Melissa Yeuxdoux

"is somebody going to show me something good done with cheap software...very cheap..." http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/art-gallery/ shows things done with Blender, which is free.

"...no matter how much humour you can put in the nonsense you are carrying on here...." I think you're being kind. I've yet to see humor.

"Problem with updating avatars to a higher polycount is that the clothing is mapped on the body.... with more poly's the clothing would al need to be remaped... or would look real ugly and stretched..." SL clothing looks ugly and stretched now. It only looks right on the exact shape the designer used when making it--to the extent that your shape differs from that shape, it is stretched or mashed. SL clothing is custom made but pretends to be pret a porter. If RL clothing worked like SL clothing, people would be marching on stores with torches and pitchforks, dressed VERY uncomfortably. Clothing as painted-on texture can never look right. Real clothing is a separate object, and when you put it on assumes a minimum energy position, stretching across concavities rather than being vacuum sealed to the person wearing it. Straps in SL clothing look totally wrong, and just try to read text or recognize artwork on the front of a T-shirt worn by a woman in SL--unless, ironically, she is making use of prim breasts!

Happened to me, too. I ended up composing replies in a text editor, copying the text, then reply, paste, submit. Any reply that takes too long seems to fail.

George Bernard Shaw, author of, among other things, Pygmalion. Also, curiously for this thread, an ardent Fabian socialist.

"Blender is wonky and infuriating, and forces you to buy the manual." To encumber the discussion with actual data: take a look at http://www.blender.org/download/documentation/ and you'll see links to downloadable documentation and to online documentation and tutorials. They do mention a PDF for sale, but the page appears bereft of coercion.

Ah. You want a walled garden, to be a big fish in a pond made small.

"And what will be next? LSL?" Speaking of LSL, was it really necessary to invent yet another scripting language and implement it in-house, ignoring all the other work done on development environments, documentation, efficient compilation and optimization for languages that already existed and are available everywhere? Wouldn't it have been nice to have started out with that 2.3 order of magnitude speedup by just starting with an existing VM that lots of talented people have worked on? Especially after laying off what, 30% of its staff, Linden Lab can't afford NIH. There are virtual worlds where avatars wear clothing, not paint, and where skirts aren't strips of cloth sewn together at the waist. Over and above competition, recall Qarl né Linden's statement: "The single greatest reason for is the inherent geometric inefficiency of prims. The (only) solution is the meshes project." Lag is the universal complaint. It's what Chris Pirillo fell back on when people called him on his initial ignorant rant about SL. Should the entire population have to continue to suffer it because there aren't in-world mesh creation tools? (Yes, it would be great to have them. Nobody's ruled them out that I know of. Heck, isn't the in-world sculpted prim creation tool the work of a resident rather than LL?)

"It's Soviet-style communism to pretend that Mesh, which is highly complicated, with expensive tools, or wonky and obfuscated opensource tools forcing you to buy the manual." This clause no verb. What are the imaginary communists pretending about mesh?

"Let's at least see you guys argue this one out on the merits of the truth about it, that it is indeed a Linden windfall to a select class of people..." ...a class so darned select that anyone wanting to join it can. All one has to do is, you know, actually learn something.