SL for Nowt

Living a digital life with empty pockets

Tutorial: Make your own Landmarks HUD

A while back, I made an inventory-management post in which I urged you to chuck out all of your old landmarks. At the beginning of that post I tried to find some free or cheap landmark HUDs that would hold the LMs you wanted to keep, because while storing them in notecards is an excellent idea it can take a while to dig out the relevant notecard, find the relevant LM inside it, click to open the window, and then finally teleport there.

Today, thanks to a fabby free landmark-giver script that I’ve found, I can give you this tutorial to make your own Landmarks HUD. It’s not the most perfect thing, nor will it rival any of the paid-for HUDs that are out there. The menu buttons where your landmarks are filed will not, for instance, be in alphabetical order (or, indeed, even in the same place each time you open it) but it’s free, and if you don’t want to fork over several hundred L$ for a professional HUD then it’s a good enough alternative!

Hop behind the cut for the tutorial :)

First of all, rez a sphere and size it down to 0.100m all the way around:

Navigate to the Contents tab and click the New Script button. Give it a name, and set its permissions. The default will be No Modify, No Copy, and Transfer, and those permissions will apply to the entire item that the script is in, so if you want to give the HUD to a friend, you should set different permissions. This is a free, open source script, so I suggest just making it full permission by checking all of the boxes:

Double-click the script to open it. All new scripts have a little bit of default text in them that will make whatever object they’re in say, “Hello, Avatar!” to you. Delete all of that text so you’re left with a blank script, then go to my Useful Scripts page and copy the text in the Landmark-Giver HUD Script section. Paste that text into your new script, then click the ‘Save’ button:

Choose a nice texture for your HUD!

Give the HUD a name that will make it easy to find in your inventory, and set its permissions (these are always ‘next owner’ permissions, by the way. You will always have full permissions on any items that you have created) –

Rename the landmarks that you want to put in the HUD, keeping their names as short as possible. The reason for this is that they have to fit onto small menu buttons. Then, drag them into the Contents tab of the HUD:

Take the HUD into your inventory. Right-click on it once it’s in there and mouseover to ‘Attach to HUD’. Choose an empty HUD position and click it.

TIP: If you can’t find the HUD after attaching it then it may be off-screen. Right-click-edit any other HUD that you’re wearing and spin the scrollwheel of your mouse towards you. This will show an overlay on your screen, which will get smaller as the wheel scrolls, and you’ll be able to spot any wayward HUDs. Click on them, drag them inside the white lines that denote your normal screen size, then come out of edit mode. You can then edit them into the position that you want.

You’ll probably note that your texture looks a bit odd and squished, so select the Texture tab of the HUD and change the ‘Y’ rotation to 270.00 –

When you click on the HUD, a menu will pop up. If you have more landmarks inside it than there are buttons on the menu, you should also have a little ‘next’ button, to allow you to click through to the next menu page:

Clicking any of those buttons will open up your map view, already homed in on the landmark location. Simply click the ‘Teleport’ button, and you’re there!

December 8, 2010 - Posted by | scripts, second life, tutorials

4 Comments »

  1. Your tutorials are always so wonderfully illustrated. I’m going to make this this weekend. Thanks!!

    I found out last night how to make my own pose stand that just takes one left-click to hop onto rather than right-clicking and choosing “pose” from a pie menu, so I made my own custom pose stands that match my decor after a year and a half of using store-branded stands. Actually what I did then was I turned a little rug I had out into a pose stand so I don’t even need a separate one.

    What’s funny is I was wondering how HUDs are made, because I’ve also been fiddling with pose HUDs. So this will be my first HUD! \o/

    Comment by AK | December 9, 2010 | Reply

    • Thanks, AK :) I try to make them as easy-to-follow as possible, and always with the thought of complete newbies in mind, rather than those that might have been in-world for a while and who would know some of the SL jargon.

      Turning a rug into a pose stand is a great way to make them fit in with your decor. While we all need pose stands, the ones we usually have never look right in our homes.

      And yep: HUDs are made just like anything else. Create them in-world and script them, then just attach them to a HUD point. The only reason I chose a sphere for this project was that it’s a more pleasing shape than a cube.

      Comment by Mar | December 9, 2010 | Reply

  2. Thanks for the Tut :]

    Comment by PatrickM | December 31, 2010 | Reply

  3. Is there any way to create a hud with the teleport functionality of the favorite’s bar in firestorm viewer? Would love to make a hud where ya put in landmarks and just click the button to TP straight there without having to use map

    Comment by Dorian Darkrose | October 27, 2013 | Reply


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