Ceera Murakami

Making an image display something different for each user would be harder, and I am not sure how to approach that. Things like a sphere that seems a different color to different users when viewed at the same time from different angles may be a texturing trick. For example, I can use multiple flat planes with an alpha texture on them, and what each user will see will be, generally, the texture on the surface that is most perpendicular to their line of sight. Prim trees made of three or four intersecting planes use this trick to look three-dimensional. There's no reason those images have to be the same, though. In fact, a good prim tree will have the image mirror-reversed on the opposite side of each plane, and eact plane would be an image of that tree from that angle of view. I've made a few very nice prim trees by modelling them in a 3D app like Bryce, that can make procedural, fractal-based models of trees, and rendering the same tree from several angles to make the images for my SL prim tree.

A "sign" that always faces the viewer is almost certainly done with particles. Somewhere in my inventory I have an "NPC Generator", that is a one-prim scripted object that displays above it a single particle for an avatar-sized flat image of an avatar. For example, I could use that to display a castle guard on the far side of a room. The illusion faisl though if the viewer isn't on the same level, because the particle continues to display as if perpendicular to the viewer's line of sight. So viewed from the balcony over the castle wall, that guard seems to be laying on his back! Displaying a "hologram" in SL is easy. Just make the thing out of normal prims, sculpties and/or mesh, and set it to be phantom and partially transparent (and monochrome toned, if it is a monochrome hologram you are simulating).

Most viewers now allow you to set the amount of time before an avatar goes 'idle', and before an avatar is logged off for inactivity. Most bot programs should have that setting as a standard feature, since a bot that has to be logged back in frequently would be pretty worthless. Recently LL has been deploying server upgrades once a week, so that would be the practical limit. If your greeter bot is in the sim and the sim restarts, it will get logged off and have to be logged back in again. I am sure some clever bot programmers have a way to detect if the connection to the sim drops, and to detect when the sim comes back on-line and automatically log in again. Check the various bot programs out there, and you'll probably find that feature, and be able to use that bot app to run your greeter.

No. Many years ago, when LL was trying to encourage people to spend real money to buy virtual land, and that was still a new concept, they used to collect "Traffic" figures and give sim and even parcel owners a L$ bonus for hosting a "popular" venue. People that owned clubs rapidly started gaming the system, by using camping chairs and accounts run by 'bots', or program-run accounts, to inflate their numners and appear to be more "popular". LL eventually ceased paying anything to the land owners, but still used traffic figures to improve a place's placement in the search listings. Most recently, traffic is only a small part of what they use to determine search rankings.

Yes, the second version works correctly for linksets. Thank you very much for sharing this script! My own practice is to place a tall, slender prim cylinder on the ground, at the corners and mid-point edges of the parcel, and then send those prims to the altitude I intend to build at. They then form a visible "fence" at the property edges, up in the sky.

Maybe it is tripping on the word "Katja"? The Gorean term for a slave girl is "Kajira", and LL has been known before to flag words that were only vaguely similar to adult-related words with their badly-designed keyword-based flagging system.

Second life makes video cards work harder than almost any other program or game out there. The reason is that the content of the virtual world is primarily user-created, and isn't optimized for maximum graphics efficency, as it would be in a game. Since the content changes continuously, SL can't pre-cache most fo what you see, the way a game can. The content creators are not, for the most part, professional game designers, and so they don't focus on making their content so it displays efficiently. Even for those content creators that try hard to make their own stuff perform well, the rest of the world around you probably doesn't.

I'm afraid you selected the wrong membership billing plan. The discount was only for new users that went with the quarterly billing option. The link for the promotion's ads would have defaulted to having Quarterly selected, and that option was also highlighted. The monthly and annual options were there too, but not at a discounted rate, so if you clicked Monthly, which it seems you did, then you agreed to sign up at the normal monthly rate. Contact billing, but odds are they will not change anything for you. They never give refunds, that I have ever heard of. The exact rates were clearly stated on the page, for each of the billing plans, and the fine print on the page did state that only the quarterly billing was at the sale price. I will recommend that if billinbg won't help you, then you should switch to annual billing if you intend to remain Premium. Annual costs only $6 USD a month (one payment of $72 USD, good for one year), as opposed to $9.95 per month when billed monthly. A quarterly membership normally comes in halfway between those two prices. The quarterly half price deal was only a "good buy" if you immediately switched to annual billing, anyway. The discount is on the first three months only, and then renews at the full rate. Here's how it works: After those first three months, it renews as quarterly again, at the full quarterly price. So if you fail to switch to annual billing before it auto-renews, it will eventually cost you more to take them up on this "special offer" than just ignoring it and signing up as an annual membership at the regular price to begin with. 3 months at $11.25 = you save $11.25 off the quarterly rate, or $6.75 off the annual rate. 3 months at $11.25 + 3 months at $22.50 = you effectively pay $16.875 per quarter, or a savings of $5.625 per quarter off the normal quarterly rate. You still save $2.25 as compared to the annual rate billing. Let it auto-renew a second time, and you're losing money, compared to the annual billing rate. 3 months at $11.25 + 6 months at $22.50 = you effectively pay $18.75 per quarter, or a savings of $3.75 per quarter off the normal quarterly rate. You lose $2.25 as compared to the annual rate billing. Let it auto-renew a third time, and you're losing more money, compared to the annual billing rate. 3 months at $11.25 + 9 months at $22.50 = you effectively pay $19.69 per quarter, or a savings of $2.81 per quarter off the normal quarterly rate. You lose $6.75 as compared to the annual rate billing. Also, this offer is only for upgrading from Basic for the first time ever. You can't use it if you are a current Premium member and want to extend your membership inexpensively by three months, and you can't cancel a current membership and upgrade later at the discounted rate, the next time they offer this deal.

You need to set your preferences to allow cookies. The Web Profiles, even if you specify an external browser for all other HTML links, use an internal web browser, and they don't work if you disable cookies.

Many of the early freebie hug and kiss animations make the avatar jump up and down or run in place, and do look pretty spastic. They used to look much better, but LL changed how collisions between avatars were detected, and it screwed up the old hug/kiss gadgets. The only fix is to gift your boyfriend or yourself with a newer, better quality hug/kiss attachment. Shop in Search or on SLM and you'll find many much nicer ones out there, and some are free or very inexpensive.

Most hug / kiss animation sets just do the animation, and don't worry about height differences. If one avatar is much taller than the other, the short one ends up off the ground, and probably kissing the tall one's neck or chest. In general, their hips match up. It's difficult to actually get them even facing each other. If you issue the request and aren't aligned right, one person often has to twist around to get themselves facing the other. Haven't seen a hugger yet that automatically solved that alignment issue, without rezzing pose balls that they have to explicitly sit on and stand up from. I have seen huggers specificly for dealing with much shorter tor taller avatars - designed so a child avatar can give or receive a hug and / or kiss. It uses a different animation for the situation, sometimes with the taller one kneeling. You could offer a couple of different options - like kiss, kiss taller, kiss shorter - with different animation pairs for each case, so the shorter one stands on tip toes and the taller one bends down into the kiss, for example. You could also offer an adjustment factor, that gets set once, and that assumes the person wearing the HUD is consistently taller or shorter than most of the people that they kiss or hug, either offsetting the animation pair, or actually selecting a different animation set if the offset falls within certain ranges.

Being "Furry" is sort of like being Pagan. There's a different interpretation of what it means for almost every person who identifies themselves as part of that group. There's no clear-cut "sects" or types within them. It's a rather continuous spectrum, much like all of Humanity's interests and efforts. Gay or straight, tame or kinky, lifestylers or casual comic fans, they include a multitude of types. Yes, Furries have a sub-group that sees being furry as a very sexual and kinky thing. But there's juat as many, if not more, who are simply into anthro animal cartoons and comics, like Bugs Bunny or Kevin and Kell or Gene Catlow. Go to a furry convention in real life, and you'll meet an amazingly divrse group of people. Best advice I can give you on a furry avatar is to go to the mall at the "Rocket City Furmeet" sim. If there's a type or species of furry avatar that they don't sell there, it must be something new or obscure. All the major furry avatar makers have vendors at Rocket City Furmeet, and you can find anything from tiny quad foxes to huge anthro dragons, to cat girls that are nearly Human or just about any species as an anthropomorphic form. Shop, ask questions of the people you meet there, and buy a few things to try, that seem 'right' for your tastes.

Just make sure your US$ balance has enough cash in it to cover your tier and/or any Premium dues that come due soon, and they will draw from that source before attempting to charge your credit card. Go to this page to add cash to your US$ balance from your current payment method on file. https://secondlife.com/my/lindex/manage_balance.php

Check out the sim "Serenity Woods", or the sim "Rocket City Furmeet". Both have plenty of friendly furrs, and the latter has one of the largest furry malls for avatars and furry accessories.

After firing the 4th cannon, there are no more quests, and no more need of that status line. Time to cash in any remaining crystals for L$, or hunt more crystals to cash in.

If the land is group owned, 512 M2 of donated tier is enough to support 563 M2 of group-owned land. Note that this only applies to "Mainland", where tier is paid directly to Linden Lab, and not to privately-owned sims. Create an alt account (it can remain a Basic Member), and create a group and have your account and the alt both join the group. This ensures your group will always have at least 2 members. Buy the land, and deed the land to the group, contributing tier from the Premium account to cover the land's tier. Assuming that you do not also have a "Free Linden Home", which uses the same 512 M2 of free tier allocation, your Premium account should be able to maintain that new land at no charge per month. You MAY get charged $5 USD in tier for the first month, billed as soon as you buy that 528 M2 parcel, because you will briefly have "owned" more than 512 M2 of land, before deeding it to the group. If this happens, make sure you "tier down" to the level that pays no tier, before the next month comes due. Details on how to do these tasks are in the article one of the other replies poined you to.

The SL system as-is doesn't suppport "pregnancy", sexual relations, or growth and aging. However, clever Residents have made scripted gadgets to allow these activities, and to simulate "growing up". Sex is simulated by using various animations, primarily by use of "pose balls". The male genitalia can be simulated with prim attachments that are scripted to change appearance with 'arousal'. There are also female genitalia attachments, or you can go with a realisticly detailed skin for the female, and not bother with prim parts. There are several scripted HUD systems that allow one to simulate the risk of pregnancy. Prim genital attachments could also be scripted for this, though I don't recall seeing any on the market. Search for "Pregnancy" in-world or on SL Marketplace, and you'll find several products, such as the "Mama Allpa HUD", that do this. Actually appearing to be pregnant is achieved by altering your shape settings. You can purchase a graduated series of shapes, or can follow guidelines from your HUD maker to alter copies of your own shape for this purpose, and change the shapes every "month" as the pregnancy progresses. Some systems assume that time in SL passes as fast as the day and night cycle, so that 24 hours of real time equals the passage of six "days" as far as your fertility cycles and pregnancy duration goes. Or you can role-play in in real-time, or however you wish for your role-play. Several places offer animation pose sets specificly for "giving birth", and also offer prim babies for sale. A prim baby is essentially just a doll that your avatar can carry. Most don't do anything. You can also just use your imagination in role-playing childbirth and can make your own prim baby doll. There are few decent options for simulating an infant or toddler as an avatar. You would have to use a "Tiny" avatar that uses special animations and body distortions and a full-prim avatar body to appear to be an infant or toddler, which you or your mate or a friend could run with an alt account. Most "SL Families" that I am aware of play with the prim dolls for a while, and then fast-forward to when the child is eight or so, which is about the youngest appearance and height that can be created with a standard avatar. An alt account could be created to run the child's avatar, and over time you can change the shape and accessories so the "child" can "grow older" and become an adult. Doing roleplay as a child avatar in SL is popular with a number or people, and does not, usually, have any sexual connotations. It's just re-living your childhood through a child-sized avatar. (Using a child-sized avatar for simulated sex in SL is against the Terms of Service, as is creating kiddy porn in SL.)

No-trans textures can't be added with the texture picker. Instead, you have to drag them from inventory to the prim surface or drag them from inventory to the texture pane in the editor.

http://my.secondlife.com/babycarlos1

My understanding is that if a contributing premium member downgrades to Basic or defaults on their tier and / or dues, the group's "contribution" is decreased by the amount that person had contributed, and the owner of the group is usually sent a polite e-mail stating that the group needs more tier contributed to it. At that time you can contribute more to it, or any other group member that is Premium can contribute more to it. If no one makes up the difference by the time the group's tier is due, the group will be in default and LL will start acting to get someone to pay the back tier, or else the group could lose ALL the land, and not just a part of it. They usually do try to give the groups a week or two to come up with more tier contributions. If you increase your contribution now to match what the other person was contributing, then your tier would most likely increase, but the group would be safe when the other person's contribution is lost.

Your L$ balance and inventory on the Beta grid is a snapshot of what you had on the real grid the last time they refreshed the beta grid. So if you had zero L$ at the time when they did that snapshot, that is all you have on the test grid. If you can find a Linden on-line on the test grid, they can increase your L$ balance there, and can refresh your inventory.

This last year LL eliminated virtually all non-profit and education discounts, so no, they won't sponsor an education sim.

BothamFidor wrote: You're only saying that because you're a cat! A fox, actually. A three tailed Kitsune, to be precise. And either way, goldfish are tasty! *wink*

As someone who does NOT find the new feeds to be all that wonderful or useful, I still agree with many of the points raised in this thread. We really need a way to subdivide our Friends list, both in-world and for the purposes of the profile feeds, into groups of various sorts. I have over 120 people on my Friends list. Some are there because they truly are friends that I socialize with. Many are there as business contacts - people who purchase my content and contact me on occasion with product requests or support questions, or who hire me to build for them. Some are there strictly because they like to ask me for assistance on occasion with building, texturing or scripting. Some are merchants that I like to keep in touch with, because I like their products. Some are there simply because they are my own alts, and having them on my Friends list makes it easier to send them money or inventory. As far as profile feeds go, I would want to filter each of these diffferently, if I used the feeds at all - like having one filter to look at my social friends, and another to look at merchant friends, and filtering most of the rest out. The ability to mute indivuduals from the profiles if they are muted in-world is a necessity. The ability to ban an individual from following your feed is needed. The ability to choose on a post by post basis who can love or comment is needed. A flag for "commercial announcements" that can be filtered on is needed, and that needs to go both ways - It would actually be more useful to me to filter out everything in the Feeds and in Trending that is NOT a commercial announcement, so I can see the merchant product announcements in the sea of social irrelevancies. Others may never want to see a commercial announcement in their social streams. As implemented now, I find the "Trending" completely useless. A handful of individuals are keeping their own posts at the top of that feed by loving their own posts with alts, or by loving each other's posts, and the people that appear there are completely unrelated to my own Friends or Interests. I don't know any of them, nor do I care that they fed their goldfish again today, and 5 people "loved" that post. I would "love" to just turn that off, or to filter trending so it only showed the trends in those who I follow.

A performace venue, maybe? If you charge for admission to the sim, so people can hear musicians or the like, them maybe. But the limit on number of avatars in a sim makes that pretty well impossible to be profitable. Even if you kept the sim rocking 24x7 with top-quality acts, it would be difficult to get enough paying partons to pay to see the performances and cover your costs.