Codewarrior Congrejo

As the others said already you can't unless you have any script that provides you with such an information. Closest Solution: Apart from an regular area scanner / visitor script; Create a Prim, put a fully transparent texture on it and set it to phantom and for the best make it flat and place it on the floor underneath the sofa long and wide enough so that anybody who wants to sit on your furniture has to step on it or at least contact it somehow (like a carpet). Do not link it to the furniture just place it underneath. Create a new script and copy & paste this script here inside: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Visit_Monitor Place your email address between the "" in string gEmail= ""; and save the script. This will notify you via email for everyone colliding with this prim (and not everyone just being in range). It should give you an overview of names who are getting close enough to the furniture in question and thereby assumedly sat on it ; ) I am still wondering why one would need to know who sat on their sofa, but I guess I am better off just to answer the question

I assume we are already too long here to get cakes.. they know they can't change our views anymore by drowning us in sweet cakes.. we are being considered a fix part of the interior ; )

It is hard to define because you described a number of various issues. Each of them can have different reasons. What you can try is the following: Clear your cache (settings > preferences) and restart SL. The fact nothing loads could be a sign of either a filled cache that doesn't want to refresh anymore or corrupted files in the cache. Especially the wrong naming of the regions from before etc kind of leads to the thought that the files stored in cache are messed up and not updating, thus displaying whatever last info they can connect to in the file structure. Try to detach extensive HUDs or scripted attachments once you maybe successfully got in. (those can cause issues too) Check your bandwidth / speed. (http://www.speedtest.net/) if nothing loads or things happen to update slowly or you 'crash' can also be a matter of instable or fluctuating bandwidth. Make sure to try and login with the latest update of the official SL viewer (in case you are having your problem with a thirdparty viewer) Regarding the teleport problem: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Landmarks-teleporting-and-SLurls/ta-p/700123#Section_.1a About mediasteams continuing to play also on the next parcel: there are a some known bugs about that and I have had that issue myself often enough: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-4519 Sometimes (another bug) it will also continue to play after closing SL. But that has something to do with not all processes being shut down after exiting SL. (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-9792) Unfortunately without knowing anything about your hardware specs these are the only pointers I can give so far. It could be that a recent update is not conform with your graphic settings and requires you to change your graphic settings. Or that after the update the SL viewer identified your hardware newly and set it to settings that do not work well - thus need to be changed. With ATI cards you should also try to disable VBO buffering. (Settings - Graphics - Hardware Button) Also always make sure you have the latest graphic card driver updates. Good luck. Code

As Rolig already said you have to contact the creator of the item. (rightclick it in your inventory and look for the creators name in 'properties') It sounds like the autoreturn is kind of meant to start a feed-back feature. (eventho it really is a misleading and kind of unconclusive naming).. just an assumption here from my side (regarding the quote: "i set it ... to be on spank back": it sounds like it would need a corresponding second spanker (attached to another person nearby). So possibly unless there is noone with the same Hud / Spanker system which could 'reply' to it with a spank back procedure it prolly won't do anything. Unless its just meant to drop another additional sentence after the spank.. like i will spank you back or something. But still the fact that this spanker has a full HUD system kinda leads to the above assumption of someone else needing to have it to in order to work. I am sure the creator will be able to answer this for you : )

I see. Hmmm.. <triangles count="528" material="MATERIALNAME"> <input offset="0" semantic="VERTEX" source="#ID7" /> <p>0 1 2 1 0 3...</p> </triangles> In this example the mesh has originally 266 verts in the <source> and the model contains 528 tris. In general it should be N vertices = N/3 triangles. But it reuses the vertices between the connected tris (stated in the <p> element) Which would mean the data any software has to read needs to a ) contain all the <source> IDs = vertices, 'plus' the list of pointers (<p>) vertices to reuse within a tris. SL stores 3 pointers. Then yes, here we reach that first break in the 'triangle/material grouping.' Interesting: 16 Bit limitation of 65536 divided by the first limitation/ break of 21844= 3,00018 .. A float..hmmmm (that horrible word 'rounding errors' comes to mind , lol ) But still yet so far sl still seems to do it right, until we reach the <library_materials> part (I guess library_effects they skip mostly due to not being in need to assign specularity etc. My guess is they just read up to the <phong> / <blinn> but I might be mistaken) In Collada each triangle group is separated by material and material ID. To find those you read through <library_materials>. The nodes in the library on the other hand only contains only one type of child <instance_effect> with an attribute = 'url'. Which refers to <library_effects> and completes the definition of the material. Though it still does not clarify why it would treat material 0 differently. What I could think of is maybe a reason of what was SL meant to be and what is it now. Before mesh introduction everything - except the internal prims - had just one face / one material. Speaking of sculpties here - them being the only thing a user could actively add to the environment- thus had to be read in and stored, applied with material etc. Sculpties could just have one material/texture. Thus there was not even a need to read for more materials then index 0, all the code in SL had to take care of was : assign material 0 to 'all' tris. (and the internal prims also just had prolly an own predefined material structure due to having a fix / predictable number of faces for each prim where u could assign a texture to) I am wondering if the old behavior plays a role in the code here, since SL still contains sculpties - and won't remove them any time soon for understandable reasons. Plus you also still can on a mesh (when you do not have a certain face selected) apply one texture across the whole mesh. But that is prolly not the issue as I assume all it does it telling it to set texture (diffuse) X to material 0,1,2,3 ... At the same time. But I still can't let go of the thought regarding sculpties and how the code may have been altered or where the procedures for mesh and sculpties maybe kind of interfere / mix up. Even with separated codeparts after detecting if its mesh or sculptie it could still intermingle somehow somewhere along the lines of interpreting tris, materials, etc. Just an idea =)

i assume it is a memory limit in storing the materialindex for all the faces / vertices in a mesh. it would also make sense in that case to just assign the first material or maybe the on-most-vertices used material to the pseudo faces in order to possibly cover it with something that is close by. That selecting face 0 leads towards all faces ( the pseudo ones included) makes sense since the index should contain all faces and accordingly sets the material to all of them. Why on the other hand there is a 'break' that splits certain of those into a separate selectable face/material is indeed odd. On the other hand it comes to mind that it might be a workflow related problem. When you work with subdivision on an obejct that eventually already got a metarial assigned it for sure does assign the same material in your editor to the subdivision faces- without needing to select / assign those newly subdivided faces again . But i am wondering if the metarialindex info gets distorted that way. and the editor itself can handle it due to its internal way it stores the informations, but maybe SL can't. Did you try to export that 'massively faced' cube (lol) with other programs as well, to see if it would behave differently ? Would maybe be a pointer towards if the Editor assigns unreadable values to the indexes and thus is a problem from there. Or if it is just the same no matter from where you export it ?

@ Drongle - regarding the SL Viewer AO and smoothing: yeah i noticed that, and it is indeed very bothersome

The Testgrid seems to be up again - just logged in sucessfully after almost a week downtime. Cheers! Code

lol oooh my gawd i have so forgotten about this old bug.. but yeah i guess we all remember the ehmmm 'good times' when all our attachments would be stuck together in one spot between our legs. As well as the famous 'i can break myself into 2 parts' (bending over) issue. And yes you never knew how you would come out of a teleport.. it almost felt like in the movie 'the fly'.. with the fear your avatar's DNA might be intermingled with someone else's and spawning that 'monstrosity' on the other side of the teleport

Happy RezDay Lucis ^^

unfortunately as the others already said. There is no legal ground with Lindenlab itself getting involved and forcing him to refund. You are only bound to the 'contract' between you and the landowner. Maybe check all information or rental notes he might have handed you before renting and see if there is anything mentioned about him being able to change the mainproperties without refunding to customers. In that case and in general you can just ask nicely and hope for his rational appeal in such cases and that he will refund you or change the settings to mature again.

You are very welcome =) To answer your new question: As Drongle already mentioned there are issues with meshes of more then 21844 tris. To quote his answer here: "There is a part of the source code that starts a new "hidden" material (but with the same name) when the triangle count for one material exceeds 21844. When you check "select faces" and apply a color (and I assume texture - I didn't test that), it gets applied to only the "hidden" material, leaving others unchanged. You have to select the unchanged bits and apply it there too" What you can do is making sure to separate into several faces / materials. In that case break the model down into 2 UV / Material areas. So the amount of assigned tris for one material doesn't exceed this limit. To achieve this you set your UV Seams as usual along the model and make an additional UV seam where you plan to split it into a new material. Try to choose this area of the mesh wisely because you have to keep in mind this is a 'break in the texture' so you will need to ensure that you paint the connecting areas on both textures in a way that the seam won't be visible or at least not noticeable. And this can be very tricky at times. create a new Image of the same resolution as the first one used in your material nr. 1 (otherwise you will have different looks / resolutions and that simply isn't nice to look at) With the faces selected create and assign a new material to them. And assign this new Image to this material. Make sure to select this new image in the image / UV view, and now Unwrap your model again. (Maybe 'pin' the Vertices of the former UV layout that you don't want to change in case you already made textures for it and to spare some work - and then just select and unwrap the ones of the new UV area) Save your file and the new image to your hard drive. When you now export your object to DAE and imported it into SL it will - just like a default cube in SL - have an additional 'face' that you can select in certain and pull its image texture onto it. The maximum of Faces / Materials a mesh for SL can have is 8. PS: but I still barely can think of any object that would need such a high amount of tris (except for certain high density structures). Even with a full avatar and clothes and hair combined in one mesh it shouldn't reach such an amount. To reach smoothness and round shapes or even sharp corners a lot people are mislead by the thought to achieve this by adding more faces and edgeloops. Because they can see the higher smoothing or more defined areas when pulling their subdivision levels up in their editing software. But all of this can be reached with Normal-Smoothing, Smoothing groups to create sharp optical breaks, and a generally good all over topology of the mesh construct. Also to make clothing work good with animation etc is a matter of where you placed your edgeloops and how the edgeflow fits to the underlying mesh and the armature that is later on moving it and not only by just adding an enormous amount of more faces. (high end game engines do this by adding tessellation at rendertime to smoothen the result even more - but also there the raw model itself is always made with the lowest possible amount of faces / tris / verts in mind to achieve a certain quality) Try to optimize as much as you can, to know how to optimize a model and keep it as low as needed to lower render impact and CPU power is what differentiates a 'good modeller and artist' from a 'I can do mesh' person =)

Here is one way to get the objects in the scene as single object exports (to OBJ, FBX, Max etc): http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/batch-exportimport Another one is this one here with additional functionality (triangulation, renaming of materials to match the objects and more): http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93587 Another way to to go for it and to also export in a format that is suitable for Secondlife's requirements would be the following: Get the latest version of blender. (it now has inbuilt an exporter to DAE with options explicitly for SL). Export your scene as wavefront.obj or as FBX - doesn't matter- and import / open it in blender. Now you can select the single object (rightclick it ) and choose export to DAE. On the lower left side you will find options - make sure to select here "selected only" (there are also some specific settings for rigged meshes to export for SL) Have fun creating, Cheers! Code

A very common problem is that many firewalls will see every new version of SL as a new entry. Thus you need to define a new rule / allowing it to access internet. or check if there is a blocked entry in your firewall's event log and set it to trusted application. (same goes for antivirus software check those too in case they blocked the SL viewer) Mine also keeps regularly blocking every new version of SL that i am installing/ updating to. When you are on it also make sure to allow the slvoice.exe again. The voice service also keeps getting blocked often after updates. Also as usual try to clear your cache (preferences) and restart SL to remove former cache files that could cause this issue. Another possible fix: if the above didnt help, the problem could be conflicting data and settings files within the SL folders itself. In that case try to uninstall SL completely, manually remove all left over folders from the install directory and then install the latest version fresh from scratch.

As the above already stated that's a big question and can't be answered with one or two sentences. - First of you might want to learn the in's and out's of how to use Photoshop in general. Either go with the suggestion mentioned above. Getting some PS Manuals in form of books or simply browse the internet. - In case you have a hard time finding something I dug you up some 'PS for beginners for your Version CS3: http://www.ozzu.com/digitalart-tutorials/tutorial-adobe-photoshop-cs3-for-absolute-beginners-t85745.html and http://www.photoshopwebsite.com/photoshop-tutorials/50-basic-photoshop-tutorials-for-beginners/ (be aware to search always for this version, CS3 is already quite some years old and tutorials for newer versions and functionalities will not apply to your version) - Once you learned the basics of Photoshop: a great site to get ideas from and very informative step-by-step tutorials is : http://psd.tutsplus.com/ Hope this helps you getting started. Cheers! Code

I am not 100% sure what you mean by "you can't get email on your security" Maybe try to describe the problem a bit further. I am guessing you mean some scripted security system? (in that case you should contact the creator of the security system) But just in case.. to make sure your emailadress is even correct in your settings: go to the SL main website , login to your account and switch to : https://secondlife.com/my/account/contact.php?lang=en-US and look for your emailadress there. When you can not find a certain object on your land there are several ways to possibly fix that. one of them being: Some HUDs Systems in SL offer the listing and finding of items by names by scanning the region for them and some even teleport you to the location so you can actively access / remove that certain object. (i won't provide names of those systems here to avoid advertisement - but u can surely find them in the marketplace). If you have admin rights on this land you could also try to remove objects from other people - but would only do that when you are certain there shouldn't be anything from someone else than you.

Yes unfortunately you need the payment information. And yes it also is one of the ways to get to you in case of copyright infringements or financial issues. The data you can provide as user information for your avatar can be pretty obfuscated and simple contain whatever fake names, addresses etc. Even when you registered for mature content with 'a' passport - this one could have been not yours. (PS: also yes: when something becomes an official lawsuit, providers of services like this one here can be forced by the court to hand over a users data in certain cases) Everywhere where money flows it is way easier to track you back. Because at some point in the line of transactions there will be a handover to you / or from you. Aside from that ( and yet still a part of the above) for uploading meshes you will need Linden. And mostly more then just the 10 L for the normally uploaded Image. So basically you need payment information to get that kind of money onto there. (unless you keep borrowing it or getting donations from other people all the time) And even if you would 'earn' that money by selling products you made in SL with their basic prims and textures you could find inside of SL (meaning never uploaded anything yourself, never used money transfers) then it comes again down to the subject 'to get to you' because when you 'earn' money even if just virtually and even if you never transferred it to your personal bank account - but yet you 'could' at any given point - so it is 'income' and hereby might reach the interest of the state, and other organizations for paying taxes etc. Thus there needs to be some way to track you and the money back. In legal terms no one cares if you access this money in real life or not. Income is income. (even though in 99% you won't have anyone bothering you because the amount is too low for being of interest. But all the 'could's' are making the difference here) But in general - especially when planning on making money out of it. You would need payment info most likely anyways. A) to afford the uploads (unless - as said - you can get all that being donated / borrowed by others, or financed by sells of default items) and b) to potentially access what you earned outsides of SL. About the tutorial / survey: I am successfully registered for mesh uploads and using it on a daily basis - and yet still when I return to the survey page I could just start the whole survey again. (it brings it up all new and fresh) there appears to be some issues with that page. Also in the testgrid (which you will need a lot in order to save real linden dollars by uploading and testing your meshes over there until they are ready for the upload into main sl), where you need to do that survey again to be able to upload meshes - there are some issues with even getting that survey opened. (I had to fiddle my way through the forums until I found a valid link where I'd manually go to and do the survey). It's a known issue and in the JIRA bugtracker, and will hopefully be resolved soon.

- to add not only the antivirus as also in most cases the firewall could have blocked the slvoice.exe - make sure to set a rule in your firewall to allow this process. As it is an own process and executeable just setting SL itself to allowed isn't enough in most cases. - Another known issue: skype. If the firewall or antivirus doesn't block the voice and everything appears to be as it should and you can hear others but your own voice just won't appear. try starting skype and go into tools > options > audio settings. check here if the microphone slider is maybe down to zero again and pull it up, save and exit. (skype has the tendency - even with automatic microphone adjustements being turned off, to set the mic volume down. And since it does that for the system settings it inflicts of course everything that would need a microphone output.

@ crypticzynergy : yeah there are several non-linden clients for secondlife on mobile devices (just as for the pc as well). A version similar to Lumiya I didnt see for iPhone yet. But also Lumiya has very limited funktionality. (as described above especially of course on the graphical side, limited view distances only up to 20 meters, etc) For a client for mobile devices that work with all full blown features like the pc version of SL we either need to wait a while until the mobile devices become even more powerful or until there would be an extra version of the SL engine itself to tap in with viewers from mobile devices which would be optimized for their limited ressources.

*nods, nods, and nods* (yes also 3 times!) ; ) It's like the advise i gave someone else yesterday about lighting for the scene to bake textures: find a good middle value. something that works in both cases (shadows or not) - he doesn't need to add something that 'is already there'. Those objects with either intense blocky black shadows with prolly raycasts and gathers of 1 or so lol are just a pain in the eye. Or the ones who have been baked with too much lights in the scene and each of them being set to cast shadows when u have an object that has the wildest shadows from all directions: also not a good looking result. And speaking of AO i wish people would be a bit more sottle with their AO overlays or bakes, especially when parts move a tiny bit apart and you start seeing that big black spot isn't really pleasing on the eye. I mean in some cases it might be a desired outcome in a matter of certain styles but in general try to be sottle and neutral as much as possible and make something that would work in both scenarios without being understated or overdrawn.

haha, well control is surely somewhat less when using the decimator algorithms. And I clearly would never leave it untouched / unedited in the end. But I agree with you and repeat what I said. I am mostly using it for shapes that don't have a really sensitive shaping such as an avatar (especially would never run it over the area of a creature's or human's face - that gives nasty results and is rather an addition for the horrorcabinett .. lol) For those I prefer control and my own 'handstitching' to optimize it's count. Apart from that it still can often teach you how far you can actually break a model down and still preserve its look. Btw. The new decimator also offers now to either triangulate or keep as many quads as possible - which I find a very good attempt. Cheers ! code

@ Drongle - true I should have removed the word 'landimpact' from that sentence. thanks for checking and testing it out that precisely! The whole LI calculation system of SL is still, to a certain extend, odd. Given the fact its counting towards their own system and server performance might be understandable that it is not always conform with the values we are used to from other 3D environments / CPU / GPU impacts. And may be one of the reason why I try not to think too much in terms of LI when it comes to the subject of an 'optimized model'. (and let's not get started about the subject on the difference in LI when it comes to 'sculpty versus mesh'. I can understand LL here but it just shows that it can't really be used blindly when thinking of draw calls and optimization) And also we might need to remember that they have joggled the costings of mesh and the calculated landimpact around quite a few times. Generally the impact and draw calls of separate objects would weigh much more due to them having more single used verts plus its 2 objects which need to be calculated stored and updated (i.e.. If you have a thousand triangles, it will be much, much cheaper if they are all in one mesh, instead of having a thousand individual meshes one triangle each. GPU costs will here be kind of similar but the CPU work will increase quite significant in such a scenario). Unless the independent parts inside this combined mesh are very far apart - in such cases lots engines would 'render' invisible triangles between them and also physics would be more expensive due to the larger all over shape bounding box and other factors. I am still often really tempted to ignore LI completely and go with the regular knowledge about graphics. And I am most likely not the only one. It sure is a 'measure-point' when considering what you will have to pay for the upload and how much it would take up in space in terms of a region or landimpact. But aside from this lots of it doesn't really apply to regular terms of making an optimized model. A valid point thou: I didn't think about it when when contemplating to separate or include the shadow in one object - was that you can and should actually leave the shadow plane with no physics - which you can't while its in the same model. So this is absolute correct from your side. So of course edited advice for the OP: keep it separated.

Heya Gaia, yeah you caught me here - i grabbed the first link i still had in my bookmarks for Domino / Primstar. Thanks for updating it. And don't worry about advertisment - i think i already made enough advertisement for you guys by pointing users to Avastar or your tutorial series on youtube. I found them very helpfull to forward for beginners because they explain everything very clear and understandable ; ) (and it spares my time explaining every little step ^^) For myself i don't really use or need them i am modeling long enough to know how to setup an own rig for me and i rather like to create my own topology then using predefined meshes. But i do love what you did with the creation Avastar it sure looks like a solid solution for everybody who wants to create solid models for SL without going through the hurdle to setup and understand everything on their own. Plus i have seen you added also the male model, the shapekeys, and animation to it. Keep up the great work !

With Smoothing you pretty much control how the normals of the faces are interpreted. So of course it can be of great use. I.e.. You can create a very sharp looking edge with a break in a smoothing group (normal's smoothing not breaking over this corner /break and due to that creating a very sharp optical break) without adding more edgeloops. But always weigh what solution you want to go for. Smoothing groups reduce the all over usage of Edgeloops and thus additional faces. But they do create more memory and render-impact in an in game environment. This is due to the fact that every UV seam, every smoothing group border etc has to 'separate' the vertices - thus creating duplicates. When being used very excessive with too many UV seams and too many smoothing groups you kind of negate the effect of sparing more faces by adding numerous amounts of vertice data. And vertices count is more important then the tris' count. (http://wiki.polycount.com/PolygonCount ) Non of the 3D modeling suits can actually show you how much 'in game' vertices your model would have. There are some scripts for Maya and 3DS that do such a calculation. But that really shouldn't be needed with such a rather low poly model. Generally i do not only consider Landimpact when thinking about optimization. Its a matter of the all over content in such an environment and the quality of content you want to create. Unfortunately the landimpact (as the above answers already mentioned) is rather a very vague value and does not really display the all over quality or heavyness of a model. Also I would never have SL generate the normals while doing the upload this also can cause troubles and unwanted / not controllable results. In certain when it comes to triangles versus quads. Quads are just something a modeler tries to keep to the very end of his creation state. Due to them making the model more conclusive and working better with subdivision, edgeflow, and creating the all over topology of the model etc. As soon as a model gets into rendering or an in game environment all your graphic card sees is just triangles and nothing else. So if you can't avoid to have some triangles in your model just go the full way and convert quads to tris at the end to achieve a more evenly spread normals behavior. The vertice count will almost not change when doing this because they share vertices at the end of each quad or tris. So this doesn't matter. And if you have a model mainly build of quads also for the final outcome/product then try to stay on quads to avoid such optical breaks in the normals orientation. Or put them in spots where they are almost not noticeable. Cheers! Code

Okay and another long answer to follow the above by Chosen Few. Since he already answered the most in a good way let me go into some of the unanswered: - to bake shadows it takes crazy time to calculate and render the texture... - how do u set up your lights? Shadows are depending on your settings raytraced / raycast. And also depending on the amounts that are set for gathering and samples it can take up quite some time to be rendered. And of course the more lights you have in a scene the more shadows and nuances of them it has to render and keep track of. One thing to keep in mind when setting up lights: not every light needs to be set to 'cast' shadows. Just as in nature some lights are just so called 'rimlights' or highlights which are only used to achieve effects from the real world with lights that bounce off from surfaces or are gathered very strong at a certain spot etc. - Ergo: don't cluster your scene with shadow emitters. Check which lights really need to be set to cast shadows and which are not. Have a kind of all-around working lightset in mind when you set up your lights. As Chosen Few already said there is no absolute rule and for sure no 'always working light setup'. Think about the environment your object would most likely be in ( a car = outdoors - aka an evenly distributed sun / sky environment would be preferable here, or a furniture = indoors- a few lamps and eventually lights from nearby lamps when you know where those would be in a scene / house - otherwise just choose a setting with a brightness similar to a house environment. Which is mostly 1 or 2 Lights from above and some Windowlight. Or when its the skin of an avatar a kind of studiolights setup mostly works best. And so on. Also keep in mind that SL has shadows and some skylights, and object lights. If the user didn't need to disable them or if their outcome is blocked by huge prims in the sky. You really don't need to add what's 'already there' or if you do so then in a lowered fashion so that it would cover both scenarios (with shadows/lights and without). Also the 'renderer' you are using can make big differences. (like the Turtle renderer Chosen suggested to you, Or Vray for awesome illumination effects with a very optimized rendering time.) Look at real life pictures of objects in similar scenes to get a good feeling from where light comes, how strong, where actually shadows are produced and where they are so sottle that you barely will need to recreate them for a texture bake. In general as soon as we leave the AO only sector rendering will always take longer. If you have ever seen how long a fully rendered image can take when it is supposed to have real life quality and lighting then you know what we are talking about. It can take up to several hours depending on your lights, settings and materials, postprocessing filters, shaders and so much more. Rendering in passes is also one way to achieve shorter rendering times. (just define which pass to bake and then combine in photoshop or gimp at the end. As chosen already assumed - I can confirm this: there is a 64 bit student version of Maya already for Maya 2010 and upwards. But yeah the watermark will make outputs rather unusable and you should overthink if you don't want to swap to blender. The earlier you start learning another program the better. Rather then spending lots time on one where you figure in the end you can't afford it and have to start over again. Cheers, Code