Rhys Goode

The only way around the fitting problem is to change the avatar shape to fit the mesh. It's very important to try the demo with mesh, make sure it fits before you buy. If the creator does not have demos, don't waste your money, too many mesh items Changing the attachement point is easy, but will have no effect on the fit of the mesh. I would attach it to my skull, since I like to have my hands free, but you could just as well attach it to your nose or your left foot, the fit will not be affected at all.

LL should realy do a better job of making it clear that you will always have your username floating over your head, no matter what display name you choose. If you knew it soon enought, you could choose a username in the form FirstnameLastname (resident), then set your display name to Firstname Lastname. But the sign up process gives such a poor explanation that it takes a month or two for people to realize that they are stuck with the username, and by then its too late.

My old 32-bit machine started running pretty slow with the introduction of V3 viewers and mesh. It turned out that the computer was spending a lot of time doing read/write to disk. When the machine was busy swapping data from RAM to the hard drive, the frame rate would go way down. Two things helped me a lot: Disable voice, and lowering the size of the graphics cache from 512 M to 256 M. In each case, I could clearly see the reducion in disk I/O using the windows Resource Monitor, and in each case, the FPS went up. I still don't know why voice was having such a big effect, even when it was just idle in the background, but thats what Resource Monitor showed on my machine.

Making the texture has always been the hardest part of making clothing. The mesh kit lets you get away without having to learn all the complexities of 3D model creation, but getting an item of clothing that realy "pops" and looks good is an art, it will take you time and effort to learn that art. I've seen a couple of clothing kits that include complete photoshop files, with all the highlight and shadow layers that go into making a finished clothing texture, if you buy one and have a look, it will give you a lot of insight into a complex process. Oh, and once you do learn to do textures, you will find the *really* hard part of your plan: actually selling your wares in sufficient quantities to make enought $L's to matter. It can be done, but don't expect to get very far with a couple of widely available kit templates. As Robert Heinlein once put it, TANSTAAFL.

Yeah, last night ( say about 8 to 11 SL time) seemed to be unusual. Rezzing was very slow, a lot more gray avatars and clouds than usuall (I rarely see any). And not just for me, other old timers I was with mentioned it too. I doubt that all our connections suddenly went south at the same time, so I assume that the servers for the sims we were in were being a bit cranky last night.

I suggest that you try customer service. They may take a day to get back to you, but they do pay attention and are quite helpful. http://www.getxcite.com/contact.php

It sounds like the *hud* is giving the @detach=n command, not the relay. Safewording the relay will release any restriction set by the relay, but it will not affect the restrictions set by another worn ojbect, like your hud. Another example would be a pair of cuffs. The scripts in the cuffs lock them in place with @detach=n, and safewording the relay will have no effect.

Oh, thank you for the numbers! Yes, passing through and perpendicular, the notion was to increase the effective radius. I knew that lod switch points are (mostly) in relation to radius, but not the details. Your explanation not only tells me that the idea works, but makes it very clear how and why. And why it makes sense. Thanks again!

I've been working on a necklace, ~ 20 cm diameter, and very thin, so the LOD changes to the lowest level with the camera fairly close to the avatar. Even using reduced vertex models for the lower LOD, the land impact gets pretty big if I want it to show decent detail from 1 or 2 meters away. I just tried adding a long skinny rod to my model, with a different material type, so its easy to make it invisible. With a ~75 cm long rod, the LOD does not change till I am far enough away that it does not matter. Using reduced vertex models, I can't get the land impact below about 25 without this trick. Using the trick, I can let the system do whatever at lower LOD's and my land impact stays around 2.5. I see great detail where ever I move the cam, moving back far enough to change the LOD, its too far away to see the crude models replacing my detailed model. It seems like I am getting something for nothing here. Is there some down side that I do not see?

My old 32-bit machine barely had enough for SL and my web browser and the OS. I went on a lag hunting expidition once, found that I was doing a lot of read/write to hard disk, slowing things down. Voice accounted for a lot of that, just being enabled. Turning off voice cut down the traffic to the disk, speeded things up. But a bigger effect for me, on that machine, was reducing my cache to 256 M from the default 512. That turned off the read/write to the disc, made a nice improvement in frame rate. For me, on that machince. As they say your milage may vary.

Most of my mesh came with alpha masks I have to wear along with them to keep from poking out, they usually fix this problem just fine. For some outfits, I use a customized version of my shape. If I tweak my "regular" shape, it still looks like me but fits better. I keep the mesh, the alpha mask and the customised shape all in the same folder, easier to put on and take off. As long as I rember to switch back to my "regular" shape, no one can tell that my boobies are smaller under the mesh. Oh, and while mesh will bend with your body, it will not jiggle with your avatar physics, so I take that off for at least some of the things I have.

I normally use WiFi to connect to my router, and usually it works just fine. But, at odd times, and for reasons I have never been able to understand, my packet loss goes through the roof, and SL gets very laggy. When my router is havine a "packet loss spell", I get out my trusty ethernet cable, plug in with that, and the packet loss goes away. SL seems particularly sensative to this connection issue. I have a different router, completely unusable for SL because of high packet loss, but it works (nearly) flawlessly for browsing most websites with.

You could try disabling http textures. In FS, preferences>graphics>rendering tab, uncheck "use HTTP textures". From what I can tell, HTTP texture transport is particularly susceptable to packet loss, unchecking it helps a lot of people with fuzzy skins or tattoos.

I am very surprised you were told that posting here was the best way to bring this to the attention of the Lindens. This is a user forum, and the lindens have made it very clear over the years that they do *not* monitor this on anything like a regular basis. I don't know of a reliable way to get the attention of the Lindens, but I do know that posting here is not it.

I have only done it to test things out, but it seemed to work just fine. I made a mesh object, split it into several texture areas. Most reserved for my tiny object, one assigned to a rather large cone, my tiny object of interest "growing" off the tip. When I uploaded the mesh, I put a alpha texture on the cone, and it disappeared nicely, leaving my nice tiny "nano" object.

Regarding detail and pixelation, I'm afraid its even worse than that: You may be working with a 1024 texture for the lower body template, but SL uses 512 x 512's internally, so the first thing SL will do is make your pixelated tattoo even more pixelated. Especially for detail work, you would be well advised to do the scaling to 512 yourself, before you upload to SL.

Well, Avatar going in and out of focus very often has to do with using http textures. This is the current default, but lots of people find that turning it off helps this specific problem. There is a check box on the Develop menu, uncheck HTTP Textures, see if that helps. In my own experience this is mostly a connection issue. When I plug into my router with a hard wire, I experience very low packet loss, and http textures load faster. But when I am on wifi, I start to see packet loss, sometimes pretty bad. And as soon as I start seeing packet loss, I start to see my avatar going in and out of focus, switching http textures off always seems to help.

I am curious about straps and such no mesh clothing myself. I have yet to find a piece of mesh clothes that deforms in such a way as to keep my body from protruding when I dance. I've tried editing my AV to one of the so called "standard sizes", tried editing my AV to fit the item of clothing, but I just have not had success. I always have to chose noticelably over sized for my AV, or wear alpha layers. I've noticed that some clothes follow the body better than others. So, my question. Is it possible to custom make reasonable close fitting clothes to a particular avatar, and be able to dance and move without having bits and pieces poke out? (with avatar physics turned off). Should this just happen automatically if the clothes are made for a particular avatar, or is there an element of skill on the part of the maker? I've seen some really nice things made with mesh, it can't be beat for making furniture or buildings, or non-rigged avatar attachments, or even nice clothing for a static pose. But overall, rigged mesh has been a disappointment for clothing. Am I just expecting too much of the technology, or have I not found a sufficiently skilled practitioner?

Not with my partner, but when I have an active (like I just said goodnight) IM window open with someone when they log off, I crash nearly every time. When I remember to close the IM window, I don't crash.

"There is no such thing as privacy in SL" .... Used to be true, but not anymore. I own land on the mainland, Moderate sim. For most of the last year, there are much enhnaced access settings, although you may need a V2 or V3 viewer to see the controls. I can set up my land so that no one outside of my parcel can see any avatars, or "hear" any chat, or hear any voice. Even if they are right next door. One more step, I can limit access to my land to those avatars on a specific list that I control. This is a pretty good approximation of privacy. They can see that someone is there on the mini-map,and they can look at the furniture, but they cant see or hear me or my guests. I am not quite certain, but I think that "owning" a Linden home gives you just the same controls for access.

Good to know. But WTF????? "scheduled" maintenance with like 10 hours warning? Somebody ought to get the scheduler into contact with the notifier.

I like it! I have an old steam powered locomotive, but have not ridden the rails in a couple of years. Think I will take a handcar tour!

I'm still new at this myself, I'll share one of my mistakes, for what its worth. Also using Blender 2.62. It took me a while to realize that I had to unwrap the UV map, tweak and revise the UV map to suite, then export the mesh, with its UV map, to the collada file, then upload to SL. *And dont mess with the UV map after that!* My first couple of tries, I made the mesh, uploaded it to SL, and then set to work making my UV map. Of couse, since my collada flle had already been made, there was no way for it to contail the UV map I made afterwards.

I just logged in and uploaded temp textures in two different sims, which happened to have two different versions of the SL server. I had no problem uploading the temporary textures. I am using FireStorm, I don't think they have ever had temporary textures with the standard SL viewer.

I'm currently sorting through my inventory, and finding or making alpha masks for older shoes that use invisiprims. I will likely toss some otherwise perfectly good sandles, the last custom alpha mask I did took an hour, just not worth the time. Disabling "lighting and shadows" works fine for what I see, but the setting I use in my viewer, or the particular viewer I use has no effect at all on what poeple using up to date viewers see when they look at me. And I dont like walking around with ugly looking feet. I can edit the "wrappers" on prim clothes to be tiny and invisible, so if someone has a non-mesh viewer I might look naked to them. Thats OK. But I draw the line at ugly shoes with spurious fleshy looking heels sticking out..