ChinRey

VanillaSunsets wrote: Just dreaming... but it would be nice to have 2 texture slots in the uploader. One for ppl that don't use ALM and have that texture shown, and one that has a slot for diffuse, specs and normal. Yes, that would be nice. One of the many problems with normal and specular maps in SL is that we don't really have the option to use proper diffuse maps, we have to use textures instead. The optimal solution would maybe to use server side texture baking. Give texture creators the option to upload either complete textures or sets of matching diffuse, specular and normal (and preferably also AO) maps and then let eacher user choose whether they wanted to download the later as sets or prebaked complete textures. The ideal solution would of course have been if normal maps had been integrated into SL right from the start but I guess it's a bit too late for that now. I'm not sure why that didn't happen btw. LL may have thought normal maps were outdated by 2003 but then they included those poorly chosen and poorer implemented bump maps - an even more outdated technique by 2003 standards. And of course, I don't understand why there is one, and only one, normal map that seems to wrok well in all light conditions and is light enough to be rendered even without ALM...

Nalates Urriah wrote: One of our big problems is we do not know how many poeple in SL are running with ALM and AO enabled. We have been asking at various UG meetings with Lindens present. We just haven't gotten an answer. It's quite possible they had no way of finding the answer themselves. They do now though. Normal and specular maps are no longer downlaoded to clients with ALM switched off and that should provide a way to get reliable stats for their use.

No, I don't hate it, I absolutely love it! *) What I do hate, are the overdone baked shadow effects that may look good on a still photo but absoltuely horrendously unrealistic in a dynamic ever-changing environment as SL is supposed to be. And what I especially hate is when you have pieces of furniture next to each other with light effects coming from different directions or, even worse, sun coming in from different directions from different windows. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against baked shadows as such (and I've certainly done a few of them myself). But there's so much shady shadowing in SL these days. Builders often forget that the content they make needs to fit in a context and heavy shadow/light effects really need to be applied to a scene as a whole, not to individual items. Edit: *) No, I don't really love it of course, it has several serious flaws. But dynamic shading in a virtual world is really difficult and to me at least dynamic is the key word for realism.

I've had that happen twice at my land. Fairly substantial objects but not particularly high LI, well and truly on my own land and in a sim with plenty of prims to spare suddenly vanished without a trace. That was more than a year ago and I never tried to figure out why or how it happened. I just rezzed backup copies.

WARNING! Shameless self promotion coming up! Prokofy Neva wrote: Those atoll houses are awfully high prim though, you could put them on "convex hull" if that won't affect entering through the door. Or you could use my mesh remakes of them.

Rufferta wrote: The Torver parcel sold at auction, and is now up for sale again. It would have been great if, before the land had been put up for auction, the Lindens had taken out a small channel on the far side and made it Linden Protected Water. For sale or rent at the moment. The buyer is quite positive to keeping an open channel but he won't do it against the wishes of a tenant and of course if somebody buys there's no knowing what'll happen. To be fair, keeping and open channel there won't help much in itself anyway. The coast further south is full of other blocks, most importantly, you can't get to the east end of the Erie-Threlkeld channel.

Grumpity Linden wrote: ChinRey, you know the old saying about how if there's two ways to interpret my words and one of them makes you mad, I meant the other one? Glad to hear that Grumpity Linden wrote: ChinRey, you know the old saying about how if there's two ways to interpret my words and one of them makes you mad, I meant the other one? That brings up another question: when is that future? Here are two pictures I posted fairly early in the discussion showing problems with the new search. They're jsut as relevant today after almost two months: Top search results for keyword "house":  Autofill suggestions for keyword "Door":  Results and suggestins like that aren't very helpful, I don't have to tell you that. Speaking of time, here's something I wrote when we had the first Big Argument about the new search: ChinRey wrote: Now, this project went off to a bad start, and it certainly wasn't the right one to start with anyway, But now that it seems to be on track, the best thing to do is to finish it and let all the other issues wait.' Don't let it stop there though. There are so many problems with MP that should have been fixed years ago and one isolated upgrade isn't going to make that much difference to the big picture. You'll have to keep on delivering. And it's going to be really tough. Many merchants have been banging their heads against the wall for so long now they simply can't believe there's finally a hope for a breakthrough. (https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketplace-Beta-Search-New-Information/m-p/2981533#M54477) That was almost a year ago and the work is still not finished! I can't imagine that anybody expected it to take that long! And as I said back then, the search algorithm is only one of many problems with MP and it wasn't even one of the biggest. I'm very fond of the saying that it doesn't matter how fast you move as long as you're moving in the right direction, but at this speed we'll be halfway through the century before we have a presentable Marketplace.

Pamela Galli wrote: I am not sure, but I think before, Features did not count in search. As Arwen said, it always has. And it's of course nice they've kept that opening. Especially for the keyword spammers of course. It seemed like this new search left them completely out but all they have to do is move their spam from the keyword field to the features fields and they're back to business as usual. LL cares for everybody in SL!

Grumpity Linden wrote: * The most important change is the new conversions algorithm. This new algorithm means that over time the Marketplace Search will better learn what items are being purchased based on search. Are you saying the learning feature is based on sales from each specific keyword??? If I understand you right (I may not of course) that is actually a Fatal mistake with a capital F. Such a function will only work for the most popular keywords since you need quite a lot of sales before you have enough data. But even worse: it will only change the listing order of the original top 60-or-so. Any listing that starts off lower than that isn't likely to ever make a sale at all.

I doubt your mesh body and head will cause your viewer to crash but yes, such render heavy items can seriously reduce your performance. In any case, if you have problems like that and you don't want to spend money on a more powerful computer, the solution si to lower your graphics settings. So open your preferences, click on the graphics tab and start lowering the values. The most important settings are: Advanced Ligting Model: Switch off if it isn't already Objects & Sculpts LOD: Set to 1.000 Maximum complexity: 100,000 should be safe Max. # of non-impostor avatars: only relevant for crowded places but try to reduce it to ... 4-8 perhaps Draw distance: As low as you are willing to go There are other tweaks you can do to reduce the graphics load too but those are by far the most important

Recently Linden Lab seemed to have finally started to realize how important free passageways across Mainland is for the value of Second Life as a whole. But no. Quarter sim up for auction at Torver. Anybody who buys it is free to block the only possible route along the east coast of Sansara.All we can do is hope that the buyer cares more for Second Life than Linden Lab does.

A Homestead sim is assigned a quarter of the server computing powers of a full sim and an Open Space sim a quarter of a Homestead but they also give the server less work, with fewer prims and fewer avatars allowed, so the server performance should be the same. Actual performance may actually be better since less content also means less load on your computer. There is no performance difference between mainland and private sims as such but an isolated sim, with no other sims bordering to it, will always perform better. This is usally barely noticeable though. Some sim owners advertise that their sims are run on higher performance "Class 8" servers. That's just false advertising.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: If someone is going to build things to sell who has neither the time and/or ability to learn Blender can get similar results why is that a bad thing? "Sell" is the crucial word here. What you make for your own use is nobody's business but your own and for that Mesh Studio can be an excellent tool. But things are very different the moment you expect people to pay you money for your works. You can't sell meshes uploaded with auto-generated LoD models or physics models, not if you have any respect for your customers or yourself. It is perfectly possible to create those models with Mesh Studio but basically that means building and meshing each of them separately and also figure out a way to keep the mesh faces to be swapped between the models. Once you start doing that, you're probably better off spending the time learning Blender. As for meshing SL's "huge legacy of fantastic prim builds", that can only be done if we also keep the technical quality at least as good as the prim originals: no dodgy physics or LoD breakdowns whatsoever! I once tried to do that with Eric Linden's Atoll Footbridge and Walkways. I got the small walkway down from 13 to 2 LI, the medium walkway from 20 to 3 and the footbridge from 21 to 4. (I actually kept some prim parts for the footbridge since meshing them at the required quality level would have increased the LI.) Not bad at all of course but it was two days of hard work for those three fairly small items. Imagine doing something like that on a large scale! Also, remember that a simple change to convex hull will reduce the prim versions LI by half anyway. Edit: I should add that I use Mesh Studio myself for almost all my builds. I've found it to be an absolutely wonderful supplement to Blender: Build as much as possible in-world with prims, mesh with Mesh Studio and do the rest of the work in Blender and you get the best of two worlds.

Chic Aeon wrote: New code is coming out in Opensim which is going to require actual physics models for uploading (clapping). This will break a lot of old content including ANY content made with planes physics. Do you have more info about that? All I could find was an article about one particular grid (can't mention names here of course) had finally started to penalize mesh with too complicated physics.

Sylvia Wasp wrote: 1) Does anyone really know for sure if the server will ever come back up again? It came back online eight days ago and has stayed up since then. There have been quite a few outages this year though and one of them lasted for several weeks. I really hope they've managed to fix the server for good this time. Sylvia Wasp wrote: 3) Will Linden Labs refund our money if the servers never come up again? Not very likely. Sylvia Wasp wrote: 5) Why doesn't Linden Labs remove the non-functional product from MP if the servers are non-functional for so long? Mesh Studio is functioning but there are of course several other broken listings on MP so it's a good question in general. The cynical answer is that Linden Lab still gets their five percent commission from those listings but the real answer is probably that LL lost control over MP long ago. The whole thing is in shambles. Sylvia Wasp wrote: 6a) Why isn't there at least a warning on the product on MP? Very good question. I've asked them and the answer is basically that they always expect it to be a quick fix - and then it turns out to be more difficult than they thought. Sylvia Wasp wrote: There is obviosuly a huge demand for such tools, and there must be many other Second Life users out there like myself who are "masters of the prim" but don't have the skills to use 3D programs like Blender, or the money to pay for them. Are we supposed to just wander off into the sunset and die? Why not build with prims? It's a underrated material these days. Anybody can afford Blender of course, it's a free program, but yes, it is rather complicated to use. However - and this is a very important and often overlooked point - it is not easy to make good mesh with a prim-to-mesh converter either and if it's not good mesh, it's usually better to just leave the build as prims. If you want to make mesh that can match prims in technical quality, you have to know how to make LoD models and physics models because the ones the uploader tries to generate automatically are pure garbage.

Qie Niangao wrote: Reports are mostly ignored, regardless of anybody's status. In this case there is no abuse to report of course but generally, yes it's fairly random which ARs are processed and which are ignored. The solution if you have a legitimate reason is to keep filing abuse reports until they take action. This is not just something I (and many other users) say, it's the advice LL themselves gave me(!)

Tanner Loudwater wrote: When doing that, the hud scrips I had all broke and I had to get new ones. As Amethyst already said, there is nothing a landowner can do that will break your HUD unless there's something seriously wrong with it to start with so you can't blame him/her for that. HUD failures are usually fairly easy to fix anyway. There are three ways: 1. Replace with a backup copy Easiest way - but only if you've remembered to make a backup copy of course. 2. Get a redelivery Most serious content creators have redelivery terminals in their stores and if they don't they're usually happy to give you a new copy if you contact them and give them the purchase info so they can see you're a legitimate customer. 3. Reset the scripts If options 1 and 2 won't work. A bit more cumebrsome but still not too difficult: Move to a new sim Wear the HUD Right-click on the HUD and select "Edit" Click on the "Content" tab Wait for the content to load Double-click on one of the script icons Click on the "Reset" button Close script window Redo step 7-9 for the other scripts in the HUD (if there are more than one script there)

Registered account Logged on Was dropped right into a huge shopping mall Saw three or four other people there Said hello Waited for reply that never came Looked at pictures of fancy clothes and stuff I couldn't afford to buy but clearly needed if I wanted to be in SL Left Took me almost a decade before I bothered to try again but that's another story.

Freya Mokusei wrote: Haha. I know this was a joke but I'm going to nerd all over you. Sorry but no. Css may look messy and gibberishy enough to fool the ignorants but after all is said and done it is just a markup language. A true nerd will never touch anything that isn't cli!

Freya Mokusei wrote: I'd be interested in hearing if anyone seeing this issue is on a non-Windows platform or doesn't have the Anniversary Update (KB 3176929) installed. I'd also be interested in hearing whether this bug presents itself in Edge. I'm on Windows 8.1 and Firefox and have exactly the same login problems as everybody else here are taking about. Not sure if that counts. Edit: one unexpected bonus to this oddity, when I go to my profile page here now, I get a nice green dot telling me I'm online - that's always good to know and I've often wondered about that.

Freya Mokusei wrote: Can confirm this appeared since upgrading to 49.0.1 - it wasn't present on 48.0. The errant styling is caused by:- https://slm-assets0.secondlife.com/assets/screen-ddd8ce7b07e791a6be384f43172cdb3e.css From:- .cssgradients #canvas-container { background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(0 8px 90deg, #fefefe, #b4b4b4); background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 10, from(#b4b4b4), to(#fefefe));} Specifically this is overruling the moz-linear-gradient:- background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 10, from(#b4b4b4), to(#fefefe)); They use all that code just to get a perfectly white background color? Is there a Css Abuse Help Center in San Francisco?

Second Life's learning curve doesn't have to be steep, it's all about how it is presented and there's certainly room for improvement there. One problem of course is the messy user interface all viewers have but the biggest problem is that the learning process is too rushed, you're expected to learn everything in one go. Some fundamental principles in education: Start with the essentials and only the essentials. Repeat, repeat and repeat. (one of the most important skills a good educator must have is the ability to repeat without sounding tedious.) Repeating the previous point: when practising new skills you need to do it right four times for every time you get it wrong. Make every new step a logical continuation of the previous one. Give instant gratification (preferably "natural" gratification that is a clear result of the lesson learned; "artificial" gratification - rewards not directly related to the lesson - is a poor substitute and should only be used when there is no other alternative). Give instant feedback. Learning by doing is always far more effective than learning by reading or learning by being told. Learning is always about association with past knowledge and experiences. That's how the human brain works: everything new is "hooked up" to knowledge already there. The more such connection we can find the better and any new info the brain can't find connections for at all is forgotten right away. When teaching, act like a salmon fisher: give plenty of line and always be ready to reel in. The only beginner's tutorial I am aware of, in SL or at any of the other grids, in the present or the past, that really tries to follow these principles, is the one at Linda Kellie's Conference Center sim and that is a very sketchy one, more of a concept than a finished product. Edit: Completely forgot one of the most important points: Avoid distractions!

wherorangi wrote: am sure that the LL enforcers are like totally fooled as well. Oh no, this is a cunning plan by LL to "motivate" people to switch jellybabies on. Seriously, SL already has a very good countermeasure against worn graphics crasher of course.

mikka Luik wrote: Now I am tempted to resurrect a few viewers from the past to see what they could produce. No need to look back to older viewers for that. These prim shapes are still available in Firestorm, they're listed in the prim shape menu below sculpts:  The "Circle2->" prims are really crazy looking (the first picture I posted here was a twisted version of one of them), the others look more or less like regular prims to start with but with very different torturing options. Most of the time you end up with lots of problems with flickering from overlapping tris and normals facing the wrong way but not always and you can get those problems with heavily tortured regular prims too. The plate I showed a picture of for example. You can make something very similar shape with a regular prim of course but there'll always be some kind of distortion at the center. With an alternative prim, you can adjust the shape around the center very precisely. Alternative prims can provide a wide variety of twisted ribbon shapes, here's a random example:  And how about this little trio - these look like shapes somebody could use:  These two look like perfectly ordinary prims at first glance. But try to get a perfectly even triangular or sloping square hollow in a regular half-cylinder.  I have to admit I'm quite surprised if nobody here is familiar with these prims. I heard quite a lot about them when I started as a builder and I thought this was all old news for veteran builders. Edit: Disclaimer: No prims were harmed during these demonstrations. Prims are incredibly flexible and quick to adapt to any new shape they are given. As long as they are properly sedated during the actual operation, they suffer no significant trauma.

wherorangi wrote: i am not really understanding this ... can you give me a hint about what values work for PRIM_TYPE other than 0..7 please ? You can't set them with scripts. They are a little bit like megaprims in that they are hacks never approved by Linden Lab. LL never blocked them though so you can still create them with third party viewers. Firestorm has 14 different alternative prim shapes. Singularity has some of them but I don't think it has all of them. You can view the shapes in any viewer but the moment you try to change the tortue in the SL viewer, the prim snaps to one of the official shapes.