Josh Susanto

If you install a chatbot, you might be able to get somewhat intelligent verbal responses. As the chatbot talks, the resultant text could be used to trigger various script functions. That, to me, might be more interesting than a robot that simply responds/reacts to set verbal cues from other people.

>Are the magic boxes no longer necessary? No, that's step 2. Step one is making them gradually useless, apparently.

I hadn't considered that, probably because I never shingle roofs in SL. But it's a great example. Thanks.

I use Lunapic, not PS, but I agree with those who say you should size up you images before editing them. Sizing them down later shouldn't really be necessary, but if you feel like you're wasting precious data space otherwise, then, sure. I usually size things up to the nearest exponent of 2 on each side and just leave them there. If it is something where I need a softer curve like in the given example, sizing it up as far as possible seems to be the basic idea. Mostly, I deal with natural rock surfaces. If they are 3000 on a side, I will tend to crop them to 2048 or some other number with a lot of factors of 2, and then shrink them to 1024 before loading, just so I can see what's going to happen to them if I load them. Always crop keeping in mind what SL is going to do. Cropping and resizing are not the same, and you can protect at least some of the image clarity by cropping to dimensions that SL is actually going to use, rather than dimensions it will fudge to fit. One advantage to me of editing with an elarged image is that if I use the cutout circle function, a larger circle is a rounder circle. This matters because I produce seamless textures by offsetting images so that the edge becomes a cross in the center, and then dropping a corroded circle over the cross. I corrode the circles by applying a %-controlled magic wand successively to a series of color borders. Turning one pixel into 4 or more pixels before putting the circle crop through assures a more complex starting circle edge and gives me slightly more control of the final corroded contour. There are also types of edit data that will do more than simply duplicate pixels if you increase the dimensions of the image before applying them. I'm not a big fan of PS liquefy, but I expect you'll do less harm with it if you first make the image as large as possible (think about it). The negative side effects of things like a "sharpen" tool can also be somewhat mitigated simply using an enlarged version of the initial image. Don't just believe me, though. Try it for yourself and compare.

If you make a 5-layered helical cone sculpt, mirror it downward, smooth as torus and apply torus stitching, you can also use an alpha in which a branch or frond is mirrored vertically from the center of the texture and duplicated at least eleven times horizonatally, you can then apply a script that rotates the prim in one direction while rotating the texture in the opposite direction, and the branches or fronds will appear to ripple correctly, whether you are viewing them from the front or the back. I hope that clears it up.

I don't think that becoming self-sufficient in SL is particularly mysterious. If you keep your production and distribution costs low, it's practically inevitable that you can exceed them with a handful of even merely adequate products. Doing it well and/or actually enjoying it, though, is a matter of finding your "thing". In my case, the SL market gradually pays me more and more as I offer more new products, and I don't even promote them; they promote each other as they spread like a full-perms fungal infection throughout SL. You've probably seen a few of them by now. Interestingly, my most profitable products have the fewest prims (mostly just one prim) and take the least amount of time to produce. In fact, my most consistently profitable product is just sculpted relief wall that literally took me a couple of minutes to sculpt once I had liberated the unprotected image from Google. If you are at all interested in making better rocks than most of what you see kicking around SL, I would welcome the competition, and I would be happy to teach you everything I know about it for free. You can certainly use the same techniques to produce plenty of other things, as I do, but the money for me seems to be in rocks; rock slabs, rock spheroids, rock cylinders, rock blocks, rocks wih a deep dark hole in them. All from photographs. I can also show you how to make sculpted alpha masks, alpha plants that have both a coherent front and a back to each leaf, 1-prim mannequins, seamless photographic textures, and various other things. You might find that you have a special talent for one of these things, or for something related, that will enable you to produce a unique product line of your own. Whatever you do, though, it is important to remember that the most important variable in your ability to succeed in SL is not talent or what special tools are available to you; the most important variable is persistence. More than anything, you just need to start doing something and trying to do it better each time.

I see the cone shaped torso a lot in RL in Bogotá. I am told that it is usually a sign of both body reshaping surgery and body reshaping undergarments. It's a look that I guess some people like a lot, but I can't think it would be worth the difficulty.

I think the point was that we sometimes get messages that just don't make any sense.

I'm still not sure how to make any use of the planar function.

So it means something like "as-yet-unfailed"?

I'm not some kind of Luddite. It's more a case of "eleventy-billion times bitten, twice shy".

'planar'?

That actually would make more sense. The items are in the shopping cart, but it has not reached the cashier. Is that it?

If I understand correctly, that's the first condition of an order; the order data hasn't been lost (yet), but the delivery system continues to do basically nothing. So, basically, it means "ordered".

Inspired by the direct delivery idea, I just went downstairs and spent half an hour opening all the canned food in the house, so that I can get at it faster when I need it.

I'm not clear. You mean this thing? https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/keyword-spam-texture-prim/1857316 I don't find yours in search, but if you want to put one up for sale just to test how the search system works, I'll gladly gift you with it.

[people hate change.] I didn't until the Lindens taught me to.

[Magic boxes require the region to be online for them to deliver the items] And my inventory would also presumably need to be accessible for the direct delivery. I've never seen my box region down, even when box contents show as unavailable in the market, but my inventory gets temporarily abridged at least once or twice a week, in a way that prevents me from manually correcting delivery errors. So - you tell me - what SHOULD I prefer as delivery inventory system? OTOH, if this somehow means that I can make my inventory reappear by pressing a reset button only about a dozen times over a period of about an hour, that would make my inventory comparable in utility to a magic box. Ist that part of the plan?

Hopefully the pet infestation will at least slow down if LL gets sued by Zynga.

I don't have to like everything that happens in SL for it to be legitimate. The horse thing is at least better than when SL was full of casinos.

[Oooohhh .. shiny!] AND - hey- I've got fudge for ... OH, look... there goes a squirrel!

>Well, it looks like there's a cap on it now. What's the cap? Is it just low enough to prevent a $5,000US total dispute over a period of 12 months? (and why would I ask that?)

I also do not blame LL for at least this one thing. I'm pretty sure that the initial programmer never imagined me sculpting an alpha prim rolled into a helical cone and then folded up into itself at exactly the same set of points and thought "how can I prevent the leaves on the back of Josh's plant from showing through the front even if he renders it inside-out?".

what do you need sculpted?

I didn't get a response, but the problem did go away. Between those 2 things, I'll take what I got, thanks.