Ceera Murakami

One further thing to note is that aligning an interior texture and an exterior texture on a hollowed prim is a task that requires some math calculations, and varies repending on the hollow % of the prim. For a cylinder, if the exterior has 1 repeat of the texture around its circumference, you need to set the repeat for the interior to 1 divided by the hollow % value. For example, at 80% hollow, you need the horizontal repeats set to 1/0.8, or 1.25 repeats, to get one actual repeat. You may also have to adjust the horizontal offset to get the interior and exterior textures to line up for where they start. For a hollowed cube, if you wanted 1 repeat on each exterior face, and 4 repeats inside (it is a single surface inside), it would be 4/0.8, or a repeat factor of 5.

No. However, this is a much-requested capability, and LL has said they are considering making it possible to donate Premium tier, including the free 512 M2 that a Premium member gets, to private sim owners. If they ever make that possible, I just might be willing to buy several Premium memberships, so I could pool the free ter and still live on a Private sim. Cashing in the stipend from them would almost pay back what the memberships cost.

Shop around in the "Rocket City Furmeet" sim's mall. They have one of the best selections of a wide range of avatar makers, and several of the makers that display their work there do have some nice, low-cost avatars for furries.

This is more an operating system problem than a viewer problem, though it part it stems from how LL wrote the installer code that the TPV's base their own installers on. Whatever Viewer you installed most recently will try to co-opt the SLurl function and become the Viewer that opens by default when a link for a SLurl is clicked on. It doesn't matter which Viewer it is. Install the Beta SL Viewer, and that is what the SLurl's open with. Then install Imprudence, and that will be the blessed application. The assumption in the installer code is that you're installing the latest, greatest version of the Viewer, so of course you want all SLurl's to open with that viewer, and not some older release. So it tells the OS that the newly installed app is the one that opens links of type SLurl. Not just in IE, but anywhere that a URL can exist. You get similar behavior with most applications, but most of them give you an option of making that app the default for the document types that they can open. For example, if you install OpenOffice, it can, but will not automatically, take over the "double click to open" default behavior for all your Microsoft Office documents. Install Firefox after IE, and it will offer to be the app that opens any hyperlinks in documents or saved as desktop shortcuts. The fix in your case is to re-install the current LL Viewer that you want to have as the default viewer for opening SLurl's. It will then co-opt control of those links, as the most recently installed Viewer.

Yes. The term "Hollow" in this case is being used to designate a small valley - a place that is lower than the ground near it.

The translator feature in Viewer 2 and 3 based viewers, as well as almost all resident-created translator huds and translator attachments, relied on a free translation API service from Google. Google has shut down the free service, and expect people to pay for it now if they want to use it at all. So that broke almost every translator in SL.

Whsiper Hollow is not a region name. It is an area of the game quest challenges in the Linden Realms game, and takes up less than one full sim. When you get the quest to go to Whisper Hollow, or to any other named location for a Linden Realms quest, you don't look for a region of that name and telrport to it. Instead you must walk around and check the signs that point down various trails. One set of signs will point you in the direction of Whisper Hollow. Make sure you are using a mesh-enabled Viewer to play Linden Realms. It is impossible to read the signs at all without one, and most of the content in the LR sims is mesh and doesn't look right with a non-mesh viewer.

Check your billing information page, here on the website. You may need to re-enter your PayPal information as payment info. US users just got switched over to a new system that allows us to specify multiple payment methods, and to specify different ones, for example, to use for buying L$ versus paying for recurring payments like membership dues and tier charges. https://secondlife.com/my/account/billing.php?lang=en-US I checked mine, and found it had "forgotten" the payment info on all my accounts. I had to re-enter the data. One good bit of news is that if you see that new version of the billing info page, with the four choices at the bottom for which of several possible payment methods should be used, then you've also been released from the old limit of 5 associations in a lifetime for PayPal as a payment method. The old system locked you out of ever using PayPal again as a payment method, if you had entered PayPal info five times on any combination of accounts, including changing from PayPal to a credit card andf back again for a single account. The new method will let you put every account you have on the same payment method, even motre than 5 at once on PayPal.

It can be fun to perform a wedding ceremony for friends, or to have a nice ceremony with the participants all dressed up, and in a pretty setting, whe you're getting Partnered with your special someone. But that is all it is - just fun. Make-believe fiction. I've officiated at a wedding before in SL. I spent a lot of time planning the ceremony, and making sure we had pose balls pre-set so the bride and groom could stand at the altar, kiss, and do other things as part of the ceremony, an altar that was properly decorated, and the rest of the setting to hold the ceremony in, on land they rented for the occasion. But most of it was just text chat descriptions, as I recited the ceremony and they responded for their parts of the vows. There is no regulatory agency for weddings in SL, because they are entirely unofficial. I have to wonder if there could possibly be a 'legal' wedding ceremony performed via SL, much like the wartime weddings that were held over the radio, with the soldier and his chaplain at a radio on the front lines, and his fiancee / bride-to-be at a radio in their home country, with a priest who had the appropriate civil paperwork in hand and to be turned in to church and / or civil authorities, and a witness at each end as well. If the person performng the ceremony was a legally ordained minister / priest / rabbi, or whatever, or a civil servant like a justice of the peace, able to perform a legal ceremony, and if the participants filled out the real-world civil paperwork at each end and had witnesses at each end in the real world, I guess you could do a "real" wedding. But I certainly wouldn't want to do it that way, unless, like a war bride, there was no other way to marry my real-world loved one before they went into a life-threatening situation.

Land is sold in blocks that are 4 M on a side. So any parcel's edges will always be multiples of 4 M. In the veiw menu, check the option to show parcel boundries. You can then see the edges of the parcels. In the build tools, go to the tab for editing land, and select the land inside the parcel. As you drag from one corner, you'll see the selected rectangle snap in 4 M increments. Count the number of times it does that, multiply by 4, and you have the length of that parcel edge. With the whole parcel selected, the "About Land" controls in parcel properties will tell you the total area and supported prim count for the selected land.

A group requires at least two members to exist. If you create a group and fail to add another menber within 48 hours, the group is deleted and can not be resurrected. You'll have to create a new group, with a slightly different name. The old name can not be re-used. This time, get a friend or one of your own alts to join the group as soon as you finish creating it. If you had already deeded land or prims to the group, submit a support ticket to LL, and explain what happened. They may be nice to you, and use their super-user capabilities to confiscate the parcel owned by the dead group, and re-sell it to you. Any deeded prims will likely have to be deleted and replaced.

When you link mesh to non-mesh prims, the land impact can skyrocket. Most likely the unlinked components fit okay on your parcel, but the recalculated land impact when you try to link them is too high for the parcel. Try taking the parts to a large sandbox and link them there, and see what happens to the Land Impact. You'll likely be appalled by how high it jumps, when the prim and/or sculpty parts are forced to follow the same land impact calculations as mesh parts.

@Tavish: The status of your progress in Linden Realms is maintained server-side. The HUD only displays it. If you leave LR and return, you get a fresh HUD, which updates with your prior status information, and you resume where you left off. The down side of this approach is there is no "starting over". You can't reset the status and start from the beginning again, except by playing with an alt that has never been there before.

Temporary prims were originally intended for things like physical "bullets", that could be fired from a weapon, damage the target, and then self-delete, so the parcel was not littered with spent bullets using up prim count aftre a battle. When a prim has the "Temporary" attribute set, it self-deletes roughly 60 seconds after it is rezzed. A "Temp Rezzer" is a device that uses this property as a way to cheat the prim limits on a parcel. Instead of rezzing a nightstand beside the bed, for example, it might use a temp version of the nightstand, and replace it once per minute. You can see these types of items are in fact temporary by checking their properties with the edit tools, and seeing if the 'temporary' checkbox is checked. Originally, using a temp-rezzer was a particularly bad cheat, because although the prims only lasted a minute, they still counted against the sim's total prim limit. It was quite possible to temp-rez an elaborate castle, using multiple temp rezzers, and to use up so many prim resources that yout neighbors could not rez what their own parcel should allow. Today, those temp prims no longer count against the sim's prim limit, but there are still problems with temp-rezzing stuff. A temp rezzer is rezzing that item once every minute. If it's a lot of prims, this can cause a large load on the asset resources for the area, because the simulator is constantly having to update the information on what is or is not in the area. It also causes a lot of script lag, because the rezzer is doing something every single minute. A temp-rezzed item should not contain scripts that you need to interact with. If you try to interact with a temp item that has a script in it, the item you were interacting with is replaced by a new one every minute, and the new one has no idea what you were doing with the former copy. If you sit on a temp-rezzed item, it doesn't vanish until you stand up again. But the temp rezzer still keeps rezzing replacement copies, overlapping what you're sitting on. So temp-rezzed furniture should be just for looks, and you can't, for practical purposes, temp-rez the pose balls for furniture. There are some valid uses for temp-rezzers. One that comes to mind is a firefly generator, that makes less than a dozen particles that look like fireflies, and they each move around for a minute before winking out, to be replaced by new ones. If it only makes a few prims, it's not too much of a problem. Most furniture that rezzes other props or pose balls rezzes normal items, and they do count against the prim count for the parcel. A script command called "llDie" can make a rezzed item de-rez on command, or after a set period of time elapses. For example, I made a torch that rezzes a threee-prim flame when lit. two hours after it is lit, it says in chat that the oil in the lamp has burned out, and the flame de-rezzes. No temp rezzer needed.

To cash them in for L$ at the appropriate machines, the green and blue ones can be cashed in individually. The other three colors you need 100 of the same color to cash them in, and only get between L$1 and L$4 for each batch of 100.

Phil Deakins wrote: Ceera Murakami wrote: The big players that own huge numbers of sims get a "sweetheart deal" from LL that gives them lower start-up costs and lower monthly overhead. I prefer the term, "quantity discount". "Sweetheart deal" sounds a bit like favouritism, but what LL do is give perfectly normal quantity discounts. If they didn't, they would abnormal. I've no idea if they have set quantitty discounts or if each is negotiated but, whichever it is, it's only a perfectly normal quantity discount that anyone can get. If LL publicly posted that the Atlas Program exists, and what the qualifications were for getting that volume discount, and anyone who met those requirements got the discount without jumping through additional hoops, then I might agree it was a more normal volume discount. But they don't publicly acknowledge that such discounts exist, and they only offer it to certain 'friends' that they choose to let into the program. That, in my mind, makes it a "sweetheart deal".

There are no comments for the CEO's Blog post because he hasn't allowed anyone to make comments. If he turned on comments, his happy-talk post would be full of the sort of critical replies you see in the threads like this one in the forums.

I really wish that blog had more concrete facts and less fluff. Quotes from the Blog post are in blue: "In Q1 2012 , we will be releasing new tools used to develop Linden Realms, which will allow Residents to create even richer original experiences in Second Life. To prevent abuse of these tools, we will introduce a "creators" program in which verified members will be given access to these very powerful capabilities." I take that to mean something similar to what they are already doing for Mesh Import. You have to have valid payment info on file and have to take a simple test that validates that you have at least seen the policies on the use of that capability. Personally, I don't want capabilities like forced teleports and forced attaching of attachments to be in the hands of people who have no personally identifying info on file. Imagine the crime spree when a griefer makes an attachment that force attaches without notification or a way to decline, spoofs a dialog, and drains your L$ balance. It makes sense to restrict access to processes that can easily be abused. I would not, however, want to see a similar restriction on all content creation. Anyone should be allowed to use the basic content creation tools, at least to make stuff for their own use. The ability for Residents to create what they can imagine in SL is a critical feature. Using a "Creators" restriction for selling content, at least on Marketplace, would be a mixed case. It would certainly make it easier to police the people who resell stolen or freebie content, and would eliminate a lot of the abuse there, if LL started cracking down on such abuses, instead of turning a blind eye to them. But it would also have a chilling effect on the SL economy, because a lot of newbie merchants might get excluded. "...since we deployed Mesh earlier this year, we’ve seen more than a 16 percent adoption rate." Can anyone define what in the h*** this means? 16% have gone through the process to be certified to upload Mesh? (Maybe, but a not very valid stat.) Only 16% are using a mesh-capable Viewer? (Comical spin, if true, but I doubt it.) 16% have purchased at least one Mesh item on SLM? (I really doubt that) 16% have at least one Mesh item in Inventory? (How would they even determine that?) This sounds like a statistic pulled out of his... PR folder... with no basis in reality. "In 2012, the primary engineering focus of Q1 will be server side performance and fixing bugs." Hooray! About time... I'll believe it when I see the list of long-standing JIRA bug issues start to seriously decline. "For landowners, existing land tier pricing will not go up in 2012." Good, but not enough. As Deltango stated, tier seriously needs to get LESS expensive. A LOT less expensive. How can they possibly fail to understand that, with the huge tracts of abandoned Mainland out there, and the disasterously low prices on land sales? "In addition, our service and quality focus in 2012 also means that we will be delivering features and policies that we believe will significantly assist merchants and landowners in running a business more profitably." If that means more policy changes where they don't ever consult the merchants, content creators and residents about the desirability or usefulness of the policy changes, this could do a lot more harm than good. LL's track record for making good policy decisions and implementing them well is abyssmal. "For creators our first new feature for 2012 will be pathfinding. Because worlds feel most vibrant when they are full of life, one of our next focuses for Second Life is the ability to make high-quality “life” within it. So in 2012, we will be rolling out more advanced features that will allow the creation of artificial life and artificial people to be much smoother. For starters, in Q1, we'll unveil a new, robust pathfinding system that will allow objects to intelligently navigate around the world while avoiding obstacles. Combined with the tools from Linden Realms this will make the polished creation of full MMORPG’s or people/animal simulators within Second Life easier and of high quality." That would be great, if SL was all about being a game creation tool. But that is completely missing the point of how most Residents use SL. A focus on trying to make SL into a game creation tool is like trying to make new and better ways to use every tool in your toolkit as a hammer, even if most of them are wrenches, screwdrivers and chisels. SL is very poorly suited to being a game creation environment. "In addition to delivering new features and increasing our support for Second Life, we will be launching some completely different products next year not related to Second Life. Some of them will be very experimental, but all will fit within our company’s proud history of enabling creativity, which I hope may interest some of you." As long as they don't divert resources away from fixing and improving, SL, fine. But they don't have sufficient resources right now to properly provide support or development for SL, so how they think they can support more new products is a mystery to me.

Honestly, there's not a lot of profit any more in being a landlord. The big players that own huge numbers of sims get a "sweetheart deal" from LL that gives them lower start-up costs and lower monthly overhead. They can set their pricing at what would, for anyone else, barely be break even, and can still show a profit. The little guy with only a few sims is lucky to break even, and often is doing it mostly because he wants part of the sim for his own personal reasons, and the tenants just help make the monthly payments bearable.

Note that Viewer 3.2.4 does not allow setting the window size smaller than 1016 x 741. You'll have to use an earlier or beta version of V3 to do a smaller size, as 3.2.4 won't do it. People complained when 3.2.4 came out, and LL reverted to the prior behavior in the next beta version.

You may run into another issue with making this work well as a trap door. Until they move again, their avatar is going to ignore the fact that the floor just went phantom under them. I tried once to make a moving trap door. I scripted a door in the floor, set to listen for a chat command so I could 'spring the trap' when someone was standing on it. The trap door opened right on cue, the door swung down into the pit to lie along one wall of the hole, and the avatar was centered right over the hole. And the avatar stood there in mid air, like a character in a Road Runner cartoon, oblivious to the fact that there was no floor beneath them. If they did move, there was a good chance that they could go far enough forward to end up on the floor at the rim of the pit, instead of falling into it. If you stand on a prim in mid air, and then delete the prim, you get the same effect. Until you try to move, you remain standing there in mid air. In my case, I 'solved' it by placing seat cushions on the trap door, and inviting the potential victims to kneel on them, in front of the throne. With them seated on a prim that was attached to the trap door, they moved with it, into the pit. The trap door unsat them as soon as it opened, and then it closed again, leaving them falling, since the unsit requires checking for a surface to stand on. If you do run into that problem with the phantom trap door, you might want to consider raising a 100% alpha, non-phantom barrier around the pit opening when the floor prim goes phantom. Then, if they try to move forward, their movement will be blocked long enough to ensure that they do fall into the pit. You could also get fancy and use a second collision detect prim inside the pit, to reset the trap only after something has fallen into the pit.

I believe they are asking about quadruped animal avatars, as opposed to furries that have Human-like bodies and animal characteristics like heads and tails of animals. There are three main parts to the task. First, you usually need to make a "deformer" of some sort, that changes the bone lengths and joint rotations of the avatar, so the front and rear legs can be the right lengths and rotations, and the body can be the right size. For example, I have one quad horse avatar, that if you look at the avatar without most of the prim parts on it, you can see that the prim hind legs are actually attached to the feet of the avatar, and the hip and legs are locked in position, so the neck to ankle length makes up the horse's torso length. I have some quad dog avatars where the hand and forearm and the foot and lower leg get folded up by the deformer, and the prim animal legs attach to the upper arms and upper legs. Next, you have to make the prim parts that give the body the appearance of an animal shape, and attach these parts to the avatar body. Invisiprims or alpha layers may be needed to hide some parts of the actual avatar body. Finally, once you have figured out a way to warp the shape of the avatar's body, and to make the prim parts that cover parts of it, you need to make custom animations and an animation overrider that will translate walking, running, flying standing sitting and swimming into actions that move the deformed avatar's joints appropriately to make the animal avatar seem to move correctly. Often the A/O is incorporated into the torso of the animal avatar, so when wearing that part the body is automatically deformed and animated correctly. For bonus effects, as with any other full-prim or partial prim avatar, it helps to have a HUD attachment that can be used to trigger additional actions, like making the eyes narrow suspiciously, or the mouth snarl, or the ears fold back, or the tail wag. These all get communicated from the HUD to the associated attachments via chat commands on a non-zero chat channel, that answers in the prim parts only if the owner of the prims is saying the commands. (Edit for clarification: All of the above applies to using the normal SL avatar, with prim or sculpted prim attachments, to make a quadruped avatar. The comment below this point acknowledges that the new "mesh" avatars exist, but would have many of the same requirements to make a quadruped form.) The new Mesh capabilities will change how some of this is done, as a replacement avatar body with a jointed skeleton can be worn while the avatar body is completely hidden. But for a quadruped much of the above still applies, because you can't change the number of joints or their placement in the mesh avatar's skeleton, and because without a deformer and/or an animation overrider, the mesh body still is affected by al the slider settings that affect bone lengths.

I'm using Safari. I haven't bought L$ on Lindex in a while, but I have sold them there, and Safari works just fine for that.

In general, most avatars do not include the skin texture in an exportable form. You can't take the avatar skin or the prim textures and export them. Not legally, anyway. The avatrr is "modifyable" in that you can adjust the prim sizes and positions, and can tint the prim parts, or re-texture them with your own textures. You would need to make your own version of the skin texture, import that into SL, and apply it to a copy of the avatar.

Any no-trans items remain owned by their current owner, and are ignored by the sale of the land "with objects", while all transferrable items will still get sold along with the land, if that option is selected. Anything owned by anyone other than the seller will also get ignored. Only transferrable objects owned by the seller can be transferred that way. If you don't have a good reason to leave the no-trans items there (for example, you're leaving it there because a friend is buying the land, and you want them to have free use of that no-trans item), then the no-trans items should be taken back into your inventory before you sell the parcel. This avoids the new land owner returning the no-trans items to you all in one coalesced lump.