Ivanova Shostakovich

You may be getting some unwanted Specular effect coming from a 32 bit Normal map via Specular Exponent. Check the bit depth of your normal map(s). If they're 32 bit and you don't need them that way, change them to 24 bit. If you want them to be 32 bit, carefully edit their alpha channels so that they are black everywhere except the wound(s) detail.

Mine can be pretty high. I most often get demos for only the things that instantly interest me. But I do get adventurous and curious sometimes. Many of the demos I try lead to purchases. Every now and then a demo will have particularly irksome qualities, such as a short time limit, or intentionally disabled demo HUD color options. Those just go right into the bin.

I have nothing to add.

I've only ever dreamed about SL once. I can't say with certainty I was my avatar. I couldn't see myself and, as with many dreams, this one had a very nebulous quality. In it, I was me and she was her, or as close an approximation as my mind could make with everything she's described, so she wasn't her avatar, or perhaps she was a blend of her avatar and what she's told me. The dream had romantic overtones and some nice things had apparently happened, but not anything I could remember, not anything that was explicitly part of the dream. It was as if the setting had been described by some unseen, unheard narrator, and the tale began with the two of us on a picnic blanket. As far as in-world or not, I think it was just a peculiar blend of the two. The fact that we had chosen to place the blanket on the incline of a hillside might be telling. We sat there together, quite close to one another. I looked up at her suddenly, feeling very surprised. "Hey, how did you how to find me? I never told you my address." She just looked at me with a sort of gleeful, nefarious benevolence. There was more after that, but the strange specificity of it goes beyond the scope of this post.

When you friend someone, they are given a copy of your calling card. This is an inventory item which will ever after show your online status to those who possess it.

An ongoing pet peeve of mine is how the build tool in Firestorm produces unreliable and unpredictable link numbers when linking together primitives and objects.

When I want something to have glossiness, I rely solely on the Specular Map for it. I've seen the issues @Gael Streeter is seeing when using a normal map containing an alpha channel. In the wiki she references, the Specular Map is what controls shine and glossiness, along with reflected light colors. The alpha channel of the Normal Map provides a Specular Exponent, which to my mind suggests that it can have a very strong influence on the amount of shine, maybe having the corollary effect of making small compression artifacts much more evident. The fact that these "defects" do not appear when local textures are used, and hence contain no compression artifacts, seems to support this theory.

I've had difficulties getting in there recently as well. I learned through the use of this tool that some of the ADITI regions are down. Specifying an up and running region at the login page helped for me.

The Mermaid by Christina Henry.

I've had this happen to me. HUDs will sometimes detach. It's hard to notice when it happens, and when I realize the HUD is no longer where it should be, I search my inventory for it. Each time it's been in the L&F folder.

Bleargh. I stayed up too late, and had to get up early. I took a bit of a nap between then and now, but I still feel like I'm thinking through wads of batting. I hope coffee will help.

Ready for Breakfast Club!

Yay to surviving! And Happy Birthday!

If a you're going to insist on using timed demos, and really want to consider what a reasonable time limit should be, you might consider for how long you expect a potential customer to be in your store, spending their own time browsing through what's available. Even browsing through a Marketplace store takes time, collecting demos, going through the invoice process, rezzing in-world etc... I've had the experience of browsing through a newly discovered shop, liking what I saw and spending a good 45 minutes looking around and collecting some demos, only to get back home to try them on, look for quality; Fit, Texture, Movement; and find that I had five minutes to gauge all of this. It was insulting. Customers in stores are there to buy. How they are treated throughout the shopping experience can make or break a sale.

I was glad to see, in the scripting function llSetAgentEnvironment(), creators can specify a transition time during which one environment will change to a new one. I hope creators take advantage of it and I look forward to seeing how it gets used. I'm going to experiment with it myself, to see what it looks like.

During testing, I remember there being the ability to add a second satellite. It looks like this is no longer an option.

While you can use any shape with a demo head, many people shop for a head based on how it looks in a vendor image, and want to use the included shape and tweak it to see how closely that head can approximate their look. If you wear one with some other shape, like the one you've been using for a while, you're likely to find yourself on a long road to what you're looking for, with no real idea if you can get there.

I'm fascinated by feathers, especially longer, more ornate ones. It amazes me how something so complex and intricate originates, grows and matures from a single follicle. Peacock feathers, especially. Great photos too!

You can clear things from your blacklist as they become unnecessary.

I've learned that I won't actually go insane if I don't have periods of time wherein I can be truly alone. However, I did just get some over-ear, noise canceling headphones that I often use for SL and/or listening to music. More data may be necessary.

BoM bakes all the currently worn system skin, system underwear, system clothing, and system tattoos into one set of flat textures, which are then applied to a mesh body and/or head. The system avatar body is then hidden by the baking service, obviating the need for wearing alphas. In fact, wearing alpha layers interferes with the process. It might help to think of that this way: The baking service needs to see the system avatar textures, if it can't, because alpha layers hide it, then it can't bake those textures for the mesh avatar. The usefulness of BoM is going to depend on the user, and their particular needs. If one has an older system avatar skin that they really like, and its creator is not producing an applier, BoM allows them to apply that skin to their mesh body. Similarly, if one has tattoos that are not being updated with appliers by their creator(s) One can have them on their mesh body through BoM. I found it to be very helpful when trying mesh head demos. It had been very difficult to judge whether a particular mesh head model would achieve a look similar to what I had settled into over the years. Having a BoM enabled demo head allowed me to tweak the shape with my skin, my face, applied to it, allowing a fast and relatively easy demo process. BoM does exactly what it's supposed to. That being said, there are some disadvantages. The baked textures will be applied to the skin layer of the mesh body, following all its curves, just as system clothing fits the system avatar and very much unlike mesh clothing. There are some body manufactures providing additional adjunct attachments with their bodies now that mitigate this problem, applying the textures instead to surfaces that bridge gaps, and/or other body features. Additionally, there is a small amount a variation in the UV mapping between the various bodies and heads, relative to the system body UV map. Another benefit to BoM that I use is applying certain underwear types. Mesh bodies have layers witch accept the textures of underwear, tattoos, and clothing articles. When I have tried wearing both an underwear layer and, for instance, a separate pair of stockings on a clothing layer, the two interfere with each other, blanking one out entirely, or making the other partially disappear. BoM stockings, applied by the baking service, become part of a non-alpha texture, thus obviating the problem. Anyway, I've been writing this for a bit, and I have plans I must go attend to. I hope all this helps.

Many hugs Maddy. You continue to be in my thoughts.