Rick Nightingale

I changed from Catwa Daniel to LeLutka Logan when it was given free. Not that I wouldn't have bought one, but I could never find a look I liked enough to replace Daniel when I demo'd other heads, including the other male giveaways over the last few years. Now I've got used to Logan, I mostly prefer the look and it has the benefit of the higher detail EVOX skins. The body has been Gianni for a long time, although I'm getting annoyed recently because I've seen so many clothes I would like to wear that aren't fitted for it! While Logan has mostly replaced my 'default human' look, Daniel still sees a lot of use. I prefer Daniel for FGI fantasy skins which never quite look right to me on Logan* (I guess because it's not actually SLUV even in non-EVOX mode). Daniel also fits my favourite alternative body which I've used since the day it launched; Aesthetic. All my more demonic looks (and still a lot of my favourite human looks) use Aes and Daniel. Me right now: Gianni, Logan, skin from Birth *Edit: I should note that FGI is now making skins for EVOX, and updating all (I think) existing skins to both EVOX and, at least in some cases, materials appliers too. So, when my main FGI skins get done I might change some of my FGI outfits over to Logan. Have to see which I prefer. I still have the issue that the FGI body skins don't work on AES and those are all my own work, done to match the FGI head skins. And of course Logan doesn't fit AES so that combination is a non-starter.

Nice - I think it just went live here after the region restart yesterday. Seems I've saved about 200LI; built has gone from 2300 to 2100 (about; I forgot to note the exact count before the change). That's a 9%-ish saving, but I had already heavily optimised by linking things to minimise total LI. Given that I was 100 away from my limit, that's pretty nice! Thank you LL.

@Katherine Heartsong We spotted this one, it's in the store but this is the MP link for a quick look: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/VC-Ray-Swimsuit-Colors-LaraX-PetiteX/25532266 It's PBR too! I'm sure we saw another but can't recall where; will let you know if we do.

I wish it had been true...

Thank you ChinRey. No, A is 20.1m, B is about 6m; saying they were identical wasn't accurate. I'm amongst those who have never noticed in all these years. I might have to mesh them because it's irritating me now, just knowing about it even if I don't look It is quite visible at normal distance (close enough to see, but not deliberately trying to look closely) because of the gap it leaves along the edge of the railing's flat top. It catches the light.

I was PBRing my house and noticed this. I don't think it's anything to do with PBR though: It's a simple, cylindrical prim top to a railing. The railing is the same thickness, but the tops... well, you can see what is happening. The tops are identical, in fact B was made by shift-dragging A. What's going on? This was in Firestorm, latest beta. I thought it might be a bug in that, but it does the same in the release FS and in the official LL viewer, both tops look like A. While the smooth shading hides the fewer faces on A at a distance, the edge of the top of the railing is visible where it shouldn't be, and where the top goes into a post in the corner (not visible in the picture) you can clearly see the flat faces of the top of A. Edit to add: Even stranger... If I cam close to the centre of A (centre of its 20m length) it's a proper cylinder. As I cam closer to the end of A, I can see the number of faces dropping as I get closer to the end until it becomes as shown in the picture. It's like the LODs are going in reverse, but only as I cam towards the end of it.

oops double post sorry

My wife (and I) really like LaraX. She's tried all the bodies out there but never found one that gave the sort of shape she wanted better than Lara, but it had its issues as we know. Particularly around the posterior, for me anyway. LX fixed them. The shapes are close enough that it only takes a few minutes with the sliders to convert a Lara shape to an LX, with significant improvements. She can't make her mind up about the butt deformer though; sometimes it's on, sometimes its not... the question, "does my bum look big in this?" has cropped up a few times now 😄. Not that it's a bad thing to have, it's just she can't decide which looks best. Sometimes choice doesn't help and if she asks me again... 🤣 We're seeing plenty of support for LaraX at the events and some creators; some of the clothes are even good (from the usual, trustworthy suspects). Some are using templates and you get four sellers at an event with the same item in vaguely different textures; and some not so well made, as always. Some 'creators' still think that they can dump a half-finished mesh out for sale that I could do a better job of myself if they handed over the .blend file, and it will sell. I guess many people don't look as closely at what they are buying as we do. A fair number of creators are updating existing clothing, as well as releasing new stuff. That's great and very kind of them. Others (including some of our favourites) I don't think will update, which is a shame as the ones I am thinking of are the ones that would benefit the most from LaraX vs. Lara. Money talks though and there's always more in new products. We would happily pay again for a LaraX version of many things she already has. Given the attitude I've seen from some people on the groups though, selling like that instead of offering a free update would cause some unpleasant kick-offs from a lot of people. We've managed to fit a lot of existing Lara stuff to LX. Some covers most of the body anyway (which really makes using LX vs. Lara irrelevant, but having the same body on makes outfit changes simpler) and home-made alpha masks help for some if the body/clothes don't clip in difficult places. Some older clothes with v4 of the autohide are a pain though and require setting up a 'custom' Lara with alpha'd parts then pulling Lara's scripts out. That was often needed originally anyway. Of course, many of her outfits aren't (and never will be) available for LX. Her favourites from Elven Elder (one of the best designers in SL; he left last year to move on in real life) for instance. For those, Lara is still good enough, as it always was. I wish we could get the EE jeans for LaraX though. There's nothing else as good. Yet. That's the good thing though - Lara is still perfectly usable and as good as it always was of course, and now new buyers get to have both. Double the choice. I keep saying we're not going to buy anything else until PBR is really mainstream. I get a say because I make the money; we have a pact that we don't put 'real' money in (we used to) and just share and spend what I make in SL. Then she gets a group message from TT and has to go and have a look, and has to use that founder member's discount she has because it looks so good on LaraX... oh well. It's only money. Wow... that turned into an essay, didn't it? I was only going to say a bit while I enjoyed my coffee.

I always recall someone saying "if your arms aren't long enough to reach to wipe your butt, you're doing it wrong." The answer is T. Rex

I quote Iain M. Banks' novel 'Excession', from the Culture series: So... no.

Ha - found it, of course just after I nearly gave up and asked here. The answer, in case anyone else wants to change it: It is in the skin's colors.xml file, which is found in the folder C:\Program Files\Firestorm-Releasex64\skins\starlight\themes\mono_teal for the one I use. Insert your own instead. This section: <!-- Groups visible in profiles --> <color name="GroupVisibleInProfile" reference="LabelTextColor" /> <color name="GroupHiddenInProfile" reference="EmphasisColorLight" /> Change the GroupHiddenInProfile as required, save and relog

The pinky-orange on light grey is hard to see; see pic. Is there anywhere this can be changed? I've looked around, in prefs, debug settings, and even the xml files for the skin (starlight / mono teal) and so far can't find it. Help would be appreciated; my eyes hurt from trying to read light-coloured text on a light-coloured background.

Not that hard in my opinion (assuming a professional doing it), having just converted a few of my items from Lara to LaraX. One of which did actually involve re-rigging (which is really arranging the skeleton and joint controls, not fitting clothing or skin to that skeleton rig which is really called skinning*1). In fact it took a lot less time than I expected. I'm a very part-time amateur and have to relearn everything every time I do it, but it took me less than a day to be happy with the fit of my mertail, responding perfectly to all the sliders etc. when I thought it might take a week. That included uploading, testing, rinse-and-repeat until happy, and making the sales packs and adverts. I don't make clothes but the process is no different (in fact it's somewhat harder*2 for both rigging and skinning a mertail!). The other items took less time than that but only involved reskinning to the new LaraX model and some tweaking of the mesh and weighting. The issue is, I think, simply that sellers obviously make more sales and money by making new items than refitting existing items to new bodies, especially when many customers will expect that LaraX version as a free update to their Lara version. Personally I see free updates as a very nice bonus, unless it's to fix faults with a product. *1 Edit to add: Not getting on your case about rigging vs. skinning; practically everyone thinks it's all called rigging. I often just call it that myself to avoid confusion. In this case though, I had to do both steps to recreate the tail skeleton in the right place. *2 Although I don't have to deal with armpits. Armpits are a pain.

My wife asked me to pass this on... She has been using the AK Alice head; it's been her favourite head for a while, ousting some very expensive ones, but it had a little issue. Don't know if anyone else ever noticed it, but we saw it straight away and once seen, it couldn't be unseen. So, finally, she contacted KAOZ just two days ago about it. Unlike some of the replies we've had from other creators when daring to be critical (even very carefully and politely) of a product, KAOZ asked for a picture and said he would investigate it. The result after just two days... KAOZ sent out an update to everyone with the corrected Alice head. It's now perfect. That's not just good service; it's outstanding! Note for mods... this is not an advert; it's a positive story and recommendation. We have no connection with AK heads, other than enjoying using and seeing them on each other. Here's a picture with one of her favourite outfits and the (new) Alice head; just because what's a thread without pictures?

Not any more; it's now 50% off the full price like the others. SWMBO just went to get it for her alt. She still bought it... it's only my money after all! She had already bought it for her main avi at the 975 but procrastinated before deciding her alt could have it too. Must have been a pricing mistake. I thought it was a bit too good to be true as I was telling her.

Having just found out that a couple who live(d) just a few miles away from me won £61,000,000 at the start of the month, I'll join in: I would start by having a builder make one of the houses that I built for myself in SL, in RL. On my RL private island. With ban lines (which I don't like in SL but RL doesn't have such easy ban/blacklist abilities). Probably, I would keep a presence in SL. A dozen regions plus some homestead watery areas say, all nicely landscaped and with facilities for others to enjoy. And I would have a (RL) kitchen big enough to swing a cat in without her hitting the four walls which she would now, if we still had her (she's been pushing up the dandelions in the garden since last November - nothing to do with being bounced off kitchen walls. Honest.) And I would still very much be the same me I always have been, just with more ability to actually be me and not have to toe the line in life so much.

Would be nice. Firestorm is now showing a notification on the top of the screen, so there's that. I recall it also has a flashing icon that can be turned on in the toolbar to notify of new issues, only when logged in of course. I turned it off because it was flashing so often it annoyed me, lol.

Thank you Patch. I did check status but it wasn't there when I did (don't think so anyway).

Oh well, at least it's not just me then. Nothing I do about it myself... time to go for a coffee fix

I suddenly can't log in to SL with any account, from two different PCs with different public IP addresses so I don't think it's local. Firefox Firestorm even clears the password field as if I've typed it wrong. Anyone else? Edit: not even through a VPN into the USA.

I've just noticed that the wiki page for llGetAgentInfo now has Agent_Automated as a parameter. It's in red... not sure what that means and I don't have a bot handy to point the function at to see if it works. Even if it's not active yet, it clearly is going to be now.

... As to the article, not bad for The Guardian. Some of the reader comments though... always worth a read for a laugh!

An alternative I've used (for chairs at tables or similar) is to have the chair under the table normally, like it would tend to be in RL, and move out from the table when sat on. When 'unsat', it goes phantom, moves back under the table, then turns phantom off again. That usually does the trick, with maybe a delay between going phantom and moving it back so the avatar doesn't get carried along. I have a similar way with a linkset of chairs/table - in fact this one has the entire room linked and is triggered by AVSit's sit/unsit link messages in the individually AVSit-scripted (and linked) chairs: link_message(integer sender, integer num, string msg, key id){ if (sender==llGetLinkNumber()) { // Message is from the AVSit in this prim if (num==90060) { // New sitter llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(LINK_THIS,[PRIM_POS_LOCAL,gSitPos,PRIM_ROT_LOCAL,gSitRot]); // Move chair out } else if (num==90065) { // Lost sitter llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(LINK_THIS,[PRIM_PHYSICS_SHAPE_TYPE,PRIM_PHYSICS_SHAPE_NONE]); // Remove physics from chair llSleep(0.5); // Wait while above happens before moving chair gSitPos=llGetLocalPos(); gSitRot=llGetLocalRot(); llSetObjectDesc((string)gSitPos+","+(string)gSitRot); // Record our 'out' position in case user has moved us while seated llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(LINK_THIS,[PRIM_POS_LOCAL,gInitPos,PRIM_ROT_LOCAL,gInitRot]); // Move back llSleep(0.2); // Wait for move before restoring physics llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(LINK_THIS,[PRIM_PHYSICS_SHAPE_TYPE,PRIM_PHYSICS_SHAPE_PRIM]); // Physics on } } } I use it on a stool that's under a built-in dressing table against a wall. Without it, the avatar invariably ends up stood on the table headbutting the wall. With it, worst case is the avatar momentarily stands on the stool as it begins to move, then falls to the floor where the stool was (in the out position). Sometimes it works perfectly and the avatar just stands on the floor. Either way, better than standing on the table.

Just to add to the fun... as to one's IP address potentially informing others where you are in the world, that's not as simple as some might think and can go very wrong. The term is "geolocation" and there are companies that keep databases of where every IP address 'belongs' in the world so that they can sell the information. They are not always correct. You can look up which company owns your public IP address (your or anyone's ISP) and where they are, but that does not mean that the IP address itself is used in that region of the world. Hence the databases - that go wrong. For example: A few years ago I noticed a lot of websites I visited were blocking me. I would either get a blank page, or it would never load at all, or some of them gave an actual error page of a few lines of text saying I had been blocked because I was a threat. Some were very big companies that I was trying to make purchases from. It took over a month of investigation to find out why. The company responsible for actually blocking me in their firewall product (used by all the sites that were therefore blocking me) was Cloudflare. Despite numerous attempts to contact Cloudflare and get the problem solved, I got nowhere. Totally useless company and outrageous that they can, at their whim, arbitrarily block someone from a large part of the internet. Further digging (and feeding the webservers some error reporting code to get them to regurgitate more informative error messages themselves) revealed that I was being blocked due to my location: Russia! I was not in Russia. I was in England. My public IP subnet was assigned from a server in London. The company that owned the IP address block was in the USA. They had no connection to Russia whatsoever, but some stupid geolocation company used by Cloudflare had got the location wrong in their database. Not just for me, but for a block of 262,000 IP addresses! Even when informed of that repeatedly in every way I could find to do so, Cloudflare's only response was the standard, automated "we got your message - it is important to us - blah blah blah". Nothing else. Finally I found which geolocation company was involved, contacted them directly, had to provide proof of what I was saying (no way would they actually check themselves), and two weeks later I could finally access the whole internet again. At least they bothered to answer me and do something, eventually. I wonder what would have happened had I not been so network-savvy? ... Wow - that turned into an essay, didn't it? It all really annoyed me, lol. Can you tell? /rant

Akeruka Heads [AK] are giving a free (well, L$1 it seems) unisex head away for the next 15 days... need to be in their group.