ChinRey

Me too although not for quite as long as you. This is also one of the reasons why I'm not too fond of voice chat. It's a half measure as will any realistic attempt to introduce body language and facial expressions be and in this case I'd say that is it can't be done properly it shouldn't be done at all. The reason I didn't completely agree with you is that it would have been great if it could have been done properly. (Voice is a bit different. It's necessary because there are people who for various reasons can't communicate effectively typing on a keyboard and for them even a crude solution is better than nothing at all. I'm willing to bet good money that there are far more people who are struggling to communicate with voice than with text on an international multilingual platform like a shared virtual reality so text must be the main focus in the foreseeable future but we still need to have a way to accomodate those who depend on voice too.)

I don't agree. Mehrabian's 55/38/7 formula (55% non verbal, 38% vocal, 7% words) is probably rather exaggerated and also ignores several other communication factors but body language is still a very important part of any face-to-face conversation. However: There's your problem. How many people will have access to a dedicated room for VR? It can't always be a bare room either since people sometimes will need to interact with objects. If you want to sit down, there have to be matching chair in the virtual scene and in the VR room. On a world wide web we also got an issue with time dilation. It may well be several hundred milliseconds and that is very noticeable and something we simply can't do much about. The hardware needed isn't actually that complicated or expensive and the technology is already here.

It's a bit of a paradox that DMCA actually punishes platforms for trying to prevent IP violations. But even so, do we really want a world where a private enterprise can appoint themselves as judge and jury in a legal case?

We don't. They make lovely little bird baths. The violins are a bit problematic in areas with heavy rain though. In some places they have to be replaced with trombones which of course is hardly an ideal solution.

Of course! Who doesn't? No, maybe not a china cabinet come to think of it.

No. Private regions can be a different matter but a rental estate as big as SN can not afford to have rules strict enough to limit the renters' builds to a niche theme as small as this. If they did, they wouldn't be able to fill up the plots.

As I mentioned earlier, unlike the bits of earth where God intended humans to live, Norwegian land tends to be vertical rather than horizontal. From an agricultural point of view there are both pros and cons to this; it means you can farm the fields on both sides but the cows tend to drop off and pile up at the bottom, making it hard to milk them. When it comes to houses, however, there are only disadvantages. A house built on vertical ground just looks ridiculous: So we don't have that many of them.

No, there isn't. Well, on a very generic level it is of course and there are, as I already said, some unique "tourist trap" features based on buildings in RL Norway. The two questions are: Does Second Norway resemble any location in RL Norway more than it resembles some location in any other Northern European or Northern American country? Does Second Norway resemble some location in RL Norway more than the average RL inspired sim in SL does? The answer to both questions is no. Look at the Hidden Lake District. It's northeastern part of Sansara, it includes all of the Linden Village and the East River community and contains fairly well known sims like Ravenglass, Waterhead, Pooley and Hawkshead. Nearly all the regions in that area are named after places in Northern England but I've yet to hear of anybody calling it an English themed area even though it's at least as close to RL England as Second Norway is to RL Norway. --- Edit: On second thought, we may be talking about two different things here. The sim named Second Norway does have a slight Norwegian flavour, thats where those "landmark buildings" are located after all. But I was talking ... ummm, I mean writing ... about the Second Norway estate as a whole and apart from the fact that palms are not allowed there it's not different from other archipelago estates like FairChang, Fruit Islands etc.

Fjords tend to be located only along the coast for some reason. It's hard to define everything but definitely lots of hills, valleys and mountains. We do actually have a lot of flat ground in Norway but almost all of it is vertical. Oh, and lots of lakes and rivers. Finland brags about being "the Land of a Thousand Lakes" but Norway has 450,000 of them.

I mean as in more "Norwegian" than any random SL sim. Bay City for example is just "Norwegian" as Second Norway is, the sims south and west of Omidyar even more so. Oh, that's right. That crude map search engine only recognises the beginning of the sim name. The full name is Blake Sea - Half Hitch https://secondlife.com/destination/blake-sea---half-hitch

Or at least like Europe which allegedly is a place on earth. It reminds me of these two classic Finnish memes. You could easily substitute Sweden or Norway for Finland except we wouldn't have talked about it as loudly as they do. The Finns are the extroverts of the Nordic people after all.

Posting this as a separate reply because it's a different sub topic. You're absolutely right. Second Life is simply too small to make really good replicas of RL places. The combined nominal area of all regions in SL are less than 1500 square kilometers (less than 4000 square miles for our American friends). That's about the same size as London or one tenth of the size of illinois or... The actual area of SL is actually only half of that because everything tend to be oversized there.

I'm Norwegian, remember, I've lived in Norway all my life and I've moved quite a bit, from east to west and from north to south. I think I have a reasonably good idea what Norway looks like and the Second Norway estate does not resemble it at all. There are some landmark builds, like Bryggen and the medieval wooden church, that are distinctively Norwegian but those aren't really typical for RL Norway either, they are landmarks and tourist atractions because they are unique. If you want to see something resembling a piece of Norway in SL, go to Half Hitch. That sim wouldn't have looked too out of place along the western and northern coast 70 years ago and there are still some abandoned islands that look something like it. Here are a few fairly random pictures of RL Norway. It's a country with a very varied landscape so I can only cover a fraction of it here of course but you should get the idea.

I first joined SL in the early days because I was curious about this new thing. I didn't stay long. I rejoined in 2013 because some amateur author friends of mine complained about how hard it was to find good illustrations for their stories. I suggested they should try SL and they all rejected it so I went in myself to prove them wrong. By the time I realized they were right, I had become hooked on building instead so I stayed for a while doing that.

Second Norway is hardly a replica of RL Norway, it's only very loosely based on it. There are some small parts of it that is more "authentic" though, like the lovely replica of Bryggen in Bergen. Oh yes, that is a great resource! But keep in mind that the topic there is themed regions which includes everything from replicas to places vaguely inspired by some RL location.

Why would LL take down a lucrative product that still sells? Most of the ones on your list are fairly "reasonable" ones whilst the vast majority of custom last names have been simplistic jokes with about the same durability as a paper umbrella in a rain storm.

Yes. In FIrestorm you can find all of that info spread out between the build/edit and the object inspect palettes. The standard viewer displays some but not all of the info.

I live in Norway, and I tell that to anybody who asks, it's no secret. As for where in Norway, I've told two very close friends which town and I've shown three or four others enough pictures they can find out if they really want to. But I've moved since last time I spoke to any of them so right now nobody knows.

I didn't know that but it illustrates one problem everybody who make game/vw mesh have to struggle with: there is no software intended for the purpose. We are just a very small niché of the 3D modelling industry as a whole of course and we have to make do with programs that are really intended forsignificantly different tasks.

If you think Blender is bad there, try SketchUp. But yes, it does. This is why it's important to remember that it's edit mode, not object mode, that is the main work mode for game and 3D world assets. (This is true for Maya and other 3D editors too btw.) From Blender 2.8 it is also vitally important to enable the vertice/face/triangle count display so you can keep track all the time. In earlier versions of Blender this data was always on display and I have no idea why they changed it. I suppose it just shows that the Blender developers couldn't care less about the needs of game/vw developers.

Ok, the first one is a good example to illustrate basic simplification techniques. The second one is even better of course but I can't really go through all of those vertices and mark the potentially superfluous ones. You have to do that yourself. I've marked some of the vertices in red. Do you need those? I can't answer that question for you,, you have to decide. You want to keep some of them but ceretainly not all and there are probably several vertices I've overlooked and not visible on this picture you could loose too. Also, those two holes I've marked with green arrows, do they have any function? There's quite a few tris and vertices to save if you close them. And does the bottom edge of the mesh have to be so complicated? Another unrelated issue btw, since we have this picture: Look at the edge I've marked with a green arrow here: This is very poor triangulation and is likely to cause serious problem both with UV mapping and physics. What you want there is this: Except with straight line edges of course - I was drawing them freehand with a mouse. I hope you get the idea: Hunt and kill all vertices that don't actually alter the look of the mesh and also those that only causes insignificant changes to the shape. Avoid long and narrow triangles if at all possible. They will distort the texture mapping and the physics engine hates them. I have to repeat myself here: Do not make LOD models for a mesh as big as 64x64 m. There is nothing whatsoever to gain from it, it's just a waste of time. Use the main model for everything. Yes, use it for physics too. When properly simplified even the more complex shape in your last post will only give a trivial physics weight, probably less than 1, certainly less than 5.

If you mean the one in your latest picture, my guesstimate would be 10. But it's hard to tell when the picture is taken in object mode so we can't see the actual polys. Compare it to Chic's terrain that Aquila posted a picture of. It's 20 LI which I'd say is exactly what it should be for her similar but more detailed terrain. Don't do that. If you need a separate physics model, there is something wrong. For large terrain meshes you should nearly always use the same model all the way, for all LOD level and for physics. There are some rare occasions where you have to simplify a little bit. In this particular case physics is pretty much the same for OS and SL. The land impact is very different though. On opensim model like this will show up with a very high land impact in the edit window but it's actually only 1. Opensim still uses the old prim count system even for meshes so one mesh is one LI regardless of how big or complex it is. However, with the ubODE physics engine, the server sends incorrect LI data to the viewer so it shows up there with false data. I discussed it with Ubit a while ago but he insisted it was a feature, not a bug, so he had no intention of changing it.

Ummm, for those of us who know our Pratchett, LOTS=16. (Besides, according to the original post num_prims could not have been higher than 9.)

Well, I learned it from Arton but I forgot that cap and even he didn't know about that extra quirk you uncovered.

This is Second Life, things aren't supposed to make sense here. I'm pretty sure that's in the TOS.