Extrude Ragu

I got by for many years in SL without putting money into it. There are many good free avatars plenty of creators on SL don't do it for money but for fun, and even still I found it possible to make money by doing things like texture commissions for people or other services. Capitalism-Ho!

TLDR: SecondLife supports many of the advanced animation techniques of modern games - But we just don't take advantage of it. The Basics The majority of uploaded animations are in a format where each bone along a chain of bones has a fixed rotation value - This is commonly referred to as an FK animation. FK Animations are OK for single poses - But they have flaws with couple poses. For example when you want to hold hands with someone else, more often than not your hands will not line up with your partners, because the rotation of each bone needed for the hands to meet each other changes depending on each avatar's shape, but the FK animation has fixed rotations: IK Animations work different, instead of controlling the rotation of the bones individually, they control the target - The bones rotate dynamically to get the limb into the target position. In our hand holding case, if both hands target the same fixed point in space, the avatars would always* hold hands, no matter which size they are. *Unless the size difference is so big they cannot physically reach each other Constraints - How they work Most people are not aware, but SL's animation system does support IK animations in its own special way, it's just not well-documented, and we lack popular creators tools that can make them. Blender's Avastar lets you pose an avatar using IK controls but the exported animations are always FK. Lets say you want to put your hand on your head. The 'Source' is R_HAND and the 'Target' is HEAD. If this was all our hand would go inside our head, but we also have an 'Offset' that can move the hand to a set offset so it is offset from the head. The target is then relative to the head. Now no matter how long or short your arms are, your hand will pretty much always end up on the side of your head, and never clip through it. SecondLife's animation format supports many targets for constraints including PELVIS, BELLY, CHEST, NECK, HEAD, L_CLAVICLE, L_UPPER_ARM, L_HAND, R_CLAVICLE, R_UPPER_ARM, R_LOWER_ARM, R_HAND, R_UPPER_LEG, R_LOWER_LEG, R_FOOT, L_UPPER_LEG, L_LOWER_LEG, L_FOOT. You can target joints to move relative to all of those places. But there's one special one... The GROUND Constraint and why we should be asking for it You see, it turns out that those clumsy default animations we all rush to replace are some of the most advanced animations in all of SecondLife See how the feet respond to the incline of the ground? The original SecondLife developers added code into the viewer support for targeting GROUND - And they used it, in the first (albeit clumsy) animations ever. The viewer can detect where the ground is, and adjust animations that are relative to ground accordingly. What's this got to do with hand holding? Well, when you are able to target limbs to an offset relative to a fixed position such as the ground, you can do things kinda like this: Both Avatar's hands will always connect because the constraint target position is set in such a way that both avatar's targets end up in the same place. Why am I telling you all of this? Well, I started working on a tool to make use of the constraints feature of SecondLife. But I've run into some issues. Firstly, even though the SecondLife viewer supports the GROUND constraint, and the viewer uses animations that use the GROUND constraint by default - The animation uploader does not recognize animations that use this constraint - And that's a real bummer! I think that with this constraint we could honestly make the posing experience in SecondLife so much better for couples as you would rarely need to adjust a pose ever again. I want to be able to make AO's and animations where arms and limbs don't tend to clip through the body depending on shape. Constraints would help achieve this. Animations that *ahem* self-touch would be much accurate too. The trouble here is a lack of third party support for constraints as far as I can see. My hope by writing and illustrating all of this and sharing it is that it raises awareness, maybe in the future we could get tools that take advantage of this, and maybe someone at LL will update the uploader to allow GROUND to work!

Here's an example of how you could get something close to an associative array in LSL. It uses a strided list for quick iteration of keys, but uses json to store the value to allow more complicated data structure:- list people; // Add a person to people // name: The person's name // details: JSON Encoded Object containing age, fav_food, shirt_color, description add_person(string name, string details) { people += [name, details]; } string get_person(string name) { integer i; integer num_people = llGetListLength(people); while (i < num_people) { if (name == llList2String(people, i)) { return llList2String(people, i + 1); } i += 2; } return ""; } default { state_entry() { // Adding people to our list of people string janet = llList2Json(JSON_OBJECT, [ "age", 20, "fav_food", "pizza", "shirt_color", <1,0,0>, "description", "Wears a red shirt" ]); string jack = llList2Json(JSON_OBJECT, [ "age", 35, "fav_food", "yakisoba", "shirt_color", <0,1,0>, "description", "Wears a green shirt" ]); add_person("Janet", janet); add_person("Jack", jack); // Retrieving people list people_to_retrieve = ["Janet", "Paul", "Jack", "Steve"]; integer i; integer num_people_to_retrieve = llGetListLength(people_to_retrieve); while (i < num_people_to_retrieve) { string name = llList2String(people_to_retrieve, i); string json = get_person(name); if (json != "") { integer age = (integer)llJsonGetValue(json, ["age"]); string fav_food = llJsonGetValue(json, ["fav_food"]); vector shirt_color = (vector)llJsonGetValue(json, ["shirt_color"]); string description = llJsonGetValue(json, ["description"]); llSetColor(shirt_color, ALL_SIDES); llSay(0, name + " is " + (string)age + " years old. " + description); llSay(0, "Favourite food: " + fav_food); } else { llSetColor(<0,0,0>, ALL_SIDES); llSay(0, "I don't know a " + name + "!"); } ++i; llSleep(3.0); } } }

To me it just sounds like negative reinforcement. Who would want to be a creator if you found yourself in a position where if you do something wrong you'd find yourself threatened with being put on some wall of shame, told how bad you are or worse harassed. There is enough performance anxiety at our real jobs. SecondLife is a place where we can try and fail repeatedly and feel like we are not risking our lives doing so. It gives us freedom to experiment. Why not do something positive that encourages positive behaviour? A creator rewards, reward people who do go above and beyond with recognition, give creators something to work towards, something they can be proud of.

Is this actually true? I thought that if a prim cube occludes an object behind it, the object behind is excluded from being drawn. I know that Sinespace has this behaviour because if you clip your camera halfway into a wall objects disappear

Sim Rent is by far the biggest expense at around 15k L$ a week... oof

Has anyone else noticed that culture surrounding death seems to just suck. Like I mean, stopping 90 y/o Grandma seeing their kids in case Grandma dies. What do people think Grandma lives for, do they think she is planning to go skydiving? No the only company she gets is her family. What purpose does it serve to survive a virus if you're already on deaths door and just want to live and enjoy the last part of your life? And like the same with Hospitals where every death is treated as a preventable tragedy, where doctors would rather put people on deaths door through extreme pain/suffering, loss of dignity, where every living moment is a living hell just to keep them alive for another 30 seconds, instead of accepting death and letting them enjoy their last moments peacefully with the people they love? Not every death has to be tragic, as long as the person has led a full life and come to their natural time, why not just celebrate that they've lived a full life and that you're there with them to give them company in their last moments, than act like it's some horror show that shouldn't be happening? There comes a point where avoidance of death is actually you know harmful to someones quality of life and I feel like people don't seem to get that which frustrates me. I hope when I'm 90 and in a hospital bed I'm allowed to pass away peacefully rather than having a full on anxiety attack whilst doctors pump $$$ loads of every drug into my veins and everything is going crazy.

There is an additional regression that OP doesn't mention Rezzed objects now have ~3 second delay before scripts start working. Was about 1/4 of a second before, it sounds like a small thing but it makes systems that rez objects such as pose systems etc very clunky, borks scripted weapons etc. There are multiple bug reports about it on the SL JIRA so it's not just me.

I'd log in, but I'd never cross a sim crossing ever again

More sex jk The newest firestorm put live stream video codecs back into the web player but that service (rabbit?) is dedded, would be nice to figure out how to watch movies together in SL again

WSB as far as I know is both the left and right it is not political. Just people who hold a resentment against hedge funds as they were responsible for betting away the economy in the past. Looks to me like they are *****tin bricks now that they've been shown that ordinary people can manipulate the market too and make them lose all their money. Of course the media is going to try to paint it as a culture war, it gets clicks and they're sweating bullets that something actually united the left and the right against a common enemy.

Let's just hope that if we are they don't switch it off for a while

Not much will change but we'll live underwater

I miss sitting on those spinning roundabouts as a kid in the playground nyoom

People who can't communicate concisely. My boss does not know how to write a short email. Every single one is like 8+ paragraphs long. I usually end up pulling out a piece of paper and writing a conclusion of each paragraph just so I can begin to understand what he is trying to say. I work with software which is a creative process, anything that interrupts my train of thought can mess me up for hours. It makes dealing with him very stressful. Headache inducing.

The ability to create worlds and have your friends with you in your world as you do it. I'd never create a game because I wouldn't be able to share my world with others or let others live in it as I'm making it. Years and years of my life would be spent on my own. I create on SecondLife because I'm with my friends, and my friends can also create and put into my world. I can't overstate how much that 'made' SecondLife for me.

I find this to be disingenuous. You don't actually provide anything but rhetoric here. You describe Trump as Authoritarian but do not appear to have anything to really back that up. You describe those who disagree with you as 'deflecting' but appear not to be prepared to provide anything to the topic yourself. Every time you've entered the topic, you immediately end with "exits the topic" - You're not actually here to discuss, just to push your narrative, you leave before anyone gets a chance to even talk to you. Likewise, this is just rhetoric with no substance. You accuse me of being a witch, but in the end of the day you cannot prove you are not a witch yourself.

I'm failing to see how "Go home with love & in peace" is an incitement to violence. We livin in loopy land or what

Hitler started wars, he did not end them.

Actually I sympathize with this more than you know. I do not think that Trump should have said that. When Trump entered office I did not celebrate at the time, I didn't like him. I was convinced he was a bad person and it was a sad event for me. Trump grew on me over time for a number of reasons. First there was so much hate directed towards him, without anything good written that I started to think that I am not getting the full story, the demonic creature they make him out to be is unrealistic for a human being to the point of ridicule. Around the same time, my country was on a witch hunt, calling anyone who voted Brexit a racist, bigot etc. I had actually voted to remain in the EU. I was a labour supporter, a lefty. My countries flag was being portrayed as a hate symbol. Something clicked in my head, and I realized that people were projecting so much hatred onto my country and characterizing it in such a hateful way that my country could never hope to be a good place as people had just decided its fate was bad and gave it no chance. Around that time I decided to let go of the EU and believe in my own country instead, not because I felt good about leaving the EU, but because I wanted to believe in my country and the people in it and give it a chance to succeed in the direction it was going. I felt more and more betrayed by the people I used to support who were so eager to throw my country under the bus as the worst place on earth and disenfranchised by them. Trump was advocating for his country and his people and describing them as good people, whilst the left could only say bad things about their own people. That is why I started to like him. Over the years I've watched him do things that I think are good things, ending conflicts, bringing troops home, putting his own people first, protecting the borders so that people can continue to have job security and support their families. When the WHO was telling Trump to accept flights in from China, Trump still stopped the flights and put his people first. His opponents describe him and his supporters as white supremacists but I've watched those rally's and people of all backgrounds support Trump, I just don't think it's true. Paint me as a Nazi if you really like, but I don't think Trump is 1/10th as evil as people make him out to be. He has his flaws, I don't like when he puts people down to raise himself up, I think he can be distasteful at times. But ultimately I think he has done more good than harm even if nobody will acknowledge it.

This to me reads like incitement. Everyone who is slightly right of left is an alt right extremist. It reads like a witch hunt. It doesn't read like someone who is being intellectually honest, or wants an honest conversation it reads to me like someone who is trying to rile people up to have a fight. It would be like if I was to say everyone who leans left is a Communist even those who describe themselves as just somewhat liberal. How about some sensible talk rather than just hate rhetoric?

We don't say that when people say e.g. to 'fight for women's rights' that they are inciting violence. To me this seems disingenuous or uncharitable at best. Especially when Trump explicitly said in his speech to protest peacefully. It seems to me like an attempt to pin blame on Trump for something he didn't incite at all.

So as long as I tell myself that anyone around me is a Nazi, I am justified in punching them. Got it. So when the media goes around calling people they don't like "Nazi's" we can agree that the media is irresponsibly inciting violence. Thank goodness that doesn't happen. Oh wait..

What speech are you talking about exactly because I can't find this You did, you took a quote from me saying I can't find examples of Trump inciting violence, and showing examples of people on the left inciting violence and said:- "Comparing a D list celebrity holding an effigy to insurrectionists is ridiculous." Which was not the comparison I was making.

I think you've lost the plot