Vegro Solari

Poenald, I want to suggest to you two names: ZBrush, which is a powerhouse and if you adapt to its workflow, mindblowingly efficient at fast modelling of all kinds, from lowpoly to ultra high detail sculpting. The main thing is that you'd be investing in a whole new skillset with it, quite applicable in real life gfx jobs down the road, if you feel like it at any time, too. SL-wise, with ZBrush you can do a lot more than you'd assume from it's "sculpture" poise; you can do super detailed textures based on light flow, you can do lowpoly models, you can bake normal maps, ambient occlusion, advanced direct painting to models, and all kinds of wicked stuff. There are no "nurbs", or like mathgeek buzzwords, but once you see what you can do, you realize you won't ever miss the buzz the math modelling buzzwords used to give. I know what you're thinking, and I'm not talking about voxel-painting everything by hand, believe me! It's got its own workflow that is refreshing and liberating, and just keeps getting better as time goes on. The learning curve is steep, it's very idiosyncratic, but this is the frequent choice app of the best mesh-masters. Silo 2, this is a very fast, intuitive, low-poly modeller app. You can pick it up in a week or two and amaze yourself how much faster you're turning out efficient and cool meshes. Only does that, but does it very well. If you were stuck on an island with Blender and Zbrush, I can't think of anything you couldn't do with just those two tools (ok, allow yourself gimp or photoshop too) that you see people do with vastly more expensive suites.

I had the same curiosity as you so put together this script which will keep a list of your visitors for you. Drop it in any prim you want and good to go. float HowOftenToCheck = 180; // In seconds, how often will the // sensor look for visitors. Higher = less lagfloat HowFarToLook = 50; // How far in meters the script will look around its position // to find the visiotrs. Up to 96 meters! //============================================================================================== string AllAgents;string OwnerName;string HackTime(){ string xt = llGetTimestamp(); string x; integer i; // First process date out of xt i = llSubStringIndex(xt, "T"); x = llGetSubString(xt, 0, i - 1); // Get rid of the date xt = llGetSubString(xt, i + 1, -1); // Second process time i = llSubStringIndex(xt, "."); x += " " + llGetSubString(xt, 0, i - 1) + "GMT"; return x;} default{ state_entry() { // arc=PI is a sphere, you could look more narrowly in the direction object is facing with PI/2, PI/4 etc. // don't repeat this too often to avoid lag. llSensorRepeat("", "", AGENT, HowFarToLook, PI, HowOftenToCheck); } sensor(integer num_detected) { string thisAgent = ""; integer agentNum; for (agentNum=0; agentNum<num_detected; agentNum++) { key thisKey = llDetectedKey(agentNum); string thisAgent = llDetectedName(agentNum); if (llSubStringIndex(AllAgents+"\n", "\n"+thisAgent+"\n") < 0) { AllAgents = AllAgents + "\n" + "(" + HackTime()+")"+thisAgent; } } } touch(integer num_detected) { if (AllAgents != "") { llOwnerSay("Hi boss! Our visitors were these: "+ AllAgents); AllAgents = ""; } else { llOwnerSay("I didn't notice any new visitors yet..."); llSleep(1.0); } } }

A while back I rented a small shop at Jason's for L$50 or something like that and turned it into an art space. That was awesome, cult following cult following! You can't really tell from the message but this ad from one of the funnest / best landlords you will ever find. They are not paying me to say this stuff either, though... Jason, why don't we talk more about this...

You could probably do this with a cheap web-server (of your own or shared/rented from your code guy). Then it would work something like, they click on your object inworld, and see instructions and a link to that webpage where you and the code guy have set up some Flash/script stuff which does exactly what you want. Once there, they get the play/rec/overdub features. Via the web, not inside SL. Too bad that soundbites from that can't be sent back into the SL object. You might be able to get them playable once they are recorded on the webserver via the "media on prim" way. Overall project complexity would be medium/high, but once finished, the costs for running the webserver especially if you share it, would likely be not much really.

You want llMessageLinked() for your purposes. Definitely. It is quicker-responding and has significantly less impact on sim resource use. Additionally, frees you from worrying about what channel all your objects are talking on, they can be "self contained" linksets.

Brilliantly pulled off! Thank you for this post.

You are cordially invited to try your best Rahkis. Or worst! Whilst I too think it's probably not OK to make money off others' work, I feel maybe one should start with the worst offenders in their quest for world justice. Instead of targeting the helpless SL punks, why not go for the bigger fish in the pond. I suggest starting with the Queen of England. In dong so, you would soon find there is a whole class of extremely wealthy people who do nothing but make money off others' work; and those are the same people who would feign dictate to you what you are and aren't allowed to do in the intellectual sphere also; because now this is called "intellectual property", and capitalists can own that too.

I submit to you that "theft" in this context is a deliberately misleading misnomer. Mesh theft would involve, for example, breaking into the offices of Ubi-soft or Blizzard, taking all their harddrives and backups with meshes, and then making a run for it with the booty. In this situation, we'd have the meshes, and they no longer would. This would be theft. In the case of meshes being uploaded by punks into SL without permission it's only "unauthorized replication" that we're talking about, and not at all "theft".What if the owner of the copyright doesn't actually mind it being ripped for SL? Or simply doesn't care either way? The unauthorized uploaders would then be off the hook (as if they ever were really "on" it), even if some people get a bit cross-eyed from being forced to admit to that fantastically awful-unlawful reality. Copyright is a nebulous abstract thing of real relevance only to lawyers, and only the most schoolmarmish of fools would want to willingly upgrade the issue of feeding this worrying parasitical overgrowth - to become some kind of an "ethical issue", effectively chanting to the same tune as the lawyers. It's like we already accept, without proof, that HEALTHY COMMUNITIES are only those that are nicely fenced up by copyrights, and the consumer sheeple are paying the IP owners, and live in abject fear of overstepping their bounds on this issue. Who would want to? You become a BAD PERSON if you do it, didn't you know? We need to remember that such lawyer ideologies(and lawmakers who support it) are not our (the creators') friends, and they never will be no matter what tunes they're "singing". Thus, in a community of creators, it is certainly not anyone's civic duty, but is perhaps a telling personal choice, to tattle-tale to IP owners. If the thing that inspired the original post is a frustration of the "how can they do this? If it''s not allowed??" kind, then I can't help but offer some illegal advice in the spirit of punk rock and pure conjecture, that surely also inspires those "IP thieves" we are all supposed to slander and hate, and rat out these days. Why don't you take it upon yourself to rip a mesh, any mesh, from a game of your choice, and upload it to SL. You could rip a single triangle that the engine renders the game's particles onto. Possibly an enlightening and inwardly liberating experience could be instore for you. Experience the thrill! Yes, boldly break the TOS! Dye your hair neon green and spike it! All things are still possible, even if someone says they are forbidden to you, unless you pay up. Remind yourself, God did not write the TOS, and what it contains is niether perfect nor just, but merely expedient for LindenLab Inc. And it's all only too similar with the USA Copyright laws.

That's news to me! I wonder how it must work, because you can't even put a folder inside a prim. Is it using a bot to help do that?

It's not possible to give out folders, or even put a folder inside a prim. Just one of SL's quirky limitations. You can get folders, but only from SL Marketplace. And for your split script, check out this cool one that Rolig Loon built: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/LSL-Library/Split-Payment-Vendor/td-p/722093 If you get stuck or need help with it, feel free to inquire!

I think those things look great. Please leave your auto-return off, if you can help it. A bold prim statement. Really spices up the boring urbane, green-acres self-delusion scenery with what looks like a couple of plywood nukes going off.

Some textures will be synthetic, produced by programs, some come from photos, and some are combinations of both! Totally hand-drawn ones are really rare. Texture synthesis has been a vibrant area of research in computer graphics for a long time, so there are tons of tools to do it, including many that are free. If you download Gimp, you can play with a metric ton of those yourself! Photo stocks can be gotten for free on the net also, or you could go out with your camera and capture your own, they'll be more unique that way. Then, again, you could put your pics into Gimp and play with them to produce the final result!

"Our servers have detected that your mesh German Sausage has mature content. Note: you will only be able to rez German Sausage in areas marked as Adult." Enough, enough!

God forbid. God forbid! "We are sorry. You cannot upload your Cute Hat mesh to Second Life for the following reason: Your mesh has a topological signature shaped like Mickey Mouse, owned by Disney, Inc., USA"

Can't say I really agree with Pamela's vision where anything unsupported is eventually thrown out of the Marketplace. To me, these are less like produce, and more like artifacts, sometimes quite unique ones, of people's creativity. Many of the best freebies out there are totally unsupported because their creator passed away. Or otherwise doesn't have time for SL anymore. But when they were still around, those creators took the trouble to set up magic box arrangements for their freebies, and paid for the upkeep of that... That tells you a lot about how they felt about those items. Now just because the Lab can't be bothered to figure out how to code a migration function which wouldn't need every single merchant to manually migrate to DD -- the Marketplace and the SL culture has got to suffer what could be a permanent and irreplaceable loss. I am being annoying on purpose and highlighting the net-negative in this move that merchants are so shortsightedly optimistic about.

O RLY? It's the first time I heard of anyone losing sleep & counting search results over the fact that certain freebies in SL might be without proper customer support! You are a very special person.

I fear those ads are more than just annoying little virus-risk outlets on your screen. Each time a google-ad is served, it collects data. Google collects immense amounts of data on everybody's first life this way, so they can use this to get more money or make CIA happy later. And now, it's collecting data on everyone's SecondLife, because Google just does not know the difference. That means the keywords in each product title you happen to view are silently recorded, correlated with your IP address, past behaviour and sites you googled for... and stored for all time in a secret database of fascinating information you might never know existed about you. Now what if I happily happened to be shopping for detachable penises or BDSM lifestyle outfits or something in the SL Marketplace, say it's for a "performance art project" in SL... Were I just a tiny bit more paranoid, I might be getting a bit worried now what Google is going to think about me going forward! Because, remember: Google Remembers. It's exactly the same issue as we had with the FaceBook integration fiasco. Remember that?

For merchants it's natural to have a short-sighted focus on their own "bottom line", and I get the thinking where "less freebies means people might buy my stuff more", but there must be a few here who realize that a lot of very unique freebies that used to be part of the SecondLife cultural Commons are about to be, or were already wiped out by this latest LL move...

Quick recap: I encountered a permissions-corruption glitch, which does weird things like block fullperm notecards from being edited inside the object, and instead makes no-mod scripts inside the same object editable to end users. At first I thought it was a Marketplace-related thing. However, doing a test re-delivery, the object comes back to me with all the correct permissions. Buying my own item, sending it "as gift" to a friend, results in them getting an object that also works as expected. It all started when I redelivered this item to a lot of customers after doing an update for the product. I used the Transaction/Orders on the Marketplace and clicked "redeliver" to do it. Soon after, different customers get back to me, and explain they have a problem: the notecard in the obect (used for changing script settings) is not editable to them, whilst all the no-mod scripts inside are. When I rez the object, I see all the correct permissions in it. But then when I send it (this time direct from my inventory to theirs, no Marketplace) they still have the same issue. That's very weird, if you ask me. Now here's the fix for it that I accidentally found: I take the troubled object and set its permissions to Mod, Copy (instead of the original Copy only). When this is resent (my inventory to theirs) to customers, their notecard editing now works fine. Things I still do not understand are: how is it possible that Re-delivery via the Transactions page on Marketplace gives people a glitched item, but me ordering the same exact item (from myself) and sending it to a friend "as gift" results in a correctly working item? (even though the permissions are identical in both cases) We were able to rule out "customer ploys" or anything like that, since in this product's case there's just no benefit to be gained. Dirtnap, thanks for putting your head against this too. Yes, I did use the "Permissions" button to set things up inside the object before I put it on Marketplace. The package contents on the site show correct perms. Test redeliveries come back to me with no glitches. Also Pamela, how dare you ask me if I filed a bug report, that's private between me and Linden Lab.

An ongoing update on this "from the trenches" for you guys. A different customer sent me an IM today, describing the exact same problem. Good thing we know how to fix it, but it's annoying we still don't know why this can happen in the first place. Extra data I was able to get on this glitch: - Customers with the glitch get your object (perms=Copy) and can't edit the fullperm notecard inside of it. They can edit the no mod scripts inside the same object! - They can copy the notecard they were supposed to edit out into their own inventory, and there it becomes editable! - Bypassing the marketplace and just sending the object to the customer from my inventory, they still have the same problem (and still can edit non-editable scripts). - Yet, this only happened to those people who got an update that I did via the "Redeliver" buttons in Order History on Marketplace. If I use "send as gift", with the same exact item (perms = Copy), the person who recieves it has no problems, can edit notecard, scripts are not editable, everything works correctly. Anyone have ideas? What's happening there?

The Top Searched thing takes ages to "compute" now (no idea why, this used to be almost instant before). I have only a handful of items in my list, and it still takes a good few minutes. So maybe you should let it sit overnight in the background Lasher, and then come morn, you'll have your report. Maybe!

That's a good point Theresa, but in this case I definitely rezzed, checked the perms (were correct), resent -- and still the customer couldn't edit what they should be editing, and could edit the scripto-jumbo which was all No Mod. We know it wasn't a customer ploy, since I make ambient sound-machines mostly (this was one of those). There's no benefit from having a mod version of this, the prims in it are just default spheres, and go transparent/disappear when clicked anyway. Or extra copies of it since the thing comes as Copy... I was as surprised by this surprise as you.

Just joking, it's not really that bad. :matte-motes-evil-grin: But, .... did you know that if you make stuff with scripts "NO MOD", sometimes (randomly) Secondlife will make them MOD, and your users will be able to look in them and mess around. No, I didn't know that either!!! Here's the story, somebody got an item from me via Marketplace, which has a few no mod scripts, and a full-perm notecard in it where you can change settings. The problem was, this customer couldn't open the full-perm notecard. Instead she could open all the no-mod techy scripts inside which were, of course, confusing. First I double checked the item, the exact one that is up on marketplace: notecard is fullperm, all scripts are COPY only, and the object is COPY only. Weird, right? Then, I manually re-sent the object; but you know what? The customer still had the same problem with the resent object (I dragged it from inventory, no Marketplace invovled this time), can't open the notecard, but can open the no-mod scripts instead! Bemused, I set the object to MOD, COPY instead and resent it. Now they could finally edit the notecard! Determined to get to the bottom of it, I bought my own item at the marketplace and sent it to a friend "as gift", then asked them to check it for me. Our findings were that you could edit the fullperm notecard just fine, and the no-mod scripts were not editable. In other words, it was all as you would have reasonably expected! The object was not changed or updated on marketplace in any way between when the customer with the problem got it, and when I re-ordered it from myself for my friend. It should be the exact same object. I think the overall moral of the story is that, if you have things inside scripts that you don't want people to have, like encryption keys for in-world rpgs, breedables or whatever, then maybe you shouldn't. And instead try to somehow do it with an outside webserver or similar. I've heard of No-Mod stuff magically going Mod by itself before, but now I know that's not just rumors, it keeps on randomly happening... (Also why did making the object "Mod,Copy" from it's original state of "Copy only" suddenly let the customer access the inexplicably blocked full perm notecard inside of the object? That seems like there are errors or transient glitches in server code related to permissions. )

That might be doable if the object has a "media" face on it, and this makes a request to some outside server controlled by the script-maker, so that instead of getting actual movies or whatever, it causes the user's IP to be logged on that outside server. So as you see, while it's not really possible to get the IP inside of LSL alone, it's not really that hard to get it if theyreally wanted to. Logging IPs this way may be considered against the Community Privacy Standards or TOS, but since it's the outside server doing it by exploiting a legitimate viewer function, Linden Lab can't always do something about it. There used to be "scandalous" products that people made which allowed tracking based on this technique, they marketed it as a tool to reveal alts of "griefers" etc., but as far as I know LL has pulled the plug on the sale of those tools, because they said it violated privacy guidelines. If the user has "media on prims" and all of that turned off in their options, then presumably that particular user won't be vulnerable. (At least I hope that's the case). Media on prims is mainly used to display movies or websites. Remember too, your IP is no longer secret if you connect to any outside website, streaming server, or anything- all of those will happily log it. If it's super important to keep anon, you should look into VPN services or other similar ways to mask your IP. It's good to be paranoid, but you need to keep it in perspective: did you know every banner ad you see on the internet has logged your IP address? And that usually every email sent also reveals the IP? And that, now that the adversary has your IP, there isn't really that much they can do with it, except try to freak you out? Unless you're up against the CIA or Anonymous or something, then good luck, because no amount of healthy paranoia is really going to help much