ChinRey

Bitsy Buccaneer wrote: I'm sure I'm not the only one who is curious to hear what you did to achieve a 100% lossless 3/4's reduction. Judging by this post she didn't achieve it, she's just seen it somewhere else. I may have found the answer and if I am right, it's not an actual reduction of render cost but a way to cheat the system into giving too low figures: Calculated render cost depends on an object's size since the different LoD models are weighed according to an estimate how often they are displayed. A fitted mesh has two different sizes of course, one nominal - the one the item is uploaded at and you get if you rez it - and one actual - the size it has when streched over an avatar. The render cost is based on the nominal size while the LoD and switch points seem to be based on the actual size. That means you can cheat a lot simply by making the fitted mesh object very tiny and let the rigging scale it up to the size it needs to be. If I'm right - and the few quick tests I did seem to indicate that - we have a serious flaw in the whole ARC system, serious enough we have to ask if ARC means anything at all when fitted mesh is involved.

Not the most important thread ont he forum I know, but I'm looking at my sales figures and got curious: when do people buy in SL? What time of week and what time of day? Monday and Tuesday used to be my best days in SL, Saturday and Sunday the worst but recently it seems to be the other way round. And recently there has usually been one - and only one - "dead" day. Sometimes it's Tuesday, sometimes it's Wednesday. My own sales start to pick up seriously shortly after 12 AM (SLT), slowly increase until they drop sharply shortly before midnight - the first few hours of the new day I'm lucky if I make any sales at all. But I get commissions for some scripts I made for a friend and it seems her best sales figures are just when mine are at their lowest.

Script lag is one of those myths that just won't go away. Linden Lab fixed it many years ago but it's stuck in people's minds. Everything that happens in Second Life adds to the overall lag level of course but scripts aren't anywhere near the top ten list. The only exceptions are: Scripts can lag other scripts - as Rolig already mentioned Scripts can sometimes trigger laggy events - moving things around, communicating with other servers, rezzing objects and so on. Scripts can cause serious temporary lag when you move from one sim to another - either by crossing a sim border or teleporting. The real causes for serious lag in Second Life are: Avatars with high render complexity Too many and too high resolution textures in the environment Poorly optimized content (especially content so poorly made you have to increase RenderVolumeLoDFactor to see it properly) Too many avatars Too much content Unrealistically high graphics settings The vehicles and other physical objects Rolig mentioned can indeed add a lot of lag in some places but they are so rare I doubt they cause much lag to SL as a whole.

wherorangi wrote: i love playing this game for its own sake. What??? It's the money that coutns! Yu can easly make a dollar day there if you're good!!!

Ignore the messages you get, they are not reliable. I've seen the "You may not be rendered by anybody around you" message even with an ARC well under 30,000. That being said, 80,000 is the default value for mid resolution graphics and that seems to be a rasonable limit in any case. You will have to put some thought into assembling a gorgeous lookign avatar with an ARC that low but it is possible, just look at some of the examples in this thread.

Rolig Loon wrote: I think the Linden Lab default is still 1.25, which is ridiculously low. Not at all! Any mesh maker knows how to make low LI mesh that works perfectly well with LoD factor 1.0. Those who don't, are mesh fakers.

You have to go to the in-world store. The body is not for sale on the Marketplace for fairly obvious reasons.

Oh, you had to remind me of the Linden Realms! Had to try it again now of course, it's great fun! I wonder how many people have actually played the game there. Seems to me that everybody just skip right to the crystal collecting part.

Sadine wrote: I'm sure there are some basic understandings of Mesh that are not intuitive, common tricks, and pearls of wisdom that newbie mesh creators like myself would benefit from. There are so many tricks an techniques. The most important one is to never trust the uploader. The uploader tries to be helpful and offers to generate LoD models and physics model for you. It even offers to split meshes with too many faces into separate ones for you. Don't let it! It always messes things up. So: If any of the menus in the "Level of Details" tab says "Generate" and the corresponding Triangle Limit/Error Threshold is not 0, you are doing it wrong. (Plants are a special case here btw. It is never right to zero out a LoD model for a plant, so if you're making one of those and you see the word "Generate" anywhere in the uploader, you're doing it wrong). If the "Level of Detail" menu in the Physics tab says anything but "From File" you're doing it wrong (unless you know exactly what you're doing and one of the LoD models just happens to be spot on for the physics too). If you try to upload a single mesh with more than eight different textureable faces, you're doing it wrong. I think that's the place to start. Even the most inexperienced mesh maker can create far better LoD models and physics models than the uploader and you can easily improve both LI and quality that way.

If you want to discuss this, I suggest you repost it here. The answers section isn't really suitable for prolonged discussions. It is a very interesting topic and there is certainly more than one side to it. But do not expect anything to happen. A mesh body is essentially just an object like most other objects in Second Life and the faces can be tinted any color you like. You don't even need a HUD to for it. As long as the body is modifiable, anybody with a little bit of building skills and a bit of patience can do it manually. You'd have to rewrite the software handling mesh in SL from scratch to completely prevent it. Edit: The answer to the question in the title is yes, it is legal. An applier is a retexturing HUD for certain faces of a mesh. Even if you supply textures for that you have no legal rights whatsoever to dictate how the user modifies other aspects of the mesh or what modifcation options the creator gives the user.

Alwin Alcott wrote: there are thousends of places for that on sl I've told you a million times you shouldn't exaggerate! But yes, there are lots of social meeting places in SL. But I don't know of any that are as well made as the old Social Islands and that is why I think it could be a good idea to reinstall at least one copy of that build, not as part of the introduction system (and without the portal park, please!) but as a general infohub/socializing sim. Over time LL has moved and rebuilt several other old sims of much lower quality than that just to keep them here so why not?

cscott0108 wrote: I'm not sure what you mean by single mesh or single wall mesh but yes I have only 1 object for the house and 1 object for the physics layer. You also need separate files for the mid and low models and for some of the parts the lowest LOD model too. In the uploader window there are menus with the options "Generate", "Load from file" and "Use LoD Above" for Medium, Low and Lowest Level of Detail. Choose "Load from file" for each of them and select the model you made specially for that level. Sometimes you can use "Generate" and set the triangle limit to 0 to "zero out" the lowest (and sometimes even the low) level but be careful when you do that. The "Generate" option has no practical use apart from that. The "Use LoD Above" option is sometimes necessary for small objects but very rarely for something as big as a house. That is, if it's a very simple mesh (below 10-50 triangles depending on the complexity of the shape) you might as well use LoD above all the way since it won't affect the I for such meshes anyway. There are four reasons why it's generally better to make a house from several parts than a single piece: LOD and land impact: You often want better LOD for outside surfaces than inside ones. Land Impact (again): Splitting will usually give lower land impact. You should especially try to avoid mixing big and small triangles in a single mesh unless you know exactly what you're doing. Practicality: Smaller modules are often easier to handle than big bulky ones. Faces: A single SL mesh can only have eight faces and you usually want more than that for a house. Do not under any circumstance try to upload a mesh with more than eight faces to Second Life! If you do, the uploader will try to be helpful and split it up into several meshes for you and it always gets it wrong. The uploader always gets it wrong when it tries to be helpful but when it starts splitting your meshes, that's the worst of all.

cscott0108 wrote: Okay, Thank you. I'll add boxes around the doors, I didn't include window holes because of the vids I watched but many of the vids didn't explain the opening issues I've never seen any videos explaining how to make SL houses. Any instructions not made specifically for Second Life will be useless there since SL uses the HAVOK physics engine which works very different from what most other 3D environments have, cscott0108 wrote: I was trying to keep the prim counts low which is why I tried to add just planes for walls/door openings. The physics weight doesn't necessarily depend on the number of triangles in the physics model. It's quite a lot more complicated than that. You do want to keep the overall shape of the physics model as simple as possible but complete enclosed "boxes" can often give lower weight than individual single planes. cscott0108 wrote: I added my own roof because I noticed SL seemed to auto stretch the physics to match the shape. Yes. The uplaoder will resize all LOD models and the physics model to match the overall size of the main mesh.

cscott0108 wrote: So I need to do boxes around the doors but use planes for the rest of the house? You made the whole house from a single mesh? That's not usually recommended but it would eliminate the too-narrow-mesh problem I mentioned so unanalyzed physics should work. Generally speaking, use analyzed physics models made from boxes for walls. And use as few boxes as possible of course - you don't need window openings in the physics model for example. You've probably come across houses with faulty wall physics, walls you seem to climb a bit up when you walk into them, walls you can walk halfway through, walls you can walk completely through. The first of these problems is inevitable with unanalyzed physics, the other two are caused by faulty unanalyzed physics. You can easily avoid them all with analyzed. Use unanalyzed physics or good old fashioned prims for floors. It is very difficult to get correct elevation height walkign on an analyzed physics model and unless you do it right, you may end up with those pesky floors you can't rez anything on. Unanalyzed physics solves both these problems. I usually use unanalyzed physics for roofs too since I regard them as walkable surfaces but most house builders don't bother with such subtleties, they're happy as long as you can't just drop straight though the roof.

Back to topic: There is no way LL will revert to the pevious newcomer entry system. Even if the current system turned out not to meet its expectations, they'll rather try something new than go back to the old. However, it is possible they can be persuaded to open up a Social Island somewhere else as a sim on its own right. They've done that with many earlier entry systems so why not?

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: I had a great time in SL when there were less than 10,000 online at one time and there were only two mainland continents. There's a huge difference between 10,000 and rising and 10,000 and dropping but you have a good point. One of the great things about a grid based virtual reality is that it's scaleable. Yes, there will be fewer and fewer people and fewer and fewer sims in Second Life. That means less money for content creators creating new content and less money for Linden Lab to develop and maintain SL. And of course, SL will be more and more outdated. There doesn't seem to be a way to stop that development now and Linden Lab has given up - Ebbe has been quite clear about that. But SL will go on as long as LL doesn't loose money on it and there are Lindens and users passionate enough to carry on. We had SL13B this year, expect SL25B to happen before it's all over. Sim death isn't a bad thing in itself actually. It's better that the grid size adjusts to the actual need at any given time than to keep lots of sims nobody has any use for.

Aquila Kytori wrote: There you will find an option called Physics Shape Type. The default is Convex Hull, to enter your house you need to change this to Prim. Of course, I forgot to mention that! You did change physics type after you uploaded, didn't you?

This is a known problem with the physics engine of SL. It has problems dealing with very narrow triangles and all objects with dimensions less than 0.5 m along any axis are automatically treated as convex hull regardless of what hysics shape you choose. The solution is to use analyzed physics but you have to do it right. Create a separate mesh for the phsyics shape constins of three cubes separated by narrow gaps, one at each side of the doorway and wone above it. (You can sometimes skip the one above and make it with just two cubes but there's not much to gain from it.) One important tip if you want to make good mesh btw: Never ever let the uploader generate any of the models, make them all manually. This is espeically important for the physics model but also for the LOD models you need.

Pamela Galli wrote: My understanding is that LL reserves the right to delete any content they like, any time they want. They actually don't, if I recall the outcome of a lawsuit -- but what I hear most often is that if LL takes it upon themselves to delete IP infringing content, they somehow make themselves liable to legal action -- they relinquish their Something Harbour status. Well, I don't know the answer, I just ask questions It may well be that LL felt they had the right to remove content from their own land but not from SL as a whole.

Now, here are two slightly different questions. There's this guy who specialises in uploading cars he's borrowed from various car games. He sells them full perm, complete with textures, disastrous LOD and everything, just like we love to see them on the Linden Roads. All you need to do is add a crappy motorcycle script to make sure it crashes on every other sim crossing and you have a car store on MP. This guy obviously thinks what he's doing is all right, he even tried to put a box with free - still full perm - samples at the Stillman Bazaar once. But how about his customers? Should they understand they're reselling stolen goods and how much responsibility do they have? I noticed at least one of them listed in that discussion Pamela didn't give us a link to. And how about Linden Lab? They were very quick to remove that box from Stillman so they certainly know about it and they are certainly willing and able to do a little bit even without a formal DMCA.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: With more ways of building things there are fewer uses for simple textures. You'd be amazed if you knew how much these "flat" as you say standard textures are still used today. And thankfully so. If everybody actually started to cover each and every surface in SL with unique baked textures, that would actually be the end of Second Life - imagine ten times the lag we have now. But apart from that, you're right of course. This is hardly the end of SL or anything. It's just that when somebody who made such a deliebrate stand for original content creation leave, we should show them our appreciation.

Only by becoming a Premium member. Then you can have 60. Groups have nothing to do with Firestorm btw, it's the same for all viewers.

USC Texture Tomb, Texture Sim was a sim full of texture stores. What made it special was that it only allowed stores selling original textures, not just uploads of other people's works. It' gone now. Maybe not the biggest loss in SL's history and I suppose most of the stores are still around somewhere. But even so, the end of a great initiative to promote originality in SL content creation.

entity0x wrote: Right now I have to use "NOT Gacha NOT demo NOT promo NOT sale NOT rental" just to get a clean search result, and that is not acceptable from a user standpoint. Don't forget "NOT scam NOT fraud NOT ip violation NOT empty box NOT keyword spam NOT copybotted NOT old outdated garbage nobody in their right mind would spend a single linden on"...

Those clouds use a very simple script that only measures your speed and doesn't take into consideration why you are going so fast. You can even trigger them if you run fast downhill. It's always been that way, nothing new there.