ChinRey

Even further off topic but there is one important thing you need to know about musicians if you want to understand music: the sharper they dress, the harder they party. Those black suits are really only excuses for more beer and as for the serious faces... well, what do you expect for somebody with a chronic hangover?

I don't know about that, I've seen and met lots of creators of all kinds both in SL and RL who didn't know what they were doing and I wouldn't necessarily call them artists because of that. Perhaps more correct to say that great artists often know what they're doing so well they don't have to think about.

Have you noticed how many people in SL tp away in terror the moment somebody says hello to them? They do that at events too - perhaps even more than elsewhere. On second thought, maybe it's my avatar that is so scary... Reminds me of something I found at a hunt once. One of the hunt prizes turned out to be a giftcard and the prices in that store were all high enough that even with a giftcard you'd end up paying at least as much that you could normally get simialr items for elsewhere... Anyway, sicne you mention CasperTech, they have a special low lag vendor for events. Use it if you have to but ideally you should try to settle for unscripted vendors. Even the simplest script will sometimes fail when the server is as overloaded as it often is at an event and every vendor script misfire means a lost sale.

Oh yes, I've always admired that clever trick. There is a name for the effect. I looked it up after I saw the Faraway for the first time but I can't remember what it's called - it was so long ago. What happens is that up close all the white pixels of the straw texture are prominent while the yellow line down the center of each straw is so narrow you hardly notice it. But when you get further away, your computer has merge those pixels because there isn't room for them all on the screen and then the yellow color becomes more prominent. It's one of the Great Classics of SL. AM Radio released the it under a Creative Commons license too and Vanish Seriath grabbed the opportunity, downloaded it and published it as a free OAR file. That great to know since it means that even if it vanishes from SL some day like AM Radio's other works, it will never be lsot and can always be reuploaded somewhere else.

You might as well give up. That locomotive is covered with 2048x2048 textures so it's actually even heavier than it seems.

You set up your business and run away as fast as you can. That's not a joke actullay. If it's a popular event, you don't want your avatar to stand there addign to the lag and taking up one avatar slot on the sim. If it isn't a popular event, you dont want to spend more time than absolutely necessary on it. Yes. Or even better: a landmark to your inworld store. I don't usually bother with events but sometimes I do join one and I've noticed that the increased sales at my regular store while it lasts can sometimes be just as high as or even higher than the sales at the actual event. Events may be the only way for new merchants to get a foothold in the market now but it is hard work if you want to do it effectively. As Tamara said, you probably want to do only one or two to start with, just to get the feel of how things work, but in the long run, you either want to do events continuously or not bother with them at all. Most events require you to have some new content specialy for them. Can you manage to do that once a week? or at least twice a month? It's hard to get into the big events. They're already filled up with merchants and on the rare occasions a slot becomes available, they'd much rather fill it up with an established well known brand than with a new unkown one for obvious reasons. Most of the sales at events are from impulse buys. So you need to make whatever you want to sell as attractive at first sight. You also want to focus ont he kind of things people are likely to buy on impulse, clothing, relatively small keepsakes, cool gadgets and such.

Norway

Coniston, Hidden Lake District, Sansara. I stumbled across that hidden gem of mainland SL when I was helping a friend searching for land to buy and we both instantly fell in love with it. When she decided a full sim was too much, I had to buy it myself. Since then I have been buying land in the bordering sims mainly to keep the eyesores away and today I have more than two sims' worth of continuous land there. It's all part of a group of eight sims protected by Linden waters on two sides and the Linden Village on one side and all the other active landowners there are wonderful people who tend to have the same basic ideas how they want their land to look and try to respect each other so together we've been able to develop it into a whole that is bigger and far more satisfying than an isolated island or skybox or a small plot hemmed in by claustrophobic privacy screens. We all have quite a few builds that won't fit the overall atmosphere but we've put them all on sky platforms way out of sight from the ground. It has cost me a lot of money over the years but it's still fairly cheap compared to many other hobbies and today I cover almost half the tier with rental income and the rest from my sales so it's not too bad. Ummm... I thought maybe I should add a picture here but it's hard to choose which. Is a link to Flickr ok? Greater Coniston photo album ( a bit outdated)

The minimum quantity you can buy is the equivalent of 2.50 US dollars. Once you have bought some Lindens, your limit will be 1999 L$ / 30 days and it will never go down again even if you don't buy a single Linden in years.

Yes! Never believe in conspiracy theories, they are all made up by the government to keep people's attention away from the real truth! But seriously to sum this up (again): If a merchant is unhappy with a review, they can report it to Linden Lab and if Linden Lab agrees the review is unfair, they will remove it. I've seen several claims that LL is playing favorites here but I've yet to see any plausible evidence to support those claims, it's all rumours. Sometimes the merchant can get a negative review removed by talking to the buyer and fixing any actual problems there may have been. But as Talligurl said, there's no guarantee the buyer actually will do it, even if all problems are solved and they promise to. If that happens, you can reduce the damage a little bit by adding a comment to the review or in the item description but as Chic said, people often don't read. I've never hear about it happening but it wouldn't surprise me at all if some merchants try to harass their customers into removing negative reviews. This is of course a despicable way to do it. In all of those cases it is not the merchant but somebody else, either Linden Lab or the reviewer who deletes the review. The only way a merchant can get rid of a negative review themselves, is to remove the listing and create a brand new one for the same product. This is against the Marketplace's terms of service and if you see that happen, flag the new listing. Any more questions? No? Class dismissed!

Do you? It seems to me we're mostly describing different aspects of the same situation. Oh, performance is certainly the main issue, no doubt about that. Important warning: mentioning how textures and/or LoD models are (ab)used in Second Life may cause seriously long Chin Rey rants. Not this time though. I'll try to stay on topic. Yes and things could have been very different if more people had listened to her all those years ago. They are indeed. When I started building mesh houses back in 2013, I was criticized for building them at too small a scale. Those houses are actually big by today's standards. Not yet. I've measured quite a few modern mesh houses and they tend to be somewhere between 120 and 150% of real life size. The trend is towards matching SL sizes with RL ones but there's still a way to go if that's the goal. There are some practical limitations too. If you make a realistic sized door to a house, many avatars won't be able to walk through it and the walking speed in SL is twice as fast as in RL. Try to jog around in your RL house and see how long it takes before you crash into something. David Rowe found a way around that speed problem when he made CtrlAltStudio but the hack he ahd to settle for there is hardly an ideal solution. Even if builders build closer to scale these days than they used to, most of the content in Second Life is fairly old. You don't have to go back more than two or three years before you find the majority of content being built at a much larger scale than today. And ignoring the scale/proportion issue only takes us back to the main problem: frame rate. I promised not to do another rant about textures and LoD models but to put it short inefficient content is by far the biggest cause of client side lag in Second Life. That hasn't improved recently, if anything it's gotten steadily worse. Yes, apart from the walking speed issue which really needs a server side solution, a VR friendly virtual reality could have been made on the Second Life grid. But why would anybody want to do that? Such a project requires content that is not only built to some reasonably scale but also render efficient and there's precious little available here that meet both those requirements. And in case there's any doubt, when I say render efficient I'm not talking about land impact or calculated render cost. I'm talking about actual effect on the frame rate and that is often a completely different story. There's no doubt that Second Life's software is better developed than the open source volunteer powered alternatives but it's not that much better and with a hosting expense ten times or more that of an independent grid, it's a no-brainer.

There are also the issues with proportions and camera position. Second Life weren't made as a world to immerse yourself in, it was made to be viewed from a distance and everything is adapted to that. There were actually sims made specially for VR users for a while but it didn't really work out. It is certainly possible to make a VR friendly SL style virtual world. The low frame rate is mainly caused by inefficient content and it's easy enough to build to a scale and proportions suitable for first person POV viewing. But almost everything would have to be specially made for such an environment and then it's hardly any point in doing it within SL, better to make a separate grid for it using one of the open source branches of the SL software, OpenSim or - preferably - WhiteCore. I'm actually involved in such a project right now but I honestly can't say when - or even if - it will be online. Just building a library of basic assets, what I'm mainly trying to do these days, is a huge undertaking. You need thousands of items of all kinds and there si hardly anything available, open source or commercial, that'll work without much modifications it's almost as easy to build from scratch.

Blender is a very powerful and free generic mesh creation tool but since you're asking about clothes specifically, I think MakeHuman is a better option. It's free and open source and comes with a large selection of free and open source ready made clothes templates. You still have to export those templates to Blender to rig them but that's still a lot less work than making the meshes from scratch. That being said, what the vast majority of clothes merchants in SL actually do, is buy ready-made full perm meshes on MP and add their own textures to them.

Ok. Please do us all a favor and don't tell the AO creators about this. We really don't need a flood of priority 5 AOs on the market.

Oh, that HUD. No wonder we didn't recognise the name, it's been renamed by various people several times. Keiki Lemieux was one of the early entrepeneurs of SL and the EZ Animator Deluxe (which was the original name) really was revolutionary at the time it was introduced. She was sometimes mentioned as an example how it was possible to make money in Second Life. But... I don't know how it happened but suddenly full perm copies of the HUD began to appear and who wants to pay the creator 1499 Lindens for something you can get for free from a friend? SHe closed her store and left SL five years ago. There's no official support for a product that old of course and I'm not sure if we really should give advice about something that technically is an illegal copy. But the damage was done long before you or your friend first logged on to Second Life so: First thing you have to check is of course whether you are at a place where scripts are allowed. If you aren't there is no way to make it work. Next, wear the HUD, right-click on it and select edit. Then find the script in the contents tab, double click on it and then click on the Reset button. While you are looking at the contents, remove any dance animations you don't really need. The most likely reason why such a HUD fails is that it is overloaded with too many animations.

I got curious and checked it on MP. Turns out the Echelon Savannah isn't a mesh avatar in the modern sense at all, it's a rigged mesh head introduced as early as 2013. From the description: "The Savannah Hybird Mesh Avatar is a combination of rigged mesh head and tradition second life body." Sahara is another model from the same maker and judging by the MP pictures (never a reliable source of info), they look quite different so no wonder the OP was disappointed. There's absolutely no chance something as old as that will support any kind of skin appliers since they didn't exist back then and the seller seems to have left SL more than two years ago so not much chance there's any help to have either. If you look through the reviews of all the products in the store, you'll see this is hardly the first time somebody has complained about wrong deliveries and no response from the seller. And to make matters worse, I found this in a one star review for one of the store's other products, posted by somebody I know and trust and who certainly knows what shes talking about: "The head is exported regular avatar mesh." This is actually beginning to look like a scam.

With the danger of being accused of floccinaucinihilipilification, shouldn't that be methane rather than propane? Sometimes every atom matters.

The highest priority you can upload an animation at is 4. I'm not sure how priority 5 animations are created, it may have been an old hack that doesn't work anymore. There is no such thing as a priority 6 animation, 5 is the highest: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Animation_Priority What would happen if LL opened for general upload of pri 5 and added higher priorities is that the unscrupulous AO makers who use 4 for their animations today would start using higher ones. Because higher priority looks good in the MP description and most buyers are ignorant enough to fall for it, not realizing that high priority AO animations are the last thing they actually want and need. Lots of food for misantropy in this.

The way I see it, it's not a question of what is appropriate or not. But it is usually pointless to ask question about a specific product here since there's hardly any chance that somebody who happens to be familiar with it will ever read it. I may be able to help you with the question about lightening the skin tone though. Every item has one or more textures with the basic color. If the item is modifiable, you can use the inworld editing tone to darken it but the only way to make it lighter is to replace the texture with a new one.

Oh I was busy writing a reply but Qie beat me too it! Only one thng to add: 1 L$/m2 for what looks like rather bland generic mainland parcel in the middle of Gaeta 5 doesn't seem like a good offer to start with, even if we ignore the obvious land cutting issue. Edit: In case anybody wonder what this land cutting is all about and why the Arbor Project group was founded to fight against it, it goes like this: You split off a small piece of the land you want to sell - preferably a square right in the midle but at the edge like this will work too - and put the main plot on the market for a very good price. Then, when somebody buys it, you add some really ugly content to the small parcel and offer to sell it for a sky high price. It used to be a very common scam and it's one of the main reasons why mainaldn even today has a poor reputation among many SL'ers and probably one of the main reason why so much of mainland is abandoned.

There is no fixed price for Lindens. Lindex is like an RL stock exchange and the exchange rate depends on what people are offering to sell or buy for. The rate was going slowly but steadily down (or up depending on your point of view) for abut a month earlier this year. Right now it seems to be fairly stable.

Ummmm... You know what prims are, don't you? That sounds like a stupid question but I have actually met people who wanted to be SL builders and had never heard about them. Prims are the original building material in Second Life and even today probably what most of what you see in the world is made from. (Mesh wasn't introduced until 2011 and it's only very recently it has become an efficient building material - when I joined in 2013 the number of builders who had had time to learn how to use mesh well could still be counted on one hand) Anyway, think of prims as Minecraft on steroids, you have seven different basic shapes and they can be twisted into a large number of forms. For a prim physics model for your house you jsut need the basic cube prim though. You make a cube prim by typing ctrl+4 to bring up the build window and then click on the ground. There you have a lovely 0.5x0.5x0.5 m plywood textured cube! Make a couple of them, resize and position them so they match the floor, walls and roof of your building. You want the floor surface to align very closely to the mesh floor, the other surfaces you have a bit of margin of error for. Then, set the trasnparency of the cubes rto 100% so people don't see them and set the mesh house to phantom to eliminate its physics completely. Essentially what you do i build two separate buildings, one in mesh for people to see and one from prims for people to bump into. That's not the best way to do things of course but it works and it is probably the easiest way if you're in a hurry. Getting good physics is one of the most difficult parts of mesh making and you have to be prepared to do a lot of trial and error before you get it right. The first mesh I ever tried to make was a much simpler structure than yours and I had a more experienced mesh maker standing beside me telling me how to do it. I stil ahd to make a dozen or so different phsyics models before I got one I could actually use. Simple prim cubes will always have perfect physics and as long as you know how to make them, resize and reposition them and make them invisible, that's the easiest way.

I hate to suggest this but if you have a deadline coming up soon, I suggest you simply set the whole buiding to physics shape none and link a couple of invisible prims to it for physics. If you upload the entire house as a single mesh, you will have so much excessive downlaod weight anyway that a handful of prims linked to it shouldn't increase the land impact. It's not an ideal solution but you're trying to run before you've learned to crawl here so it's never going to be an efficient Second Life build anyway. I really hope you continue working on your meshing skills but realistically, you're not going to learn that in a week. So get this done the easiest possible way so you have a reasonably presentable building for your project, then start studying the basics of mesh making for Second Life and take it step by step. One thing I'd like to mention though, if you look at the pictures of physics models, you see that Chic's is blue and yours is yellow. The physics model display is color coded accodring to how efficient they are. A blue model can mean anything from excellent to very bad. Other colors range from very, very bad indeed to complete disaster.

That's a very good lesson to learn. Don't stop learning though. There are always more ways to increase the efficiency of your builds, I don't think anybody can claim they know every single trick and technique.

It's called the alphabug and it's not unique to SL or to mesh but a common problem with virtual reality simulations of all kinds. When two surfaces with transparency overlap, the render engine will always have problems deciding which of them is to be in front of the other and it switches back and forth like what you see in the pciture. In this case it's easy to fix. There is now reason the rock needs an alpha texture and several reasons (in addition to the overlap problem) you don't want it to have it. Remove the alpha channel from that texture and reimport and problem is fixed. Alternatively, if you can't do that, change the alpha mode of it to "none"