Parhelion Palou

Your draw distance determines how much shows on the minimap. With a short draw distance you won't see much of the next region until you get close enough for the region to be within draw distance. I don't know of any way to speed up the process other than increasing your draw distance. With my draw distance set to 1024 meters I could get 36 regions in the minimap with the map zoomed out as far as possible.

Note: You can't get 589 sqm of land. The smallest unit of land is 16 sqm (a 4m x 4m square), so all parcels have sizes evenly divisible by 16. The closest you can get (and stay under 589) is 576 sqm.

SL's involvement in audio and video streams is to get the URL to the viewer. The streams go directly from the source to your computer. There's no standard port for streams either; they can (and do) vary a lot. If you don't want to open ports in order to get the streams you'll have to stick to a few that you like and hope the parcel owners don't switch to a different stream. You could also find a stream you like and play it through a media player on your computer. Then set the viewer so it doesn't play audio automatically.

In honor of a recent poster who will, with luck, make his exit forthwith ... fifthwith even. I'd say I spend perhaps as much as 20% of my time in SL communicating. Guess I'm failing at SL.

I tried that -- rezplat did rez a platform, but anything I tried to rez on it never showed. I'd get a "couldn't rez at this location" message instead. If I right-clicked on the platform then clicked anywhere else the platform would disappear. The platform must have deleted itself; I didn't get an off-world message.

LL designed Sansar to run on the cloud (it is AWS); now they want to do the same with SL. Their data center is rapidly becoming antique and they figure it's cheaper to move onto the cloud then to rebuild that data center. The job will be more interesting than with Sansar -- for one thing SL has region crossings so there's a lot of CPU to CPU communication that Sansar doesn't have. They'll need to make sure that region crossings don't get worse. We're supposed to get database upgrades too.

I assume LL will use the same service that they use with Sansar: Amazon Web Services (AWS) As for hacking, that's really up to the people renting the service. The leaks I've heard of have been from people not securing their data or using stupid passwords.

For completeness: For estate regions, estate managers and owners can restart regions themselves.

I tried moving objects above 4096m recently as a test for a similar question. I wasn't able to move anything higher than 4096m. Perhaps the ability to do so was an undocumented feature that was later corrected. Another reason not to bother to build at 7000 meters (if it was possible) is things start getting weird around 6000 meters due to loss of precision.

They were originally a premium area but haven't been for the last couple years.

That line is in more than one article. I suspect it either got mangled long ago and has been copied without examination since, or has been wrong since the first time it was used. Linden Lab wants dollars to pay for private estates. There's no way that I've ever heard of to use premium membership tier allowances on a private estate. It would be nice if it was possible; I've had a premium membership since I started in SL though I only owned land on mainland for a 2-week period in 2006. I wouldn't mind using my 512 sqm to help pay for the region I own.

Here's another attempt at the pyramid: Maddy and Hippie made it into this attempt as did at least a couple other forum regulars. Maddy was having computer problems & couldn't manage to stay online for long. Maddy: I did see Rhonda and Clover earlier but I didn't start taking crowd pictures until some time after Rhonda left. So here's Clover: I was there almost the entire time; I didn't see Dres there.

The bonus applies equally to all parcels in the region. You can't set bonuses per parcel. You could set the bonus level to 1.48, which gives all parcels a max LI of 1850. Then put a prim/LI counter on three of the parcels that's set to alarm/notify if more than 1050 LI is used. It would be a good idea to make sure the 1850 LI parcel has some free LI in case someone rezzes something that blasts through the 1050 LI limit on any of the other three parcels.

I've never seen jittering until somewhere above 6000 meters. My work platform is around 3000 meters up and things behave well (at least out to a fraction of a millimeter). Jittering at 500 meters would be unusual, but I have no idea if some combination of graphics settings could cause it.

That's the much newer version of the original map, which was often broken and very, very slow. I generally create a SLURL myself or use the in-world map, but someone posted (in Answers, I think) recently to say that search doesn't work in the current Maps page. He'd been trying to find one of Skye's regions, but it came up as not found. I found the page and played with it. The Maps page only searches in "SL Places" and "SL Events", so most regions don't show up. You could use the Create a link thing to create a link to the region you're searching for, then use that URL to go to it on the map, but to me that's not worth the trouble. An option to search everywhere ("World") would be good.

There's a pop-up window to create a map link off of the Second Life Maps page. Click on "Create your own map link" in the upper right. That one works, so perhaps there's an older page that isn't working.

Go to Marketplace, enter sci-fi in the search field, click the Search button. There will be over 20,000 results that cover practically every category. Click on the category you're interested in to see what's there. There's way too much sci-fi "stuff" in SL to give you answers that cover the range of possibilities.

What keeps Linden Lab going is land, especially payments for estate regions. You don't need to be premium to own an estate region, so I wonder how many of the people paying a big chunk of LL's income are premium?

Exactly right -- it may have been possible to move things above 4096 m in the past (though I didn't have any luck with it years ago either), but you can't move things past 4096 meters now. Taking a vehicle past 4096 meters is the same as flying off a region edge; you're unseated and the vehicle returned to Lost & Found. I just tried both to verify. Vehicles will work fine up to 4096 meters, though it may take awhile to get there. There's a small loss of precision at 4096 but it's not much worse than at other altitudes above 1000. If you're on mainland, put your station anywhere you wish. On estates, building something big at 1000m is usually discouraged or not allowed. My build platform is at 3300 meters and things work fine for me (and I'm a bit fussy -- I like working to the nearest millimeter at altitude).

A sim surround does eat up some land impact ... the center is on the region though it extends beyond the region. Textures go on sim surrounds, but they're not textures themselves.

Try it without the shoe base. It may not be needed with the Maitreya body.

The in-world map works. What doesn't work is the web-based one at http://maps.secondlife.com That's the one @Stevie Davros was talking about. It seems to be looking for things in SL Places, which is apparently a subset of the full region list. If you click on a SLURL you can get to the region. Weird.

When you set up the gift (entered the name, etc.) did you use Buy Now or do the purchase using the Cart? If you used Buy Now you bought yourself a copy. When you do a gift you have to do the purchase through the Cart ... that's where Marketplace puts it. As for the BBB: I've got some squirrels living in my back yard. I can tell them about your problem and it'll be just as useful as telling the BBB.

I hope companies don't try to destroy the planet in order to get a market for VR. VR as a mass market device is already dead; the hype wave has passed. Most of the goggles that were purchased are already sitting in closets alongside the 3D glasses for TVs. There are two problems with VR that can't be fixed: motion sickness and isolation. A significant percentage of people who use VR goggles will get sick, and people don't like to be isolated from their surroundings for long. A Sansar experience might be perfect for those who do use VR ... the odds of going through one in 15 minutes are pretty good. Then they can take the goggles off and do other things.

Perhaps Animare Pose & Animation System?