Ceera Murakami

Until I can learn how to make Mesh stuff that doesn't actually have a higher PE than what I can make with prims, it will have very little effect on me at all. For that matter, most of what I have tried to make so far with mesh hasn't worked right at all. So far, my efforts to make even the most simple mesh items have utterly failed. And I'm not going to trash all my self-built prim stuff and spend tons of money on other people's creations, that most likely won't be what I want anyway.

Try the free water textures that are in the Library. When set to a transparency of 50% or more, some of them look a lot like window glass that isn't perfectly clean, or that has some glare reflections on it.

Actually, it depends on how the in-world prims are owned. The prims in the sim could be deeded to the land group now, in which case the transfer is simple. When you do the step for setting the land for sale to a specific user, tick the option to "sell objects with land" option, and any transferrable objects that are deeded to the group will become the property of the new parcel owner - the new group, if 'Buy for group' is used. The prims might also just be 'set' to the land group, but owned by individuals. This is often the case if it is personal property belonging to renters, or for no-transfer items that they want safe from auto-return on group-owned land. Those items need to be set to the new land group individually, and auto-return needs to be off while you make the swap. I use the 'sell objects with land' option to transfer ownership of whole sims worth of in-place content in one step, including Linden Plants that I set out as landscaping. It is a real godsend. Note that if you do it as Cinnamon suggested, and change group after the sale, that drag-selecting over an area gets only the items you are close enough to see. Small items that you can't see due to LOD culling can get missed. Drag-selecting also will not select Linden Plants at all. Those you must click or shift-click individually.

Are you only 16 or 17 years old? If so, you can only go to and see sims that are G-rated. Most of the SL Grid is made of sims that are Mature or Adult Rated. G-rated sims are sprinkled through the Mature areas like rasins in rasin bread. If you're standing in a G-sim, and are on an account that is age-restricted because LL believes you're only 16 or 17, the land will seem to stop at a sharp edge when you come to the border between a G-rated sim and a neighboring M-rated sim. It is a barrier you are not permitted to cross - like trying to walk into an atult book store, and not being able to show ID that says you're of legal age to do so. Someone standing next to you with an account that is for a person over 18 will see continuing land, and be able to cross that edge at will.

Are you only 16 or 17 years old? If so, you can only go to and see sims that are G-rated. Most of the SL Grid is made of sims that are Mature or Adult Rated. G-rated sims are sprinkled through the Mature areas like rasins in rasin bread. If you're standing in a G-sim, and are on an account that is age-restricted because LL believes you're only 16 or 17, the land will seem to stop at a sharp edge when you come to the border between a G-rated sim and a neighboring M-rated sim. It is a barrier you are not permitted to cross - like trying to walk into an atult book store, and not being able to show ID that says you're of legal age to do so. Someone standing next to you with an account that is for a person over 18 will see continuing land, and be able to cross that edge at will.

By the way, Linden Realms looks outrageously bad and is completely unusable on any viewer that isn't mesh capable. I just took a look with the 1.23.5 Viewer, and it was hilarious. Tons of badly textured cylinders and cones and spheres - signs unreadable... Gives you a great preview of how unusable SL in general will be for non-mesh viewers, once Mesh gets more widely in use.

Kylie Jaxxon wrote: Admittedly, I am a complete novice when it comes to such things, but wouldn't they already know where all this is, since it had to be changed previously when they instigated one-word names, etc? ETA: LOL, nm...I am really confused and possibly further explanation will confuse me more :smileysurprised: No, because their implementation of single names was merely by changing the sign-up process so any new account created stuffed "Resident" into the surname field. They changed the viewer only enough to deal with displaying the names and display names, and accepting input for login in a single field, by parsing a dot or space as a break between firstname and surname, and if no dot or space was there, they only check against the firstname and assume "Resident" as the surname. But the majority of the code relating to dealing with inventory ownership and assets could have been left untouched.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: Ceera Murakami wrote: As I understand it, the barrier to name changes is that they did some really STUPID coding initially, and used the exact "first name" concatenated with "surname" as the string that all ID checks are coded to examine. The concept of UUID codes came later, and the UUID is NOT what any of their databases are keyed on or coded to use. So a change in the name, even if the UUID remains the same, is an incredible problem. To fix it, they would have to change every instance where identity is checked, and they would also have to re-index the entire avatar databses so UUID was a primary key. (The latter may already be the case, I don't know.) Still not an insurmountable issue. Fixed something like that at my company earlier in the year. Where we had stored a vast number of customers by some bery sensitive private numbers... and a new system put in place displayed on our website a certain item that was linked to what we'd stored them by... and had to sit there with the IT folks and have pretty much this debate... "It can't be changed" versus "can you just move a column in SQL and then alter the old column for a new entry?" - In the end, took about 5 minutes of code work to fix, after 5 hours of back and forth on how to do it. They just ran a command line search and replace script. Depends a lot on how well, or how poorly, the code itself is written. I'd place it on a par with the "Year 2K bug" coding issues. For some programs, adapting them to cope with the Y2K bug was trivial. A simple search and replace to swap in a batch of code was all that was needed. But larger, more complex and less well-written code became a real rat's nest to untangle. LL has a history of making some really bad coding choices, so I would be willing to bet that in their case, the code that would need to be changed exists in hundreds of different places, and in dozens of variations, across several inter-related modules of code. Fixing it would most likely take an eyes-on look at every line of code, by individuals familiar with exactly what does what. The decision to base indexing off a concatenation of two very visible fields makes this one suck in terms of implementing a simple solution by updating database columns. You either have a 'pseudo-field' consisting of the concatenated value, or else on account creation a third column value is created that is the concatenation of first and last names. If they had the foresight to do the third field idea, they most likely also would have realized that a completely unique key would be a better index in the first place. So I'll bet they took the lazy way out, and calculate a pseudo-field as the key. If that is the case, they can't just repopulate the key field with the UUID. Placing the UUID in either the first or last name fields will break everything. That leaves them stuck with locating every place that checks for ID, and re-writing the part that says "compare against the concatenation of firstname and lastname" to change it to "compare against the UUID". And that could exist in many, many places in the code, with a wide renge of variations in how they coded it.

As I understand it, the barrier to name changes is that they did some really STUPID coding initially, and used the exact "first name" concatenated with "surname" as the string that all ID checks are coded to examine. The concept of UUID codes came later, and the UUID is NOT what any of their databases are keyed on or coded to use. So a change in the name, even if the UUID remains the same, is an incredible problem. To fix it, they would have to change every instance where identity is checked, and they would also have to re-index the entire avatar databses so UUID was a primary key. (The latter may already be the case, I don't know.) They don't even know themselves exactly where in the code all those embedded ID checks are located, and most of the original coders for the code that does that are long gone.

Seems like a no-brainer to me. First name = Mandatory entry Last name = Optional entry. If not specified, you get a single-name login and the legacy "Resident" surname. This is a free-entry field, just like the first name. No unicode or strange characters in either field. Whatever you enter is compared to existing registered names for uniqueness. firstname.lastname if both specified, or what's in the firstname field only if they opt for no surname. Single name example: RodsTheMan as first name, no last name specified = Checked against "rodstheman" for conflicts, shows in-world on legacy systems and scripts as "RodsTheMan Resident". Two-name example: Ceera Saito = Checked against "ceera.saito" for conflicts, and does NOT matter that "Saito" was once a surname choice in the original naming system. The latter would be excellent for me, because I could finally get an alt that has the same Surname as my Partner of 6 years. Doesn't offer a solution for the flood of people stuck with "Resident" as a surname in legacy systems and scripts, but as V2/3 style viewers become the norm, the visibility of "Resident" will decrease.

What bank? LL outlawed any sort of in-world 'Banking' quite some time ago, because of massive fraud in unregulated so-called banks that accepted deposits from residents, promised high returns, then skipped with the money. The only way a bank should exist in SL is if a real-world bank, fully acredited in the real world, like Chase Manhattan or the like, was to open a branch inside SL. And I am not aware of any legitimate bank that has done that. There was one group that said they were legally licensed in Singapore, but I haven't heard about them in over a year. Or are you saying you're having problems buying L$ with real money from your real-world bank?

You could buy a Premium account ($72 USD a year dues), then pay a one-time fee to buy no more than 512 M2 of land on the Mainland. You'll get most, if not all, of your money back over the next 12 months in the form of a weekly L$300 stipend from LL, and you'll pay no additional fees for the land. You will, however, still have to pay Linden Lab that $72 USD a year in membership dues, each year, or you'll lose the land. 512 M2 is pretty small. Just a 16M x 32 M rectangle (typical shape), and gives you only 117 prims to use for your house or store and everything in it. That's the closest thing to "land I don't have to pay tier on" in SL. You're still, paying LL for it, in the form of your membership dues.

I have 30,325 items in my inventory, and have no problems. Used to be over 40K, but I did some "Spring Cleaning" and tossed some older stuff I'll never use again. There is no set limit, no. But the larger your inventory is, the more lag you'll have when you first log in, as the asset server catches up your viewer with the list of what you should have. I have some alts with very low inventories, and they have better frame rates in general than my main account, no matter how long either is logged in. So big inventories do seem to cause some client-side lag.

LoL... It is probably trying to flag for "Basketball shoe" variations... Leave it to the Lindens...

The problem is that the terrain transitions are generated client-side, with a slight randomization factor. So if you have flat ground that is close to a transition between two terrain textures, it can flip-flop between them erraticly with each viewer and login. I have a lovely beach that is usually sand, but sometimes is patchy sand and grass, my "low" value, for the transition between the lowest texture and the second one, is a couple meters higher than the beach's surface. There is no way to fix this, other than to move the transition point further from that surface level - for example, moving the "low" designation a little higher on each of the 4 sim corners.

You can not make a specific selection. All Linden Homes are randomly assigned, as far as sim and location in the sim. The best you can do is to repeatedly abandon and re-request a home, up to 5 times per day, until you get one whose position you like, or you get sick of trying.

They really should place a huge warning dialog on the screen when anyone attempts to return items that way. It's the virtual version of using a bulldozer and dumpster to clean your bedroom in a single action. Everything gets lumped together in an almost unusable and unidentifyable mess. Go to a large sandbox to try to re-rez your coallesced item (s), because if they are spread out over a large area, parts of it may attempt to rez beyond your parcel edges, and that could cause problems. Also, if you returned any one-prim Linden Plants in that action, you'll need a sandbox that allows creating plants, or it won't rez at all.

Holidays coming up. People have other things to do, like shopping in RL? It does seem there are fewer posts here lately, though.

You can not open a shop in the "Linden Homes" sims, on the free 512 M2 parcel that already has a house on it. But you can decline to request a Linden Home, or you can abandon the one you have if you already asked for a Linden home, and that will give you 512 M2 of free tier that you could use elsewhere on the Mainland, where use is not so restricted. You would have to purchase that 512 M2 parcel from some other Resident, for a one-time purchase price. After that, yes, you could set up a small business on that 512 M2 parcel, and not pay a monthly tier fee, as long as you do continue to pay your Premium dues. But remember that 512 M2 only gives you 117 prims to work with, and that isn't very much for the building to contain your store, and the vendors to display what you want to sell. It can be done, but it's a pretty small merchant space.

They are checking on a bug that is causing people to be able to buy things and end up getting both the product and a full refund. Apparently something going wrong with communication to the magic boxes. Yes, until they fix it, some merchants are giving their stuff away for free, without knowing it. More info in this thread: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Oh-really-now/m-p/1274143

Short answer: Yes, in any tax jurisdiction that I am aware of. Long Answer: LL can give you monthly statements for exactly how much real money you sent into SL (buying L$ or paying Premium dues) and how much you took out (cashing out). PayPal can give you reports of how much you cashed out as well, and they DO report that income to the USA's IRS now, as I understand it. Best bet is to treat income earned from cashing out via PayPal as real income, once it is in PayPal and able to be spent, or once any checks or other forms of payment received hit your bank account. If you keep good records, you could concievably count some in-world expenses (like the land you use in-world to build products on, and texture upload charges) as 'expenses' for your business. Server space rental and cost of materials are valid business expenses in most jurisdictions. It is unlikely that any real-world tax authority will care about resident to resident transactions in-world done in L$. What they want to know about is when real money gets to a point that you could spend it in the real world. If in doubt, talk to a tax specialist in your country, who knows small business tax laws.

The problem is that SL attempts to wrap the texture from far edge to far edge. It assumes that ALL textures are seamless ones that will tile to some extent, and not that you might ever want to put a texture exactly as-is on one prim face. Let's say you have a texture that is 50% white and 50% black, split horizontally. Take that texture and apply it to two prims, one above the other, with the bottom one rotating the texture 180 degrees, so the two black halves touch. In a perfect rendering situation, the black would be seamless. But in SL, you'll have a two pixel wide white line at the seam. Why? Because it is bleeding a bit of the far (white) edge onto the black edge. You can minimize this by setting the texture repeat to 99% in the build tools. The texture won't match perfectly, but the far edge bleed will be gone. If you use a script to set the texture repeats, you might manage to set the repeats to 99.8%, and make it almost truly seamless. What Chosen and the others said is right, however. There are extremely few valid reasons to split a mega-huge texture into 1024 x 1024 pieces and display it across multiple prims. It's a waste of graphic resources.

Joe Miller may have made statements like that 5 years back, but I think he was talking out of his own belief, and not stating formal company policy. Or that if it was a "plan" at the time, the response the announcement generated caused them to do an immediate about-face on the idea. Certainly they never did release the server code to open source. Intsead, they tried licensing a turnkey server system (SL Enterprise), which tanked horribly. Is Joe even still around? Or did he get kicked out with one of the employee purges?

Linden Lab has never intended to open-source the server code. Only the client.Some users speculated about the server code also going open source, but LL canned that idea almost as soon as it was first mentioned. If the OpenSim grids could offer 100% compatability with the main grid's functionality, it would hurt SL a lot more than their half-implemented, reverse-engineered server code does today.

AliceEmber wrote: Thanks for replying! There is an AO with it. In my outfit it says "WerewolfAlpha AO (worn)". But I still stand on two legs. (And the front legs look very strange, with super wide shoulders.) I picked one of the quad werewolves as my starter avatar, if that makes any difference? Are you in a no-scripts area when you are putting it on? Like a public sandbox that has scripts disabled, or someone else's land that only allows scripts for group members, and you're not in the group? If so, the AO can't function.