HarrisonMcKenzie

I live in Asia and am always looking to meet people from around the world. I have some friends and an RP family from Europe that I can hang out with, but I can always use more closer to home. I play a kid avatar, age 11, but fun adults are ok too. If you wanna get into trouble with me, drop me a line here or in world (HarrisonMcKenzie Resident).

Wow. This whole thread is... wow. Maybe the OP is acting like a spoiled child, but why does everyone feel the need to lash out at them for having a bad time, thus only proving them correct? To answer some of the OP's questions though, as others noted, everything in SL is made by the players. Many old items are created by putting primative shapes together in order to make something. Better creation and uploading features were added later, which means there is a wide range of quality. Further, most creators are amateurs who lack the training, skills, or experience to make the high quality professional models you would see in other games or in film. As for the scale, in addition to the camera placement, a lot of people lack any formal artistic training, and thus aren't intimiately familiar with proportions and biology. This mixed with some programming choices means it is hard for players to actually scale things properly. It's not uncommon to meet people who are 8 feet tall because they don't have correcting tools to make sure they have human proportions. And as for why people are rude or seem to lack social skills, well, that's the internet for you. SL, as with any video game or intense fandom, attracts a certain kind of person. That's not a bad thing (pretty much everyone I've met in SL is wonderful), but you are going to see certain traits more commonly online than you will in person. A lot of people in SL are in the fringe of society, but not everyone is. Regardless, there is a reason why people choose to sit behind a computer monitor, so you aren't always going to see the same kinds of interactions you would in person. Maybe SL isn't for you. Maybe it is. No one can answer that question for you. I detest Warcraft, even though that's insanely popular. If you find your experience in SL to be truly appauling, there is a wealth of things you can entertain yourself with. But if you choose not to let a few negative experiences define the entirety of SL, I'm sure you can find things positive about it. There is a lot of really cool things in SL and great people. If you want to find that, you just need to look for it. I hope that give something constructive to the conversation.

Thanks for your replies everyone. I do have transaction histories (it's the entire reason why I have a vendor system). What I mean is that it would be faster for a customer to say "hey, here's my proof of purchase. Can you send me XYZ size," than it would be for them to contact me and then me having to go look for the purchase. Nalytha: That's what I've been doing the whole time. I don't want to charge for sizes separately, since I don't see any value in doing that. The problem, though, is that customers can't see what size is it isn't included when it's boxed up. Since I sell for a certain shape/age group first and foremost and tack on other avatars and sizes as available, I can't find a way to be more explicit (this item has these sizes, and that item has those sizes). If I could leave it as a single box, I would love to.

I wanted to throw this idea out there to see what people think and how you would do this. I make clothes for kids, which are specific mesh avatars and don't fit one another. I keep having this issue where people are buying my clothes, not realizing that their avatar size isn't included. I'm trying to make this as transparent as possible and have tried a few different ways to display my sizes, but it's not working. I want to help make it clear what avatars/sizes are available so that my customers don't feel like I'm ripping them off. One idea is to pack each size differently in the vendor, as well as a "fatpack" with all sizes at the same price, so that customers can see what sizes are available before buying. I want to honour any purchase a customer makes and make it possible for them to get all the available sizes (again, I'm not pricing them differently). In order to speed up size requests, I thought it would be fun to have a Proof of Purcahse included with the item. I do have vendor records, but it's going to be way faster if the customer can send me something. But how do I make a Proof of Purchase? I'd like it to just be a notecard or something simple that the customer can send me, I can open and verify, and then send them their requested size. So the question is, how would you make a Proof of Purchase? Please share your ideas (making a Proof of Purchase or how to handle this sizing issue). Thanks.

I use the built in engine in Firestorm. It's really easy to setup. Just add the AO button to your toolbar, set up the AO, and the click the little checkbox.

What makes a good family: For me, it's about in and out of game respect. I approach SL as a video game and family RP as fun. But I understand that for my family, SL is basically real and taken very seriously. What that means is that things that happen in SL mean different things to each other. It also means that things get a little blurred, since my family knows some details about my personal life, and I bounce in and out of character (and I know details of theirs). Knowing that SL is so real for so many people, it's important to approach being in a family with sensitivity. We've had people come into the family and then bail, and that really hurts the rest of the family for a long time. Finding a family: I'm not a demon or a furry. I have seen adoption ads for them, but you should understand that the further you stray from the norm, the fewer people do it. In my limited experience, things like family RP and school tend to lean more towards modern day humans. While I have done adoption trials within days of putting up an ad, it could take you weeks or even months to get a hit. Similarily, it has taken me a while to find a good family (basically months). Scaling that up for a smaller playerbase, it could take several months to even a few years to find a good, lasting family, but you could also get lucky and find one fairly soon. What we do: We don't do too much anymore, partially because I moved across the planet. Most of our time is us spending time together, telling jokes, and sometimes using RP huds like Xeolife. However, we have had birthday parties, school events, and I did do a little story where I got sick and my dad looked after me for the few days. My dad also came to some RP sims with me and met some other people I knew. At the end of the day, like the rest of SL, you'll get out of a family what you put into it. If you are really active and creative, you could go on vacation, cook together, and do anything else as a family that you could do in RL or elsewhere in SL. I hope that helps.

I wouldn't be opposed to providing some outfits. I make clothes for kids though, so if you're an adult, they'll probably be a bit too tight.

I use it like crazy. Since I change clothes everyday (though I'll sometimes wear the same thing a few times; kid), trying to deal with this in my inventory would be a nightmare. I also have to go through and see what fits, since not every item I have actually fits with every other item (like pants shoeing up through shirts). As for inventory lag, most people in SL seem to have closer to 100 000 items, so I highly doubt a few dozen links is going to make that worse. The only downside I've found is that there doesn't seem to be a way to have a master outfit or to link to another outfit. I've moved my body and hit out if my outfits, because if I change my shape or add a new accessory, there is no easy way to update each outfit. Instead, I just add and remove the outfits to what I am wearing, then tweak things like if I wanna wear a hat today.

More to the point, Blender is free, while other software packages can cost thousands of dollars. That's why Blender is popular in SL. I would recommend finding a comprehensive tutorial series for Blender, like those on Lynda.com. I order to make clothing, you need to be comfortable with modeling, character anatomy and physics, character rigging and animation, UVW mapping, and rendering (so you can make occlusion/shadow maps). You also need to be familiar with graphic design so that you can actually texture the clothes. So basically, you need to be at least functionally proficient with all aspects of at least two pieces of software. Or you can buy full permission templates and cut your workload in tenths. A lot of people do that.

Thanks. The article I read made it sound like it was released. But that's awesome if we don't need to add the bone lists anymore. Adding an entire text document to each and every rigged file sounds like it would be a massive pain, and one I was hoping to avoid when I rig something this weekend. Thanks.

Edit: This was written on my phone, in case anything doesn't make sense. What seems to be missing, and what always seems to be missing, from every single mention of Sansar is this: Sansar isn't SL2. You mention that early on, but it's clear that it hasn't sunk in. Sansar isn't SL2. It's not going to be, and it probably never was. It sounds like LL is making something like the Unity Game Engine, not another SL. SL players are not the target audience for Sansar. The project doesn't seem to be concerned with that. Whatever it is, it's not necessarily for us, so there is nit point in comparing it to SL or talking about migration. You talk about having a foot in each door, but that's the wrong way to look at it. This means you are still looking at whatever Sansar is through the lenses of SL, and that's not what you or anyone else should he doing. What you are suggesting is that LL is going to run two SLs and do a bad job with both, rather than develop and support two largely unrelated products. Autodesk develops AutoCAD, 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, and countless other products, many of which basically do the smell thing. But Autodesk isn't holding those products back by keeping a foot in the door, because these are separate products, not versions or sequels. Sansar is not SL2. We need to understand that. We really do. But we really aren't understanding that, which is leading to complaint after complaint, discussion after discussion, all of which are rooted in the idea that Sansar is SL2.

I do something similar, only with more folders. For example, my Clothing folder has subfolders like shorts, pants, tees, long shirts, and jackets, as well as a Don't fit/don't wear folder for other sizes or items that I might use in the future but won't be worked inti an outfit. Similarly, my Objects folder (which is a dumpster fire) has a Rez Archive folder for backups, a temp folder for product images and notecards before deleting them, and a Shopping bag for items I've bought but haven't figures out where to put them. As for numbers, I'm somewhere around 15 or 20 000, IIRC. But I'm only a year old.

I didn't follow Bento very closely, since I haven't been working on anything that uses it. However, now that it's out, are we going to have to change the way we upload? I work in 3ds Max, so I need to go into the DAE file and add the complete bone list in order to upload an rigged mesh. I'm assuming that process is still going to be the same. Does anyone have an updated bone list? I have very little luck with the wiki, and with 90 new bones, I'm not sure where to start. Thanks.

As noted, you shouldn't do anything in SL for money. What you're also describing is a club, which SL has a billion of. What would your club do to make it stand out from the billion others? This ties into the thought of charging a cover fee as well as the timing. 50L for maybe 2 hours of entertainment, in a place that is just like any number of places in SL that don't charge a cover and run longer than 2 hours... You're gonna lose your shirt. You are literally suggesting what ever other person suggests and generally fails to do.

I play a kid avatar (11 years old) and had a great time attending school and playing with other kids... until I moved to the other side of the world. Now that I log after midnight, I spend most of my time now with family, but I'd love to hang out with some other kids (or adults too). I know there are kids in Europe and Australia that are a little closer to my timezone. Anyone wanna play together? Any cool stuff us kids can do after sneaking out past other kids' bedtimes?

Welcome to SL. There should a lot of amusement parks and kids areas (for kid avatars, not necessarily minors) and stuff that are G rated. I think a lot of people rate for M, since they feel like they can't control behaviour enough, and wwant to err on the side of caution. I know this is true for at least one RP elementary school, since the principal just wanted to make sure nothing happened ratings wise. But there are still a lot of G sims. I can't think any names right now, but if you IM me, I can send you some landmarks.

I'm looking for pretty much anything, though my needs are a bit more specific. I play a preteen child, and while there's a decent selection of kids clothes available, the number of models is extremely low. It's basically limited to hoodies, tees, saggy bum jeans, and maybe shorts. I'd like to look at the wider variety in men's clothes, but so few items fit a child and don't have a ripped barrel chest or a huge butt. This pretty much limited me to the few options for kids clothes. On the other side, I'm looking for full perm templates to make kids clothes. But again, there is such low selection and nothing fits. I'm having some success with templates that include DAE files that I can scale down offline, but even the selection there is beyond poor. I can get any number of pairs of pants or shorts, but can't seem to find a sweater, dress shirt, or jacket of any variety. So for me, it's really just a matter of anything that fits.

Wow. Busy days. Unfortunately, you said no kids, and I play an 11 year old. Any particular reason why you are so adverse to child avatars?

There aren't a lot of people discussing Sansar because there's nothing to discuss. It sounds like LL is making a game engine and are targeting digital artists and programmers to develop content for it. While some SL users would find that of interest, we aren't defacto LL's audience for the platform. At this point, all we know is that there is something called Sansar, that it won't be replacing SL, and that it isn't being directed towards SL users. Beyond that, no one really knows anything.

I want to chime in for the no mesh body side. I get that a properly build 3d model always looks better than a system generated shape. Buy for me, the answer is why. The very first reply summed up my feelings on mesh avatars perfectly. They look great when you are at the beach or when you are naked, but that's about it. I love the mesh feet that I have because my feet no longer look like door stops. But it does mean that I can't wear socks, since system socks don't work and since I can't find any mesh that fits. I play a child avatar, and mesh does two things for kids. Attempt shapes just don't scale down well, so it allows people to play young kids. For the older kid crowd, it helps you not look like a bag of potatoes. But for the older kid crowd, unless you are at the beach or running around naked, that much better looking chest and human looking proportions are going to be covered up as soon as you get dressed. Putting on a shirt covered up the realistic chest and shoulders of a mesh avatar just as well as the broad shouldered potato sack that is a system shape. When you're dressed, it simply doesn't matter. Now add in that I have to wear an alpha hud that may or may not work well, how clumsy it is to change outfits and thus change those alphas (with system, I can just save the corresponding alpha layer), and the cost of buy something that no one is going to see, and I really struggle to find myself in the mesh body camp. I want to buy a mesh avatar and look like a human boy, but it's such a pain to use and ends up just being alphaed out anyways.

Can I ask you something, OP? If you aren't going to wear mesh clothes, what are you going to wear? Are you just going to hang around in the nude? I'm sorry, but when I get dressed, I add an item of clothes and the corresponding alpha so my body doesn't show through. It's really that simple. My left hand never disappears, and I'm below the ground, it's because my hover isn't set right. If my hover isn't set correctly, that's not the mesh's fault.

Just out of curiosity, how old are you in RL? Aside from a system generated email, does any other website or game celebrate your birthday? Do real world institutions do anything special for your birthday? Does Microsoft throw you a party as thanks for sealing their monopoly in your life? Does Google send you flowers for making your way around the sun and fueling their hilariously supervillain business model? Does the grocery store you go to every other day plan a surprise party? Does your dentist give you a free cleaning on your anniversary? No, because these things are ridiculous. What do you expect LL to do?

I have an idea for something I'd like to do, but I don't know if it's something I can do using SL's scripting language. I also have limited programming experience (but I do have some), so I'm unsure where to start. Please read on. The idea I have is to make a simple card game that can be played via a hud. The rules will be handled by the players themselves, so I don't need that aspect scripted; all I need is the ability to drop "cards" (scripted objects from your inventory) into the hud, have the hud draw a random hand from those cards and diplay them in the hud, be able to discard cards so they can late rbe reshuffled into the deck, and be able to display chosen cards from your hand in-world during play so that the other player(s) know what card you are playing. My first question is about feasibility. Is this something that can be done in SL? I specifically want the cards to be visual rather than chat broadcasts so that the game feels real. And I don't want to have to rez out a table to play this; I want it to be something you can just attach and play anywhere. My second question is about scripting tutorials. Besides just reading a wiki, what resources are there to learn LSL? Are there any good video series on YouTube or really good tutorial sims? If I can, I'd like to make this myself, but I live in a timezone that does not make logging and seeing North American players easy. Thanks for your help.

I'll try this another way. As a designer, I have yet to see a valid reason to sell clothes with modify permissions. The only arguments I've heard are to change the colour, change the texture, and to script the clothing. There's also other display properties like full bright and transparency, but those aren't relevant to the clothing I make (and I don't use full bright). Having modify left in so you can recolour the clothing is nit something I wish for my customers to do. Again, much of my clothing include graphics it other design elements (like multiple colours) that simply does not allow you to recolour the item using unworldly mechanics. If it were a simple one colour shirt, sure, but that's not what I make. The colour swatch in Edit is a full object colour overlay, nd that makes the work that I have spent hours doing look terrible because you are adding a layer of colour ever the entire piece of clothing, not just changing the base colour. Leave the item open to have the texture change is absolutely the reason why I do not include modify permissions. I'm not saying that my customers are thieves. But there are cases where the ToS of a template prohibit this. If you want to make your iwb textures for clothing, you can but a full perm template to do it. My work as a designer is to create new and unique designs that others aren't making, not to violate my ToS by basically reselling a full perm template. As for scripting, I would love an explanation for this, because I simply don't follow. What kind of script could you possibly put in a piece of clothing that is so important that you would boycott a designer for not letting you do it? I completely agree with having furniture or accessories being modifiable, since those items are meant to be interacted with. I agree that furniture should have modify so that you can include roleplaying scripts or add animations if the item does not have them. If I were selling a teddy bear, I would likely leave modify in so that a holding animation can be added. If I were selling a bookshelf, I would allow the customer to modify it so they can add notecards and stories to the shelf. But I'm not aware of anything you can add to clothing that is at all relevant or necessary, aside from changing the colour or texture, which I have already said I do nit want done. Again, my goal as a designer is come up with new looks, not to sell DIY kits. I'm nit saying that there is anything wrong with doing that, but it is not why I am making clothes.

That's a very good question. I just started selling, and I chose to make everything no-mod for a few reasons. First, since it's almost all rigged clothes, you can't really do much with modify anyways. They can't be scaled or prepositioned, which means the only relevant thing to do is rename the item (or the next topic). It's like an animation being no-mod; there's just no reason to have it be mod. The second is for some security. When you buy one of my shirts, you are buying that shirt. So if you bought a Thundercats shirt, you have a Thundercats shirt. It's not hard to rip a texture, which means that leaving in modify permissions kinda of turns the item into a template. Sure, the customer can't sell it afterwards, but they could make their own designs from that point forward. Nd since I use a very, very common template for some of my clothes, it means I could be damaging the entire market but allowing people the get their own clothes. There is also consideration for the creative image. Making clothing, even if you are just making the texture, is artwork. I do consider the colour pallete I use and how it looks as a finished product, and allowing people to change the colour can impact the quality of my work. Especially for something like a graphic tee, changing the colour in SL can make the images look terrible, which removes my ability to present my work as I want it displayed. It doesn't really bother me, but I know a lot of artists who would be offended to see their work tampered with. And lastly, it's about dollars. If I know I can sell a red version of this shirt, that's another product and future sales I can make. That's not to condemn designers who include colour or texture changing abilities; it just means they are using different sales tactics.