[Creating rigged mesh for existing modified joint positions]

1 hour ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

It might take a couple of log-ins on the beta grid (with some time inbetween) to get it synced with your main grid inventory. I'm not sure what the current process is. For a while it was log in, then log back in after they do whatever they do to resync it at silly o'clock in the morning SLT. Was having problems with it and don't know if that was a temporary glitch or if they've changed it.

If you have problems, ask. Someone here will know.

Once you get it sorted, the beta grid is well worth the effort. Nice quiet place to work on a project and free uploads

Yeah, at first my password didn't work. The wiki said to contact support if that happens, so I did, and they got me sorted.

What do I do if I run out of L$ on the beta grid? Can I just contact support again and they'll give me more? Is it automatic?

[re: Dev Kits for Mesh bodies]

57 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Depends on what you asked him for. 3d content is under cc3 license, but the software itself - the whole script set - is not. Getting an avatar and a rig for the 2.8 version of Blender from the beta test addon is just useless without the support of all the procedures performed by the avastar scripts set, plus you're asking someone who was trusted enough to get into the beta testing selected group to break that earned trust. 

Look at the page; it specifically says Avastar is distributed under the GPL.

Also, I was under the impression that the beta was just available to anyone who bought Avastar. If they're manually selecting people based on trust, I wasn't aware of that.

[re: Dev Kits for Mesh bodies]

38 minutes ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

Re the MyAlt4099 guy - he messaged me this morning asking me to use my current support to pirate the avastar 2.81 test version for him. Do not have anything to do with him. I've added him to my ignore list.

And if you weren't so quick to ignore me and actually gave me a chance to respond, you'd see I linked this page, and quoted where it says it's GPL, meaning it would be legal—not piracy. How is this anyone else's business anyway?

[re: Dev Kits for Mesh bodies]

1 hour ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

They are entitled to set whatever terms they like for their dev kit. You may not LIKE those terms - and you DO have a right to grips, but they DO have the right to set them. If you want a devkit for your body but don;t qualify for an official one, you do what I did for my body or that the avatar folks have done with the default av and put in the months of work to reverse engineer one without violating the ToS or infringing the creators IP.

 

Yep, I know that. And I'm entitled all the same to give my opinion on those terms. (edit: actually, just noticed you already acknowledged that)

[Creating rigged mesh for existing modified joint positions]

2 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Not a preview on the avatar, but you can login to the beta grid (aditi) where you're basically loaded with fake Lindens to test upload. 

That'll work I guess. Thanks. 🙂

[Creating rigged mesh for existing modified joint positions]

20 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

When Rigging an attachment that is supposed to be on an avatar with custom joints positions, the only possible way to make things match is to have the base model to rig on. Upon upload you won't need to tick the joint position checkbox as that is already delivered by the base avatar, but unfortunately the only way to know where joints are located is to have the actual skeleton at hand

And SL doesn't provide any way to export that data?

If trial and error is the only way, is there any way to do it without wasting L$ on test uploads? Is there some way to preview a DAE on your avatar before you pay to upload it?

[re: Dev Kits for Mesh bodies]

17 hours ago, MaxMare said:

You can only export SL default body.....sadly there are ways to export your 3rd party mesh body but that`s illegal and just wrong...I`d stick with dev kits, you get all you need for creating mesh clothes..

I don't see how it can be considered "wrong" in a moral sense if you aren't using the exported model in a way that's harmful to the creator. That said, it's still against the ToS, so I don't recommend doing it. Still don't know why it has to be; they could easily have written the ToS to only prohibit harmful uses. But that's what LL decided.

Quote

IN order to get the kit, you are expected to already own a store and have something to show for

Not everyone with a legitimate use for the dev kit would necessarily own a store. Isn't that unfair to people who just want to make things and don't care about selling them?

[Creating rigged mesh for existing modified joint positions]

If I have an avatar whose joint positions have been modified by a rigged mesh attachment, what's the best way to create my own rigged mesh to go with that avatar, with those joint positions? I'm using Avastar, in case there's an easy way there. This is a mesh avatar I bought, and I don't have the source files for it. Is there a way to pull those modified joint positions from Second Life and import them into Blender/Avastar, similar to the XML export for appearance sliders? If not, how can I go about doing this without resorting to trial and error / wasting L$ on uploads that don't look as I want them to?

I'm aware I can ask the creator for the source files, but I'm looking for a general solution.

[It's 2020. Why does it still cost money to upload an image?]

19 hours ago, VenKellie said:

images as well as other uploads like sound and mesh are all assigned a UUID and that UUID changes with every item uploaded so it kinda impossible to check if the item is already on the server. As far as i know it would require a complete rewrite of the asset server code to do such check but would also make uploading and fetching alot longer process, meaning a instant upload of a 512 by 512 image could take up to 5 seconds to upload if LL rewrote the asset code to allow such checks on the server during the upload process.

Five seconds seems like a perfectly acceptable delay if it's only when uploading an image.

[It's 2020. Why does it still cost money to upload an image?]

18 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

The 10L acts as a break. Every image you upload will exist forever, so think for just a second before you upload the file. 

Only storing a single copy of a single image is impractical for many reasons stated above, it just doesn't scale. There is also no way to prune images from the system, even images that haven't been requested in a really long time still have to exist or there is the potential for breakage, hopefully the CDN manages this.

There has to be some fee to prevent SL image data (which is accessible outside of SL via HTTP) from being misused to encapsulate other non-sl-image data - remember when gmail had unlimited storage .. and someone wrote a gmail filesystem driver. Google had to overhaul their API to break GmailFS and ensure it stayed broken.

About Gmail, that's not how I remember it. I'm pretty sure Gmail started with a gigabyte or so, and had been rising for a while since then. Might still be; I don't know. And I don't remember them ever intentionally breaking Gmail Drive. In fact now they have their own official equivalent that works much better.

["Floating" AO's with Bento?]

I'm really fond of animation overriders where most of the animations have you floating above the ground instead of standing/walking normally. I've found many like that, but so far I've only been able to find one that has Bento:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/RP-018-Flying-Fairy-AO-Bento/5102172

There's nothing wrong with that one, but I'd like some more variety. Is that really the only such AO in all of Second Life that has Bento? Or does anyone know of any others?

[It's 2020. Why does it still cost money to upload an image?]

54 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

You still have to actually check for hash collision with all the other hashes.

You pretty much figured it out, LL has a vested interest in preventing their platform to be used for money laundering.

Checking for a collision is as easy as looking up a texture by its hash.

What's their vested interest? Why is it LL's problem what people use their platform for? Are they legally responsible? I'm really sick of the government always acting like they're entitled to set rules for things they have nothing to do with, and I'd hope LL wouldn't willingly limit their own users' freedom simply to help them do that.

Have they actually confirmed that that's why they don't allow third party exchanges?

I know this is off topic for this thread, but I have pretty strong libertarian views in case you can't tell, and I just felt like ranting there, lol.

[It's 2020. Why does it still cost money to upload an image?]

10 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

What I fear is that free accounts will be charged more, a basic premium will undergo no changes and the higher levels would get lower rates. 

Yeah I could see them doing that. 🙄

It would be nice if it was free even for free accounts. There's too much stuff in SL that requires money of some sort. And not everyone necessarily wants to associate a payment method with their account, or is even necessarily able to. For these people, even a L$1 fee can be a deal-breaker. I do have one associated (and in fact have a premium account) but the same isn't true of everyone. It would be nice if they accepted something not tied to a real-world identity, like Bitcoin—it would be very much in the spirit of SL, I think. There used to be third party exchanges that did, but then they banned third party exchanges for some reason...

Still though, any requirement to involve money can still be a problem for some people, even if they can do it in a completely anonymous, freedom-preserving way.

[It's 2020. Why does it still cost money to upload an image?]

7 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Ideally yes but that would mean checking all existing textures for duplicates every time somebody uploaded a new one.

Wouldn't that be easy using hashing though?

[It's 2020. Why does it still cost money to upload an image?]

On 3/16/2020 at 4:25 AM, ChinRey said:

It's only 10 L$.

Although they may not be too important, there are two reasons to keep an upload fee. One is that the SL economy needs money sinks to function. The other is to reduce the amount of frivolous and duplicate uploads. Hosting those images isn't a big deal but keeping track of them rendering them sure are. The SL assets server has several billion entries as it is and the more we add to it, the slower it works. We do not want to fill it up with entries that aren't necessary.

As for renderng, I've seen things like houses with dozens of identical windows with identical textures, each using a separate copy of both the mesh and the texture. Such idiocy needs to be punished and the only way to do it is through the increased upload fee that causes.

If an uploaded image is identical to an image someone else uploaded, why do they need to store another copy? Couldn't it just add a copy of the existing texture to your inventory?

[It's 2020. Why does it still cost money to upload an image?]

Yes, I know it's not much, but there's tons of places online that have no problem hosting images indefinitely for free. For some sites that's literally their entire purpose, like Imgur. Free image hosting is everywhere online.

Yeah, LL is fine hosting images here for free. What difference does it make if it's going to be inworld instead? I'm sure there is a reason; I'm just not sure what it is.

[Any way to tell when an item's description was last edited on Marketplace?]

On 2/18/2020 at 7:56 AM, Dean Haystack said:

Never buy anything with the hopes it will ever be updated.
There are numerous reasons why updates might never come, fail to meet sales expectations, general lost of interest to keep developing, even untimely demise.
Even if you could tell when that change was made, there is still no guarantee an update will ever come.

Don't worry; I didn't buy it for that reason. I've actually had it for (I'm pretty sure) at least a year, and I don't remember whether it had the mention of 2.0 back then. (If I did, I wouldn't be posting this thread. :P)

[What are my options for client-side scripting?]

Okay, so there's three things I'd like to have (which Firestorm has) that I can't find:

• An option to #include from local filesystem by default without having to add a #pragma line to all my scripts Added by editing HBPreprocessor::clear() method
• The preprocessor feature that removes unused functions from the code.
• An option to make double-clicking something in the inventory attach it via "add" without detaching anything
• Some way of seeing the number of the current face that's selected when editing a prim http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2001
• An option where manually moving the camera locks its angle until you press Esc, additionally locking its position if you alt-clicked something other than your avatar. (I think in Firestorm it's called something like "Reset camera on move", which I'd uncheck to get the behavior I want)

Anyone familiar with CoolVL know if any of those options exist? I'd ask on their forum but when I tried to create my account, it said I needed to click a link in an activation email which I still haven't received, and I don't see anywhere to contact the staff (as it says to do) that doesn't require me to be logged in.

While I haven't tried the Lua scripting yet, it looks like it does have everything I need and then some. Thanks again for the tip

[What are my options for client-side scripting?]

1 hour ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

Use a viewer with client-side automation script support via LUA, e.g. CoolVL.

Wait, that's a thing? I looked for something like that but didn't find it—thanks!

I currently use Firestorm, and there's some features that I simply can't give up—mainly the LSL preprocessor. Pretty much all my scripts are written for it; it's indispensable. I did some research and it does look like CoolVL supports this feature, but it says macro expansion isn't supported. I don't think that will be too difficult to work around, but hopefully it won't have any more troublesome incompatibilities with Firestorm's preprocessor.

Thanks again

Of course, if anyone has any other ideas, feel free to suggest them, just in case CoolVL doesn't work for my needs or those of whoever else sees this thread in the future.

[What are my options for client-side scripting?]

I have a complex network of personal scripts that I've built up over the years, which I use to control all my attachments. Central to all of them is a system I call "Switchboard", whose primary function is to keep track of global variables and do things with them, like insert them into strings and output them on chat channels.

I'd love to reimplement this as a client-side program of some sort; that way everything should run faster, without any risk of causing lag, and I'd also have orders of magnitude more memory available for storing code and variables.

My question is, what would be the best way to do this? All I really need in terms of functionality for interfacing with SL is a way to process incoming llOwnerSay messages, and send output on chat channels. (Custom GUI panels for replacing HUD's would be a nice extra.) I know that if nothing else, I could figure out how to compile and run it as part of a custom-built viewer, probably by embedding Python or something in there. But is there a simpler way?

[Any way to tell when an item's description was last edited on Marketplace?]

I'm concerned about this item specifically: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/THW-Action-System/3916543

The description says "Massive 2.0 update in development", but according to the release notes on the creator's website, this item hasn't been updated since 2012. So while it could be getting an update soon for the first time in eight years, I feel like it's also not unlikely that the message about 2.0 is almost as old, in which case the odds of it coming out in the next year or two probably wouldn't be that great. I'd ask the creator, but his profile says he's taking a break from SL and will be back. Again though, I don't know when he posted that or how up to date it is.

One thing I did notice is his inworld profile lists a classified entry for the item with a "created" date of just last week, but I don't know if those simply auto-renew or something. And more generally, it would be good to know how to determine this for other items as well, in case this comes up again.

[What's the best way to find what channel a no-mod script uses, scanning the entire range?]

11 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Why is this in People / General Discussion and not in Creation / Scripting ? To scare a wider audience into thinking that their clothes and furniture are going to be troll-retextured soon?

Oh, all the dresses and underwear that will get the TEXTURE_TRANSPARENT treatment at public events.

Yeah I posted it in the wrong section by mistake, sorry.

[What's the best way to find what channel a no-mod script uses, scanning the entire range?]

19 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Or DMCA and other parts of the legal system? The trouble with hypotheticals is that answers are usually hard to determine until you test them and see if things blow up in your face.  If you really want to get your tinfoil hat busy, you might wonder how far you can follow this line of inquiry before someone in the Governance team puts a little "Watch this guy" tag in his notepad.

I guess another answer is, just closely read the ToS, between the lines. If it can reasonably be construed not to forbid something, I figure you'd have a pretty good case if you do get in trouble. I don't know that from experience, but it makes sense.

This is kind of sort of getting off topic though, I suppose.

[What's the best way to find what channel a no-mod script uses, scanning the entire range?]

9 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

Valid use-cases that violate neither the ToS nor anyone's IP:

• You have multiple HUD-controlled items from different creators. You want to make a single HUD that controls a subset of those items functionality for your own use - you'll still use the supplied HUDs for other functions but most of the time you will only be wearing your stripped-down (and less laggy) version to control the lot.
• You have multiple scripted items, each with their own APIs and you are attempting to coordinate their actions.

Clean reverse-engineering (ie, without circumventing permissions, without reading any of the creators script code etc) is NOT an IP infringement under the protections that apply to LSL scripts and you just need to do it using tools that do not violate the ToS.

Things like detecting script/anim UUIDs that you're not "supposed to have" and using them usually is a violation so while this is actually easier than reverse engineering an API and just issuing the right commands, the latter is the "legal" way to do it.

How about the following use-cases:

• You want to make your own attachment to extend or replace a product you bought that uses a proprietary applier HUD, and want the textures to apply to it as well. This attachment is only for your own personal use.
• Same as previous, except you also plan on selling your attachment.
• A popular vendor sells mesh clothing items, as well as a wide variety of applier HUD's for different textures. These HUD's do not use a standard applier system, and are only compatible with this creator's products. But you want to make your own items to sell which are compatible with these textures. You don't include the UUID's for the textures in your own HUD though; your customers will still need to purchase the textures from the creator to use them with your product.
• Same as previous, except the creator either gives the textures away for free or sells them at a big discount knowing they can only be used with their own products, which they charge for. (In my opinion, the seller's only recourse in this case should be to either do nothing, or realize their business model needs some adjustments to adapt.)
• You have a no-modify attachment that comes with a HUD which lets you change from pre-provided textures, but the creator did not provide any means of using your own textures. You want to make your own textures and use those.
• A popular vendor sells mesh clothing items which are no-modify. You want to sell your own applier HUD's for these items, with your own self-made textures.
• Same as previous, but you'd also like to profit from the knowledge you discovered by selling your own applier script that works with custom textures.
• You believe that once someone buys an item, it shouldn't be up to the creator what textures you can use it with. Knowing that the terms of service do not echo this sentiment,  you want to do whatever you can to work around the rules (as in, find a way that doesn't violate them) to nonetheless give people this freedom you feel they should have. So you make your own script that lets you set your own texture on all sorts of different products that weren't designed to accept custom textures. You set restricted permissions on this script though so people can't themselves discover the channel, and get that vendor's UUID's for possibly less legal purposes.
• Same as previous, except you do publicly spill the beans about the channel. Maybe you feel that the benefits to others outweigh the potential harms to the seller. Maybe you're against DRM and want to do whatever you can to weaken it and maximize end-user freedom within the ToS, whatever the implications. (Or maybe it's a specific seller who slighted you and you want to get back at them somehow, even.)

Which of those (if any) would run afoul of the ToS?

[When I do llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast, sometimes not everything updates for me]

2 hours ago, animats said:

Oh, so llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast uses unreliable updates. That should be documented.
Second Life sends update messages either as "reliable", which get retransmitted a few times before giving up, or "unreliable", which don't. Properly, the only "unreliable" messages should be ones that are regularly superseded by later messages, like move updates. (ImprovedTerseObjectUpdate, which tells the viewer something moved, is the main legit unreliable message. Can you put a color change in an ImprovedTerseObjectUpdate?) But apparently more than that is sent in "unreliable" mode.

Try SetLinkPrimitiveParams, without the "fast". That's supposed to be synchronous.

If you're doing this to animate something, don't.  Use texture animation. Much lower overhead; it's all viewer side once started.

I'd rather not have to refactor/rebuild all my scripts that use SLPPF to compensate for SLPP's inherent synchronous delay. Is there any way to avoid that?

If I report that bug (where it uses "unreliable" messages) to the Linens, is it likely it'll be fixed reasonably soon?

How would that result in the numbers in the Scale boxes updating, but not the prim's actual size?

(And yes, I know blankets and towels have no ability to fix bugs in Second Life. My autocorrect just felt like being funny, and I figured I'd let it. XD)