ChinRey

Klytyna wrote: Vulcans, being logical creatures dont use StupidColor Normal maps at all, they use good old grey scale bump/displacement maps, where dark is lower and light is higher... You mean heightmaps? Ebbe has promised us we'll have those in Sansar. It might be ... interesting to see what shape the ears of the programmers he's hired for Sansar are. Edit: No, I was wrong, it was displacement maps Ebbe promised we'll have in Sansar.

Pamela Galli wrote: Look at how much activity there is in the SL Discussion forum there, or how many say they rarely or never log in. Another reason for us to move on over and shake it up then. Oh well, we got a good non-answer from a Linden and I suspect that's all we can expect from there. Can't blame her for it either really. She's got a job that both requires and forbids her to answer and that's never easy. I have occasionally quoted great people in my posts here, I think it's time for one from Oz Linden (I found it in Prok's profile): "Sorry.... 'why' is not one of the questions we're usually allowed to answer"

Derek Torvalar wrote: Tis the insidious nature of POOP. This is off on a tangent, Derek, but what does Perl Object-Oriented Persistence have to do with this forum? I always assumed it was written in php. Then again, if it really is perl code, that would explain a few things currently discussed in another thread.

Pamela Galli wrote: Please, LL, recognize the importance of the forums to those seeking information, insights, and support from them. There is at least one popular alternative forum dedicated to Second Life but outside of LL's control. Maybe we should all move there instead... (Edit: I'm tempted to post a link to another forum here just to see what would happen. One of the ways to define those unknown limits is of course to test them out and that link would definitely be testing. It wouldn't be a valid test though. Whether they admit it or not, the moderators know they've gone to far. So they're treading on eggshells at the moment and may well accept posts they would normally have rejected for a while.)

MissDeeMeanur wrote: Did you miss this bit, ChinRey? No I didn't but I treated it separately from the rest of the guidelines. That's what the last paragraph in my reply is about - and to some degree the second paragraph too.

Alazarin Mondrian wrote: Hi! One of the reasons I clear my cache frequently is that on my main account my main avatar is a Dark Spots Designs dragon and for some unknown reason one of my lower legs occasionally attaches itself to some point that is way to one side of my leg. No idea why but cache clearing does fix it. It is almost certainly related to the inventory issues you have with your main. It is hard to see why your main have inventory problems and not your alts though. 50k-55k items is definitely too much to be ideal but it shouldn't be enough to cause issues like the ones you describe. This is a shot in the dark but somebody (I think it was Rolig or Lindal) mentioned recently that a long friends list can give some of the same problems as a bloated inventory. I'm not sure if the explanation lies there but it's worth looking at. Speaking of the friends list, you did remember to remove duplicate calling cards when you cleaned your inventory, didn't you? they can contribute a lot to inventory bloating and many people overlook them. Bitsy and Alwin already mentioned this but I'm not sure if they made it clear enough: there is a way to box up old outfits you don't use but don't want to loose: box up copies of the originals of the items, not the links in the outfits folder. As long as there are no no-copy items involved, you can have as many boxed copies of the same thing as you like so one box for each outfit. You should be able to save a lot of inventory space that way. Amethyst Jetaime wrote: The links are just information, not really an inventory item. Not quite. A link counts for just as much in the inventory as any other items there. In a sense all items in the inventory are links. Some are internal links to other inventory listings, some are external links to entries in the assets database and both kinds take up the same amount of space in the inventory list.

Kristin Linden wrote: We encourage you to review the Community Guidelines Done! As far as I can see, there's nothing there that can explain why the thread that triggered this discussion was removed. One of the posts in the thread should probably have been removed because of offensive language and another post - one of mine- should probably have been removed too, not because of what I wrote myself but because I quoted and replied to that offensive language post. But that's really not enough reason to remove the entire thread. The main problem however is that none of the participants in the discussion have been given any kind of explanation why. Add to that the other seemingly arbitary post removals that have been mentioned through this discussion and the result is that at the moment nobody can be really sure what is allowed and what isn't allowed in the forums. A forum like this can only work properly if the participants have reason to trust the moderators' judegement and right now, with no explanations whatsoever, I can't see that we have that.

arton Rotaru wrote: I hope they didn't do it again with Sansar. Oh, I'm sure they had the sense to use HSV rather than RGB values to map the normals there.

Rhonda Huntress wrote: I am still having to log in again infrequently. Me too. Does that mean the Church of the Holy Logon failed even before it started?

arton Rotaru wrote: Hey Chin (or is it Rey :matte-motes-smitten:) Rey usually, but either is equally bad. (Hint to everybody: never choose a joke account name even for a minor just-for-fun alt. Before you know it, it's your main) arton Rotaru wrote: I guess you have just missread Drongles post. Oh, I was sure he wrote [X+Y+Z+] twice but yes, I must have misread. (Unless he edited the post later that is... ) arton Rotaru wrote: OpenGL normal maps are x+y+z+. While DirectX normal maps are x+y-z+. So it's a difference between OpenGL and DirectX and not LL's fault then. They really love to make things as difficult as possible, don't they? But at least we have to make sure we know who to blame. Does anybody know what standard Vulkan uses btw?

This is the good old alpha bug and it's a problem with OpenGL (and I think DirectX too) so it's not Second Life specific. With two alpha textures overlapping each other, the render engine have problems determining which is the closest one and it often gets it wrong. This is especially a problem if the center of the two objects with alpha textures are close to each other since the distance between an object and the camera is always calculated from the center of the object, not from the nearest surface. One possible solution is to use alpha masking rather than alpha blending. That fixes the alpha bug but it does have some other disadvantages so it may not always be a good option. Edit: Arton is right of course: does the hat need alpha at all? If not, simply remove it and the problems is solved.

Can't say I'm an expert here, I've only blocked a person once and that was temporary. But I know some viewer settings require you to restart before they take effect even though there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Did you try that?

Rosanna Ewing wrote: and i have heard that also "experienced" mesh makers work from time to time with these prims in combination with their mesh creations. Not experienced ones, no. But even the most experienced ones may have had to do it before they became experienced and later decided it wasn't important enough a problem to be worth the time and effort fixing. You can often link a lot of prims to a mesh without increasing the land impact so although it's not something you're likely to do once you udnerstand how mesh physics work, it's usually not big enough a deal to worry much about either.

Drongle McMahon wrote: The "swizzle" of the normal map [X+Y-Z+] is wrong for SL. It has to be [X+Y+Z+]. I suppose you mean [X+Y-Z+] ? But more important: What you are saying is that SL got the direction of one of the channels wrong? We've had normal maps for more than three years now, am I the only one who have never heard of this issue before? Or was the whole thing just too trivial to be worth mentioning?

Rosanna Ewing wrote: What i want to note: ii don't prefer the normal prim solution. Just one comment first: the prim solution is not the "normal" one, it's an emergency fix for mesh makers who don't know how to make mesh for SL. Rosanna Ewing wrote: So my question is: what is the right method in my own made physics for the 3 floors in the mesh build? If the floors are separate meshes, the easy way out is to make their physics models from cubes and use analyzed physics. Use as few cubes as possible for each floor and if a floor needs more than one, make sure there's a slight gap between them. This is not an ideal solution since you don't really want to use anayzed physics for walkable surfaces but it's fairly easy to do and the disadvantages are usually trivial enough to be ignored. It is possible to use unanalyzed mesh for individual floors - there are several workarounds to the 0.5 m limit Pamela mentioned - but that's when it gets a bit complicated. If the floors are parts of a larger mesh, well normally that's not a good solution but it is a quite common one and at least it allows us to use unanalyzed physics: Make sure the floor surfaces are positioned at exactly the same position on the physics model as on the main visual model. Make sure the overall dimensions of the visual and physics models are identical. If they are not, the uplaoder will resize the physics model and that can lead to all kind of unexpected results. Make sure the normals for the floor surfaces are pointing upwards. Unanalyzed physics is directional so this is crucial. Because of the directional nature of unanalyzed physics you probably want to include physics for the ceiings too, not just the floors but that shuoldn't affect the walkability of the floors. Make sure there are no smooth normals in the physics model.

CinemaMachinima Grau wrote: I am hesitant to rent since I cannot risk a landlord shutting down the land if we are in development. That's understandable, there certainly is a lot of monkey business going on in that market. There are many serious, reliable actors too though and the trick is to find them. One thing you can do is look at the top 10 Estates list at gridsurvey.com. These are all estate owners who are in for the long haul so they can't afford to cheat their customers and they're certainly not going to close down a sim as long as somebody is paying rent for it. I do feel a bit bad for suggestion this solution, not because they don't deserve the recommendation but because there are many others who do too. Unfortunately, in an unregulated market like Second Life it's very difficult for a customer to distinguish between the serious providers and the crooks.

Qie Niangao wrote: Like, it's supposed to be that a Forums login qualifies you to look at your dashboard, file support tickets, buy Marketplace junk, trade on Lindex (maybe?), but not bid on auctions, nor file a jira (I guess?) If so, that has never ever worked. Forum logon has always been separate from everything else at least for as long as I've been here. That being said, I had a look at my cookies to see which domain the forum cookies are set to and it turns out there are cookies set by the forum both to secondlife.com and secondlife.i.lithium.com. That surprised me a little bit and I'm not sure what it implies. Another anomaly is that one of the cookies expires Januray 10th 2027. That must mean it was reset two days ago and I can't think of any reason why. In any case, the recent login issue is hardly the only glitch here. Considering that Lithium costs several thousand dollars a month I really think it's fair to say that the performance of this forum is underwhelming.

Hmmm... To quote that article: "The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such." And Harvard still keeps the thing up on their web site? It took the experts 20 years to figure it out, I needed five minutes. Does that give me the right to feel superior? (No, it doesn't of course. The obvious and fatal flaws I pointed out were specific to that particular test, not to IAT in general. Since it turns out the racism bias test at Harvard actually was intended as a serious test, it was obviously made by incompetent people and easy to kill by anybody who actually thinks things through. But those flaws would be easy to fix and they are not inherent to IAT. So for all I know, IAT may still be a usable tool when done properly.)

As Alwin said, hard to say without some more info. But if you are on a Windows computer, look in the Program Files(x86) folder. There shold be a subfolder named SecondLifeViewer there and in that a program named SecondLifeViewer.exe. That's the one you want. If it's not there, uninstall and try again. On a Mac all you should need to do is open the DMG file in your download folder and drag the Second Life Viewer icon to yur program folder or wherever you prefer to store it. Edit: Oh you're talking Ubuntu. The official SL viewer doesn't support Linux anymore so you have to use a third party viewer like Firestorm.

entity0x wrote: ... but C# is heavily MS-centric, (through .Net, though tolerable and workable through Mono) and Javascript is doable, and transferable from/to existing web experience. Yet at least with C#, we have a close match with Unity, Sansar and 'Mono' in SL (though I am unclear how SL uses Mono or how deep - Documentation!) C# is also very similar to Java. Bill Joy from Sun Microsystem once described C# as "sort of Java with reliability, productivity and security deleted." Sun once sued Microsoft for their incomplete implementation of Java 1.1 and C# was launched while that lawsuit was going on. Although I doubt anybody's ever going to admit it, I suspect that "incomplete implementation" is the true origin of C#. Whether I'm right or wrong there I think the way Java is used all over the interweb illustrates what we can expect from C#. It's a "minute to learn, a lifetime to master" kind of language. There are some brilliant Java applets made by very skilled programmers but also some very shoddy ones made by people who have spent a minute to learn. The multi-paradigm concept may be a key factor here. As I mentioned earlier, Object-Oriented Programming is a buzzword these days and it also happens to be very suitable for the kind of applications we are discussing here so there's going to be quite a lot of pressure for programmers and scripters to write object-oriented code. In programming there are few things quite as bad as object-oriented code written by people not familiar with the basic principles of OOP. It doesn't matter how good the programmers are, if they don't understand the paradigm they have to work with, they can't write good code. The Marketplace is of course a prime example of this.

ChadUnfroyd wrote: ... and presumably Lithium have washed their hands of LL's pathetic implementation of their software. ... Cerise Sorbet wrote: This forum is Lithium's own implementation of Lithium's own software and hosted by Lithium. So it's Lithium's pathetic implementation on Lithium's software then? Qie Niangao wrote: Whirly Fizzle wrote: Yes, Lindal filed a bug report: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-41134 ... which was closed as "Unactionable" yesterday. To sum it up: Lithium fails to deliver the services LL pays for and LL can't do anything about it because of vendor lock-in. Farming out auxiliary services can make a lot of sense for a company but if you do, make absolutely sure you choose a reliable provider who gives adequate service and will continue to do so. In other words: if you're looking for a host for your message board, stay away from Lithium and if you're looking for a host for your virtual showroom... In other other words: if you're offering auxiliary services to other companies and your solution causes vendor lock-in, make absolutely sure and absolutely clear you can deliver and continue to deliver. Also, make absolutely sure you have a spotless record for doing so in the past. If not, serious customers will shy away from you. They've all learned from their mistakes by now.

entity0x wrote: I found out that Sansar may be using C# and Javascript as the languages. THis is something I have looked for, as proprietary languages is a waste of time, when they'r enot transferable, and all the time is wasted learning its nuances. C# actually. It's High Fidelity that uses Javascript. C# is often mispresented as an object-oriented programming language but that's mainly because object-oriented is such a buzzword these days. What it really is, is a kind of Jack of all trades that can do a decent job under just about any programming paradigm you can think of. Unity supports both C# and Javascript but C# seems to be the most popular choice and it's likely many scripts from there can be adapted for Sansar.

Chic Aeon wrote: It is going to be interesting to see who goes and who stays in the content creator arena as it appears that the learning curve is kinda in that professional area and those professionals can likely make more money elsewear. There are quite a few skiled content creators who do good business with quality meshes elsewhere and still sell horribly poor uploads of the same meshes in SL. The reason they do that is - and I'm actually quoting one of them here - "People in SL buy anyway." Spending time and effort optimizing builds for SL when you could have invested it on a more lucrative market simply isn't cost effective. Some do it anyway because they can't bring themselves to present half-baked works, but many won't and some evn can't afford to do it. I mentioned in another thread that the SL version of the Grand Hall is such a bodged job and I have to make absolutely clear: that is not the creator's fault. He's just being prudent, taking the logical consequence of working within a system that tends to punish rather than reward quality improvements. This is something that'll have to be different in Sansar of course. Chic Aeon wrote: It also appears from the latest videos that the "repetition" factor is in play as it was in Cloud Party. Oh yes. I think object instancing is mandatory for any new virtualreality and has been so for a while. We do have "asset instancing" in SL of course, it's one of the most important tricks for good builders who want to keep the lag down. That helps a lot but it'll never be as effective as object instancing. Chic Aeon wrote: So you could have one tree or a hundred trees -- the tree being in a viewer's cache. I never saw Cloud Party. Did they use SpeedTree or just some similar system?

The prim limit per suqare meter may vary depending on what kind of sim it but for a regular mainland sim, it's aproximately 0.34 - that is 175 per 512 square meter. If you own several parcels in the same sim, you are free to reallocate prims between the parcels any way you wish. I do that myself - my tenants simply get as many prims as they want and are willing to pay for, regardless of the size of the parcel they rent. Rental price can vary a lot depending on the quality of the land and ... other factors. I suggest you try to keep it somewhere between 1 and 2 L$/week per prim and if you're renting out developed properties, remember to include the prims used for the fixed installations in the price.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean but I can think of two fairly common explanations for something similar: If you are playing the Linden Realms game, there is a bug in the experience code that causes an avatar to get stuck in a horizontal position every now and then. The solution is to use the "stop animations" function. You find it under the "Me" menu, depending on which viewer you use it's in either the Movements or the Avatar Health submenu. If your avatar is stuck hovering when you log on, it's because hover is the default state of the avatar (this dates back to the early beta stage when there was no physical ground to stand on) and sometimes the avatar fails to switch to the regualr standing state during log on. The solution here is to fly briefly and then stop flying. If there is some other reason I suggest you try the stop animations fucntion first and see if that helps.