Second Life Collision Sounds

Table of Contents

Ink Cloud

I live on a small island parcel in the Innu region of the Second Life mainland. Like me, it’s tiny, but I love it. On the hill behind my parcel is Vincent Priesley’s (sweetvincent) wonderful animated sculpture “Ink Cloud.” It drops ink (messy, but fun) and you can sit on the cloud too, like so:

Second Life Collision Sounds

The sound of the “collisions” when an ink drop hits the ground is cool for a few minutes. It gets fatiguing after a while. And will drive you batshit crazy when you hear it 24/7. So, I looked into Second Life Collision sounds.

The first thing to know is that if you make a Prim “Physical,” it will make a “collision sound” when it collides with something. Like this:

Modifying Collision Sounds

You should be able to change the sound of the collision by changing the material of the object like so:

Except that this feature is apparently broken at present and all materials sound the same.

Turning off Collision Sounds

If the collision sounds start to drive you mad, they are easy to turn off:

Preferences > Sound & Media > Play Sounds from Collisions:

Adjusting the volume of Collision Sounds

However, it’s kind of nice for the collisions to sound like something, just not too much. One way to make the collisions quieter is to change the gravity of the object. A very low gravity will fall slower and land more quietly. In the video below, I think Gyazo normalized the sound so the second, low-gravity collision sounds the same, but in-world it’s softer:

Of course, you might not want things to fall that slowly. Probably a better solution is to lower the volume. The sound of Collisions falls under the “Sounds” subsection:

When I turn “Sounds” down, I can still have collision sounds, but they can be softer and non-fatiguing! 😀

Yay!

Problem solved!

Falling for Fun

The last thing isn’t really about collision sounds, but as long as we’re talking about Physical Prims, it should be mentioned that sitting on a prim, making it physical, and dropping it, is a lot of fun!

Fun with Anti-Gravity

The last-last thing to know is that if you give a prim a negative gravity it floats away.

And… when it hits 4,000 meters altitude, it returns to your inventory Lost & Found for “going off-world.”

I love this in that you could make some sort of kinetic sculpture or performance and you don’t even have to clean up! It just floats up to 4 km and cleans itself.

Imagine a field of prims with different negative gravities and you let them loose all at once – could be a cool show!
Or, same thing, but sit on them and ride up to 4 km!
Or, install a coffee shop around 3,990 meters, put a negative gravity prim generator below it, and your guests can watch the prims float up and vanish.

So much fun!