Miffy Fluffy's Multi-Love-Pose (MLP) script is a wonderful thing. Place it in an object (usually a bed), and you have a deluxe, menu-driven, multiple animation, fun contraption to enjoy with your sweetie. What's more, you can add animations of your choosing to the MLP. Variety, after all, is the spice of (second) life.

The only trouble is the MLP can be a bit daunting to configure the first time, especially for newbies. Let's walk through the process together, and I think you'll agree it's not too difficult when you take it step by step. We will install the MLP and add a new pose. Basic building skills are assumed, but I'll try to be as verbose as possible for those of you who are new to all this.

[Note: I'm writing this while the grid is down, so I can't log in to execute the procedure and make the descriptions below more detailed. I will come back later when the grid is up and fill in the details. When I've done so, I will remove this note.]

Find the link to the latest version of the MLP in Miffy's profile (Find > People > Miffy Fluffy). TP over to the location of the latest version, and take a copy. At the time of this writing, the MLP is distributed in a single, blue, rectangular prim. Now go back to your home (or a convenient sandbox) and rez your copy of the MLP.

The MLP is actually a set of several individual scripts. Edit the prim and view the contents. Note the names of the scripts and the default animations that come with the MLP by default. Don't modify anything yet; just have a peek to see the basic organization of the system. In the next steps we'll roll up our sleeves and make customizations.

Now, ordinarily the next step is to place the whole MLP system inside another object, usually a bed. I have a slightly different strategy. I flatten the distribution MLP object, and make it transparent (and possibly tint it), so that I can lay it on the surface of whatever object I want to have MLP functionality. You can cover the surface of a bed with it, or adhere it to the headboard, or what-have-you. If it's as thin as possible (ie. 0.010m), transparent, and fitted properly, it should be "invisible".

The advantage of doing it this way is, if you decide to move it to another piece of furniture later, you can just move it, rather than extracting everything from the old piece of furniture and adding it to a new one. In other words, it's portable and self-contained, and yet can be inobtrusively attached to anything else.

Select a poseball set you enjoy, and rez a copy. Note that you DO NOT need the poseballs themselves, only the animations -- the MLP will rez poseballs itself.

Couples' poseball sets have two animations -- one for the girl and one for the boy -- so you'll most likely need to unlink the balls to get at the individual animations. You can also get at the individual animations by clicking the "edit linked parts" and then selecting each ball individually. Place copies of the animations in the MLP. Be sure to note which animation is the female animation and which is the male animation. You'll need to know the exact names of the animations in the next step.

Edit .MENUITEMS in the MLP. You may want to make a backup copy before you make any changes, just in case you make a difficult-to-fix mistake later. (Select all the text and paste it into a text document on your local computer.)

The syntax for poses is... [fill in when grid comes back]

The order of the menu items is different than you might expect. It goes... [fill in when grid comes back]

Now save your changes and close the editing window.

Click the MLP and choose restart from the menu. When the MLP has fully restarted, click again and choose your newly added animation from the menu. Now's a good time to offer tp to that special someone for a little testing. When you select the new animation, the MLP should rez poseballs. Try them out and adjust positioning as necessary. The adjustments you make affect only the currently running animation. Once you're satisfied with the positioning, choose the "save positions" option on the MLP menu.

This step isn't strictly necessary, but to be thorough, I like to shutdown or restart the MLP and then test out my new animation from a cold start. Provided you did the above steps correctly, it should work perfectly.

Whew! Congratulations on adding a new animation to the MLP. Now you can repeat the process for any other animations you're fond of. After that, there's nothing left to do but enjoy. So... enjoy!

[revised: Wed Sep 13 18:36:33 PDT 2006]