Damian Mills

I am quite comfortable in either mode. If I'm at a club and there's a public conversation going on I'm almost certain to join in unless I'm with a date in which case I tend to just be absorbed in private IM with that person. But if I want to address a serious statement to an individual rather than the crowd, then I use IM, for instance, "Would you care to dance". I honestly don't see much of a difference between the two and I don't separate them in terms of "effectively meeting people". I meet people how I do. Sometimes it's in public chat. Sometimes I address them in private. Sometimes they address me in private. *shrugs* They are all paths to the same end point.... me meeting them.

My SL body is as close to my RL one as I can make it given the massive limitations of the Gianni body (LOL, and "massive" is certainly the right word there). In general my SL avatar is me and I want it to look that way. I even liked how my hair and beard looked in SL so I grew out my facial hair in RL and then took a trip to a good barber shop to get a similar RL look. Predictably, my SL avatar is taller than my RL body, but I made sure I was height proportional to my girlfriend. The same is true of my wardrobe.... some of which I had to make myself. I treat SL more as another place than as a fantasy reality.

I've never gone to a single shopping event. My general understanding is that they are too crowded to get into which means almost certainly my FPS would plummet meaning I can't actually look at anything I might want to buy. No thanks. I find stuff I like on MP and from there I get brands I like. What I buy is fatpacks not outfits as a general rule. So this whole scheme is a complete miss for me.

Thank you so much! Yeah, that was what I was looking for. And for my purposes, I hardly need fine grained control. I just have a build with baked lighting textures for day and night. I need a way to set the sky to match the current state of the build for myself and guests. So if I can can any reasonably pretty sunset, moonset, noon, and midnight then I'm golden.

Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh! Yup, sure enough, that got me my experience box in Firestorm. Next up, trying to code the experience in question. It seems like a simple matter of iterating through the llGetAgentEnvironment list and then presenting it to other avatars in a llSetAgentEnvironment list. I could've sworn that I saw some function to use environmental assets from EEP but now I can't find it. But at least now I have the basics of being able to write experience code.

Hi everyone. I thought I'd tackle a "simple" experience task to get the hang of experience coding. All I want to do is change windlight on my parcel for all visitors. I don't need to "force" the issue, a suggestion they can override is good enough. So I ran into my first issue right out of the gate. In order to get access to the EEP stuff, I needed a beta viewer. But that viewer doesn't have the compile for experiences option in the script editor, neither does firestorm. So, the question... What viewer do I need to compile the script? Is there a better option than llSetAgentEnvironment? It seems pretty cumbersome to have to iterate through a list to get all the individual details when I already have an environment setting in inventory that would do the job nicely? Any other thoughts on best way to set a visitor's windlight (other than RLV)

Interesting point. I'd figured on twice the budget meaning more flexibility on where I skimped and where I lavished attention. It was honestly getting the weather system installed that made me rethink how badly I wanted a new linden home. That would absolutely be not in keeping with the overall theme (a thunderstorm over just one house LOL). But where I'm at now, there is only ever me and one other person 200m away on the radar. So there's no neighbors to annoy. It does make me wonder about finding an isolated mainland plot somewhere though. I've never bought or even researched mainland land sales so I'll have to figure out how to even find the thing.

Here's my classic Linden Home. I'm pretty pleased with what I managed on the 175 prim budget. And me, out on the back deck in the rain... yeah, it rains at my house and I used a fair bit of my prim budget to make that true. Man, I wish I had the double prim budget of a new linden home. But then again, having weather might be impossible in someplace like Bellisaria. I like the weather so much I may end up having to buy some land somewhere.

Weird squiggly letters that I can't read. Honestly, it doesn't get my blood boiling but I tend to avoid such people only because I have no idea how to communicate with them. My assumption is that some different social cohort than my own deals with them more fluidly than I do. Sapiosexual: Yeah, I have an astronomically high IQ and I'm big into romance. That word in your profile is a guarantee that I'll give you a pass even for casual chat. I often wonder if other high IQ people laugh at that the way I do. I see it as the tool of people who themselves are not that bright trying to be snooty about it. I do get a lot of good jokes out of it though so there is that. Profiles wrapped in barbed wire: Yeah, I get it that someone, somewhere, did you wrong. Grow up. Move on. Try to see what mistakes YOU made to get you in that situation. Blaming the entire world around you for your own choices is not a good look. Bonus points if you have 30 profile picks whining about the behavior of others and you are surprised when someone thinks that's off-putting.

You wouldn't cause render issues for me. You just wouldn't be rendered at all. I typically set the cutoff around 150. Even on my serious desktop computer, I really don't want to deal with the 450k avatars every time I go to some club somewhere. So if it looks good to you, keep it. Just be aware that for a fair number of users you're going to be rendered in cardboard cutout mode. You won't look good to them.

When I swapped over from my system body/head to mesh, I just went ahead and used the gianni shape as a starting point and then edited the heck out of it to make it look the way I want. Then I did the same thing with the Catwa head. For some reason, the way my sliders were set for my system body/head produced weird and hard to fix problems much like what you're showing. I'm sure there is SOME specific answer to why your face is so long but it's likely a combination of sliders not a single one and at least for me, it turned out easier to start at a known "good" shape then modify as required.

How odd that I did meet a "more than friend" in just that way. Her profile sent me to the gallery. I bought one of the pieces I just could not live without and walked away wanting to know a lot more about the person who had made that art. Stir, let simmer for a few months, and presto. Of course, it helps a lot that my interest in her art was (and is) very genuine... as is my interest in her as an artist.

Two choices for you. A) Get a new linden home now. To do this, you'll need to abandon your current home. Then you should read up on everything you can find about the current release schedule for the new homes. As I recall, they are releasing them in groups of 30-ish every few days. Yes, you read that right... 30. There are 38000 give or take premium members most of whom presumably want one. Next, camp at your computer day and night and pray you can hit the refresh at the right time, select the Bellisaria option if it shows up, then quickly commit to the house before one of those 37999 other peole do it. B) Wait about a year and a half or two Eventually, the rush will die down. It will sooner or later become possible to get a new linden home in some reasonable fashion like... you know... picking it from the list the way you tried to do. At the rate they are releasing, they will have satisfied the total demand about 8 years from now but that's a worst case scenario. I'm guessing 2 years is more reasonable.

I gave up. Instead, I managed to find a skin which mostly avoided cartoon muscles (LOL, as if the Gianni body weren't already ridiculously muscled). In my case, that skin came from LURE. In and of itself, finding a decently shaded male skin is a nightmare unless you were going for the cartoon look. With a decent skin, I then added facial wrinkles via a tattoo layer. It's not perfect. In some lighting the tattoos reflect the light very differently than the skin and they end up looking like light grey patches. But for the most part, it works. The rest is up to shape. You can google for information on how male faces tend to change with age and then have at it with the sliders. Ditto with the body although there is a LOT more variation in terms of age related changes there than in the face. I'm a pretty active 55 year old and so my body looks the part. My face, however, was not spared the effect of aging.

'Wait... seriously? OK, I don't have a new home and I'm reasonably resigned to the fact that it'll probably be a good year or two before I get one. When I do get one it'll be substandard... whatever bottom of the barrel refuse is left over. I can deal with all of that.... much as I shouldn't have to... because in the end, this is a game. That being said, NOBODY should've needed to tell LL that if they release an awesome new feature but release it in packets that are roughly 1/1000 of the demand every few days then they are going to have an awful lot of unhappy customers. If someone needed to tell LL that, then the entire company can be considered "grossly incompetent". If some employee came to me with an awesome new plan and then told me, "On the average, customers will only be able to wish for at least a year." I'd have told them to go back to the drawing boards and figure a new product or new release strategy. Because that's just plain pretty unacceptable.

I think a person who owns a sim gets to make whatever choices they want to promote the environment they are trying to create. On a personal level, I prefer dealing with avatars at least 6 or 8 years old. I just find a very different flavor in the older age brackets. This is my choice and there's no "fault" that attaches to it. If I was making a sim and I wanted to promote that feel then I'd limit age accordingly in that sim. Again, a perfectly reasonable action and totally within my rights. I have no particular feeling about sims that don't allow noobs. I'm more interested in what it does allow and what sort of feel that makes.

That's just a part of the special joy of owning a linden home. There is this convoluted process you need to go through to get it that starts on the web. Good luck if you can figure it out.

I read it and discarded it as meaningful or useful. The only metric I care about is when I can get a home without playing Linden Home Lottery. I figure that point is a year or more off. I gave some thought to what might be actually useful to me. The only thing I could come up with is something like this. They offer me a chance to move to a "new Linden Home" right now, but those homes are simply cut & pasted into blocks much like the old Linden Homes. Then... when they have a "real" Linden Plot available, they pick up my posession lock, stock, and barrel and move them. Because I already fit into the right format, everything should move without incident. This strategy allows me to start prepping right now and leaves me with little or no delay when I can somehow secure a real Linden plot. Other than something like that, it is simply a waiting game. When I go look at the home screen and see a selection of homes I might want... a large selection... then I can pack up my possessions, vacate my current home, acquire the new one, and move in. I don't see much they can do to change that given how the process works and the glacial pace of rollout.

Yes, the barrier to entry of mesh creation means there are way fewer creators than there used to be and a commensurate drop in variety. In addition, a lot the current "original mesh" is anything but... huge poly count downloads from the internet and that leads to nasty performance problems. On the other hand, mesh is mesh. There are skirts now -- and they actually span legs and move pretty reasonably so long as it's not a floor length dress. There are shirts that are not painted on bodies. The list is endless. So we have lost in random creativity and performance, but we have gained in terms of realism. I guess it's up to the individual to decide if that's a good trade-off or not.

... and since I locked in another year, I will continue to get those benefits at the same price for another year and change. Any disgruntlement I might have is only looking down the road and my complaints have more to do with how they are delivering their premium service in general and the desire they review things. From what BJoyful has said, they already have made substantial changes I was unaware of (yay). At this point I don't really have anything else to whine about. I think I'll just wait to see how it plays out and with some guarded optimism on the topic.

No, I did not. And that makes a pretty big difference in how I view things. That means fundamentally I can almost certainly get the house style I want. Insofar as location, I don't leave the interior of my house right now due to location. I don't think ANYTHING in Bellisaria could be worse and most of it is significantly better. Thanks for pointing this out. Regarding rezzers, yes, I've used them before and consistently gotten spotty resullts. It's only a linden home and there aren't that many things in it. I don't mind packing up. What I mind is packing up, becoming homeless, then waiting some indefinite period of time jumping through stupid hoops to get a new home. From what you've said I needn't do that. I can just wait till availability is actually up to snuff and just find a parcel that's doable somewhere.

I think I'll just wait and see what I eventually end up with. If I'm being overly pessimistic then, Hey! It's great to be wrong. But I wasn't able to get my first or second pick of styles much less locations in the Linden Home I have. From my quick trip around Bellisaria, I doubt it'll be different in the new homes. I will say this though, I do very much approve of them trying to build communities rather than just houses sandwiched in together. For a while I was looking for a family oriented town for exactly that reason. I didn't find one that actually had any people in it but still, I would've liked that. My current "community" typically has 0 or 1 person other than myself in it and we never see each other.

Of course I can. I could go ahead and get an autorefresh script and could probably automate the entire process. But I won't. Frankly, it's simply not how I'm used to receiving "service" or buying a "product". Aside from being offensive, it's also just way more trouble than it's worth to me. What that means to LL is that I will go without the benefits and that may or may not affect my likelihood of resubscribing. More urgently (in my mind), it's a thing they really ought to be looking at. Man, if I was trying to roll out a new product, I would certainly not say, "OK, now in order to get this product, go install a browser add-on and configure it then sit at your computer poised to frantically hit the enter key praying that you'll get something." Does that seriously sound reasonable to you. Then, of course, comes the question of desirability. Let's suppose they kick me out of my current home. Because LL really doesn't seem to give a moment's thought to what people actually want, as I noted in my previous post, I'll be scraping the dregs of the barrel when I eventually get something.... just as I was when I got my current home. Are these surmountable obstacles? Obviously. Would I personally think of it as a good idea to implement those sort of hurdles coupled with a nearly guaranteed crappy product delivery for a service I was running? No. Then again, I'm not running LL right now so it's just one opinion.

This would hold water in my mind if it were just a rollout issue but it's not. I went premier about a year ago. When I did so, supply of the OLD Linden Homes was terribly limited. They are STILL terribly limited. I did not end up with the home I wanted despite these homes being copy & paste and them having more than a decade to bring supply up to demand. My personal guess is that there is some other business driver guiding their decisions... perhaps something like wanting to put people into existing communities so we don't spread out too much? Who knows? Here's what I DO know. The process of getting a Linden Home the very first time is convoluted and confusing. The process of moving is even more ridiculously so. In the last year and change nothing has changed in regards the supply/demand balance. I have no expectation that it will change in the future. Accordingly, I am confident that when it is feasible to get a new Linden Home a year or two from now, I won't get the one I want or anything close to that. I'll be picking over the bottom of the barrel. The desirability of the lot in question will be suspect. Just compare that to getting a private home. You find a something you like... and there are endless choices. You give the owner some lindens. That's it. You're done.

*nod* It'll still probably be years till I actually move. The whole business of needing to pack up my house BEFORE I start trying to find a replacement is just a very poorly thought out process. Heck, as it sits, I'm not even sure I know how to search for what's available. I think I need to do it on an alt that doesn't already have a Linden Home. Why oh why can't I just do this the obvious way? Step 1: Search for homes I might see as an upgrade. Step 2: Secure the new home. Step 3: Pack up and move Step 4: Release old home. You know... the way pretty much EVERYONE does it in the real world... and for exactly the same reasons. Yes, I know it's possible if you play enough games with the system to mitigate at least some of the process hell. But honestly, needing to spend a few days studying how to move just seems wrong somehow.