Profaitchikenz Haiku

I was assuming that the channel chosen for the toucher would be obtained from part of their UUID plus some random addition so that it couldn't easily be guessed at or grabbed by scanning a known range. I didn't see how a bot would be able to know what channel the text box was using, but I'll take your word for it that they can tell.

The simplest way I can think of, and it might also be a least-lag solution, is to have the answer given to a text box, not by listening to local chat. so it goes like this: The question goes out in local chat as usual. An avatar wishing to answer touches the object and gets a chat box into which they type their answer. The answer gets processed in the usual way, and the winner can be announced in local chat, but as no answer was given in local, there's no way a bot can stand logging questions and keeping track of answers. Assuming a bot can't touch an object and get a text-box to type into, it can't answer.

I would put a link to Jethro Tull's "Thick as a brick", only there's a chance I would get misinterpreted so I won't.

It was Bulldozer Linden did it.

Going back a few years, some places had a "clear visible cache" barrel at their arrival point which you sat on and went sky-high. Similar in a way to the red rose that stopped all animations.

Tease...

I queried this at the server user group meeting quite some time back, after all the avatars-as-cloud and Lumiya failures came about when LL removed the UDP clothing support. UDP was apparently still being used and when I asked why this was so when we had been told UDP was so-yesterday it had to go, Oz replied that they were now using UDP for what it was supposed to be used. Or something like that. My guess is that UDP was overloaded with lots of inventory stuff trying to get passed across on it and so that side of things got replaced, presumably by the bake service, In a more recent post in the Tchnical sub-forums regarding frequent inability to remain logged in for more than a minute or so, Oz replied that the symptoms the user was described described what happens when UDP communications had failed. Not sure what it's going to be replaced with, and I haven't heard anything on this.

My understanding is that the move to the cloud was to get scalability and future-proof the platform more than cutting costs or improving performance. I think the expectations that everything would be better/faster came about because several issues got put on hold while the move took place, and it was assumed that as part of the move things would get better. As to whether the cloud is working, I have to say from my experience it's no better nor worse. There are still TP-crashes, region-crossings can be tricky, slow-rezzing and objects invisible, I still encounter these regularly, but apart from the odd "routed to wrong region" I can't see any signs that the cloud has made any real difference to our experiences. The differences it has made are probably visible more to Lab staff, and I don't think we're going to see them posting their gripes on here

Daz Studio's Hexagon is supposed to be capable of making SL sculpts. Wings 3D is also capable but I think the plugin isn't easily available. I've used it once or twice but wasn't comfortable with the interface. There is also a dedicated sculpt-making tool called Sculpty-paint. I've only used it for examining and cleaning up sculpts I made in SecondLife, which leads to the next part:- The inworld creation tools are very useful, particularly when you want to make sculpts to fill a precise role, their drawback is the texturing ability, which varies from tool to tool.

This is what happens in forums, people find things to care about. Without things to care about, there would be nothing to do but post kitteh-pikshures.

My guess is that they've taken a chance on people accepting it based on the fact that there isn't anywhere else to go where you can take your inventory with you. The majority of Slitizens are committed to what they have. Eye of a needle and that sort of thing. I would hope that what people are seeing at the moment is a combination of the newness of being in the cloud and the issues from the pandemic. It'll sort itself out in time, provided we make it plain what we want. The new owners would certainly want to preserve the revenue stream, I doubt they've initiated a run-it-down-to-the-bones policy.

A circle can be defined as <x+X0, y+Y0, z) where X0 and Y0 are your centre, and x is r*cos(theta), y is r*sin(theta), where theta takes values from 0 to 2*PI radians. so to plot pieces anywhere on a circle centred on X0,Y0,z, generate random values of theta between 0 and 2*PI, and then additionally generate a random value for r between a desired minimum and maximum, use this r and theta to calculate x and y, add the x and y to the X0 and Y0 of the centre, and the results will all lie in an annulus(*) between the min and max values of Radius. A quick explanation of how this works, when theta is an angle between 0 and PI/2 ( 0 and 90 degrees) both sin and cos return positive values, when theta is between PI/2 and Pi ( 90.+ to 180) cos is positive but sin is negative, between Pi and Pi*1.5 (180.+ and 270) both sin and cos return negative, and between Pi*1.5 and 2*Pi cos returns negative and sin returns positive. (* that's a ring, and not the ring some of you might be thinking about)

/me pulls the plug. "OK, are you still there? Does that answer your question?"

TL;DR that's entertainment I think this is a problem with sophistication. The days of being a polymath declined as we moved out of the age of enlightenment through the Victorian era, and entered the Quantum century. When we had a simple model of the universe (Newtonian Euclidian Aristotelian), knowledge was finite; as we explored further and began to discover uncertainties and increased detail the amount of knowledge that could be known with certainty decreased, the amount of detail that had to me mastered to make sense of a particular discipline increased. The amount of knowledge you have to try an assimilate today is massive, but to add to that problem, large areas of it have to be regarded as still uncertain and therefore you also have to add in the extra study of emerging studies. Most people don't want to be living on the bleedin' edge and want surety. There is another even more fascinating problem that has a bearing on the rise of conspiracy theories: that is the 60 or 90 minute saga. Since the thirties, we have been exposed more and more to radio, film and TV programs that in the 30,60 or 90 minutes present a problem, arrive at the solution, and most importantly, wrap up all the loose ends. We expect this same nice short full encapsulation to apply to everything, and so when a report comes out into the 9/11 or 7/7 catastrophes, people are not happy with the grey areas that cannot be explained due to lack of available knowledge and distrust the story. It's like a movie that finishes at the end with not all the villains exposed and not all the crimes solved, not all the retribution carried out. We expect life to be to the same standards as movies or TV programs. Knowledge now has to conform to the same standards as entertainment in order to be assimilated, it it doesn't, it's not taken on board.

'ow many padres hum?

I'd suggest searching for Magrathea, they should be able to customise a world for any millionaire with a desire for something a little bit different.

If we are living in a simulation, what's going to happen when the hardware the simulations run on moves to the Magellan Cloud?

Be aware that different physics is used when uploading to SL or Opensim, so what you find on a standalone might not be the same as what you find in SecondLife.

I've been in a state of near-isolation for quite a while now because of my partner's susceptibility. SL definitely helps by giving me the feeling of both being able to get out and explore and at the same time giving me a stable point as an anchor. What I have noticed not just on these forums but on a few others I frequent is a growing tendency to short outbursts or over-reaction, which I have to assume is caused by lockdown and then need to adhere to external restrictions. All I can say to people is, be aware of this, try and give others a bit more leeway.

I've also seen it, and it seems to coincide with something I've spotted in-world, when you open a group profile to check, the list of members is often empty and remains so even after hitting the refresh button. Sounds like a back-end issue to me.

This raises an interesting point, perhaps we do need a set of agreed benchmarks to allow for comparisons of not just different viewers, but changes to server code, hosting base,... Without that, it's always going to be subjective.

Duplicates a thread in the General forum, I suspect it's a leg-pull

Of course, it could just be one of the Lindens indulging in a sense of humour... They do like a giggle every now and then just like us.

Consider the Tar-baby story...

I have tried this on a machine that is limited to 4GB RAM and it does help with the load on the GPU, although I suspect that the full-sized textures are still downloaded so there's no easing of the network load, or even of the cache demands. I was worried at first that the extra processing to resize the textures to 512 max before flinging them at the GPU would slow things down but I saw no difference. This is partly subjective but partly based on having the task monitor window open as well as the viewer window and watching the figures. I believe there is one area where it doesn't actually make a difference and that is to do with avatars and their baked textures, based on some crashes when in close proximity to highly-detailed avatars, but perhaps a Firestorm Dev can confirm this?