Phil Deakins

Coby. You can argue until you're blue in the face but you'll never succeed. SL users have decided - a long time ago. Furniture, and rooms are designed to fit the general size (height) of avatars. You can argue that avatar heights vary, which they do, but they are generally within a small range and furniture is made to suit them. Furniture makers do not generally cater for those who prefer to be tiny compared to the average. It's the way it is so get over it. Even you have said that rooms need to be bigger, which means unrealistically large. You are an exception in SL. You have no right to have furniture and house makers make things to suit you personally. So get over it. You don't have any arguments to show that SL sizes should match RL sizes - no arguments whatsoever.So there's no need for me to reply to every part of your post. Everyone is happy with things as they are - bigger than RL - except a tiny number of people of whom you are one, so accept it that you are out of step with the rest of the SL users. By all means, be a small avatar and find stuff that suits your size - it is your world and imagination, after all - but stop arguing that everyone should be like you. It's their world and their imagination, and a long time ago they decided that SL stuff is bigger than RL stuff - if you pedantically cling to the SL and RL meters as being identical.

I don't mind an SL meter being seen as an identical measurement to an RL meter. It makes no difference either way. The only reason I ever suggested that SL meters be seen as not being the same as RL meters is because of the very few who want avatar heights, etc. to match RL heights. I suggested that, if they don't think of the SL meter as an RL meter, but think of as a different measurement, say a 'leter' (Linden meter), then all that is left is making things look right together. Actual meters aren't needed at all for that. Just suppose that LL had designed sims to be 256 leters by 256 leters, and avatar and prim measurements in the same units - leters.. This whole debate about making stuff RL-sized would never happen. Or suppose they called the unit something else - like 'unit'. We'd never have this RL-size debate. It would never come up. That's why I suggest thinking of the SL meter as not being the same as the RL meter. Your long post was interesting and no doubt accurate, but what you wrote doesn't make any difference in this debate. Meters aren't the real issue. They only became an issue because of the that word - meter - but they have no bearing on it whatsoever, except that because the word exists in SL, a few people want everything to be sized in RL meters. I don't care about meters. I only care about things looking and working right together. And that's what we do have in SL - furniture fits the general avatar and rooms fit the general furniture. We could still have things looking right by sizing everything according to the RL meter, but it doesn't work right in SL. That's the whole argument. The camera and the lack of head movement won't allow it to work right. Even Coby says that rooms do need to be bigger - even with an optimally positioned camera. So meters are irrelevant to this debate. Only avatar heights are relevant and from those we arrive at furniture sizes, and from furniture we arrive at room sizes. ETA: It was shown earlier that the original, LL created avatar was oversized as far as RL and meters are concerned. But it wouldn't have made any difference. If users were the first to make avatars and not LL, we would still have larger-than-RL avatars, and then furniture and rooms, because of the default camera position. LL probably tried various cam positions etc. before deciding on the one we have now - the one for the original avatar. And it works well.

Extrude Ragu wrote: as long as those that would send you Home give you fair warning, you have no cause for complaint whatsoever. But they DON'T give you fair warning, that is my issue here, they DON'T. 0 Second Warning Auto-Eject scripts are a thing that exist and cause grief and are actively used, if you have taken the time to explore the mainland for more than 10 minutes I gauruntee you you will be very, very aware of this. Yes, I know that and I already said that zero warning is really bad.

Maelstrom Janus wrote: Rubbish - security devices are griefing weapons ...by your reckoning if a griefer gave you a ten second warning before flipping you half way across sl he'd be fine.... I bet we'd soon hear the moans pouring in from you if someone started setting up banning orbs and lines around your property... Security devices are security devices and not weapons of any kind. They are used to prevent people from going into private areas. If all the parcels around my land set up ban lines, then yes I'd moan. I believe that LL would act on it too. A land owner has a right to go to his/her land on the ground. You obviously dislike them enormously, presumably because they occasionally stop you in your tracks, or because you think you have a right to go wherever you want to go, but you don't have a right to go wherever you want to go and, as long as those that would send you Home give you fair warning, you have no cause for complaint whatsoever.

Czari Zenovka wrote: Ah, that sounds easy enough...thank you. Question - in one of the threads where this was mentioned, someone said that he used Convex Hull on his house (I'm assuming selecting the entire house and applying Convex Hull) and the amount of prims/Li that he saved. Based on what you said about open spaces, though, would that be feasible or only on selected parts of the house? I recently 'improved' a gazebo I've been selling for years. It used to have 6 columns but, to reduce the prim/LI count, I replaced the 6 columns with a 4-column 1-prim sculptie - the one I use for table and chair legs - and I made it Convex Hull. Yesterday, a guy IMed me to say that he can sit in it but he can't get out of it. When I checked the display one I couldn't walk into it and I had to change it back. In all honesty, I can't say if it was the convex hull or the 4-column sculptie that caused it, but one of them certainly did. I'd need to check it out to find out which. You can easily test it though by creating a multi-prim object with inner space that you can walk through, and then set it as convex hull. My memory is poor but I think you'll find that you can no longer walk into its inner space.

Ceka Cianci wrote: i just feel that the limits shoudl be ours to decide..not a group of other people.. peer pressure should stay in the RL and relaxing freedom in this one.. otherwise we end up escaping back to the real world and getting the hell out of this one to relax hehehe I completely agree. I don't think anyone here is insisting that everyone should adopt their view and try to deny individual freedoms to choose limits. As far as I can tell, it's just one person who likes things to be RL sized and I'm arguing that that simply doesn't work. I reckon I won that argument anyway because the other person has declined to give me dimensions of a room in which it does work - the room necessarily being much bigger than a typical RL room Coby and I don't see eye to eye on it, which is nothing new, but I still see her as a lovely person who I count as a good forum friend, so nothing is changing - not like the old RA days, eh? I've enjoyed the debate though.

Ok. Forget gravity. It was just something that occurred to me when I was writing a post to Coby. And I only mentioned it to show that SL is not the same as RL. This bit of your post stopped me from reading the rest:- Freya Mokusei wrote: I don't think things 'must' be equivilent to RL sizes, size is not the issue, scale is.. The rest of your post qualified that statement, so I didn't read it because the statement is wrong. Size IS the issue in this debate. Scale never was. It's only been about size. Hence Coby's argument about the length of the meter being identical in both worlds. So you're arguing about the wrong thing here. I don't have any views about scale so, if you really want to discuss it, I'd really appreciate it if you'd start a seperate thread for it.

I've never heard of that AvaStar newspaper. I wonder if it's still going.

Maelstrom Janus wrote: Ban lines should be deactivated and security orbs and their kin banned. I don't agree. Ban lines are sometimes used to keep people out of areas where only group members are allowed, to charge admission, and for all sorts of other reasons. When nobody is there, outsiders are still not allowed but there's nobody around to ban an intruder. They only go up to a relatively low height, so, apart from vehicle crashes, they aren't so bad. They are bad, imo, when a parcel owner puts them up just for the sake of it, and for no particularly good reason. Security devices are perfectly fine as long as they give warnings before booting. They don't affect vehicles and warnings just cause the user to move on quickly. They are fine.

Pamela Galli wrote: I was under the impression that ejection without a warning of say, 10 secs or so, was against TOS and AR-able. I thought that too, but, a while back I tried to find where I read it but I couldn't. To the OP: There is nothing wrong with ejecting systems above your suggested 200m. They have to be allowed for skybox homes. Instant ejection is seriously bad though. Some years ago, I found a parcel that ejected the moment it spotted me (which could be anything from instant to several seconds, depending on how often the system scanned). I would normally fly over at near ground level and, although it wasn't a big parcel, I could never make it across before it ejected me to Home. I tested it a number of times to see if I could get across. I IMed the parcel owner, and, as a result, the scan frequency was changed so that I could get across. perhaps, instead of getting too infuriated, you could IM the owner and suggest at least one warning before ejection. It's quite possible that security owners don't realise. It just never occurs to them until it's pointed out.

Oh for goodness sakes - do it! Jump in SL and jump in RL. Forget the height achieved. Just look at how fast you come down in RL and how slow, by comparison, you come down in SL. Gravity is NOT the same in all circumstances. Your eyeballs will show you that. Forget gravity if you like. It only occurred to me a few minutes ago. Instead, tell me why SL sizes should match RL sizes. You seem to be arguing on that side, so tell me. Also, if SL is deliberately designed so that people can jump to non-RL heights, why the insistence on everything being the same as RL? It doesn't make any sense at all.

In some respects maybe gravity is the same, but jump and gravity is definitely much lower in SL. Perhaps it's just poor design but it's there. I don't believe that SL was ever meant to religiously mimic RL, so gravity behaving differently in different situations really doesn't matter. My brain tells me that on low gravity worlds, things grow taller. It may be telling me wrong, but it does seem like sense. It doesn't matter anyway. SL != RL. It's plain old common sense, and that's all there is. There is no reason to suppose that the SL meter is the same as the RL meter and, even if it's seen as identical, there is absolutely no reason to insist that things in SL are sized the same as things in RL. Simples If it helps, I'll go along with RL and SL meters being identical, even though it is a totally unnecessary consideration. As I've been saying, meters don't a look in when sizing furniture and buildings. It's only general avatar heights that count.

Coby Foden wrote: Perrie Juran wrote: I don't mean to sound like a pessimist here. I am optimistic that over time things will continue to improve. But we sadly have a long way to go. I'm also optimistic that things will improve by itself - over a long period of time. The reason being mesh objects. RL scale is better than to build oversized due to land impact. The more RL sized stuff appears to the grid the better. Avatar sizes will gradually follow the trend to go down to more realistic (i.e. RL) sizes. After many years we can go to historical sites in SL and wonder "Why on earth everything was so huge earlier? Did some alien giants roam about here?". :smileywink: You may be able to do that in the future (think why was everything so huge), but everything doesn't look huge right now. Everything looks about right. It's only when you pedantically compare it to an RL meter that you think it's huge when in fact it all looks about right as compared with the real world. Meters don't actually show. Of course, you have chosen to have a very small avatar so things do look huge with you at the side of them, but most avatars are bigger and it all looks perfectly normal. It's your choice to have an unusually small avatar. Most users choose to have an average one.

Freya Mokusei wrote: Can't tell if trolling. SL gravity is actually the same as in RL. Your perception of gravity (in your example jumping) is deliberately skewed so that avatars can jump much higher than they could in reality. Mass still falls at the same speed in SL, as it does in RL. It has nothing to do with jump strength or avatar mass (which remains a constant in SL, unlike IRL). Obviously, also, meters have nothing to do with gravity. Trolling? I started this thread. How can I be trolling? Try the jump in both SL and RL. See how long a jump takes to land in both. SL gravity is much lower than RL gravity. It doesn't affect the length of a meter, of course, and I didn't suggest that it did, but it does mean that, if SL were a real planet, people would be taller than they are on the Earth and, therefore, avatar heights should be taller than real people.

Coby Foden wrote: Phil Deakins wrote: There is no semblance of size consistency with AnnMarie's vehicles. Some are sized to suit the roads and others are sized much too big for the roads and too big for the average avatar. Which clearly proves that building by eyballing things is a very bad choice. :smileytongue: No. It proves that Annemarie's vehicles are very inconsistently sized. Eyeballing the general avatar size is excellent for making furniture and buildings to fit the general avatar size

Coby Foden wrote: Perrie Juran wrote: I don't mean to sound like a pessimist here. I am optimistic that over time things will continue to improve. But we sadly have a long way to go. I'm also optimistic that things will improve by itself - over a long period of time. The reason being mesh objects. RL scale is better than to build oversized due to land impact. The more RL sized stuff appears to the grid the better. Avatar sizes will gradually follow the trend to go down to more realistic (i.e. RL) sizes. After many years we can go to historical sites in SL and wonder "Why on earth everything was so huge earlier? Did some alien giants roam about here?". :smileywink: Things may improve, RL sized avatars isn't an improvement by any stretch of the imagination. If there is an improvement over time, it will be that LI is kept down by the use of smaller objects. That's all. As a consequence, avatar height may also be reduced. But it's the LI that will be an improvement, not avatar heights. Your idea of matching RL and SL is blown right out of the water by the large difference in their gravities. Because of gravity, SL people should be taller than RL people. That's if you want RL realism, of course

Freya. You asked a lot of questions and gave no answers. I'm not going to answer the question because all you were getting at is that the meter is relevant to avatar heights and, therefore, buildings and furniture sizes. It is not. Avatars come in all shapes and sizes. It's not like the real world where people vary in heights but almost always within a relatively small range. In SL the range is much larger so nothing can be made a standard to suit them all. You asked about feet in the floor, in the air, and lower legs inside seats. It's not possible for a furniture maker to avoid it, due to the greatly varying sizes of avatars. In RL, the floor/air problem is avoided by raising the knees. That can't be done in SL. Legs don't go into RL furniture and they just rest where they lay. That can't be done in SL either. It's ridiculous to suggest that SL furniture should work the same as RL furniture in those respects. Using the meter exactly as an RL meter wouldn't change any of that, so it's pointless you even mentioning it. The absolute is that general avatar heights, not meters, dictate 'mass produced' furniture and building sizes. There is no way round it. It's an absolute.

Coby Foden wrote: Uff... Phil! Extremely bad choice of comparison. :smileytongue: Those different dollars are clearly defined each what is their value in other monetary units. Have you ever seen anywhere definitions like "this meter here is this many of that other meter over there"? I think not. So meter is a meter anywhere is still valid even though you for some strange reason don't accept this simple fact. But that's your choice. It's not a bad choice for comparison. Nobody in Australia even talks about Australian dollars in Australia. They are just dollars, as they are in every country that uses that word for its currency, and it was with the RL meter. And, to repeat my point, there is no reason in existence why a meter in SL must be the same as a meter somewhere else. Also, to repeat another of my points, meters don't even come into it. They are irrelevant to the size of avatars, furniture and buildings in SL. They have to be irrelevant. The only measure that matters is general avatar height. If everything is made according to that, then everything fits together very nicely. Try to see past the RL meter and see SL as SL and not an extension of RL, Coby. SL is not RL, it's not an extension of RL, and SL devlopes according to its own environment. There is no reason in the virtual world to insist that it developes according to the RL environment. If you really want to have SL behaving as RL, consider this. SL has lower gravity than RL, so SL beings are bound to grow taller than their RL counterparts. You don't believe that SL has lower gravity? Log in and press the PgUp key (jump). See how long it takes to go up and down. It's much more like the moon than Earth, so the gravity in SL is much lower than in RL. So you have just been randomly eyballing things against randomly chosen avatr size. Then some other designers use some other randomly chosen avatar size to base their designs on. Now wonder the scale of things is so inconsistent in SL. Some builder's things might be 1.5 times larger than in RL, some designers things might be two times larger than in RL. Eyeballs are what matter and, since my furniture sold extremely well, eyeballs did a very good job. There is no way you can realistically argue against that fact. Do you see this as a good thing for SL in general? The rampant inconsistent scale of things? I don't see it either way. I just made furniture that suited the average avatar height and, I assume, so did all the other furniture makers. And it has always worked very well. In SL we get some people who make unusually small avatars and some who make unusually big ones. So what? unusually small and big real people look wrong on RL furniture. RL people don't have any choice but SL avatars do, and they choose to have unusual heights. It's their own choice. And, btw, if someone had laid down standard sizes for avatars, and we made furniture to suit those standard sizes, what would have happened? The same that happened to the very topic of this thread? I.e. standard sized becoming unreliable? No no no. SL has always been "your world, your imagination". It has never been "your world, your imagination, as long as everything is RL-sized. Get over it. You are a tiny minority. Everyone else is happy with the way sizes are in SL. As I have said the only reliable accurate reference point is the meter. That's the unit chosen by Linden Lab for SL dimensions. They did not create their own unit not related to anything. There is a very good reason for that. Completely untrue. The meter has no relevance whatsoever to avatar heights and, therefore, furniture and building sizes. Actual avatar heights are the only measuring stick for furniture and buildings. I'm beginning to wonder if you are persevering with your arguments because you like having my attention They could have named the unit as LD (Linden unit). A region could have been 812 x 812 LD. Default avatar size could have been 4.45 LD. And so on. Well, if LD was the unit, what would be the proper drinking glass size, vehicle size, chair size, room and house size for the avatar? It would have been toatally guess work as there wouldn't have been any reference point to RL dimensions at all. Just eyeballing things against 4.45 LD avatar. Really weird and confusing. I guess the scale of things with LD unit would have been even more rampant and varied than it is now. See above,

Coby Foden wrote: Freya Mokusei wrote: Phil Deakins wrote: Meters are irrelevant. the basis for that is the avatar height. Should cars fill multiple lanes of a highway? This reminds me that Phil does think that AnnMarie Otoole's cars are too big for the roads. So Phil does see the problem in oversized, randomly sized, builds there, but for some reason he refuses to see the problem in other areas of too large (i.e built by eyeballing with no reference to meter at all) builds in SL. Those cars have been built by somebody, possibly by using their 2.6 meter tall avatar as a reference. Random size avatar as a reference; the result: random sized, out of consistent scale, vehicles. There is no semblance of size consistency with AnnMarie's vehicles. Some are sized to suit the roads and others are sized much too big for the roads and too big for the average avatar.

Coby Foden wrote: Meter is a meter everywhere. Why it should be any different in virtual worlds? What would be great idea an innovation behind that? Like a dollar is a dollar everywhere? What you are actually doing is that you base your feeling of proper size of things in SL to a random avatar size instead of the exact meter. Yes. Avatar heights dictate the size of objects. Meters are irrelevant. By the way, what has been the exact avatar height you have used as a reference point when you have made all your designs? Is it just the avatr size what you have randomly chosen to use? Or is it something else. How did you decide to use that avatar height as reference in building stuff? Didn't you use any other measurements at all (meter, inches, feet) in building? Just eyeballing things in reference to the randomly chosen avatar size? I used my own avatar - not any measurements of any kind. In my early times I used to get around and meet lots of people, and I set my av to a typical height - not the tallest and not the shortest. I made my furniture to generally suit that height. As you probably know, it sold enormously well, so it wasn't a bad way of deciding the sizes. But furniture can't be made to suit all avs. The tallest ones necessarily have their feet in the floor when default sitting on a sofa, for instance, and the shorter ones have their feet above the floor. Once I decided to make a bed according to RL sizes but it was way too short for most avs and I abandoned the idea. There might be a market for making specifically RL size furniture, if there aren't already such specialists, but it would a minority market. ETA: Also, remember that typical SL rooms are much larger than typical RL rooms, so furniture does need to be similarly bigger or it will look way too small in typical SL rooms. I actually tried that and an RL-sized sofa, for instance, is lost against a typical SL room wall. It looks so tiny. So a balance has to be arrived at where room, furniture and avatar look right together, and the basis for that is the avatar height.

As you said, reducing avatars to RL sizes doesn't screw up the default way of moving, but it does when furniture and therefore rooms are also made to RL sizes. Anyway, we seem to petering out a bit on this side topic. Just know that I still love you, even though you do fit in my pocket

I can only judge by the number of people in the forum who support RL sizes all round, including in this thread. I accept that mesh is a reason for reducing the size of things, but not to RL sizes - just smaller, even if they are smaller than RL. RL size is too arbitrary, and for no valid reason. The real reason for making things larger than RL is the default camera position. As long as that doesn't change, things need to be larger. No. a meter is not a meter everywhere - in RL, yes, but not in virtual worlds. A meter is what a virtual world says it is. But even if you insist that an SL meter is the same as a real meter, it doesn't make a scrap of difference. Things are bigger in SL. As far as mesh is concerned, forget the meter altogether. Just make things suitably sized for SL. That's all that's necessary. The meter is totally unnecessary in SL as a measure for making things. The only thing that matters is avatar heights. Btw, where are the dimensions I keep asking for?

Coby Foden wrote: Phil Deakins wrote: It's just not on that everyone needs to move using 2 hands when they can move perfectly well with 1 hand. And negotiating furniture in a 12'x12' room really is awkward even with 2 hands and a repositioned camera - so awkward that it's very fair to say that it just doesn't work when compared to the SL we have now where accurate one-handed furniture negotiation, with the default cam position, is so very very easy. After using long time a better more natural lower camera position the default "from top of a tree view" looks really strange and ugly. It distorts the perspective, vertical lines are not vertical but tilted. The default view could be one reason for "grasshopper leg" syndrome one sees very often. And it is could be also reason for "to build big". Because looking from the top of the tree everything looks too small unless made big. The very, very easy is not always the best way of moving about and seeing around. Learning and using more advanced ways is not awkward at all. I haven't suggested that there isn't a better camera position. I've only said that, regardless of what camera position is set, a typical RL-size room and furniture doesn't work in SL - not without it being far too awkward, and therefore it doesn't work.

Coby Foden wrote: RL sized avatars and furniture will work also in rooms. Why are you stuck with that statement about RL sized rooms to support your view that RL sized avatars do not work in rooms? I have said that avatars - in general - will need bigger rooms in SL than in RL. The point is that smaller avatars will need smaller furniture and smaller rooms than big avatars. And that has its benefits. The reason I talk about RL-sized rooms is because that's what YOU claim, except that, in this thread, you've said that the rooms do need to be "slightly bigger" - slightly. Of course RL-size avatars and furniture will work ok in big rooms. That's never been in dispute. The only thing that's been in dispute is the claim that they work well in RL-size rooms, and, in this thread, "slightly bigger" than RL-size rooms - "slightly". You now seem to have conveniently dropped the word "slightly". Actually there are RL sized rooms available in SL. I have visited in some and it does work - but it needs that you will need to know how to move and cam around at the same time and that you have adjusted your camera properly. But if you find those too awkward to learn and use, then your test has only proved that the default camera position and using only keyboard to move are very inefficient ways in small spaces.. Yes I know there are RL-size rooms in SL Jo Yardley (Berlin) says she does them. But I keep pointing out that they don't work, even with 2-handed movement and drastically altered camera position. It's *still* to awkward negotiating the furniture without bumping into it or walking over it. My test included changing the cam to the position that was stated in the previous thread, and using 2 hands. I did all that, and it doesn't work in a 12'x12' furnished room. Of course you can stay in the room and blunder your way around it, but that's not the same as it working. Building in prims the size does not matter concerning land impact. One prim has always the same land impact regardless of its size. For mesh objects the size matters - the bigger the mesh is the bigger is the land impact. So there definiterly is a very good reason to design to RL scale instead of making things "generally larger" than in RL. With mesh arrival it's the time to let go from that historical over large building style. If you were designing in mesh (which I know you don't do) you would very quickly learn the fact that smaller is better than big. Surely people having small land are concerned how much land impact each object what they put on their land will cause. Then don't use mesh buildings. I don't have any experience at all of mesh - not even as a user of it - but I can't imagine any benefit in having mesh buildings. A few LI/prims maybe, but so what? It's just not worth it. Mesh parts of buildings, perhaps, but not whole buildings. Surely mesh is best suited to smaller objects. So I don't accept mesh buildings as a valid reason for reducing the size of avatars to RL sizes, when it screws up the default way of moving around in SL. With your mesh building logic, you ought to be pushing for smaller-than-RL avatars In all honesty, I believe that you want RL-size avatars and furniture, as in the previous thread, simply because that's what you like, and that mesh isn't the reason - it wasn't mentioned in the previous thread.

It is an extremely tiny number of people who seriously want SL sizes to match RL sizes. Mesh wasn't the reason in the previous thread, so what is your reason? You seem reluctant to provide the dimensions of a suitable "slightly bigger" than RL room. Until you do, there is no point in continuing the discussion. Words are just words. The proof either way is to be found in an actual furnished room, and I want to test your "slightly bigger" room. I don't mind if it's your own SL home but the proof is in the bricks and mortar, so to speak, so let's see it. Put you room where your mouth is