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ChinRey

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Everything posted by ChinRey

  1. The splash page is cycling through several different variants and it's been a while since I saw the one I posted a screenshot of so you might be too late for that one. The only thing that stays the same is the googly eyes.
  2. IMVU had a rather agressive campaign targetting SL users at the time this thread was started. That was two years ago though. It didn't last long and it didn't work. I'm not always against necroposting but it's not appropriate in this case so let's just put this thread to rest.
  3. I thought I'd ask ChatGPT about it and here's its answer: When I asked if I can quote it on this, it added:
  4. Oh yes! If I was allowed to change only one thing in Second Life, it would be to add a first person view option without all the other UI changes we get with mouselook. No other improvement would be even nearly as important to me as that. All is not lost though. It's fairly easy to adjust your camera position closer away from the birdseye view and clsoer to your avatar. Penny Patton made a really good tutorial how to do it: https://pennycow.blogspot.com/2012/01/improving-sl-camera-short-version.html My own settings are a bit different from Penny's and closer to Jo Yardley's: https://joyardley.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/camera-placement-in-second-life/
  5. Normally I would agree with you but for this topic it's good to have the historical perspective.
  6. I think Sansar helped save SL. The big problem Second Life had during the 2008-2013 time period was the constant pressure from LL's owners and top management to rush through new "shinies" to stack on top of the rather shaky fundament. Sansar took off that pressure and the Lindens who remained with SL shifted their focus to repair and maintenance which is what they should have done much earlier.
  7. Yes but that actually makes it interesting, especially with the 20th anniversary coming up. Ten years ago, that's halfway from the beginning to now. Think of all the other virtual worlds that have popped up and died since then. Sansar, High FIdelity, Meta (not quite dead but definitely a zombie)... You know what, I suspect the title was correct at that time. SL was in a bad shape in 2013 and LL had even started working on a replacement. But then Oz and Ebbe came along. Ebbe cleaned up LL's organisation. Oz was tasked with patching up SL to keep it going until Sansar was ready. Only he did such a good job that when Sansar inevitably folded, SL was stronger than it had been for many years. Yes, we can talk about all the things they didn't do or couldn't do and all the things they got wrong, it would be a long list. But there was also so much they got right and it was enough. SL is still dying btw but aren't we all?
  8. No, you misunderstand me. "Somebody who has editing rights to the object" includes the owner. I've corrected my post to eliminate the misunderstanding. It's actually a good idea to lock permanently rezzed objects anyway, espexially if more than one person has editing rights to them. If somebody needs to edit the object, they can always unlock it.
  9. Nothing new but I can repeat something I said in the old thread about it: the workaround is to lock the object. The alpha switch bug is caused by miscommunication between the server and the viewer of the owner (or somebody else with editing rights to the object). If an object is locked, nobody will have editing rights to it so the problem goes away.
  10. Am I the only Norwegian here? Tordenskjold as an SL last name is sacrilege! There can only ever be one!
  11. You should try to use a mid level graphics program like paint.net. It's far more user friendly than Photoshop and Gimp and it still has nearly all the functions you actually need for SL textures. I haven't used Photoshop for years myself since I'm allergic to pay-per-month software. I do use Gimp for operations paint.net can't do but I hardly ever need it - it doesn't even happen every year. You are right that a image editor won't scatter objects randomly for you but it's not really that difficult to do it manually, just make a bunch of copies of a layer with a single leaf or a small group of them and move, rotate and resize each layer. An additional advantage to doing it manually is that you can add some discreet perlin noise shading to each layer - an amazingly effective way to add life and depth to the texture. I'm forever grateful to JubJub Forder for teaching me that last trick. Any reasonably advanced image editor have to crucial functions that Blender lacks as far as I know. One is the option to color the transparent parts of the texture. The black outline of your leaves are caused by the color of the transparent pixels bleeding onto the opaque ones. If you look at the last picture in my post, where alpha mode is set to none, you see that the alpha color is green, similar to the leaves themselves. The other is that they offer a variety of scaling algorithms. There are several ways pixels can be combined or split when an image is resized and which method you choose can make a huge difference to the apparent image resolution. (Paint.net actually has an advantage here since it supports Fant, a very advanced and useful scaling algorithm that Photoshop and Gimp can't support.)
  12. Oh, that at least is easy to find out. Drag a texture onto one spot of a copy of the mesh and see if it retextures the whole thing. There's always the good old method of trial and error.
  13. I'm not sure if I understand your question correctly but if I do, you're talking about a surface covered with leaves, not leaves on a tree, right? If so, here's something similar, a plastered wall covered with ivy: The texture resolution isn't great but good enough. And it's a 512x512, if I really needed more, I'd use a 1024 instead: The foliage is three dimensional with branches at different distances from the wall and often angled away from or towards the wall. That doesn't show up well in a picture so you have to take my word for it. It's a modluar system with different parts that can be combined in various ways to fit different wall sizes and shapes and give different amounts of coverage. This particular example has 356 vertices and 180 tris but it uses 13 modules (covering 12x5 m) so the LI couldn't be lower than 7 no matter how much I reduced the tri and vertice counts. If I were to make something similar as a single mesh, I could have reduced the mesh complexity significantly, possibly not all the way down to 1 for a mesh as big as this but certainly down to 2 or 3. The texture is fairly simple, it looks like this (except I scaled it down here, sorry I don't want to post full size copies of my textures on the forums): The trick is to use multiple overlapping panels instead of just a single big one and also to use texture repeats for all they're worth. Here's one of the modules: This one only has two panels, so 8 vertices and 4 tris, but it has five instances of the texture with each panel covering the gaps in the other one: You get the idea? Getting it right with a good coverage and no visible repeats is a bit of an art both when it comes to texture creation and mesh making but it's not that difficult and it's sooo worth it! As for LI and LOD, you can make a 1 LI mesh with at least 6 single sided flat panels without reducing the LOD at all - use LOD above all the way. You should be able to get away with 10-12 and, depending on how they are configured, the alignment of the planets and the actions of a quantum butterfly in Inner Manchuria, you may be able to cram 20 or more panels into a single full LOD 1 LI mesh.
  14. Yeah, that's an old one. I think what happened was that LL had to add this restriction to textures with restricted perms and either implemented it for full perm textures by accident or decided it was easier to implement it for all textures with no perm check. They never saw it as a big issue since there are at least two very obvious workarounds.
  15. The fine lines between the mesh faces can have two different causes - or a combination of both. The first is a problem with texturing in general and not specifically SL related. There will always be a little bit of "bleeding" between opposite edges of a texture or UV island. (This is why it's usually recommended to keep a few pixels of space between the islands on a UV map btw.) One solution in SL is to reduce the texture repeat right a fraction, set them to 0.999 insted of 1. The second is that prim positions and sizes aren't always as precise as they should be in SL. No matter how well you align two prims, there may always be a tiny little gap between them. One possible solution is to increase the size of the prims so they overlap a little bit. Set the sizes to the lowest possible amount of overlap possible. There's no guarantee this will work but it's worth a try. A better solution would be to merge adjacent vertices in Blender but although this is a very simple process, I understand if you don't feel comfortable working in Blender at all. I have no real explanation for the messed up texture alignments. That's certainly not an SL issue so if the textures are aligned on the prim original it must be soemthing about Mesh Generator. One solution would be to use FIrestorm's mesh export function instead but then you would have to do some basic editing in Blender before you upload - no way around it at all. Of course, another alternative would be to keep the picture panel as prims. You only need three pathcut ones for it so the land impact will only be 2. If you decide to do it as six separate rpims, the LI will still only be 3. And of course, with prims the actual lag and load time will be (marginally) lower than if you convert it to mesh. Btw, if you decide to covert the panel to mesh, select "Use level above" for all LOD models. If you do the LOD models for a 12 tri mesh any other way than that, you're doing it wrong. There are a few equally good ways to do the physics model but the safe and easy one is to select "Cube" and click the the Analyze button.
  16. Two very quick examples. Ideally you want hull (that is analyzed) physcics for a wall but that's a little bit more complicated than surface (unanalyzed) physics for walls as complex as this and I'll try to keep it as simple as possible. For a build like yours it doesn't make that much of a difference anyway. For a archway/tunnel like this: You probably want a physics model like this, that is without the small polys along the edge: Even this is probably too complex a physics model even though it won't cause any upload issues. Something like this would be even better: --- Now for an arched hole in the wall: Try this: or this: or even this: --- What is important to remember here, is that the only function the physics model for a wall has is to prevent avatar from walking through the wall. Avatar movements aren't very precise so you don't need detailed physics. And you probably don't need the physics model to cover the area above the opening since there's not much chance an avatar will ever end up up there.
  17. That's a bit long and there may not be a backup copy of the sim anymore. But you should try to file a support ticket to LL about it. They won't give you your land back or refund your rent but in situations like this they are usually willing to reinstall the sim temporarily to give the tenants time to recover their items.
  18. Thank you for remembering. 🙂 It wasn't that detailed a post though, only a few scattered examples and I didn't even mention what is possibly the most interesting way the prim system could be expanded: how prims could be merged into single objects without turning them into hard-to-handle polylist meshes. How to create a better in-world system is a bit off topic in this thread though, what is relevant here is why we should do it. The answer is obvious: It adds more activity to a virtual world. I know a guy who works as an IT teacher at a high school. He told me how impressed his students were when they saw the lovely home he had made in Meta's metaverse and how fast their enthusiasm evaporated when they realized the only thing they could actually do there was walk around and watch the scenery. All attempts at creating a shared virtual reality suffer from this problem, they tend to get boring fast because there isn't really that much to do there. In-world building for fun and profit (or at least the illusion of future profit) is one solution to this and it's fairly easy to implement, especially in Second Life. All game/VR platforms I'm aware of have some kind of in-world building options but none of them are anywhere near as advanced and flexible as SL's (and opensim's) prims and that gives us a very strong advantage over the competition. If only we could take advantage of it.
  19. It won't be the first time a file mysteriously vanishes from a server and I assume that's what happened here. I know a few of the developers and they're really nice people and always eager to help. I've contacted one of them about the missing file. Let's see what happens. About the 3DS issue, I suppose it means none of the developers have experience with the program. Maybe it can be sorted out if somebody who does volunteers som help and advice...
  20. You think that is bad? A friend of mine on opensim once gave me a copy of a house she had made. It was (still is) a gorgeous replica of Case Study 22 and I loved it. But when I rezzed it and tried to position it, there were no arrow to be seen. But when I rezzed it, there were no arrows to be seen anywhere. It turned out that it had been accidentally linked to some parts several thousand meters up in the air (there's no linking distance limit on opensim). It took me a while to figure that out.
  21. Oh, you're making hats! You'd better be careful with that, Madelaine. All that mercury nitrate isn't good for your health.
  22. I didn't know until now either. But as I said, I haven't used the LL viewer for ages and only installed it now to test PBR.
  23. I was thinking along the same lines. It wouldn't explain the weird result of the two scripts I posted but it would explain everything else. Come to think of it, we've all been making one aspect of this far more complicated than it needs to be. There's no need for scripts or fancy keyboard shortcuts to identify face numbers anymore. All you have to do is select a face and look at the builder/edit palette: (At least that's how it is on FIrestorm and on the PBR release version of the official viewer. I don't know about the official LL viewer. It didn't have this feature last time I used it but that was many years ago.)
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