ChinRey

I'm trying to imagine what people will use animated mesh for in a world where horror movie style trees with slowly rotating branches that seem to be out to grab you is considered the ultimate thing in realism... What I'm working on right now is nature - lush, dense vegetation. And a long road through it all where you can walk or drive or race for miles. I want it to be render efficient enough to give a good experience even if all you have is a battered old laptop and with a high end game computer you can safely use Oculus Rift without having to keep a stack of barf bags by your computer. Apart from the racing - you can't do that with sim crossings every 256 m - this is all possible to do within Second Life of course but there's no point. It requires optimized mesh throughout. There's hardly any of that avaiable in SL today so almost everything would have to be made from scratch anyway. The build is 1000x1000 m in size, that's 16 sims. (It's built to RL scale to so effectively it's more like 30-50 sims in size.) 2000 dollars a month in tier - who's gonna pay for that? Come to think of it, I may not give up Second Life building completely. Just about everything I make for that project would be very suitable for SL too and I've already uplaoded some meshes for my own use. There's just one problem, the lack of a market. Who in Second Lfie wants a low lag forest when they can have a single tree with slowly rotating banches for only twice the LI?

Phil can answer for himself but to me it's not a question whether the old is better than the new or the new is better than the old. It's the collision between the two that is the issue. The old Second Life doesn't vanish overnight. It's still there in what you can read about SL in all those undated and outdated articles and blogs all over the internet, in all the old builds inworld and of course, all over the Marketplace. But most of all, it's still in people's mind. Their perception of what Second Life is, is based on the old one and it doesn't fit the new. A very good example: That is your perception of Second Life and it's very much based on how it was (or at least how people thought it was), not how it is today. Well, it may still hold true for a small group of people but not for SL users is general. It isn't even true for SL cotnent creators in general, most play it safe and go for the market's lowest common denominator. In case there's any doubt, I'm definitely not keen on going back to the old Second Life. I too want to go onwards and create something fresh and new. But I don't want to do that on top of the old clutter, using hastily updated worn out tools and materials. So I'm taking my creativity elsewhere. That doesn't mean I'm leaving Second Life btw. I have plenty of other reasons to be there.

I'm sorry to hear that but my first reply was actually serious. Linden Lab is notorious for making unfair and unbalanced games with sudden bad ends that can only be avoided with sheer luck. That's how they've always done it, even their non-lethal games and hunts tend to include a few internal jokes on the player. The people on this forum are all just residents like you and there's nothing we can do about it. You can of course try to open a support case but I seriously doubt it will change anything.

Actually I almost always start with a prim sketch inworld. It's so much easier to see what the build really needs when you can build within some sort of context right from the start. But you're right since I don't really build much anymore anyway. And I hardly ever bother to upload anything to Second Life unless it's something I make specifically for a friend. Why should I? There are several reasons for that. The one you mention is an important one. We can't make a virtual reality that looks exactly like real life. If we try too hard, we fall right into Uncanny Valley and that's not a pleasant place to be. Other reasons include the camera position bug, the clumsy user interface, the lack of consistency in proportions, lag and one that is very relevant for this thread: lack of context. Bill Gates once said that content is king. He's right but King Content isn't worth much without Queen Context. When you build inworld, the context is all around you. It may not be the same scene the build is supposed to be placed in but the overall style is everywhere and very difficult to ignore. When you build in Blender (or Maya or whatever 3D editor you prefer), it's very difficult to remember the context and it's easy to end up with something that may look gorgeous as a standalone item but doesn't really fit in with anything else. Mesh design tend to be all based on the same Unity inspired industrial standard so we don't get nearly as many blatant eyesores as we had back when everybody were going wild with prims. Instead we get all those miniature stylistic clashes. Everything looks ... right ... but ... there's something that just doesn't fit; you can't put your finger on it but it's nagging at the back of your mind. I suppose it's another version of Uncanny Valley.

I'm not sure I agree with you there, at least not when it comes to landscapes. Nearly all the truly great SL builds I know of are prim and/or sculpt based and the few mesh ones all have the prim/sculpt look - either they are straight prim-to-mesh conversions or mesh replicas of old sculpt builds or just generally inspired by that style. As for optimization, a mesh avatar can never be as performant as a system one because it inevitably means you have to add rather than replace parts. Scenes can be made to perform better as mesh but it's rarely done because requires quite a bit of skill and effort and the only reward the content creator gets is the personal satisfaction of doing an excellent job. In case there's any doubt, item performance is not measured in land impact. Very often you have to go for less optimal solutions if you want to minimize the LI.

Linden Department of Public Works, also known as the Moles. They are the semidomestic content creators emplyed by Linden Lab to create official content for SL, including games like Horizons. You can open a support ticket and ask them to tweak the settings a bit of course but don't hope for much, the Moles love to make their games cruel, unbalanced and unfair.

If it is the same account you used for posting your question here, you must remember your username and password and then it's fairly easy to fix: Log on to secondlife.com, click on Account in the right column of the page and then on Change Email Address. The scrambled version of the current email address you see there may be enough hint for you to remember but if it isn't just enter a new one - one you can remember If it's for a different accoutn and yu can't remember neither password nor email address, you will have to open a support case and ask Linden Lab for help.

Yes

Yes but dressing up a pixel doll isn't exactly mainstream either. I'd ve very surprised if that niche is even as wide as the hobby creator one. The "digital barbie doll" segment is where SL has become strongest though and for that reason it does make sense for Linden Lab to focus on that. It's usually better to play on your strengths than on your weaknesses. What is srange however, is that when they updated the website recently, they changed the focus of the welcome page away from that and back towards their old markets. I already mentioned the two slogans targetting wannabe buidlers and wannabe SL millionaires. The third slogan on that page is geared towards SL explorers and that species is all but extinct by now.

That's a very healthy attitude. In this case it's not quite as bad as it seems though. A scripted item can only access your Lindens if it is owned by you and either worn or rezzed. It's perfectly safe to store it in yru inventory and once the object is deleted, any permissions assigned to it are deleted too. Unofortunately it is not possible to grant an item limited access to your Linden account, it's all or nothing at all. This leaves the system wide open for all kinds of scams of course but there's nothing we can do about it except being careful. If you are sure this is a legitimate card from a legtimat SL business, no worries. If you're unsure, don't try to sue it.

Ebbe once said that kind of thing probably was the most valuable side of SL (can't remember exactly the words he used). I tend to agree with you except I wouldn't use a word as negatively charged as "shallow". Lots of people use Second Life to dress up their avatar in fancy clothes, pose it for some picutres, show it off to their friends, maybe find some suitable partner and run it through some sex animations and even fool themselves into believing strangers they happen to meet care about how their avatar looks. There's nothing wrong with that and God knows I do it a lot myself. But it's just innocent fun, light entertainment. There is absolutely nothing serious about that aspect of Second Life whatsoever. Yet people here keep insisting Second Life is not a game. They want it to be far more important. And it can be more important than just a game but to achieve the significance so many users seem to put into it and Linden Lab always at least said they wanted it to have, it needs to be far less excluding than it is or has ever been.

Aha! That explains why they tell us not to use wifi for SL.

I agree with you there but Linden Lab doesn't. From secondlife.com's new welcome page: Become a Creator Express yourself & create anything you can imagine and: Earn Money Start a business & earn real profits from the virtual world

If this thread is back on track, perhaps it would interest people here that a few of the more recent patches to the Singularity code are named "Bento hell and back, and back to hell, and back". That may explain a bit.

Oh yes it is. Buiding well with mesh requires far more technical skills and knowledge than buiding well with prims. This is partly because mesh was never properly implemented in Second Life - essentially it's all a crude hack with lots of permanent bugs and faults you have to be aware of and know your way around - partly because SL mesh is not very well documented. But most of all it's because more possibilities inevitably means more possibilities for things to go wrong. There has definitely been a change of focus in Second Life from the user as a creator to the user as a consumer. At the same time the relation between the virtual landscape and the avatar has changed with the ladnscape becoming more and more a backdrop for the avatar rather than an experience in its own right. It's certainly not a switch from one to the other, the whole picture of SL users always included all nuances and still do. But the change in balance is profound and it happened very fast. In another thread I called it a paradigm shift and I do actually think that is the right term here. I'm not saying one SL is better than the other though. It's just chanegs so big and so fast as the ones we've seen recently are bound to cause problems no matter if they're for better or for worse or for .. for different.

I think it's inevitable unfortunately. The SL market is so fractured it's extremely hard to be noticed, there is far more supply than demand and in general SL buyers aren't very quality conscious - they tend to buy based on the pictures on MP rather than how things actually look and work inworld. I once had a chat with a well known MP.garbage peddler who also apparently is a fairly successful 3D modeller outside SL. He was very clear about it: he wasn't going to spend time and effort on his SL builds because "people buy it anyway". Cynical yes, but you can't argue against it in a free market. I have to say though that there are some fairly successful SL stores that sell good quality. There are a few people who actually are good at both, some good marketers hire good builders to buid rather than do it themselves and vice versa and some good builders have managed to succeed through sheer endurance, slowly building their reputation and customer base over the years.

Let me put it this way, being good at marketing doesn't necessarily mean you're good at buiding and if you want to succeed as a content creator in Second Life, marketing skills are far more important than building skills.

According to Linden Lab, ten percent of the sims are on the RC channels. There is one difference that sometimes can matter: the regular sims have rolling restarts on Tuesdays, the RC channel ones on Wednesdays. If your land is on an RC channel you'll get most of the server upgrades a week or two earlier. That's generally nice of course but sometimes there is a bug or two that hasn't been quenched yet. In reality it's extremely rare you'll notice any difference at all. Back in the earlier days when LL still believed that progress comes from revolutions rather than evolution, livign on an RC channel sim could be quite ... interesting. They seem to have learned better nowadays though and do their upgrade one little safe step at a time.

It's in that very helpful and complete mesh building documentation LL published six years ago. Ummm.... I mean the one they were going to publish and promised to publish and would have if only writing documentation hadn't been such boring work. There are three ways. The problem only occurs with analyzed physics models and ideally you don't want to use analyzed physics for walkable surfaces anyway since it also has a negative effect on hovering height. Choose "From file" in the physics tab, select a simple cube dae you prepared earlier (size doesn't matter, it'll scale automatically) and ignore all the other physics model settings in the uploader. But if the floor is thin (and it usually is) and has a stairwell or an irregular outline, you sometimes have to use analyzed physics because of a bug in the LI calculation and a rather crude hack LL implemented to compensate for that bug. In those cases, the best solution is to make the physics model from complete cubes, that is cubes with all six sides included. (Make sure there is a tiny gap between the cubes, if you don't, the analyzer will try to merge them into bigger more complex and less efficient physics shapes.) The third method is to set the analyze method to "Solid". That'll cause the uploader to fill in any missing sides of the cubes it builds the physics model from. It's never a good idea to trust the uploader to do anything at all (except transfer the files from your computer to the assets server of course) but it usually doesn't mess up this particular job too badly. If you make the physics model right (for analyzed physics only use detached complete cubes and - possibly and rarely - other convex polygons), the analyze method won't make any difference and quite frankly I can't see why "Solid" isn't the default, or even the only, option. On those rare occasions I've seen that analyze method actually made a difference, solid was always the best choice. That's right. The High, Medium, Low and Lowest options in the first phsyics menu only allows you to choose one of the LoD models for the physics and they will nearly always include details you don't want in the physics and often omit details you want. The only situation I can think of where it may be a good idea to use the high LoD model for phsyics is for large ground meshes but even in those cases there is a catch or two that may cause problems. I can't think of any actual or theoretical cases where one of the other LoD models would make a good physics model and not choosing a physics model at all is always a bad idea.

Not normally, no. It used to be a common problem but today any good mesh house maker has learned how to make mesh floors you can rez on. It's not difficult to do once you're aware of the issue. But yes, there are some old mesh houses around and also some recent builds by unskilled mesh makers so that is still a good tip. Thank you Innula!

Erros do happen. I assume you are sure you paid the premium fee on time? It is possible that it was marked as abandoned by mistake and auctioned off but that seems rather unlikely. This is one small plot right in the middle of a huge parcel of abandoned land. Normally they would have merged it with the larger parcel rather than auction it off on its own. Another more likely explanation is that it was marked as being for sale by mistake. Prokofy once mentioned that could happen under certain circumstances. I can't rememebr the details though and it was so long ago it'd be almost impossible to find the thread int he forum by now. In any case, if this is the explanation, ti will show up on your Linden transaction history one way or another. That is actually rather worrying. Linden Lab are always quick to respond to support cases. They may not always have a good answer but you should expect some sort of response from them within a few days. If you have filed a support ticket and not received any reply you really should contact live chat support. Yes, that's only fair of course. But I went over and had a look at the plot and to put things into perspective, we're talking about a piece of land with a market value of no more than 512 L$ - about two U.S dollars, possibly less. So if there's any comfort: it's not really a big loss.

As much as I love to complain about LL, I don't really think it is fair to expect them to notice every glitch across almost 24,000 sims. They do tend to react fast if you tell them though. Log on to https://support.secondlife.com/contact-support/ If you are a premium member, contact live chat support there and they'll deal with it right away. If you aren't, you'll have to open a support case. That'll take a little bit logner but not much. But before you do anything else, try to log on to your home sim one more time. It's rolling restarts day today so chances are you were jsut unlucky and tried to log on at exactly the wrong time of day.

As Rhonda said, it depends a bit on how well the script is written but in any case there is a delay from you click on the fire button until the message reaches the server. That delay can be anything from 0.1 to 0.5 seconds depending on how far away from the server you live and how good your connection is - long enough that any delay casued byt he script should be trivial by comparasion.

Did you take the mesh upload test? You need to do that before you are allowed to lsit something as mesh on the Marketplace.

Ummmm... you did try to simply log off your alt and then log on your main, didn't you? In any case, this definitely sounds like a problem with your web browser's autologon function being a bit over-enthusiastic so if you can't get it to behave, try to log on with a different browser or on a different computer.