Can someone help me find a few things

We are new here and are having real problems finding the things we want. I know with all the fantastic things available almost anything you can think of is here but using the search rarely finds what your looking for, it took days to find a TV.


What im looking for now is a "lawn" for my property. One that will conform to the land, not flat grids that you can texture with grass. Also I am having a real problem finding a Pet dragon that is AI like the wolves, kittens, and leopard we already have. One that can be set to roam and comes when you call.

Any help on stores where these two items can be found would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You, Harley

the only way to apply a lawn to the contour of the land is to have terrain permissions and it has to be on a private estate, also this would change the whole sim. you cannot lay a lawn to follow the ups and downs 'bumps' in the land, that is why you see so many flat lawns. you could get a desired effect using sculpties, but people don't because on parts it would either look like your walking 2 meters above it (bounding path) or if phantom 2 meters below it.

Hi Lord,

I'm not sure about pet dragons as you describe....but I know Grendels Children has all sorts of dragon stuff. I bought two baby shoulder dragons from them....very cute......hover above your shoulder as you wander about.

As for a lawn.....there really isn't anything like you describe.....you have to terraform the land (if you own it, you can adjust the land itself to be hilly or flat or whatever you like) Probably the only other way you could create a lawn to go over land that you can't terraform.....would be to use giant textured sculpty prims made to look like grassy hills. But...sculpty prims are tricky because you cannot walk on them (you hover a few meters above)
If you are new....your best bet is to learn all you can......if you're renting, ask your landlord if the land can be adjusted a bit. If you're in the sky and you want to create a lawn......you might want to look around different garden centers for ideas and tricks to maing a skybox area look more realistic. One great thing about SL....there's almost always a way to achieve what you want~!!!

Thanks, Guess thats why I never see to many lawns,, I was going to raise the land to make it more green, but im on Mainland so can only go +4 meters.

Thank you Milla,

I was at Grendels already, it is a great place. Not quite the type I am looking for though. She may need to settle for a big cat or wolf. Our house already sounds like a zoo. Have two kittens, a wolf, a bear, a leopard and humming birds, all making noise.

What about particle grass?

yes particle grass can look better, but to do so you need to lay out a few prims so that the heights are not constant, also the tops are level with the ground not at an angle (also dependent on the texture), unless you adjust the script, if you can.

making it look good requires some skill.

Rika's idea is a good one...you can get a temp rezzer that will create a field of wildflowers around itself. Be aware that these things WILL add to viewer-side lag. The bigger your field of flowers, the more lag you'll encounter.

The best AI pets I've seen are the dogs at Virtual Kennel Club. No dragons there, but you could suggest the idea to the creator.

As far as finding things in general:

- If I know the name of a place, I'll try Search/Places first. If that's empty, I'll try Search/All. I will also do this if I can think of some keywords that won't be so generic that five hundred results will come up.

- If I'm looking for products of a generic type, I'll do a search in the XStreet Marketplace website, http://www.xstreetsl.com. I'll either buy the product direct from there, or if the maker has provided a SLURL location, teleport to see it in world. Onrez.com also has a web marketplace for SL stuff. (Note: Some of the best SL merchants don't advertise on Xstreet or OnRez, so you may STILL have to do some flitting about in world or asking after things by old fashioned word of mouth. This forum is a pretty good place to do that.)

Back to landscaping: A flat, grass-textured prim really makes a nice, low-lag lawn, and is easy to dress up with planting beds, walkways, and trees. Sloping land is a great starting point to terraform a water feature such as a falls or stream.

Ummm... errr... NOT a temp rezzer. Particles are not objects, the sim doesn't know where they are. That's quite an important difference. If you don't see the particles, there's nothing to render, and there is no FPS drop. If someone would temp rez a whole field of prim grass, that is, create prim grass objects with the 'temporary' flag on, and generate new ones every time they expire, that would make the whole sim slow down for everyone regardless of whether they see the grass or not.

The trouble with land textures is that they have to tile like anything else, so the land doesn't look varied, like real land. If you're willing to live with a less "groomed" look, you can get a lovely unpatterned effect with sculptie landscaping components for forest floors that have begun appearing here and there. They have a wavy surface textured like a forest floor, or leaves, or mulch, and you if you partially submerge them in lumpy land you get a lovely variegated forest floor look. There are "paths" done the same way, that appear to come and go as a real forest path does. Of course, you cannot actually walk on the sculptie surface, so they must be kept close to the real land surface.

I've seen them at Botanicals, I believe, and at the garden strore near Second Wildlife ... let me know if you want LMs, and I'll send when I login.
.

a search in Xstreet brought this:

https://www.xstreetsl.com//modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=637584

Hello,
for finding nice little avatars try this location:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Extrovirtual/50/119/32

Wol,
SL Guided Tours

Well, hold on one second. True, particles are not temp rezzed...but they DO add to VIEWER side lag. And if you turn off particles in your viewer, why bother to have particle grass in the first place?

Temp rezzed grasses and flowers are objects, not particles...but add to server side lag and impact the prim count of the sim.

I use a temp rezzer for undersea grasses, and a couple for tropical fish in my little reef garden. I would not use the things to try and plant a large field with grass and flowers, though.

It's possible to make a planar sculpted prim that exactly matches a section of existing terrain, You can then texture that sculpted prim with a grass terrain texture, make it phantom, and set it just above the actual terrain, making a small area look like you textured the land in that spot only. I don't know the exact trick for getting the mapping of the existing land transformed into a sculpty, but I've seen the trick demonstrated once. Worth looking into.

Not turn off. Turn away. If the particles are not within the camera's field of view, they aren't rendered. Anyone who is looking away from the particles or has them occluded by a sufficiently big wall does not have their FPS impacted by them.

The important bit is that 'FPS drop' is not 'lag'. While these two issues may be perceived as the same, they have very different causes. It is possible to create an object that results in one but not the other, and particles cause 'FPS drop' but not 'lag' while temp rezzers normally cause 'lag' but no 'FPS drop'.

Particles can be turned off, temp rezzed objects cannot. But if you're viewing particles from across the sim border, you still suffer FPS drop, while temp rezzed objects that exist across the sim border don't affect the performance of the sim you're in.

http://kanae.net/secondlife/nomi.html

If you have the RAW file for the terrain, and can convert it to a bare heightmap, that would be the software to do it.

Don't know about a big dragon but ask the owner at Zoobies. That lady is pretty good and quite helpful.

We are talking about the same things, just using different words. However, I don't like the term "FPS drop". To me, that IS a synonym for "lag". I prefer the terms "viewer side lag" and "server side lag". Both are perceived as a performance hit, generally a reduction in fps, but as you say, the causes are different.

"lag" is "delay between cause and effect". When your FPS drops, effects still happen, you just don't see them.

But oh well, I guess that doesn't matter that much...

is the isle of wyrms still around?

usta be you could get amazing dragons there.

Harley, it would be good if you could explain why you found Search to not be useful to you. There is active debate amongst the forum peoples about whether the search system serves the purposes of the SL residents or whether it is mostly useless. Experiences related from people such as you are valuable I believe. Thanks

I should know better than to argue with you about technical matters. You're right, of course. But everyone refers to any kind of slowdown as "lag". and I've kind of gotten used to it.

Yes. But I witnessed a guy making a 10 x 10 sculpty that exactly matched a hill I had hand-terraformed, and he did NOT have access to the .raw file. He did some scripted trick that scanned the area's terrain height, and built the map that he needed for making the sculpted surface. Just that one 10 M area.

There is a product on SLX that does this with a web site back end to create the sculpty, the in world object does the height scan and sends it away, and the sculpty map is generated and sent inworld.