Teleport Effects HUD

How to add effects, animations and sounds to the HUD. There are two ways.

The simplest way is to hold down the CTRL key and drag and drop your custom items or addons from your inventory on the HUD. The HUD should highlight in red when you move the mouse pointer over it. Unfortunately, this simpler way isn’t always reliable.

The more elaborate way is to use the Second Life’s building tools to edit the HUD contents:

1. Press Ctrl+3 to open the Building window in ‘Edit‘ mode.
2. Right-click on your HUD and choose ‘Drop‘.
3. The HUD should appear in front of your avatar, however it’s small and semi-transparent. To make it easier to spot it, you can press Ctrl+Alt+T to see invisible objects highlighted with a red halo.
4. If you didn’t skip the first step, your HUD should already be your current selection. Otherwise, left-click on it to select it.
5. If you see a ‘More >>‘ button on the building window, click on it to expand it and show the detailed options.
6. There are various tabs, click on the ‘Contents‘ one. Here you’ll see a list of items contained in the Teleport Effects HUD.
7. You can drag and drop sounds, animations and effects in the ‘Contents‘ panel of the building window to add them to the HUD.
8. When you are done, click on the ‘Build‘ button on the bottom of your screen (or close the Building window) to leave the building tools.
9. Right-click on your hud and choose ‘Take‘ to get it back into your inventory, then ‘Wear‘ it.

Now, you know how to add items to your HUD. But how do you create them?

How to…

…Upload a sound. Adding sounds to SecondLife is easy, but there are a few stumbling blocks that you should be aware of. Your sound must be in 16-bit, 44.1KHz, .WAV format and it can’t be more than 10 seconds long.

My recommendation is to use WinAMP: you can convert any file to .WAV format by switch the output plugin.

Once you have your .WAV file, select Upload Sound from the File menu in Second Life, pay the upload tax (L$10) and you’ll find your sound in the Sounds folder of your inventory in a couple of seconds.
…Create an animation. The expensive, professional way to make animations for SecondLife is Poser. It’s what you want when you need to make high quality dances and couple animations.

However, there are alternatives for the simpler kind of animations that you probably want to make for my HUD. You can use a free, open source and much simpler tool meant specifically for SL: Qavimator.

In Second Life, you can upload animations using the Upload Animation command from the File menu.
…Create an effect. Effects are just scripted objects that the HUD “rezzes” in world when you activate the summon/vanish sequence manually or automatically by teleporting.

TIP: if you are building your own effects and they are wrongly oriented when put them in the HUD, make sure that the root primitive of your effects isn’t rotated (i.e. check that the rotation fields in the Object tab of the Building window are all set to 0).

The scripts inside the effect will receive a special value as their start parameter (accessible thru llGetStartParameter or thru the on_rez event):

• the value will be 0 (zero) when the effect is “rezzed” manually by the user (e.g. to edit and customize it);
• the value will be positive when it’s “rezzed” as part of a summon sequence.
• the value will be negative on vanish.

The effect is responsible for its own cleanup, the script should set the object on temp-on-rez and start a timer to call llDie after 10 seconds.

There are two sample scripts attached to the README notecard, it is my intention to eventually polish them up and create a library of sample scripts (effects base scripts, particles, rotations, etc.) on this site.