Mircea Lobo

There is some, but usually not that much from what I last knew. I used to find it on a website called jamendo or something like that, but thanks for that link as well! It's nice to know some artists choose that direction too

Oh yes, I understand now. That can keep the origin of the child prim while getting rid of the unnecessary half going into the main prim. That can indeed be done later. The complex part is the code to detect alignment and size over the face of the root prim. Waiting for someone good at that to suggest a formula.

I noticed many people in the open source world don't really agree with the GPL license. Personally though, it's one of my favorites. Since for one thing, it makes sure that what's open source stays open source, and you can't release the binaries without the source code also being available. I heard about good FOSS projects going closed-source later on, which I consider sad... GPL makes that very hard though. But overall, I like all free licenses... like MIT (OpenSim's) and especially Public Domain Outside of SL and software, it would be nice if at this day more music and movies were released under Creative Commons as well.

Well, the true part is that it is more of a choice at this day. If you're comfortable with sending such data online, it's always up to the person... but Linden doing the asking I will never agree with. Just my belief. As for suspending the account... well I did a lot in SL over the years, and couldn't imagine my account ever being put on hold. Though if someone hacks in and starts stealing money that's very bad... but I'd rather ask they reset my password urgently. Such dark scenarios never happened for me and hopefully never will.

I should consider owning SL then. With people willing to do that so easily, I could start my own espionage service without anyone even blinking... could run the CIA out of business

Ok. For me it's more important to know you're not an alien from outer space, so please email me your photo and all of your official documents (bank account too :) )

Well, I actually somewhat agree with his comment. In today's license-crazy world, when it comes to digital content you don't even know what belongs to who. After there's been talk that jailbreaking a device (which you own in your very own home) should be a crime, and selling your iPod should become illegal, wondering if you have any right over what you create on servers hosted by Linden is funny in a sad way. Knowing how things are, they can easily do whatever they want with your content and claim it's theirs, then throw the user out like a bad tooth *shrugs*

Hypotetically keeping kids from writing fake account settings to see some 3D porn is a good reason to request scanned ID over the internet? It's a sad little world we live in Anyway my opinion stays and since my signature is not offensive I choose if to keep it. Back on topic: I still had a question about Linden's decision with the path finding and OpenSim. We know the official SL viewer can't connect to OpenSim any more... but will OpenSim viewers without the Havoc libs still be allowed on the Linden grid? Obviously this means no client-side physics, but I don't care to use these so I don't mind if in consequence it works the old way. But will it still be allowed to connect at all?

The signature stays cuz I'm against the whole thing. It's still a way of pushing you into giving them ID to get access to some sims... though it's a lot less bad than when this system was first implemented. Just sucks there might be sims I won't be able to visit although I'm way over 20, as a price for privacy. Anyway, this topic really isn't about my signature

The suspicions were false, otherwise I would have been banned after they saw my ID back in those days. But my complaint here is on the means being used. I never heard of other such services in the past, and SL is the only one I've ever come across to ask real life ID over the internet. If other services do this online, they're places I'm fully staying away from... fraud websites are most likely to do this. I'm not sure if anyone ever considered that behind the closed doors, Lindens might be using this information to identify and track people in real life based on their SL activity (despite silly claims they never store it). Don't be surprised if someone someday will have their mother receive a call (from someone mysteriously having her number) telling her what sim you've had sex on in Second Life, cuz one of the Lindens got drunk that night and felt like it. If the law lets them collect ID online, you can be sure it won't give a damn if this happens. And personally I hope something like that will, so others can realize how wrong their procedure is. Anyway, thread's going way off topic. But most of my curiosities with path finding were clarified so it don't matter much I guess... but I think there were other threads discussing this system in the past.

From what I understand, you don't need to know the size position and rotation of the child prim, since in its case you only set those properties. You do however need to know those of the root prim. Also, I just realized that in my example, I might want the script to be in another child prim itself, not the root prim like I thought. Rotation would indeed be one value since the child prim must always stick to the surface of the parent prim. So you can only rotate it one way, same as you can only rotate a sheet of paper on a table in one direction without lifting it off the surface. Using slice could have worked, but that can only be done in one way so I wouldn't see it working out too well. If slice was possible in two directions this would have been easy. Since not, I'd rather do it by changing the position and scale of the child primitive.

NOW I don't know if they do any longer... that "age verification" crap seems optional and thankfully barely any sim uses it. Back then, I was notified by Linden Lab that if I don't send my card, my SL account will be deleted. I was lucky to have recently bought a scanner, and I had to send it via email to an address I didn't even know. If a bully asked for my identity card at a street corner, even that would have upset me less. But since then I'm opposed to the concept of requesting such data over the internet entirely... it's just my opinion that it's wrong. Even worse, the verification expired multiple times on this account, so it's not even permanent. And I'm NEVER sending any more data to LL again, even if it means being restricted from some sims. Although I renewed my ID card with the police (due to expiration date) they still have my social number and stuff they should have never pushed me into giving them. [EDIT] Small correction: I remember it's either a scan of your identity card, your bank account, or your drivers license. But I consider either of these private data which internet services shouldn't lure people into sending them.

Theoretically, even on the LL grid you own your personal creations and regions. But you don't have their data on your machine. If Linden ever feels like it (or they get a very unlikely database crash) your work might be gone. In OpenSim, if something is rezzed on a simulator the data is stored in the opensim.db file of the machine hosting that sim. If it's in the inventoy, then it's stored on the grid server. Still, you can always rez something you wanna have a safe backup of somewhere on your sim, and take backups of your local simulator. On one of my OSGrid sims I even have a storage house for that. Separately @ Phil Deakins: I'm not a privacy freak. Hell, I post videos of myself on Youtube often. But if I'm constrained against my will to take photos of my identity card and send them to strangers over the internet, that crosses the line of what I consider acceptable by far. If some consider this normal, they are free to even post their identity card on Facebook if they feel like it. But I don't want it done with my data thank you.

I need to create a slightly trickier script, for which I will need help from an advanced scripter. The situation is: I have two square primitives, partly flat (like paper sheets) and positioned one over the other. The one on top is smaller in width and length, and is a child primitive of the bottom one. Here's a screenshot: What I need is a script in the main (red) prim which can set the position and size of the child (green) prim over a specific area on the surface of the main prim, with a specific rotation also. The script would take those arguments; A two-value vector for X and Y position, a two-value vector for X and Y size, and a one value float for rotation. For size and position, the values describe a percentage over the surface of the main prim, ranging between 0 and 1 (0% and 100%). However, the object and / or main prim could be positioned rotated and scaled in any way before the script runs (even attached to the avatar), and I also need it to work in no-build areas if attached. It must be done without breaking / re-creating the linkset. It should also know to error out if a combination of position and size would cause any part of the child to poke out of the main prim's area (excluding cases where child rotation isn's 0, 90, 180, etc. since those are impossible to detect). The height / thickness of the child needs to not matter, and be always centered on the surface of the main prim. There will be more such child prims in the final creation, but once I have a test case with one I should be easy able to make the rest. Some examples: If I'd use <0.25, 0.25, 0> for position, <0.5, 0.5, 0> for scale, and 0 for rotation, I would get the exact example in my screenshot (child prim covers the 1/4 upper-left corner of the main prim). If I use <0.25, 0.5, 0> for position, <0.5, 1, 0> for scale, and 180 for rotation, it would cover the upper half of the main prim. If I would use <0.5, 0.5, 0> for position, <1, 1, 0> for scale, and 90 for rotation, it would cover the entire surface of the main prim. The tricky part in this script is that the object (and therefore main prim) could be positioned and rotated in any way. The script needs to know the main prim's size and rotation each time before executing, determine where its top surface is, rotate the child prim the same way, then position and scale it at the given amount over its surface. That position and scaling is what I can't even figuring out how to do. Does anyone have such a script or is willing to help with making one? I need it to be freely usable, though I will credit the person who helps in a script comment. If I finish what I'm trying to make I will be posting what I do so others can enjoy it as well.

THIS. That's one of the first reasons I always liked OpenSim. Apart from being free to have your own region (since you're the one hosting it), you own your data and primitives / assets / etc... they're all in a database on your drive. On the LL grid, Linden owns everything. Just the system SL went for from the start, but it's bad to feel you own none of your data and creations in the complete sense.

Oh, that yes. Thankfully the SL viewer is open-source, and continuing on the path of a custom OpenSim viewer will likely be the way. Some people are still thinking about an original viewer written form scratch, but IMO there's no way that anyone will make one in a decade, as good as SL and with the same features. In this sense, maybe it is better OpenSim separated from SL... we might have the possibility to become even better now, and a more different alternative than the original SL. Even though I never wanted OpenSim to become a competition for SL... I always just seen it as the "fully free Second Life".

The only OpenSim grid I'm actually familiar with is OSGrid. Not sure if it's the largest, but it's surely ran by the core developers too. I don't know how often they log in to build stuff, but I know some have their own sims and did create new content (Nebadon for instance has many good creations there). But I guess it depends on what the owner of each grid cares to do... some might only be interested un running the grid, others might be users who go there themselves.

For them to have "proof of my age" for no actually serious reason, I was forced to send my full identity to complete strangers twice under threats of my account being suspended. I don't know if someone considers that a normal thing, but even after 4 years I'm still waiting for something to be done about what happened. Personally I'd even hope for those responsible to be in jail for frauid, invasion of privacy and identity theft (I emailed some legal associations in this sense at the time but never got a reply, luckily for Linden). Trust me, some people do NOT take this sort of thing lightly. Anyway this is getting way off topic, and I remember I already discussed it during a major drama at the time, so no need to get into it again. Linden does some very bad things at times, but it would still be hard to hate them since they do a lot of nice stuff too. I think the pathfinding problem was one of the mistakes they did with SL in some senses (mostly how they chose to do it), but at least I'm a bit more clear now on the matter.

It is true that exploits arise often for a lot software, with updates to fix them pretty soon after. Still, I rarely see major and dangerous flaws having to be fixed ugrently in this case. On the side of griefing, I only remember reporting one flaw in all those years years for OpenSim. Which would allow a griefer to force a prim in your no-build parcel by unlinking a linkset and having some prims remain there (which couldn't be dragged individually but the center of the object as a linkset could be used to move them inside). I remember at some point that a griefer which had a "crush" on OpenSim used to annoy people on OSGrid, but all he succeeded in was to indicate important flaws which were instantly fixed... in the end some OpenSim devs realized he was truly useful And I'd rather not get started on the idea of identity theft in Second Life after the experiences I had. Linden already does that officially, and have forced me to reveal my full ID card with photo / full name / address years ago under threats of deleting my SL account. I'm hoping that someday legal action will be taken against those Lindens, but it seems such a thing isn't happening yet. As for attacks to take the grid out of service, that's one thing that requires a major flaw in the server code. If the server doesn't allow access in a way that can be used to bring a region / grid down, such a thing can't happen... unless someone physically throws a grenade in the server room.

I guess. But I can't really think of anywhere that would be the case. My personal experience as a beginner to medium developer is: If it's possible to grief in a place like Second Life, then the server has a problem because it allows flaws or unauthorized access somewhere. The client can't be blamed since any griefer can modify it to do bad things... but a good server is responsible with making sure only intended functionality gets through. Which in almost all cases happens 100%... I've yet to see a server that couldn't block a known method of griefing through abusing the technical means.

Easier ways to grief are technically true with open source software. But I don't believe they're ever a reason not to release a source code for something. A good client + server package knows to secure such attacks, usually on the server's side. If it's easy for people to grief, it means there are flaws in the code that those griefers discover and use, and that they need to get fixed (in most projects they do instantly). Some trolls were actually useful in this sense, since they unwillingly helped identify flaws in the software and fix them. At the moment, there's barely anything I know of that a griefer can do on OpenSim which they couldn't on the LL grid. I also play multiple freely licensed games... the Quake-based FPS Xonotic for instance is a project I've been a contributor at for years. I play it online frequently, and have never seen a case where anyone was able to hack the server to cheat (aimbots were discussed here and there). Same for all others. SL works differently of course, but again I don't know any ways of griefing that weren't found and secured as best as possible.

So many replies... hard to read all of them. But to look at a different side of things too regarding OpenSim: I wonder what the situation would have been if LL also open-sourced the Second Life server code. I heard there were plans to do that years ago, but they changed their minds (sad decision IMO). Although OpenSim is pretty much a SL server in practice (even if not in purpose), I think everyone would have been happier if LL went all the way with opening up their technology. But still, maybe someday...

Each with their own opinion and way of looking at things I guess. Some clarification though: Although OpenSim is intended as a server for virtual spaces and multiple viewers, I personally used and saw it as a server-side for Second Life, so people could run their own sims on their own grids freely. But since you mentioned that, I was also thinking of those days when I heard some Lindens were working to allow teleportation between OpenSim grids and SL's. Back then we were hoping they would go all the way through with that, but sadly it ended up at this instead.

Although it wasn't specifically supported by LL, it was a creation that grew on their technology and a lot of their (LL grid) users used it as well. As a developer I know you need to consider everyone who depends on something you created, even when you never had to support that as a company rule. Pretty sure that if LL ever broke something you liked, you wouldn't be feeling the same way. But yeah, no worries... we'll survive Also, instead of seeing it as something who stole from Second Life by reverse-engineering the code, you could look at OpenSim as something that helped expand SL's horrizon as a technology. Supported or not supported, official or unofficial, it was and still will be an important part of SL as a whole, that things wouldn't be the same without for me at least. Just what I think.

One thing I agree with there is that Linden was never obligated to support OpenSim in any way. That part is true. Of course, being aware that many people who use their viewer also connect there, it wouldn't have been that bad to show more care to them as well. Legally and as a company they didn't have to, but if LL was all that nice they could have been more caring (eg: Use a different approach for client-side physics, or still offer the --loginuri in a separate circumstance). I'm an open-source contributor so I tend to think that way about everything I do (that the best approach must be used to make everyone happy). But 99.f% of the time that is not the case with companies, and it's only a few things that really matter there. Again LL is not obligated to OpenSim, but if they really believed in what they do with SL they could have considered OpenSim part of SL and its progress, not a project that's just tolerated there.