mgjackson

Surely the whole idea of a VR sim is flawed - Why would you want to put on head gear and dance about your living room breaking stuff. Its bad enough with the Nintendo game consoles where you have a chance of at least seeing the cat! However, if there was a Matrix style technology that allowed you to 'jack into the net', then that would be a game changer.

> If you're looking for a parcel by the sea, make sure it's protected water or you risk ending up with a nasty surprise like mgjackson did.Fortuantly, my little plot of land does boarder a protected sea and the airport is above me and they've dropped their real land below sea level so I have a nice big area to sail in. The downside is that, well, now I have an island and so its a bit lonely - before the land either side of me would change hands quite often and there would be someone new to talk to. The other issue is the airport obscures the sky, so spoils sunsets and sunrises. Also if I have shadows switched on, my land is constantly in shadow.

I own a small plot on Yuri and rent a similar sized bit of land next door. I assumed it it would remain a sea-themed part of SL and that it wouldn't change much as it boarders an enclosed water sim, with a canal and access to an inner waterway near by as well as having access to Blake Sea However, a large airport has basically been built on top of it....quite why there I've no idea as the land is certainly had a premium price tag and there's plenty of large empty areas elsewhere in SL. I guess its just the joy of land ownership in a universe that doesn't have planning regulations :-)

I looked at quite a lot of the abandoned land and a lot of it wasn't that good. I suppose the other thing is the Linden Homes - they are very popular and why bother hunting for land when you can have a very nice home in a nice neighbourhood. I looked around the LH regions and I didn't see any empty Californian style homes and the trangular Alpine style ones which I had one of also seemed to have quite a high residency.

Yep. I reserved a Nexus 7 at PC World from the demo one that HMV had on display because HMV didn't have any in stock.

I've read a lot about the decline of SL and I guess the hay-day where big brands bought into it* have gone, but from what I can see land is being bought and sold and new things being built. After a lot of searching I've purchased 512 of sea-fronted main land which in real money was about 30 GBP, which does seem quite a lot for something that doesn't exist :-), but I looked at a couple of larger plots which were cheaper but was put off by the tier costs. However, both of those plots and a third near me which was up for the equiv of a staggering 300GBP have sold very quickly. *If I understand it correctly, a few years back it was thought that the internet would become an imersive experince and people would log on with their avatars and would do virtual shopping of real world goods etc. However, that requires a lot of dedicated time in front of a computer and the idea never really caught on. What has happened is the internet has come pervasive, ie thanks to smart phones and tablets its bloody everywhere and you can now even order your weekly shopping while sat on the loo :-)

I see, yes, just flown up to one.

Hi, Silly question but what do those red love hearts on a black background appearing on the World Map mean? Also, where do they come from - I thought the WM was minaturised snap shop of each of the regions. Thanks, Matthew

No, its not that big :-) I just chose a bad spot.

Thanks, my first attempt at rezzing it was in a small harbour which the boat complely filled. It was also across a sim boundary, which in retrospec, wasn't that smart. The boat comes in 2 main pieces, the hull which you stand on, and the top deck and rigging which the avatar wears. As I pulled across the sim boundary, the hull suddenly dissappeared and the remains of the boat sunk, leaving the top of the masts poking out of the water....quite a sight, and no doubt amusing to others watching. However, that enabled me to 'take' the top part of the boat and I've been rezzing the hull in a small dingy launch area, and then wear the top part as its in the inventory. But its not a very elagant way of getting afloat.

Bought a 3 masted schooner and having a little trouble finding a bit of open water where I can rez it. The boat also has a 'stationary' mode where it can be rezzed unattached to the avatar, and not had a play with that yet. Any suggestions? Thanks, Matt

I think there is a problem with SL in that they don't have geographic access points. SpeedTest.net shows I have to a local server 20mb, however a speed test over to California where SL are based (I think!) is only about 2.5M which negates having an ulta-high speed connection as you need to set your viewers speed to way lower than that. If SL had region access points then I'm sure they would provide a better expeirence for their users (perhaps they could make it a premium service to keep the riff-raff out :-))

Hi, I've been on and off second life over the last 6 months and I've always had a problem of the connection dropping despite doing all the tweeks (turning off http rendereing, using Firestorm, having the band width set as low as possible etc) and although I could reduce the problem I couldn't get rid of it altogether. However, have now just been upgraded by Virgin Media to a 20M connection and been given a new Super Hub, the problem has gone away. What I suspect was happening was that they upgraded my service from 10M to 20 a while ago, however the old legacy cable modem couldn't cope with the speed increase and was dropping packets and I guess one of the packets being dropped was a crucial one that SL needs. I also had an elderly Netgear FVS318 router which the Super Hub also replaced and I think that was struggeling with the speed as well. Just thought I'd put this up incase others are going through the same headache. Cheers, Matthew

I found a DirectX driver from www.iz3d.com which outputs 3D. I don't know if it uses any of the graphics cards capabilities or if it just Doing Its Own Thing, but it works with pretty well with another online game. DirectX only - I didn't know SL only used OpenGL, but that explains why I couldn't get it to work :-( Unless there's a TPV that uses DirectX, I guess this is scuppered then.

It does appear that 3D might work without the viewer having to do something special. Have asked a similar question elsewhere and got given a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_3D_Vision "The stereo driver software can perform automatic stereoscopic conversion by using the 3D models submitted by the application and rendering two stereoscopic views instead of the standard mono view. " Presumably required a 3D monitor compatible with an Nvidia card....will want to actually see this before buying it :-)

I noticed in the settings for my Graphics card that is has lots of 3D options, so presumably if I had a 3D capable monitor, then all I'd need is the silly glasses.... However, does the viewer need to be 3D capable, or just that it renders a 3D world enough - my understanding is that the viewer (or any game for that matter) just chucks the graphics render information at the graphics card and it sorts it all out.

It works pretty well with 15m prims....didn't want to hog the whole sandbox so didn't go any larger :-) Very impressive script, thanks again.

Wow, thank you, most kind. Shall have a play and see if I can get it to work. My first attempt to get a script to build something was to link several prims to a root prim which had the script then iterate through the list setting size, colours and position. (I'd missed the concept of an object being able to rez objects from its own inventory) Quickly hit the location position is relative to the root prim and the 10M setPos limit (which seems a pain, but stops prims literally dissappearing over the horizon)

Ok, thanks. This seems like it could be quite an interesting little project :-)

Thanks, a script was what I was starting to suspect :-) A newbie question: Can a script create prims though - seems quite dangerous if a runaway script started creating thousands of prims.

Looking closely at some of the buildings built is SL, I am constantly amazed by the level of detail that goes into them; it seems as much effort is required as building the real thing. I've been looking at the Abbotts Spaceport and thought I'd have a go at building something similar - there's also a similar version on one of the University Campus Sims. However, what as got me flumoxed is creating the huge dome the goes over the top - I'd assumed it was simply a large hollowed out semi-sphere, but its not. Its actually hundreds of transparent rectangular prims put together. The first few rows are rectangular, but then on the uppers rows, each prim is tapered to neatly fit. I've tried to do this by hand and its is very difficult - I don't know how to work out the relative rotation of each prim and to calculate the actual tapering so it fits neatly to the next one. Having tried a couple of attemps, including trying to build a scaffold to line the prims up, I can't see how its done. Are these things actually built using a script that lines the prims up and calculates the angles etc, or are they really all done by hand. Thanks, Matthew

I've been struggeling to keep a connection since I joined SL a few weeks ago - What I found helped was: Use Firestorm, this has options to not only use http requests to get data (all the viewers have that) , it also has the option to restrict the number of requests sent at the same time - it may be the issue is its flooding the net with lots of requests then some are getting lost and thats breaking something. Also make sure the band width setting is set to low - apparently the SL servers send as much data as you say your network can handle and don't check if thats not true....if you say you've got a fat pipe, but only got a thin one then its going to get blocked up. NB, I used a speed checking service and apparently my connection is way below what Virgin Media claim it is. I'm not sure about the wifi/hard wired argument - this is 2012 and most things are wireless these days, so SL should be able to cope. Plan B.....Get a copy of OpenSim, install that on your pc and create your own little universe. T'is what I'm doing for the moment and there are avatars you can upload so you don't have to be Ruth, or the male version Ruthbert :-)

Wow, thank you, what a most eloquently put welcome. And thanks to everyone else in this thread for their help. So far I have been amazed with what I've seen and what its possible to do in SL, and although I've only spoken to a few people in game, this seems a very friendly community.

Thanks, its good I'm not alone in my observations. It does seem a level of perserveance is required to get into this. >Was a reasonable objective critique of a poorly designed game run by an incompetent corporation It does seem its gone a little to ruin - I've was intrigued to read that IBM and Mircsoft had set up their own regions, but these appear to have long since gone. I found a NHS region, but the bill-boards for the meeting agendas are all dated 2008...probablty a joke there about the NHS keeping virtual hosiptials open while closing real ones :-) I can only make a comparison (which I don't really want to as they're not the same thing) with Runescape which I'm a long term player of. Great pains have gone into keeping the game fresh and new features to make it accessable to newbies and keep old hands interested (and paying their subscriptions) are added virtually every week.

Thanks for your posting, thats most interesting. 1. Its almost as if the client needs to down load a whole region, and then on future visits just bring done any differences...I've no idea how it works under the bonnet, but that may be impossible. The amount of storage might eventually be huge, but then these days most PCs are. 2. Yes, Been having a look at the official client; its logs off more readily than the catznip one, so if the HTTP thread fix works, then it should be apparent more readily. However, having been using catznip, the Linden client seems slower. 3. My view, again as a newbie would be to ask, could I set up a private region for our company - we're small and distributed around the world, so SL seems a good way of getting peaple to liase. However, some of my colleagues can be hard of thinking and/or obstinant, and if they couldn't get it to work I think would be quick to criticise. Afterall, Video conferencing is easy these days.