Fluffy Sharkfin

Well we could start by trying to place more value on our empathy for others than we do on our own personal freedoms to do as we please. Considering that the reason some people feel the need for a dedicated sub-forum is because there are those in society who use "freedom of speech" as an excuse to abuse and persecute them perhaps it would be kinda nice if we could just put aside our concerns over which of the multiple forums we can say whatever we like in, and do something to make someone other than ourselves feel at ease? I have to ask, exactly what is it you can imagine saying in this proposed forum that you predict will be subject to censorship, and honestly is it really so important that your right to say it outweighs having compassion for others?

Okay, it's just that there are no shortage of hearts and minds in need of changing, wouldn't want you to waste your time and energy where it wasn't necessary!

If you're genuinely curious, try asking someone who's been abused, perhaps they can explain why simply telling them "well I'm not abusing you now, why are you acting so nervous, just get over the trauma already!" isn't a helpful approach.

The majority of my post was about my reasons for supporting the proposal for a new sub-forum, the comment about the crutch was merely to try and drive home the point that while creating a sub-forum is undeniably a good thing, there is a lot more that we should be doing to make sure that the rest of the forums are equally welcoming to and accepting of all members of the SL community. In short, if you're trying to convince me or explain why the new sub-forum would be beneficial, you're preaching to the choir! (...and if you're just explaining how crutches work, thanks but I've spent some time on them myself and managed to figure them out already! )

Just because two groups have a shared agenda doesn't mean they're automatically affiliated, and it stands to reason that LGBTQ+ and left-leaning ideologies would coincide, since both are in favour of members of the LGBTQ+ community not being persecuted, labelled as abhorrent and excluded from society. 🙄 There's no nefarious plan to curb peoples freedoms going on here, the only "radical agenda" being pursued is an attempt to make this community a more welcoming place for those who have already suffered too much inequity and injustice at the hands of society. It's not about politics, it's about empathy!

As I said I can see a lot of potential good in the idea of a dedicated sub-forum, and completely understand that for some feeling included and accepted means being allowed the space to be themselves without fear of being harassed or expected to continually justify themselves to others. It makes perfect sense that members of a community that have been so mistreated would feel the need for refuge and would be wary of expressing themselves in other parts of the forums given the type of abuse members of that community have been subjected to by society as a whole over the years, and if providing them that refuge helps to make them feel safer and more comfortable in SL then I for one think LL should make it a priority to do so. I admit I do fear that some of the expectations of what this new forum will achieve may possibly be overly optimistic, but my concerns over its creation are mostly practical and revolve around moderation, and I suspect that LL will share at least some of those concerns, in which case a sensible, in-depth conversation over what peoples expectations are in regards to moderation would be the best way to allay those concerns and clarify to them what it is the creation of this new forum will accomplish. Just re-quoting this because I wanted to address it specifically. To borrow the phrasing of another post in this thread "Why not both?". I understand that not everyone has the mental fortitude or is fortunate enough to be in a place where they feel emotionally strong enough to "fight the good fight", and those people should indeed be allowed to take refuge while the rest of us as a community fight on their behalf but, and I can't stress this strongly enough, it needs to be made clear to all that the creation of this forum is no more a solution to this problem than a crutch is a cure for a broken leg. The fact that there are those who feel they need a refuge from the rest of the community is a very visible sign that we should all be trying harder to promote tolerance, acceptance and empathy towards each other, regardless of our differences. I just hope that if this new sub-forum is created it's viewed in the same spirit as setting aside a comfy chair by the fire in order to make someone feel welcome and accepted, with the understanding that they can find refuge and comfort there for as long as they need, but when they're ready there's a seat waiting for them at the table with everyone else and they're just as welcome there too!

To be fair, all these new virtual worlds are still in their infancy and while crypto-based worlds may be an elaborate cash-grab there are some that could be legitimate contenders given enough funding. What we have in SL today is the culmination of nearly two decades of an army of amateur content creators industriously churning out new content on a daily basis, and while it may seem like an insurmountable task to generate the same amount of content for a new platform, when you're investing billions into a virtual world, hiring professional content developers to start populating that world with high quality content in order to attract users probably isn't going to make that much of a dent in your budget. It's easy to compare a mature platform like SL with these new metaverse wannabes and sneer (especially since most of them really do suck right now), but technology keeps advancing and the current state of real-time graphics is light years ahead of anything you'll find in SL. Sure, you'll always be constrained by the nature of live-streaming content, but even taking that into account the level of achievable realism is such that if any of these new virtual worlds were to really focus on avatar creation and providing high quality content and advanced content creation tools, etc. then SL could be on shaky ground.

You're far more tolerant than me then because they're clearly not manga readers and should therefore be cast out! 😄

Most likely because, for the majority of them, SL has nothing to offer that's of interest to them?

Perhaps, but still the potential for harm exists and shouldn't be dismissed lightly. I'm in favour of creating a sub-forum dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community in SL and can see a lot of potential for good, but I'm opposed to the idea of creating one as a "refuge" from the bad behaviour of others on these forums because they belong to all of us and nobody should feel unwelcome or marginalized. If we don't address the root causes of these issues, such as intolerance and bigotry, then we're just allowing it to fester and grow and it will eventually seep into any refuge we may try to provide, and worse we encourage it by reinforcing the belief held by some that the LGBTQ+ community should be kept segregated when the reality is it's the intolerant bigots that we need to ostracize!

The problem with having a separate sub-forum for LGBTQ+ related topics is that in doing so you open up any LGBTQ+ related thread posted in other sub-forums to potentially being moved at the moderators discretion due to being "off-topic", and while there's the chance that the poster will appreciate that LL have provided a sub-forum dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community it's also possible that their reaction would be to feel ostracized from the SL community as a whole. If there are problems with moderation those need to be addressed first, otherwise having a separate forum isn't going to change anything, in fact it may potentially cause more harm than good.

We could get into a cyclic argument about whether there are no good games in SL because of lack of interest in gaming or whether there's a lack of interest in gaming because there are no good games in SL, but as you pointed out my sample of residents is not the norm but just one demographic among many, as is yours, and it makes sense that your sample would lean more towards the "play house/store" demographic given your involvement in the rental business and community building. Some of the profiles I see that list the games people play outside of SL also include an open invitation to add the person on Discord, so clearly these folks are quite happy to keep their gaming and their SL separate and are not hounding LL to compete with Fortnite, etc. but that doesn't mean that they (and every other demographic of resident) wouldn't benefit from improvements and additions to SL which enabled creators to provide better content and fun new activities. LL enabling content creators to create better games wouldn't be detrimental to the rest of the SL community, quite the opposite in fact since those new features would no doubt also be used to update existing content/activities. As the saying goes, "a rising tide lifts all boats".

How popular would the Olympics have been if having more than a handful of competitors and a dozen spectators broke the laws of physics in the same way that lag affects the physics engine in SL? The number of profiles I've seen where people list the games they play outside SL suggests there are already plenty of people that would enjoy playing a variety of games in-world too, but until LL makes the necessary improvements and provides the tools/features required to create games that work and are fun to play those games will never exist so we'll never know for sure.

If you get an error message for a line that looks fine it's always worth checking the preceding line for missing semi-colons, parentheses, etc. In the case of the script you have there, you have an extra } on line 85, deleting that will probably resolve the error you're getting.

I like to flesh things out with prims sometimes, just to get an idea of scale and how something will feel as you're walking around it, but have never bothered exporting them. I use them more as a tool for "concepting" in-world but I can see the value in being able to export complex linksets, etc. to make it easier to convert some of the older content to mesh (but importing exported prims without doing a little retopology and some sensible uv mapping first would just be silly). I'd still much rather have some form of "local mesh" though. The idea of having the ability to rez a "blank scene" in-world and associate it with a local file then being able to edit that scene and see the results appear in real-time around you is very appealing (and not unlike what Nvidia is currently spending all their money developing)!

That's remarkably low for something of that size! I've played around with trying to make large scale low land impact mesh but was going for something a little more "lumpy" so didn't stretch my polygons quite as far. I managed some reasonable looking 1 LI columns with LODs and physics that worked out at just over 13 meters tall ... (the textures are only 512x512, but for a stylized look you really don't need a lot of pixels).

Attempting to compete with dedicated 3D apps by trying to provide a set of in-world mesh building tools isn't exactly "bringing the SL back to SL" though. As Coffee pointed out the original SL building tools are all still there, and LL added mesh so that people could use dedicated 3D apps to produce better content, investing further development time trying to compete with those apps seems a little pointless. That being said, if LL wanted to invest time in updating in-world building then they could always adapt the voxel based terrain system that they're secretly working on (🙄🙏) and implement a new voxel prim type which could be sculpted using basic in-world tools and then potentially "baked" into a mesh complete with automatic lod generation and some preset uv mapping options. If they wanted to be really fancy they could include a basic vertex painting tool and start supporting vertex color based texture blending, that would make building landscapes in-world really interesting. Just one reason why multi-layer materials with dedicated mask textures should be a thing. The ability to use seamless tiling base textures with decals, or have a separate layer for different parts of an article of clothing, and then be able to swap the textures or tint each layer independently would greatly improve the customization process and would remove the need to create so many hi-rez textures for every colour option, etc. TLDR:

If only we had multi-layer materials with mask texture channels... 😟

Or possibly "lightening"? llSetBuoyancy

After reading Kelly Lindens explanation of listen events in the notes on the llListen wiki page my understanding of listen events has always been that, even though the event may not fire, any script with an active listen will still query the simulators chat history during its slice of runtime, so it will cause some additional cpu load (I wouldn't know how much exactly but I'd assume that on a heavily loaded sim where script time is already suffering none is always preferable to some).

Regardless of their choice of topic and how useful it may be, I'm just happy to see LL making an effort to interact with residents on social media and take on some of the responsibility of helping people learn about SL. The timing for the announcement is pretty coincidental given the recent discussion in another thread about SL and Twitch, kinda like... SL Residents: "official SL live streams would be cool, but there's no way LL will ever do that!" Linden Lab:

The problem with arguing for or against something as ill-defined as "cancel culture" is that without understanding what the term actually means to the people you're addressing your arguments are going to seem irrelevant to them at best. Depending on who you're talking to the term "cancel culture" can vary in meaning from "holding people accountable for their behaviour" to "silencing opinions that you don't agree with", and while there are those who are in favour of cancel culture because they want people to be held accountable and those who are opposed to it because they don't want to be held accountable themselves, there are also those opposed to it because they recognize the inherent dangers of "mob mentality censorship" and those in favour of it because they enjoy seeing others being torn down, either because of their own jealousy, simple schadenfreude, or in some cases because they use virtue signalling to mask their own bad behaviour. If you don't start any conversation on the subject of cancel culture with a clear statement that "everyone should be held accountable for their behaviour and nobody should be denied the ability to voice their opinion" then you're most likely going to spend half your time arguing with people over things that you probably agree with them on.

The problem you're having is due to the fact that, while you may have resized the mesh body before uploading it, you're still using animations created for a regular sized avatar, so your mesh is being stretched to fit the default rig. It's been a while since I messed with joint offsets on mesh but, unless I'm mistaken, opting to include joint offsets when uploading your mesh should solve the issue, however bear in mind that if you use any animation which includes translations rather than just rotations then those translations will override the joint offsets included in your mesh and cause deformations that will remain until you remove the mesh and reattach it. The solution is to create custom animations to accompany the mesh body and then, rather than including the joint offsets in the mesh, you rely on the animations to provide the necessary joint offsets, but obviously that's a lot of extra work so opting to just include the joint offsets in the mesh and avoiding animations with joint translations may be your easiest solution.

What if they made legs a premium-only feature and disabled all the bones below mPelvis for all avatars with basic accounts?

I must admit I've never even looked at Garys Mod, despite having friends that have encouraged me to try it, but then apart from a couple of other platforms I've been pretty loyal to SL over the years. Coincidentally one of those other platforms, EQ Landmark, is the reason I was introduced to Twitch, since the developers held a weekly livestream to keep the community up to date with what changes and new features were on the horizon. Another thing the developers eventually used their Twitch channel for was to hold building competitions (since part of the premise behind Landmark was that the developers wanted to enlist the help of the community in creating content for the next version of Everquest). In order to facilitate this the developers held design meetings live on Twitch during which they would go through a design brief/style guide for a specific race in the game (the document was also available for anyone to download in PDF format), listen to feedback from the community and answer questions. Then, once the competition had run its course, they would review the submissions and highlight some of the best entries live on stream. I've seen a few conversations addressing how LL might make better use of the mainland and, while I know that it's exceedingly unlikely to happen, I can't help thinking that if they took a similar approach and came up with some fun building competitions based around different themes with some sort of coherent style guide they could crowd-source a tremendous amount of content and transform huge swaths of the mainland into something far more aesthetically pleasing and impressive whilst simultaneously engaging with their community and, potentially, a much larger audience.