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MagnaMural: Texture Display & Organizer
Public Domain Version
Manual

by Apollia Pirandello

MagnaMural.Astroblahhh.Com


For a much more brief summary of commands, go to this page: MagnaMural Commands Summary

A zip file of this manual, the Commands Summary, the MagnaMural's and MagnaMural Updater's scripts, and the MagnaMural Main Page is here. (128 KB)


Text chat commands are formatted like this.
Menus, buttons, and other things you can click with a mouse are formatted like this.
Window titles and other things you don't have to click are formatted like this.






About the MagnaMural and Where to Get It

The MagnaMural: Texture Display & Organizer is a scripted item I created in Second Life. It enables you to easily browse, display, organize, and store your textures.

It used to be a commercial product, but, I finally realized that I have a moral problem with selling closed-source software even in Second Life, and so I placed it into the public domain. One thing that helped me make up my mind to do this was this essay by Richard Stallman, Why Software Should Be Free.

You can get the MagnaMural for free at OnRez, SLExchange, or within Second Life. To find it within Second Life, log into Second Life and press the Search button. Then, click the People tab, and search for Apollia Pirandello. You'll find more details in the Picks section of my profile.

If you like it, or even if you don't, I welcome donations of any size.



Contents

Basic Description

The MagnaMural is a 4-prim screen which enables you to easily browse, display, organize, and store your textures.

It is very easy to control. Every feature of the MagnaMural is accessible through text chat commands, which can either be spoken in regular "audible" text chat, or on the silent chat channel of your choice, from 1 to 9999. Also, gestures can be made to give any text chat command you like. And, clicks cause a few things to happen as well. Once you click anywhere on the MagnaMural, that activates the MagnaMural's capability to respond to text chat commands.

You can navigate through your textures forward, backward, or randomly, merely by clicking one of its 4 prims, using a gesture, or giving a text chat command. Also, when the MagnaMural is listening for text chat commands, you can instantly go directly to any texture within the MagnaMural just by saying its number.

The gestures included with the MagnaMural allow you to issue commands to the MagnaMural simply by pressing an F-key on your keyboard. You can customize the included gestures, and design your own gestures to issue any command you want to the MagnaMural.

Many of the major features can also be accessed by clicking Panel 3 (the lower left prim), which will make a blue dialog pop-up, full of buttons, appear in the upper right corner of your screen.

Since it's full-perms, open source, and public domain, you can also modify the MagnaMural in any way and for any purpose you like.


Dimensions

The MagnaMural has a maximum size of 20m x 20m, allowing you to see your textures twice as large as you could see them on a single regular prim (since a single regular prim only has a maximum size of 10m x 10m). The MagnaMural has a minimum size of 0.04m x 0.04m.

It is easily resizeable to any width and height through text chat commands, and it has four shape modes.

Three of these shape modes cause the MagnaMural's width and height to maintain a certain proportion to each other, so you only need to say the width for the MagnaMural to resize itself appropriately.

And then there's:

The thickness is always (and unchangeably) 0.010 m.


Textures Included

The MagnaMural comes with over 200 textures from Second Life's Library, plus some Second Life screenshots (and one Entropia Universe screenshot) which I myself took, and some public domain pictures from the Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ , which I uploaded to Second Life myself. All the textures have full permissions (copy, modify, transfer).

(If you're curious to know more about the Wikimedia Commons images, or to see or download the originals, retrieve the texture, right-click on it in your inventory, click on Properties in the little menu that pops up, then, in the window that pops up, look at the Description text field, and go to that URL in your web browser.)

The MagnaMural package also includes a MagnaMural which is empty of all but a single texture, so you won't have to go to the trouble of emptying them of a great many included textures so you can have a MagnaMural with only your own textures.



Contents

Various Features, and Ideas for Possible Uses

The MagnaMural is useful for all kinds of things. For instance, you can use it for:



Contents

Controlling your MagnaMural

Each MagnaMural is made up of four prims. I like to refer to its four prims as panels. The operation of the MagnaMural is very simple. There are four ways to control the MagnaMural:

The MagnaMural is designed for the personal use of its owner only, so, only the owner can control the MagnaMural. It won't work properly if deeded to a group, so please don't deed it to a group.


First, I'll explain the panels. Depending on which panel you touch (click on), something happens.

Depending on which side of the MagnaMural you're looking at, the layout of the four panels is like this:

FrontBack
12
34
   
21
43

Here are the command issued when you click on the panels:


Whenever you click on the MagnaMural, the MagnaMural will begin listening for text chat commands, if it isn't already. (Unless the MagnaMural is in Locked Mode, and you clicked on a panel other than Panel 3 - in that case, nothing will happen).

It should stay on indefinitely while you're actually using it - issuing commands, clicking on it, adding textures, etc. And, so you don't have to worry about shutting it off - if you don't click the MagnaMural, and don't say anything in its presence, and don't change anything in its inventory for 10 minutes, the MagnaMural will go to "sleep" again and stop listening for chat commands. You can tell the MagnaMural to stop listening immediately by saying off.


You can either give chat commands in regular chat, or on the silent chat channel the MagnaMural is set to, and you can also use gestures to issue chat commands to the MagnaMural, audibly or silently. The gestures included with the MagnaMural will silently issue several commands on channel 9.

Before the gestures will work, you have to activate them. To do this, go to your inventory, right-click a gesture (for instance, "MagnaMural - F8 - Forward - Channel 9", and choose Activate from the little menu that pops ups. The gestures can be used by pressing one of the F-keys on your keyboard. The gesture title will tell you which F-key to use.

The gestures included with the MagnaMural will only work if the MagnaMural is set to listen to silent chat channel 9, but you can customize them to use other channels, and to be activated by other keystrokes, and you can even create new gestures to issue whatever commands you want.

You can duplicate a gesture by right-clicking on it in your inventory and selecting Copy from the little menu that pops up, then right-clicking anywhere you want to put the duplicate, and selecting Paste from the little menu that pops up. Then, double-click the duplicate to edit it.


Here are the chat commands and gesture F-keys for the navigation, with multiple ways of saying the same command separated by commas. The commas and dashes aren't part of the command.

The Reload command might (or might not) help if the texture is blurry and taking a while to load, and it will definitely help if there are those annoying lines that may temporarily appear in the MagnaMural after you do a resize or change the shape mode. It should also help if, through some fluke of Second Life, a texture hasn't loaded on all panels.


And, to move the MagnaMural itself:


You can go to any texture by saying its number in regular chat or on the silent chat channel (which is 9 by default). For instance, saying /9 12 will go to texture 12.

The textures are organized in alphabetical order, meaning textures with names which are earlier in the alphabet have lower numbers, and textures with names which are later in the alphabet have higher numbers.

To find out the number of the texture you want, there are a couple ways. One, you can have the MagnaMural generate a numbered, alphabetical list of every texture contained in the MagnaMural by saying list.

Two, you can turn on the optional floating text, which hovers above Panel 2. The optional floating text is a display of the number of textures in the MagnaMural, the name of the texture you're currently looking at, and the number of the texture you're currently looking at. The command to show this information is sn (short for "show name/num", and hn will hide it. Saying n or name will reverse whatever the current setting is, as will the the dialog button NAME/NUM.


By default, the silent chat channel is 9, but you can change it to whatever you want (from 1 to 9999) by entering Silent Text Channel Select Mode by saying ch. The MagnaMural will retain its channel setting even if you reset the script - that is, as long as you don't mess with the name of Panel 1, which contains that information in the following format: "MagnaMural ([silent chat channel number])".

Usually, when the (or a) MagnaMural "talks" to you, the silent chat channel number of the MagnaMural "talking" will be displayed at the beginning of the line, for instance, "MagnaMural (9): Going back to most recent previously-displayed texture."

This will make it easy for you to know what the silent chat channel is, and also might make things less confusing in case you have multiple MagnaMurals around which you're using at the same time.

By the way, when the MagnaMural "talks", only you, the owner, can hear it, so you don't have to worry about it disturbing anyone.



Contents

Brief Summary of Commands


This information is available in the notecard "*-Astroblahhh.Com MagnaMural Commands Summary - Public Domain", and this other web page, Commands Summary, which is a lot shorter than this manual.

The commands below are case sensitive - that is, it matters whether you use capital or lowercase letters in them. The commands below need to be stated exactly as they are below in order to work - minus the commas and dashes, which aren't part of the commands.

Many commands have more than one way to say them. To distinguish between multiple ways of saying the same command, the commands below are separated by commas.


Navigation

Textures within the MagnaMural are in alphabetical order and are numbered accordingly.

If you type in any number between (and including) 1 and the number of textures contained in the MagnaMural, the MagnaMural will go directly to the texture referred to by that number.

The Reload command might (or might not) help if the texture is blurry and taking a while to load, and it will definitely help if there are those annoying lines that may temporarily appear in the MagnaMural after you do a resize or change the shape mode. It should also help if, through some fluke of Second Life, a texture hasn't loaded on all panels.


Texture Retrieval, Deletion and Info


Resizing and Shape Changing


Other Settings


Manual and Help-Related


Other



Contents

Longer Instructions on How To Do Various Things




Adding Textures

It's easy to add more textures. There are two main ways to do it. First, here's the shortcut method to copy textures into the MagnaMural. It should be possible to use this method even if you have a ton of textures in the MagnaMural.

Click the Inventory button at the lower right of your screen, and find the textures in your inventory that you want to add to the MagnaMural. Highlight the textures in your inventory (you can highlight more than one by pressing Shift as you highlight them).

Then, press and hold Ctrl on the keyboard, and drag the textures with the mouse onto Panel 2, making sure the cursor hasn't changed into one of those circles with a diagonal bar (like a No Parking sign) signifying that for some reason, Second Life won't let you drop items in there. Then, let go of the mouse button, and the textures should be added to the MagnaMural.

If the cursor did change into the circle with a diagonal bar, then, moving the Second Life camera around a bit might fix the problem. Or, it might not. Second Life, as you probably know, can be rather temperamental.


Second, here's the longer way. (However, if you have a ton of textures in the MagnaMural already, it may not be very convenient, because the Contents may take a long time to load, and until they do load, you won't be able to add more textures by this method):

Right-click on the MagnaMural and click Edit in the pie menu to bring up the standard Second Life object Edit window. Press the More >> button (if it's there). Click the Content tab. Press the Inventory button at the lower right of your screen, then find the textures in your inventory you want to add to the MagnaMural. Highlight the textures in your inventory, then drag them into the Contents folder in the Edit window.


The only problem is, Second Life, at least in my experience, is not totally reliable when it comes to copying inventory to various places. It can be quite laggy, and it might never copy your items at all. However, it may give you less trouble if you copy fewer textures at a time.

With both methods, if you have the optional floating text turned on, then, you will be able to see the total number of textures increase as the textures are added. If you know the exact number of textures you're adding, this will give you a good idea at a glance of whether your textures were successfully copied into the MagnaMural or not.

By the way, it won't break anything if you accidentally drop your textures on some other panel than Panel 2, but they won't be added to the MagnaMural's lineup of textures to display.




Backing Up and Duplicating Your MagnaMural

There are a number of ways to back up your MagnaMurals, which are all pretty easy. The easiest way is to just pick it up, by right-clicking it and choosing Take from the pie menu.

Or, if you don't want to pick it up, you can right-click it, and choose Take Copy from the pie menu. If you can't see Take Copy on the pie menu, press More > until you find it.

You might want to double-check that Second Life really did take a copy of it, because in my experience, Second Life can be rather unreliable. If you take a copy of it, if I'm not mistaken, the copy should end up in your Objects folder in your inventory.


You can duplicate a MagnaMural that is "rezzed" (created as an actual object) in the world by right-clicking it, choosing Edit from the pie menu, making sure the Position radio button (a round button which either is empty or is filled with a small dot) is filled, and then holding down Shift on the keyboard as you click and drag one of the arrows to position the MagnaMural.

Or, while you have a MagnaMural selected, you can go to Second Life's Edit menu and choose Duplicate, or simply press Ctrl and D on the keyboard at the same time.


You can also back up MagnaMurals which are still in your inventory, rather than "rezzed" (created as an actual object) in the world.

Click the Inventory button, then find the MagnaMural you want to duplicate in your inventory. Right-click on it and choose Copy from the little menu that comes up.

Then, right-click somewhere else in your inventory, and click Paste in the little menu that comes up. This should create a duplicate of the MagnaMural you copied.




Deleting Textures

To delete textures from the MagnaMural, there are two ways to do it. Saying tdel in text chat will delete the currently-displayed texture. That's the easiest way. The MagnaMural will ask you to say "y" to confirm you really want to delete that texture.


The other method is just the standard way to delete items from any object's contents. Right-click on the MagnaMural and select Edit from the pie menu. Then, in the standard Second Life object Edit window that appears, press the More >> button if it's visible. Then, click the Content tab.

If you have a lot of textures in the MagnaMural, the contents may take a long time to load, possibly an unbelievably long time. But, once (and if) they do, you can highlight and right-click on any you want to delete, and select Delete from the little menu that will pop up.

Second Life, as you probably well know, is glitchy and laggy, so even if it looks like the texture has been deleted (or hasn't been deleted), it might actually have been (or not have been). I don't know of any real solution to this - just keep trying. Perhaps going to an unlaggy sim might help.

Saying tdel is much faster and easier.


Just to be safe, I recommend making a backup of your MagnaMural before you delete anything from it.




Editing the MagnaMural's Prims

Since the MagnaMural's prims are modifiable, it's possible to edit the MagnaMural's prims to achieve a variety of interesting visual effects using the standard Second Life object Edit window controls. I recommend working on a backup copy of the MagnaMural, since some changes you can make via the Edit window aren't easily reversed.

Right-click on the MagnaMural and choose Edit from the pie menu. Then, if the More >> button is present, click it.

With the settings under the Textures tab, you could give the MagnaMuarl partial or complete transparency, metallic shininess, bumpiness, and turn off the Full Bright setting so local lighting and daylight will have an impact on how the picture looks.

And, to access the features under the Features tab, you can put a check in the "Edit linked parts" checkbox and select a prim. Then, you will be able to make the prim you're editing emanate light, or even make it a flexible (flexi) prim.




Getting a List of Textures

The MagnaMural can generate a numbered list for you in alphabetical order of all the textures it contains. You can easily copy and paste this list into a text editor on your computer (or in a Second Life notecard), and jot down your own notes on what the various textures look like. (If you're using a Windows computer, I highly recommend the free text editor NoteTab Light: http://notetab.com/ )

To generate such a list, just say list, or click the LIST button in the blue dialog pop-up (which will appear in the upper right of your screen when you click Panel 3, the lower left prim of the MagnaMural). After the list is output, open your chat history (such as by pressing Ctrl and H on the keyboard at the same time), and you can easily copy and paste the list from that window.

If you don't know the basics of copying and pasting text on your computer, you should definitely learn, because it's a skill that will serve you very well. This page should help: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial95.html

With the help of this list, you will be able to easily find any texture and go to it just by saying its number. (That is, as long as you haven't added more textures to the MagnaMural since you obtained the list, since adding new textures will probably change the order of the textures).

You can also search the list for any text by using your computer's text editor. If you're using NoteTab Light, just press Ctrl and F at the same time on the keyboard, which will summon the Find window. Type in the text you want to find, and click Find Next.

I'm not sure if there's any limit in Second Life to how long the list can be. I had the MagnaMural successfully print out a list of 3,722 textures - the only bad thing about it was it took many minutes to output this gigantic list. :-)




Hiding your MagnaMural and Making It Possible To Move Through It

This is great if you have a small piece of land, but don't feel like cleaning up every bit of junk you leave on it, but also don't want to bother the neighbors by leaving stuff out. You can easily hide the MagnaMural without un-rezzing it - just say hi, and that will put the MagnaMural into Invisible Mode. This doesn't automatically turn off the floating text, however - so, if you want it off, say hn to turn off the floating text.

(If you forget where your transparent MagnaMural is, go to the View menu, and select Highlight Transparent - or, press Ctrl, Alt, and T on the keyboard all at the same time - and your invisible MagnaMural will be highlighted in red).

To show the MagnaMural again, say sh.


And, if you want to make it so your MagnaMural won't be an obstacle to anyone walking or flying through, you can say ph to put it into Phantom Mode. This is also useful if you want to make the MagnaMural into a doorway of some kind, or something else you can walk through.

To make the MagnaMural solid again, you can say so to put the MagnaMural into Solid Mode.




Locked Mode

The MagnaMural has a Locked Mode, where nothing happens if you press any of the panels other than Panel 3.

This will make it so once you have the MagnaMural set to an image you like, you can't so easily accidentally change it through stray clicks. If you do want to change the texture while it's in Locked Mode, though, you can still change it through gestures and text chat commands.

All Locked Mode does is make it so the MagnaMural doesn't pay any attention to clicks on the panels which navigate to other textures. It doesn't make it utterly impossible to change the texture, or to delete textures.

Locked Mode can be set by saying lo, and unset by saying ul, and whatever the current setting is can be reversed by pressing the LOCK/UNLOCK button in the blue dialog pop-up.




Retrieving Textures

To retrieve the single texture currently being displayed on the MagnaMural, either say g in "audible" or silent text chat, or click Panel 3 (the lower left quadrant of the MagnaMural) and press GIVE TEXTURE in the blue dialog pop-up.


If you wish to retrieve every texture loaded into the MagnaMural (which are all stored in Panel 2, which is the root prim), right-click on the MagnaMural and press Open. Then, in the Object Contents window that pops up, press Copy to Inventory after the textures have loaded.


However, if you have a ton of textures in the MagnaMural, Second Life will probably be extremely slow to load all the textures, and, if you have a really huge number, Second Life might crash when you try to take them. That's what happened to me when I tried to take 3,722 textures at once out of a MagnaMural.

So, it's best to think of a very full MagnaMural as being a lot like a black hole - easy to put things into, but very difficult to get everything out again. If you have a MagnaMural with many hundreds or thousands of textures, it might be impossible to get them all out at once, though it should at least be possible to retrieve them one at a time.

So, don't make it so your only copy of your textures is in one chock-full MagnaMural - have other backups of your textures.




Setting Up Multiple MagnaMurals

If you want to browse multiple textures at once, like a more standard texture browser, multiple MagnaMurals is how you can do it.

MagnaMurals are only 4 prims each, and you can easily duplicate the one you're looking at (and hence, all the textures it contains). The easiest way is to right-click on it, click Edit, then, as you click and drag one of the positioning arrows, hold Shift on the keyboard. A duplicate MagnaMural will appear.

If you have all the MagnaMurals set to the same silent chat channel, then, while they're activated to listen for commands, they will all respond to your silent chat channel commands, menu commands, and gesture commands at the same time. (You can activate them by clicking anywhere on them).

You can also set them up to respond to different silent chat channels by saying ch, so you can optionally control them one at a time. And, if you ever do need to control them all at once, they will still all respond to audible chat commands.

It might be a good idea to put your multiple MagnaMurals in Brief Mode (by saying br), so they won't all spam you as much with many messages all at the same time.

By the way, you shouldn't link multiple MagnaMurals together, because they'll won't work properly anymore if you do that. (By "link", I mean, don't use the "Link" feature which you can find in the Tools menu. It's perfectly fine for MagnaMurals to touch, or to intersect each other).


Here's how you can preserve the exact configuration of the multiple MagnaMurals you've set out.

First, set out multiple MagnaMurals, and arrange them in whatever configuration pleases you. Then, right-click on any MagnaMural and choose Edit from the pie menu. As if you're going to link them, hold down the Shift key and click all of the other MagnaMurals you've set out. Then, right-click any of them and choose Take from the pie menu.

This will take all of them into inventory, and they will probably end up in your Objects folder. But, instead of them being taken individually and separately, they will be combined into one inventory listing - a "coalesced object", distinguishable in your inventory from a regular individual object by the fact that the icon for a coalesced object is a stack of cubes, rather than the one cube which is the icon for a regular, individual object.

When you rez the coalesced MagnaMurals, all of them will appear in the configuration you had them in when you took them into inventory!

For more info on coalesced objects, see this page from the official Second Life wiki: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Inventory_Recovery_Steps#Did_the_objects_vanish_after_being_returned.3F




Watching Streaming Video on Your MagnaMural

First, decide on a texture you want Second Life to replace with streaming video. If it's not already added to the MagnaMural, add it, and then put it on display.

Then, right-click your land, and click About Land in the pie menu. In the About Land window that will pop up, click the Media tab. Click on the box below the words "Replace this texture:", then pick a texture you would like to be used as your land's Media Texture.

Next, you'll need a streaming video URL of a QuickTime streaming video. Here's one - SciFiFree.Tv:

Add that (or another one like it) to the text box below the text "with content from this URL:".

Then, I suggest putting a check in the checkbox next to "Auto-scale content (slower and reduced visual quality", since otherwise, the streaming video won't fill the MagnaMural. Then, close the About Land window.

And, lastly, press the |> (play) button next to the eye icon that should have appeared toward the bottom of your screen. This should make the MagnaMural (and anything else which has your land's Media Texture on it) display streaming video.


You can find other legal and public domain streaming videos here: http://www.americafree.tv/index.shtml

I suggest using the QuickTime 500 kbps streams. Once you get to a web page with a video on it, you can find the URL of the stream by viewing the source code of the page in your web browser, and searching it for the text ".mov".



Contents

Solutions to Possible Problems



Contents

Limitations of the MagnaMural


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This page uploaded to web: Apr. 9, 2008
Last modified: Apr. 9, 2008