How to Use the HUD Viewer

The HUD Viewer shows the HUDs your bot is wearing, rendered in your browser, and lets you click their buttons as though you were sitting in front of a viewer. It is how you operate a HUD-driven product on a bot without logging that bot in yourself.

What It Is For

Plenty of Second Life products are controlled entirely through a HUD: dance machines, rental boards, vendor systems, roleplay meters, group tools. A bot can wear those HUDs, but until now pressing their buttons meant logging into the bot account in a viewer.

The HUD Viewer renders the HUD from the bot’s own session and sends your clicks back to Second Life, so the HUD behaves exactly as if the bot had pressed the button itself.

Opening It

• Visit your LifeBots Dashboard at https://lifebots.cloud/dashboard
• Click My Bots, then choose your bot to open the Manage Bot page
• Click HUD Viewer

[IMPORTANT:] The HUD Viewer tile is greyed out while the bot is offline, and the viewer itself will tell you “Bot must be online to view HUD objects.” The HUD only exists inside the bot’s live Second Life session, so there is nothing to show until the bot is logged in.

Before You Start

The bot has to be wearing the HUD. The HUD Viewer displays what is attached to the bot’s HUD attachment points; it cannot show something sitting unworn in inventory.

To put a HUD on, open the Inventory Manager, find the HUD object and use Attach or Attach To... to place it on a HUD attachment point. See How to Use the Bot Inventory Manager.

If nothing is attached you will see No HUD Objects.

Choosing a HUD

If your bot is wearing more than one HUD, use Select a HUD to view: to switch between them. Only one is rendered at a time.

While it loads you will see Loading HUD objects... and then Loading HUD... as the textures come in.

Using the HUD

Clicking

Click anywhere on the HUD exactly as you would in a viewer. The click is sent to Second Life with the precise spot you touched, so multi-button panels and sliders register the right button.

Hovering over part of the HUD shows the name of that piece, which helps on dense HUDs where the buttons are not labelled.

After a click the viewer refreshes automatically, so a HUD that changes its own appearance updates on screen.

Zooming

Scroll to zoom in and out. Small HUDs with tightly packed buttons are much easier to hit zoomed in.

Script Dialogs

Many HUDs respond to a button by opening a blue dialog box with choices. When that happens the HUD Viewer catches the dialog and shows it to you, with its buttons, so you can pick an option and the reply goes back to the script.

If you would rather not answer, choose Ignore to dismiss it.

[NOTE:] The viewer waits a moment after each click to see whether a dialog appears. If a HUD is slow to respond, the dialog may not be caught. Click Refresh and try again.

Refreshing

Refresh re-reads the HUD from the bot’s session. Use it if the display looks out of date or a texture failed to appear.

HUD Viewer vs the LifeBots Control HUD

These two are easy to confuse, and they are opposites.

	HUD Viewer	LifeBots Bot Control HUD
Where it runs	In your browser, on the website	In Second Life, worn by you
What it shows	HUDs worn by the bot	Controls for your bots
What it is for	Operating a third-party HUD the bot wears	Commanding your bot from in-world

See LifeBots Bot Control HUD for the in-world tool.

Troubleshooting

Problem	What to Check
HUD Viewer tile is greyed out	The bot is offline. Bring it online and reload the page.
Bot must be online to view HUD objects	The bot went offline. Log it back in.
No HUD Objects	The bot is not wearing a HUD. Attach one using the Inventory Manager.
HUD appears blank or partly untextured	Textures are still loading. Wait, then click Refresh.
Clicks do nothing	You may be clicking a decorative part rather than a button. Zoom in and use the hover name to find the right piece.
HUD looks stale after a click	Click Refresh to re-read it.
Expected a dialog and got none	The HUD may have been slow. Refresh and click again.
Wrong HUD is shown	Use Select a HUD to view: to switch.
HUD works in a viewer but not here	Some HUDs rely on features that cannot be reproduced outside a full viewer. Confirm the bot really is wearing it and is in the right region.