Qie Niangao

March 30

I don't see a problem, just need to decide what triggers activation and deactivation. the blood spread would be in a timer event (not a sleep loop) so a deactivation can abort it mid-spread. Assuming the puddle's coordinate system is sensible, should be fine.

March 29

If the Land Use Fees table shows 0 monthly tier is authorized, you shouldn't get charged, however that billing is a full month in arrears, so you will be charged if you owned land or donated tier to a group at any point during the 30 days* before that billing date.

Incidentally, you shouldn't be able to set that tier limit to 0 if you still have tier donated to group or own land, and it's not supposed to matter where that table is set in determining what you're actually charged. That is, if you don't own land and don't donate tier, after a full month of that being the case you should stop getting charged, regardless of where the table is set. The value set there is still useful, though, in making sure you get a warning if you try to acquire land exceeding that setting. (Nonetheless, call it superstition, I'd always set it to the correct value anyway, just to make sure.)

_______________
* I think it really was 30 days at one time, but it now seems to be based on day of month, so the bill on March 11th, say, should correspond to the 28 days since February 11th, and the one on April 11th should be for the 31 days since March 11th. Or something like that.

March 29

First I just want to say that I'm easily confused, so don't assume you were confusing in anything you said. Anyway, I think I now understand what you're trying to do, and it is absolutely possible. Now we just have to figure out a reasonable way to make it happen.

It seems this pose stand already handles both avatars and already comes with a multi-sitter script (the "[zED] MPS" system). Now that makes me suspect that the pose stand consists of more than one link, and that both links are scripted with that system. There's no real requirement that a multi-sitter script be present in both prims, but the few items I have that use MPS all seem to do that, with separate "Settings" notecards in each, and I'm lazy enough to guess that's how the pose stand works. If that's right, maybe start by simply duplicating that configuration and seeing if you can get both avatars seated and animated together on a fresh, similarly scripted linkset.

Once that's working, I'd try simply dropping the rotation script into the root prim and seeing if it's close to what you want. (I agree with Quistess that a more general solution would use three prims, the root doing the rotating and the child prims being the sit targets for the avatars, but maybe we can get close enough by imitating this pose stand as closely as possible.)

March 28

11 minutes ago, artifactsofmars Omegaman said:

my Frightville Studios sim, Ichoen, is not even on SL maps!

I'm standing on it. Got there by searching Maps and teleporting.

My script says: Region restarted at Wed 2024-03-27 08:13 PDT, 0 days, 23:32:27 ago
Sim channel = Second Life RC LeTigre, Version 2024-03-18.8333615376, Agent limit 44

So yeah, it wasn't a restart. I wonder if there could be some very weird network problem between your part of the world and AWS

March 28

Hmm. I think we may need to understand what's supposed to be spinning here, with "a new technique with the camera and a spinning object." But I'm also unsure what this couples pose product consists of, with a pose stand containing a few single poses. Unless that "pose stand" was really a multi-sitter for both avatars in the couple, I'm inclined to agree that whatever scripts are inside, they won't be useful for setting up your pose(s). If it were me, I'd probably just start with AVsitter because it's in wide use, free/open source, and has tools for moving around posed avatars, saving configurations, etc. It's not magic or anything and one could certainly work with scripts from scratch, too.

But however you get these avatars posed together, there's something that's supposed to be set spinning, and I'm not sure if that's the cam spinning around the avatars or the avatars spinning around with the cam watching, or the cam and the avatars spinning around with the world whizzing by behind them, or something else entirely. However that's supposed to work is going to determine what gets linked to what, with what as root, and where that rotation script belongs.

March 27

22 minutes ago, Kit Young said:

The PBR viewer is consistently too dark when I login. I fix it by going to World>Environment>Personal Lighting and changing the Ambient color from black to medium grey

That's kinda the hard way to do it and defeats environments that have optimized for PBR. Maybe try cranking up Preferences / Graphics / "Brightness (exposure)" so you don't have to use personal lighting.

March 27

6 hours ago, Otoa Kiyori said:

I thought I saw a LSL wiki a while ago... but I cannot find it anymore..

Well, the wiki's LSL portal is here, and you can search the whole SL wiki from there, but I don't see a page for the Society nor the Preserve. On the other hand, the Society has come up in the Forums a few times and the Preserve many more times in case any of that is of interest.

March 27

6 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Mesh used to be swappable by UUID too, but that was disabled. The reasons are documented on the wiki: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Why_UUID_Flipping_is_Bad

That's why they needed a throttle. Instead they destroyed the whole representation.

March 27

3 minutes ago, Orwar said:

Preferably something easily accessible, maybe with a comment section or something where they can find more info or ask questions, now where might we find a system like that ..

I know, I know! TikTok! It's the answer to everything! (Although TikTok appears to have peaked and Zuck's loathsome Instagram is somehow the new growth platform. Pick your propaganda algorithm.)

Actually, I didn't realize how much I'd missed in this thread before I posted, so I should have clarified: I don't honestly believe that younger generations are incapable of learning directory hierarchies, nor even that they need some remedial tree-training. Rather, I think they simply may not expect to apply that to a game inventory, nor to other tech operations us old coots may take as revealed truth about the universe.

So here's a dirty little secret: I barely organize my SL Inventory at all. Stuff I create I kinda need to keep structured at least while I'm working on it, but otherwise stuff rarely gets sorted at all… except chronologically: Every few years I sort everything by date and shovel strata of stuff into year-labeled folders or the Trash (old landmarks, etc.) and rely on search and sorting to find anything I want to wear or use.

Why? Because I outgrew folders. I never sort email, for example. Once in a while I'll tag a category of stuff that will stay relevant for a while (and gmail loves labels), but I'll never manually sort mail into folders again. That habit of eschewing folders carried over to my SL inventory management practices, as much as I can get away with it.

I'm not promoting this approach to the SL inventory, I'm just saying that people adopt different practices based on a range of experiences. Different practices may benefit from different affordances in the interface, but mostly they just work with whatever the system provides; the difficulty is mostly communicating among those who adopt those different practices.

March 27

7 minutes ago, Orwar said:

By the time I started high school there wasn't a one of us my age who didn't know how to use folders

I dunno. Although they have folders, seems to me iOS and even Android go out of their way to disguise the filesystem(s) and scatter most of the directory structure around invisibly to the end user. Load a proper third-party file manager and behold a whole, heretofore hidden storage hierarchy.

So I wonder if the "app" model of phones has made the average user think of storage as unstructured magic. Who needs "files" when there's "user data"?

And in SL, objects have inventories ("Contents") but nope: no storage hierarchy permitted.

I bet there are funky old games like that, too, where the player collects stuff in one big bag of loot.

March 27

20 minutes ago, AlexMas118 said:

no issues talking in local. If I call p2p other user I don't listen, the other user can't listen

That part is interesting, inasmuch as the Bluetooth connection works with no issue until Firestorm tries to use it for a very slightly different thing. If you haven't already tried with a wired USB audio connection (Apple's USB-C EarPods are surprisingly not awful for the surprisingly reasonable price), it may be worth seeing if there's something amiss in Firestorm's voice configuration.

Usually I'd fuss about the USB-Bluetooth adapter approach, which always caused me problems that magically went away when I got a motherboard with a proper Bluetooth + WiFi module, but if you're only having problems in p2p mode, that doesn't really seem like a Bluetooth problem.

As you may know, the Lab is in the process of replacing Vivox with WebRTC, and on a pretty accelerated schedule. That might possibly fix stuff.

March 27

Yeah, this is one of SL's older self-inflicted wounds, confusing instance with class: mesh models are not first class assets to be manipulated in the world, where only individual instances of those models survive the upload process. This is unlike every other object primitive that can be morphed into any other by script.

This decision to neuter mesh was intentional, as I understood it, in service of mesh modelers who feared IP infringement (which was a problem with sculpties and prims).

Now it all looks pretty anachronistic. Soon enough human-crafted, artisanal mesh will be quaint, the hand-carded wool or hand-thrown pottery of virtual worlds, but SL will still prevent AI from morphing its mesh content.

March 26

"Firewall"? "The IP would only be exposed to LL"? Clearly this won't be simple peer-to-peer but I'm not grokking the architecture here at all.

[EDIT: Okay, I finally read the SL Wiki article so I see the "relay" of the SL Voice Servers… which must be pretty clever beasts if listeners will be able to mix/mute separate audio sources within the region, which is kinda expected, right?]

But then I don't know anything about how Vivox works now either, and strive to keep all SL audio muted as much as possible. Still… internet sing-alongs? That's gotta need some synchronization magic beyond my ken to not end up sounding like an echoey Zoom call.

March 25

13 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

Kama City is my home, and prices have definitely rebounded here.

I can confirm the Kama City phenomenon, at least in the far northwest corner. There were several quite pricey parcels here (well, it's double-prim) that sold, leaving just one still available in this region (Broadwater). Because the sales had (apparently) different prior owners and sold to (apparently) different buyers over the course of a few weeks, I'd guess they went at asking price or near it.

March 24

1 hour ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

Originally for age verification there were systems to send in a photo of a real life ID card and such. I think these ran into problems with various privacy laws, so they just let it fall back to 'payment info on file' and we do a collective 'wink and nod' to pretend that's valid.

They may have also had privacy law problems, but also they were garbage. People were reportedly verifying as Elvis (not to disparage any theories of his ongoing presence amongst us).

March 23

However effective an age-verification method is (or isn't), there's much to be said for sticking with industry standard (which is, basically, asking nicely).

If the company is fine with losing lawsuits left and right, then sure: get creative, hire an "age verification" service, etc. Remember Aristotle/Integrity? That might have screened out a handful of underage users but as I recall, it exposed more liability than it averted.

This isn't legal advice, but there's much to be said for hiding in the herd, doing whatever everybody else is doing. This is nowhere to innovate.

March 23

1 hour ago, Dorientje Woller said:

Blunt question to everyone: if the manager/CEO of your favorit retailer is not keeping him/herself to their own rules, should the staff and you as costumer being punished for his/her deeds?

There's a kind of war among Vietnamese restaurants hereabouts. Every time one opens, it's flooded with negative reviews on all the common eatery directories, Google, etc. It's become an artform, the creativity with which reviewers can find fault with these Vietnamese restaurants, but not everybody looking for a good meal realizes that some reviews might not be quite what they seem.

30 minutes ago, Rathgrith027 said:

We've been at this for 48 hours now and it's been beaten like a dead horse. Let's call it how it is, and just close the thread and wait for the results - then we can reopen discussion.

I can only take the thread in small doses, which has been tough during its firehose phases, so I know I've missed lots. It sure does seem everybody has had enough time to air their views remarkably publicly and it's to the point where it seems unlikely much would be lost if it were closed. (But then I thought it was doomed on the first page, so never mind me.)

March 22

5 minutes ago, Rathgrith027 said:

Must. Chuck. Rooster. Into. Henhouse.

Finally! A conspiracy theory I can get behind!

March 22

8 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

a viewer I've never heard of to do something I wasn't aware was possible -- take screenshots showing the HUDs someone else is wearing

That was my initial response too, but a little digging showed claims from years ago that such a viewer existed among the various exploitware and malware viewers that circulate(d) in certain crowds. If those claims were valid even back then, I doubt those exact viewers could even login and rez the world these days, but if they really existed they could have been updated. Given the fence around the llGetAttachedList script function you'd think they'd have plugged such a viewer-messaging leak long ago, but that would be buried behind old, inaccessible SEC- jiras, so who really knows?

Besides this, though, there are other places where that post is at best technically naive. I was particularly struck by the forensic pixie dust it sprinkled over UUIDs and the apparently hypnotic powers of PBR. If they're that fast and loose with slightly techie details, imaginary viewer features do seem pretty parsimonious.

March 22

7 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Moreover, I wonder how far should LL bend for one rather poorly substantiated blog post from a person hiding behind an anonymous account on a website in one of the back alleys of the Internet?

Right, but they do have the problem that people were somehow primed to take that bait hook, line, and sinker. Not to repeat my earlier rambling, but the Lab does need to respond to that vulnerability. Removing a business-supporting pillar wouldn't even help beyond the fleeting appearance of having done something, so yeah, let's not do that.

March 22

It's certainly possible. Whether there's an off-the-shelf script that does exactly what you want may be hard to discover. (I, at least, have no idea, and don't know the scripts you mention which I gather are common scripts for doing something related.)

There are shirts and pants scripted to change which parts are visible based on touch or HUD control, so maybe they're using a relevant script you could discover by inspecting demos. Passage of time, hmm… probably that, too, like wet clothes that dry off or something.

If you were to ask someone to make this script for you (perhaps on the Inworld Employment forum) it may help to have a little more specificity on a few points.

The surfaces involved are separate links in the linkset? Or separate faces of one or more links?
These are discrete states, right? i.e., the surfaces are either visible or invisible, not transitioning through a continuous range of alpha levels?
The textures are old-school "Blinn-Phong" materials, right, not PBR? (This one is kind of a big deal right now because we expect script control of PBR transparency to get a lot simpler soon-ish.)
The state transitions trigger based on just the passage of time, right, until it gets to the final state? and then what should the wearing avatar do to restart the sequence? touch? (Ease of touch for the user can depend on attachment point and model geometry) a HUD? a chat command? And it's always only the wearer who can trigger the restart, right?
What should happen when the item is attached from inventory, as when an outfit is worn or the user logs in? just continue where it left off, or reset to the first (or last) state?

It's all possible regardless of those specifics, it's just a scripter would need to know. Also, this isn't a complex script in any case, but it could be really simple if the states were modeled either as the faces of a single link or all faces of a set of links; it's just ickier to have State One be several faces on several links, and State Two be several different faces on different links, etc.

March 21

In my experience with managementspeak, any outfit hired to do a job is immediately a "partner." No external investigator could escape becoming a "partner."

Vocabulary word of the day: dysphemism

March 21

2 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I'm wondering if we are all assuming that they will be doing something externally rather than internally?

I'm still vague on what really happened or what the actual accusations are or whatever..

But the tone of the thread feels as if users will be the ones having things put on them, when I'm not sure one way or the other if it's even a user thing going on that needs adjusted..

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

When you have disorders and conflicts like this in an organization fraught with "Founders' Syndrome" (which has good or bad elements in my view), more than even finding facts and resolving conflicts this one time, you need to have a conflict management sytem in place in general.

So like the states of Minnesota or Alaska, or Russia under Yeltsin, or the New York Times, Linden Lab should put in the office of an ombudsperson. This person hears complaints and then negotiates around them and sometimes makes public judgement calls, sometimes not. It could be less grand, and merely be a complaints procedure with some reliable trusted staff person or even outside figure or company.

The situation appears to have arisen because some staff or contractors couldn't make known their concerns in a safe manner without jeopardizing their jobs. Even if their claims of retaliation or threats are exaggerated or untrue, they still to have a place to go with complaints. This is very basic in labour relations. The entire thing has the feel of an obscure furry vendetta precisely because there were not channels for safe and reliable resolution of conflict except 'taking it to Twitter".

So I hope some process like this will happen and a person is put into place. For extra credit, customers could also come to this ombud, but that's a separate opera.

Yeah. The more this thread dwells on what resident and Linden behavior or appearance might be offensive, the more it misses the real point: The Lab needs a way (a process, an ombudsman, an external tribunal, something) to insure future compliance problems are addressed without a whole credibility crisis like this.

Because such problems will always arise, regardless of how hyperfine we slice the definitions of acceptable conduct. Those definitions are not the big failure here, nor are the occurrences of non-compliance. The problem is lack of confidence that those problems were handled effectively, fairly, responsibly.

Allegations such as those in that Medium post must never again have any credibility because, going forward, everyone knows how problems are handled and everyone trusts they are being handled.

The main challenge I'd expect in designing management practices that achieve this kind of confidence is staying transparent while complying with mandatory confidentiality. It would be a huge breach of individual privacy for the Lab to tell us everything some would want to know about the current situation. There were surely some staffing actions that cannot be discussed (especially if under litigation) which makes it extra important that trust is established with those practices that can be revealed..

Why is it so difficult in Second Life? There are two very different constituencies: employees and residents, but it's hardly unique to need to maintain the trust of multiple stakeholder groups. It can't help that many stakeholders havean appetite for the salacious subject matter of these allegations. Tricky business, virtual pornographer to the masses.

March 21

44 minutes ago, Tayt3rChip said:

Someone portraying a child is usually constituted by a collection of attributes and features, not one or two attributes.

27 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Your height or shape, IMO, has little to do with whether your avatar appears to be child-like. It's the whole package.

Everyone surely agrees about this. But anyone with a (merely) realistically-sized avatar who visits Adult venues at some point will have been challenged for appearing too child-like, regardless of how representative the avatar's skin, eyes, etc. The explanation is always that the management must never fall afoul of the regulations because it's a terminating offense, which they know from a friend of friend who got banned through no fault of their own… which is, somewhere in that game of telegraph, almost certainly untrue but these situations are not about truth, they're about the chilling effect of rumors and hysteria. Maybe that FOAF was an obvious child avatar flagrantly violating ToS, or maybe the story was embroidered along the way, or maybe it was all made up on the spot, but no matter the truth: it arose out of fear stoked by events like this.

Now, I have to admit I've never gone out looking for age-related adult content violations, so yeah, color me naive: I don't think I've ever encountered it in all my years of SL. I can accept that it's happening somewhere, and there's stuff on the Marketplace that shouldn't be there, etc., and I hope all that is dealt with responsibly. But I very much have encountered the hysterical response that arises whenever this topic gets mindshare. It will be worse for a while after this, pretty much regardless of what the Lab actually does.

March 21

13 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Was the reporting account of a now deleted post important? Noone going to the loony bin over it.

I don't know to what this refers. Was this something where I (or somebody?) could be expected to assess the reporting account as a source? Or was it a thing I (or they) could investigate to determine truth independently of source?

Probably we can't discuss the specifics because I guess it's about forums moderation, right? But anyway, in case I wasn't clear before, I'm not saying allegations such as those in the Medium article shouldn't be investigated by those with access to the ground truth (which investigation I have no objective reason to doubt has been happening). But the rest of us should find better use of our time and attentions than to automatically accredit that source.

Forums

Blogs

Knowledge Base

Posts posted by Qie Niangao

Linden Lab

Tilia

Second Life

Connect With Us

Partner With Us