Rhys Goode

There are "A" areas on the SL mainland. A bit more costly than G or M, but they are there.

I have a physique body. Nice shape, but clothing is an issue. I realy like her for nakie dancing. Clothing her is a royal pain, though. The applier system is clunky, I ended up having better luck if I make a fresh copy of the body for each outfit, and apply just the clothing layres I want to that body, to the extent that I can get them. The appliers are not nearly as versitale as system clothing layers. I can wear some of my prim clothes, but I have to fiddle with the sliders and make a new shape for each item. The physique fitted shape does work with my regular avatar shape settings, but comes out with a different shape than my SL avatar. Oh, and the alpha masking system for physique, as the other systems I have tried, ends up with either not blocking out a critical piece of my body, or else runs an crack of invisibility next my clothes, so only about half my mesh cothing can be used with them at all. Neither of my fitted mesh outfiits work with physique, no matter how I fiddle with the shape. I could make myself a custom skin with a custom alpha mask built into the skin,but that is a lot of work to just to wear a pair of boots, And then I would have to change my skin, just to take off the boots. I also worry about the rendering cost of these things. There are the equivilant of 4 mesh avatars, each with several times the vertex count of the standard avatar. So at least a factor of 10 increase in the load on my graphics card, I hate to think about a room full of them. But, as I said at the beginning, a pleasing shape, and very nice for nakie dancing.

I've heard the privacy concerns over and over, but to me, quite lame. It's a big negative for me when I meet someone who shows "offline" when I am talking to them.

Looking at the ads on MP, the TELLAQ line seems to be the so called "fitted mesh", that lets the shape of the mesh avartar vary with the SL sliders. I have several such I have been playing with, and thinking about just this problem. It looks to me like a hard one to generalise, because each of the avi's I have seen are fitted to the bones differently, the meshes all deform a bit differently when you animate them. For example, some can wear a prim necklace pretty much like a regular avatar, some have the mesh avi swollow the necklace if the head turns left or right. I have some nice fitted mesh thigh high boots, work fine in SL for just about any slider values. They do not work with any of my fitted mesh avatars. It looks like making something that both fits and can be animated is going to be a difficult, hit-or-miss process with a lot of trial and error on the beta grid.

Junkyard Blues is usually pretty lively.

to paraphrase, "I know lots of people who get away with breaking the rules, they should just change the rules to suit me, its all so unfair". Not hard to guess how this guy feels about copyright restrictions.

"3. road side adds, well that was more a problem of the past but add farmers drove people nuts." Ah, that does bring back memories, but I cant even think the last time I saw an ad farm. Some things in SL *do* get better.

I loath and detest all resizing scripts. Give me mod permission and let me do it myself! Just sayin...

glad you foound your pet, but I thought I would point out a nice feature of firestorm. Area search. You could search for lizard, or whatever you lost, FS will pinpoint it, let you cam in, edit, take, whatever. My go to tool for lost items.

Maybe I am strange, but I do not treat my $L funds in quite the same way that I treat my brokerage account. I worry a lot about long term trends in the brokerage account. In contrast, my $L's have value purely in the present. And for me anyway, the value of virtual goods has not changed. My rent has not changed. So far, a non-envent. OK, I may find that I will not be able to use an outfit I purchased today in two or three years, in a different virtual world. But I have been in SL long enough to know that the odds of me wearing something I purchased 2 years ago are virtually nil, anyway. I do have some things, like a house and a bed, that I have used for many years, and I will be sad to leave them behide. But the total cost of all such devices for me was less than the costs of dinner and a movie and a babysitter by a large margin. So I am not about to lose sleep over it.

My ASUS is a few years old ASUS RoG G74S series. The processor is a rather slow 2.0 GHz, and the NVidea GeForce GTX 560M/PCIe/SSE2 is showing its age. But it will let me turn on all the bells and whistles and get 20 fps in most places. So I think is is agreat platform for SL. However, it is anything but sleek. with the top closed it is a full two inches off the table in the rear, almost an inch in the front. This is to make room for the cooling system. You may not need a cooling pad, but be careful where you point the exhaust ...

I've been using 10 to 20 different public wifi hook-ups per year for the last 2 or 3 years. Maybe even 4. Packet loss has always been an issue, usually *the* issue. Now, suddenly... almost zero packet loss, even on really slow (tested with speedtes.net) connections. The more I think about it, must have been a change in the base SL code.

A narcissistic boar. Or boor, more like. Calling it "harassment" , just because someone does not redesign the whole sim to suit your needs. To me a favor, keep out of my sim, and stay in your own sty.

I've been out on the road this summer, doing SL from public wifi at assorted locations as we tour in our RV. And something very strange has been happening. I've run into a string of 4 or 5 sites in a row where SL works reasonably well, but with packet loss only about 0.1 or 0.2 %. Even when the download rate on Speedtest.net dips well below 0.5 mbps. This is truely odd and different from my experience over the last few years. My tried and true experience was that many, even most, wifi connections had excess packet loss, even when other things worked fine. My daughter had a router that tested out at 20 mbps, but gave >10% packet loss and horrible lag for SL. Other apps worked fine. Now, I know that the IEEE has had some issues with the standards on routers. It was possible to comply with the standard, and still not work for some applications. (Like SL). Anyhow, I wonder if anyone out there knows? Has SL changed the code to work better with faulty routers, or are newer, more agreeable routers replacing the old ones?

The 500 prim gift is not the joke, the container it came in is the joke. A flat, 2-d image of the ship, inside a bottle with a bit of sand. LI is 27! Given its size, with proper LOD control on the mesh model, it really should not be more than 2 or 3. I can't concieve of uploading such a resource hog, if I wanted to build a similar ship in a bottle.

" I've never seen a skybox as small as 48 m² and using only 12 prims. It's impossible!" I made my friend a simple skybox to fit her 512 m^2 parcel. Made from mesh, with proper LOD control, it has only 1 LI. It would shrink just fine to 48 m^2.

In Firestorm and in the official viewer, I think you want the debug setting MaxFPS. Default is -1 to use all the resorces it can get, but you can set a max level.

Nice tip, Coby. I can hardly wait til my next texture gets mangled!

I have several parcels of land in SL, in 2 mainland and 1 rental sim, and 1 or more platforms on all of them. I have never noticed a difference in lag between ground level and high up on a platform. (I usually use FS, but sometimes the official viewer too). I sometimes notice lag being worse one one sim than another, very likely an SL issue. But usally when I see problems such as you describe, it turns out to be the connection. At the bottom of the report generated using Help>About, it tells you the packet loss. For me, if packet loss is less than about 0.3 %, everything runs smoothly. But lag is pretty bad a 5%, and SL is pretty much useless at 10%. (I travel a bit, and see quite a few different connections.)

The trick is to add extra geometry to make the finished mesh larger than 0.01 m when the part you want is the right size. I fisrt used simple shapes like a cone or a cube, set them to a different material face, and then set the texture to full alpha. I have evolved. Now I add to my mesh a small triangle, and use x y and z reflections to make a "cage" of 8 little triangles arranged in a cube around my main mesh. This way, the object center is not shifted from your original mesh, and you can manipulate it much more easily when you load it into SL. If you make the triangles small enough, they will never be rendered in SL, so there is no need to set them to alpha texture. I set them to about 1.5 * 10^-6 meter.

Been here since '06 myself, and one of the things I learned early on is that hardly anyone likes to have someone pop into thier private space unannounced and uninvited. Yeah, it gets you tossed and banned. Violating private space has always been a no no in my experience. And I hope that as long as I have a private space, for which I pay good money, I will not have to put up with idiots barging in and ruining my peace. My living room is *not* your sandbox.

The 5% tax is a minor impact for customers who use MP. The reason I am a fan of MP is that most of the stores I go into are so stuffed with vendors that between the scripts and the textures, the places take forever to rezz. MP is slow and clunky and has bad search. But its not nearly as slow as shopping inworld, so it is easier to filter out the dross.

Sometimes the normal map can be hard to see (and its literally impossible if you do not have the advanced lighting model enabled on the preferences>graphics tab) Here is a link to a detailed example of using the SL materials. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Case_Study_-_Example_wood_crate_using_materials You can even get a free copy of the finished crate from MarketPlace: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Materials-Example-Crate/4968980

Yes, the beta grid is *the* place to go for building/uploading. They give you free funny money when you log in, and it costs the same in $L to upload there as on the main grid. But the beta grid $L's are free. Of course, nothing you build on beta can be directly exported to SL. You will have to upload and pay the regular fees to get them onto the main grid. If you want to upload mesh, you will need to find the beta grid IP quiz, which is exactly the same as the main grid IP quiz. And, if I recall, they require that you give (but not use) payment information, as part of the qualification process for uploading mesh.

I keeping my name and a nicely designed avatar would be great. But in the long run, designing a platform which does not let the clueless creators lock up my computer with laggy, poorly designed crap, would be worth more to me. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of good creators, and having the residents do the building is what makes SL so attractive in the first place, but there are too many things that have been built with 4096x4096 textures used for every last detail. (Yeah, I know SL trims them down to 1024's, but the clueless creators do not). Or some of the nifty keen mesh clothes that have so many verts that you cannot stand next to the person wearing it. please, please, SL2 , put in some building guidlines that make sense.