LibGwen

Hm. And just the other day I wrote "There are no deserts in Mainland." It's plausible: Desert, 19th century, and post-apocalyptic neighborhoods? Or I suppose all three: living in railcars in a post-apocalyptic desert. 😉

Try searching for "wear" and "add" instead. I have my wearables sequestered in a folder called "Objects you wear" and my vehicles are split into "wear" and "rez" folders. * I have a wonderful wearable scooter and unicycle from Kurenai Motorcycle. Unfortunately I think they're out of business. Resizable. The scooter can fold up and go on your shoulder, and it converts to a hover scooter for crossing water.

I've been traveling the roads of Second Life lately, and some posts I've read in the land forums suggested to me that some land shoppers wish they knew more about the characteristics of the mainland continents: Where to go for the kind of "feel" they'd like? Few people have a sense of Second Life geography; the world is just a series of landmarks to them, and for various reasons they don't want to take the time to find out. The question is where can people look for that sort of information? The first page of this thread had several comments about roads and terrain, so this seemed a good thread to ask. I'd be happy to make posts somewhere for a few weeks of my observations from the road until some other project takes my attention. But I'm not a photographer. And these would be *road* observations, no help for people who want to shut themselves away, who should be teleporting to the empty spaces far from the roads to look at parcels. There's also an irony: The emptier the land, the simpler it is to describe, so the duller the post. A thread dedicated solely to such a topic would be boring.

Given some comments in this thread yesterday, I was struck by a thought: I remember looking at an article a few years ago that purported to be about refurbishing train cars into houses. The article didn't deliver, but in SL people were so excited about the "tiny homes" models of campers at the SL16B demo area, it occurred to me that train cars might make a nice theme for tiny homes in SL for people who like smaller spaces. I Googled "train house" images and spent some time oohing and ahhing.

I worry that people are getting their hopes up too far. You may end up with a trolley/train that's nice to look at going by but you can't really ride. In my experience, you can't ride an automated vehicle in Second Life for long before you get queasy. When you're the one driving the vehicle, you're looking where you intend to go, so it's not much of a problem. But when something else is doing the driving, your eyes work a lot harder. There's also camera position. If you move your camera from the position the vehicle puts it at, the scene gets jerky. It would be interesting if different seating sections on a train put your camera position in different places, or even had the option not to see outside at all if you want to chat with a friend on the journey, so you wouldn't *have* to move your camera.

The thing I hate about mesh is how its use as clothing eliminated unisex clothing and variability in avatar proportion. Everyone has to have the same few bodies and dress like a caricature of video game masculinity or "female"-ness. A woman avatar can't "dress casual" or cobble together her own ensembles. (e.g. tuxedo with feminine touches, or the way Laura Holt dressed in the old "Remington Steele" TV show). A male avatar has to have his shoulders stuffed; he can't be a student or artist. If you're a furry, alien, robot, or beautiful freak, forget about wearing human clothes at all unless you've dug them out of a store's dusty archives of system, flexi, and sculpty clothes. This is not a quality of mesh, it's a quality of how little effort clothing designers want to put into the stuff they present to their customers.

Street signs are quite rare on the mainland. Usually you tell what road you're on (if it has a name) by looking at the parcel name. Rez zone names may also incorporate the road name, for example "Sandy Beach Trail Rez Zone, Elten" or "Frog Road Rez Zone, Mavericks" (that last one is in Sansara, which has very few named roads). I don't know if it might be slightly more feasible to petition the moles to alter the names of the protected land parcels that make up a particular road or rez zones in Bellisseria, rather than ask for street signs, which take up LI.

New games and stories often have the effect of rekindling creativity in oldbies, or even kindling it for the first time. Look at what GTFO or Bellisseria inspired.

This thread has been fascinating. Everyone has been sensitive to different things and had different thresholds. My two cents: The robot picture Rhonda Huntress posted on page 2 is the only one I'd seen yet in this thread (as of the bottom of page 2) that hit my "wait, what?" button. I interpret my reaction as a threat assessment, triggered by some combination of inappropriate body language and tension in the face. But I couldn't assess if it's the instinct of my species or the training of my life's experience. I suspect the posts on page 3 have it: It's the savannah instinct ChinRey and others supposed. Molded by the positive and negative results of my experience.

Spitballing: 1) Because people tend to get abusive toward someone suggesting things could be better than they are. So "safe" fantasy consists of an ersatz good life that's secretly inimical. 2) Because anyone can mock, drag down, and trash. It takes energy, respect, and work to comprehend, support, or enhance. 3) Because support tends to happen quietly, out of the glare of spotlights. Look at how often someone embarks on a project in SL and gets all kinds of contributions from people who think it's exciting and inspiring. 4) Aesthetics. It's one thing to have a vision, it's quite another to be able to put it out there for people to see what you imagined. In all the conversations about Bellisseria continent's appeal, I have never seen anyone try to figure out why it makes people say "Yeah, that." It's that it was assembled by people who know how to do proportion, sight lines, and attract your attention to the "here" rather than the "away somewhere". 5) For some reason, imagination is been out of fashion for several decades. When trying to decide what to do with this post, I was trying to think of imaginative movies in the last twenty years. The only name I could think of was Luc Besson. People like "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" because it's full of imagination, not because of anything remarkable in the characters or plot. It's quite a frightening future, but wow. (And only now do I notice how old this thread is. Well, I agree, the grid's lack of inspired futures needs to be pointed out.)

Actually, a copied simple item does have the same UUID unless someone made an alteration to one of them. (e.g. eyebrowshapers, skins, notecards) But this doesn't apply to complex items like hair or AOs. I have gotten rid of many duplicates by comparing UUIDs. > Unfortunately, of course, you can't do anything bout no-mod items that you get from other people, so even if you are truly obsessive about filing, you're screwed. Folders and notecards can help mitigate this by giving you a place to explain to yourself.

Since the changeover to VMM, Marketplace keeps selling my customers the wrong items. Everything shows correctly for me, but they are seeing a title and description for one thing, but are sold something else for the something else's correct price. They are understandably upset about this. Worse, Marketplace takes a 5% tax of these scrambled purchases, then I have to refund the customer the full price, so Marketplace profits 5% on every purchase it gets wrong.

How do I answer an answer someone has given me here? Updating my original question doesn't bring it forward in the queue. I tried the suggestions and want to ask for more advice. But my question is stuck back weeks ago where no one will know.

Second Life went to Server Side Appearance at the same time as my ISP upgraded. Starting from that point I have been suffering packet loss of 25% or higher for a minute (or 2-4 with SSA) every time I look at anything in-world. Consequently, I axed my normal activities in Second Life and spent my Second Life time wading through bad advice trying to find out what's wrong. I've tried different viewers, I've switched in and out routers and modems, I convinced my ISP to do line tests, I tried configuring ports, I changed security suites (more bad advice). I went back to a pre-SSA viewer because unlike SSA viewers it can cope with lossy teleports, lossy dressing, lossy instant messaging ... without permanently losing information or crashing me out of SL. Finally today I stumbled across the tracert command. It appears to report the problem is somewhere between above.net in Phoenix and lindenlab.com (and lines 10 and 11 might be questionable too). After all these months, is the problem finally defined? What do I do now? And why isn't anybody else having this problem? Thank you. UPDATE: If there's any difference, it's small. HTTP Get Textures was already off. Reducing MeshMaxConcurrentRequests to 8 may have made a little difference, but I'm still getting 16-144% packet loss every time I teleport and about 15% when a texture is (finally!) coming into focus. And now I can never see mesh the first time I log in; I have to relog. I can't imagine how *that* works. This is absolutely crippling since entire stores are made of mesh now. Not to mention wintertime scenery. If I crank bandwidth down to 500, packet loss is 20-30%. But 500 makes my computer loud; I'd much rather use 2000.

I can see a certain number of mesh items. After that number is reached all new mesh items are completely invisible to me. If I relog I *usually* can start seeing it again, until the allowance runs out again. (Sometimes I have to restart my computer.) This has always been annoying and makes it impossible to shop in stores that use mesh vendors, but it's miserable at the SL10B celebration. I can look at five or six exhibits, then pffft, no more mesh and I have to relog for the upteenth time to see whether the next one is really a mostly empty plot. Does this problem have a name? Is there any way to increase this allowance of how much mesh I can see before I have to relog? How do I tell if I should *not* increase it? Thank you. Addendum: I don't know how I can describe it any clearer than I did. What you're describing has nothing to do with what I described. You're talking about the refinement of visible objects in the distance but I asked about objects that cannot be seen at all when I'm nose to nose with them.

How do I make the surface of water in SL look less like I'm seeing through a polarizing filter? It's disorienting and ultimately headache-inducing to not be able to tell that some of the landforms I see are supposed to be under water. When standing on land, water is so clear I can barely see it, as if I'm viewing it through a polarizer. However, walking around underwater it's obvious enough I'm in water, so I don't want to make the water less clear, I only want--when I'm standing on land--to make the *surface* more "there" so I can tell that there *is* water. I have never experienced this problem before with any of the viewers I've used. The computer was recently reformatted and this is the first time I've used Phoenix v1691 on any machine; it is the first viewer I've tried on this machine because I don't like any of the other viewers I've tried in the past.

I need a viewer that will work *now*, not later. My other computer is down with malware, and this shiny new one won't run the viewers. I've tried two different versions of Phoenix. Both say Phoenix won't run because it's improperly configured and to please reinstall it. Obviously the problem is with me, not Phoenix. I've also tried the SL Viewer. It says "Second Life is unable to run because your video card drivers did not install properly, are out of date, or are for unsupported hardware." "Graphics initialization failed." My drivers are up to date and SL Viewer is the only thing complaining about them. Is there a viewer that will get me into SL to deal with all the stuff that's been screaming for my attention for the last two days? I'll deal with trying to figure out why SL Viewer thinks my drivers are wrong later. I don't even *like* SL Viewer. I'd much rather have something reliable and non-crashy like Phoenix. Windows XP, ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro. addendum: Updating the video driver again got SL Viewer working, but it's terribly jerky. I reduced everything I could think of and it only helped a little. But at least it let me deal with all the emergencies. I'm seasick from the jerkiness, though. Both of the versions of Phoenix are still giving me the same message as before, so apparently it's not a video driver problem for them. I don't know how to check if Phoenix is having firewall trouble. If I'm having so much trouble with the most current SL Viewer and two different Phoenixes on this machine I would expect Firestorm to be worse. More suggestions?

The back of my avatar has some strange sharp angles on the inside of the legs near the top of the thighs. It's very noticable in certain textures of pants or from certain angles. Is there anything I can do to smooth it out? I have tried every Appearance slider that seems even remotely likely to affect that area, but none of them smooth, they just make the jagged part bigger or smaller. 

Ah, that explains or clarifies a lot of puzzling things I've been encountering.

> have you also tried right-clicking the trash folder and selecting Empty It worked! They didn't come back! *happy dance*

> Is there some reason that you haven`t just done what I said and looked in your filters? Because RL comes first. Yes, Show Filters (I use Phoenix viewer) says the icons I'm wondering about are textures, scripts, and snapshots respectively. Which raises the question of why the snapshot windows are called "Texture" windows and why the buckled calf boot one I mentioned doesn't have a snapshot in it.... There are two more file icons I've run into that aren't on the Show Filters list, but I'll worry about them later. So now I know what they are, I still need to know what I'm expected to do with them.

No, the third icon behaves as I described in my comment above. In my viewer a landmark has a pushpin icon. Opening it would produce a Landmark window, not a Texture window. Yeah, bracing myself is the hard part. And I often don't understand what DOES happen.

In answer to Darren, I don't know how to show a picture of what I mean. * I don't have anything in my textures folder, but now you mention it, the folder has a teeny icon that looks like the first icon I described. The scripts folder has an icon that seems to match the second one I described. I don't see the computer monitor as an icon on a folder, but the icons are too small to be sure. If it MUST be on one of the folders, the only one it could be is the photo album folder. But they don't look much alike. 1) The first type (texture?) is usually just titled with the name of the packet: Dolly; Amore; Pearls Jewelry Set - gold cream. 2) (scripts?) Titles like: erase me!; Give Contents; Hover text; rotate object; Set Text; Set Texture 3) (photo album?) Like 1) above, titles are just the name of the product: Buckled calf boots; Knitted Love. I took a chance and selected "open" for the possible photo of Knitted Love. It opened a window with a photo. The window was titled "Texture: Knited love" [sic]. Oh right, keep the newbies confused! So I tried the buckled calf boot one. It did NOT open a photo, and again the window was titled Texture. So there are two kinds of texture files? How does that work? How am *I* supposed to treat them?

Newbie questions: Many new clothes packets come with some file icons whose meaning is not obvious. 1) What is the red and green dotted square? What am I supposed to do with such files? 2) What is the greenish piece of paper with the dot in the corner? What am I supposed to do with such files? 3) What is the computer monitor? What am I supposed to do with such files?

As a newbie I've been gleefully making outfits. But now that I'm beginning to settle down and concentrate, I've found that outfit folders cannot be purged. I have six permanently sitting in my Trash now, and a dozen more on the way. Is there any way to delete these? Yes, they're empty. Sure, I can TRY to remember to retitle and reuse one whenever I want to make another outfit, but it's far too easy to forget, especially when I'm in a hurry to log off. And I have a couple dozen of them.