Building signs in SL

Let's say I want to build a simple billboard in SL. Let's say in Real World it would be on a sheet of plywood, 4' by 8'. And I'll put two posts on it, and slap a similar sheet of plywood on the other side with the same image.

1) How do you create a plain text sign in SL?
-- Do you just create the text in PSP and import it as a texture into SL?
-- Since it is not square, do you use PSP to cut it in half and then seam the two resulting textures together in SL with your fictional 4x8 subdivided into two 4x4's?
2) How do you create import a nice graphic "sign" into SL?
-- Since it is not square, do you use PSP to cut it in half and then seam the two resulting textures together in SL with your fictional 4x8 subdivided into two 4x4's?

Any help appreciated,
Newbie,
Jacer Shepherd

SL textures don't have to be square. the only restriction is that each dimension must be a power of 2. For your sign, an image that is 512x256 pixels (or some multiple or divisor of that) would work.

The big issue with texture-based text in SL is that images take a long time to load at a sufficient resolution for the text to be readable. It may not be as pretty, but I much prefer floating text on a prim to texture-based words. If teh text is important, it comes up instantly that way. if it isn't important, it probably wasn't worth waiting for teh texture to load anyway.

Okay, I'm dumb. How do I create any kind of text within SL? Could you point me to an FAQ or quickie instruction. Truly, I have tried to search the FAQ and Student_Island_place_thing and had no luck : (

I can't log in right now, but if you look for "floating text" scripts, you should find what you are looking for there. I believe you can get that along with almost any freebie pack, especially at the big freebie sites such as that blue giant whose name I forget.

there are 4 ways.. each more complex than the next.

1. Paint a sign. In your favourite paint program, (photoshop perhaps) make your sign. Save it, and upload the image to SL (L$10) Then slap that texture on your "sign borad.

2. use llSetText. This will create "floating text" and will not be at all good for you, your friends, neighbors, passers by, or the grid at large, it will probably also make your hair fall out, make your children turn to alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and drug smuggling.. and may quite possibly result in the death of a kitten. (bad juju). That said.. LLSetText it really limited. And it's probably not what you want.

3. xyText. (a not simple example of which is provided HERE). This is a cool system, but has someheavy limitations. While you can sneak up to 10 characters on a single prim, it's never as good as it sounds on paper. The process uses multiple, relatively high rez textures.. and it may take some time for your messages to load completely

4. Other variations on the xyText concept. I myself have a 3-letters-per-prim system that I'm quite fond of, and am finding many elegant uses for. While I did a lot of the development on the project in the open forums.. the final version of the scripts varied considerably from what was suggested by others.

Of the four.. #1 will be fastest, and give you the highest quality and greatest amount of control, while impacting the server the least.

you need a script for hovertext plop this inti a prim

string text = "put your text between these 2 quotation marks";
integer color_red   = 255;
integer color_green = 255;
integer color_blue  = 255;


default
{
    state_entry()
    {
       vector color = <
       (color_red   / 255), 
       (color_green / 255),
       (color_blue  / 255)>;
       
       llSetText(text,color,1);
       llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName());
    }
}

Winter, I'm curious. Why do you hate llsettext so much? In terms of getting the actual words to the reader as fast as possible, I have yet to see anything that is even remotely comparable in terms of speed. It doesn't even particularly impact the server, since that script isn't trying to constantly refresh anything.

About teh only downsides i can think of are:

- Lots of inconsiderate users place it in a manner that interferes with neighbouring objects. the overcrowded mall is the prime example.
- There is a limt on the practical amount of text you can include on one. This has more to do with aesthetics than character count, as you'll hit that first limit long before the second.

It's only really any use close up- at least on my machine, floating text on prims is invisible until I'm (or my camera is ) within about three metres of the object.

Good for local information, pretty rubbish for grabbing attention. Though in my experience you can put four lines of basic text on a 5x5 metre prim and people will still fail to read it at all.

Winter- I did something similar (I only used numbers 0-9 on my alphabet texture though) to do a digital clock display on one prim- what was the reason you chose to use three faces instead of five? I used the cut/hollow prism squished flat.

My suggestions for the original questions:

The texture size thing has been covered (512x256)
If the information on the board is going to be pretty static, then creating the text as a texture in a paint program is the easiest way. SetText is good for close up (though it has a habit of getting confusing when there are lots of items close to each other, it shows through walls etc), and the scripty "xytext" boards are handy for text that will be updated a lot, though they eat a lot of prims relatively speaking.

Painted text as textures on single prims would be the quickest and simplest option to start with, in my opinion.

Why I hate Floating Text
An Essay by Winter Ventura

I hate floating text, because it is unreliable. I'm a graphic designer.. an "artist" if you will.. and as such, I'm a bit of a control freak. I grew up in an age when a pixel was a pixel.. and there were only 72 in an inch. Images were measured in pixels, and graphics, like GUI's were planned in terms of "how many pixels tall, and how many wide". Designing for the World Wide Web was a nightmarish transition.. where everything was relative, often resolution dependant, and a picture that took up half the screen on one computer, could be the size of a postage stamp on another.

Floating text is not a reliable distance from a prim. Floating text is not a reliable size in relation to a prim. If you cam back, or in, the floating text moves.. often unpredictably. If your screen resolution is high, or low, the floating text can be tiny, or larger than you want. Floating text ALWAYS faces the viewer... even if you are standing behind the opject, or your camera is looking down on an object. Rotating the camera can cause floating text to sweep wildly and unrealistically around.

Even particles will scale down when you cam away. The size is relative to it's distance from the camera. Floating Text doesn't do this, and worse, it may move around vertically in relation to the source prim.

If object chat is the "noise pollution" of SL, floating text is the graffiti.

Have you ever rented a fairly expensive stall in a mall, or other establishment, or purchased a lovely piece of land... and had someone, on the other side of the line, install something with floating text? perhaps a JEVN vendor, or a simplified box vendor.

There is no predictability whether the walls will be thick enough to "BLOCK" the text. There is some vague magic going on... voodoo as we called it on the Mac... sometimes you can block it, and sometimes you can't. Floating Text most often bleeds through walls, even pairs of walls. In a mall situation, this can be four lines of text, smack dab in the middle of YOUR vendor.

Floating text *IS* appropriate for some uses. I think that some cases, it's reasonable. A great example is "touch me to unpack" on a self-unpacking boxed item. Things that get dropped, and used, then put away.. scopes on weapons.. some hud objects use floating text to good effect. But floating text.. on a STATIC object like a sign or a vendor.... something that's installed.. and not moving.. it's like leaving the blender plugged in and turned on 24/7.

Object chat is annoying.. Floating text showing through your neighbors walls.. is just plain RUDE. I think there HAVE to be more considerate, and attractive ways to communicate with people. I think that dynamic prices in vendors are obviously neccesary. But displaying that can be done in other ways, that don't take up several meters (from some perspectives) of space.
------------------------



Why did I go with 3 per prim? that answer is remarkably simple. A cube with a 66% taper, and flattened, makes 3 faces. Each of these faces is an "Exterior" face. The coordinate system for offsetting the texture was therefore identical in each case. A little rotation of the texture was in order, but the same texture, and the same coordinates.. worked for each of the three letters.

A 4-letter prim uses a prism, I beleive.. as does a 5-letter prim. The 4-letter prim has 2 faces that are "cut faces". The cut faces thankfully will shift like "normal faces"... BUT the "2 "normal faces" would now be missing parts, meaning that the texture would need to be adjusted in scale and position for THEM!.. A 5-letter prim is a prism, cut, with a hollow face in the center. Now, not only do we have 2 regular faces (well.. partial regular faces) AND two cut faces.. NOW we have a huge hollow face. Setting aside all the issues with trying to get that texture to the right scale and position (why ARE hollow faces so hard to texture?)... there's a whole part of the hollow face that extends BELOW the 2 cut faces. Meaning now that any texture I would use, would have to have a great deal of "white space" in order to use alpha'd fonts.

Not only would this drastically complicate the coordinate system... and getting all 5 letters to work (meaning 3 major variants of the scrip to interpret the letters). but now, my texture would have to be a great deal larger, just to support the same apparent resolution of the letters. In the end, I did the math.

3 letters per prim
Base + 7 letterprims = 8 prims, 21 letters.. 1 script for all letters, with a minor mod to each

5 letters per prim
Base + 4 letterprims = 5 prims, 20 letters... 3 letter scripts, major hassle, larger image = slower load times.

so, for 3 prims (6 on the double sided one)... I save a great deal of work on my part, get a much higher visual quality for my product the texture loads MUCH faster (256x256 for 95 characters).

switching to 4 letters per prim would only earn me back 2 prims (on a 20-ish letter display board)... and would have doubled the work.

switching to 5 letters would have gained me only 3 prims, and would have easily quadrupled the work, and slowed the texture load time or reduced the visual quality.

switching to a variant of xyText would have dramatically increased upload costs, and photoshop pre-design work, in order to generate my own font, and would have had ALL the same problems with letters loading slowly that xytext suffers from.

Normal faces" was very important.. because the coordinates were mathematically predictable, and there wasn't any overlaps on alpha textured faces.

Floating text to me is the bane of shopping.

I don't know how many times I have completely abandoned a shop I would have otherwise been happy with because of extreme overuse of this feature.

I specifically remember one place I found, with lots of what looked like gorgeous artwork. I probably would have spent a lot of money there. Art is my biggest weakness, I will always spend much more on it than anything else. But I TPd out after a few seconds - they had floating text over EVERY piece, and they were so close together that I couldn't read most of the text, let alone see the beauty of the art they were selling. It COMPLETELY spoiled the experience.

I will never understand why some shop owners do this. Do they just not look at their displays at all? Do some people have the ability to "filter out" the text with their eyes? I know it looks horrible to me.

That particular shop made me vow to never use floating text when I sell. It's just so ugly compared to most everything else in SL.

Floating text is bad! I generally disalow it on my sim.

floating text is totally client sided, sim wise its not even there

its bad with astetics, usually the places where everything is crammed into a clusterf anyways sooo to me it doesnt matter

i usually rely on textures, set text is usually suited best for dynamic script output IMO

Personally, when it is properly used, I see absolutely nothing wrong with it.

My personal experience is that in a mall, gaps between stalls should be about 3m to ensure that floating text from the neighbour does not interfere. This si usually tighter than most mall designers allow for. A compromise is a term in the rental agreement that limits which walls the tenant may place floating text up against.

You complain that floating text is unreliable, because it can't place the letters precisely. This reminds me of my old university administratum. they wanted, as a coursework project, to have one of teh computer classes design the university website. Except they wanted to specify exact margins and a million and one other things, in a way that the technology (pre-css) couldn't possibly allow for. There was a single way it could be done - create a giant gif file with that image as the sole content on each page.

The admin liked that idea. But dropped the idea once someone mentioend that it would be ruinous with the bandwidth that was available in those days.

It's the same issue with text. Do you want precise layout specifications? or do you want to get the essential information across?

In any case, I have found some rules regarding just how floating text appears. As I noted earlier, it is masked by a wall at a distance of about 3m. The main issue problem with floating text lies with it being abused (kind of like overlarge textures). It is just a tool, like any other, taht can be used well or used badly.

Winter, I don't see why it would take larger textures to do the five panels instead of three. It would just be a wider prim (66% wider), with the text the same size, just two more squares width.

Mine is very simple, the only thing I had to do was set up some values for the faces to apply to the offset. It's one or two lines more of LSL, not two whole scripts. It's only the repeats that are a real issue and they are set in the prim one time not in the script. I think (I don't use the middle face in my clock) that faces 2 and 4 need a correction to the offset, that's all.

My alphabet texture is 10x10 because that was easy (it has a lot of empty spaces atm), and I move in 0.1 clicks, adjusted for the quirks of the faces on the next line. That's just the horizontal too- there's obviously no problem with the vertical which stays constant.

If you think it's worth looking at I'd be happy to share my work on it, or I can just shush

ALPHA.

Letter 1 is 1mx1m
letter 2 is 1mx1m
Letter 3 is 1.5mx1m
letter 4 is 1mx1m
letter 5 is 1mx1m

Meaning, in order to use the same alphanumeric texture for all five numbers, they must have, at minimum.. 50% whitespace on the horizontal.

Texture: ABC

if the phrase is "BBBBB", this is what will appear:

Letter 1: B
Letter 2: B with part of an A under it
Letter 3: B
Letter 4: B with part of a C under it
Letter 5: B

There are only 2 ways to make this work. either use 24bit textures... (which last time I checked.. made the background opaque.. totally nixing the whole "alpha" concept... or add a huge gutter between letters on the texture.

Adding large "gutters" will result in either a larger image, resulting in a longer load time, or a lower horizontal resolution, resulting in lowered visual quality.

There just isn't any way to get around this.

The simple fact is, 3 letters uses the same coordinates system every time. 4 letters uses 2 different sets of coordinates and offsets... and 5 letters.. requires a completely different texture.. AND 3 different sets of coordinate systems..

Hours of programming, hair pulling, guessing at coordinates, testing, and retesting equations in excel.. TRYING to build a reliable coordinate matrix for each of the three systems... going back, realizing that there's not enough whitespace.. redoing all three systems again to get them all to match... hours.. days.. of work, resulting in me tossing the whole thing in the trash in anger and frustration... all to save 3 prims on a 20 letter message display???

to me... NOT WORTH THE EFFORT.

When I use 5 face prims, the faces are roughly the same size. And once you get the offsets right in the faces, you can copy that prim and drop any letter into it.