Jenni Darkwatch

Without using mesh: Make the railing out of _two_ prims. One for the inside, one for the outside. That should allow you to make it as thin as you like. The problem then would be the top railing, where you could possibly use a cut torus to make it thin enough.

Ah oki! I misunderstood, my apologies.

Sassy Romano wrote: bigmoe Whitfield wrote: There is not point in attempting to sell something most people will never use or have any use for. a vpn is really only useful to get around a goverment block or torrenting. really not other reason to use it or have it. Securing an open Wifi access point connection Connecting to a corporate or home network Geoblocking circumvention None of these are getting around a government block or hiding. Nonsense. It's relatively trivial to get around government blocks (unless you're talking getting OUT of government networks). But, e.g., getting around Chinas "Great Firewall" is trivial. Same with Iran. Though I wouldn't use a VPN for that.

Why would it be illegal? As soon as you do you end up on the NSA's terrorist list though, regardless of what you use it for. Same with TOR and other privacy networks.

It seems that some sims still can't take vehicle crossings safely. Examples: Crossing from Dura to Ultsch with the MLCC Oceanic failed. It's the same symptom as a few months back: Some efficient vehicles cross fine. Others go off into space, though I had a case a few days back crossing into Degrand where the boat recovered after ~5 mins. The trouble with this issue seems to be that the affected sims do seem to change. Last week I had that same problem crossing from Banach into Coull. As always, please feel free to use my avi if need be, and the vehicles I used recently are all in the "* Vehicles" folder: "MLCC Oceanic" and "Riva Iseo - PG - Jenni" if you'd like to pick them out. Please do let me know if I can provide more info or specific tests. Edit: I wonder if it's Dura that's the actual problem in this case... it does throw some rather weird errors in regards to pathfinding. The most reproducible one is when querying linksets: "Error detected while querying for pathfinding linksets". I cannot reliably reproduce that one either though. It seems to work some of the time, and not any other.

"Game" physics aren't anything like real physics and have nothing in common with what you'd call physics. They merely tell a computer which parts are solid and which ones are not. That's all they do. A bounding box is an imaginary box that would cover the entire mesh, i.e. lower edge would be min(x/y/z) and upper edge would be max(x/y/z). The physics shape needs to _exactly_ be the same size as the final mesh. An example: If you make a mesh tree where you only want the tree trunk solid but not the leaves. You simply can't do that by just making a physics shape that only covers the tree trunk. You'll either need to add triangles at the outer edge(s) or you'd need to split the tree trunk off into a separate mesh. What may also help you is to inspect the physics shape. In the Develop Menu->Render Metadata->Physics Shapes Btw, since physics calculations are expensive for computers they tend to incur a higher LI with more complex geometry. Last but not least... if you have an object with less than .5m in any axis, the physics enginge will treat it as convex hull (no holes in it). The trick there is to add some invisible geometry to make the object more than .5m thick/wide/high. I'd second the suggestion to use the forums for help, it's generally easier and reaches a bigger audience.

sooo... what kind of impact does this have on FPS? It looks like the vids were taken at extremely low settings, no materials, no shadows, nothing?

I'd go for either a swing bridge _or_ a bridge that stays phantom until someone actually steps on it. And yes people place "offsim" items into LL waterways, BUT: If it blocks a channel (i.e. is physical and blocks one of the 16m wide channels) I'll send a nice NC to the owner and an AR if it's still there a few weeks later, which generally gets things returned. I have some buoys on our land that extend across an LL waterway and never had an issue. They only mark the channel though.

From my perspective, socializing in SL is a lot like RL. I don't appreciate it if total strangers walk up to me and say "Hi!". I meet people within certain settings, with certain shared interests. Sometimes I have to be social, like when people are on our land. It'd be rude to tell them to mind their own business, so I pretend to be social and friendly. I have limited free time in my life. Therefore, meeting _new_ people who as likely as not will leave SL within days or weeks is definitely not on my to-do list. As far as empty land/places... our own sim is usually pretty empty at ~600 (non-group) visitors each month. It's not meant as a social hub, though once in a while people go there to party since it's a public park. The sim is, for me and many of its residents, a way to relax and be creative.

I'd actually disagree with the "not necessary for clothes" part. Some (few) clothing makers now rez out models of the clothing to look at, and I'd rather like to see a simple "temp wear" option become more mainstream too, via llAttachToAvatarTemp() - I have no idea why nearly no store uses that, it's incredibly convenient as a shopper.

I'd agree with the assessments. Malls are there for the time you want to see an object in-world before buying. The problem with that is that most creators, with very few exceptions, don't bother to provide any way to look at a demo, or to temp-wear a demo (a relatively new ability in SL, but not one I've EVER seen used). This is especially true for clothing and accessories. Landscaping/home deco is more often rezzed at a shop. Therefore, shopping on MP is easier, faster and simply more enjoyable for many people. I do the same. I use MP to find things and only go to an inworld store if I would like a look first. On the other hand, the place I regularly hang out at is frequently very, very busy. Yet even there are the occasional hours where there's literally no one on the entire sim. I attribute that somewhat to the natural tendency of people to leave immediately if no one else is there. Because as often as not if I stay, people will eventually gather.

Any of the mainland oceans should work, plenty of airports in SL to use too. Just watch out on sim crossings. Don't cross sims via sim corner if you can avoid it and most definitely keep your script count as low as you can. I personally tend to freak out if I have more than 10 scripts on me while using a vehicle. If you do fly over land, you'll have to be high enough to avoid banlines and you'll still occasionally run into land owners who will eject without warning.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Siemp Bender wrote: I will not put in all brands in SL, but till now I see this problem allot by very GOOD creators, they made really good clothes, but do not take care of their scripts! Realistically, the mesh clothing you're wearing itself places more of a load on the simulator (because it has to be sent to every avatar that arrives in that region) than the miniscule script in a piece of clothing that uses a color-change HUD does. Two problems with that: 1) If such a script is in everything someone wears, even if it's just basic clothing, quickly adds up. When using any kind of vehicle in SL it's beneficial to not wear anything scripted at all, because the more scripts one has the higher the crash rate. 2) There's plenty of creators out there, even well known ones, where it isn't just one script. Not to mention, a redelivery terminal fixes some of the support issues, as does a big fat warning on a user's screen that they should make a copy before removing scripts, warning them of dire consequences if they don't. Scare tactics do work to get people to do something, as we all know from malware that uses that tactic

Agreed about the texture size warning. I can think of one case where it does make sense: If you have different surface materials on _one_ texture surface to reduce geometry. Whether this reduced download time I can't tell with any authority, as it depends on too many factors IMO. An example would be a piece of clothing made out of different leathers, fabrics, metals. Making all of these separate texture surfaces doesn't always make sense, so making it one texture with different diffuse/normal/spec parameters for each part makes more sense.

I still know a few high-end creators who believe that no-mod does in any way shape or form deter copybotting. To be honest I've given up debating about it - stupid remains stupid. There's one other argument against mod+copy: That griefers can take your object, inject a malicious script and get the creator in trouble. However, I think Lindens are not that dumb to retaliate against the creator of an object if there's no reason for it.

You'll have to have a separate texture face for the impostor texture, yes. If you do not have a spare texture for that you can actually cheat by using a separate mesh for that, but inverting the high/med/low/very low order... i.e.: For the high LOD use one or two triangles with a blank surface (which can be part of the impostor texture, just UV it to only display the blank parts). For whichever LOD you need to switch to impostor, i.e. low/very low, use the mesh you made that has just a picture of your home. As an advantage to that approach you can make it a box and show the proper view from each side + roof, without blowing LI through the roof. However... that scheme breaks if you do indeed expect people retexturing the final product. It works ok otherwise. I've mostly used that method for plants and a few obscenely detailed parts like wrought-iron railings and such, and since I never sell my work recoloring wasn't a problem

At least providing a way to remove scripts should be common decency by creators. Alas. Many simply don't care. There's plenty of things _I_ don't care one iota about, so I can't really blame creators for being uncaring.

In principle? Just make a lighter version of the texture and use the alpha channel to mask off specular/non-specular parts. That's all there is to it. Unlike some other engines you can color the specular map to suit your needs.

Linux is a fringe OS, and fixes for that I'd guess are not even on LL's radar. I most certainly would not hold my breath for a 64bit version of the viewer from LL. While I like the idea of actually fixed web content I seriously doubt that it'll work all that well. LL relies on people to install third party libraries to even get most media going. As you know yourself, 32bit media libs on a 64bit system is a huge pain in the hiney. Oh and there's another 64bit (linux) viewer: Kokua.

Personally, I use one of the methods described by Drongle: I split inside and outside into separate meshes. The outside I keep as a rule smaller than 30m in any dimension, but I make the effort to build all LODs for it. Inside I go nuts with details but only build the high and maybe medium detail. Within rooms I do the same thing, often building the rooms separately. Btw, 30LI for a home isn't bad at all. Our beach fort I think has something like that, and it has no insides As far as LI switching distance... if it at all matters you can always go ahead and create a distance impostor. Just one surface with the image of the outside wall instead of the actual geometry. Considering that I rarely have DD higher than 128m, anything disappearing at that distance is really not an issue for me I prefer to have shadows and everything rather than see a mile out and have corresponding long load times/bandwidth use. For reference, my LOD is set to 2 and plenty of things turn crappy at much, much lower distances. Sculpts tend to turn ugly quickly. Some mesh also does, depending on creator.

Actually you're right... I am not sure if SL treats multiple copies as "copies" or as same object with different parameters...

Depends on what you mean by "lag". If you mean framerate, no, having duplicates makes little to no difference for that. There's exceptions to that, but with any halfway modern computer made in the last 5 years it makes no noticeable difference. Load time? Yes. The entire scene loads faster if you have multiples of a single object. One load vs. multiple loads. Laggy chat, movement and such? Nope, no difference. Lag is a very ambiguous word.

There's CoolVL by Henri Beauchamps, Kokua Viewer, Firestorm, Niran's Viewer a.k.a. Black Dragon... just go look at the Third Party Viewer Directory here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory

If you go mesh, it's trivial. If you want prims-only, I'd use two prims: One hollow box for the frame, one hollow box for the glass. Use an alpha texture (with or without normal/spec) in alpha masking mode for details like lead and such on the outside of the "glass" box, use a separate alpha with normal+spec for the glass inside. Should come out as 1LI after linking. The reason for the two alphas is alpha glitching. You can at least reduce the most obvious glitching by using an alpha masked texture for everything that's not solid. Depending on your source texture you can use the same texture for both alphas. If you do read up on materials you can get fairly realistic glass these days too.

Just a side note: IRC doesn't scale well for very large channels. XMPP servers have a lot of performance issues if not tweaked to absolute perfection, and they too suffer from the large group problem. And anyone who ever used IRC will probably remember those lovely netsplits. One big issue with group chat is getting the messages out to everyone in a reasonable amount of time without getting them out of order. IRC gets around that by not worrying about order. I have no idea what XMPPs policy on that subject is. (Disclaimer: Former IRC Operator) I still like IRC's channel management abilities far and above most every other medium. Extensive channel control abilities rock. Coincidentally I'd also love the IRC ban/exempt abilities for SL land and local/group/voice chat, especially moderation flags and such would be useful in many cases. Some of that can be implemented client-side btw.