Qie Niangao

Yeah, there are still some uses for the largest of the old megaprims. The current maximum dimension is 64m (used to be just 10m), but there are megaprims much larger than 64m, and so folks still use those. It's a bit of a lost art, however; in fact, prim-wrangling in general is a sport for us oldbies. (E.g., knowing two different ways to make a prim with five sides facing the same way is not so special when a perfect 8-sided Mesh is a minute's work.)

Do you really think the knowledge of how to create the one prim objects that linden can would cause people not to buy the larger land? Personally, I really don't think that; I've seen no indication that the Lab tries to inflate land impact to sell more land, but they do try for "fairness" to discourage over-use of features that lead to lag. The problem is that they have just the one lever, "land impact", but there's all different kinds of lag (viewer, network, sim, other servers) caused by a huge array of content factors. And they have adjusted land impact calculation when it penalized content inappropriately. When Mesh was first on the main grid, a single script had a prohibitive impact on a multi-element linkset. We complained and they fixed it. But they're also pretty locked-in to never increasing the land impact of anything already on the grid, lest stuff be spontaneously returned from over-full parcels. So, if Linden plants are actually laggier than they "should" be for their low land impact, there's not a lot the Lab can do about it -- just not introduce any new ones. (Well, that and reducing that excessive lag by removing the plants' wind response from the viewer.) EDIT to add: Oh, you also asked about Linden Homes. Yeah, they're a quite different product from regular Mainland -- kind of land ownership on training wheels. They're certainly not for me, but some people prefer the simplicity. The thing is, a Linden Home isn't just a free house, it's also a hugely subsidized sim. The Linden Homes continents have a lot of landscaped space that's not assigned to the home parcels, and the houses themselves are rooted off the home parcels so the owner gets a full 117 prims to use for decorating, not having to spend any on a house.

About those Linden plants: they did have some very special attributes, but to be fair, there are some pretty amazing low-prim (low "land impact") plants from private parties, some made with Mesh and some still with sculpties. The land impact is trickier to manage with Mesh because it's so sensitive to scale, but it comes "Materials-ready" -- which is kind of a big deal. One of those "special attributes" of Linden plants was that they never had the hideous "alpha sorting" problem, where partially transparent textures would flicker, "fighting" for which one rendered on top of the other. With modern viewers, that's now possible to fix with any (modifiable) texture, using "alpha-masking" (and some threshold tweaking) instead of "alpha-blending"... but it does trigger "mesh-based" land impact calculations, so optimizing for that can be quite tricky. Moving in the wind, however, is largely lost. There are some plants that use texture animation to appear to move around a bit, but yeah, it's mostly just the leaves and it's not at all in response to the "wind" that's shared across the sim. For a while there was a debug setting to get the Linden trees to move in the wind again, but I think that may be gone for good now. (The Linden plants, however, have a dark side, too. They can get caught-up in a coalesced object, making it hard to find a place to rez. They don't link with other objects, which is inconvenient. They're really difficult to select in the Build tool. The grasses insist on growing at ground level, so if you mistakenly "plant" them in a skybox, they'll end up in unexpected places.)

You're posting in a two year old thread about a topic that is long since settled. It may have been comforting for some users, back when Linden Lab was still paying Aristotle / Integrity for security theatre, but that's all it ever was. Although it did interfere with registration by some adults, it never discouraged a single minor from accessing any Second Life content. It only gave some folks a false sense of confidence -- that kids were being protected, or that they themselves were being protected from encountering minors pretending to be adults. It's very good that such illusions are no longer being promoted.

hazeonelove wrote: I appreciate that thank you. I know can be a bit scatter brained and off topic at moments. But I'm glad some of you can still piece it together and understand it. Thank you! Well, they're doing better than I am. Is this thread really intended to be about getting banned for setting somebody's titler? Really? Okay, I'll play along. Those things exist to create drama. That's the whole effing point of them. If you choose to set them, you've voluntarily engaged in that drama, and then when you get drama, you don't get to b!tch about it. Now if this thread is really about "PedoBeach" and this "brother" who likes to hang out there, well that's just fine. Carry on. That couldn't cause any drama. Nope, never. For example, this "brother" won't suddenly discover his account is permabanned. Nah, that won't happen.

Well, it is a truly exceptional spot, all on its own, so I think it could fetch more than L$10K. Thing is, it may fetch more than L$100K if the neighbours could be tempted into a bidding war. One of them is encroaching nearly all the way across the parcel, above the surface (and the other is bigger and has banlines)... although both seem to be rentals, so while the owners may have deep pockets they may not be quite as motivated as somebody more personally invested in the spot. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I really have no clue what price to put on this parcel. So, a "suggestion box"... yeah, there's the jira, where you can file a bug report and mark it prominently as a "feature request"... but in this case, the current parcel privacy thing is the result of a lot of suggestions; it's not ideal, but it's an improvement. And believe it or not, the banlines are (a bit) less intrusive than they used to be, too, after numerous attempts and much complaining. In this particular case, if I genuinely cared about pixel privacy for some activities, I'd just use that skybox and leave the ground level open. Others may feel differently, but a 512 right at the corner with three open-water Blake Sea sims? It's just way too cool to waste with banlines (and too small to get much advance warning of intrusion).

Yeah, if somebody is able to get on a "privacy" parcel, they can see the same as if the parcel wasn't private. If that's really a big deal, you'd need to restrict access (at ground level, or use scripted security at skybox altitudes). Restricted parcel access, however, is pretty unfriendly -- shows ugly banlines to neighbors and passersby -- thus greatly reducing the value of all land in the vicinity. It's certainly possible to get a warning when anybody "intrudes" on the parcel, but this is basically the same functionality as a visitor counter, so it would be bad to do both separately. Land prices are very difficult to interpret. You have to bear in mind that any price you see is for land that hasn't (yet) sold at that price. Some of it is set for sale only to make it appear yellow on the map, really just as advertising, with no intention of selling at any price. [Edit: some kruft removed -- I hadn't seen that you'd already posted a link to the land location.]

chris21ce wrote: Thanks I have visited them links and its making my script worse [...] ... and you established this in less than five minutes? You must be a very advanced scripter indeed! So if it's really supposed to handle large numbers of sounds, the script must be rewritten from the ground up, so as not to construct the menu list in advance, but rather from the inventory contents on demand as the user pages through the options.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: The owner can set that up themselves. Set the landing point but set the teleport routing to anywhere. Maybe there's some magic here of which I'm unaware: If teleport routing is set to "Anywhere", what effect does a landing point have?

Gayngel wrote: The owner would like to keep the landing but still allow direct teleporting from an Slurl link to the shops, club, etc. That doesn't make any sense. If direct teleports are allowed, nobody is ever going to go to this landing point. If you're renting out shops -- and those shops have to share parcels because they're stacked up on top of each other, god help you -- then you really, really do not want any parcel landing points. That said, in the old days, there were in-world "malls" that were single parcel and used a single set arrival point from which people rode scripted teleporters to get to their destinations. This had the virtue of pooling all traffic -- and the fatal disadvantage of forcing all shops to share one parcel title and description in one big search listing. That's why stacking shops on a shared parcel is such a very bad idea. (Tenants sharing parcels has other problems, too, but for shops in particular it's disastrous.)

Christin73 wrote: SL does not come with it's own combat system unlike 3rd person shooter games. One might ask why those other games have to be crippled by having just the one built-in combat system.

Ebbe Linden wrote: [...] Sure seems like we have some D-K customers who think they know product management though That's fair. So of course I'll chime in. Kinda. You know, those products that are getting shut down? That's good. Focus is good. So I don't want to risk distraction, but some of the technology behind Versu and Dio might, just might be relevant to Second Life, to the extent that they can help SL creators generate more immersive user experiences, including narratives and interactive NPCs. That's certainly not how these products packaged their technology, and maybe the developers on those products just aren't interested in SL, or maybe other business arrangements have been made. Or maybe there's just nothing to be gained here for other reasons, but there is very definitely a need for tools to help create better SL experiences. This need is also being addressed in part by a project called "eXperience Permissions" that should be a step in that very important direction (although we users don't really know much about it yet). With or without contributions derived from LL's investment in those products, SL's future is more interesting to the extent it offers users more interesting stuff to do in-world.

steph Arnott wrote: Crap means sh^t and that is offensive of which you know full well. Except it's cultural. Where I come from, "crap" is a perfectly acceptable euphemism. On the other hand, there's another "c" word that is considered very offensive here (and, I'm sure, to the forums software) but not nearly so much on the other side of the pond. Anyway, to the point: Yeah, well, a new CEO does have to establish himself. One certainlly expects he's right now communicating with employees, too, at an unsustainable rate. He can't possibly keep this up, but ... well, take my word for it: time invested now in this kind of communication, internally and externally, will vastly reduce the amount of unproductive time he has to spend in future. That said, he'll do well to arrange for some other Lindens to continue with this precedent of engaging more actively with the community of customers, removing the pathological barriers that were erected before he arrived. As others have observed, his re-opening the jira is a tremendously positive sign.

Just to be sure, you don't mean teleport routing, right? That function is parcel- not region-level, but Mainland is pretty much all parcel-level settings, and I'm not aware of any Mainland region that has non-Linden land and a telehub (the alternative to direct teleport).

Metalsnake27 wrote: I just find it strange that everyone else also sees me with the same moving issues, at first I thought it was just me with my viewer, but my friend is always telling me how I'm randomly being pushed all over. Oh, so that's what you meant earlier with "and for some others". Now that I understand that, it's even stranger. The belated "nudges" your avatar gets aren't delays in the downstream network, but something delaying upstream control inputs. Yeah, that could be network jitter, but it seem awfully asymmetrical ("when I'm viewing other avatars or objects and they are mostly moving fine"), and I'm starting to wonder if it might be local to your machine or your LAN. (Other apps don't suffer similar glitches in control inputs, do they??) I know there used to be sites one could use to test network jitter, but I haven't had to do that in ages, so I'm not sure what to use nor what results to expect.

I'd feel better about it if reymark actually were Sudo's alt but the style is quite different, and I don't see Sudo presenting as such an unwitting congregant at the "believe in the power of bitcoin" revival tent. It reminds us that many ordinary folks are putting hard-earned savings at risk with bitcoin, and will be very lucky not to be parted with that money. One wonders how many of them lost everything when Silk Road 2 got wiped clean.

I sense Confirmation Bias. Gee, my flying/sailing/driving is a little laggy, let me check sim statistics. Lo, the sim is dilated all the way down to .98. Ergo, non-1.0 dilation is laggy!

Thanks. And that's apparently correct: Gearsawe Stonecutter asked for this, and it's awaiting review. Since 2007.

It's really helpful that Show Updates was enabled because you can really see how many position updates are coming in after you (try to) stop moving. So if all those packets are arriving that late, that would be some pretty funky network. I guess, just to rule out an alternative explanation, pushes from an attached script, I might check whether the same thing happens using one of the test avatars. ETA: If this is caused by network, you should get similar erratic behaviour from other constantly-updated moving things, including other avatars and objects in keyframed motion (e.g., the "rock monsters" in Linden Realms). Or anything else that sends a constant stream of object updates for other attributes, too, not just positions (e.g., dimmers). (It would not appear for continuous change that doesn't use object updates, so it won't happen with smooth llTargetOmega rotation, texture animation, nor particle systems.)

ObviousAltIsObvious wrote: open isn't available for attached objects, Do we have any idea why this shouldn't work? I don't see how it would be confusing for the user, whereas not working causes confusion aplenty as we see here. And compared to "Drop", "Open" couldn't add that much complexity to constructing the context-appropriate menu for attachments.

Now, to close the topic, if I wanted to buy a land with an area of (x) to build my own home, on average, what would be the cheaper solution? Buying that area of land from LL, or from a private estate owner? Such a simple question, with an absurdly complicated answer. To grossly oversimplify: An ordinary full region (a "sim", or 256m x 256m of virtual land) requires a monthly payment to Linden Lab of US$195 if Mainland, or US$295 if a private Estate. For this reason, the up-front "purchase" price of Mainland is generally higher; indeed, one can often "buy" a parcel of land from a private Estate for just the first week's or month's fee. One of many ways this gets more complicated is that, to own Mainland yourself, you must be a Premium member. (This sounds like a big deal, but in fact a premium membership comes with a weekly stipend, and an annual membership works out to about US$1 per month net of that stipend. Still, you have to pony-up US$72 for that membership.) There are a bewildering array of ways to have your own land, but I'd personally recommend starting by renting from a Mainland landlord. I'm not suggesting that this is what you'll want to do long-term, and it's very important that you understand that there are many other options with very different advantages and disadvantages. The thing about a Mainland rental is that it can be quite inexpensive and of flexible duration -- as you'll almost certainly change your mind later, no matter what you choose first. Renting on an Estate is very similar, but generally somewhat more expensive because of the different monthly fees paid to LL. Even simpler is a Linden Home, but that does require Premium membership, and it omits a lot of the land experience (both good and bad). [EDIT: Oh, gee, I'm not sure the above is even germane to the question. I mean, if one wanted to buy a complete region, it is possible to buy either an Estate or a Mainland region from either Linden Lab or a private party (although full Mainland regions are rarely available, especially from the Lab directly). Full Estate regions can be bought full-transfer from private parties at a discount below the setup fees the Lab charges, but I'm not sure how common that is now. Regardless, those up-front costs soon wane in significance compared to the grinding fees, month after month.]

Or, were he a Silk Road 2 customer, he wouldn't have lost 70%. He would have lost it all. That's assuming he acually had any bitcoin investment at all. It's just as likely that he was trolling for the fun of getting others to lose money. It's like working at Goldman Sachs without the pesky getting dressed and leaving the house thing. I'm frankly surprised that the technology is so terribly primitive that an exchange could be completely vulnerable to that transaction malleability bug. I think a successful crypto-currency would be a disaster for the world economy (modern markets absolutely depend on the intervention of central banks in money supply), so in that sense it's helpful that the wheels come off the bitcoin bus every few months. It is nonetheless surprising just how often it falls apart... ... almost as if the vulnerabilities were designed-in. Hmmm.

Well, this thread has gotten pretty confusing. Part of the confusion came when you mentioned that you;ve been getting emails notifying you of new posts -- where, it turns out, those new posts are in fact spam on the forum (but probably cleared away by the time you check the forum itself). And yeah, probably best not to follow any links in those. And, if they annoy you, there's not much choice but to disable getting those email notifications of new posts. (I think you know how to turn those off because you turned them on, but... actually, I have no idea how to help with that; I've never turned those on; it doesn't seem as if it should be difficult, but who knows?) Anyway, the first post in the thread apparently wasn't about those spam-post notifications, but rather (I suspect) about the inscrutable way this forum times-out a login, and what it does when it thinks you should login again. I've been using this forum for as long as it's been around and I still can't divine any rhyme or reason to how it handles that, so if it asked you to login when you didn't expect it... uh... that's our way of welcoming you to the club. Yeah. Yeah, that's it.

Kelli May wrote: You can't always - let's make that ever - expect an instant response. I do. For example: Where's our OP? Hmmm?

Yeah, it's just that the OP said the machine shuts down "immediately" and I'd like to confirm whether that really means what it seems: that enabling ALM leads to an immediate shutdown. If it's thermal load, that should take a moment to build up (maybe just a second or so, but still not the instant one makes the setting), at least sometimes. On the other hand, I agree that laptops are not ideal for running with higher graphics settings anyway, and the higher those settings the worse the thermal problems, so maybe the rest doesn't matter. (Incidentally, I mumbled about drivers because it's been my experience that notebook manufacturers often don't support the latest versions of the GPU manufacturer's drivers. That's a limitation I've never seen with desktop graphics cards and motherboards, although we have seen some driver versions (ATI only??) needing to be reverted to older for SL compatibility. So the OP having the latest drivers may or may not be a good thing.)