Profaitchikenz Haiku

I have suddenly realised I don't have an ignore list, now I feel deprived. Seriously, though, just empty the ignore list. There's no person so bad that you'd never ever want to read what they posted ever again, surely? Oh wait, Trump. Yes, sorry, forget I spoke.

For those not on Macs,. there is Windiff (in windows) , and Unison on Linux that can synch files between directories on various machines on the same LAN. So if you're running Windows and you have the chatlogs on a PC and on a chrome book both in publicly-accessible shared folders, then something like "windiff \\myPc\Chatlogs \\myChromeBook\chatlogs" will compare the two directories and give you the option to copy changed or new files from the one to the other. If you're running Linux then (of course) it's not quite so simple and you have to go through a few hoops first of all with the keyring for public shares followed by setting up Unison, followed by sorting out the correct permissions,... but again, it's fairly simple once those initial pains have been suffered.

I thought every dialogue started with the name of the object and the object's owner? I also have to say (and this follows a griefing years ago where several hundred blue boxes were stacking up in my viewer) that getting too many unexpected messages/dialogs of that type is going to make people look for the mute button

Yes, and frequently there is no "connecting to ..." message and if you're lucky you get the "teleport unable to ..." message. If you're unlucky you're stuck or crashed, and have to come back in and put back up things like the mini-map and inventory floaters that always seem to get knocked for six in these instances. There are good days and bad days, if it happens once to me I know it's going to happen several times (maybe every 8th attempt). Some regions are worse to get out of than others, and I have a tentative assessment that altitude is a factor here. The higher up I am when I click on a new destination the more likely it is I'll not get out of the place. I haven't looked to see if SL in general is heavily loaded on the bad days, the regions I visit are sparsely populated so I don't think avatar numbers is the issue here. I looked at Molly's hint but I don't think any of the places I go to are in the cloud yet. Updated to report that I've spent a couple of hours going around without a single crash and only one "Teleport failed to complete in a timely manner" instance, so maybe they've sorted out what was going wrong?

It's possible that the avatars in question don't notice the little number has incremented in the count of messages, and therefore miss the one telling them that "...., an object owned by .... wants to ...." and therefore don't click and agree?

As far as I know the system avatar doesn't have an AO to itself, it uses whatever you are wearing. If this is in the library, then once you have copied it from the library to your inventory folder it becomes another editable item (see final paragraph). There are quite a few reasons for a pose to not work, you've found the main one, if an AO has a pose affecting the same joints but a higher priority then you won't see any change. Secondly, if the animation is for some of the extra bones that bento introduced, you won't see any activity unless you have a suitable avatar. As far as I know (and I'm still a system avatar myself) this means I would need to get a mesh body with the bento rigging. For facial expressions, which use built-in animations, bento heads will not animate. There are some AOs on the marketplace that monitor the animations currently playing on the avatar and start or stop a suitable bento one to replicate the facial expression that the system avatar is performing behind that alpha mask. Back to the AO and animation priorities. Wear the particular AO, and edit it. Look in the contents tab, and you will expect to see masses of animations, a script (or two...) and a notecard giving the basic settings. Copy the notecard to your inventory and then look inside it. You should be able to find lists of animations to be played when the avatar is in various different states. Assuming your AO allows it, you can copy new animations to the contents and then alter the notecard so that these animations are played instead of other ones. By this method you might be able to substitute lower-priority animations and be able to take tea without having to divest yourself of your AO.

I look forward to seeing people choosing black ink on black paper...

Not debates, merely competing postulates.

The setting is something like "Arrow keys always move me", when set to true you can't cursor to and fro in the chat-bar to correct typos. The other setting you'll want to look at if you're going to try the WASD is "pressing letter keys starts local chat", if set to true then your plans will be thwarted again.

It was set, but after changing it I can't see any difference. I also worked through all of the notifications listed and could not find ones for requesting animation permissions. it's such a basic thing within SL I would expect it to be non-hideable. Anyway, I thought I'd just add a gripe to the list, but I can elarn to get along with it.

A neat trick. Actually what I had in mind was: list colours = ["red", <--->, "blue", <----> and so on]; // then inside the listen event integer found = llListFindList(colours, [msg]); if( found > -1) partColour = llList2vector(colours, found + 1); else partColour = (vector) msg;

Take the supp[lied message and cast it to a vector. if the supplied string is not a valid vector (ie has full stops instead of a comma) you'll get a silent conversion to ZERO_VECTOR colour = (vector) msg; // sensible to use string trim on this) if( colour != ZERO_VECTOR) { // do stuff } The thing you'll have to be careful of is extra spaces, <0.5,0.5,0.5> will convert. but <0.5, 0.5, 0.5> will fail because of the spaces after the commas. You will probably end up going through the message copying each non-space character between < and > to a fresh string to guard against such issues You could also, assuming you might want <0,0,0> as a valid choice, have pre-defined vectors for red,green, blue, yellow,black, white... so the message is tested for these first and if no match, converted to a vector

Interestingly, nobody else has mentioned the only annoyance I have with the newer crop of viewers, the hidden requests. Time was, when you clicked on a scripted object, a blue-box message popped up "Dancing fool, an object owned by Frank Zappa, wants to animate your avatar ..." Now, it doesn't warn you visibly, instead one of two tiny little number icons up near the top right hand corner increments by one, and if you do happen to have suitable spectacles and click on that numbered icon, you will see the message requesting permission to make you go YowZah Zowzah Zowzah. If you don't see it because you're concentrating on the figure(s) in the centre of the screen and the typed chats and emotes, you are left with a dull feeling of "Why did I even bother sitting on that?" I really wish, (and hope somebody is going to respond with a setting I've not managed to find so far,) that there was a return to the big blue "you cannot ignore this popup" box.

Sometimes all it takes is to use the angry-mummy voice and a threat of early bedtime to sort things out.

As far as I can tell (*) the edit window always opens at the position you last closed it in, so assuming it initially opens mid-screen where your object is, drag it to one side or the other of the window, and when you re-edit the object it should stay at that side out of the way? * Thinking back, I'm not sure if it retains the remembered position between logins/

This might be specific to the region you were in, I just tried and successfully uploaded an image in Sandbox Pristina, give that a try.

OK, what I was referring to was the people who cannot create all the content themselves but mix in some of their own and some of other people's creations. In the train-sims, for example, you might make a few buildings yourself but find some available stations all ready to use, which however didn't have the best Lod behaviour, so you ended up putting perhaps trees in front of them along the longest direction of approach so as to occlude the object partially. Likewise in SecondLife., people tend to buy houses from other creators. Trees in SL can be awful, but the best ones I saw were sculpts with the trunk and branches as one sculpt and the foliage as another sculpt comprisng several panes. Because of the way sculpts work they could be a bit messy during the intial loading phase but after that behaved perfectly at varying distances, and, of course, were just 2 LI. You mentioned another point that I too have experienced, none of the regions I have visited in the Opensim have ever crashed my viewer or slogged it to a halt, but many do so in SecondLife. is it the prevalence of mesh with large textures and the extra bump and speculars for ALM? I don't know.

If you can, try a direct Lan patchcord between your PC and the router. The 100MBS does not say much other than the optimum maximum, if there is a certain amount of latency you may be getting long periods of no packets sent, leading to the region deciding you have disconnected. If you can't use a patch cord, experiment with the positions of the PC and the router, there may be things partly obscuring the signal, or echoes off surfaces affecting it. The other thing to do is drop the bandwidth setting. I use a laptop on Wifi sometimes which is perfectly stable, but I have the bandwidth set to 1200 maximum (it's a nominal 60Mb ADSL line), and the laptop is in direct line of sight to the router, I make sure I do not sit with my back to the router.

I fear LL are in between Scylla and Charybdis here. Some people wander around viewing a region with a moderate draw distance, some people like to stand at a landing point and cam around the entire region without moving. I cannot see a way to optimise LoD levels to fit both those types of behaviour. I know it's been disparaged by many. but playing around with RenderVolumeLodFactor is a perfectly good workaround, moderate draw distance users can get by with the LL-recommended setting, hard-core 256metre+ draw-distance users can crank the figure all the way up to 11. Another group of users are the photographers and film-makers. They are probably the ones more affected by this because medium to long shots which are desirable to avoid the excessive perspective leaning are going to experience the degeneration, and in the case of film-makers, cranking up the setting is possibly going to hit their frame rates. The vehicle-users possibly get hit the worst as they are travelling fast enough to need rapid redrawing but cannot ramp up the LodFactor as that is going to get them worse frame rates. I can't see any workable medium term solution to this other than avoiding regions that are hard to view, and persuading users, as Chin is trying, to adopt better methods. I'm impressed buy Chin's original post, it reminds me of the tricks we used in the train simulators to try and stop the annoying objects popping into view full-blown behaviour: judicious view-blocks combined with carefully crafted lower-LoD models worked. Personally, I'm in favour of people walking or travelling around a region instead of just camming from a central point, but it's all about personal freedom.

Funny you should say that, I discovered it last year and joined up, with some difficulty because they for some reason insisted my ISP (the largest in the UK) was such a major provider of spam that they were blocking it. Having joined and managed to log in, all I can say is I came, I saw, I tiptoed away I think it's part of their responsibility as the people who initiated and maintain SL to indicate what they regard is the bare minimum and set the standards. However, I have just realised the main stumbling block to the idea of plugins: LL some time ago stipulated that TPVs could not provide differing experiences to the main SL viewer. I forget the precise definitions, but there were older TPV features such as client identification that LL vetoed because it was leading to some unpleasantness inworld. Any plugins would need to be approved by LL first, I suspect.

Yes, yes and yes with a capital K. Furthermore, several people can collaborate on an inworld build, as far as I know that's unique to SL/Opensim.

I fully understand your reasoning, but on the other hand, it is educational for people to know that something like this can happen, and would suggest also that you're shutting the door long after the horse has bolted.

Nothing, it's up to you when you edit it or drag it from your inventory into an object. You'll find a check box for mono or LSL, usually now it's always mono but I've been surprised once or twice, especially when I've gone through really old stuff from back when I didn't know any better.

This sounds like limited space for the lists. Are the scripts you tried LSL or Mono? Mono would allow much more data storage. If you can edit the scripts, add a couple of llOwnerSay messages to monitor the accumulated steps and remaining free memory at each stage, similarly monitor the loop when the stored positions are dumped back out. Although Lucia's recommendation is the most up to date, puppeteering still has a role to play for those of us who get nauseous each time we try to get to grips with Blender's idea of how you should build outside the world.

This came up at one of the server user group meetings I used to attend, avatars were shown walking around with massive 5 or 10-metre square objects fully transparent over their heads. At the time, the only logical explanation was as you have surmised, it was a way to make tiny jewellery attachments such as ear-rings or possibly mesh hair remain visible and not decompose into triangles. I don't know if this has ever received further attention. Avatar attachments don't count against region object counts, so it wasn't seen as an immediate problem. The instance you have shown also might be a clever way of getting around the combined LOD/LI issue as well?