Theresa Tennyson

Okay, let's look at everything that would have been necessary to support your proposal besides developing the new avatars themselves. 1) Second Life is built on the assumption that all avatars are identical, and this avatar, its skeleton and its morphs are hard-coded into the viewer. Also, at this time the viewers did the baking. 2) Because of this, there's no messaging system from the servers saying what "kind" of avatar any given avatar is - since there's only one thing that can be considered an avatar it's unnecessary. It's how you can tell a printer the length or width of a piece of paper but it assumes that it's rectangular. If you somehow got a word-processing file from the Krell of Forbidden Planet that was intended to be printed on trapezoidal paper there's no way your Earthbound printer can get it's electronic head around that. 3) In order for a new avatar to exist alongside the old avatar using all the viewer-side technology like the appearance editor, it would need to be added to all viewers in order to appear as something new. Now bear in mind that during the time frame you're proposing this happening, well over half of Second Life residents were using Phoenix, which not only wasn't being written by Linden Lab but used a different code base, and those users would scrrrreeeeaaaaammmm if asked to use anything else. It was months before Phoenix got mesh support and they didn't think they'd be able to do it at all at first. 4) Now you need to add a completely new message system to the servers to send information about the new Sooper Avatars, including a message saying that they existed and weren't Ruth, and make sure that all of this new information wouldn't crash old viewers. 5) Remember, no mesh at all until all this is done (including adding materials support too, mind you.) That's what you decided. Not as simple as saying, "You should have done this," is it?

You're saying that people should have waited for Linden Lab to do it in 2011 (because it takes time to do anything), but that they would probably have done it badly anyway. What exactly does this accomplish?

It seems to me that you're simultaneously saying, "There's no need to wait for..." and "Somebody else should have done [something that logic would indicate would take time, therefore require waiting.]" You're also asking for it to be done by an organization you regularly accuse of incompetence, which might not be a great idea.

And nobody would have had to wait for the new Sooper Avatars?

Let's try to simplify things for you... The reason people are interested in using the baking system is because it is a texture compositing system. It can take multiple textures from a wide variety of sources and combine them into a single texture. That's all it does. It's really fairly sophisticated - it can make a composite texture from a variety of people's textures without the need for them to give away the actual textures, and can assemble them in an exact order. It produces three of these composite textures. The reason people are "forgetting" about the "other three" precious, precious textures of the bake is the eyes, hair and skirt bakes can't composite sophisticated textures, meaning they aren't that useful. If you were running a pig dairy and brought in all the pigs you could find with teats, you'd discover that half of them weren't very useful. The problem with the baking system as it is now is that these composite textures can only be applied to the base avatar. (They're also 512 by 512 pixels but that could theoretically be changed.) If they could also be sent to other things, such as mesh avatars, you would eliminate the need for tattoo/makeup layers and the alpha cut systems, both of which are complex kludges that exist only because mesh bodies can't have an in-world composited texture applied to them. Now tell us why that possibility wouldn't be a good idea using reasoning more sophisticated than, "I said it wasn't earlier."

I specifically mentioned Omega, the universal applier system, didn't I? And I have personally made Omega appliers from old system skins that fit multiple bodies straight off. (Oh, you do realize that every skin requires multiple texture uploads per skin tone, don't you?)

Here's the problem - in the pre-mesh days, I knew everything would "work" with my avatar, but I also knew that nothing would work really well, which greatly reduced the amount I was willing to spend on a given piece of clothing. In those days spending L$250 for an entire outfit would be a special occasion. I also knew that the difference between the "good" makers and the bottom feeders wasn't particularly high. A pair of jeans I got for L$20 from Magi Take were often at least as good as ones from the "big names" of the time. It was also unusual for anyone to offer demos so most clothing purchases were a gamble. Now it's routine for me to spend L$199 on a single tank top, and the in-world stores of those makers of L$199 tank tops are often packed. I'm comfortable paying this much higher price because the product is better and I can try it before I buy. It seems that clothing is actually a much bigger business now than it was in the past. As far as the fractured market, I take it you didn't buy a personal computer in the 1980's, a high-end camera in the second half of the 20th century or auto parts... well... ever. I see mesh bodies the same way I saw SLR camera systems. I bought an Olympus camera because I liked the features and I knew that it had reasonable support by third party lens and accessory makers. It had less than Nikon and Pentax, but more than, say, a Fujica. I also realized that I didn't need a system camera at all to just take pictures. With fitted-mesh avatars it took a while for them to be really good, and there were abandoned directions and products. I'm sure most people thought that Slink would dominate the market, and of course they haven't. Personally I think the Wowmeh body had better slider support than any of the bodies on the market today. I heard that as fitted mesh was being prepared for release there was a semi-secret project where various resident designers were approached to make clothing to fit the new fitted-mesh starter avatars. Obviously nothing came from that, and it was no loss. The thing is, if they waited for a good, fully-developed avatar everyone could agree on than we'd either still be waiting or have another "standard" that's even kludgier than the popular bodies we have now. (Someone will now mention the mesh deformer project. I experienced it in testing; I experienced it in InWorldz. It was so, so not the answer.)

So, tell us how different the UV mapping of any mesh body that uses Omega appliers is from the default avatar mapping? GRRR! No spoiler tags! Oh well... Imagine this is next is hidden. Omega compatible mesh (i.e. almost all popular human mesh bodies) is based on the default avatar mapping. The only real changes needed are erasing the toe shading and fingernails. Most skin makers already have made these changes years ago for Slink appliers. Belleza tried re-mapping the hands and feet for their initial mesh body but they were slapped hard by the other skin makers who wouldn't make appliers for their bodies and changed them back. What exactly do you think an applier applies, anyway?

"So [the baking system] ONLY works if the uv mapping exactly corresponds to system avatar us mapping, anything else, epic bake fail. You can't use it to bake clothing textures for "some mesh dress that somebody released the uv's for" Is the bolded red statement true or false? Please be assured that I'm not debating you because I think you're a "noob" - I know you've been around for quite a while. I picked you as a target because of your post history. Congratulations!

Actually what I'm indulging in is my dirty little hobby of making people who think they know more than they do* spin themselves around in circles, and my usual favorite target isn't posting in the forums much any more. *(i.e. "So [the baking system] ONLY works if the uv mapping exactly corresponds to system avatar us mapping, anything else, epic bake fail. You can't use it to bake clothing textures for "some mesh dress that somebody released the uv's for")

But if it could take bakes and used the default avatar UV you wouldn't have to do any of that, now would you?

Because, of course, it would be impossible to use a bake to texture the helicopter, click a button to make the helicopter stop receiving bakes because you're done with that project, and then bake your default avatar normally. Oh wait - it would actually be trivially easy!

Even if the body is only a single layer (and nobody here has been saying that) there's nothing stopping wearing clothing on a separate texturable layer. That's exactly how Chip Midnight's bodies work and even some Veg-O-Matic slice 'n' dice bodies do the same thing. Of course this is all only important to people who think applier "clothing" actually looks like clothing in the first place...

As a mesh body wearer, when was the last time you actually saw the bake for your system avatar's torso or legs?

A single mesh in Second Life can have a maximum of eight textured faces. This means that every mesh body that uses patches that turn on and off is actually made up of x/8 separate meshes that are linked together, with x being the total number of alpha cuts (don't forget the cuts in the tattoo/clothing layers in your total, by the way.) It's the downloading and assembly of all these individual pieces that makes a mesh body look fractured until it's completely loaded. If you can use alphas on a mesh body, though, the entire body can be a single mesh.

Okay, as you obviously have a high degree of confidence in your knowledge, explain to us why the baking system cares how the surface the bakes are applied to is UV-mapped. This is going to be good...

Ahh, someone has thrown me a bone to inspire me to learn the new forum. And such a meaty, meaty bone too... Let's start out on the subject of Tech-Fail. The baking system has absolutely no idea what UV mapping any texture is meant for. All it knows is that it's supposed to stack up certain textures in an order based on the "clothing" assets worn, and send them out as three combined textures - one for the head, one for the body and one for the legs. With mesh bodies removing the need for the original purpose of these textures, there's no technical reason "clothing" and "skins" couldn't be made that would allow the baked textures to be applied to dresses, or even helicopters. List of winners: In your world, is it common for people to spend thousands of Lindens on a new body because they want to wear old freebies on it? It is? My, what an interesting world you live in... 1. True, a mesh maker could add polygons that aren't really needed. Then another mesh maker can sell the equivalent product without these unnecessary polygons and accurately advertise that their product is lower lag; then the market will decide. In the early days of mesh there were makers advertising their work specifically as "high poly" - it isn't common anymore because the market realized those high-poly things were lag monsters and rewarded more efficient makers. 2. Interesting. Will the new system magically take away old bodies? No? Then people can still wear their old clothing with the bodies they were made for. Those people jacked because they would want to wear "old" clothing with a "new" body - wouldn't they fall under your category of "wearing goat skins"? 3. You might be less "meh" if you were in business and needed to make appliers, often multiple appliers, for your products and had to listen to your customers wailing for appliers for new bodies for your old products. 4.) I have a good computer, which I built myself specifically for Second Life, but live in a location where the internet service is slow and can't be upgraded. Last night it I went to a crowded club wearing a mesh body and it took fifteen minutes for my avatar to coalesce into a single entity, almost entirely because it was made up of multiple small sections which are only necessary to allow hiding body parts without using an alpha texture. I personally consider that a problem. You can consider me to be dim if you like but you do that at your own peril. 5.) I have several avatars. Some have vintage, top quality Curio and Belleza skins that the makers didn't make appliers for and never will. Many have tattoo layer enhancements, including some where separate tattoos are worn on the front and back of the torso (i.e. not viable for mesh bodies even if I could get appliers for them.) I would like to use these semi-custom skins on mesh avatars but can't (legally) right now. If you think I'm a mesh-hating Neanderthal - well, you're just a glutton for peril, aren't you? *brapp* Mmm - tasty...

Kay Holmeforth wrote: Hi, I'm having a problem and I cannot find any other place to ask for help, so if this is in the wrong place, please tell me. I tried to file an official ticket, but the category just wasn't there! Here's my issue: Since Saturday, whenever I edit a prim, any prim, but specifically purchased boxes, I'm getting stuck at "Loading Contents". I've tried with multiple viewers, multiple accounts (thanks to my family sharing their login details with me), and whatever I try on this PC, I cannot see the contents of any object! Repeat: Multiple accounts across multiple viewers...this is not an isolated issue! It's something to do with my PC, or it's something to do with something restricting permissions from this IP, or it's a systemwide problem that nobody seems to be talking about. I've also tried clearing cache, manually deleting the system folder, making fresh installs of each viewer (Firestorm latest, Singluarity latest, Imprudence latest). PC stats: AMD A4-3400 APU, 4GB RAM, Geforce GT610 GPU, Mint Linux 16 OS. Zero problems before this weekend, no updates installed, no changes made to inworld preferences or website settings. Please help! Reports are saying that several people with this problem have an anti-malware program called ByteFence installed and removing it fixes the problem. ByteFence is sometimes installed by other programs without making it obvious that it's being installed. More details at the end of this JIRA: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-40728

ChinRey wrote: Syo Emerald wrote: She is just pointing out, that part of Garys problems might come from an ageing computer. But of course, since Gary and you might need a new graphic card, nobody should have nice things. No, it's more than that, Syo. It's a question who Second Life is for. It doesn't have much appeal to the regular gaming and graphics crowd with high performance game computers because, let's face it, the graphics here are rubbish by today's standards. It does still have appeal to more "casual" users of virtual realities but generally not enough that it's worth a three digit number of dollars in extra hardware. What that flippant "buy a better computer" answer ultimately means is that Second Life is only for the established users. And not only that, it's only for the established users who are still interested enough to keep spending significant amounts of money on hardware upgrades just for the sake of Second Life. Second Life can and probably will survive for many years just on the momentum of the past but unless the hardware requirements can be lowered so it becomes accessible to more people, it doesn't really have a future. It's not as if the hardware requirements are for "nice things" either. Ninety percent of the gpu power used in SL is wasted on poor software and worse content. Have you ever been to other more modern and better made virtual realities? Have you noticed how much better the graphics are and how much lower the hardware requirements are? I keep mentioning the Unigine Benchmarks here because they really are what the titles say, benchmarks for VR performance. 256 sims worth of simulation with a graphics quality way beyond our wildest dreams of what can be achieved in SL and they still have noticeably lower gpu and cpu load than a typical SL scene. All of Gary's problems are concerned with mesh bodies loading slowly. No other game that I know of has this problem because their assets are pre-loaded, and therefore limited to what are or can be pre-loaded. If you somehow were able to watch the loading process in those games it would probably look pretty scary. The loading process of Second Life is one of the things we have to live with to allow the widest range of assets -- for instance, if someone considers themself One of the Best Mesh Makers in Second Life but can't convince other game developers that they are, they'll never have their work seen in any other game. Second Life gives them the ability to have their work seen (and judged, but that's another point.)

DagonThyne wrote: I'm not sure what the store is called, but there is a small shop in Bay City which sells full sized drivable models of various Plymouth vehicles. I bought their 1958 Plymouth Fury (the car from the movie Christine) and it said to allow 15 minutes for delivery. I never received it. I am still out the L$1000 I paid for it. Does anyone know what this store is called, or better yet, who owns it, so I can contact them? Sounds like Primouth Motors - the owner is "akhenatan Grommet."

JasonHardwick wrote: It is mainly about the look of the head and face. I'm using a Signature mesh body which I'm completely happy with, but taking my head and facial features and trying to put them onto what looks to me like one big round mesh cue ball head is more than challenging. The original skin if from Tellaq and I don't know of any mesh heads that might be an equivelant starting point. As to why I would want to bring my look into the modern age if I'm happy with it now....well, why would one trade in a perfectly fine automobile for a newer model? Simply to have the latest and greatest version with all the bells and whistles. You can use the default head and the Signature body - the body should have come with a notecard that explains the process.

Bree Giffen wrote: Good one Solaria! I largely agree with the article. Interesting. I didn't think you'd agree with someone who looks up to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_V._Schall, a conservative Catholic professor.

Solaria Goldshark wrote: Theresa Tennyson wrote: Solaria Goldshark wrote: Ruminations on public discourse in the modern age. http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/ It seems to me that one of the marks of a true expert is having so much knowledge about a topic that they can state their position so clearly and provide so much evidence to support that it will be obvious that they're correct to an unbiased observer. If they can do that they shouldn't need to expect deference based only on their position as an "expert." I'm no sure anyone can be an unbiased observer. I'm not sure anyone can empty themselves so completely that they can be pure observation. The observer is required to make a judgments based on the evidence given, which requires the observer to wrestle with established biases of their own knowledge, experiences, feelings and beliefs, and then follow the evidence. However, I do have some evidence to support your position. Observe! Empty yourself! Expertise. As I'm familiar with Stevie Ray Vaughan, I can accept that he has expertise as a guitar player. Now let's look at another video: THIS video isn't evidence of any given Monkee's expertise as an instrumentalist, though, because they didn't play the instruments on the audio track. My big problem with the article was that the writer seemed to be using the word "expert" as "someone who is in a position where you'd expect them to have expertise" instead of "someone with expertise." For my thinking, an "expert" is like an "artist" - it's not something that you can be, but a status that flows back to you by what you do. You can say that you're a medical doctor if you have a medical license; you can't (legally) say you are one if you don't. A doctor is something you can be. If you are hired by a university to do a certain job you can call yourself a professor. You'd think that the professor would be hired because they had expertise in a field, but I know from bitter experience that isn't always the case. I've worked with a professor who had less knowledge, experience and ability in certain aspects of what they were hired to teach than some of the undergraduate students in the program. In many criminal trials there are "expert witnesses." If it's a fairly big trial there may well be "experts" on both sides with completely opposite interpretations of a certain piece of evidence. And there have been a number of trials where "experts" on one side or the other were either incompetent or flat-out lying. http://truthinjustice.org/expertslie.htm If someone shows expertise in a field I will probably defer to their opinion, but if their claim for expertise is based on the position they hold instead of what they've done I won't defer automatically. From reading that article, the author is one of the people I won't defer to automatically because he failed to show me that he had any real expertise about what he was saying.

Grim Thursday wrote: How hard would it be for LL to put a waiting period for someone to visit a sim? For example, a psychopathic-no life having- socially awkward pos that comes to, oh, for example, Help Island and crashes eveyrones viewers every five minutes to the point of no one can go there anymore gets banned only to create another account and do the same thing over and over, while LL's answer is to occasionally send a Linden there for 20 minutes and uselessly ban this person...how hard would it be to implement a 7 day age policy to go there? Let's say the psychopathic- no life having- socially awkward pos comes to Help Island every day and night with a new avatar that is 0 days old and crashes veiwers every five minutes because "perma-banned" is just a word, how hard would it be for LL to actually to something about it? To put it another way, how hard would it be for LL to get off thier asses and do something proactive like making a 7 day wait in order to stop a psycopathic-no life having- socially awkward pos from holding a piece of mainland hostage? I guess what I'm trying to get at is, why doesn't LL actually do anything besides banning someone who comes back minutes later with a new account to only crash veiwers at Help Island? Or, to put it plainly, why doesn't LL take five minutes from their day and instead of sending a Linden there to essentially do nothing helpful, why not implement a 7 day waiting period for anyone that comes to Help Island? To put it in layman's terms, why isn't there anything being done about the psychopathi- no life having- socially awkward pos individual that has been crashing Help Island for months? PS, great sim. Would recommend. Let us for the moment consider Help Island for what it was supposed to be - a place for new avatars to get help. (Of course for some time it's become a retirement community for griefers and Don Quixote trainees, but that's neither here nor there.) The messaging you're proposing would be quite interesting - "New? Come to Help Island to get help! Um... next week." It would be a useful demonstration of the Kafkaesque quality of much of Second Life, but not great for the actual purpose of the establishment.

ChinRey wrote: I'm not sure how clear this picture is: but it shows the physics shape of the ground in a sim with updated navmesh and a thin red prim between the physics and the actual ground at that spot. 0.7 m difference, is that normal? Before Pathfinding, the physics engine used a heightfield to determine collisions with the ground. The polygonal physics model came in with Pathfinding (it's probably more accurate to say that Pathfinding came in with the polygonal physics model - Andrew Linden said that Pathfinding was really more of the final excuse to use a more efficient physics model that Havok had developed. It may well be that the viewer ground display and non-collision avatar movement over ground still uses the heightfield and it doesn't always match the new, polygonal physics model. https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Server/Pathfinding-FAQ/td-p/1672699