Rhys Goode

I agree. THey should use freedom from the stupid ads as a perk for premium members. I pay several websites real money for freedom from ads, and since I pay real money to LL, they should at least protect me from SPAM.

I think you are confusing the SI unit of length with the SL unit. The SI unit is rather precisely defined as ""the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second." For those of us who use feet and inches, it works out that there are, by definition, 2.54 cm in 1 inch. There is no such precise definition of the SL meter. The best I can tell, looking at what the viewer tells me is the avatar height in SL meters, there are about 3.1 SL cm in 1 inch. So 183 SL cm actually corresponds more closely to 5 ft than to 6 ft.

Yeah, it could be RLV, but more often than not, its just SL messing up. I use RLV and know how to diagnose it, most often an unremovable atttachement or clothing layer has nothing to do with RLV, but just SL being SL. A quick re-log almost always fixes it for me.

Nice explanation Nalates, thank you. I have always wondered about how I can look fine in my own viewer but messed up in every one elses, or sometimes the other way around. And why after II change clothing, I get fuzzy, then sharp, then fuzzy again before settling down to sharp again.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Actually I imagine most bots put almost no load on the servers because they don't move, don't need much visual information and usually are very simple to draw. There's a region in Bay City that has a club that's notorious in the neighborhood for being constantly full and dragging down sim performance. I recently went to that particular sim and saw a cluster of obvious bots on another part of the region in open non-commercial land. I had a thought - they were probably put there to reduce the number of "real" avatars that could go to the club and therefore improve the performance of the sim. The region did seem to be running quite well after botting. Yes, I have seen the same thing on a different sim. And that is what the sim owner said when I asked what was up with the bots. The sim was perpetually laggy but is now running reasonably well with with a stable of 15 bots keeping the number of real avatars down to a managable level.

What's with this strange dichotomy in the first place???? Artistic, creative content vs "ADULT! ZOMG!!!!!" content? I put a lot of effort, imagination and creativity into my adult pursuits. Call me a pervert if you must, but do not insult my artistic integrity.

I don't have a lot of customers, but the mesh attachments (mostly necklaces and such) I've made have all resized nicely, just as expected. Sorry I can't offer you insight into what could be going on with yours. I like them because I can take something that would have been a bunch of prims linked, do it as one mesh object, then resize them independently in x, y, z, to get the perfect fit. Linksets only scale gracefully in all 3 dimensions at once. Oh, and my two cents on footwear --- You can't beat rigged mesh for thigh-highs, but I really can't see any practical difference when it comes to an ordinary pair of stilettos. Except that attached mesh is a lot easier to resize.

I am not a scripter. But I have friends who dabble in the art. And the trend that I seem to see, is to spend a lot of time and effort putting more and more functionality into fewer and fewer scripts. So, does this make sense automatically? If some complicated SL functionality is executed using 10 scripts, Does it automatically use less resources if the same function is accomplished with one ginormous script? A lot of scripts seem to spend a lot of time doing nothing at all. And its possible to write a script that is constantly busy, busy, busy. I can see how having 1000 scripts running is almost certainly worse than having 10, but I'm not so sure that having 10 scripts is necessarily worse than having 2.

Many full perm kits come with additonal restrictions. And I am pretty sure that this is spelled out as an allowed practice in the LL TOS. The most common restriction I've run into is for something like textures: They are full perm, but the copyright owner specifies that you can only resell them applied to your own creations, you cannot just turn around and resell them. Sounds like your mesh kit has similar, perfectly legitimate restrictions. Here is thread where the subject gets discussed at length: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Unfortunate-Tutorial-Item/td-p/993895

Take a picture! This happened to me once, at least 5 years ago, all that was left were my prim hair and shoes and a purse. I have the pic framed and mounted in the hall in my SL home. A great souvenir! (As I recall, all I had to do to fix it was to relog. But that advice is a bit dated)

Jarren Clarence wrote: " I am curious as to why Linden Labs do that to innocent Residents,especially if we hardly engage in any harmful acts in the virtual world" Sorry, Jarren, but it sounds like you are saying: "I am innocent, I am innocent. I hardly did any harmful acts, its just not fair to be held responsible for them.".

Um, being on your own sim is not the only way to be private any more. I have a mainland home, and I have it set so that noone outside the parcel can see or hear whoever is inside the parcel. Then, if I exclude public access to my parcel, I have pretty darn good privacy. Yes, someone can see that I and whomever are there on radar, but that's about it. The can look at my furniture, but not at me. My house has been there for a while. My previous security feature -- having damage enabled and a shotgun by the bed -- never really worked all that well.

My inventory is at just shy of 11,000, and I am cleaning it out once again. The main reason I keep my inventory "small" is that "bakefail" incidents are farily common for me (noisy internet connection), so every week or two I end up clearing cache to fix the glitch. After clearing cache, I let my inventory rebuild before I do anything else, and that takes too long otherwise. Also, 10,000 items is a lot to keep track of. I regularly run across items I haven't seen in years, and for which I have no foreseeable use. I like getting new clothes, old clothes that I haven;t worn in years do me no good at all.

Y'all will have to scrounge up your own tinfoil, but you can get tempates for the hats here: http://www.firstpalette.com/tool_box/printables/paperhats.html

I have not noticed any grid wide issues myself, but I have occasionaly found myself trying to log into a region where that particular server is acting up. When I have problems like OP describes, I try logging into a different server. I will often put in the name of a Linden region (Hatton or Hippo Hollow are two) into the Start At box. They tend to be quiet, just the place to nurse your bruised viewer back to health.

The phrase "unscheduled maintenance" in Linden speak means "the damn thing is broken, we are fixing it as fast as we can" in plain English.

One day I logged into a busy club with my alt, and just let her dance, so I could see what she was "looking at". Even with no prompting from me, her gaze would flit around a bit, and often end up fixed on a nearby avatar. Not the best looking ones either, she had very poor taste on her own. Kind of random.

1. It depends on where I am, and who is there. There are a few sims where the shadows look just spectacular. Others, not so much. And several sims where I turn off advanced rendering entirely, they look garish with it enabled, nice with it off. Also, a few people with bright facelights can ruin an otherwise well lit scene. 2. I've never paid much attention to ground shadows on my furniture 3. No opinion Mostly because of garish facelights, but also because of some of the lighting in some of sims I hang out in, I have lighting and shadows turned off.

Muletta Sorry, you must have missed the part about selecting the particular part or parts you want to unlink. You have to first check the "edit linked parts" box on the edit menu. Then you can select the part you want to edit by clicking, and if you want to select several parts, hold shift, and click on the parts you want to unlink. Careful here, its not always easy to tell when you've selected a part, it should be highlighted, but its not alwyas easy to see. *Then* unlink, either from the menu or the keyboard shortcut. Sorry I did not make myself clear, I was just offereing a different way to do the same thing that the "unlink" button does, without worrying about how your browser displays this option on your menu.

Once you get the part(s) you want unlinked selected, you can use the keyboard shortcut ctrl-shift-L to unlink. (I hadn't realized there *was* an unlink button on any menu, I learn something new every day!)

Here are some numbers I thought might be of interest. I am making a chain link belt, it has about 45 85-vertex tori and an iconosphere. I made it using Blender, which reports 3645 vertices. The belt was inspired by a simiIar belt from by inventory, made from 50 tiny prims As I was starting to build, I wanted to see a small change in the shape of the unit link, and neglected to make a UV map for one iteration. That turned out to have a *huge* impact on the mesh uploader. For the model with no UV map set at all: One run of the Mesh uploader reported 7304 Tris, 3645 Verts for high LOD, 3652 Tris and 3652 Tri/1828 Vets form the lowest LOD. The numbers of verts and tris for the lowest LOD varied from run to run, the upload cost between $L150 and $L165, with DL cost 141 to 165. The Physics cost 24.12 did not change from run to run. Much worse for LI than the prim based belt. But wait ... I went back to Blender and pushed the UV unwrap button. I took no care at all to mark seams, so the map was not good for much. For this version of the model, the mesh upload reports 7304 Tris, and 14397 Verts for the high LOD case (same count of Tris, a lot more Verts), and 116 tris/619 verts for the Lowest LOD. THis model cost only $L37 to upload, and DL cost was 25.2 +/- 0.1, Physics 9.64. There was a little variation in the Lowest LOD counts, and so in the DL cost but only a little compared to the first case. Not too bad, about half the LI as the prim based belt. But ... And as I wrote this, I realized I could do a lot better. This is a piece of jewelry, by the time the camera gets far enough away to shift to the lowest LOD, it is invisible. So, I added two small faces to make the object appear bigger (they are from a different material, I can texture them to be invisible), and told the mesh uploader to use the full detail model for the first 3 LOD's and to use 8 tris for the lowest LOD. When I cam away, the resulting object object behaves even better than the 25 LI object I got above by taking the defaults, but now the DL and (and so LI) costs are down to just over 4, and it only costs $L13 to upload! So, both the out of pocket cost of uploading, and the ultimate LI both went down by a factor of 5 when I did the most rudimentary UV map possible. Using the model witht he UV map, and exploiting the fact that it cant be seen far away anyway, got be down another factor of 5. I can't wait to show these numbers to my friend who's motto is "UV maps are for later, after you get the basic shape set".

Renee Caxton wrote: Mark my words, what they are doing will not fix anything. If viewers are having trouble communicating with the servers (the thing SSAB is supposed to "fix") then adding yet another server is not going to help. Most likely they are just trying to appease vendors by further locking down DRM on clothing. Instead of constantly breaking things, the Labs should concentrate on FIXING things. Right now the Labs viewer is so messed up I cannot use it at all. If they break Firestorm too then I will just retreat to OSGrid. Second Life is hopeless. Three years and thousands of dollars down the drain on my end ... poured into a company that hates its loyal customers. /me scratches her head in wonder. The crash statistics (objective data, unless you think there is a conspiracy to make them up) say SL is more stable than its ever been. This is certianly true for me, I rarely crash at all. And at the events I go to, other people rarely crash either. Oh there are a couple of exceptions, a few people who certainly have ongoing problems. But a few individuals account for at least 90% of the crashes I witness, it has to be problems with their connection, or thier computer capability or configuration, otherwise the large majority would not be dancing along without all the crashes. Personally, I can account for nearly all my crashes as being caused by my connection. My ISP provides a link has the annoying habit of going dead for minutes at a time, at random intervals. No internet traffic at all. Its not just an SL thing, it happens when I am not even running SL, and it happens to our other computer at the same time. Sometimes the viewer recovers, sometimes it doesn't. The other case is when I am out in the world, using public wifi. If I get a link with bad packet loss, then I crash like crazy, turn off the computer and read a book. But more often than not packet loss is tolerable (1 or 2 %) --- enough to cause significant lag, and a few crashes, but not a show stopper. In fact, my biggest annoyance of all right now is bake fail problems, the particular issue being addressed by SSB. So, I can't wait for the bugs to work out, I have very high expectations that it will improve my SL.

I've always gotten a reasonable facsimile of what was promised. Sometimes not the quality I would have locked, but far short of fraud. If I ever got and empty box, then snubbed by the vendor I would fine an abuse report. (I would expect to hear nothing from LL, and I would certianly not expect a refund from LL.) But the only reason I can think of that this kind of scam is uncommon is that LL must take action to stop it, after enough people file abuse for the same scam.

Very cool stuff! Thank you!

You can assign the different parts to different materials, and then, when you join the meshes together, the separate materials can still use the original UV maps, just apply them to the individual "faces". Or, you can use the materials to help you untangle and re-arrange the UV maps of the individual parts to fit neatly on a single texture.