Qie Niangao

I haven't had a chance to watch a minute of it. Just caught this on Inara Pey's indispensable blog: Looks interesting

An attachment can keep a history of your last many distinct cam position and focus pairs. That part is easy and good enough to get back to where you were looking, say, five minutes ago. It's not necessary to sample the cam all that often, and only need to record anything if the cam moves, so it's pretty negligible as a lag contributor. It gets a little trickier (but still not very resource intensive) to use llCastRay to try to identify what the cam is looking at. That can provide a readout of stuff the script can find out about the object (or land, or avatar) in view, and to tag some stored cam positions with object name identifiers. I find it handy for personal use, but it also unveils the many frustrating ways llCastRay runs amok. As a product, it would deserve a crappy rating, there's no fixing it, and it's beyond anyone's patience to explain why it's so often so confused.

I suppose many of the creators just don't know any better, and have overgeneralized a rule that things they embed need to have permissions stripped (especially animations, for AVsitter users). But I'm at a loss for re-educating them that respecting intellectual property doesn't mean locking everything down. Sometimes I try to explain, but I'm not sure I've ever succeeded.

That sounds scary, though. It wouldn't be an option at all if the objects were modifiable, so deleting one could destroy customer content it contains or links to or is painted on its side, all assuming the customer hadn't locked the thing, defeating the whole process. But even no-mod, the object could be known by its UUID to other customer content, such as particle beams. Then there's Land Impact: the replacement must have no greater LI than the one its replacing, and only rez after the old one is deleted, freeing-up the LI for that replacement. Even so, if I tried this, somebody would have a script rezzing up to parcel capacity the instant any becomes available. The really sad part is that the other alternative, updating through remotely supplied object parameters, got significantly nerfed with mesh, whereas before a script could change any object into any other object of the same or fewer links (at least).

I'm given to understand that the "no fly" land attribute is just a hint to the viewer, not anything the simulation enforces. If that's true, then anyone who wants to preserve the "feature" might lobby their favorite TPV to create such a setting. Come to think of it, I'd love a setting that made me arrive flying whenever I TP anywhere. If the landowner doesn't like it, ban me, see if I care.

I hate no-mod, but no-mod configuration notecards are hilarious. Unless they're also no-copy and contained in a no-mod object, all notecards that can be read by script are one easy script away from full perm. What I find especially annoying are scripts like AVsitter distributed no-mod. If merchants want people to respect their IP, they should really stop violating the terms of their open licensed components. Furries may have a special reason for valuing mod perm, specifically for fitted attachments: the more stuff you need to attach, the more valuable the ability to link stuff together as fewer attachments. One precaution though about linking attachments: scripts might misbehave if they're not robust to changing link numbers. Speaking of scripts, one of the best things about mod perm attachments is the ability to fully remove all scripts—often unlike "delete scripts" options—and reducing script count really does improve the odds of arriving intact in a new region. (Please, creator, if you're going to make it no-mod, for the love of god, offer a way to get rid of that auto-alpha script; those aren't for grown-ups.) Finally, I've noticed a little trend of giving mod perm to fatpacks only. I feel a little weird about buying those because it indirectly rewards those merchants for distributing no-mod single packs, but on the other hand it rewards them more for the mod fatpack I actually bought, so I tend to do it. And I usually soon regret it if I buy the no-mod single-pack.

Hot off the press: So no dates, but it's coming. Sequence of the snack/RC simulators aren't necessarily fixed (but I suspect they're pretty eager to get VoiceRTC out, whichever release it ends up in).

No-copy items make everything so much more complicated. It's possible the ticket can help get them back, but the fact there are no-copy items involved makes it especially tricky because anybody working the ticket should first establish for sure that the items weren't returned, so as not to create unauthorized copies by "returning" them from region history. Most of the no-copy items I ever acquired have vanished one way or another over the years—and good riddance. They were all more aggravation than they were worth.

Yeah, hence my earlier footnote edit. On that much longer timeline, it's possible the investors got impatient with progress and a decision became inevitable to focus on the new opportunity. Still, though, they're turning away from a pretty big cash cow here; one would think they could get somebody to at least keep it running even if their focus shifted. Roblox is big, but I'd be surprised if Blueberry is hauling in such mega-Robux as to already see all that SL revenue as a mere paltry distraction. As to the cast of characters, I realize the Forums policy forbids naming names, but we're quoting from an article here so there's: "Founded in 2012 by Mishi McDuff", "… said McDuff, in a statement", and "excited to support Mishi and her team", and "Katherine Manuel, chief operating office", "Manuel will be speaking", Then in another GamesBeat article from April 2023, more names: "Ashley Hopkins, chief creative officer at House of Blueberry" "Emily Eitches, head of business development at the House of Blueberry" So... I've kinda lost track of why it matters and don't know any of these people, but I don't see why we'd need to skirt the known identities of company officers with titles and all. That's a very long, detailed interview article. It's a subject I never cared about before this thread, but I found this quote interesting:

!

Interesting. That was public back in mid-January and it took them another quarter[*] to announce they were pulling back from SL. Their SL revenue stream must be pretty big, and the investment is US$ 6M, so the clock is now ticking for offsetting loss of that revenue as the operation shifts to the Next Big Thing. I guess Roblox would be the safest bet but it seems a little boring to attract investment, unless it's just a first step towards something more exciting. Something I wouldn't have expected: ________________ [* Edit: Wrong! See Kylie Jaxxon's post below. Make that a year and a quarter.]

Yeah, it's absolutely possible for any script to report its location (and anything else it can detect) to a remote server, without any way for the script owner to know it's happening. This is usually mentioned in connection with attachments (that give the info to stalkers), but it's just as easy for unattached items rezzed on land. And now that you mention it, I can imagine that especially something like a "security" script meant to appeal to landowners concerned with "privacy" would be the ideal delivery vehicle for a system that sends bots to investigate "private" areas. Fiendish.

That seems to have been the idea, with the bans taking effect before the potential intruder gets to the parcel. So it would deny access to the same avatars as would a regular whitelist banline, with which only the elect few can enter the parcel, the main difference being that being blacklist bans these go all the way to the sky. And yeah, that's the other analogue, the zero-second orb, that ejects or teleports home after intrusion. People hate zero-second orbs. Me included. (I agree that teleport home is vastly more disruptive than ejection. As I've said many times, llTeleportHome should never have worked on the Governor's Estate; what private Estates do to terrorize visitors can be up to them. I'm told there's money in marketing to "special" tenants who long to ensnare and tear the wings off careless passersby.) Anyway, operationally the device in that thread would be deeded to the land group, so in a rental situation the landlord could decide how avatars get exempted from the device's auto-ban. Maybe tenants wouldn't get direct land ban/unban powers but instead use a script or otherwise interact with the land-deeded script, and might themselves be added to the whitelist by the rental system. (I have no idea whether that thread's specific Marketplace item supports rental scenarios, though.) But none of this makes any sense for a public-facing parcel.

1. Happy Birthday! 2. "Different" is such a relative term. I grew up in a patch of Midwest US so homogeneous that the Norwegian immigrants thought the Swedish immigrants too alien to qualify as fully human, and vice versa. And the local town kids were a different species from the local country kids, and everyone knew and respected those distinctions. But facing Godzilla, even Kong is close enough. 3. Identities in SL are always at some level performative, or constructed at least. Some profiles, for example, are aggressively individualistic. Like "anybody who got the vaccine will be muted on contact" individualistic. While it might be amusing to try to bridge those differences, there's nothing generous in doing that, so I'm inclined to give them the wide berth they seek. At least until Godzilla blurs some lines for them.

Oh yeah, now I remember that thread. I remember trying very hard to behave myself even though I'd hate for such a system to become commonplace. It's really a way to use a "blacklist" named-ban script to get around the height limit of "whitelist" access control, but it's gussied-up as a way for orbs to avoid ejecting people from parcels by pre-banning them. So that script would indeed ban everybody upon entering the region unless they were excepted, perhaps in an owner-supplied list, or by having an owner-favored Group active, or whatever. That all would be working as designed, though, so the "scripting error" here would be… something else?