Qie Niangao

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: 7 Seas isn't gambling. You pay for a fishing rod and bait. You are not paying to play, you are buying something in SL. It's akin to buying a race car to drive in a race. What you buy is tangible, within the confines of SL. You actually get something, not an entry fee. If you had to pay to enter the fishing derby, that would be gambling. I don't think that distinction actually works. To be honest, I hadn't thought of 7Seas at all when the policy was announced, but in areas that pay out L$s for "fishing contests", those L$1 rods are a problem here because there is no way to play for free, and the objects themselves are quite obviously not sold as mechandise for any other reason than to permit playing the fishing game. All this lawyer hocus-pocus notwithstanding, LL will still have to make decisions about what they consider skill-gaming and therefore subject to the new policy. So it in fact doesn't really matter what we think about this, nor even what it says in the policy -- it's all up to whatever the Lab wants or thinks it can get away with. They may choose to see L$1 fishing rods as "merchandise" instead of "game tokens" even when there's a L$-payout contest, but that's really up to them and what they think they can pull over on the Feds.

That checkbox exists in the Linden viewer, too, but I don't think it's actually what you want here, unless you have enough tier to spare that you can pre-load Group B with enough to cover the land transfer, which I think you'd need to do before the "buy for group" transaction will work. Even if it removed the tier from Group A, I don't think it would know that it needed to first add it to Group B before doing anything else. Maybe, but that level of sophistication is not what I'd expect from the group land tools.

I don't understand "land credited" to your account -- do you mean just individually owned, rather than group deeded? If so, then to simply transfer land from Group A to Group B with the least fuss and bother: Go into Group A's land contributions and remove the tier you're contributing to cover the land you want to transfer. (It will fuss about needing more land credits, but you can ignore that for a few minutes.) Add that amount to Group B's land contributions. Set the land to sale to yourself as an individual. Set your active group to Group B. In About Land, choose "Buy Land For Group" If you moved enough tier in Step 1, Group B should now own the land. If Group A owned any other land, go back and make sure it has all the tier contributed that it needs. (Sometimes there's rounding errors or some other mistake in your calculations back in step 1 (like maybe you forgot the 10% group bonus.)

Zak Kozlov wrote: What if someome make a token system? What if i'm giving away a vendor that's selling you a game for price X and the payout system of playing that game is grid-wide kind of thing? Technicaly, you don't buy-in to play the game! You just buy a game (an object) that allows you to play it and potentialy win money... in the same way getting into a free-to-enter building contest, where let's say.. you paid for the textures you are using. This policy is unfair, it has potential to kill some of the biggest markets in Second Life or create a monopoly of them if i'm contacting a lawyer it will be to figure out if some of the loopholes I can think of can be used with no problems. Hey, everything have a good side! ... this whole policy is so crazy that it motivates me to be productive again and find a workaround! Fine, but some free advice from someone who's not a lawyer (as far as you need to know), just don't waste your time on the token scheme. That was done to death after the first gambling ban back in 2007. The Lab wasn't born yesterday. You can make everyone's life arbitrarily miserable with tokens asymptotically approximating gacha prizes, but ultimately the most miserable of all would be you.

daisybloomer wrote: Drake1 Nightfire wrote: I wonder.. Is a gatcha machine technically a game of chance? Its like those claw games at the mall. It's a good question, though I think the distinction is in where the element of chance is. In a skill game, you put money in and you can end up with nothing coming out. In RL, those claw machines you are talking about, you put money in and you can end up grabbing nothing and end up with nothing coming out. Gacha machine, you put money in but you do get sometihng out every time. The difference is the first two is chance "of winning something" versus the last is chance "of what you win." You may not want to go down this rabbit-hole. I tried to explore it over in the corresponding SLU thread, and got very hostile reactions from folks rabidly defensive of their gacha addictions. In practice, though, there's no question that LL has already defined their way out of it by stipulating that the payoff must be in L$s, not gacha "merchandise." (Yeah, I know there's a loophole there big enough to drive a truck through, but see that SLU thread for how folks react to it.)

Phil Deakins wrote: If you put money in, and not all of it was used, but then the system closed so that you couldn't use what was left, then you would have suffered a financial loss. That's not going to happen. There will be no unused money, and there will be no 'stuff' (objects, land, etc.) that the owner hasn't had their money's worth out of. Yeah, I get it that this is your belief, and if LL shouts to the rooftops that SL1 is closing Real Soon Now, then it will be true -- nobody will be foolish enough to spend anything in SL that they won't get all the entertainment value from immediately. Of course, the more that's known, the more the economy in SL changes. I mean, I routinely used to buy copiable high-end landscaping stuff with the intention of using it for a long time in a lot of places, and historically that's worked out well, but now I rather regret some recent purchases that I'd have been much, much better off buying the less expensive no-copy versions because I'll never get to amortize those costs over anything like the number of copies I'd expected at time of purchase. Instead of buying longer-term stuff like plants, prefabs, and furniture, then, we should shift our spending to hookers and blow.

For simple scripts, you can just edit them in-world, and they don't need any particular extension -- indeed, they're never "files" in a filesystem, just stored in a database with lots of other in-world assets. Edit the object, go to the Contents tab of the Build Tool, press "New Script" and write your script there in the script editor. (It starts you out with a very simple script that you'll replace.) Or you can create the same "New Script" as an addition to Inventory, then drag and drop it on whatever object you want to script. For what you want to do, you'll likely find llLoadURL useful. You might also want to review this page in the wiki, which is probably easier to understand than my instructions above.

I'm having trouble with the apparent definition of "losses" here. Somewhere you limit it to "out of pocket" losses, which seems weirdly narrow -- it almost defines-away the problem or narrows it to the kind of mishap for which there are insurance policies. Well, even narrower, inasmuch as people routinely insure future cash flows (crops, a famous pianist's hands, etc.) It's certainly true that it's been quite a few years since anybody sensible "invested" in SL with a realistic expectation of generating returns from that investment. But it certainly did happen, back in Anshe's day, for example. The kind of outlays that she and her investors made back then were not for immediate "enjoyment" and would amount to very substantial losses were they insane enough to do the same today. Similarly, the Lab is now demanding that anybody who wants to run "skill games" must invest funds in amounts I think vastly underestimated by most posters -- at least tens of thousands of US$s, in my reading of the requirements. Now, one can hope that there's nobody deluded enough to actually make that investment, but I think that would be a false hope. So suppose some fool does so... how long must LL keep this grid open before parting that fool from his money would no longer qualify as a "loss"? (At root, I don't think this kind of "loss" is very interesting, nor really germane to the situation. The issue in my mind is whether the very disruptive change of SL2 is most likely to lead to the best outcome. I've come around to believing that it probably is, only because the number of incompatible changes they need to make to have a platform viable for the future would be more disruptive if they made them in SL1, obsoleting great chunks of people's inventory from one login to the next. But that's not necessarily true. It's by no means a foregone conclusion that they couldn't get to the same place, spending less development costs, by drastic migration of the existing platform, rather than developing a whole different one from scratch.)

Oh, okay, so just the general ability to suggest changes to policy, nothing specifically tentative about this particular policy. Gotcha.

Lucifer Densmith wrote: Ocatavia highlighted the stupidity of this New tos (or potential new tos, because US, the resident are supposed to SUGGEST to LL our recommendations about it, so LL still able never launch this new tos, thats why i recommend to every people to highlight the stupidity of this potential new tos, in this topic. That part I bolded, what does it mean? That is, "supposed" by whom? Did LL somewhere say they were soliciting suggestions? (I'm not being snarky; it's just completely disconnected from reality as I understand it, so I wonder if I'm missing something here.)

On the contrary, there's always hope! ... and in this particular case, I don't think that hope would be entirely baseless. Last I heard on the subject, Simon was making progress on significant improvements to chat. (Incidentally, for obscure reasons that I don't recall and probably never completely understood, group chat in SL is somehow very different from what IRC and XMPP can support. It's not as if LL never tried those obvious approaches, but they were dismal failures.) (EDIT: Even more incidentally, there are lots of reasons for SL Groups, completely unrelated to chat. That's part of the problem with Groups: they try to do too many things, so they don't do any of them very well. Thinking of it that way, however, I suddenly wonder if there's anything relevant to be borrowed from Google Hangouts.)

Marketplace is such a disaster; if the damned thing is available there, it's well hidden in all the other garbage that purports to be radio and media equipment. It may be easier to learn scripting than to search this godforsaken Marketplace. With that in mind, the particular trick involved here is pretty simple: the script simply needs to use PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT and call llParcelMediaCommandList individually for each avatar who's supposed to listen to the stream. As already mentioned above, this means that it can't use the usual parcel audio (aka "land radio") stream, but rather only the parcel media stream. That kind of matters because folks rightly expect to be spied-upon using the media stream -- in fact, it's exactly this _COMMAND_AGENT version of llParcelMediaCommandList that was used by the RedZone scumbag to detect and publicize alt account identities, a few years ago. Hence, many folks routinely disable all media in their viewers, or at least use media stream filtering in third party viewers.

To have an art exibhition in SL you DONT need an (A) place. We can show naked pictures, we can be naked, but we CANNOT "use" it in publick when in (M) SIMS. That may be correct -- rules change all the time -- but early-on we were told that nude RL photographs are Adult if open to the public (as in a store) or visible in the open (on private residential parcels not set to show in search). At that time, that was how they interpreted this part of the Maturity Ratings policy: A region must be designated Adult if it hosts, advertises, or publicly promotes: Representations of intensely violent acts, for example depicting death, torture, dismemberment or other severe bodily harm, whether or not photo-realistic (meaning that images either are or cannot be distinguished from a photograph). Photo-realistic nudity. [.... Emphasis mine.] I only mention that for historical reference because there's just no telling how the policy is being interpreted at this point. (And, of course, the OP's gallery may not even have nude RL photography.)

Which prim is this script in? My hunch is that it's in the root prim, which is link #1 in the multi-prim linkset, which is one of the ones you change with the link commands... and in the s_setting state you have a changed() handler that calls llGetPermissions, from which the run_time_permissions handler will IM about the shift controls. So I"m guessing that the link commands cause CHANGED_COLOR and CHANGED_TEXTURE events, and the changed() handler isn't checking for the specific change when it should ask for perms.

Phil Deakins wrote: I think what has probably made a significant difference is the marketplace, where people can find what they think they'll like and then use the inworld search to find the store and check it out. There are also direct links from Marketplace to in-world locations. Those let shoppers avoid in-world search altogether for those products -- in the event that the links are actually accurate. More often than not, they're to some long-absent skybox above what's become a graveyard of starved breedable critters. Anyway, it's all an absurd anachronism that there even is a distinction between Marketplace and in-world shopping -- should be exactly the same search automatically populated with exactly the same content. (And yeah: if a merchant has no in-world place to rez their wares then they don't get listed on Marketplace, Tough.)

Perrie Juran wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: Moni Duettmann wrote: At least I can't remember a situation where "clearing the cache" solved a problem. This is so weird. I keep hearing folks say this, but I get corrupted texture cache about once a week, and it fixes by clearing cache -- always and only by clearing cache. I am almost always using one or another beta viewer, so that may contribute to more cache corruption, but still it's so odd that some folks seem never to have the problem. I'm surprised that you don't install them in different locations to avoid cross contamination. But something strange did happen to me last week. I crash a lot because of the texure memory problem. Normally I just relog. But last week FS could not get pass "loading texture cache." I wound up having to do a reinstall. There hasn't been much chance for cross-contaminating, but it's a good suggestion and something I should be careful about going forward. Until very recently, there wasn't anything left to contaminate because I kept cache on ramdisk, but I've just changed operating systems and cache now persists on the SSD, so it could conceivably happen the next time the viewer upgrades Incidentally, about that texture memory problem: One of the reasons I finally switched to Windows after over a decade of running Linux on the desktop, was an attempt to escape that same texture memory problem -- at least, that's how it was reported in the SL console log. It took me about a month of trying everything (including 64-bit Ubuntu -- which I do not recommend) before I discovered that I had a bad stick of DRAM. This despite the fact it always and repeatedly passed every stage of memtest86 with flying colours. Both Linux and Windows 7 worked without a hitch, but what finally gave it away was that Windows 8.1 simply refused to boot with that memory present but worked fine when it was replaced with identical memory borrowed from another machine. So, apparently those texture cache problems might be indicating a hardware problem too subtle to appear with normal system diagnostics -- nor even targeted tools such as memtest86. At least I haven't seen them recur since I got rid of that almost undetectably bad memory. (Note: It is absolutely true that the bad memory could have caused cache corruption, but I've had it occur a couple time already since I fixed that problem. I should explain that I'm not particularly complaining about cache corruption as a problem, but more puzzling over the mystical attachment some folks feel for their ancient cache contents.) Oh, and yeah, I've used HTTP Textures constantly for a long time. When they were first an option, I'd toggle that off and on to get stuff to load, but that was a long time ago, and now loading performance with HTTP Textures is just head-and-shoulders better than without it.

:smileyembarrassed:

Drongle McMahon wrote: On the other hand, I can't immediately think what hourly or fortnightly changes would be so much better met by an assignable mesh asset than rezzing a new instance. Can you enlighten me with some examples? The uses I've most often heard are about the ability to offer small changes in a single mesh's geometry. I guess an example would be a car that has a bunch of alternate options for wheels, where one would dearly like to switch those wheel geometries without having to either replace the car altogether or (perhaps worse?) script a solution that surgically changes the linkset by removing one mesh wheel object and replacing it with another. The specific problem I face is more stark, and for my application, it's impractical for me to use Mesh at all, given the SL1 implementation that conflates instance and model. I have a network of scripted objects scattered around the grid with instance UUIDs that are static, but I change the appearance of those objects occasionally, when I'm feeling creative. If their UUIDs change, I have to revise scripts in another whole bunch of objects scattered around the grid. It's possible to reduce that impact by using another level of abstraction -- an object "registry" that keeps track of UUIDs, so all comms must first clear through the registry, sort of like DNS (where that registry can be in-world or external). But that's an extra layer of both system delay and in-world processing, to say nothing of the added script memory to support that extra complexity. Now, I don't really care in SL1 because I still have prims and sculpts that I can modify to my heart's content while retaining their instance identity, so I can just ignore mesh altogether. But if a new world were to support only a similarly neutered representation of Mesh and no other object type, I'd have to abandon changing such objects.

Oh, speaking of Mesh in the new world, whatever import format(s) they choose to support, please let them not castrate their internal asset representation as they did in SL1, such that a rezzed instance is immutably tied to a single model. I mean, that's fine for building backdrops and (most) game characters, but for an interactive virtual world, it was a huge step backwards from every other object type in SL. I don't really understand how they made that mistake. Does LL have nobody on staff who remembers the principles behind the original data model? It's as if the folks working on Mesh had simply no clue about how SL is used, and what a disaster it is that we have to rez a whole new object in order to replace one Mesh with another. (This is nothing to do with "animating" Mesh -- that's a whole other set of requirements. I'm talking about changes that might occur once an hour -- or once a fortnight.)

Moni Duettmann wrote: At least I can't remember a situation where "clearing the cache" solved a problem. This is so weird. I keep hearing folks say this, but I get corrupted texture cache about once a week, and it fixes by clearing cache -- always and only by clearing cache. I am almost always using one or another beta viewer, so that may contribute to more cache corruption, but still it's so odd that some folks seem never to have the problem.

Well, for example you said "you're not even allowed to put a skybox on you premium land" but that's only true of Linden Homes, not the Mainland, but both require Premium membership. One gets 512 sq.m.as a "Premium bonus" but spending it on a Linden Home is... a choice.

kiramanell wrote: Darkness Anubis wrote: Oh I know quite well what the rates are like on the Market Buy on Lindex and I agree never use it. I know many people who simply prefer the convienience of buying with cash on the Marketplace. They don't care that the rate that they are getting is ridiculous. They get their shiny now. Same reason some people still use that little 'Buy L$" button on the viewer. It is fast, simple and convienient. That rate is pretty abyssmal as well. And, pray-tell, what method do *you* use then to buy Lindens, if not using the "Buy L$" button?! I justy double-checked, and all website methods of buying Lindens lead to the same page. Is inworld buying cheaper perhaps? Darkness is saying the "inworld buying" is to be avoided -- that's what she meant by "little 'Buy L$' button on the viewer." Also, if one really wants to get the best rate and can afford to wait a few minutes, you can always save about 3.5% by scrolling the web page down to the Limit Buy "Offer to Buy" button, offering just better than the current block of best offers to buy. (Otherwise, a "market buy" gets you the best offer to sell, and you can see the Bid / Ask spread.

kiramanell wrote: Darkness Anubis wrote: I also think premium in order to buy land needs to go. Anyone should be able to buy land. Many more people would happily own land if they didn't also need to have a premium act. BTW before free accounts existed there was a one time $9.95 act available and they COULD own land. It went away with the advent of free acts. Premium to buy land?!? I never heard of this. Must be crappy mainland then. I've been renting my sim from a reputable Anshe Chung subsidiary for years; and, while I'm premium, you don't need to be. In fact, I often think of just letting go of Premium: judging by their looks, seems the free house you get pre-dates the prim-era even, and they're non-mod to boot. And you're not even allowed to put a skybox on you premium land. You appear to be confusing Mainland with Linden Homes, both of which require Premium membership. We could debate the relative merits of Estate vs (real) Mainland ownership, but that's been done to death, and always ends up at different people wanting different things from their SL land. In the case of SL2, I do think that Mainland is rather more an issue than Estates. Whatever they decide to do with land, I can't imagine they'll not use some kind of channel partners to distribute and maintain it, as the Estates do now, and end users will probably be able to rent similar Land products. (That is, I can't imagine they'd make the minimum dimension of isolated landmass suddenly 1024 x 1024 and therefore cost sixteen times as much, so nobody could afford a private island.) Mainland, in contrast, is huge and it would be absurdly inefficient to wholly replicate all the SL1 continents in SL2. It seems very unlikely, then, that one could own the exact same Mainland in both worlds.

For sanity sake, I'm going to assume this is a full-primmed sim, not a Homestead or OpenSpace. There's a single Object Bonus Factor that applies to the entire region, set by the Estate manager on the Region UI. Evidently this region is currently using a bonus factor of about 2. (The math works out to 2.035, somehow.) With no bonus factor at all (that is, a setting of 1.0), a 4352 sq.m. parcel should get 996 prims, so shrinking that down to only 800 prims would require a bonus factor of 0.8, but the documentation says it can only go down to 1.0. I can't test to confirm that myself, however. [ETA: This is very hypothetical, but I doubt you really want to do that anyway, simply because, if it worked, it would affect all parcels on the sim. Not sure what would really happen then, but it might end up limiting the whole sim to 80% capacity -- that is, 3000 fewer prims than it would otherwise have. I mean, regardless of object bonus, you can't rez more than 15,000 prims, total, but if it were possible to have an object bonus less than 1.0, I'm not sure how/where you could rez the objects beyond the parcel limits to make up for the lower object bonus.]

Not that it particularly matters, but just for completeness, it's Oz, the new Technical Director, who doesn't wear shoes, and I always assumed that was somehow associated with the vaguely Zen look of his overall avatar -- but admittedly, I never looked that closely. Pete, the Communications guy, wore sneakers. I have no idea if he picked his own avatar, or if they "have people for that." The thing I was pondering about the whole arrangement was that the Lab chose to do this on FIrestorm's sim, presumably by invitation from Jessica. I'm not sure how to interpret that choice of venue. The event comes on the heels of Ebbe's initial statements about SL2 which was at a TPV dev meeting. It's probably true that most SL users now invest more credibility in Firestorm than in Linden Lab, so perhaps the Lindens were just being practical and leveraging that. I know some Firestorm folks were making a tremendous fuss when they first heard that SL2 would start out closed-source. That made them look fairly silly, so maybe they realized that by themselves, or maybe a Linden helped them come to that understanding, but anyway they seem to have STFU about that now. No idea if the choice of venue for this was related at all.