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Inventory Management: Textures (a tutorial for using tx Oh’s YATO-BF)

Inventory Management: Textures (a tutorial for using tx Oh’s YATO-BF)

If you’ve ever built anything in Second Life, then chances are that your inventory is heaving with textures. Once you start obtaining textures in SL it can lead your inventory to spiral rapidly out of control. You start with a few freebies from the NCI Freebie Wall packs, and before you know it you’ve spent thousands at some of the big texture stores in-world.

Thing is, you need to be able to access those textures quickly the next time you’re building something, and it helps if you can see them displayed, rather than clicking one texture after another in your inventory and waiting for them to load. But if you have lots of textures sitting in your inventory so you can access them easily, then you’ll never get that inventory size down.

So what can you do about it?

Well, naturally, the answer is some form of texture organiser, and you’ll find a whole bunch of them on SL Marketplace, from free to not-so-free. Some have a gazillion bells and whistles and some are very simple. In this post I’m going to give you a quick guide to using a dollarbie texture organiser that comes with a HUD (most of the cheapies and freebies don’t include a HUD version, but this one does) – tx Oh’s YATO-BF (aka: Yet Another Texture Organiser- But Free!)

Hop behind the cut!

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Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Sunday

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Sunday

Since I woke up super-early today (and it’s a glorious day, so I’m feeling rather chipper) you’re getting your Sunday task on what’s probably still Saturday night for you :p And, since it’s a weekend many of us will have a bit more time free, so there’s an extra task for those that have a lot of time to dedicate to their inventory today.

For those with a lot of time to spare:
– Open up your Body Parts folder and make several new folders inside it, each with an exclamation mark and a space before the folder name (to push it to the top of the list). Make these folders for: Eyes, Hair, Shapes, Skins. If you feel they also belong in here you might want folders for prim hands and feet, hairbase tattoos, and eyebrow shapers, as well as physics layers (if you use them).

– Open up a second inventory window and begin to sort relevant folders into your new body parts folders. Run quick searches (‘eyes’, ‘skin’, etc) to catch the bulk of items first, then start to look for stragglers that you missed. This may seem like a big task, but you’ll be surprised how well you know your inventory (after all, you scroll through it a lot, muttering as you look for something, right?) and you’ll probably catch most items within half an hour or so.

– Sort each new body parts folder as it makes sense to you. This could be by store name, by colour (hair, eyes, and maybe even skins), or by type (hairstyles, shapes, skins, etc). Then sort and file the contents of at least one folder into those sub-folders.

For those with a bit of time to spare:
– Create the folders, as above, and run the same searches to grab as much as you can and stuff it into the relevant folder, but don’t worry overmuch for now about the stragglers. However, if – when you’re logged in at a later date and looking for something – you come across a straggler that belongs in the new folders, put it in there when you see it. Make that a new habit!

For those with less time:
– Create the folders, as above, and do as many of the searches as you can. Try to keep doing this, little and often, whenever you log in. Even five minutes now and then will have everything sorted within a week!

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Saturday

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Saturday

Here’s your Saturday de-cluttering task!

Saturday

For those with a bit of time to spare:
– Search for ‘pose’, ‘posing’, and ‘adjustment’ and get rid of all those extraneous pose stands cluttering up your inventory. Then, use my tutorial to make a simple one-prim, one-script Pose HUD to use in future. And keep on top of deleting all those pose stands! Make it something you do before logging off each day: check your Recent Items tab, look in every folder, and get rid of the pose stands!

For those with less time:
– Do the search listed above and ditch the pose stands. Leave the Pose HUD for another time, but remember to keep on top of deleting pose stands!

And, because I’ll never ask you to do something I won’t do myself, here’s the result of yesterday’s task: the 25 oldest objects in Mar’s inventory:

That little lot contains a surprisingly large amount of salvagable items. In order of purchase, they run from the bottom row, on the left (bought at Free Dove on the very first day Mar rezzed). That skirt and sweater set has stood the test of time and still looks great, as does the “70s Chick” outfit near the right, and all the items by S.Y.D and all-but-one of the Layniewear dresses. The camo capris in the “freebie 0L$ yellow box on the middle row are perfectly wearable, as is the red cardigan by Deka. The full-perm boxes in the centre of the middle row had to go, though ;)

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Friday

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Friday

I’ve been doing these occasionally on Twitter, but it seemed like a fun thing to start on the blog, too: little daily prompts to do a small bit of inventory-sorting. Think of it like cleaning your virtual clutter, Flylady-style!

I’m going to create a schedule of ‘little and often’ things to do each day. While it’s still in the planning stage it’ll just be one thing per day, but I hope to expand it so that there are options for everyone, no matter the state of their inventory.

So we begin with today, which is Friday (at least, for most of the world; those of you in Australia and the like get a free pass!)

Friday

For those with a bit of time to spare:
– Rez the 25 oldest items in your Objects folder and unpack them. Take a good look at them. If it’s clothing, try it on to see what it’s like. Some of it may be salvageble (a great top with an iffy pair of pants; you can keep the top!) and some of it may be instantly trashable. File what you want to keep (don’t just let it sit in the unpacked folder; put it somewhere!) and ditch the stuff you don’t want. If it has sentimental value or you might want it in future, rez out a prim into which you’re going to put things you want to keep, and use that as an archive box.

For those with less time:
– Rez the five oldest items in your Objects folder and treat as above.

PSA: Accessing your inventory on Second Life’s Viewer 2

PSA: Accessing your inventory on Second Life’s Viewer 2

UPDATE: Since Viewer 2 is now no longer available, Basic Mode is no longer an issue (unless you’re using a very old viewer install, in which case it’s time to update!)

OK, peeps. I’m seeing a lot of search terms on the blog from people who are completely bamboozled as to where their inventory is on the new Viewer 2 for Second Life.

This is just a handful of the search terms I’m seeing:

– viewer 2 how do i look at inventory?
– access inventory sl viewer 2
– new viewer 2 no inventory
– how to go to inventory in sl
– opening inventory in viewer 2 sl
– second life 2 new inventory
– where is inventory in viewer 2
– sl new viewer inventory
– viewer 2 inventory
– inventory in viewer 2
– access inventory in sl viewer 2?
– inventory viewer 2
– inventory in sl
– viewer 2 inventory window
– access inventory with second life viewer 2
– sl viewer 2 no inventory

OK, I’m going to shout a bit here, in the hope of being heard. Non-Linden peeps might want to cover their ears…

LINDEN LAB, YOU HAVE A BIG PROBLEM HERE! BASIC MODE IS CONFUSING RESIDENTS!

Phew. Okay, now that’s over, here’s what’s happened and why you can’t access your inventory in the new Viewer 2. This new viewer starts you off in a mode called BASIC, by default. You have to change this, manually, in order to get to ADVANCED, which is where you can access your inventory.

Fire up your viewer and look near the bottom, where you log in. You’ll see this:

This shows you are in BASIC mode. Basic mode is pretty much nothing more than a glorified, visual chatroom. You are very limited in what you can do, and you cannot access your inventory. What you need to do is switch to ADVANCED mode. You do this by clicking that little arrow beside ‘Basic’ and selecting ‘Advanced’ from the dropdown menu, like this:

Now you have to re-start your viewer, so close it down and fire it up again. Check that little button. If it still says ‘Advanced’ then you’re good to go. You can log in and be able to access both inventory and all program preferences.

I realise that this is something of a reiteration of my post The Absolute Basics – Beginners – Preferences of the other day, but this is OLDER residents being confused, not just newbies! Older residents probably won’t even think to check a blog post that is aimed primarily at newbies, hence I’ve re-stated this section of that post on its own, here.

An open letter to Linden Lab

You really need to make things like this more clear, LL. We’re not just talking about newbies having problems; older residents are being completely confused by this new default Basic Mode – especially since it’s enabled by default and many people on updating their viewer would expect it to work as closely as possible to their old viewer. A change as big as this one MUST be highlighted visibly in the viewer!

For me to receive so many search terms for the same thing, in just a few weeks… well, I’ve been blogging for over three years and helping new and old alike for the same time, and I have never seen so many search terms for one thing. You clearly have a BIG problem here, and it needs to be addressed swiftly. It shouldn’t be up to bloggers like me to help newbies understand a big change you’ve made to your viewer, when you have the ability to highlight that change right there in the viewer so that they can check it. Also, not everybody reads blogs and forums – official or not – so there are a lot of people in the dark over this.

Also, calling it ‘Advanced Mode’ is a BAD idea. ‘Advanced’ makes people think it’s difficult, that maybe they need to know techy or dev. stuff in order to access it. By calling it ‘Advanced’ you could be scaring off some people who will never venture beyond Basic to find out the world’s true potential. Why didn’t you call the two modes ‘Beginner’ and ‘Experienced’, or even ‘Basic World’ and ‘Full World’?

Regards,

Mar

he Absolute Basics: Beginners – Preferences

Quick tip: Cataloguing skins

Quick tip: Cataloguing skins

Ladies, do you ever find yourselves trying on skin after skin in the same designer’s line, because you can’t remember which one had that lovely greenish-blue eye makeup? Sometimes it can take several minutes for each skin to load, and then it rebakes, and you’re sitting there for simply ages, while you try to find that one makeup you need right now!

Here’s a quick tip to help you out.

Hop behind the cut!

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Inventory: Hair we go…

Inventory: Hair we go…

Okay. I’ll be honest with you. This is the inventory-management post that I’ve procrastinated over the most, and I think you know why. Hair is one of those inventory things that we all accumulate at a frightening rate, and usually in such massive fatpacks that it’s easy to add thousands of items to your inventory in a single freebie hair spree. And then just the thought of sorting it all… well…

You’re with me on that, right? I hope so, because this post has now – finally! – gone into my draft post queue so that I can work on it. By the time you eventually read it, it will probably have been sitting there for a month or two while I polish it (or I may have been brave and just bitten the bullet in one go).

So anyway! Onward! Today we’re going to delve into the horrifying, tangled miasma of our hair folders.

Bear with me. Out of necessity this post will contain a lot of text, but I’ll try to put enough images in that your eyes won’t glaze over ;)

Hop behind the cut!

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