Tiffy Vella

I'd like to remove the limit on how far down we can dig and build into our land, (as long as it does not affect neighboring parcels, of course). If I want to excavate underneath a ground level build, and make a tunnel that goes all the way down to the very distant water, with an extensive cave system for people to explore, wouldn't that be pretty cool? In the past I've played with making explorable tunnels/rooms in the sky, but this is visually messy from the outside and very primmy. Ive experimented with tunneling in the small gap between terrain height and 0.00, and its a fun creative challenge but limited. I certainly can see that terrain texture stretching would be an issue, as they already look pretty dismal when stretched just a tiny amount (or not at all). Skyboxes are a great part of SL life but they do clutter the view and make it hard for aeronauts. Imagine if we could sink them below the terrain, even if just to teleport to. Atm, we cannot edit the position of a skybox below 0.000 on the Z axis. From my mainland parcel, the natural blue ocean can be seen twinkling a loong, looooong way down. I'd so love to build a scene and edit it down to there, to take advantage of the Linden water characteristics. This would be a boon for designers of photography settings :)

Always sad to lose nice people.

Yay you're back! I loved your old episodes, and look forward to seeing what you've been discovering in SL.

+10 internets for you!

Agree...it's very much a child's game and unlikely to compete in the same market as SL. I pop in sometimes with my young one so we can run about together. It's full of rugrats.

I feel your pain, as I loved building with prims, and it's what attracted me to SL initially. It's a great way to get a feel of spaces; being and building in the same realm. Then like many others, I migrated to mesh. It's good, and bad, and yes has changed our 'social/class structure' in SL, not always for the best. One suggestion, and this is something I do occasionally if ever building something bigger- Create your building in SL with prims, just the general blocks, to get a sense of space. Walk about in it and enjoy that process. Then transpose those measurements into the 3D program you like to use, and finish the build there. Test it out in the beta grid before bringing it into SL. Not a perfect solution, and it still takes you out of SL to build, but it might give you some good out of both approaches.

As a customer and creator, I vote for mod mesh all the time. All the fears of what could happen if I made my work moddable have never happened, not in 8 years of designing and selling in SL. My work has never been undermined by being tinted a gross hue. It's never been ripped because of mod permissions. I never lost sales of multiple colours because of moddability. I'm pretty confident that leaving mod perms open increases the value of things enormously. The worst thing that ever happened? Several times a customer tried to mod something, screwed it up, and needed a replacement (back in the prim days). So I send a new one over to them which takes less than a minute. How easy is that, and how better to build goodwill. I think I'm fairly creative, and I think what I make is fairly artistic, but what's the use in wasting energy getting all precious over "oooh don't destroy my faaabulous creation". That's so insulting to your customer for a start, and such a waste of passion. Instead, prove how brilliant you are by making brilliant things. Rigged mesh can't be resized or repositioned on the body, but that is no reason to deny the huge benefits of moddableness to customers. It's pretty disingenuous to say that modify permissions are unneccessary because of rigging and ignore all the other parameters that customers might like to control. For example one designers black will be entirely different to anothers as some use warm tints while others use cool ones, and this is exactly why customers need to be able to minutely add tint to a surface. Not to destroy the artistic integrity, but to create a cohesive look. That makes the creators work look better, not worse. Over the years, we have largely removed the freedom of modding objects via edit menu from customers, and replaced this with overscripting of everything. Texturechange huds are fabulous, yes...but they have replaced so much freedom that used to be in the customers hands.

That could cause the same degree of drama as daring to suggest script limits on a parcel. Those who don't care about polygon count simply don't care about polygon count. Nor do they probably care about how they appear to others, as long as they look fabulous on their own screens and in their own photos on Flickr. We have seen in the past what happens when there is an attempt to educate those who use a lot of resources in SL: there will be blaming of everything from others' graphics cards to their 'nanny-state attitude' to their sad old computers to their imperfect methods of measuring. I don't think the attempts to change attitudes should stop though. I look forward to seeing a few jelly babies when I go out and about, as it will make getting around in crowds easier. Perhaps the ability to customise the skins for unrendered avatars could be a fun bonus feature. We could turn them into ghosts or zombies, so that when exploring dark themed sims the bright jelly baby look doesn't blow the ambience.

Alts are very useful tools, and I've never found they caused drama. I use one as a camera. My main account can then model for vendor photos, and adjust the scene, etc, while my alt sits on a box (so she can't move) and sets up the best photograph. This way, I can keep a consistent camera angle between shots, and my main has the freedom to keep making adjustments knowing the camera won't be thrown off. I think for every dodgy way to use an alt, there are 100 good reasons to use them.

There was a 'scarf' going round a few years back that caused the wearer to share an intimate moment with Mudkips. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

*coughs* There may be a small one hidden on my land, even. So I'm guilty of this very thing. It's there because of the "why not" factor, and because I was playing about with pretty rotating projected lighting one day, and voila! there was suddenly a small club. It's a nice way to spend time while doing my SL business inworld if my presence isn't actually needed. I could be writing notecards, imming with people, working in blender, and the whole time my avvy can be bopping away to parcel music and enjoying herself while her typist does all the chores. It's funner than standing afk in a field, and if anyone happened to stumble onto it and enjoy it, well, that would be excellent.

I quite like noobies, and try to help if I'm feeling nice, but when they fire off a question and I start to type and then they ask the next then the next and never wait for an answer...I give up. It's the patience thing. I'm totally over this conversation though- Noob:How do I make money in this place? Me:Learn how to provide a product or service, and sell that. Noob:No too hard I just want money where do I get it Me: Use your credit card and buy lindens Noob: No way i aint spendiong money on some stupid game. Give me a job. Me: What can you do? Noob:Everything I can do everything.Let me be your manager. We'll be rich, baby!!!! Me: sigh Also, if you are building something in a sandbox, a noobie will try to sit on it. They like to sit on random things that aren't chairs. As a noob, I did terrible things. I trespassed for my first week as I loved to see inside everything and had no concept of private space in SL. On my first day, I broke into someones home and built them a lovely new sofa- my first thing ever and hell I was sooo proud of it. It was made of a few stretched cubes and maybe a torus as I was feeling fancy. It had a gothic hard granite texture on it. I even sat on it and took a photo. To whoever that was--I am SOOOO SORRY I DID THAT UGLY THING IN YOUR HOUSE.

Clean hair.....keeping the fingernails tidy.......oh, and a nice smile!

It looks like Flickrs ToS allows its users to retain ownership of their images, which is good news for its huge SL community. This is a great example of how, even if something is strictly legal, it doesn't make it right. Sounds like this bloke already has no respect within artistic circles for pulling stunts like this over the years. Happily, I'd never heard of him before this. Sometimes, people present art that pushes the envelope, and ignites debate over "what is art, and what is creativity" etc, and this can help broaden our understanding. It's been happening since the dawn of ages, and it's rather fun. But this is just boring ol' lazy theft because opportunism.

I would love to see a set in honour of Terry Pratchett. Vetinari. Vimes. Colon. Ridcully. Luggage. Weatherwax. Eternally Surprised. Death. Ogg. Pulsiver. Igor. And just all of them. The list never ends. Wasn't Cake already one, years ago, or am I misremembering Soup?