Pussycat Catnap

I think we've all wished for a 'crap' category in the MP for ages... but our definition of what goes in there changes with each season. I do think we would benefit from a lot more ways to filter search. I'd like a functional set of filters to filter in or out 'sculpty', 'mesh', 'bento', and several more categories... I'd also love a more complex set of tools for cross searching the SL databases - like "find this object inworld" - which would search the SL database for a copy of the object, and if found on land with open perms, offer me a SLURL to go see it. - which could be simplified by letting people set an 'opt in' (but NOT opt out) toggle to have their land used by this search.

Yeah I was also remembering many old video games that had this "feature" as well. Characters dying on the way to the dragon's lair because they forgot to pack a sandwich... I guess in SL, it would clear out all those tiny empires bots under the waters of sailing sims... and it might make it easier to get into monthly shopping events if the avatars of half the people going died in the process of trying to get there...

There are two uses for voice: 1. So that annoying racist guy in the infoHub can say dumb crap all day long and blare out bad heavy metal in between cuts of 'spliced up hip hop' used to accentuate racist comments. 2. So that Zindra could fill up with "live girls voice and cam, $9.95" venues... But if you really want it... check your land permissions and make sure the toggle isn't set back to "nice and sane" and is still on "I like annoying sounds of some geeky grandma breathing and snorting into their mic." If not that... see if your mic is working in other applications, drivers up to date, etc... There's thing like 'Discord' and 'Mumble' used by gamers that can be used to test if the problem is on your end or SLs.

They seem "about" right. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=swimsuit+men&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images They're only a little bit low and to the edges from where all those guys are.

A LOT of these "top designers" are coming from some other 3D environment and uploading stuff from there to here then putting a price tag on it. If you peruse releases on daz3d.com or renderosity.com you will start to see things that look "suspiciously familiar" - in buildings, clothing, and even at least one mesh body brand... Some of the things here might be from the same designers as there, some might have been "liberated"... - But either way, building for there, which is an art community, and here, a gaming platform, is radically different. Over there you never have to thing about walking around inside your build - you just think about how you would place figures for art composition or animation - but all of that is controlled by the artist. There is no need to consider "is this wall or floor solid", or even "is the air inside this space NOT solid"?

To the credit of the original poster... the starter avatars in SL are not competing with what they looked like in 2003. They're competing with what they will look like in other "free 2 play MMOs". Look at the start avatars in other games, like Wildstar, Guild Wars, Tera, Final Fantasy, or even MineCraft. While MineCraft avatars are blockier, they also look more 'refined'. In Second Life they look amateurish compared to all of the other contempary 'free to play MMOs'. And like it or not... that's the competition these days. Whether or not you consider this a game, it is an MMO engine, and is quite similar at a basic user level to your basic 'sandbox MMO' minus a good 'combat engine'. The hype of a "virtual world" is long gone. Now these worlds are common place, and all the others admit to their 'game' nature. People coming here 'new' are coming looking for an 'online game' to kill time with, more than likely between releases of some game they are more devoted to. Their first impressions is going to be based off of comparing it to that. Only later will other impressions set in. I don't buy the argument that making them better would compete too much with merchant players of the game. I'd wager it would encourage people to expect quality more, and that could help drive sales as people sought out more distinctive looks. But I think even more than the avatars, the clunky way avatars move around inside of SL is more off-putting. Newbies often past the ugly avatars, get in world, and get confused on 'how to do anything' because it is all so 'different' from all of the modern competition. SL is the 'autoCAD' of MMOs. Maybe close to the oldest, but the one who's UI got left behind when all the others standardized. There are two common movement schemes out there: 1. WASD - wherein A and S are left and right movement, not turning, or Q and E offer left and right, and the mouse while holding down one of the buttons can offer turning, the other button allows turning the camera. 2. WASD again offers movement just as above - with A and S left and right. But now moving the camera turns the avatar and the camera is always looking where the avatar looks unless you enter a 'free camera' mode using some other keybind. - Both of these also come with an 'auto-run' or 'auto-walk' keybind. Hit is, and you avatar continues to walk with the direction controlled by the mouse until you use a WASD key or hit that keybind again. - These movement schemes allow for very rapid and even action based movement. They're common across almost every 'MMO' except for this one. Most of today's new players are more than likely to have already been active in one or more MMOs, and it will be 'off putting' how clunky it is to move here - where clicking the screen seems to interrupt your motion and start interractions all the time. This could be simplified by having the mouse function like an MMO mouse until you hit a toggle keybind to go into 'edit' mode. But clicks on inter-active objects would still trigger their actions. Basically how some sandbox MMOs that have forms of building do it.

You are going to want to toss that pre-bento mesh head like the radioactive lead weight that it likely is. The whole concept of sliding in different meshes to do animation is incredibly resource heavy for a look that is not all that ideal. Most of the bento head makers are making extremely stylized heads that will look highly deformed when worn with whatever shape sliders you relied upon before mesh. The closest I've found to the 'default SL avatar' is the Mayreal Bento mesh head (it is also one of the cheaper and yet fuller featured ones - an amazingly good buy). But whatever bento head you go with... I suggest logging in an alt and putting that alt on a pose stand right next to yourself, wearing your 'pre-mesh' shape. Then make a copy of your shape, and just sit there for about 10 minutes to 10 hours tweaking the dials until the two avatars look "close"... but the bento one has more 'detail'. - That's what I did. Do this with a 'demo' of the bento mesh head... because some mesh heads are so 'stylized' you will never find a look you like on them... and better to find that out BEFORE tossing away the absurd amount of $L some of those brands want... ps: if you wear things like wings, tails, etc... you should replace these with bento options as well. Especially for a neko tail - some of the most laggy items in all of SL are the pre-bento mesh neko tails. There is one particular very popular one that is basically a sim killer...

These are Tiny Empires players. They litter the ocean floors of SL because other than people who use the oceans for what they are there for - sailing - they don't bother anyone. And there aren't enough sailors to file ARs when these folks cause enough lag to crash us... because 90% of the time... they actually don't. They're just kind of annoying like having a guy standing around outside your favorite hangout 24/7 would be... I do wonder why you had one of them jump into attack mode on you like that. Maybe she was a noob who thought you were one of the bots... Her AV and yours BOTH look like bot AVs... which are often either unrefined or wearing the fashions of 3 seasons ago... Basically... they're a harmless nuisance. Move on and ignore them.

Some people do do that... I have seen things for absurd prices that are basically a 'nothing' level of content. And I have seen freebies that many people would pay 10,000L for if they knew what they were getting (like the AVpos system - which is now free / open source). But I would look again. Look not just for a Maitreya skin (I assume you meant Maitreya?)... Look also for Omega. If you find Omega... you can go to the Omega shop and get a thing that lets you apply Omega to Maitreya. Many skin makers only put out Omega because it's meant to 'work with anything'. The kit Omega sells to 'apply an Omega item to your body or head' is usually 99L. They used to discount them to 1L while it was gaining popularity, but now it's about 99L for most things - super cheap still. But I would check the store of the skin you like a little more first. They might actually have a Maitreya applier somewhere. Some of them also just sell a bundle of appliers for all the brands they support.

SL is a sandbox MMO. The technology here is basically that of an online video game of about a decade ago, patched forward. You can call it what you want - but the platform is a gaming engine.

Lighting seems to matter too. And I realized my last image was before I actually worked on the eyes a little. They still have a slightly odd angle - difficult with the mesh head to get this right. But they're close to intent here. Now 31... with and without whiskers. I had to put myself in a bright light or it "can't find black people" and thinks there's no face there... I remember that issue from when this app was all over the SL community a few years ago...

Different ethnicities show age very differently. This tends to skew people's perceptions when they look at others outside their ethnic group. That said, it seems to have decided my avatar is pretty old. Probably the whiskers and unusual eye angle. But as to height in SL... We started making a push to get height down almost 7 years ago. It has been slowly gaining ground, and now I find my avatar is "almost" normal to people around here, with my 1:1 scale height (when I put my avatar up against a prim, the prim measures the same numbers that I imagine is my avatar height if SL was RL - about 5'3" last time I looked but I tweaked my shape a little since so I actually need to recheck this). These tall people who get upset about height need to learn to get over it. Some of us want our avatars to have realistic proportions, and it is almost if not impossible to do that when you get too tall. It is nearly impossible to do it when 'too scale' because we all should be using an arm-length slider of about 110... and it doesn't go that far... (your fingertips should touch mid-thigh if standing up straight and something isn't preventing a vertically down position - as in not to round of a body. Just stand up from your chair and look at where you hands fall, and then look at your avatar...). For years this issue has had one dimension to it: 'too-scale' avatars wanted their own avatars to look 'realistic', and the tall people wanted them gone. It took us years to get folks to stop harassing us, and to stop claiming our complaints about being harassed were themselves "reverse harassment"... Now that we've gotten past that, more and more people are joining us, because you can just your 'avatar anatomy' to look better when you make all the proportions 'snap' - and then... when you decide you want a body part to look 'very unusual' you can make it stand out more, and look 'intentional', because of the contrast. Something I use to my own desired effect.

I thought it was always time for shoe shopping. I buy them all the time, even though I'm barefoot 90% of the time in SL. Note on the dress rework: THe fact that you can hack complexity scores to get them to be lower than the actual complexity of a mesh is known and how it is done was even posted on these forums... actually posted in a critique AGAINST one of my points.... basically by someone rebutting me. So be wary of a rework of that item. View the rework, when it comes, in wireframe mode. - I still call out high complexity. The conclusion she should have reached is that we also need to find low-complexity hacks and call them out AS WELL...

I use the Mayreal bento head - it's the only one I could get to not look like a warped out mess, and also look mostly like my original look. I will try those out, thanks.

Where'd you get those fangs? As a neko I'm always looking for good fangs. Right now I have a very basic mesh item that I have 'moved into place' over my teeth and as long as you don't zoom in, it looks OK...

True... But I don't understand WHY that runs counter to people's gut feeling. As we get better at this, we learn to optimize more. And so does Linden Lab. The tech available to us over time is more efficient. I am always surprised that people do not realize this. So that dress is basically using two bad technologies. One of which is largely still unavoidable. Flexi - which causes animation stress Transparency - which causes your GPU to have to calculate the color of any given pixel on your screen as seen through a variety of objects from 'camera' to 'end point of sight' - and the more transparencies it passes on that journey, the harder it is to render. - Combine these two and you have a multiplied burden, because what is transparent and how much so keeps changing. There's nothing we can do about transparency - the difference between it being in SL and not is obviously too dramatic to. Whenever I can, I flip things to 'alpha mask' which is just an 'on/off' transparency and not a blend of colors and light variables. But that too usually looks bad on anything with detail. Flexi on the other hand, is a tech that needs to die off.

Boxes are for hiding in, not for products in SL. I strongly dislike things I buy in SL being packaged. It just adds another step the process and forces me to manage inventory. It was needed years ago when you couldn't direct delivery so easily. When we were packing things into xStreet vendor boxes or whatever. It might be needed inworld when you use vendor systems - I don't know but suspect this is the case. But anytime it is not needed, it annoys me to get one.

I know that bandwidth of 3000 is higher than recommended. I've often heard it said that it's unwise to go above 1500 (or 1200 or some other close by number I forget). Basically bandwidth is "how much cake can I stuff into my mouth all at the exact same time". Problem is that your mouth (your internet and LAN speeds) isn't getting any bigger - you're just cramming stuff into it. Try to eat slices of cake, versus shoving the whole cake into your mouth in one bite... you know which of those will be more successful. But people see 'bandwidth' and thing 'bigger means more' when it actually just means 'traffic jam on the I-880, with a 7-car pileup by the bridge'... - you're putting 3000 cars onto a 1500 car freeway. But this should be a problem consistent across wi-fi and ethernet... UNLESS the quality of your wifi is actually throttling down your 3000 before it can get off your LAN? (wild guess there - a slower local wifi might actually 'protect' you from overstuffing yourself). I also use ethernet on a Macbook pro, and I don't have these issues. But I think I too have my bandwidth higher than it should be. See this article: http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_speedtest I might experiment with lowering my own bandwidth, just to see if I actually do have these issues but have mentally normalized experiencing them... Adjusting this slider in Firestorm: Tells me I should be using 500 on wifi, and 1450 on Cable. 1000 on DSL.

Taoism has it right: Just be.

Judge others to be flawed and possibly beyond redemption. Promise a solution that only you can provide. Welcome people to follow you. Give them a long list of rules they have to obey. Demand they are loyal. Require everyone wear a special outfit and name tags, and move into the commune on the outskirts of Seoul or Waco. Suggest healing massages that require cleansing of intimate body parts using your sacred organs. Bury the husbands in the shed out back and impregnate all the wives. Burn your building down when the feds show up. World's been on this ride enough times.

That is an amazingly bizarrely mono-ethnic mix of avatars given that it's 2017 and not 1957...

What the system should do is scan your inventory for a copy of the object - and if found, allow the posting a review. That would allow anyone who owns an item to review it - which would make Marketplace much more useful for driving sales of good product and driving down bad product. Similar to how reviews on Amazon function (in terms of usefulness - not in terms of how they vet legit reviewers). This would NOT let the original poster of this thread post a review - but I don't think they should be allowed to. However it would allow the person who got the gift to post a review, and that is a legitimate source for a review. It would also allow inworld buyers to post reviews.

I am having an interesting time here visualizing this. I guess the real question is where are they rubbing?

I have no idea actually... I use Belleza female everyday though with no problems. But exactly how taxing it is on my system - I am not sure. Likewise for Belleza male - my alt has this. I am not sure how taxing it really is. I have been told, on these forums actually - that this triangles trick is amazingly common... so Belleza isn't unusual in this.

I wasn't trying to paint 'The Matrix' as a 'white race fear' move myself. The article that was linked a little above paints a LOT of SciFi as that... as some kind of 'white fear of justice being served'. While the article came across that way to me... I'm not sure if I think this genre is motivated that way - at least not consciously. It's "dangerously inciteful territory" to go down to claim whites are creating a whole genre of fiction just to express a supposed nightmare of facing justice... That claim... was made by the linked article... not me. I can see the logic, and I can see some of that expression in some fiction - but I'm not going to go there with that claim until I find my "Louis Farrakhan Fan Club" membership card... But that 'meme' is a part of the collective psych of the west, so there is no reason it would not also influence non-white authors. There are many non-white authors in genre fiction. The influence of black authors that have used pen names to hide said fact reaches pretty far. My real point, side tracked by the linked article I later responded to... is that the Matrix to me represents how I think an 'AI dominant world' would be: the 'super AI' would act in a way that it justifies as protecting us. In other words - if we coded our 'robot masters' to follow Asimov's laws of robotics - they would in fact 'enslave' us "for our own good". I then turn to the justifications used for everything from slavery to reservations to project housing to even eugenics to show this - very often the people doing these programs were "well meaningfully evil". In their own minds, they had crafted a perfect set of logic to show how oppressing another community was for the 'best' for that community. Consider that the Reservation system itself, was made by late 19th century progressives, as an alternative to genocide. It was simply argued that rather than kill off the last of the 'savages' as people like Frank Baum (author of Wizard of Oz; who led the call to do Wounded Knee in the months before that massacre)... well, rather than follow Baum's plan - they could put the 'simple minded savages' under protective custody and slowly teach them to be white... In the 1890s, this was considered the 'liberal' stance... Remove their ability to "do harm to themselves", by removing their agency and culture. No where in the thinking did it occur to them that another culture might actually be legitimate... A 'Robot Master' would look at the mess we have made of ourselves... and decide to "help" us clean it up. Protect us from ourselves... by placing us under it's 'parental care'... It would do so... perfectly in line with any orders to protect and serve humanity and see human life as sacred.