Navigating in Your Huddles HUD 111002
THE ALL BUTTON
When I started dancing in SL using the Huddles HUD, I did not use a notecard. I simply used the All button. This listed all of my dances in alphabetical order. What fun :-)
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NOTECARDS FOR DANCES
The ALL button was sufficient until I got to about 50 dances in my HUD. At that point I learned about Notecards and how they allow you to arrange your dances in order. WOW! What an improvement. I could put the dances in the order I wanted and began to think about how to arrange them.
This led to arranging dances by speed. It also led to thinking about how to transition from one dance to another and what to do when the music stopped. My early Notecards looked something like this ...
Sultry Down Body
SLOW
stripper
strippers2b
strippers2c
swoon
danish
dip me in chocolate
crimson breeze
rythm6
Sultry Down Body
SLOW
erotic dance12b
Abranimations - Soft Wiggle
Slow_Seduction
Seduction 1|27|Sultry Down Body|2.2|Seduction 2
Sexy Dip - Abranimations
Sexy Bend - Abranimations
MDHUupdnHBD|12|Dance46|7|Dance38
rythm6
Sultry Down Body
MEDIUM
dizzy orchid
grinding nutmeg
precious morning
milk and honey
crystal roses
firefly
honeysuckle
rythm6
Sultry Down Body
MEDIUM
red chilli sheen
flaming sambuca
carnival
gimme gimme gimme
caramel|25|Sultry Down Body|2|Spirited Twirl - Abranimations
strawberrys and cream
jumpin
rythm6
Sultry Down Body
FAST
Abranimations - Clubbers 8
LETSGOCRAZY by OWENIMATIONS
I am on fire
this joint is jumpin
flapper
crazy legs
orange squash
rythm6
In this notecard I arranged my dances in order from slow to medium to fast. I put my transition dance, Sultry Down Body, on each page in the first slot (lines 1, 11, 21, etc), the speed on the second slot (lines 2, 12, 22, etc), and my waiting dance, rythm6, in the bottom slot at each page (lines 10, 20, 30, etc)
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NOTECARDS WITH SEQUENCES
When I got to about 200 dances in my HUD, I began to realize that I could not click through the 20 or so pages fast enough to easily switch between dances. This led to learning how to make sequences of dances that I often used together. A sequence is described in other DANCE QUEEN notes and looks something like this:
stripper|42|strippers2c|81|Sultry Down Body|1.8|swoon|45.5|danish|37|crimson breeze|25|dip me in chocolate|29|swoon|45.5|danish|23|Sultry Down Body|2.2|strippers2c
At first I used both individual dances in a Freestyle mode and a sequenced mode. As my number of dances grew, I realized that I had to start using only sequenced choreography and removed the individual dances from my main notecard. There are just too many pages to click through otherwise.
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ANOTHER SOLUTION OR THREE
Now, with the number of sequences approaching 325 and well over 4000 dances in my HUD, I am finding that another improvement in navigation is needed.
There are three ways to do this:
- One is to use separate notecards and navigate among them. With the Huddles HUD this means that I stop dancing while the new notecard loads. With large notecards this can take several minutes, which is not a good general solution. Other HUDs, e.g. Fleursoft, have much faster notecard switching and alleviate this problem.
- Another option is to use the feature of Huddles that lets you find a macro by entering in chat '/99n name of macro.' A macro is any dance sequence that uses the [NAME] macro, for example, Dance Sequence 120. Since I named Dance Sequence 120 in my notecard as 'Urban Killer' this lets me simply type in chat the following:
/99n urban killer
With this approach I can make a separate notecard listing all my Macros and copy and paste into chat. I can leave the HUD on one page, for example my page of Waiting Dances Between Songs. The notecard can be open and minimized in the lower left of your screen, then maximized when needed. Here are what some entries in the notecard might look like:
SLOW DANCES
/99n DD Slow
/99n Heat Wave
/99n SLOWnWETMEDIUM DANCES
/99n Urban Cool
/99n Urban Killer
/99n Pearl's a Singer
Each line represents a macro in my active Huddles Notecard.
- A third solution is to use two HUDs at one time. I wear one in the upper left and one in the upper right (in the Firestorm viewer).
MORE ORGANIZATION
The more I dance the more I realize that there is a lot more than speed that I use to decide which sequence to play with a song. I use something that I call feel. You may use other terms. Feel to me is like the strength of the beat. I defined three categories of feel: soft, moderate and hard. So I combined this with speed to get more categories in which to place my sequences, for example, MEDIUM-SOFT, MEDIUM MODERATE, MEDIUM-HARD. Of course there still are special categoreis like Macarena or Line Dancing or Rap, but for the vast majority of songs, this additonal categorization lets me do a better job of quickly choosing just the right sequence when I hear a song.
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NOTECARD CAPACITY
Although I use dance sequences almost exclusively for dancing in clubs, I still keep a long list of individual dances in a notecard. These are the dances that I plan to put in a sequence someday. I have the individual dances categorized as described above. Unfortunately, the maximum size of a notecard is 65,536 bytes, so, if you have a really big main notecard like I do, you have to put your dances for development on a separate notecard from the dances that you use regularly.
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If you have more ideas about navigating in your Huddles HUD, let me know.
xxxxx
Nottoo