Indio Quinnell

When you say you're currently renting a quarter of a sim... does that mean, someone else owns the actual parcel, and you're paying them US$60 a month? If so, you're actually getting a pretty good deal, because according to the Mainland Pricing and Fees page, the land-use fee (a.k.a. "tier") on 1/4 of a mainland region (16,384 sq.meters) is US$75.00. So you're actually saving US$15.00/month with your current arrangement, which makes me wonder if you're really on mainland, or if you're on someone's privately-owned island with grandfathered pricing. (I suppose the other alternative would be that your landlord is making up the difference from another renter or in-world business somewhere else...) The main advantages to buying and "owning" the land yourself (though you're not really owning it, so much as renting it directly from Linden Labs, since you're still forking over a monthly fee for it) would be: (1) You're not dependent on the continued goodwill of whoever owns the parcels you're on now. If they decide to quit SL, you could unexpectedly find yourself with a new landlord (if they sell the property to someone else), or even with no land at all if they just abandon it. Now, one would hope that they would give you the first option to buy it yourself before handing it off to someone else or abandoning it, but you never know. (2) You can, in turn, sell off the property yourself to recoup some of your investment, such as it is, if you ever decide to leave SL, or just decide that you don't need the entire 1/4 region. You could also rent out parts of it yourself. (3) Greater control over the property; owning the parcels gives you access to the land-management tools, which in turn lets you eject or ban troublemakers from the property, prevent other people from using your area as a sandbox without permission, etc. It also generally means there's no covenant to worry about. The downside, of course, is that you'll be paying more per month.

I'm not sure exactly where "JustBecauseICanBeFriendly" is getting their information, but "frames" has nothing to do with anything. Assuming they mean "frames per second", frames are not something that the sim "has"; that's strictly a function of how fast your video card can render the objects in the sim. A slower CPU and video card will give you fewer frames per second than a faster one, but it's not something that the sim imposes on you. (Except indirectly, in that a sim full of sculpts and mesh objects with a couple of dozen AVs running around will take more horsepower to maintain a given frame rate than a relatively empty one with primarily prim-based builds.) Basically, it depends on what you're willing to settle for. My just-over-two-years-old Lenovo Z575 Ideapad, with its AMD A6-3420M CPU/GPU chip, manages to run Second Life at a reasonably respectable level, as long as I keep the draw distance down to 64m (or 32m if the sim is heavily populated or has lots of sculpt- and mesh-heavy builds) and don't overtax it by cranking all of the graphics preferences to their maximum. It's not the most ideal experience, no, but it works, and doesn't seem to crash any more often than my desktop machine does. If you can live with some limitations on how far you can "see" in a sim and how detailed or smooth the rendering can be, you can probably get along with something like this: Asus X54C-SX548V which is within your desired budget. On the other hand, if you really insist on having the full gaming experience with upwards of 60FPS at maximum resolution and all graphics sliders maxed out, you're either going to have to pay a lot more, or consider settling for a desktop PC instead of a laptop. (Here in the States, at least, gaming PCs are at least half the price of an equivalent gaming laptop.)

Well... First of all, I feel I should warn you that it is not just as simple as "using Winamp." I'm not sure if your friend explained this to you or not, but in order to stream the music you're playing on your PC to other Second Life residents, you first have to install the SHOUTcast DSP Plug-In for Winamp so that whatever music is being played in Winamp gets transmitted to your ShoutCast internet radio server. ...What's a "ShoutCast internet radio server", you ask? That's a service which receives the audio stream being sent from your PC, and rebroadcasts it out to the SL residents who are tuned in to your stream. How do you get one? Well... you have to subscribe to one, and pay for it. Yes, it costs money. The amount you'll have to pay will depend on what kind of service you get; some are a flat monthly subscription fee, others are a "pay-as-you-go" where you only pay for the bandwidth actually used and top it up as needed. (Much like a prepaid cell phone.) This may be where your plan falls down, I think. It's going to cost you money to DJ, and there's no guarantee that you'll make back enough in tips in-world to pay for the real -world $$ you'll be spending on the ShoutCast server. In fact, unless you really work your butt off getting gigs at popular clubs every night of the week, odds are pretty good that you will not make a profit at it, and probably won't even break even. So, if your plan is to not have to spend any more money to play Second Life, I'm afraid you're in for a disappointment. As for getting music onto your PC... iTunes is not the only way you can get MP3s, you know. You can also buy music off of Amazon.com and get it in MP3 form... and if you have a collection of CDs, you can always "rip" the music from the CDs onto your hard drive. Just Google "CD ripper" and you'll find several free and shareware utilities to do it. (You might even be able to do it within Winamp itself, but I've never tried it.)

Nuhai Ling wrote: Isn't Dio copyrighted by some band from the 80's? I asked my dad and he remembers it being very popular. Not quite. You can't copyright a single word, or a name. (If you could, some wiseacre would have already taken out copyrights on words like "the" and "and", and would be demanding royalties for pretty much every piece of english text ever written. You can trademark a name, but that's not the same thing. Trademarks have a much more limited duration, they have to be actively renewed, and -- most importantly -- they only allow you to keep others from using the same name in the same trade, and where there's a likelihood of confusion between the two. "Apple" is a good example. When "Apple Computers" got started in the 70s, there was already an "Apple Records." The record label couldn't keep the computer company from calling themselves "Apple", because they weren't engaged in the same business trade. (Although when Apple got into selling music with the iTunes store, Apple Records did threaten to sue... or maybe they did sue; I don't remember off the top of my head. I haven't had my coffee yet this morning. ) Another example would be the fact that pretty much every town in America has an "A1 Towing Service", an "AAA Bail Bonds", and an "ABC Auto Salvage", purposefully named that way so that they'll be near the top of any directory listings. But if the towing service in Los Angeles, California tried to sue the one in Atlanta, Georgia for using the name, it would be quickly dismissed on the grounds that both are local businesses, separated by a couple thousand miles, which don't advertise in each other's markets and don't serve the same customers, and therefore there's no significant likelihood that potential customers would confuse one for the other. Now, if the Lindens decided to start a heavy metal band under the Dio name -- or if the band ever decided to launch a social-networking service -- then there would be some legal hair-pulling between the two sides.

Before you report them, though, be sure that what you're reporting as a "hate group" really is one, and not just a group who expressed an opinion you disagree with. IMO, the word "hate" is over-used far too much as a means of shouting down opposing points of view. For example: A group named "Kill All Jew Pigs" -- hate group. A group named "Second Life Tea Party" -- not a hate group. "Skinhead NiggaKillaz" -- probably a hate group (and a group of illiterates, too) "Catholics 4 Life" -- not a hate group. "Obamassassination Planners" -- probably a hate group that the Secret Service might be interested in having a word with. ...and so on.

Your math is a bit off, I'm afraid. 96 x 80 is 7680, not 1680. The OP's 75 x 75 skybox needs a minimum of 5625 square meters. If they can find an estate manager (or a mainland parcel) who's willing to carve out a square 75m on a side for them, all well and good, but most sim managers I've seen seem to prefer to do fixed 512m plots at a 16x32 size, since it makes the math come out even along both the north/south and east/west axes without any leftover bits at the edges. Hence, my recommendation that they'll probably need to rent a 96x80 rectangle, arranged as a block of 3 x 5 parcels. (3x32=96, 5x16=80)

Well, there are actually two answers to your question. First, there's the issue of physical size. The absolute minimum parcel size you need is 75x75m, or 5625m^2 of space. However, sims are usually divided up into 512m^2 parcels, and the most common parcel size is 32m x 16m -- so to accommodate a 75x75m house or skybox, you're going to need fifteen parcels laid out as three rows (on the "long", 32m side) of five (on the "short" 16m side), for a total estate size of 96x80m. (This is assuming, of course, that the place you're renting from won't cut up the parcels to accommodate the exact size of your build. Most estate managers prefer to stick with standard 512m^2 plots because that makes it easy to divide up the sim, while odd-size parcels can leave unrentable sub-512m^2 bits everywhere. Also, having a few extra meters on either size does help reduce the chance that your prims will accidentally encroach on a neighboring parcel that you don't own.) The second issue is prim capacity (or "land impact", or whatever bloody stupid thing LL calls it now). A 512m^2 parcel generally gives you 117 prims to work with, so fifteen parcels will give you a capacity of 1755 prims on your estate. That should be enough to hold it, unless you go completely nuts with a lot of high-prim furnishings or massively-expanded mesh objects.

That sounds like the same problem as sculpted objects; you're colliding with the bounding box that surrounds the object. Did you set the object as "phantom", and/or "physics shape = none"?

MuffinUnsane raises a good point, above: When you say you're looking for a custom AV, do you mean that you want something that is completely built from scratch, all the way down to the individual prim-and-sculpt level, made completely to your specifications and only for your exclusive use? Because if so, yeah, that's gonna run you several hundred real-world dollars, possibly almost as much as having the actual fursuit made. Building an AV is a time- and labor-intensive process, especially since the widespread use of sculpts and scripted attachments has raised the bar for the amount of realism expected in an AV, and most AV makers aren't going to want to invest that kind of effort into a one-off project without a considerable amount of compensation. If, on the other hand, you're just looking for someone to re-color an existing canine AV with your blue dingo's pattern, that certainly can be done, and will probably be a lot cheaper. There are several creators on Marketplace who specialize in making mod kits for various popular AVs; you might see if one of them would be willing to take on the project. (Though I would still expect to pay a fair amount of real-world money for it.)

Well, yes and no... You could do sound by uploading the sound file, then have the script start playing the sound at the same time it triggers the animation... but again, I don't think the technique will work for a 2-minute video, as there's a maximum limit of 10 seconds on sound files (there are ways to work around this, by having the script actively queue up and play multiple files in sequence, but it gets complicated), and lip-synch won't be even remotely guaranteed. You could, in theory, do the same thing by having multiple image sequence-mosaic files, and having the script switch the texture face from one to the next when it reaches the last frame/tile in the sequence... but this, too, would get complicated. Plus, pre-loading two minutes' worth of sound and image files would be a significant burden on the player's viewer, and you can't necessarily guarantee that everything will pre-load before your script starts trying to play them. In the end, I'm afraid that what you're trying to do simply isn't possible, or practical, within the limits of the SL system.

Penny was referring to an animated texture. However, you can't just apply an animated GIF to a prim face, either; what you have to do is convert it to a single image that's divided into a mosaic of frames, then put a script into the prim to animate the texture by displaying one "tile" of the mosaic at a time. The technique is descibed at the various LSL wikis, here: http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=llSetTextureAnim http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetTextureAnim However, that's not going to work for a 2-minute video. Unfortunately, I don't know of any techinque that will permit what you're trying to do. Why, exactly, is the transparency important, though?

You can't directly apply a FLV file -- or any video file, for that matter -- to a prim surface. What you'd have to do is have the FLV file hosted over at YouTube, and play it the way you've been doing with other YouTube videos. However, I don't think alpha channels (i.e. transparency) are supported using that method, either, so I'm afraid the answer to your question is probably "you can't get there from here."

I suppose it could be done by attaching the jaw to the "chin" point and then using a custom animation (do objects attached to "chin" move when the mouth opens, though? I've never tried it), but I don't think this is actually how most furry heads do it. Usually, the way this gets done is that the jaw is a separate prim attachment from the rest of the head, and the root prim is a 100% transparent sphere with a script that causes it to rotate around the Y axis; when the sphere rotates, all of the "jaw" prims attached to it move as well, so it creates the impression of the jaw opening and closing if you position it properly.

Has she tried re-rezzing the prim and modifying it again? I'll bet you she'll be able to modify it again just fine, even though it says "(no modify)" in her inventory list. This happens to me all the time; SL's permissions system is kind of screwed up when it comes to differentiating between the permissions of the prim itself vs. the permissions of the content inside it.

Erf... sorry, I'm afraid I don't know enough about Macs to be able to answer a question like that. I'm strictly a PC/Windows users, so I wouldn't have any idea where MacOS keeps files. Hopefully, another Mac user will see this thread and be able to help you out.