Dillon Levenque Posted March 24, 2013 Share Posted March 24, 2013 Ciaran Laval wrote: Considering you were blissfully unaware how much a private island costs and now you're suggesting that using 75% of your disposable income on Second Life makes it cheap, I'll take your response with a very large pinch of salt. Likewise. This might be about the right size for that pinch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lucretia Brandenburg Posted March 24, 2013 Share Posted March 24, 2013 Depending on where one lives, if someone doesn't own a car, grows his own food, maybe knits his own sweaters from wool shorn from a neighbor's sheep on the down low, and doesn't ever need to go to the dentist or get a pair of glasses, I bet 50k can stretch real far :matte-motes-wink-tongue: 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
161488303349 Posted March 24, 2013 Share Posted March 24, 2013 Teagan Tobias wrote: I agree, SL is expensive. VAT in the UK went to 20% on January 4, 2011. That brings $295(USD) a month to over $350(USD) a month. Not only is that a car but its a nice new car, and to put in prescriptive... Family decided to try camping and bought a camper and a truck to pull it. “His” truck was a Dodge RAM four door big V8, brand new off the lot not much over that $350 monthly, comfy to ride in and carried everything we needed and pulled the camper too. Not expensive for a big truck, very expensive for a place to play. historical currency exchange rates Apr 2003 1EU = 1.09US Oct 2007 1EU = 1.42US Mar 2013 IEU = 1.29US can see why LL stop absorbing the VAT when they did. was killing them. amount left over in their pocket. even with the VAT impost then was still cheaper for EU people to go on SL than at the start the exchange rate has come back since but even with VAT then EU people are no worse off than at the start. by the money left over in the pocket measure and EU people get the society benefits that comes from the VAT being applied to their community. maybe not personal all the time. until lost your job or have to go hospital. then get it all back your VAT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Orca Flotta Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 lol 16, it's not easy as that. Unemployment and Health are public insurances and not connected to the taxman. Same as pension funds. Different pots so to speak. Those insurance premiums are automagically substracted from your monthly wages. And your employer pays roughly half of it on top. In Germany we say as a rule of thumb that an employers pays roundabout twice your wages. VAT goes to the gov'ment to do with it whatever they fancy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Lucretia Brandenburg wrote: That's a good point Penny Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is going to jump on that bandwagon until they toss away their old too big content and I don't think many want to. I remember my first house in SL, the kitchen sink was big enough for me to bathe in, and I looked like a toddler on the staircase, and back then my avatar was 5'7". I think part of that is because people want to live "bigger" in SL than in RL, bigger houses, more land, etc. I'd say it has more to do with the fact that the appearance editor gives incorrect height (add about 6-7 inches to whatever the appearance editor says you are if you're using the official viewer), many scripted rulers are just as much off, the starter avatars have new users coming into SL at about 7' tall and social pressures that have guys especially unwilling to be the shortest guy in the room. (you see women shrinking down far more readily than guys). Also, for the most part, one doesn't need to get rid of old content. So long as your content is moddable you should have no trouble reducing its size. The bigger problem is getting people to try alternate camera settings (necessary for smaller content). Such camera changes are really easy to do, but they require you to change some numbers in the debug settings and the average SL users is unwilling to play with that. Lucretia Brandenburg wrote: I have to say, it is very difficult to get realistic, attractive proportions on a "short" avatar. It's actually easier to get good proportions on a realistically sized avatar. The problem is the appearance editor, it's very difficult to make drastic changes to a shape since you basically need to redo ALL the proportions just to change your height. The various appearance sliders interact with each other in ways that are not entirely intuitive and there's no single "size" slider that keeps everything in proportion while changing your height. I've been building up a library of free, full perm shapes I've been distributing to help people with that. The tallest avatar here is the 7'1" "Action Male" avatar. The shortest avatar in the above picture, the dwarf, is 4'10". I made an alternate version of the pictured 4'11" Japanese woman with "idealistic" 8 heads tall proportions, just to show that it is possible. Of course, another issue is that SL users are so used to the skewed proportions most avatars have (tiny heads, short arms, scary long legs) that realistic proportions look weird to a lot of people at first. (Tho people seem to get used to them very quickly, then find themselves unwilling to go back to their old shapes.) Attitudes on smaller shapes are changing. It used to be most adult sims had height rules which required you to be over 6' tall to be in their sims. Now, very, very few adult sims still have rules like that. In addition, more sims are being built to smaller scale since, like I pointed out in my previous post, it allows you to do A LOT more with the land you're paying for. An efficient builder can literally fit the content of four average SL sims into a single sim. The Wastelands, Doomed Ship, 1920's Berlin, the Mama Allpa sims, and others are all either already built to realistic scales or actively promoting it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Hexem Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Guilliaume wrote: You do not make very much money, do you, or perhaps you are bad at managing money? I am only saying this because, no, even $295 a month is not expensive. My free spending money for the month is somehwere around $400 and my combined household income is almost $50,000, which is like the lowest tier of middle class for the U.S.A. Maybe Second Life is expensive for people who do not have the money, but in the grand scheme of things, the fees are really chump change according to average household incomes. Sure, you can buy a car for lower than some of the fees, but that point is also ignoring the fact that buying a car is not hard to do. My first car was only $1000 and my second was only $5000. I paid for my first car on the spot with cash and I paid my second car off in 25 months with $200 payments with no previous credit history. If you want to talk cars, then allow me to point out that gas and car insurance alone are more expensive than $295 a month. Do you think one basic necesity is expensive? Regardless of prices though, Second Life's fees are there to show commitment to your ideas and support for the company that allows us to use their virtual world. The fees themselves and whether you view them as expensive or not is purely objective and nobody is forced to pay them. In fact, there are plenty of ways out there to create your own free open sim. Ask anyone- I'm one of the first people to offer the advice of throwing money at a problem to fix it, but that's a pretty retarded post. As for the topic at hand, prices in SL ARE too high. Ridiculous high. For the same monthly cost of a full sim, I could build a computer, every month, with better specs than the server the sim is on. Include the setup fee, and I could have a small server farm in less than a year. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
161488303349 Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Orca Flotta wrote: lol 16, it's not easy as that. Unemployment and Health are public insurances and not connected to the taxman. Same as pension funds. Different pots so to speak. Those insurance premiums are automagically substracted from your monthly wages. And your employer pays roughly half of it on top. In Germany we say as a rule of thumb that an employers pays roundabout twice your wages. VAT goes to the gov'ment to do with it whatever they fancy. (: sure can make it complicated. or not. like how we think about it. tax. levy. insurance. rate. payment etc. some of the names just sound nicer. but they all pretty much compulsory no matter what we call it. it all end up as the same thing. money we pay for things our tax systems belong to us. we get what we vote for in the end. if want to change then vote for change. cant expect other people who dont get a vote to pay our taxes for us. taxes we have in our own power to change + by comparison Mar 2003 1NZ = 0.52US Oct 2007 1NZ = 0.76US Mar 2013 1NZ = 0.84US so SL is cheaper for me now than it was back at the start. same for euro countries. not as much cheaper as us. but still cheaper Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pussycat Catnap Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Penny Patton wrote: Also, for the most part, one doesn't need to get rid of old content. So long as your content is moddable you should have no trouble reducing its size. The bigger problem is getting people to try alternate camera settings (necessary for smaller content). Such camera changes are really easy to do, but they require you to change some numbers in the debug settings and the average SL users is unwilling to play with that. Recently when having to adjust the cat furry avatar I now use down to my size, I discovered the joy of chat based linkset resizer scripts. There I was trying to eyeball stretching each paw by the same amount (click, drag, check that Z on the left toe, oops, its 0.01 different than the one on the right... oh and is this the same amount as I did the head by... and darn it, and eyeball just went out my left ear... ack, start over...)... And then I noticed the resizer I give away as a freebie is what I ought to try for this... And it works for EVERYTHING that can be modded. So after putting it into my new avatar. Measuring the difference in how tall it was to how tall I wanted to be... I was getting shorter by I think a factor of 0.82974... (ok I just made that up. but it was that specific, and I now have it written in a notecard, you will see why in a moment). So I pop it into the avatar and just type the resize command: /4 0.82974 - poof, entire avatar resized in about 2 seconds (cause I was laggy or it would have been faster). Then I thought... hmmm... this chair I bought is way too big... Popped the script in, typed in the same chat command. And poof, perfect for my avatar in a second. - Just had to remember to delete the script after, or EVERYTIME I type anyting in /4 it feeds it to that script. My freebie is nothing more than the same script the lindens put on the script library wiki. I just put it out as a freebie (with a link to the source) knowing most people have no idea there even is a script library wiki... (I could have charged for it... I'd be able to pay my tier off of the popularity of it, and I KNOW some of the others that are for a fee are identical. Though many are touch based). Advantage of a chat based one... remember that crazy number up there? Precision. Try and resize by EXACTLY 0.82974 down clicking some script a few hundred times to take off 0.05 per click... Oh yes and this: Penny Patton wrote: It's actually easier to get good proportions on a realistically sized avatar. The problem is the appearance editor, it's very difficult to make drastic changes to a shape since you basically need to redo ALL the proportions just to change your height. The various appearance sliders interact with each other in ways that are not entirely intuitive and there's no single "size" slider that keeps everything in proportion while changing your height. - It is amazingly easy to do proportions right when you're avatar is small enough that you can avoid maxing out the dials, but not so small that you have to minimize them. Right in the realm of about human size also happens to be a sweet spot for most of the proportion dials. Female arms being the notable exception... ONLY child AVs can get female arms right without being in some crazy high number... But they then have trouble on all of the other dials... Oh and yes, the first day I ever fixed my proportions, for the first maybe 2 hours I felt I had spider arms... then I logged out, looked at some art, and logged back in and noticed I couldn't look at about half the people around me without wondering how they managed to reach their own mouths... Because we spend everyday of our RLs looking at RL proportions, it really only takes a little bit of time to get used to it once you first see it in SL. The curse is that once you can tell the difference, a lot of your friends will look really funny for a while. Its often easier for me to look at my Tiny and Furry friends for this reason: no uncanny valley issues. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solar Legion Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 That's lovely ... there's a script that can help people resize their prims (be it avatar, furniture or anything else). But hey, guess what? Not everyone has the time, patience or even visual acuity to bother with all of this. So to those promoting "proper proportion" and "realistic scale" .... unless you are going to personally resize everyone's avatars and objects .... Quit trotting it out as if it is the end all and be all answer to everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christin73 Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Looks like a nice place and looks like you spent many hours building it. I know it takes alot to build things like that but the rewards are big. When you build and create something like that you hope people use it because it can get expensive. The rewards outway the expense and is well worth it in my view. YOu worked too hard to give it up so hopefully you can find a way to keep it going. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drake1 Nightfire Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 How many prims do you need for it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Solar, it seems more than a little silly to say a solution should not be recommended at all just because some people might not have the time or patience for that solution. Also, no one is suggesting one run out and resize everything they own all at once. You've been in SL since 2006, SL itself is about 10 years old now, so you should appreciate the wisdom in taking the long view. How many people in SL with avatars more than a few years old are still wearing the same clothes they bought when they first joined? Living in the same prefab houses? Using the same furniture? If content creators start catering towards smaller sizes it can certainly make it easier for anyone to scale down over time and eventually reap the benefits. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ceka Cianci Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Lucretia Brandenburg wrote: Depending on where one lives, if someone doesn't own a car, grows his own food, maybe knits his own sweaters from wool shorn from a neighbor's sheep on the down low, and doesn't ever need to go to the dentist or get a pair of glasses, I bet 50k can stretch real far :matte-motes-wink-tongue: OMG! this was good LOL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solar Legion Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Penny Patton wrote: Solar, it seems more than a little silly to say a solution should not be recommended at all just because some people might not have the time or patience for that solution. Also, no one is suggesting one run out and resize everything they own all at once. You've been in SL since 2006, SL itself is about 10 years old now, so you should appreciate the wisdom in taking the long view. How many people in SL with avatars more than a few years old are still wearing the same clothes they bought when they first joined? Living in the same prefab houses? Using the same furniture? If content creators start catering towards smaller sizes it can certainly make it easier for anyone to scale down over time and eventually reap the benefits. I've been here long enough to know that there is a difference between offering a solution and pontificating over one's views. Offering the idea of scaling everything down/altering proportions as a solution is as simple as saying "Perhaps you could scale your build down and make your proportions closer to being 'realistic'" and then offering a link to documents that go more in depth if the user shows interest/thinks it would help. Every single time an issue concerning land tier vs. space crops up (every time I have seen at any rate), users (including yourself) have come along and pontificated on the subject. At least once in the last year ... at great length. Indeed, in your own response to me, you could not help but add in a little pontification! Content creators making clothing, buildings and the like "to scale" will not help those who do not have the time, patience or visual acuity to "scale down over time and eventually reap the rewards." To sidestep this for a moment and address something else from your response: Most that I know are constantly adding to their wardrobes and constantly changing their homes and furniture setups. I myself have multiple outfits and even complete avatar changes. My home(s) have remained a constant for going on two years now with the only furniture changes being upgrades released by the manufacturers. I sidetracked to address this for a reason: Once a user has found a look or set of looks that they like, they will not be quite so prone to changing shops (and thus, styles) simply to "scale down." They would have to rely upon their favored shops to rerelease prior work in the newer scale. This is why I ended my prior comment the way I did. Unless those who are so vocal about this scale change are willing to personally alter things for those whose time, patience an/or visual acuity prohibit them from altering their scale/proportions .... The most such a thing would do if ever adopted grid wide (yes, hypothetical future/outcome) is to alienate them. On a far more personal level, I myself fall into the lattermost category: I do not have the time, the patience nor the visual acuity to undertake such a thing. Most that I know simply do not have the time nor the patience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Hexem Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 I'd love for everything in SL to be to scale. But it will never work unless some sort of standards are set up by a central authority, AND all creators re-release everything, for free, at that scale, or at least offer moddable updates. Vehicles in particular come to mind. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perrie Juran Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Gadget Portal wrote: I'd love for everything in SL to be to scale. But it will never work unless some sort of standards are set up by a central authority, AND all creators re-release everything, for free, at that scale, or at least offer moddable updates. Vehicles in particular come to mind. ^^^^ This, what I have bolded. The problems date back to Primitar and then the settting of the base lines which are described as being an "empirical judgement." The same thing occured with the settings for Avatar Physics when they were introduced and Torley acknowledged the base settings could have been done much better when I pointed this out. (I'm being too lazy right now to provide th elinks, but I can document the above) So the only two ways for what Penny is saying to happen (and I do agree with her that it would be better if everything was scaled properly) is that either LL pushes a magic button that automatically rescales every thing or by attrition. Personally speaking, I do see a trend toward more realistic Ava's and fewer so called "Amazons," but it is very slow going. But doing it that way could take years. I wish I knew a quick and easy way for it to happen, but with out LL's intervention, it's going to be a long road if we are to ever get there. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lucretia Brandenburg Posted March 25, 2013 Share Posted March 25, 2013 Here's a pic of my 5'5" self at the movies. Of course, it gets really fun when I'm hosting a skinny dip and standing next to a naked 8 foot tall DJ ... WATCH OUT, THAT IS GOING TO PUT MY EYE OUT! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solar Legion Posted March 26, 2013 Share Posted March 26, 2013 Gadget Portal wrote: I'd love for everything in SL to be to scale. But it will never work unless some sort of standards are set up by a central authority, AND all creators re-release everything, for free, at that scale, or at least offer moddable updates. Vehicles in particular come to mind. And therein lies the meat of what I have been saying Gadget. Despite the trend for more "realistic" scale and proportion ... There still exist content creators who have not adopted this mindset. With that said, my smallest appearance change (that I still use) is somewhere around 6'4". The absolute tallest are full prim changes which come in being significantly taller. For the non-human appearances, this is perfectly fine: Each ne was based off of old RP characters that are supposed to stand out. The hybrids and more "human" types stay at the lower end of that scale as well. To be perfectly blunt, I have always found the "realistic" scale/proportion to be visually "off" on a monitor where SL is concerned. That includes the well done versions some here have showcased, even when the screenshots are done with a properly scaled environment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pussycat Catnap Posted March 26, 2013 Share Posted March 26, 2013 For every forum hero that comes along and says "How dare you show me how to hold it when I use the bathroom without offering to hold it for me"... I get 2 people thanking me for the articles and comments I post on the subject. Thing is... mommy can reach over there and yank it off of you and hold it right... or just give folks enough instructions that those who want to do it right can figure it out. Because surprisingly enough, a -LOT- of people want their SL to look better - they just don't know why it doesn't look as good as it could. I'm likewise extremely thankful to the people who first pointed this out to me, and the people who pointed out windlight, and the neighbor I used to have who would hassle me every day to 'go take that class at NCI on building and stop moaning about how nobody's selling what you want' - because she got me hooked. We're not here yanking it off of you... and you don't have to read the advice if you don't want to know... and we're not demanding you do it. Ignorance should be a choice, not something that folks get stuck with; so I'll keep spreading the news. - This isn't like the countless times people get ejected from sims for being small... We're just forum trolling; which is pretty harmless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted March 26, 2013 Share Posted March 26, 2013 Solar Legion wrote: I've been here long enough to know that there is a difference between offering a solution and pontificating over one's views. This isn't some opinion or religious idea, it's basic design principles. You build twice as large, you're using four times as much land area and a comparable amount of extra Land Impact. Of course I'm going to point that out when people complain about the cost of land. These things are directly related! It's really as simple as that. As for your fears of alienation, it's not like all content in SL except for your own is going to be scaled down overnight. Even if all content creators and Linden Lab themselves pressed the issue it would take a couple of years of people slowly phasing out old content before it became the norm. If it makes you feel any better, I do believe that, going forward with new releases, content creators, especially those selling houses and furniture and whatnot, should include both properly scaled versions and larger versions, or a script to make it easy to switch between them, so that the customer can choose which they'd like to use without having to mess with the build tools. With, if mesh, an explanation that the larger version uses more LI. You, yourself, admit that you've only had the house you own for a couple of years now. What about the four years before that? Are you so certain that you will never see a house in SL that you think looks better while simultaneously taking up less LI cost and be tempted to upgrade? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted March 26, 2013 Share Posted March 26, 2013 Perrie Juran wrote: So the only two ways for what Penny is saying to happen (and I do agree with her that it would be better if everything was scaled properly) is that either LL pushes a magic button that automatically rescales every thing or by attrition. Personally speaking, I do see a trend toward more realistic Ava's and fewer so called "Amazons," but it is very slow going. But doing it that way could take years. I wish I knew a quick and easy way for it to happen, but with out LL's intervention, it's going to be a long road if we are to ever get there. Agreed. There is a standard present in the measurements of SL's own build tools, however as long as LL starters new users with 7' tall avatars, that will be the norm and any trend to the contrary will be slow going. If LL introduced realistically scaled starters tomorrow, and retired the older starters to the Library, it would still be a couple of years before that became the norm. However, I don't believe there's necessarily anything wrong with that, either. SL is ten years old, if they had introduced realistically sized starter avatars five years ago, by now it would no longer be an issue. It pays to take the long view. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suspiria Finucane Posted March 26, 2013 Share Posted March 26, 2013 Gadget Portal wrote: I'd love for everything in SL to be to scale. Just curious, how to you scale imagination? SL would be a boring place indeed if it mimicked RL in every way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted March 26, 2013 Share Posted March 26, 2013 Suspiria Finucane wrote: Gadget Portal wrote: I'd love for everything in SL to be to scale. Just curious, how to you scale imagination? SL would be a boring place indeed if it mimicked RL in every way. This misses the point. It's not about mimicking RL, it's about getting the most out of SL. For example, avatars, without tricks, can be anywhere from about 4' to about 9', except the vast majority of SL avatars are squeezed into the topmost extreme, 7 to 9' tall. So, anyone who wants to be a 9' tall giant has their imagination restricted by this. You can't look like a 9' tall giant when the average guy, who thinks he is 6', is actually 8'. When everything is out of scale, it removes your ability to deliberately use scale in design. Anyone who wants to build a large, detailed environment in SL, whether it be their own avatar's home or a massive roleplaying area, also has their imagination constricted if they don't take scale into consideration. When you make things larger you have less space and prims available to do more. Not to mention the performance issues. If everthing is made to scale, 128m is 128m. If everything is scaled up huge, then you need to increase your draw distance to 256m to percieve the same amount of content, except due to how LOD and CG rendering works, you're videocard is struggling to render far more. SL is straining to send more information to you. More information needs to be constantly updated. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solar Legion Posted March 26, 2013 Share Posted March 26, 2013 Penny Patton wrote: Solar Legion wrote: I've been here long enough to know that there is a difference between offering a solution and pontificating over one's views. This isn't some opinion or religious idea, it's basic design principles. You build twice as large, you're using four times as much land area and a comparable amount of extra Land Impact. Of course I'm going to point that out when people complain about the cost of land. These things are directly related! It's really as simple as that. As for your fears of alienation, it's not like all content in SL except for your own is going to be scaled down overnight. Even if all content creators and Linden Lab themselves pressed the issue it would take a couple of years of people slowly phasing out old content before it became the norm. If it makes you feel any better, I do believe that, going forward with new releases, content creators, especially those selling houses and furniture and whatnot, should include both properly scaled versions and larger versions, or a script to make it easy to switch between them, so that the customer can choose which they'd like to use without having to mess with the build tools. With, if mesh, an explanation that the larger version uses more LI. You, yourself, admit that you've only had the house you own for a couple of years now. What about the four years before that? Are you so certain that you will never see a house in SL that you think looks better while simultaneously taking up less LI cost and be tempted to upgrade? For the last four I had no house. And Penny? Like I said, I have no issues at all with offering solutions. I have issues with pontificating on them time and time again. Offering a solution is as simple as saying "You could try this" and then offering a link if the user is interested. No need to get into specifics, especially outside of the Answers section of the forum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted March 26, 2013 Share Posted March 26, 2013 Solar Legion wrote: And Penny? Like I said, I have no issues at all with offering solutions. That's not what you stated earlier when you said, "So to those promoting "proper proportion" and "realistic scale" .... unless you are going to personally resize everyone's avatars and objects .... Quit trotting it out as if it is the end all and be all answer to everything." Second of all, my first post to this thread pointed out that the OP could try building smaller, with only a brief explanation of why that would work and links to examples and more information. Pretty much what you're saying I should have done. If it's my subsequent posts that you have a problem with, those were responses to questions and statements regarding what I'd posted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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