Hey, what’s that sound? The answer here is a little-known fact that needs to be spread more: you can customize the collision sound an object makes. That’s right, you can make a falling anvil sound like its cartoon counterpart, a glass can emit a startling “crash!”, or you can do something completely different to confound and astound bystanders. You can even silence an object (like thunky stairs).
Even if you’ve never scripted before, you can do this with a simple script that requires 1 line of change. I show you how to do this, how to search for sounds on the web, and more!
00:48 - Building materials have different collision sounds
02:40 - How a script changes collision sound
03:48 - Search for sounds on the web
05:50 - Upload and insert the sound
06:16 - Create the custom collision sound script
08:15 - Silent collisions for stairs (and other stuff)
Come to Here island afterwards to see the collision sounds I’ve got setup, including the falling peas.
Add to your aural experience and enjoy the SLience! ;D
If you're wondering why this is on my personal blog instead of the official Second Life Blog and why you haven't seen the KB Article of the Week lately either, it's because Linden Lab is undergoing changes in communication policy and preparing for future improvements.
As much as that doesn't seem to make sense, I can't go into details now, and I would've let you know earlier were it not for events beyond my control. Please pardon me, I promise to share more if/when I can do so. In the meantime, if you have ideas for how I can better help you by making video tutorials broadly visible in places I've missed, let me know!
-Torley Linden 
Resident Enlightenment Manager
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Awesome tutorial Torley!
It's so good to see empowerment of residents to design that 50% of the experience of Second Life - sound is such an opportunity ! We often concentrate and value visuals so much more, in SL and RL.
Would be great to do one on various ways of using llPlaySound and the advantages of llSoundPreload.. hmm perhaps I should try my hand at a vidtut .. hmm !
Great info Torley - Thank You. And I LOVE that new avatar! Awesome!
Aloha
I knew Katt Linden was heavily censoring the forums, but that's pretty bad that even you are censored now.
On the topic of this, you used to be able to set the collision sprite too, but that LSL function has been broken for over a year.
Now you've done it, Torley! Your innocent little video spawned the creation of an underwater volcano complete with sound-enhanced lava bombs. It's primageddon (and I love it)!
If you get a chance to check it out, it's on the ocean floor at the Abyss Museum of Ocean Science…
Thanks for the inspiration!
Awsome tip of the week, i'm now having fun with collision sounds, yay!
Are you planning on doing any tutorials in Teen Second Life soon?, Your new avatar rocks.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielvoyager/
http://danielvoyagerblog.wordpress.com/
Daniel Voyager
Great as usual T.!
very interesting for me!
Now a question:
I logged in soundsnap and uploaded in my pc some sound; i think I can upload in Sl either as .wav either mp3 (I'ven't still trained it); my question is "How could I hear a sound in Sl only when I'm near an object? and only if I touch an objet?"
I'm able do it when there is a collision with a phisycal object (thank's to you and your video) but not a more simple thing.
I need do avatars hear a sweet sound if they click or they are near the photos in a gallery. (like some object in Greenies house).
Could you help me?
sorry my english
Eleonora P.
Now I'm going to have to run around sticking odd noises into everything.
@Dizzy: Yes! By all means, esp. since you have a wealth of empirical installation in designing sonic installations in SL, if you make a vidtut I will share it!
@Sahona: Thanx! My new griffin is such a fun gift.
@Gigs: llCollisionSprite was so fun for cartoon effects and beyond. Ugh, broken for so long, I'll ping the internal engineering queue about it.
@Sunn: Oh I <3 seeing, and hearing cool stuff to come out of my videos! Glad you shared this, and hope to visit soon. "Primageddon", ha-ha!
@Eleonora: Direct MP3 uploads aren't supported, that's why I used WAV. And, by "near", what sort of range did you have in mind? In the Preferences, there are sliders to adjust the distance/attentuation at which you hear sounds, and you can restrict sounds to a parcel in About Land. But, you can't simply say "I want this sound to be heard up to 5 m away for everyone". Does this help clarify things?
@Ghosty: Yes, and watch the reactions… prankalicious!
Sure, ty.
My post on YouTube seems to be eaten, so I'll just add it here.
According to lslwiki.net, setting collision sound volume to 0 also disables the bump particles.
And Q: Is the collision sound a prim property? You know, like you can set a SitTarget with the script, then when you delete the script, the sit target still functions.
If so, I suppose it's be smart to delete the script from object's contents after the collision sound is changed, to keep running scripts in a sim to a minimum.
Aww, no TotW on SL official blog anymore… so does that mean there'll be a Planet Second Life soon?
Anyway, I wonder if I could directly upload OGG/Vorbis files.
@Geneko This is actually an interesting point. As far as I know the process during upload actually involves uploading a wav which is then converted to mono ogg, which is how it is stored on the asset server. There used to be an option for choosing which bitrate you wanted this encoding to happen at, which has now been removed.
However I am unclear of the exact process here, and I've yet to actually find a Linden who does know ! One of those things that got designed years ago perhaps !
Hi, Torley,
We have a service for game-guides and virtual world guides/tutorials here:
http://yolto.com/learn/
The guides can be distributed for free or for a price.
The main capability of this service is: title pages are always public AND SEARCHEABLE. So, if you add some text (embedded video and almost any html is allowed) to your title page it will be very easy to find.
You are welcome to post any of your guides/tutorials. Please contact me directly if you have questions.
Regards.
I love your new avie!
I don't suppose you know how to make awesome avies like that, do you? I've love to see a series on tuts on how to do non-human avies.