Extrude Ragu

Hear, hear

I made an alt one day just to fly around the grid in this hawk avatar I found playing freebird once. My main account was sitting in a meeting.

Ok you got me there, they do do a Peanut butter version but classics are my fav

wym chocolate and peanut butter don't go together

love u 2

That's fine then because my post had nothing to do with giving an opinion of said community, nor do I care to give one

Honestly an LGBTXYZ page doesn't bother me, at least it really is something that by name represents a set of people with a set of unifying values/interests. Whether those are my values and interests is another matter but at least I can tolerate it. What I found particularly disagreeable was the one they did before, the 'Black Community'. The page was basically written with the insinuation being that people with black skin all think a certain way, have the same values etc. I'm sure it was made with 'good intentions' but we all know how the path to hell is paved. Imagine being told by a certain group of individuals on the internet that because your skin color is a certain way, you automatically like a certain type of music, have certain beliefs etc. And what if you don't? To me it has a subtle but nasty implication that if you are black and don't share those values you are 'invalid'. I think such a way of categorizing people by characteristics they cannot control is not actually inclusive and even alienates people. I'd personally hate to log in and have people assume how I think and what I believe in based on the color of my skin in-world.

It amuses me to this day that on the mainland this huge open space on a grid where the primary mode of travel is walking, LL decided to A. Build roads with not even those narrow little American sidewalks, but no sidewalks at all B. Build absolutely no path networks to walk at all To LL I suppose it's normal, being where the company comes from, but to me it's wild and makes me laugh to this day

I personally would appreciate having the option if nothing else simply because I keep tripping up over this even though I should remember it by now

Yep, I often think about some of the people that have just disappeared. I often wonder how they are doing, if they are doing at all... Some I've not seen in a couple years... some thirteen years....

So I was thinking of developing a new series of products focused around avatar interactivity both with the world and other avatars. The system would by functionally similar to avsitter except it would run from a hud or worn item on an avatar instead of from rezzed furniture. So I suppose a couple of things come to mind: By default, when we create an Experience, it is land scope, but I know some creators have grid scope experiences - Is there a process for this and criteria that has to be met? The system would have content that is 'general rated' in nature (such as games with attachments, think: tennis, volleyball, and also avatar interactions such as hug, hi5), but also optional content that is adult in nature (i.e. sex). I don't want to use an adult rated experience because all the general content would not be available on land rated general (XP_ERROR_MATURITY_EXCEEDED) Would LL find it acceptable to instead have the Experience be general rated, but only expose the adult content whilst on Adult/Moderate land?

Just noting that Anim Hacker now has it's own homepage now over here:- https://aiaicapta.in/anim-hacker/ Release notes are kept at the bottom, it's currently on version 0.3

I'm sorry but that's just how I feel, it doesn't really matter to me that science boffins say they're not a living being, to me it is a baby. It's got nothing to do with politics, I am honestly being sincere, this is genuinely just how I feel.

When I think about abortion, I imagine myself as a baby yet to be born in my mothers womb. As a baby I am helpless and weak, my mum is the only person who is there for me, who will protect me and raise me until I can fend for myself. That is what I want to believe. To... 'abort' ... me... feels like betrayal from the person I trust and depend on the most in my weakest moment. You know, it's not to say I don't empathise with women who will give birth to a baby of a bad man or go through financial hardship, but even still mommy is strong and baby is weak. I'd hope that even if my mum could not support me, she would still give me to someone she trusts to raise me, because she loves me and she cares. Probably the only time I feel like I can accept abortion is when giving birth to the baby would kill the mother, but even that creates feelings of conflict inside me, my gut and my heart really do not like it. That's just how I feel about it.

I'd like to see some Mainland that is actually appealing to use the extra 1024sqm on. Like, I love SecondLife, but I can't be the only person who has looked around on the mainland for places they actually would want to set up a store or have a mainland home on and just everywhere they've been gone 'nope, nope, nope' The trouble we have at the moment is that we have two extremes, Bellisaria and Old Mainland, Bellisarria is nice and consistent, but it's also a bit too sterile American Suburbia which unfortunately also affects the new Sakura regions. There's not really much in the way of life going on. Like, if I walked out of my flat IRL (Britain) I would immediately see other humans, a park, shops within walking distance. Heck I'd probably bump into one of my neighbors going down the stairs on the way out of the building. There is life and things are lively. Walking out of a Premium home onto the streets is jarring. It feels a bit like I've surfaced from a fall-out shelter and entered a ghost town, there's no shops, park life etc, just this maze of roads that lead nowhere. The mainland on the other hand feels like a dumpster fire where the majority of things built are failed ideas people have been throwing at the bin and forgotten to pick up. Sure there's a gem here and there but every gem is surrounded by garbage. I hope I don't sound rude, it's just the frustration in me speaking from not being able to find a nice spot to set up on the mainland. During meet the moles, the Lindens said they couldn't do apartment living because of SL constraints. I don't understand why they couldn't just use skyboxes for the apartment interiors to fix the majority of these concerns, surely now that we have this PBR stuff in the viewer we could portal effect the outside world onto windows and vice versa so people can still have their view. Having more compact european/asian style development would make for very lively areas, cute alleyways with shopping, lively highstreets where people live on top of their stores.

It has barely even been a day since this was announced, I just checked the pricing and it's now 29.99 USD/mo as 'promotional' price instead of stated 24.99?

30day month / 7 day week = 4.3 days (rounded) 4.3 * 650 L$ = 2795L$ / mo (on average) To purchase 2795L$ costs 11.60USD at time of writing from Buy L$ page... Don't see the problem here

To summarise the primary reasons why I think people move to Discord (And thus, the primary holes SL needs to fulfill to keep people socialising in-world) Chat persistence - In SecondLife, when you Groupchat, you're only chatting to whoever is online now, and whoever is offline will not see what you sent - So there is less point in using Groupchat to reach groups of people in SecondLife as it is less effective. If chat was persisted, this would be less of a problem Role chats - Sometimes we just want to talk to staff in our sims group, or perhaps residents, or some other special group-within-a-group of people, discord allows this, whilst the in-world tools do not Reliable reach - If we @ someone on discord we can be pretty sure the message will get seen by them as the client will do a whole lot to draw attention to it, there is no such facility in SecondLife Some Secondary things:- Sharing - Multi-media sharing is easier in Discord, think images etc. We can just drag them into the chat to let other people see them. Toilet/Bed/Train/Bus Messaging. OK this sounds dumb but people like to yap on their phone whilst they are on the go. Discord allows that. Some way to send messages into SL from outside would be perfect Streaming - Suppose this falls under sharing, but today people like to stream what they're up to, their video games, etc to each other, admittedly a harder technology to graft into SecondLife and one that might never happen at least from LL, but people do like to stream stuff

Does anyone know the maximum transition time for these functions? They are not documented

Interesting that we will be able to color emission independently At first reading seeing that the Alpha channels are going under utilized seemed bad (think: disk space) but then the alpha channel has always been problematic to pack due to image editors like photos hop, affinity photo being 'smart' with the alpha channel, so at least it'll make life easier I suppose since in practice most textures won't use Emission, it remains 3 texture uploads like before so 30L$ a pop Occlusion channel is interesting, I suppose this is just for 'fake' detail and not a replacement of the occlusion rendered by the viewer. It would seem like a good opportunity to me seeing as these objects would render under different rules to also make the real-time occlusion a bit less weak for objects rendering using pbr, so creators don't feel the need to bake AO on everything and thus we can use repeating textures for houses and large objects instead of lots of baked ones

I wonder if SL should team up with either ATI or Nvidia in some kind of sponsorship to modernize the graphics pipeline of the viewer. I mean for the graphics company, it's a nice business case study, to show how their technology and expertise could make an old game run much faster, and for LL even though it costs money to get engineers from one of these graphics cards to use their expertise to improve the viewer, they'd probably be able to do it in 1/5th of the time it would take for a less graphically experienced in-house linden to do it. It'd also be good for publicity if there's a big name like ATI or NVidia coming up when the viewer opens, it'd probably change the public perception of SecondLife into something that has been modernized.. Yes I know LL are modernizing it as we speak but public perception matters

I created an alt a few days ago with the sole purpose of making a bird to fly around the grid on. Don't judge I just prefer to make alts instead of outfits Anyway, as a new account I was sent to the new newbie area (very modern btw - well done LL) - And eventually I went to a 'Newbie friendly' area in the destination guide cuz I like to see what the newbies in SecondLife are experiencing from time to time. So I landed in this Newbie friendly area I believe it was the Social Island. Immediately this person in a penguin avatar started using some tool to shove me around with their avatar - as a new avatar I was being griefed I did manage to groundsit so they could not shove me around but not great. They were persistent too, even after I groundsit they were still on my head for a whole hour trying to push me.

Ok so I've actually spent a lot of time trying to find the 'correct' answer for this in the past, apologies that my post is a little longer than others, but I hope it will be helpful Channel Packed Firstly, the most important thing to know is that SecondLife uses Channel Packing. What Channel Packing means is that SecondLife uses the alpha channel of an image to store data other than transparency to save on disk space. The alpha channel for every pixel is a value between 0 and 1 (or 0 and 255 in image terms) - Data we pack into our image from another greyscale (black and white) image. According to the Material Data for SecondLife documentation, SecondLife uses three textures, each use the alpha channel for different purposes OK so this might be a bit overwhelming but I'll go over them one by one and try to break them down as best I can as I understand it Texture 1 - Diffuse map The RGB Channels are the diffuse map - On passing glance you might think this is just the color of the object - It's similar but not quite - What this really is is how light is diffused over the object. So to be technically correct, the 'Diffuse' bake from the Bake Type's drop down in Blender will get you the RGB channels for Diffuse as that takes lighting and material of the object into account. Some people might opt to use the 'Combined' bake but that is a debate to be had about graphics settings and a whole can of worms I'm just going to avoid. What about the alpha channel on Diffuse? The alpha channel on a diffuse map is optional, in SecondLife it can used for three different purposes Emission Transparency - Alpha Blending Transparency - Alpha Masking Emission Emission data is useful for objects that emit light in different places, think for example like a tech control panel with LED's and stuff, you can have just little spots of the texture light up. For that you'd bake an Emission map and then use Channel Packing to combine it with your diffuse (I will describe channel packing further down) Alpha blending is good for objects with semi-transparent materials - Note that this is expensive to render as the computer drawing each pixel has to now do additional maths using the alpha channel. Avoid alpha blending where you can. Alpha masking is good for stuff like tree leaves etc where it's either fully visible or it's fully transparent - This is less expensive than alpha blending. Texture 2 - Normal Map You would get the RGB data by selecting the bake type 'Normal' The alpha channel - What the heck is a 'Specular Exponent?' So what specular exponent in normal map alpha really means, is that it takes each pixel's alpha value from the normal map (from 0 fully transparent, to 1 solid) and multiplies it against the Glossiness setting in-world What this means in practice is that the alpha channel on your normal map is really important because it controls how glossiness data of your material. The confusing part Ok so we know that the alpha channel on a normal map controls glossiness, so we need to bake 'Glossy' from the Bake Types in Cycles. Right? Right?? Unfortunately not, baking Glossy in Cycles produces RGB data that is actually used for our specular map >.< So what the heck do we bake? Well, we want a grayscale image to use as glossy, and unfortunately there is no option for that - However - There is an option to bake the inverse of what we want - the Roughness bake which is literally out glossiness data inverted. So, to get the correct alpha channel 1. Bake Roughness 2. Use an image editor to Invert roughness, this is our greyscale Glossiness map. It's also possible to invert the texture inside Blender's Image Editor by going to Image -> Invert -> Invert Image Colors Texture 3 - Specular Map RGB Channels - I've reached the conclusion that this is the 'Glossy' bake from Blender as it produces data that looks the most correct to me in my experience Alpha Channel - Controls the reflected environment map - IE it's a multiplier for this In theory this is good for metals, but Honestly SecondLife's environment map sucks so I tend to avoid using this. Some PBR materials you might download come with reflection maps - I think what you'd do is simply plug the reflection map into emission inside your node editor, and then bake emission to get this data if you wanted to reflect the 'environment' but honestly today that effect sucks so Currently SecondLife is in the process of implementing PBR/GLTF and when that happens, using the Alpha Channel on specular will become more desirable. When that happens you'll want to experiment with the alpha channel on specular, but actually you'll be uploading PBR materials so this whole thing i'm teaching you now will become legacy information. How do I channel pack textures? In my experience, photo editors such as Photoshop, Affinity Photo do not work as they destroy RGB data when a pixel becomes fully transparent for reasons beyond my understanding The best way to channel pack a texture is to use a tool built explicitly for channel packing I recommend the Multi-Channel Image Tool it is free, open-source and it's the easiest to use channel packer I've found. If you're not familar with Github, you download it by clicking "V.1.2.0 - Optimized..." under 'Releases' and then clicking 'Multi-Channel-Image-Tool.zip' to download the program. On the Combine tab in the program, there is an R,G,B,A tab, and you set the data for each of these in their respective tabs Example So for example, if I wanted to channel pack a normal map for SecondLife, I'd use my normal map texture for the R/G/B tabs, and set the channel to extract from the image to R/G/B respectively. Then for the Alpha Channel, I'd select my Glossiness texture (Inverted Roughness). It will default to extracting Alpha data from the Glossiness map, which is wrong our image is black and white. So we'll just choose 'Red' as black and white images have the same value for Red/Green/Blue. Finally I'd click Save as, now I've saved a channel packed image! Anyway that's my wealth of knowledge on the subject. I hope it helps you and any other SecondLife resident looking for this info

The funny part about the short skirts is that whilst a lot of it is skimpy for the sake of being skimpy, the other reason is that the further you rig a skirt below the butt it becomes exponentionally more a PITA to make rigging that looks nice. Time is money and all that. Wish SL would add physics skirt bones to the armature or something to that effect to make it easier..

Probably because there would be too many tickets to manage. Servers generally get less stable the longer they are running. Most servers and the software they run are rarely completely water-tight and due to human error by programmers or hardware error can have memory leaks and other issues such as corruption that accumulate and degrade service. Restarting servers on a schedule is pretty standard stuff, it is a form of preventative maintenance. It's always going to result in more up-time if the server restarts on a schedule than waiting until the person who runs the sim notices/cares to report it.. don't forget not all sims are being monitored by their owners constantly. There's a debate to be had about how long between restarts though. Personally I reckon LL could get away with once a fortnight instead of once a week