steeljane42

Yeah, assuming much again. "Everyone who doesn't agree with my point of view must be curmudgeons, won't ever buy a full product and will rush to leave bad reviews if they actually do". That also speaks of your mindset, but not really related to this discussion, just like your comment, though. P. S. Sorting on MP for women's apparel with 0L$ returns 136165 results right now, 1L$ - 35768, 3k more with 2-3L$. Can't say I remember the in-world vendor that would have had paid demos and didn't refund right away, so I'd say it's pretty obvious that majority prefer 0L$ demos over paid ones.

More like a principle to not feed the greedy people. It's their creations, of course, so they can charge w/e they want for the full versions and demos, but when someone is so desperate to try and squeeze a few hundred of L$ out of the free demos it just screams "greed" to me, so I most likely to avoid it and make business to someone else. Thankfully the stores I like a lot don't do that and for everything else there's plenty of alternative in most cases. And yep, when in shopping mood I often grab a few hundred of demos at the time to see if I can mix and match a couple of new looks/outfits (I almost never go for full/ready to wear outfits). So while ~300-900L$ (with 1-3L$ per demo range) wouldn't be THAT bad, I'd rather spend them on something else.

Assuming much? It's more of a principle, than being cheap. But yeah, given that 99%+ of demos I get going directly into the trash for various reasons (some are just bad, some don't fit the other clothes I had in mind and so on), I don't see why I should waste hundreds of L$ on demos when they cost nothing to make. Or, you know, some creators could even sell passes so the possible customers could access their regions to look at the rezzed buildings, landscape/decor, furniture and other not demo-able items. I make some exceptions from time to time, but in general if a demo is non 0L$, then I just skip it. Thankfully it's mostly template resellers that try to charge for clothing demos these days, can't say I remember seeing many (or any) original creations' demos being sold for 1L$ or above.

Without too many tech details: you can see materials with it enabled. https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/materials-normal-and-specular-mapping-r1352/ So leather shoes will actually look like leather, latex will look shiny and your red dress will reflect the lights (given all of them actually have materials). Depending on how item is made it can look different or absolutely plain without ALM. Unless your PC has some difficulties with having ALM on (even older/weaker machines shouldn't, if you keep shadows disabled) I wouldn't suggest turning it off ever.

If it's not there anymore, then there's a good chance it was removed since then. Unless you already made sure it's just you and your friends (or alt) can see the building in question. Either way, if you still want to try, the assets blacklist is local (unlike mute/block list, which is server sided) and located in (default path): c/users/username/appdata/roaming/firestorm_x64/avatarname folder. Delete/move (if you wish to save it and don't derender bunch of stuff again moving would be the better option) assets_blacklist.xml from the needed avi's folder with viewer closed and login to check if building is there. If you will need your blacklist, then just move your old one back and replace the newly created/empty one with it. If the building is 100% there and you can't see it like that, then there's a slight chance for cache corruption, so could be worth to delete it.

It's not about complexity, which doesn't mean almost anything anyway. Here's a short chart of some mesh bodies. I was lazy to get them all (or to make the chart look better, so just a basic picture), but as far as female bodies market goes it's probably well over 85% of what you see in-world anyway, a few male ones as well. Old Catwa pre-bento head is there to show that "it's not as bad" as it used to be, so despite new TMP bodies taking the lead in vertices amount, they are behind Belleza female bodies (all 3 have roughly the same numbers) in triangles and well behind some old stuff, like said non bento head, so nothing new really, no one's PC is gonna burn. Those are just bodies, without hands (and some without feet), so the full amount of vertices/triangles will be higher, in some cases (like for the new TMP bodies) a lot higher, their hands are almost 190k triangles (or were it vertices?) for some reason. P.S. Couldn't find anyone with new TMP bodies in-world while I was checking a few new events, so I went there to grab demos myself to get the numbers. What an atrocious shopping experience they've made. You have to accept experience, which controls your camera for no reason whatsoever, attaches temporary stuff to your avatar and demo itself is invisible to others, so if someone wants a friend's opinion on how their body/head/skin/hair/etc combo looks like before buying, they have to resort to sharing pictures of the demo inside the store, since it auto-detaches if you leave the region.

They look like secondlife:///app/wear_folder/?folder_id=<id here> normally, but it's possible to put custom url instead as well. If you click it, it will replace your current outfit with content of the said folder. I believe it should be library items that everyone have in their inventory, otherwise it won't work for anyone else, but the owner of the folder. So the worst thing that can happen is someone putting a bunch of ancient library items on you, but it's more annoying than harmful. Most commonly used by "fun people" (the ones who are only fun to themselves, but usually quite obnoxious for everyone else), like "click here to see my RL photos" or "click below to receive free stuff".

That's way too small sample size, besides nature of those disconnects is very random to begin with. I had a couple of completely free days 2 weeks ago and did a lot of shopping/demoing/checking in world. Probably around 1.5k of teleports give or take a hundred. Not a single disconnect, even in to/out of very slow regions. And then it did disconnect me 3 times in 6 teleports on the next day and had those annoying random disconnects again ever since. Today is good so far (for me, but seems like others already got disconnects), but way too early to tell. I'll believe it's fixed only after a few weeks of testing, if I won't disconnect even once (and that's how it used to be for me before), then hopefully LL finally managed to track down the issue, fix it and make sure it won't happen again. It's been over a month already and is beyond annoying.

I thought they are rolling those changes only around new Linden homes because those don't allow skyboxes to begin with? Someone correct me if I'm wrong and they did adjust the rules for the new area. Because otherwise for other mainland parcels it's not a viable solution. People do live in skyboxes there, some have them on different altitudes. I doubt LL will want to restrict privacy/security for residents there or dictate how they can use their parcels. Like a certain person keeps suggesting in every other mainland thread - forcing everyone to live on the ground. Maybe have other plans to disable teleports on mainland too and force everyone to use vehicles. Because... realism! I mean LL could do that, but I really doubt they would. Mainland already looks like a loss for LL when it comes to revenue. With private regions it's simple - someone always pays a tier, be it a landlord subrenting it to other people or someone directly paying to LL. People stop paying - region removed, server space/resources saved. Mainland regions, however, are always there, 24/7, even if they are completely abandoned. And there's a lot of abandoned land around. I wonder how many of ~7800 LL owned regions could be taken offline if they weren't the mainland ones. So further restricting on how people can use their mainland LL would risk to push even more people into private regions making even more mainland into lifeless desert that no one pays for, because I'd imagine a lot of people would want to keep their skyboxes for all kinds of reasons. Especially I'm talking about large parcels, because even if someone loves to live on the ground level there are some things that better if they are put somewhere else. For example in my region I have the usual cozy lakes and forest kind of place, with a few houses, forest paths in between and other matching stuff. And in the skies I have some very nsfw facilities, which would be plain ugly from the outside if I left it on the ground, plus I'd have to cut into the forests to make space for them and make my home less of how I'd want it to be. LL could drop the mainland tier to make it more appealing, though. But it's already 70$/month cheaper for full region compared to private regions and I don't see it helping too much, there's more that twice as many private regions on the grid now and like I said earlier, none of them are really abandoned, like a good portional of the mainland. Just in case, "I have no beef" in that argument. I never liked the idea of "living in a community", so first parcels I did rent were in private regions already and yes, they had banlines and a security orb with 20s warning, then many years after I did get my own region which is closed to the random visitors completely. I'm also not really interested in sailing/flying so others' orbs never bothered me, but I will agree that instant kick ones are pretty unnecessary, though. There were many cases when I teleported to what should have been a store and got instantly kicked by someone's orb, so I think 15-30s range is fine, it leaves people time to press the teleport back button. So yeah, I don't really care either way, but I strongly support the "privacy group".

Spare time for homestead is most definitely not the "actual spare time" that full regions have. For full regions it does work as you'd expect from what I saw. If you have spare time you're looking at 90%+ for scripts run, often around 95-100%. If region runs out of spare time it'll start eating into scripts' performance and you will see less and less % run. Homesteads always have tons of spare time, but I think actual spare time for those is around 4ms (maybe 5ms), after that scripts run % starts dropping while stats still show 15-16ms of spare time left. It's probably just lack of interest from LL to update/adjust their tools when it comes to homesteads. Maybe a technical limitation too, you never know with SL and its spaghetti code that goes back to 16 years already. P. S. My friend's homestead has around 2.1k scripts (majority of them seems to be very light, mostly just idle ones in landscape stuff used to change seasons in whole region easily.) and 85-95 EPS. It usually hovers around 45-50% scripts run too.

Looks like the this one to me (but I'm not 100% sure, picture is too small) https://www.flickr.com/photos/157661345@N05/46617069364/in/dateposted/

I'm pretty clear I believe. The main thing is that the premium and basic users both can be spenders and in many cases basic ones will outspend premium ones by a lot. Therefore I don't see why premium perks should even be a thing, more than they are now or some versions (and I did add a few examples of what could different premium groups have in my last post). Stipend, home, live support and/or little things I did mention earlier, sounds like enough for 6$ a month. I also was very clear about not seeing anything that would make me do that (aside of expensive permanent subscription option, but mostly because I do have a thing for "lifetime upgrade", than actual need) and the only things that could change that would be ones which would start ruining it for non premium users. Which is what I'm against.

As you see I didn't find any reason to "upgrade" myself, if I had some kind of example what I would give to premium users I'd probably have said "if there was this, that and this too, I'd subscribe myself". But I don't need any mainland as I have my own region (and before that I was just renting parcles in private regions, which is what majority people with any interest in having a land do I assume, there's 16k of private regions vs 7k of LL owned), I don't care about 300L$ a week because it's the drop in the ocean compared to the rest, same for premium sandboxes, voice morph etc. So in a way I actually think that whole premium thing is the relic of the past. And LL could easily let people to buy mainland's parcels without it. If this how it works for whole private regions, then no reason it can't work for parcels on the mainland, after all the mainland region is just joined usable parcels plus a few LL owned ones, like roads and protected water. The other benefits (more groups, 2 animesh attachments vs 1 etc) are all in the "locking out content" territory in my opinion and like I already said, it's the path I hate the most for online "games". But on the low scale and because I remember LL was going to change their premium model I think they should separate perks into 2-3 groups. 2048sqm (or more) free tier and no stipend for those who need more land (maybe for their stores?). No tier option with more L$ a week and no free home, for those who already rent a parcel elsewhere or don't need a home at all (and there's a lot of those people). Maybe another group for bloggers/fashionistas/photographers with free picture uploads or something similar. LL could cooperate with some well known 3rd party creators and increase the number and quality of gifts for that group of premium users, kinda like a LL version of monthly subscribe box with clothes, skins, vehicles, decor etc. All of those groups should also have access to live chat as the main benefit. And what's up with that "paying player"? Basic doesn't mean "not paying". You don't need premium to buy L$ or to even own a few full private regions and homesteads (yes, I know you need a full region first before you can get a homestead), you only have to add a CC or paypal and have money (duh). Basic user with one private region pays more each month than "premium user" pays in 3.5 years for the premium status (assuming yearly plan). Now where are my "ultra mega premium" benefits then? Right, nowhere and I'm fine with it. Because It's a dangerous path of making the basic experience worse and adding more perks for different tiers of "elite users". Lots of F2P games do that, they cater to so called "whales" who invest thousands of $ into the game each month, while making normal (often paying too, just in way more reasonable amounts) users experience pretty miserable, pushing them to "buy it, suffer or quit". I don't want that to happen in SL, there's already enough of other issues with "new user experience" as it is, locking features behind the paywall won't help to keep those new users interested, that's for sure. And might piss off the old ones as well.

I thought about it for a while and still have no idea what would change my mind. Certain thoughts that I've seen in this thread (like script stalling for non premium users in favor of the premium ones) are not the premium benefits, but more of a basic downgrades and I think that's really awful idea. There are many people that own a region, buy a lot of L$ to get stuff for that region and other random things on top of it and make LL a lot more money than w/e that premium costs a month. I'd very unhappy to see that my SL experience would become worse in favor of "premium users". And no, few additional bucks a month is not much compared to how much region cost, but I can't stand when I feel forced to get something. Locking out new features/content/performance behind the paywall is among the worst things that happened to online gaming and while SL is quite far from your generic online game, the effect would be the same here. Maybe I'd get it if there was a permanent upgrade option (I read there was at the start of SL) for, don't know, 300-500$ maybe? Mostly to just have it, than anything else.

My guess is LL will do their best to release it before (or around) SL's 16th bday, unless some new serious bug shows up or some of the big known ones are way too time consuming to fix (was that blended alphas + ALM one fixed yet? I remember seeing pictures of mesh heads with it, it was in pretty bad state by then). Makes sense to me at least. Another year, recap of the last one, plans for the upcoming one, celebrations and shinies. And what can be more shiny than environmental changes that will be visible by nearly everyone who would update their viewer in time? Out of all known/planned features it's the one I'm waiting the most. I've seen plenty of screenshots with examples of what is/will be possible and very excited to make my own sim wide windlights (or better call them EEPs now?), but I'm gonna wait until all big bugs are fixed and Firestorm implements it.

This one for me too. I'm always like... "C'mon, instead of trying to act tough better teach your friends/family/etc how to use the block function". Also worth noting that in my 6.5 years in SL I have never met anyone decent who would have had this kind of "threat" in their profile. And blank profiles as well. Ones with "IM me to find out" or similar kind of line I also count as blank. No need for fully filled picks that tell your (S)life story, but the "I'm so special so YOU have to find out about me by yourself" attitude is pretty terrible in my opinion. Those are usually rocking pretty default-ish looks too, either classic or mesh, but not comment worthy as well. RL/SL ones don't really bother me, though. It's actually good thing to see right away in my opinion. Saves a lot of time for completely incompatible people (ones who do want to heavily mix SL with RL and ones who just come to SL to relax and roleplay a bit).

My partner and I have same teleport issues since last week too. Reminds me of the similar issue from 3 years ago, when it just started randomly and ended just as randomly after a few months. It weren't fun few months, though. This one https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-20201 If TP fails the next login sometimes (not all that often, I'd say 1/10 or so) is also a mess. First it shows a window saying about avatar not being in region, then when it lets me to login it doesn't seem to fully connect to the grid, clothing is "downloading" and I see the "buy land" icon even on protected land. Unlike 3 years ago I always see my L$ balance properly, though. If that happens, then the relog always fixes all issues.

That's only partially true. Competitive online games where ping matters the most - you are correct, streaming service is completely unusuable. But even for action based single player games it can be "ok", not perfect, but playable. See PS Now as an example, Sony provides PS2, PS3 and PS4 games through that and only PS4 games can be downloaded, the PS2/3 are streaming only. A lot here depends what is your ping to local node, if you're close enough and have good connection, then the difference is not too big (speaking from experience after comparing "local" version of a PS3 game vs how it works like through PS Now), but if your ping is bad, then input delay makes it quite awful for anything, but turn based games (rpgs mostly). Considering that SL (for most people) is exactly afk simulator like you said, I think it can work through streaming just fine, given the not terrible connection. Then again, unless it's a temporary solution for someone during traveling, I'd say it's better to just save 250-300$ for some used hardware and make own PC, than subscribe to said service for 17$ a month.

You know, someone can wear maitreya fit on belleza/slink or a system body and it will look like garbage rigging wise and "of course" everyone will think it's your lack of skills in rigging, rather than that person just wearing the wrong version. Better write a script that detects if "body of brand X" is worn and auto-detach your creation if it's not. Maybe even self destruct/deform it (like some paranoidal timed demos do) with the warning for a better effect. --- As for this whole discussion. I prefer everything to be mod as well, in cases with furniture/decor/landscape items it's very simple. Is it more than 50L and no mod? No buy. With clothing it's is a bit different. There are a few brands that have exactly what I need textures wise, so I demo their new releases if they are looking like what I want to wear and if all is up to their usual standards - I buy them (still wish they'd put a killing script mini HUD into folder). There are also a few other creators that have no mod clothing, but provide coloring HUDs (often overly complicated and slow, but hey, it works too) where you can adjust colors, materials and all that for all available faces and also have a kill script option to get rid of that stupid auto alpha. Then it's kinda "mostly" mod and it's good enough for me. But other than that, I usually skip no-mod clothing, unless it's an expensive gacha with which I wouldn't mess anyway since no backup is possible in that case. And I do my best to support creators that are not afraid to leave their original creations (even non fatpack versions) mod. That being said, there's not really much to discuss. It all comes down to two things. Creators make things how they want to and set the perms/price of their choice. And customers are free to choose if they want to support said creator or not. Basically - vote with your wallet and things might change eventually. I remember seeing a thread in general discussion here, about the older times in SL and how no-copy furniture (even expensive 3k+ L$ beds and what not) was a standard. And look at the furniture market now, you won't find many no-copy stuff there that is not from those ancient times or from especially stubborn creators (gachas excluded, obviously. but that's a whole different topic).

I saw my region's performance being low at times too, usually after the rolling restarts as well. In general I try to keep scripts run around 55-60% and sometimes after the restarts (and not during those, when I assume some things could be a bit unstable) I noticed it dropped to 30%. Same everything else: 1 person in the region, same objects, same script count, no noticeable difference in net, physics, simulation or agent times. It's a standalone island, so no child agents either. Manual restart is enough to get it back to the normal state. I also did assume it's because LL are saving on hardware before moving to cloud, it would make little sense to mass change/upgrade servers at this point, so I guess only replacements that happen are for hardware that is completely broken. Just speculation, of course, but I really doubt LL are looking for mass new servers upgrades/purchases at this point, they'd have to sell them to someone (and lose bunch of money on it) after migration to cloud is done.

I wouldn't get too excited about it if I were you. There's a pretty good chance that those skins will look completely broken on system heads. It's the case even now, when skin makers make a skin with a certain mesh head in mind. You can still apply it to other heads of the same brand just fine and even to other brands if skin applier is omega, but in most cases the result is "meh" at best and unusuable at worst (wrong position for lips, eye corners and so on), some heads have very different topology. And I very much doubt skin creators will take their time to make special versions of the same skins for system heads, if they wanted to they'd be doing it already without BoM. As for the topic. It doesn't affect my SL budget at all. Well, almost. It did once when it was close to the bento release, I had a non bento mesh head and was considering changing it to something else, but it was just a couple of months until full bento release already, so I did wait a bit. Other than that, nope. Don't care about BoM at all too, since the only type of an applier I use are catsuits with materials on a "clothing" layer for 3D effect instead of just painted clothing look, which BoM won't support at release (and probably for a long long time, based on how slow LL are at implementing new things in general).

Look up the Overwatch lootboxes and how they are banned in Belgium already. They contain only skins and provide nothing that affects gameplay or provides an unfair advantage over the people who don't have said skins. So yes, gacha = lootboxes. The content of the "box" doesn't matter, it's still gambling for a chance to get an item you want, be it rare or a common; skin or some boost. You have no way of knowing what you'll get and have to gamble.

For clothing and other "demo-able" items - sure, aside of events and a few stores that don't have MP at all (for their own personal reasons) I usually buy on MP. But most if not all rezzable things (unless they are almost free, like <50L$) I only buy after seeing what it is in-world. If it's a decor or landscape stuff, then I want to check textures, triangles (I don't need some light mesh, quite the opposite, but some items I saw are just insane, like 900k triangles for some small decor), If it's a building, then I want to test the above plus check if it has some physics issues, if it's a furniture, I want to check the animations on top of the look. And if I already teleported to in-world store and they have a vendor nearby, then if I decided I need this item I'll most likely buy it right there.

Some creators provide a few versions of their furniture; classic, bento hands and bento head+hands. I don't buy anything that only comes with "full bento" for this exact reasons - they look awful and in most cases don't even work that well. I suppose this is a bigger problem if you visit public places where you can't control what kind of furniture there is. I also do hope all creators will get enough complaints about that and start include option to turn them off or at least add alternative (non full bento) versions to the box. P.S. In my opinion it's not worth to use non-bento mesh heads because of that, though. Not only their expressions are limited to what head creator decided to add or sell as animation packs, they also use frame by frame (or whatever proper technical term would be) animations, which look almost robotic compared to bento ones. They were okay pre-bento, I had one myself, but these days.. not so much.

I doubt caching improvements will push badly designed content to spread, not more than it already does at least. Because I don't think people who already make (or just "port") said bad content care if their content causes any issues, be it with caching or bandwidth. And if use that logic, then better not improve SL at all in most cases. Recent animesh might lag some people with slow PCs even more, it's not too heavy from what I've seen, but it's just more mesh and geometry around in general. Upcoming EEP might too (not that sure about that, but it should come with some rendering engine changes I believe, including godrays and some more). And I'm sure when SL just got mesh many years ago, it also forced some people to leave, permanently or temporarily, because their machines couldn't handle mesh. Most platforms/games designed for average specs in mind, unless it's something aimed for either extremely low or high end. Now what is average in SL these days, PC specs and bandwidth, only LL knows, so we can only speculate. But I would be surprised if LL aimed for the lowest end when they make plans on how to improve SL. Or, you know, if go back to the bandwidth example, there are people on satelite connections in the middle of nowhere too (actually met a few of those in SL), who get unstable 256kbps on a good not rainy/snowy day. Should LL stop all possible improvements just so those would stay in SL?