It may be late news but the new version of ZHAO is out. For those of you who are thinking WTF is she talking about now?, ZHAO stands for Ziggy's HUD animation overrider. That is an animation overrider. The thing that makes you walk, sit, fly… nice animations, not the default crappy ones. It is free and open source. Just pick it up at Winged Isle. (**edit of Jan2008 – LM is changed and a new version is out)
So what is new about it?
- It looks better. That is, it is smaller.
- It uses menus now. Just two buttons on your HUD, one for turning it on/off and one for the menu. It is faster and less buggy than the old one which you had to wait to rezz all the prims on the HUD.
- It allows up to 12 walks, sits and ground-sits. Stands are limited only by memory.
- You can choose the frequency of animation cycling, from 5 to 120 seconds. That means, you can choose how neurotic your avatar looks like :) Or you can turn off cycling completely.
- Animations can either rotate sequentially (in order you put them in the card), or randomly. You choose.
- You can go to the next animation manually.
- It notifies you if there is no animation you stated in the config notecard.
- It uses different notecard format than the previous one so you have to use the notecard converter (comes with it) to set it up if you already have the old version.
One thing I always loved about ZHAO (beside the fact that I don't need to spam the public chat with /ao on /ao off every time I want to dance) is that you can change sets of animations with two clicks. Not only that it supports multiple avatars that way, you can have different sets for different occasions, e.g. one for public, one for more cozy occasions. And, the best part, it is easy to turn it into personal dancing machine.
- Make a copy of your config card. Rename it to something like disco queen. :)
- Delete all the standing animations from the card. The rest you can keep.
- Instead of stands, write your favourite dances.
- Go to a club.
- Load the dancing card.
- Enjoy the booty shaking.
- When you are about to leave, load the card with stands.
Messing with AOs is the only “tecchy” skill I have in SL.
Now, where the hell will I find the time to convert all my anim cards and all my custom AOs???
Ask Ziggy, ask Ziggy!!!
If you are running the old version of ZHAO, that shouldn’t be the problem…. that notecard converter works pretty nice. Just rezz it, drop the old card into it and you’ll have the new one. Anims you should transfer manually.
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