Toothless Draegonne

People who don't get that the Madlands is a shared space with all that this implies. Seriously, just because you own a parcel of actual real land doesn't mean you get to fire a Bofors at every airliner that flies over. Same deal on the Madlands. Oh and low frame rates. Get that tf outta my eyeballs. The PBR preview viewers seem to be a step in the right direction there though. 😄

First ever bit of "land" was really just a smol spot and rez rights for 50L/week at a certain region with a friendly land owner. Basically to be able to muck about without needing to go to a sandbox. I still have that little spot too, though the rent these days is more of a "thx for helping out a newbie way back then" thing. Madlands parcel is more of a "because I can". I'm under no illusions that the madlands is what you get if you throw a bunch of lego bricks into a blender. No point in trying to carefully curate it, and asking for privacy in literally a shared space is an exercise in futility. But hey, premium account comes with madlands access, might as well use it. Private region, well that's so I can mess about and do stuff that would normally get the banhammer quicker than you can say "community guidelines violation". I'm paying for it. If I crash it because a script went haywire, the worst I'm going to get is a raised eyebrow and a "how did you even" from whatever poor support linden comes along to put it back together again.

People who think they've never met the Bear Containment Units have probably met more of them than they think. What, you think they all wander around in world casting blue dots on the map and looking obvious in-world and in-forum? Believe it or not, some of them have alts. Probably so people like me don't jump on their head and start whacking them with balloon swords like some kind of pinata. 😄

Your problem with laptops that have actual GPUs in them - and I say this as someone who has a couple of them - is they tend to run hot. Like, really hot. In the case of more awful thin-and-light types, so damn hot I'm amazed they aren't violating some kind of consumer safety laws. Handhelds like the Ally tend to sip 25 to 30W max, at least for the SoC. They won't be roasting your nuts while you play virtual barbie dolls or pewpew your buddies across regions with keyframe guns.

I couldn't tell you what the Ally definitely will run like, but based on my experience with an 1165G7-powered handheld, it runs SL at medium quality quite nicely. Given the Ally is running a chipset a lot newer than the 1165G7 with RAM that's a lot faster than LPDDR4-4266, I'd say chances are high it will run SL rather well. Don't forget some kind of little bluetooth keyboard/mouse though, at least until someone makes a viewer more oriented towards the whole twinstick-and-a-dpad thing. Now you'd probably get a better desktop for the same price, but if you absolutely want SL in a handbag (or maybe very large pocket), it might be a decent little thing.

Well I guess at least we got some neat new LSL recently that was probably made to support this massive waste of time. Of course I say that, but I bet half the people complaining about it are going to be in there dumping money into the system anyway. This is, after all, a platform where $40 is seen as a bargain to change a username.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BL9FG4RY Description: "ASUS TUF A17 FA707RW 17.3" 144Hz Full HD Gaming Laptop (AMD Ryzen 7-6800HS, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Ti, 16GB RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD, Windows 11)" Recently got for running SL and being a "yellow" (AMD CPU, Nvidia GPU) testbed. Actually pretty good, will run ultra with some caveats (which tbh is the same as most hardware), and definitely runs high. Cost isn't too ridiculous and pretty good for what it is. If anything the GPU is a bit overkill for SL, but once PBR/GLTF becomes a thing you'll probably see it used a bit more. Doesn't get excessively hot, unlike the thin-and-light I use for work that turns into an egg-fryer when it's under load. It's okay in some very busy regions if you tame the draw distance a bit. Just you and a few friends just hanging out somewhere that's reasonably made, you'll be anywhere from 60fps to ramping right up against that 144hz refresh rate unless everyone's wearing crash-me-harder avatars. Monitor is nice, decent brightness and colours as you'd expect from IPS. Not glossy, not incredibly matte either. Er, "satin" maybe? It's definitely not what you'd call a "high end" laptop, but it's also roughly a quarter the price and you'd only get marginal improvements for the amount you'd spend anyway.

I'm not sure if there are packs of SL-compatible RAW files for sale anywhere, but they're a pretty common image format. See this page for info on how RAW files translate into height values: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Tips_for_Creating_Heightfields_and_Details_on_Terrain_RAW_Files

You have to be the actual region owner (not just an estate manager). Otherwise you're stuck with asking whatever baron you got the region from to do a raw export or import for you. They're just greyscale bitmaps that are used to dictate how tall the terrain is for each coordinate. They can't be used for overriding SL's limits. You can use image editing tools to mess with them and draw pretty pictures, or do landscaping without using the terraform tools. They don't set water height; You have to do that yourself via the estate tools.

I wish I was earning Linden money, but no. My day job is with other gamedevs. And I've been enough of a pain in certain Lindsay's sides that I don't think I'd ever be hired anyway 😄

So sell your models on Etsy then (or CGTrader, Gumroad, or whoever). 😄 Though Etsy do have a listing fee of $0.20 per item sold which is recurring if you want to auto-renew the listing, then 6.5% sales fee, and then a payment processing fee that varies by country. So for every single one of a model you sell (which I guess would go as a multi-quantity listing), you have the $0.20 flat fee PLUS the percentage, PLUS the payment processing fee. Per item. And that's just for models. Good luck putting something that uses custom code or other more active items onto Etsy.

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If you spent $600 during that buy-down period, you already got your money's worth. Why are you complaining that other people get a little bit of a discount now? You're still paying less. Complain if the regular price drops below GF rate and you're still paying more. As for educator discounts, what's wrong with having a Student & Teacher rate? You know those regions come with limitations, right? "Land Barons" I would have thought would be jumping with joy at the chance to charge the same amount of rent for parcels on regions that they're paying less for.

$20, better than a kick in the proverbial I guess, though still far too pricey for normal people just to have a basic bit of "land" with some isolated compute that isn't going to get ruined because they have to share that compute with a crazy cat lady, and have six other fashionistas in draw distance with their gigabyte-VRAM sofas and billion-polygon clothing racks. Though I do gotta wonder how many of the people screaming about marketplace fees have any idea how much of a percentage other online shops charge, or how much of a percentage exchanges charge to convert one currency to another. As for the premium plus requirement to pay with $L, yes, I'm totally going to give you money just so I can give you money. That makes perfect sense. Bit of a mixed announcement really. At least it's heading kinda-sorta in the right direction, and if you think otherwise, here's a question: If someone doesn't have a place to put your shiny billion-polygon clothing rack imported from CG Trader, are they going to buy it?

That's why the access group. And yes, any botnet operator could set their botnet up with payment info. But none of the bonnies, brendans, trichickens, cicas and other ones do, and haven't for all the years they've been operating.