Jennifer Boyle

If you take it a step at a time, then you don't have to learn as much all at once, and at each stage you'll find that some of what you already learned helps you. If I were in your position, I would start with a mesh body because the mesh body is a bigger improvement over the system body that mesh heads are over system heads.For me, the most important characteristic of a body is support by clothing makers. I got Maitreya for that reason, and have been completely satisfied. Not only are plenty of clothes available, but the body keeps getting better, and the tech support is good. You should be able to get a basic wardrobe of nice clothes without spending much if you look for promos and group gifts. At that stage, I'd just enjoy and learn for a while, perhaps while demoing mesh heads when convenient. Then select a head after you are comfortable with the rest of it. My estimate for mainstream body, head, and adequate but not huge wardrobe is L$12,000-15,000. That is assuming some effort is put into finding nice clothes that are not too expensive.

There is a script that Maitreya gives away free. You rez a prim, put the script in the prim, adjust the alpha cuts they way you want them, click on the prim, click on a button in the menu that pops up, click on another button, and you're done. Then, any time you attach that prim, the same pattern of alpha cuts will be reproduced, and when you detach it, those parts will be unhidden. If the clothing item is modifiable, you can just put the script in it, and not wear the have the extra prim. Some like to make the prims invisible. I like to make them brightly-colored so they are easy to work with and attach them to a HUD attachment point and position them offscreen.

Isn't is sorta pitiful that "live" chat support for a service that has users in all time zones worldwide is available only eight hours per day?

I am not familiar with that body. You can with the current (V5.3) version of the Maitreya Lara body. It can be done by wearing two tattoo layers and using the HUD to hide opposite arms of the two. I have no idea if other bodies and their HUDs have similar functionality. I suspect that some do, and some don't.

I am not as knowledgeable as others who have answered. Nevertheless, I may be able to offer helpful advice. It is VERY difficult and time-consuming to get a mesh head to look like a specific person. Many of us had system heads with faces that we had had for many years. We wanted the improved features and appearance of a mesh head but not to look like a different person. We had to invest a LOT of time and effort to achieve a good approximation. I advise that you, as a new user, set the bar lower for yourself. Just try for an avatar that resembles you, not one that reproduces your appearance faithfully. You can easily achieve that without inordinate effort. In your place, I would cruise the head shops, look at the displays, and find one that I thought looked more like I wanted to look than most. I would get the demo and play with the shape sliders to see if I could get it a look that was good enough to satisfy me. I think I'd be able to do that in a short time.

Before I had a mesh body, I made a lot of alpha masks because I could make them hide exactly what needed to be hidden, and the ones that came with mesh clothing often didn't do that. After I got a Maitreya Lara mesh body, I made a lot of autohiders because it is a lot more convenient to adjust the alpha cuts once and wear the autohider ever after when a garment is worn. Now that we have BOM, I have gone back to making alpha masks because they can mask exactly what is needed, and are not limited to predesignated areas. For a long time, I've thought that we needed to share these things. It just makes no sense for many people to independently make something when we could share. I propose that we have a freebie autohider and alpha mask store. I visualize a building with rows of shelves. Each donor could rez a box containing her contribution and set it for sale for L$0. Obviously, there are more details that need to be addressed, but I wanted to see if there was any interest before taking the trouble to address them. If there is sufficient interest, I will make the necessary land, a building, and simple fixtures available for it.

I'd like to get a copy, if someone has.

Thanks, Wulfie, you are so helpful. Why did the creator of the first object made the object no-mod instead of just making the script non-mod? Wouldn't their intellectual property have been just as well-protected? From the intended use of the object, it is pretty obvious that users could save attachment point if they could add scripts. Why do creators treat customers like this?

To each her own. The point isn't the exact number of HUDs. The point is that we need several, and, therefore, each needs to occupy only the NECESSARY screen space. When I am tweaking the colors of components of an outfit, I need all the HUDs for all the garments onscreen (or available from minimized) because i am never sure about what color/pattern one part needs to be until I have decided on all. I may change the color of my skirt and then decide I need to change my blouse, and then decide I need to change my shoes, and then decide i need to change my jacket, and then decide I need to change my shoes again, etc. ad infinitum. I may have HUDs onscreen for hair that has a band that i can change the color of, top, bottom, hose, shoes, underwear, and, occasionally, purse and/ or hat. Anyway, since a lot of customers want HUDs to be no larger than necessary, why wouldn't creators accommodate them? As other posters in this thread have made clear, it's pretty easy to do.

I have a no-mod scripted object created by someone else that I need to wear. I have a no-mod script made by someone else in a prim that I created that I need to wear. If I place the first object inside the second object and wear the second object, will the scripts still work properly? If they would, I could save an attachment point.

A perfect example. Yes, but you aren't a female clothes horse! I have hundreds or texture-change garments, and I like varying the colors and mixing and matching them in outfits. For special situations, like an ensemble that I know that I'll want to keep exactly the same over time, I do use your method. If I used it routinely, I would have thousands of of outfits and my inventory would be in the hundreds of thousands. Great idea!

Superseded by the post below. I intended to edit this one, but created another one by accicent. Sorry.

I am aware that it isn't necessary or desirable to wear most HUDs all the time. There are exceptions, such as HUDs that animate parts of the avatar. However, when getting dressed by donning an outfit, I do need all of the HUDs for the various components of the outfit on the screen. I need all of the clothing HUDs on the screen at once because I need to see what the various pieces look like together, and I need others that affect appearance and how the clothes fit, like my body HUD. It is inconvenient to wait until after I have the outfit adjusted to add the ones that I need to wear most of the time, like AO, or ones that are necessary to use some part of the outfit, like a weapon. The rotating mesh seems like a great solution. I have not encountered any HUDs that are so small that I think anyone would have trouble seeing them clearly. I guess there's nothing a creator can do that will please everyone, but like most people, I want them to please me. I have seen a few HUDs that allowed the user to change the size, a good feature. Some have multiple tabs or pages, a way to allow many buttons while keeping the size down. There is absolutely no reason to have empty space between HUD buttons; some have a lot of it. And they it isn't necessary to have the store name in large letters or a large logo.

As time goes on, many of us are using more and more HUDs. We have them for AOs, mesh bodies, mesh heads, deformers, various attachments, and all kinds of mesh clothing. Consequently, when we first don an outfit containing multiple texture-change items, we may have ten or more HUDs onscreen. With the need for so many, it becomes critically important for them to take no more space than necessary. Many HUDs are much larger than they need to be. The best ones are both no larger than they need to be and can be minimized. The worst ones are much larger than necessary and, in addition, have a lot of blank, wasted space between the clickable buttons and are surrounded by a wide, useless transparent border than interferes with clicking adjacent HUDs. As a heavy user of HUDs, I wonder what is in the minds of creators when they make large HUDs when small one would work as well. I can think of examples from my own inventory of two HUDs with the same functionality one of which occupies many times the screen area the other does. Creators of avatar components, attachments, and clothing, please make your HUDs only as large as they need to be.

I actually happened to have my inventory open looking at calling cards at the exact moment a friend changed her username, and the name changed before my eyes. Her IM log files from before and after have the names that she had at the time, so that IMs from before the change are in one file, and the ones from after are in another. In your example, IMs from before the change would be in a file named Billy Bo.txt, and the ones from after would be in Sponge Bite.txt.

The tile says it all. Just curious.

For less than what advertising on a radio station would cost, you can offer very attractive prizes at events, which will likely draw a good crowd.

Let me ask you a related question that I have long wondered about. We have been told many times that the reason that SL's performance is not better is that all of the content is dynamic and the system must constantly update the data it uses for rendering. Most of the content that I am routinely around is almost static. Most of the non-avatar content in the sim where I live is structures and furniture, much of which hasn't changed for months or years. I have wondered why locked objects cannot be flagged and checked much less frequently than others, saving a lot of resources. I visualize the system intentionally taking several (10-30?) seconds to unlock an object and the system examining it at the same interval instead of multiple times per second. Locking objects could be incentivized by giving an LI reduction for locked objects, if just having better performance wasn't enough incentive. My BF is a professional programmer, and he thinks such a system is feasible and should help. Sometimes, when I logon in my own house, where I spend at least half my time, textures on objects that have not changed for years take as long as a minute to load. Other times it's really fast. I have a very fast connection, powerful CPU and graphics card, lots of RAM, and OS, programs, cache, and data all on SSDs, and cache is at maximum permitted size. Why is there such variation? What is going on to make it so slow sometimes? It's been considerably better the last several weeks. I've wondered if the migration to the cloud had something to do with that.

I wonder if anyone has ever filed a lawsuit in RL court against the owner of an account to recover losses due to fraud in SL. I realize that most disputes don't involve amounts for which that would be practical. Surely, sometime it must have involved residents of the same state, so that a suit could be filed in small-claims court, which might be practical for large amounts.

Yes. That would be a big improvement. Very high draw distances might be useful for photography sometimes, and frame rate wouldn't be important.

Perhaps more would be possible if the viewer code utilized the processing power available on most modern PCs by efficiently using multiple cores. This will have to happen at some point if SL is to remain viable. Why not now? If it's not possible to have on-the-fly computation of avatar size and position, shouldn't it at least be possible to have manual adjustments for avatar height and girth, similar to the commonly available adjustments for position and rotation? That would improve the experience with two or multi-person animations a lot without needing much additional processing power. Or, even better, couldn't a script determine avatar size itself? Doing it once at the beginning of an animation would require only a little additional processing.

Why do we have this limitation? Why can't scripts determine the 3D coordinates of the avatars' bones and adjust animations to fit avatars as needed?

One of my me3mories from long ago is being interviewed by Botgirl Questi. https://botgirlq.blogspot.com/2008_04_10_archive.html

I'm not quite there, as I thought I was. I did more or less solve the problem of the visible prim inside my head. I made a black sphere and attached it there, so, if I'm wearing my black hair, it is inconspicuous. I did not solve the problem with the pink inner corners of the eyes yet. I'm having a problem with the Lelutka eye applier---it detaches after a couple of seconds, so it's unusable. The major problem is that parts of the avatar become fully transparent. Only the lower tattoo area is affected. Sometimes, the whole area becomes transparent. Other times, just parts do, but they always correspond to cuts on the alpha HUD. It can be precipitated by teleporting and by making areas either transparent or opaque using the HUD. The areas that become transparent, or stop being transparent, in respose to the HUD sometimes are not the same areas that the HUD changed. Sometimes the changes with the HUDF produce the expected result with no other change. Here are some illustrative pics: Any ideas? The only explanation that I can think of is a bug in the Maitreya HUD.

I made progress, and I thought others might be interested. I started with Blush's suggestion, and made Maitreya applier using the semi-transparent white texture. I applied it to a Maitrya tattoo layer. It gave me exactly the effect I sought. Then I made an applier for my Lelutka Simone head and for eyes using the same texture. Here is me wearing both tattoos: I am, of course, wearing a full body alpha mask. Interestingly, it isn't necessary to wear the Maitreya body, and there is no change in appearance when i put it on or take it off. There are still small pink areas at the inner corners of both eyes. I think I can get rid of them by experimenting with the eye applier more (I had no idea what some of the settings in it were.) There is an opaque box prim inside my head that is part of the head. I can't do anything about that. Too bad it wasn't transparent, which it just as well could've bee. At least there's no prim brain in there!