ChinRey

Sassy Romano wrote: Well I hope you're not going to feel that my mesh for mesh sake is appropriate here? There are just some things that you can't do properly with prims:- Lovely! But... aren't there a few zeros missing from the price tag there?

Syo Emerald wrote: Not staying for long? As you can see, I have a lastname. I have been here for more than five years. I did mention something about "blatant stereotyping, didn't I? But although I was exaggerating a lot, I wasn't joking. There's absolutely nothing wrong with trying to build the best looking avatar possible. It's one of the many great things you can do in SL. The problem appears when that becomes the only thing to do here. And btw, yes, it would be equally bad if building was the only thing you could do in SL. I must have missed that period and didn't know about it. (I was here briefly more than ten years ago and then I stayed away for a long time.) Syo Emerald wrote: And I'm part of the crowd that keep social venues busy. I express myself trough my avatar, thats why my avatars apperance matters to me. Me too - and I also find time to build and explore. I guess I spend far too much time in SL really. There are also two problems when we combine fancy high poly avis with socializing, the ones Fmeh mentioned right at the start of his rant. I'm not sayiong you're actually doing this yourself - probably not since you're an experienced SL'er - but imagine you're putting together a really wonderful avi. A high poly mesh body, a lovely mesh fitted mesh dress, flowing fitted mesh hair, highly detailed mesh eye lashes and nails (of course) etc., etc. And of course, since you really want to look your best, you only use items covered with high resolution textures and some "new materials" for good measure. Looking good, aren't you? So you go to a club to show off a little. But it's all delusion. What other people actually see, is a grey cloud of disjointed untextured body parts and clothing. I doubt there are many people who actually want to express themselves that way. (There is a builder's equivalent to this btw: set your LOD sky high and tweak the windlight to make your build look as good as possible, then fool yourself into believing that is how others see it too.) Then it's the question of uniformity vs. individualism. I bought the Maitreya body the day it was launched and I was really happy about it. I still am, it's a lovely work. But in the beginning it also amde me feel special, because I had something great nobody else had. I still use it a lot for many reasons but it doesn't make me feel special anymore, quite the contrary. With mesh bodies and clothing there is also a limit to how many people you really can have in the same place. Club owners and club goers are usualy very concerned about script count because of the lag too many scripts can cause. That's good of course but seriously, script lag is nothing compared to fitted mesh lag. Ten fitted mesh avis jumping around at the same dance floor, that's lag Hell regardless of how careful they are with their script counts.

Perrie Juran wrote: When it was first introduced there cropped up those people who's attitude was "if it is mesh it's got to be good." Oh yes, "Mesh for Mesh' Sake" - that's a serious issue. To me the saddest aspect there are the old school builders who used to be great before they turned to mesh. There are some builders (I won't mention names of course but most of them are doing landscapes and plants) I truly admire for the great meshes and sculpts they used to make. But then mesh came along and they bought Mesh Generator or Mesh studio and ... got completely lost, producing mesh garbage that is way below the quality of their own old builds and well below what we really need in SL.

Rufferta wrote: I got a good laugh from this. I think, to put it more simply, that when you make something in mesh you lose the spontaneity of working in the moment. You know, I didn't even think about the spontaneity factor but you're absolutely right of course. When was the last time we had a mesh speed buildign contest in SL?

Anya Ristow wrote: And the trick is to find these events. Time to start a new group perhaps? One where only events that are guaranteed free of crowdfiller bots are allowed to advertise. Shouldn't be too hard to organize and with a few enthusiasts telling all their friends and their friends telling their friends, it shuold be reasonably easy to spread the word about the group too. I can't see a realistic way to reach the newcomers though. We would really need support from LL for that and I can't imagine they woud be interested.

I think your post got truncated at some point, irihapeti. Here's a corrected version: irihapeti probably meant to write: am not really getting your point FMeh to make something oldschool from scratch in SL then - use a 3rd party tool to create the textures - use a 3rd party tool to create sounds - use a 3rd party tool to create animations for avatars that will interact with the model - use the SL Code Editor to create effect scripts - use the SL Builder to create the model by torturing triangles then combine all to create the finished thing + to make something newschool from scratch in SL then - use a 3rd party tool to create the textures - use a 3rd party tool to create sounds - use a 3rd party tool to create animations for avatars that will interact with the model - use the SL Code Editor to create effect scripts - use the a 3rd party tool to create the model by torturing triangles - Log on to the beta grid for the first test upload - Try to figure out why the UV maps that looked so good in your 3D editors are all wrong in SL - Fix the UV maps - Upload second test to check you got the UV maps right this time. If necessary, repeat the two previous steps until you have it sorted out - Go back to your 3D editor software, merge, remove and move triangles until you have something that looks like a decent mid resolution LOD model - Upload on beta grid to check what is wrong with the mid resolution model. Keep making new ones until you get a good compromice between LOD and LI - Go back to your 3D editor software, merge, remove and move triangles until you have something that looks like a decent low resolution LOD model - Upload on beta grid to check what is wrong with the low resolution model. Keep making new ones until you get a good compromice between LOD and LI - Go back to your 3D editor software, merge, remove and move triangles until you have something that looks like a decent lowest resolution LOD model - if your build needs one - Upload on beta grid to check what is wrong with the lowest resolution model. Keep making new ones until you get a good compromice between LOD and LI - If your build requires a defined phsyics shape, go back to your 3D editor software and make something that looks like a decent physics model - Upload to beta grid with physics - Figure out why the physics model made the land impact skyrocket - Fix the pjhysics model - Upload the complete build to the beta grid - Check for the inevitable blatanty embarrasing errors - Log on to the main grid - Upload to the main grid - Go back to the 3D editor and fix the blatantly embarrasing errors you can't believe you overlooked on the beta grid - Reupload to the main grid - Go back to the 3D editor and fix the blatantly embarrasing errors you still somehow had managed to miss then combine all to create the finished thing and finally: find a way to blame Linden Lab for the lag your twenty gazzillion high resolution cutsom baked textures cause. + the torturing of triangles part is the same. Only the tool used for this part is different. The rest is the same as it ever was

Aethelwine wrote: I don't know if there is some restriction to using animated textures on mesh There aren't any. Animated textures work exactly the same on mesh as they do on prims.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: I don't think current SL residents are the target market for Sansar. Sure we are welcome there, but I get the impression that world will be geared towards other kinds of markets and LL won't lose any sleep if only a part of the SL populations makes the transition. You're right there of course. The fact that Sansar will be mesh based hardly matters here because it isn't really meant for the kind of people who build Second Life anyway. Amethyst Jetaime wrote: But, just as a RL architect doesn't manufacture the parts for the buildings they create, you can buy full perm mesh parts and do a lot more than just 'decorate' over and over. Yes, but it's not really the same, is it? Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Of course you do have to buy the parts, and not everyone can afford to do that. So I agree, the casual hobbyist with a minimum to spend inSL has been left out in the cold when it comes to creating things for sale. While they may have never made much money doing it, many depended on the occasional sale for their pocket money or even the rent on a modest home and since they don't have that income stream, they either leftSL or cut way back on what they buy here, if anything. There is probably a connection between this and the amount of land inSL that has been steadily decreasing. Hard to say for sure. Mesh didn't accelerate the depopulation of SL, it's been going on at a steady rate ever since 2011 and the introduction of mesh didn't change that. It is of course possible that the arrival of new user groups masked the effect mesh had but look at the alternative grids. There are lots of places in the hyperverse where you can build with prims just like in the old days and they're all empty. The only alternative grids that can show anything even remotely resembling success are the ones that try to emulate the current SL, focusing on the user as consumer rather than as creator. I'm afraid I'll have to post a rant of my own here now - got so many and sometimes conflicting thoughts about this. One problem that hasn't been mentioned here yet is what we got instead of the old prim twisters. Mesh isn't easy. You have to understand how it works to use it properly and, just as important, you have to understand how it works in Second Life. And no matter how good you are, getting it right takes time and unless you're making avatar thingies for the "new SL'ers", there is very little money in it. There are only a few hundred mesh makers in Second Life who have enough skill, patience, will and sheer stubbornness to do it right. There are thousands of unskilled mesh makers who don't realize their limitations. And a few who don't care. A well known SL creator who has a big fan base here and also apparently works professionally as a 3D modeller outside SL once told me quite openly and honestly that yes, he knew what he sold on MP was rubbish but there wasn't enough money in it for him to do a proper job and people bought his stuff anyway. Oh well. I have a lot of places in Second Life I love to visit just to enjoy the view and admire the skillful work the creators put into them. Only two of them, Berlin and the Amazon, are mesh based and neither is anywhere near the top of the list. That may not be all about mesh though. Running a public place is probably the most thankless and least rewarding task you can take upon yourself in SL and it's possible it just means that hardly anybody are making such places anymore. But I can't help feeling that most mesh based builds I've seen are dull. If you've seen one, you've seen them all really. And of course, since so much of the content usually is made by people who don't know how to make mesh, there are usually serious lag and LOD issues to detract from the enjoyment too. As a builder I'm first and foremost a mesh maker of course. But I often wish I wasn't. Making sculpts is a fight but it's a fun fight! I just love the challenge of beating those obnoxious vertices in that ridiculous material into submission. There's something deeply satisfying with working with prims. Those seven basic shapes seem so simple and even crude but once you start playing with them, it's absolutely amazing what they can do. I can spend hours twisting prims just for the sheer joy of doing it. Today I even found a new prim shape nobody seems to have thought about before. To me that alone is enough satisfaction to last for weeks. There's nothing enjoyable about working with mesh. That is, I can be very happy with the result but the process to get there is just work. Much of the allure of mesh is its seemingly endless possibilities. Unlike prims and sculpts you can make any shape you like with it. There are two very big dangers there. One is of course that it's tempting to overdo things. It's so easy to add a little bit here and a little bit there and soon you're so lost in details you forget the big picture. And of course, in a virtual world there will always be limited resources. Mesh has a reputation for being laggy and overcomplex meshes are a very important reason for that. Good virtual reality content creating is all about making the most out of the available resources and that is very easy to forget when you work with mesh. But perhaps even more important, endless possibilities is creativity's biggest enemy. Jubjub Forder once gave me a really good illustration of this: give somebody a blank piece of paper and a pencil and ask them to draw something. Most people will just stare blankly at the paper, not knowing where to start. But give them a pencil and a piece of paper with a circle on it and you don't even have to tell them to draw something, they'll start elaborating on it right away.

I think Syo Emerald's reply is the best so far because it illustrates so well the difference between the "new" and "old style SL'ers - and gives me a good excuse for some blatant stereotyping. I bet Fmeh never thought about clothing when he mentioned mesh and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't occur to Syo that mesh is used for other things than clothes and avi attachments too. And that's the difference in a nutshell. For the stereotypical old school SL'er the avatar is a vehicle to socialize and explore the wonders of a virtual world. For the stereotypical new school SL'er Second Life is just a backdrop for the avatar. (Me, I'm somewhere in the middle btw, Dressing up my avtar is one of the fun things I do in SL but it's certainly not the only one, and not even the most impotant one.) These new avatar fixated users aren't doing much good for SL, apart from contributing to the MP sales of course, but they're not doing much harm either. For Second Life as a whole they're simply irrelevant. Except for one crucial detail: these people aren't going to stay for long. Right now the inflow of new avatar fixated users is almost enough to compensate for the loss of traditional ones so the number of active users doesn't drop very fast. But avatar posing is boring in the long run - even more boring than redecorating your virtual home once a week. Most of them will be gone in a year or two and then we'll suddenly see how precious few there are left of the traditional Second Life users. That's going to be quite a shock for many people both in SL and LL.

Anya Ristow wrote: Nobody is talking because nobody is actually there. These are bots. Or more likely afk "friends" of the DJ. Bots cost money, a long friends list doesn't. Anya Ristow wrote: If you know of any place where conversation still happens, even if it's griefing, please let me know. Even if it's griefing? Hmmm, still tricky - even Barbarossa seems to have gone awfully quiet recently. Sandbox Island is probably your best bet these days if you want to be harassed.

A friend of mine just asked me a question and I have no idea about the answer so I pass it on. How modifiable will a Bento avatar be inworld?

Dresden Ceriano wrote: It seems to me that LL is, and has always been, trying to shoot for "mainstream" acceptance adoption. Yeah, that's the hype I was talking about. There are lots of speculations about the future of virtual reality. Here are three clear and obvious facts for a change: There will never be a mass market virtual reality named Second Life. There will never be a mass market virtual reality named Sansar (or one that was named Sansar in the development stage). There will never be a mass market virtual reality named High Fidelity.

You can open a support case at https://support.secondlife.com/create-case/ But first, check if there is a reason for the flagging. Are there any protected RL brand names? Are the items listed in the right category? Are there any unrelated keywords? etc., etc. Linden Lab doesn't just remove listings because they are flagged, they check themselves first and if they find something wrong, they send you a message telling you why it's delisted.

Whirly Fizzle quoted: Some older graphics cards and drivers may encounter difficulty rendering the increased number of joints, and you may experience a change in framerate as a result. If possible, upgrade your OS or driver to the latest version... I missed that part but it goes without saying really. But a very imprtant question here is exactly how old a driver will have to be before we run into trouble. 14.4 is still and will probably always be the last AMD driver to work reliably with Second Life. And of course, Intel graphics cards never worked well here. Does this mean Second Life will only work with Nvidia cards from now on? That would be a disaster for SL Then again, I wrote that in terms of lag Bento is probably the least of two evils. We have all kinds creative use of fitted mesh, flexis and scripted attachments instead now and that was just beginning to take completely off recently. Those things aren't exactly low lag either and not nearly as potentially useful as those new bones are.

Not sure if I should post in this thread since I don't really have any constructive feedback to offer. But since I'm always quick to criticise Linden Lab when they mess things up, I think should tell them when they're doing a great job too. And this is great, like really, really really great. I couldn't believe my eyes when I first read the blog post - had to check the calendar in case I had overslept by a few months and it was April 1st already. The only big concern here is lag. All those extra bones will of course add more load on the client computers, making SL even less accessible to the general public than it is today. But then again, people are already emulating many of these fucntions with methods that I suppose are even more laggy and it seems to be more and more of that coming up. So when it comes to lag, I'm fairly sure those extra bones are the least of two evils and of course, the potential usefulness is just mindblowing! Keep up the good job, guys! (I'll still keep telling you when you mess things up though )

Darrius Gothly wrote: 1) It depends on the definition of "success". Hey, I was going to say that! Second Life never reached its full potential of course and it certainly was anywhere near what the hype claimed it to be. But there's a long way from there down to downright failure.

File an abuse report against the owner of the place and mention specifically that they are using multiple bots for spamming. Tha usually helps.

Dear Dakota, since this thread is touching the keyword spam issue, I'm beginning to believe you just don't realize jsut how big that problem is so here's an example. A few days ago I went to MP to see if there were some cool new outfits for my Maitreya body. So I searched for Maitreya, and listed by newest first with 96 results on each page. On the first four pages there were 259 listings that had nothing whatsoever to do with Maitreya. That's more than two thirds of the search results! I checked some of the listings and it seems that some gacha resellers are just filling up the keyword field with what they think are the most popular search words on MP at the moment. Quite clever, the risk of being caught is next to zero and the penatlies if you are unlucky is neglible, at least for gacha items which won't be listed for long anyway. I didn't flag the items of course. That would simply have taken far too much time and just thinking about it made my mouse button finger ache. We've been talking a lot about improving search results recently, well: there's your problem. New search algorithm? Nice, if you can get it to work. Exclude demos from regular search? Yes, please! Merge versions into single listings? That would be great! But all of those issues combined are still just a minor inconvenience compared to the massive problem keyword spamming has become.

Vic Pittman wrote: Two weeks later, I realize my review is gone. It had been flagged and removed. You paid 2000 L$ for a phone without animation??? Yes, I think you have reason to be mad. But as Pamela said, if the description didn't state the phone was animated, I'm afraid you have to be mad at yourself rather than the seller. Even so, I find it hard to believe a two star review would have been removed for the reason you say. A seller can't remove reviews, only Linden Lab can and I don't think they're that easy to convince. It's mroe likley the seller relisted the item to get rid of the review (easy way to find out: check the link in your purchase history - if it takes you to the MP front page rather than the item listing, it's been relisted). If so, they've violated the MP TOS and you can flag them for ti if you want to.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Dno't look at me! I splel jsut fnie! I thought corrcet spellign was a TOS violaition?

How long have you been a premium member? You won't be able to bid on auctions right away. I can't remember the time limit but it might be 30 days. You can still buy land directly in-world as Alvin suggested though. But of course, as Obvious mentioned, you can't have both a Linden Home and a mainland plot included in your premium membership. It's eitehr one or the other.

Anya Ristow wrote: It got people into SL chasing far-fetched promises It did indeed but that meant they actually came here and made this make-believe world of ours a little bit more alive. Anya Ristow wrote: and made SL a place of redundant, low-quality crap in eyesore stores with traffic-faking bots, gamed marketplace, gamed events listings, gamed search, gamed classifieds, gamed map, creepy, non-responsive (bot) avatars to make newbies feel unwelcome, phony banks and stock exchanges, ad farms, spam, and creepy fake events in the pursuit of trivial amounts of tip money and side sales from tacky, laggy vendors. Those are the blessings of a completely unregulated market where merchants and traders are free from responsibility for their actions. Anya Ristow wrote: IMO "the ability for people to make money here" caused SL to fail. Did SL fail? It's been here for more than twelve years now and although it's hardly still going strong, at least it's still going. That's actually an amazing achievement in itself. Compare it to the other hypergrid based virtual realities. Yes, for each serious content creator in SL there are probably 10 copybotters, 100 pretenders and 1000 happy amateurs who just want to have fun putting things together. That's not good of course but it's still a much higher ratio of serious creators than any of the other grids has to show. Much, maybe most, of SL if garbage but not all. Even today there are many true gems to be found here. As far as I know there is only one sim worth seeing on any of the other grids and it was made by Yadni Monde who wouldn't have been a great builder if it wasn't for Second Life. (Edit: no, make that two. Aley's also been busy on another grid recently.) Compared to those other grids SL is a huge success and I do believe that's very much because of the good content creators who came here looking for the promised land. Most of them were of course taken in by empty promises but they still delivered their part of the deal to the benefit of LL's investors and everybody who truly love and appreciate Second Life as a virtual world.

Karolanne Placebo wrote: it happen to me & im on catzip viewer it seems to be with everyone much there list n list of it on search with google I can remember when i play secondlife without texture fuzzy :< This thread is more than a year old Karolanne, and the problem we had back then was eventually solved. But you're still right. Texture thrashing is back! I wonder how long it'll take before they fix it this time.

timothy1701 Starfall wrote: I tried deleting this thread but don't know how In the "options" option at the top right corner of your first message, select "Report Inapropriate Content" and use the form there to ask a moderator to remove it.

Darrius Gothly wrote: But for the most part, start-up ventures like Sansar launch from the premise that the only way to get real money is to cater to the high-end customer. Very well said and I'd like to broaden the perspective of it a little bit. In an interview a while ago Ebbe LInden said it should be cheaper for people to "pitch a tent" in virtual space and in a previous thread here he said that sooner or later somebody would make a virtual world for the millions. I think he's right but it's hard to predict the future. What's important is that the CEO of Linden Lab believes it and yet there is absolutely nothing in what we've heard about Sansar so far that indicates that they are going for that market. That simply doesn't make sense. It must mean that they either are completely missing the target they're aiming for or they have some really, really good cards they haven't shown yet. (Edit: sorry for mixing metaphors. It's just one of my many abd habits.) Sassy Romano wrote: This is where I suspect they're going but i'm wondering if they're hoping that the pull of Oculus Rift will be their edge. Oh no, you must be wrong there! LL would never dream of violating their own TOS and it clearly says that gambling is not allowed.