Qie Niangao

Oh, yeah, that refreshed my memory: some of the "newbie-friendliness" of poseballs is said to be about choosing pink or blue and getting it right on the first try without having to fuss with menus nor play que es mas macho with the sofa parts. Although nPose use seems to be growing, I can't say for sure that it's the one Pussycat is seeing. There are several no-poseball engines now that do much the same things, including at least a couple of commercial ones (AVsitter seems popular), and all of these -- as well as MLPV2 -- have seen a lot of changes in the past few years, so the lead shifts back and forth, and older creations using any of them may be pretty behind the curve. As far as memory consumption goes, it's pretty difficult to beat nPose's approach for large numbers of animations, because it only loads pose-specific notecard data as needed instead of storing monstrous lists of the stuff the whole time. That said, Lear went to some trouble to slim MLPV2's memory use as well as the amount it reports using when LSL got the relevant functions.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: If its furniture you're shopping for - shop elsewhere. There really shouldn't be any furniture for sale left that uses poseballs. Its been obsolete for years. If you see it its a sign the item is just going to be buggy or laggy or otherwise poorly scripted as its coming from someone who is no keeping up to date with changes in SL, and changes in what code works... Personally, I vastly prefer no-poseball furniture, too -- the npose engine in particular, for items I'm not scripting from scratch -- but I don't think it's accurate to say all poseball furniture is obsolete. Many creators still prefer the MLPV2 engine specifically because it uses separate poseballs. After this thread, however, the oft-cited reason to prefer poseballs, supposed newbie-friendliness, seems specious. (I wouldn't wish xpose on my worst enemy, but I gather some folks still use it, and AFAIK it uses poseballs, too.)

Nothing to do with SL, but Christo Graham's Muppet Christ Superstar is worth a seasonal listen. Prove to me that you're no fool Hop across my swimming pool __________ HT : NPR monkeysee's Pop Culture Happy Hour

It really sounds to me as if most of this is caused by not noticing the dialog that pops up when remote-poseball scripts ask for permission to animate the avatar. As Pussycat mentioned, that dialog can get buried in a "99+" chiclet at the upper right corner of the screen, but it's also easy to just miss the dialog until something else pops up and it disappears. If the script hasn't gotten the sitter response to that permissions dialog, it will leave the avatar in the default sit, and the menu it gives -- if any -- in response to touching the furniture may be different from what other sitters (or non-sitters) see. I don't know that there's any way to make the viewer's behaviour any more intuitive without switching viewers altogether, and that would be asking for more and different trouble. Perhaps it will help just knowing to expect that dialog and to expect to need to trigger it again if things aren't working and he doesn't remember seeing that permissions dialog. (Note that furniture without poseballs generally won't need that permissions dialog; that's because someone sitting directly on the furniture grants that permission without needing to be explicitly asked. Really old or primitive furniture may have poseballs linked directly to the furniture, and those don't show the dialog either.) There may be other problems, too, but I'll bet the permissions dialog causes most of the trouble he's having. [ETA: I meant to suggest that you watch Develop / Avatar / Animation Info while he's having trouble, to detect any "ghost animations" or other weirdness different from what you see with your own avatar -- all with AO removed, of course. I very much doubt this is related to his problem, however, so this would only help confirm that it's not.]

You have to invest a lot of time and effort to make an in-world store pay for itself, in contrast to no-cost Marketplace. Also, as I've explained too many times lately, a good "traffic" number is practically meaningless now, except for the most vanilla, least-common-denominator commodities. For anything that's not just an impulse buy for any random newbie, in-world stores either exhibit stuff that can't be practically delivered in a demo version (and then, preferably, on a dedicated parcel with its own Search terms) or are located at highly specialized locations (usually with relatively low traffic counts). It's just very different from how it worked when SL users spent more time shopping in-world.

Discokitten wrote: Now I can't use the chat box. Wait. What? I don't understand what's happened here, but it sounds awfully inconvenient. Are you able to see the chat box and just not type into it? or it's gone missing? or... what's going on here? About removing the scripted attachments (hair, etc.), it's not surprising that this didn't solve your problem, but it was something you clearly needed to do anyway. To get some insight into which attachments are script hogs, check World / About land / Script Info / My Avatar tab. Any attachment over maybe 200 kb may be worth more detailed inspection. But again, these scripts affect the shared "sim" servers, rarely the performance of your own machine. I don't want to overwhelm you, but if you could do Help / About Second Life / Copy to Clipboard, and then paste the contents into a reply post, it may help figure out what's possible on your machine. (But the chat box thing, that sounds like something else is going on, too, besides performance limitations.)

Something here that I haven't seen recently: a Governor Linden parcel set for sale at L$1/sq.m. Pretty sure it hasn't been this way for long or I would have noticed. Not sure if this one ever went to auction... maybe? No idea if this is the start of something new.

This all seems to be operating from the assumption that it's exceptional and rude to be banned from a sim. If instead you accept that being permitted in a region is an act of generousity to be repaid throughout a stay, you may be welcome longer at more places.

Rstan wrote: Is it possible? without any permanent tiers? No.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: ... replace it with something that better suits the business... I kinda hope it hasn't come to that again. I'm no fan of Lithium, but every time we switch forums software some content gets lost despite a lot of time and effort spent trying to preserve archives. For most stuff I suppose it doesn't matter, but it's become very difficult to track back into the history of LSL scripting and the same must be true for all the other technical topics. That said, Lithium's business focus seems to be shifting ever further from relevance to what LL needs. There are a few other companies using it for customer support forums, but the ones I've seen are relatively tiny and inactive. Meanwhile, Lithium just bought Klout (talk about a company whose fifteen minutes have passed!) so it's possible LL won't be the ones deciding to pull the plug.

sweetone14 wrote: Does this only apply to "about land" options? Meaning, if I only "Set" the group to the land, can my managers still kick people, edit ban list, etc.? Depending what all "etc" may entail, the usual solution is to have a scripted device owned by the parcel owner that other authorized parties can use.

Until this thread, I had no idea what a "Toddleedoo" is or why it should need shaping. Having now seen pictures, I think we can safely assume that general traffic is of no value to selling these things; they're going to be of zero interest to the vast majority of the general public (although, apparently, of considerable interest to some aficionados). That's the thing about malls: there are some products that might appeal to many passersby, and those can make sense in a mall. Then there are other products that have only highly specialized buyers, and those may really benefit from being in (only) highly specialized malls. Putting those latter products in a non-specialized mall, regardless of traffic volume, doesn't do anybody any good. So, unless there's a Toddleedoo-specific mall somewhere, this particular poster would be better off with a cheap 512 somewhere -- if they can benefit from in-world sales at all. Even if a mall were competitively priced, they'd absolutely need to offer such specialized products separate parcels each with its own Search listing, landing point, etc. -- and separate parcels erode traffic statistics. (And, in passing, traffic statistics, just as numbers, aren't make-or-break as they once were because they don't much affect Search ranking anymore -- where in-world Search itself is used less, too.)

Barry Lubezki wrote: Great. Too bad that Linden Labs does not read these posts, or anything that SL residents come up with. So don't get your hope up too high. In this thread you wonder why Lindens don't read the forums?

Hmm. The Library one changed slightly to http://community.secondlife.com/t5/LSL-Library/bd-p/LSLScriptingLibrary The other two had the common problem with automatically generated links: punctuation got sucked into the anchor tag. So try these: Inworld Employment at http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Inworld-Employment/bd-p/InworldEmployment and Wanted at http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Wanted/bd-p/Wanted (Seems odd to have to resort to a three year old thread for this; seems this same information gets reposted at least weekly.)

You can't actually prevent anybody from rezzing anything. You could ask the newly-rezzed object to delete itself, but obviously that only works with scripted objects on script-enabled land. So one way to defeat this would be to put the previously-rezzed instance on script-disabled land, rez the new one on script-enabled land, then wait a while for your script to decide the old one is gone so the new one can survive, then enable scripts again for the old one, thus having two or more working instances of the object at the same time. The scripts can just keep checking to see if any other instances have checked recently, but the more often they do that, the more system-wide overhead (regardless of specific choice of comms and persistence) -- and, of course, unscripted objects can't be protected at all.

There are plenty of places with cheap rents, so what's the fuss about? Yeah, some charge more, and most of those sit empty, and who cares? If a renter is so set on renting one of those more expensive ones, they can pay the price, otherwise they can rent something cheaper. Where's the problem? FWIW, I agree that in-world stores really only pay for themselves if one is selling stuff that must be examined in-world before buying, and for which a demo version isn't completely satisfactory. (Personally, I despise Marketplace and do all I can to avoid buying anything there, but 99% of SL shoppers are perfectly happy with that abomination, and that's all that matters.) Stores full of vendor prims with product images are pretty much pointless now, except in the rare cases where traffic interested in a particular type of product all congregates in the same place (e.g., specialized role play sims).

I'll second the advice to start with nPose. I can't remember the details now, but I recall chatting with the original scripter of the system and learning that some design decisions were specifically to support seating on moving vehicles. One thing I'm not sure about is whether nPose has an option for control-driven position adjustment. I know it was on the wish list at one point and I showed them some sample code, but I haven't followed-up in ages. (Back then, I think it still used rezzed adjustment prims, which might be a problem in a moving vehicle.)

PaperB wrote: I Think you are right, there is a lot of cultural issues involved in wether or not one may find anoying or bad this kind of advertising. However, it has been studied that this kind of marketing is not proved to be successfull. Latests trends of marketing show that consumers react better when they dont feel they are beeing sold something. [...] You know, now that you put it that way, it could be as much generational as cultural: today's prime consumer demographic has much less tolerance for blatant ad pitches than, say, our grandparents. I mean, consider vintage advertising using such ham-handed tactics as direct celebrity endorsements, compared with current trends of almost subliminal product placement, the more subtle the better, to sneak any commercial message past our now ever-vigilant and hair-trigger BS detectors.

Right. The OP hypothesized somewhere above that it was because, having bought some items (sold as original) without picking them up right away, a prim limit was exceeded and some automatic banning kicked in. Seems unlikely, since resale of original items is apparently the whole business of the place. Also, modern scripts could just return the stuff to whomever rezzed it, no fuss, no bother, but it's possible the place is stuck in a time-warp using old scripts. An alternative explanation might be that the OP got swept up in an IP ban of somebody else who once had their dynamically assigned address. The reason that's probably not what happened here is that one would expect the same to happen to the OP's daughter, but as I understand it, she doesn't get banned until the OP shows up on the parcel. That would be moderately intricate logic: One gets banned by name if one inherits the IP address of somebody who actually did something ban-worthy, and then when you get a different IP address you're still banned along with everybody else who shares that address, but those next-generation folks don't get the same degree of banning: they can't themselves trigger bans from new addresses, despite having been banned before. It could work that way, and in fact it might in fact slightly mitigate some of the inherent stupidity of the whole approach, but it sounds more like an accident than a planned feature.

Marcus Ansia wrote: An IP tracker of sorts is the only thing that makes any sense here... Agreed, but they're not magic. That they're using something other than media is moderately worrisome... although I forget now what kludge the one with "skills" used for her contraption. (Y'all know the thing I'm talking about, right? Somebody must remember how the stupid thing works -- for absurdly small values of "work".)

The only thing about this that remains a question (to me, anyway) is what they are using to get your IP address. Did you try all this with media disabled in the viewer? If so, and if they still got your IP address, then they're doing something a bit unusual, and worth further investigation. They could, for example, use parcel audio, too, but that's much trickier. And there have been reports (unconfirmed AFAIK) that voice, too, can leak IP addresses, but that should have been plugged long ago, if it was ever true. I realize it's very annoying and invasive and rude of the merchant to do any of this by whatever means, but it would be kind of important to know if there are new exploits in use, beyond what I suspect: the same ol' snakeoil hawked at ridiculous cost by one with sell-assessed "skills".

Antumbra wrote: I do agree that it would be unfriendly, but some people in this post think that's all I do. When in fact that's not true! I say hello first and ask them how was there day I also ask if I can ask them a question before I do ask my "what do you think of my outfit" question. If they say yes I can ask them a question. Doesn't that mean they gave me some of their time for me to ask my question and for them to answer? Yeah I know not everyone is trying to make me look like some terrible villain, and I thank the people who really answered my question and tried to help me out. This precisely describes the spiel of a particularly annoying bot that used to plague busy areas such as infohubs. Maybe you're not a bot. But it's like the Turing test in reverse: Observers are going to suspect this behaviour to be that of a commercially motivated computer. Also, again, if this is ever done in somebody else's store, imagine the tables turned and you're paying serious money to have land on which your creations are presented in-world. Would you allow somebody to distract and potentially annoy your customers with other commercial offers? I don't think so. I think you'd swing that ban hammer without delay -- and be right to do so. The same applies to venues, even non-profit ones. Somebody is paying big bucks to hold that land for a purpose, and if they wanted your advertising there, they'd be charging you for it.

Antumbra wrote: but its not really spamming cuz I only send the LM's to the people once and they had NO problem with it what so ever. Well obviously at least one did have a problem with it -- such a problem that she even bothered to call you out about it. Perhaps there were thousands of others left silently seething, and perhaps even more who will never login again because the encounter was so unpleasant. Anyway, on a private parcel, especially a store, you can and almost surely will be banned from the parcel for doing this. On a Linden-owned parcel, you are in fact violating a "no advertising" restriction and could theoretically be banned from Second Life altogether -- although in practice you'll just get a bunch of ARs filed against you and nothing will happen. Usually folks will just assume you're a bot and file the ARs without contacting you, so it's kind of surprising that anybody bothered that one time.

Charliedru Lannock wrote: Purpose of this function: This function would allow prims or objects to scan for Avatar Sit Targets on other prims (not part of the same object / LSL script). Even prims owned by others. This would enable your object to know the Sit Target and adjust itself accordingly. For example, in the case of breedable pets, the pet could detect the sit target then "Sit" on the prim itself. Using a method to detect if an avatar is sitting on the prim currently, or simply using CastRay you could auto-adjust the "Pet" to properly sit on the lap of an avatar seated on a prim, according to the prim's properly Sit Target. This is pretty hopeless. In practice, a sit target is so much a function of the sit animation that these sit target-posed breedables would end up many meters away from where the seated avatar appears when animated -- except when the animation is strictly controlled, and in those controlled cases it would be much easier to simply share "pet sit targets" over some inter-object communication protocol for pet-lovers.

I appreciate that you were replying... and further on the plus side, it's some relief to know the thread is really gone and it's not the ol' hysterical blindness flaring up. Does seem an odd topic to need blocking but I trust it's because the solution is in place and we'll never have occasion to think of it again.