ChinRey

Not quite sure what you mean by family friendly... If you're looking for a place with a playground for children, you're more than welcome to my little Mouseplay Park at Coniston Other places off the top of my head: Aero Pines Park is probably on your list already. Lovely old style sims. The amusement park at Rizal probably isn't. It's an early Mole build and sadly forgotten but I think even today it stands out as one of the best works Linden Lab's tame builders ever made.

irihapeti wrote: 3000 people who are in the most engaged group of SL residents Best guesstimate about 2500. But we'll never know for sure. The way the "survey" was executed it's fairly certain that there were people who responded multiple times. How many of the replies were duplicates? Somewhere between 10 and 50 percent maybe - can't really narrow it down more than that although the abnormal number of extreme answers can give us a clue.

irihapeti wrote: heres a list Oh well, I guess I have to explain what I mean then - prepare for a loooooong post. Reality check first: More than 35% of SL's users are "Extremely likely" to recommend SL to their friends (according to the post at the Firestorm site - Canary Beck doesn't use exactly those words on her blog). How is LL able to cope with this flood of newcomers to Second Life? 35% of the SL'ers are Travellers/Explorers. Where do they travel and what do they explore? 3% are newcomers. No wait, 3% are newcomers who somehow have heard about third party viewers and decided/been told to switch to Firestorm. Is there anybody who can possibly believe that? About 7% are "not at all likely" to recommend SL to their friends. That looks credible if we take the question in its literal meaning but many - including apparently the Firestorm team - actually interpret it as a popularity question: "do you like SL?" No? Why are they still here??? The dispersion curve is highly polarized - answers tend to be either very positive or very negative with relatively little in between. That's a well known warning signal to anybody who deals with statistics. If you actually look at the numbers, not just the headlines, and engage a braincell or two, it's easy to see that this is all wrong. And if you look at the methodology, it's also easy to see why: No protection against multiple replies - you could go to the Firestorm site and take the survery hundreds of times if you wanted to. If I understand correctly, there wasn't even a basic IP check, but even if it was, it wouldn't have been nearly enough. No attempt to reach a representative selection of users - The survey was promoted on the Firestorm startup screen so it would only reach Firestorm users, it would only reach those who still read those advertisements on the startup screens and even for some reason still click on them. That's a rare breed indeed. Ok, whether the Firestorm users can be regarded as representative of SL users as a whole is up to discussion but the other two factors alone are enough to say that the people who took the survey aren't. The classic questionoid - Big, serious companies often ask their customers "would your recommend us to your friends" and people who don't understand statistics often mistake that for a survey. It isn't, it's a PR trick - just a slightly sneaky way to suggest they recommend the product to their friends. The answers are never taken seriously by the company. If it's a serious company that is - some of course use that question as a safe way to get confirmation of their excellence. As far as I know, the question is never used in serious statistic surveys and for good reasons. It's ambiguous for a start. And the answer doesn't really mean anything anyway. No control questions - I'm sure you've taken a serious survey or two in your life. Did you notice how it kept asking basically the same question over and over again in different ways? That's because people have a depressing tendency not to answer straight. They may misunderstand the question the first time, they may need a little bit of "warm up" before they really get into the topic, they have a tendency to polarize their first answer - usually they tend to answer more positive than they really mean but sometimes it's the other way round. etc., etc., etc. I'm not an expert on statistics, I'm sure somebody who is could fill out the lists with lots of other objections. These are just the points every layman (and laywoman) should know about the topic and I think it's more than enough to reject this survey. One of the most basic principles in computing, statistics and all other kinds of data analysis is GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out. And here we have a classic example how wrong things can go when we forget that. (Edit: the post didn't end up nearly as long as I feared but I still hope I haven't bored anybody to death with it )

irihapeti wrote: the evidence of this is here http://www.canarybeck.com/2015/12/08/the-many-roles-we-play-in-second-life/ over 3000 SL residents participated in this survey. For sure is self-selected this group, but I would say that these 3000+ are in the most engaged group of SL residents the top 3 groups: Roleplayers, Socialisers and Explorers (these types of people here in SL and eleswhere) are pretty clearly the target audience for Sansar. When add [in] the Music, Entertainer and Fashionista counts then is a no-contest pretty much. Builders, Scripters and other technical groups are a pretty distant second, even in SL Except for on tiny little detail: that survey was so clumsily done the "results" have no value or credibility whatsoever. But that brings up a interesting and rather important question: With allt he talk about what people want and need and how LL listens/fails to listen to their customers, has there never ever been a serious customer survey in SL???

Drongle McMahon wrote: Most often, supplying a set of non-overlapping hulls avoids problems, but I don't suppose it isinfallible. I think there's a new quirk with the uploader there. Sometimes it splits non-overlapping hulls but not overlapping joined ones. I've seen that twice recently and it has never happened to me before. I sent some example files to you and to Aquila in case you want to have a look.

Long post with replies to several previous ones... sorry. Pamela Galli wrote: I have read over this and I notice a faint light in the darkness now. It would help if I knew what a hull was. A bit off topic but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_hull The simplest explanation I've heard of what a convex hull is, is that it's a shrinkwrap around the object. That makes a much simpler shape of course since it eliminates all the little bumps and indentations. It's important to differentiate between the convex hull physics shape we can use inworld and the convex hulls we get when we analyze the physics shape in the uploader though. The convex hull physics shape we can select in the builder window is a single one encompassing the entire object. When we upload a mesh, we - or the uploader - can split it into several parts which each gets its own convex hull. Usually when we use analyzed physics in the uploader, we want to make it from clearly separated cubes as Aquila suggested. That's the easy way out, you know exactly what the physics weight will be (0.360 for each hull and it doesn't change when you resize) and you have a pretty good idea how the physics shape will end up. Better watch out though, sometimes the uploader gets sneaky and tries to add some extra hulls even if you tell it not to. I've even had some meshes where I had to do exactly the opposite of Aquila's advice - where the only way to get the correct number of hulls was to make a complex merged physics dae and get the uploader to split it up. The cube isn't the only convex hull though. Any polygon with no angles pointing inwards is a convex hull. Unfortunately, the uploader doesn't know that and it can't handle all possible convex hulls. My experience (Aquila or Drongle may correct me here) is that it can usually handles hull shapes with "unbroken" sides facing at least one axis but it faints when it sees a real three dimensional complex convex hull. Chic Aeon wrote: No, I always analyze because Drongle TOLD me too long ago LOL. I think that was good advice, even though Drongle denies it now. You can sometimes save a lot of LI by using unanalyzed physics and analyzed physics also has some disadvantages for walkable surfaces (personally I probably wouldn't use it for the palettes in Aquia's illustration for example) but unless you really understand how those physics shapes work, you have to be prepared for a lot of trial and error and it might not be worth the time and effort. Back to topic: Dyson Indigo wrote: It has always been my dream to create low prim builds and it seems to me that meshing is the way to do this. I'm always a bit scared when people talk about mesh as "low prim" because there are so many ways to cheat to achieve that. You can make very simple mesh and overload it with lots of laggy custom textures for example (I've seen fairly small houses with render weights of 30 000, 40 000 even 50 000!!!). Or you can butcher the LOD models. The latter is the favorite method among people who pretend to be mesh makers because it's so easy, you just have to reduce the numbers for the LOD models in the uploader. Here is my standard for good mesh: With RenderVolumeLODFactor set at 1: an indoors objects still looks good when viewed at 25-30 m distance an outdoors object looks good at 128 m distance (what do I mean by "looks good"? Ummmm... that's a good question, glad you asked ) Physics depends on what kind of object it is of course but for a house: All walls must be perfectly solid. All floors must be walkable - with no noticeable hovering above the surface and certainly no sinking into them. Roofs must be walkable although I'm willing to accept a little bit of hovering and even sinking on a sloping roof. (Edit: except thatched roofs of course, you want quite a bit of sinking into them.) It must be possible to rez items upon all major surfaces that aren't vertical. Staircases can have ramp physics but if so, it must be set to minimize hovering and sinking. Large dormers and bay windows are of course spaces it should be possible to walk into. Others may have lower quality standards, but me, I flatly refuse to accept any mesh that doesn't meet these requirements as good quality. If you want to make quality mesh with low land impact, you'll need to put a bit of effort into it. Not only do you have to make a separate physics model as Aquila mentioned but you will also need to make LOD models manually. The uploader isn't able to help you there. It generates the LOD models by removing triangles from the model and there's simply no way it can know which ones to keep and which ones to eliminate. So if you use autogenerated LOD models, you either end up with lots of holes in the models or unnecessarily high LI because it keeps lots of unnecessary triangles. Tools like Blender's decimate and limited dissolve functions, Mesh Studio's resolution settings etc. can help you on the way but to make truly efficient mesh with good quality and low land impact you'll have to do most of the decimation manually. It's worth it though, if only for the satisfaction of a job well done.

Yes, that is a common problem with fitted mesh, it can¨'t be resized. It is scaled automatically according to where the different collision bones are located and I'm afraid that means all the regular sizing function are deactivated.

Ashy Calcutt wrote: Rare if any.. any help island is void of any Lindens.. Yes. But my question was actually a genuine not a rhetorical one. From the wiki page it's clear that the help islands actually was starffed at some point in SL history and that really surprised me. Are there any old-timers here who can remember when that was?

My impression is that LL doesn't mind people having alts as such. Their real concerns are all about what you use your alts for, not how many you have. So if you contact them and ask, they're probably happy to give you permission to have the alts you need. Except, Freya's second point may be a very real problem. If you are planning to use the alts to impersonate real life performers, that's a big no-no regardless of whether you a hundred alts of just use your main for it.

Sassy Romano wrote: The wiki is not necessarily up to date. For example:- http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Sharing_or_transferring_Second_Life_accounts Or the last three lines of the alt accounts wiki page: "No system is perfect. If you have legitimate reasons for creating multiple accounts but have been unable to do so: If you have a basic account, go to Help Island and talk to someone there. If you have a premium account, submit a support ticket." Assuming for the sake of argument that this doesn't mean you can go to Help Island, have a chat with some random stranger and suddenly you can have as many alts as you like, when was the last time you could find a Linden at Help Island?

Christin73 wrote: Funny how LMs are done. Like yesterday I tped into a pirate sim and landed in the water lol. You think that is bad? I've been to places where the tp point was inside the walls. And once I tried to visit a store that was inside a closed skybox high in the air with the tp point outside the box.

Medhue Simoni wrote: If you have Skype and Blender, then you have a great whiteboard. With Blender's grease pencil, you get alot more than just a whiteboard too. Oh there are lots of other electronic media that are vastly superior to Second Life when it comes to emulating traditional educational tools. Second Life doesn't stand a chance there. But there have never been any creative attempts to use the possibilities unique to Second Life for education. Except for a few scattered private inititaives that went unnoticed by anybody in a position to develop them properly. But this is way off topic and besides, I'm sure everybody on the forum have had more than enough of my rants by now, so I suggest we leave it at that.

Is this the start of a Viewer War? Yay! I've heard about those but haven't been in SL long enough to actually see one myself! Chi Rey grabs a fresh box of popcorn, tosses a coin to decide which side to cheer on and sits down to watch the show.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Maybe this is a DUH thing but .. Why doesn't LL make Experiences .. that are Tutorials? The current newcomer reception sims do use Experiences although in a limited way. Actually, I think they even used it there before it was publicly launched. Oh well, this is all just idle thoughts of course, it's not as if any of us are going to do anything about it. I just wanted to mention that the welcome areas for newcomers today are very different from and much better than what people here seem to think. If anybody from Linden Lab want to know how to make the Learning Islands and Social Islands even better than they are today, please sen me an IM Chin Rey decides not to hold her breath

Dresden wrote: Have you been here long enough to remember the fiasco LL created the last time they tried to simplify the viewer? The dreaded Basic Mode. No but I think the name alone says enough. That was a textbook example how not to implement a good idea, right?

Pussycat Catnap wrote: They instead should have it be about doing some social things, wearing a new outfit, maybe using teleport and fly, sitting on some furniture and clicking some "common kinds of items" like a dance ball and a 'drink machine' (I dunno, I find those a lot, specially coffee giver items, but that's probably just me). I understand none of you have started new alts recently since you're not familiar with the newcomer entry sims Linden Lab are using nowadays. What Pussycat describes here is pretty much what Linden Lab have tried to do with the Learning Islands and Social Islands. The haven't completely succeeded. With no pedagogues at hand for the job, they made three fundamental mistakes that greatly reduce the effectiveness of the system. A few minor tweaks there would significantly improve the retention rate. But even with those flaws it's still in a different league than any other welcome system for beginners I've ever seen or heard of in Second Life or on other grids - except possibly for Linda Kellie's Conference Center sim. Ebbe said they had done some testing and found that no privately run welcome center was able to match the retention rate of the existing system and I'm not at all surprised. Optimizing the Learning and Social Islands would probably double the retention rate but even that would not be enough. I don't know how many newcomers SL receives but judging by the traffic on the Learning Islands I would guess it's about 15,000-30,000 a month, including new alts for old-timers of course. It's easy to see that will never ever be enough to maintain SL at its current size so we definitely need better recruiting. But we also need to figure out why newcomers leave right away. The first answer here, the by far most important factor, is the user interface. We are all used to the Second Life Viewer. We're even quite at home with the even more complicated interfaces of various third party viewers. We like it that way! We love to have as many bells and whistles as we can. Newcomers aren't. What they need is a clean, simple interface focusing on the three basic functionalities and with all the distractions cleared out of the way. The second most important factor is lag. Render lag. Nobody but nobody says to themselves "Oh, Second Life? That sounds interesting. I better go and buy myself a new computer with a powerful graphics card so I can check it out and see if it's something for me." Having to wait for a minute or two for a new scene to render is a huge turnoff and undoubtedly a major reason why people leave before they're properly hooked. I've heard that SL is four times as render heavy as WoW and I don't think that's an exaggeration, quite the contrary. Some say that SL is so much more complex it has to be heavier and that's true but it doesn't need to be nearly as heavy as it is and I think we all know that. Some blame this on the content creators others on Linden Lab and the truth is somewhere in between. Second Life is full of content that is far more render heavy than necessary and that is of course because so many builders don't know how to build efficiently or don't care (or that their buyers don't know and/or care). But that is to a large degree because LL never has encouraged building efficiency or even provided proper documentation how to do it. To reduce the problem, Linden Lab and the content creators will have to work together. I asked a question about that at the Lab Chat, unfortunately Ebbe misunderstood it so he never answered - maybe some other time.

bambi Littlebird wrote: Erm ,as it was his sim I would have expected him to account for my lost objects.. I can't say anything about the rest and there sure are rude and unreliable landlords both on islands and mainland in SL. But you can't blame him for that one at least. There is abolsutely no way he could have deleted your items. He could have returned them but then he would just send them back to your inventory (into your loast and found folder), they wouldn't disappear. There's no way he could have helped your recover anything you may have lost in other ways either.

irihapeti wrote: is in the basement Me, I usually don't rummage thrugh people's basments when I visit. But I had to look of course. Picked a spot at random on the big map to tp to and landed right in front of the time capsule! irihapeti wrote Is pretty interesting what can dig out of there Yes, it's amazing what you can find at the Bazaar. I once stumbled across a box full of copybotted cars there. It didn't take long before somebody removed that one. Can't imagine why... The Clanis telehub with Ryan Linden's map inside is at the bazaar too btw. I completely forgot that.

There is no way to get a script to write to a notecard. The only workaround is to get the script to say the text and then copy and paste it manually. Edit: I didn't know of the Experiences function (thank you Rolig!) and thought the http option would be a bit too complicated but it's a good tip. A fourth method we all forgot about is email. Every single object in Second Life has an email address and it's fairly easy to add a script to send you a message with the text you want. But in the end, no matter what method you use to output text from a script, to get it onto a notecard in Second Life, you will either have to type or copy and paste manually. This is an intentional limitation btw. Linden Lab decided long ago that allowing scripts to write notecards would cause more load to the servers than it was worth. There have been several attempts to make them change their minds about it but they haven't so far.

Innula Zenovka wrote: ... now that it's staffed by Real Lindens™ again ... Yes, life support has improved a lot recently. But I think it's important to say that it's not because of the quality of the people there, that has always been very high, but because they now have the tools and communication channels they need to do their job properly. There was a time the only thing the people at live support could do was give advice. If it was a problem that required action from LL's side, all they could do was open a support case and wait for it to be processed.

Sassy Romano wrote: A new thread though eh? Maybe but it won't be me starting it. But as a professional teacher I can assure you that we already have reasonably adequate substitutes for all the tools you mentioned (only the whiteboard/blackboard is really essential anyway) plus a few advantages you won't get with an html page or Skype.

Sassy Romano wrote: What am I missing here? An opportunity perhaps? But don't feel bad about it, so does LL and they've done it over and over again. Done the right way, SL can be a very effective tool for remote teaching even on subjects not related to SL itself at all.

bebejee wrote: Colours are dull on SL viewer, its like a thin film of grey has been stuck on the screen, best way to desribe it. Some of my HUDS clearly show some grey layer making them look dull, I dont know what it is. It's definitely not an issue directly related to the viewer. There is no reason why different viewers should give different images or image quality, provided the graphics settings are exactly the same of course.

This is getting a bit off topic for the scripter forum, maybe it should be moved to the mesh forum instead? But that's up to the moderators to decide. Qie Niangao wrote: Can't all but one linked mesh be rendered at the lowest LoD? That's a very interesting idea for regular mesh and well worth keeping in mind. But the only way to achieve it would be to scale down the invisible objects and in this case we would have to use non-scaleable fitted mesh. Qie Niangao wrote: (About the alternate material layers thing: back when I was actually paying attention to this stuff, the plan was that fully transparent geometry, though downloaded, would not be rendered at all. I'm guessing that didn't get implemented, but if it had, it would have made the multiple-material-layer approach almost as practical. They kinda promised us this in as a workaround for nerfing the mesh abstraction to make it impossible to swap models on the same object instance. Wouldn't be too surprising if they took with one hand and never got 'round to giving back with the other.) Judging by the calculated render weights, invisible faces and objects are still loading the render engine: Prim with default plywood texture (512x512 px), RW: 404 With default plywood texture and 100% transaprency: 464 With default transparency texture (32x32 px): 344 Default transparency and alpha masking: 284 Custom 4x4 px blank texture: 277 Custom blank texture and 100% transparency: 337 Custom 4x4 transparent texture: 337 Custom 4x4 transparent with alpha masking: 277 Not that I trust the render weight formula in any way but it's all we have and besides, I'm sure they would have included that factor in it. Of course, invisible objects still have server and download weight too.

Qwalyphi Korpov wrote: LOL, okay then. I'll agree that we all agree if you'll acknowledge that there is no agreement. At least there is no meaningful agreement. For a while now Linden Lab has clearly worked hard to fix and learn from past mistakes. But it's been a slow progress and recent incidents seem to indicate that the lessons still haven't sunk in properly. And time is running out.