Thecla

SL is what you make of it, and that includes the people you spend time around and what your own personality makeup is. Drama and toxicity has two components: the people you socialize with, and how you yourself respond to uncivil/juvenile/crazy behavior. I've been in SL for almost 20 years, on and off, and have played plenty of multi-player games, also on and off. I have a great time in SL. I have great friends who are wity, mature, and creative, and enough of them that I never find myself going out "to meet people" that I'm not meeting through friends. I also am not easily provoked by idiocy or unkindness or downright pathological behavior. No one can hurt you in SL unless you let them. I'm kind and generous with everyone I meet in SL, and if they are not, well, I don't have to talk with them or spend time around them, lol. All that said, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who's spent a decent amount of time in SL that there is a percentage of the population that tries SL because they think socializing will be easier than it is in RL, only to struggle because it's not. Many of those people lash out when they get frustrated or don't get what they want. Fortunately they are generally easy to spot and avoid. If you run around to the big dance clubs, or meat markets, you're mixing in the general population and your mileage is going to vary widely. Find venues, smaller communities, and activities that lead you to your tribe.

The textures in EEP files are just a few and limited to 1024sq. Moving clouds in SL are procedural and use one small texture so they are not an issue. I don't believe haze has an impact...I use it extensively on my sim and have never noticed a performance change. Lights, specifically projector lights, definitely have an impact on your viewer performance, particularly if you have shadows enabled.

An experience running on your parcel can change their EEP. My sim uses extensive use of an experience to provide teleportation and EEP changes. In fact, when a user enters they are informed they have to accept the experience in order travel throughout the sim. A sign that sends them a re-invite is there in case they clicked decline or missed it.

This may have been mentioned already, but with respect to events, what really pisses me off is A) I see something I want that someone is wearing or it's rezzed somewhere. B) I go the store, do an area search. It's not there. OK, it's likely it's an event. C) I do to the store's entrance and there is a huge wall of logos of all the events they participate in, but no placards showing what products they have at what events. WTH. Just strikes me as dumb, particularly when plenty of other stores have a placard and even a landmark for you when you click on it.

Ok so it's just a config change. That's too bad. I was hoping you'd get a higher memory allocation since you're paying an ongoing fee. Assuming an efficiently built sim where textures are appropriately sized, running scripts are minimized, prims/mesh are grouped to reduce LI, etc, it stands to reason that if you charge someone a monthly fee for the ability to add 50% more LI, you give them equivalent performance to a standard sim. Otherwise you're kind of just charging them for the opportunity to &$%@ themselves and their visitors.

What is a "land impact upgrade" exactly? Is it any different than what I posited in my original post?

I'm contemplating upgrading my private region from 20k prims to 30k. Does doing so include any changes that increase performance, or do they simply make a config change for your region that allows 10k more prims? That seems like a bit of a rip off if that is the case, particularly since your sim performance is likely to go down if you up your prims (and likely scripts) by 50%. Anyone know more details about this option?

Well you can set up an experience on your parcel which will switch visitors to the EEP of your choice (provided they accept the experience invite) and perhaps you can put a sign saying "best viewed with advanced lighting and shared lighting". Several sims where environment is important route visitors to a landing point in a skybox and include an "automatic" teleporter to the main content that can only be accessed by accepting the experience. I'm gonna bet that if you search on places for "manga" you'll likely find a few stylized sims.

An update. Aquila and Zalificent you have changed my life, lol. Went back easily identified the offending prim and modified it to suit my needs. And I had no idea that objects set to convex hull have that physics property. Super useful to know! And the backdrop worked beautifully out of the box, it was my meddling that caused problems. Also Rafael (I think that is his name, I'm not positive) of MINIMAL has been super responsive and helpful in the past when I have asked him questions. While his scenes/backdrops are optimized for what they were intended for and not disassembly or "parting out", he has no issues with that and will gladly share information to help you with that. And now I'm better equipped to make the best of everything I mod. Thank you so much

OMG thank you SOOO much for all this information. This is invaluable. It never occurred to me to check the physics of the prims after unlinking one of them. It was not the root prim, and I thought nothing else could have changed. I am truly grateful for the time you took to respond.

So occasionally I will buy a finished skybox or scene or backdrop and either modify it or break it up to use it in other builds for my sim. On several occasions removing a *seemingly* unrelated piece will change the physics model. For example, a backdrop that has a doorway...I unlink and remove some walls or other piece next to the doorway...or even some distance from it, and I'm no longer able to pass through the doorway. And the removed pieces are not invisible non-phantom mesh parts, such as for walls and stair cases. What is happening here? It's more that I want to understand the principles and practical aspect than finding a solution, although perhaps a better conception of what is going on will allow me to find workarounds. Here is a specific case, an elevator backdrop from MINIMAL. I removed the two side panels on the iteration on the left, and the result no longer lets me pass through the door (fyi the upper floor exterior wall is simply set to transparent, nothing else was removed).

I've never used a bought shape, only ever used my own. There are a number of good reasons to get comfortable making your own shapes, the primary one being to modify it on the fly to accommodate various bits of clothing and outfits. I change my shape very often when changing outfits to better match the style of what I'm wearing. A few tips: 1. I used to teach figure drawing so I have a pretty good sense of "standard" human proportions. But I think a lot of people have no sense of this at all. For those, a Google search on "basic human proportions" will yield a bunch of helpful resources. There are all kinds of easy rules that you can follow to help you, such as "eyes are generally one eye-width apart". Of course all rules are made to be broken and departures from them are what make us look unique, but they provide a good starting place. 2. Play with the sliders. All of them. A lot. The relationships between the various sliders and the impact they have on your shape is not always obvious and can only be discovered through exploration. The more familiar you become with how one slider affects the results of another, the better equipped you'll be to get the shape you're looking for. 3. Pan around your avatar as you edit your shape. This is particularly true for your head. What looks good from one angle may not look so great from another, such as with cheeks, nose, and mouth. 4. Different heads and bodies respond to the sliders in different ways. What worked on one body or head may deliver surprising results with another. 5. This should go without saying but different skins can have a dramatic impact on how you want to shape your face. In some respects, shopping for a new head/skin combo is like three dimensional chess: every head/skin/shape combination is different.

Thanks Wulfie. I guess I need to play with it a little more actively as my example, which was just a smooth sphere, did not show any of the variation in the colored specular texture I used. That texture may not have been dark enough either. Thanks a bunch!

It's the Axolotl - Vanter Dress. I get that the shinniness texture is usually grey scale. But this dress, and some others that I have seen...the COLOR of the reflection changes, or is at least a gradient of color and not just value. SL only gives you a color picker if you want a reflected color. How do you get a gradient of color? Is this some alpha channel thing?

Can anyone fill me in on how to create the "oily" shinniness reflection which shows a gradient of color, apparently based on angle of viewing or light striking the surface? I can't really see if this changes based on angle but the effect is convincing all the same. I tried putting a rainbow-ish texture in the shinniness texture box and fiddling with levels, but no joy.

I've heard a lot of "oh you need to use <program> to do that, much easier than Blender" more times than I can count. But I have spoken to numerous content creators that I respect who basically use Blender for their entire workflow, including rigging, with superb results. I think there is some benefit to learn the Blender workflow and get comfortable with it before you buy and learn another product for that. One issue with Blender is that there are literally a dozen different workflows for doing any given thing...like texturing, and it is difficult to know in advance which workflow that you've seen in half a dozen tutorials will work best for your specific project. I just consider it part of the learning process...when you have some comfort level with different workflows, it gives you a better view of the landscape of alternatives and what workflow to use for what project.

First thing, I will not buy a clothing product that does not have a demo. Period. Been burned too many times to waste money like that. There are too many clothing creators with lousy rigging skills to bother with. I prefer demos that have the right textures, and a hud that shows all the available textures. Nothing pisses me off more than a demo that comes in just white, you buy the color you want, and it looks nothing like the advert. So if I get a demo like that, it goes in the trash. I don't mind the big "ring prim" on demos...provided it does not obscure the product in a way that is super intrusive (like some hair demos, where you can't even see your face, wtf lol). I've never seen that, people who've figured out how to mod a demo so that the ring is transparent. I'm shocked that someone would go to that trouble. Some demos, they can stand to have "DEMO" written all over them, some can't. It's better in my mind that demos that don't come with a full texture hud.

I'm having trouble following you because you're (apparently?) switching back and forth between "sides" and "faces". Or perhaps I'm just not following your description correctly. Faces and sides are not the same thing as far as SL is concerned, or rather the term "faces" is reserved for collections of "sides" to which textures and materials can be applied. While in your 3D authoring program for example you have vertices, edges, and faces (or sides, if you will), SL specifically reserves the term "face" or an area of an object to which a texture can be applied and that area may be composed of numerous sides (or faces as you would refer to them in your 3D program). So if you're in a 3D program and assigning materials to groups of faces, SL will only recognize a maximum of 8 group, and will refer to them as faces.

LL has quite a few things that I think they need to fix before improving the animation system. It's a matter of priorities and resources. And I would not take their lack of attention to this area as a sign that they are de-prioritizing adult content. One of SL's enduring strengths is that it is relatively open and can be many things to many people. That inevitably leads to segments of the population getting into ideological scuffles with each other. As noted I think sex in video games is accepted more and more each year. Heck, one of the big complaints about soon to be released Starfield is that you can't bump uglies. And I think LL has come to terms with how the SL population breaks down and what people do in it. I recall way back when Philip Rosedale being discouraged at how adult content was flourishing so healthily. A recent interview of him which put a question to him about adult content had him saying that people can do what they like in SL and that's the beauty of it. Yes that might be just the standard response but he must have come to terms with it after all this time. I believe first person porn is high on the list of what people do with the Quest 2 so anyone who has dreams of a PG metaverse needs to wake up and smell the coffee and take a look at human behavior. What do we do in life? We eat and screw. What's popular on the MP? Food and sex stuff lol.

I switched from Maitreya, which I had worn for years, to Legacy and it was extremely painful to do so given the size of my clothing folder lol. But I switched because Legacy has more subtle shaping and there are areas of the Legacy body that are superior anatomically to Lara, including where the arm meets the torso and in the hip/butt area. Also, the body does not deform nearly as much in various poses. Fortunately the Legacy body comes with deformers that allow you to wear clothing rigged for other bodies. How well the deformers work varies from one piece of clothing to the next, from fabulously well to "wtf, no." I also think you can wring a far wider variety of shapes out of Legacy than Lara. I would say when checking out different bodies to definitely put it through it's paces in terms of poses and animations. I'm not a fan of Legacy's networked HUD, which I assume they did to allow them to provide more styles...which they have not done. In any laggy area, trying to manually alpha body parts turns into a game of whack-a-mole.

Given all this technical gobbledy-*****, which I use simply as a placeholder for "everything I don't know and don't have the bandwidth to master", what would be the best "rig" for SL on the value scale, at the current time? I'm not asking for just indescriminately piling on horsepower across the board, just a reasonable build that gives the best bang for the buck, from a moderate "gaming builds" perspective. I'm not in the market for that, but I think spec'ing a machine like that would give a good view into where to focus attention (and money) and where it delivers diminishing returns. OMG I got flagged for the latter part of gobbledy-STUFF because it's an asian insult. Good on SL.

I bel I believe you need to be thinking in terms of "faces", not sides. A mesh object in SL can have 100 sides as defined by vertices, but no more than 8 faces which can be assigned different textures, through scripting or otherwise. There is no way around this limitation as far as I know.

There is a very similar house as that last one for sale in SL...I think it's from Meshworx, I forget. I do know RW architects that use SL to show plans and landscaping to clients, but they are usually sitting next to them as learning the SL interface just to take a few quick tours through a plan is a bit of an inverted lift. I'm not sure what the current state of the "AutoCAD to SL mesh" process is, but again, the issue with architecture students is that you're asking them to learn SL and a whole bunch of technical stuff in order to even rez a model in SL. That could be a whole course in and of itself, lol. Along with the RL revolution of pure design architectural style and theory are the advances in fabrication...such as 3D printed houses, which in turn make possible structures that would have been prohibitively expensive to build. For much of the last century, architectural designs have been constrained by engineering and materials...building materials are mass produced to build the most common forms, which in turn hinders the evolution of cost-effective "departures" from common forms. In short, a square house is much cheaper to build than a round one.

I would definitely suggest that you become proficient at creating, editing, and combining in-world created prims as a first step. While most contemporary objects in SL are mesh, it is all imported and knowing how to handle them as objects and potentially combine with with in-world prims is a basic skillset. While you can buy full-perm, untextured clothes on the MP, or those with AO and specular maps and so forth, I think you'll find it far more creatively rewarding to jump right into making your own mesh, which you're going to do anyway down the road. Might as well jump right in. As suggested Blender is free and is a tremendously powerful program. It's a bit of a swiss army knife and for SL you'll find yourself using only a fraction of it's features. Blender can be intimidating at first, learning the interface and basic function, but if you're disciplined about it and put in the time within a week or two you'll pass that threshold where suddenly you feel moderately comfortable learning more skills and functions seems less daunting. I tell people that learning basic modeling in Blender is pretty straightfoward and logical. Texturing, on the other hand, is not only far more involved but also in some respects a craft and art form...not just in what textures you are applying, but i now they are applied. Many people end up using other programs to texture their mesh such as Substance Painter, but Blender is still the first place to start with texturing. One reason to skip buying full perm clothes is that you're stuck using the basic templates that they come with. If you're making your own mesh, you have far more latitude in the texture creation process than simply recoloring stuff in Photoshop. Builder's Brewery provides classes that run the gamut from scripting to learning Blender, to texturing, as well as very SL-specific topics such as uploading meshes and configuring LI (Land Impact) and LOD (Level of Detail). YouTube has a smattering of useful tutorials on creating for Second Life, and a HUGE number of Blender tutorials. I'll end by saying that it's worth the upfront "WTH...how do I do this" challenges.

Hello, I'm looking for advice on best practices for moving a large build from one sim to another. The build consists of multiple stacked skyboxes, each confined to a relative small confined leve/area. However, each of them has developed organically and has @ 500 elements each. I'm hoping there is a way to relocate them safely without having to pick up small collections of objects. Any help would be most appreciated.