Rhys Goode

As several replies have noted, rigging is not going to be much of an advantage for a belt. But making belts using mesh as a regular attachment, instead of prims or sculties, has advantages. I haven't seen any for sale, but I've made a couple for my own use. You can get all the fine detail you want onto a single mesh item. Since its all on one mesh, it can be resized independently in x, y, or z. With belts made of several linked prims/sculpts, you can only change the overall size, not the shape. With a little care in designing it, a mesh belt can shrink down to fit the smallest avatars, even the tiny mesh avatars that have been popping up. I've had to throw away too many mesh/sculpt that would not shrink far enough to fit my avatar. And you also avoid the problem of LOD scaling with sculpties. Mesh can be designed so you don't have to rely on someone cranking up the LOD factor on thier viewer to see it properly. And for what its worth, its lower lag. If I rezz one of my old belts on the ground, LI runs 50 - 100. My mesh belts have LI of 3 or 4. So they put less load on the server, and allow me to feel virtuous.

*far* more trouble than they are worth. Just sayin.....

I haven't noticed a problem. Perhaps if you tried logging into a different sim? When I suspect trouble with the last sim I was in, I log on to the LL sim called Hatton.

If you don't have a UV map, you might be able to make some progress by using a test pattern such as http://simsdoc.deviantart.com/art/Test-Pattern-128460421 This let me figure out where to put a design on a cheap mesh tee shirt that came with no map. But its possible to make a mesh object that has no well defined uv map at all. If you've got one of them, all bets are off.

Yes, madcow cosmos. I had not realized robotic tubas were in such short supply!

I've several cases over the years, where SL versions of clothing items were linked to RL versions of the same garment. Playboy (the RL brand) had a whole shopful of such items a few years ago. I've seen a few attempts at the same thing for tee shirts, by one man brands I can't remember.

My favorite delivery box was the container for a whimsical robotic tuba avatar. The box has an animated loop - it sprouts stubby little legs and an antenna, walks a bit, then turns back into a plain box, and scoots back to the starting point.. Only 8 prims! I've had it rezzed in my workshop for 3 years and I always smile when I see it.

FWIT, I've been playing for 6 years, and I have never seen that message once.

Phew, not me then. 40% packet loss!!!!!!!. With or without wifi, and on two different connections! A new definition of unplayable. I realized that something was up with LL, when I ran into a horde of people recovering from cleared cache at one of the linden sims. I know that any system like SL will have its massive %&*#'s every now and then. Why don't most of these incidents make it to the Grid Status report? Thank goodness for the forums.

I know of no general change in SL crashes over the last couple of week. How is your packet loss doing? From Help>About, you get a report that has packet loss on the last line. If it is running over 1%, you will begin to notice significant lat. If it gets over 10%, the game begins to be unplayable,

I spent some time the last few days working with a simple mesh building model, trying different ideas for the physics. Several times, I found I could walk right through walls that should have been solid. The wals showed up exactly as I expected using develop> render metadata>physics shape. The last two times it happended, I logged out with the modle rezzed, and then logged in immediatly. In both cases the walls were working as expected when I relogged. If you are just trying to figure out what works and what doesn't, as I am, this can be *very* confusing. On the plus side, I've gotten pretty comfortable seeing whats going on by rendering the phyics shapes. Not as satisfying as walking up the stairs, but now I can be pretty confident that the model will behave as I want when I bring it to the main grid.

4 G is a bit thin, in my experience. If money were no object, go for the ram. For me, with 4 G, I had a lot of memory swapping from RAM to disk, especially with chat enabled. I could see it with the windows Resource Monitor. This would pick up if I had other programs running in the background. And it translated directly into lag.

I have a 4G modem that I use on the road, and the bandwidth, ping time, and packet loss are all more than adequate for running SL. SL runs just as smoothly on the modem as it does plugged into my router at home. My only complaint is the cost, $10 USD/gigabyte, and I can easily eat up a gig in an evening. I think your point about the graphics capability of current tablets is well taken, but what with Moore's Law and all, I would not bet much money that they will always be constrained by graphics power.

I don't know of any way a shape or skin can really damage your avatar. I did get a prank shape once called "britney spears" that turned my shape into a deformed gnome, but shapes can be changed easily. I can imagine a skin that callis itself something else, but turns you blue and tattooed, but again, these are easliy changed. You have to be a little more circumspect about attachements, the hair and the AO. There *are* attachements out there that can take all your $L's, and people have been robbed this way. *BUT*, before an attachement can take your money, it must pop up a window asking your specific permission to take money. I would never, ever answer yes to such a popup, unless I was very familiar with the source. There might be other problems with AO/hair. They can possibly contain code that lets a stranger track your location in SL. And I've seen things labled something like "pretty hat", that turn into big green monsters doing things you would not want to see in a G sim. But these are pranks, all you have to do is take off the attachment and they go away. The fact that there is no listing for the creator is *not* a giveaway that something is evil, by the way, lots of legitimate ways that can happen. So, yes, I will take candy from strangers, but I always nibble it carefully. Most of it turns out to be second rate freebies, occasionaly an amusing prank, a few are malicious, but of no danger if you pay attention when you try it out.

Hehe. The card shows "ratings". I haven't though of them in years, thanks for the stroll down memory lane!

While they both do business on the internet, VirWoX is an entirely different company from Linden labs. And yes, VirWoX claims to have the ability to turn bitcoins to Lindens, and back again. A bit of Googling turns up several threads on doing just that, on the VirWoX user forums. But I can't find any such claim by Linden Labs. Here is a link to the knowledge base (official linden info) on buying and selling Lindens: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Buying-and-selling-Linden-dollars/ta-p/700107 Not a word about VirWoX. VirWoX might be a reputable business, I can't t say from experience, and I don't take everything I read on the internet at face value. But you would be a lot better off taking up your complaint with VirWoX, rather than ranting about scams on a Linden Labs user forum that is not even regularly monitored my Linden Labs management.

"'If your lagging to much might be worth while not to use voice but ok'" A minor technical point. My old PC was a bit memory starved (32 bit machine, 3.6 G of RAM), and if I had voice enabled, it resulted in lots of memory swapping from my RAM to my hard drive (seen using widows Performance Monitor), and this resulted in a fair amount of lag on my machine. The lag was there whether I was actually talking or not. So disabling lag made a realy noticeable reduction in lag for me, especially in a crowded sim. Now, this kind of lag is confined to your machine. So, its OK for other users if you want to use voice, but it the lag is too much, it might indeed be worthwhile not to use voice. Just don't complain to managament about the lag if your machine is the source of it, they might get a bit annoyed.

And they must be doing something right. For the first time in several months, I can log in with a fully functional avatar. I even got $L5000 in play money when I changed password to update my beta grid self. Happy days are here again!

They keep an up to date ranking of viewers by crash rate on the wiki. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory Firestorm has the lowest crash rate. I myself am in SL 2 or 3 hours every day, I crash only a few times a week. If your approach to solving the problem of a program that runs stably for most everyone else crashing on your machine by making the assumption that the program is the source of all your problems, you are going to have a very disappointing experience.

You might be able to do it in blender, but I think most people use a graphics manipulation program, like Gimp or Photoshop. Robin wood has free tempates, and a nice tutorial, http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/AVUVTemplates.html You can also have a look at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Creation_Portal

Sure you can report them, but this is one of the things the mute button is really good for.

I agree totally that well made mesh cothing *can* look much better than system clothes. But from my experience, 90% of the dresses and skirts I've seen are not suitable for much else other than standing around looking pretty in a static pose, and then only if you are careful about the camera angle. Yes, standard sizes help a bit, but you almost always need an alpha mask to keep from poking through. Alpha masks work great for shoes and pants, not so well for a close fitting dress if you want to go dancing. So, an important warning about mesh: Try the free demo. And try the demo in the context you will use the clothing. I like to dance in SSL, so I always try the demo and see how it looks when I am moving into "odd" positions. Try bending over, and sitting down. I have a couple of versions of my avatar shape, with the key sliders set to a "standard size", and a few outfits where I have customized the shape even more. But for me, most mesh clothing fails the movement test. The ability to try on a demo is one of the big advantages of mesh, in my opinion, I've seen lots of system clothing, and sculptie clothing that looks great on the box, looks great on me in the right static pose, but looks like hell when I start to move. Designer skill is a very important factor, whether you are looking at system clothes, sculptie clothes, or mesh clothes.

Well, I changed passwords once more, and lo and behold, I got a fully functional avatar on the very first try. Not only that, but the avatar came endowed with $L5000 more than is in my main grid account. Recently, as I have switched passwords for me and my alts, they set up on adati exactly the main grid $L balance. Getting "free lindens" when you reset the adati account by changing passwords is a return to the old normal behavior.

I have a collection of old shoes that use invisiprims. My solution is to wear them with appropriate alpha masks. If l have "Lighting and shadows" checked in my graphics preferences, the invisiprims don't work, and my feet stick out. If "Lighting and shadows" is un-checked, then the invisprims work as in the older viewers. But since my own graphics settings do not affect how others see me, and since SL feet are realy ugly poking through a shoe, I always wear an alpha mask when I wear one of my old shoes. I had to make my own for some of my open toe pumps, most shoes and boots I choose from a freebie collection of alpha masks. Then they look OK either way. Shoes with no invisiprim work better either way, but the old ones are no worse than they ever were.

Did you remember to change the physics shape type, on the Features tab, from "convex hull" to prim after you rezzed your model?