, you'll have to figure that out yourself). Head down to Position (meters), and in the next 3 declarations of code, change decimal_digits="3" to decimal_digits="5" (in my testing, 5 is the max amount SL keeps track of, you just get wiggly numbers you can't do anything with if you go higher). label="X" is doing it for the x, "Y" for y, "Z" for z, of course. Things are in the same order as the actual Build menu in here.

Do the same for Size (meters)! You can up Rotation as well, but 5's probably excessive for use there. You can also play around with the decimals in the rest of the declarations, as sometimes you can get more out of it (sometimes you can't).

The other SUPER DUPER AWESOME thing to do is fix your texture tab (which is talked about in this entry, this is all Jacek's smarts here). Transparency is capped in the editor...because the Lindens think we're idiots? I don't know. There's no reason not to make that puppy 100, so you can do full transparency in one click WITHOUT resorting to another texture.

Go to Transparency %, and bump max_val="90" to max_val="100"

I also up both the Repeats Per Face, max_val="100" to more than 100 too, because it's useful for Planar mapping (normal people have no need of this, but I've passed 100 repeats more than once. I haven't had to bump past 500...yet).

Unfortunately EVERY SINGLE TIME you have to update a viewer you have to go through this process again, which generally leads to me swearing, making due for a brief period, and then telling people I'm logging off to make my tools not awful (because you get used to them being awesome, and going back....sucks).

4 comments:

Aisuru Rieko said...

I was going to say thanks on Plurk but Plurk is being a total hoar. this is very useful!

Ben Vanguard said...

Thank you so much, savvy Ally!!!!!

Kii Lilliehook said...

Great as always, Alle.
Another thing I found usefull is to reduce the increment for the horizontal and vertical texture offset, so I can adjust textures with my mouse weel. I was missing that for so long!

Subversive Writer said...

I find using git to track the changes makes the whole process a "set it and forget it" sort of deal. I've got an "import.sh" which:
- scans my "tweaks" directory for any files
- overwrites those files with the official releases
- symlinks the (original) official releases to the "tweak" files.

Whenever there's a new release, I just:
git co linden
./import.sh
git add ...
git commit -m version.number
git co master
git merge linden #(which has yet to have a conflict)

And of course, technically the checkout/add/commit process could be part of the script too... I suppose it all seems convoluted, but the point is you don't "need to do the whole thing again every time there's a release"