Ceera Murakami

I absolutely agree that the "Outfits" feature needs some sort of heirarchical orginization structure. I guess what we have now was designed by a geeky guy whose wardrobe consists of several identical blue jeans, black slacks, and khaki shorts, paired with a small assortment of t-shirts, polo shirts and one dress shirt and tie. For him, a dozen or so named outfits is more than he knows what to do with. Me? I most likely have more pairs of shoes than he probably has ever had clothing items of all kinds combined. (And 2/3 of my forms have digitigrade legs, and can't even wear shoes!) I have over 80 avatar forms, not counting how I dress them. My "clothing" folder is nested 4 layers deep, at least, with 20 or so base categories, and categorized by things like which outfits can be worn with digitigrade legs and tails, as on my furry forms, or which ones require human-style legs and feet, and on which are copyable and which are no-copy... The current Outfits folder is only useful to me for a handful of very commonly used forms and clothing looks that I like to be able to switch between rapidly. It's worthless for 90% or more of my clothing and avatar inventory. I would love to see the ability to organize outfits heirarchically, and to assign a thumbnail image to them, like the "Avatars" floater now does for library avatars, so I could quickly see and select the look I want from my wardrobe.

I believe that even if they pay in US $, you get your money in L$. The USD Balance is from you selling L$ on Lindex, and can be applied to SLM purchases you choose to make, or to being cashed out via PayPal.

Not really much more you can do, I am afraid. Just explain to the former tenants that you're as much left in the lurch as they are, and that they have toi take it up with the sim owner. The residents can try to submit a ticket to LL to get the sims temporarily re-opened so they can get their content back, but after more than 30 days it's harder to do that. Not impossible, just harder to get LL to open them. Ideally the sim owner should submit that ticket, and notify the tenants when the sims are briefly back. Perhaps LL will take into account that you are the estate manager, and allow you to also submit a ticlet to temporarily re-open the sim, on behalf of the former owner and their tenants. There was a time when LL considered the Estate Manager of a sim to be a concierge-level custimer, with regards to requests for that sim or group of sims. Not sure if LL will still take that into account.

Villainous Serenity wrote: So in world, anyone can use my personal IM's logs, not Local, and share them with whom they please? No. Precisely the opposite. Void stated that "disclamer" is invalid and unenforcable. No one can claim that they are exempt from requiring your consent to post any personal information or chatlogs regarding you. They can't make a statement in their profile or anywhere else that they are exempt from the TOS or Community Standards. That first part explicitly protects chatlogs, and requires consent to share them with anyone else. The second part is primarily stating that if you choose to disclose information in a publicly-readable place, like these forums, or the solution provider's directory, or other web resources, outside of a normal conversation in-world, that the information is public. They have to say that so they can keep the forums open, or else they would be in violation of their own rules for hosting the forums, if anyone disclosed their own personal info there. The "disclaimer" in someone's profile has no more validity than me posting in my profile that "By reading my profile or speaking to me in-world you agree to send me $100 USD.". Only a fool would send the money, right? There's no valid reason why you should. A disclaimer in someone's profile can't void any rights you have here. Period.

This capability already exists for private sim owners. The sim owner can, at any time they wish, save to their hard drive a "*.RAW file" that contains all the terrain data and water height data for the sim. If they want, they can make weekly or daily backups and save them to their hard drive, and can restore to any of those. Each time they save a raw file, that resets the base point for terraforming limits, and resets where the terrain snaps back to if land is selected and the "Revert" command is issued in terraforming. That capability is impossible (by LL Policy) on the Mainland, since LL refuses to allow land owners on the Mainland to have actual sim owner rights, even if one person owns every square meter of land in the sim. LL is the "Owner" of all Mainland sims, and they archive the terrain oncem just before they release it to public purchase, and then never again. The only exception I have seen to that is when they once decided to add natural coastlines to some existing mainland sims that just sharply abutted the adjoining water sims. They terraformed once and saved the result. "Estate managers" do not have permission to save or upload raw files. I often wish that they did, but it is unlikely LL will ever agree to that.

Unfortunately, efforts like that are pretty much doomed to fail in SL. In the real world, we have consumer laws and the like that help to regulate business practices, and a consumer group like a Better Business Bureau or a Chamber of Commerce can leverage those laws and accepted practices to give some credibility and authority to their regulation attempts. In SL, there are no internal laws regulating trade, and the only 'legislative body' with any true authority is Linden Lab, which runs the virtual world like a benign (and somewhat incompetent) dictator, while refusing to get into "resident to resident disputes". The only thing LL will do if someone commits fraud inside SL is respond to either a DMCA Takedown notice, for IP theft issues, or to an action of an actual real-world court of law that subpoena's user information for trial in the real world. It's extremely impractical to open a real-world legal case for the monetary values commonly exchanged within Second Life. Most transactions are far less than $20 USD. Even a small claims court will likely cost you more in fees than you'll ever get back in damages, and that is if you're in the same legal jurisdiction as the one you want to sue! Good luck if you're in England and the other guy is in Russia. Let's say you do create a "Chamber of Commerce), (or a police force, or a court system, or any other type of regulatory force). There's absolutely no reason for anyone else in SL to pay any attention to you. Even if you and your members act with incredibly high ethical standards and very honestly run your organization, the only people you'll represent are the ones that agree to join your organization. Everyone else, and there will be millions more than you have members, will either not even know or care that you exist, or will not be terribly interested in joining. And those who don't join your group may well resent your attempts to influence their actions. I run real-world small businesses, and have for many years. I was recently a member of the US Better Business Bureau, in the real world, and had a solid, "A" rating with the BBB. Even though that is a very legitimate organization, I quit being a BBB member recently, because as someone doing business on my scale, the annual dues to be a BBB member just were not worth the almost non-existent return I got from being a member. I can't imagine how an in-world BBB or CoC, with no force of law backing it, could be of any more value to me, as a merchant, than the real BBB was. I can maintain my own high ethical standards without any help from an organization. So why would I join yours?

One good rule of thumb in SL is to buy something, and then not buy a second thing until you have confirmed that the first one arrived in your inventory. That way, when the seemingly inevitable delivery problems do happen, you only lose one purchase, and only have one merchant to deal with.

It's a relative newcomer who is copying some aspects of SL. Started in Sept 2008, a couple years after the server code for SL was reverse-engineered and the viewer code open sourced. Looks like they copied a very limited subset of what SL is and does, but are implementing it mainly as indoor rooms, like IMVU. Just another "me too!' virtual world attempt.

Not only is showing the display names in the same field a REALLY bad idea, but the current data dump is also inconsistent between SL Marketplace sales and in-world transactions. If I sell something on SLM, the "Resident/Group" field reads "Commerce Linden (commerce.linden)". To find out who actually bought the item, I have to look in "Description" and parse out the buyer's name from a mess like this: "Order #1283798654, Item #2613948 (Maire Kidd/TRU Timeless)". And I can't tell if that is the legacy name format, or display name. I can tell you that in this example, "TRU Timeless" is the merchant account that my texture sales are from, and "Maire Kidd" is apparently the customer. The name before the / changes depending on the sale, and I know that the TRU Timeless account doesn't do anything with display names. On the other hand, any other kind of transaction shows the buyer or seller in the "Resident/Group" field, like this "Star Captain Porter (starchaser.webb)" I would much rather see the "Resident/Group" field show ONLY the legacy name in the resident field in the downloaded XML (minus the last name Resident where applicable). I really couldn't care less about their Display name that week, but if it is to be provided, then it needs to be in a completely different field. The SLM sales need to have the buyer's namd in the same place as any other transaction type, not jumbled together with the purchase description. And describing what was sold on SLM only by an order number and "item number" is unnecessarily cryptic. I guess I have to look up the transaction, parse out their actual name, then note the item numbers in all the transactions for that user (which are impossible to sort on!), and then go into SLM's merchant controls to figure out whaic code represented the item they asked about? This is utterly pathetic.

Well, for one thing, you can drop the default Anti-aliasing setting in V2 or V3 from 8x to 2x, and boost your frame rate tremendously, with virtually no effect on in-world viewability. 8x is an insane level of overkill, and eats graphics processing time.

Personally, I think the UI changes in 3.2 are a major improvement. This is the first viewer since 1.23.5 that I haven't needed to add XML hacks (like the Starlight skins) to in order for it to be marginally usable. No sidebar. Ding, dong, the sidebar's dead, and good riddance! No more having one hand tied behind my back when I need to multi-task. No more forcing one action at a time, lock-stepped modal content into a pop-out sidebar that couldn't be properly expanded to accommodate the content, and that ate up unnecessary amounts of on-screen real estate. I can put floaters where I want them, and in the size and shape I want, and that is where they reappear next time I want them. If I need more windows of a certain type open, like checking three profiles at once, it's easy to do. V2 started to allow you to open floater versions of what was in the sidebar, and even multiple windows for things like inventory. But the first instance (like if you clicked someone to open their profile info) kept opening in the sidebar. New (old) chat floater. I'm overjoyed to have my text entry field following my chat floater, so what I am typing is right next to the chat that people near me are saying, and I am no longer having to glance back and forth from one area of the screen to another to maintain a simple conversation. In 3.2, I 'dock' my chat floater, in the old style nearby chat display, without those space-wasting icon strips, at the top left of my screen, about an inch tall and half the screen's width. It doesn't interfere with any of my HUD's there, and it's easy to glance down at the 3D world or up at what I am typing or a hair higher to read nearby chat. With the older V2, I had to keep the nearby chat floater at the lower left, where it interfered with my HUD's and made it harder to type and actually enjoy the virtual world at the same time. Maybe, for a perfect, flawless touch-typist, it worked for them to have the chat text entry welded to the bottom of the screen, and incapable of moving with the chat floater. Or maybe if the people that liked it there mostly use Voice, and only need text entry occasionally, having it hard-coded to one spot works. It certainly didn't work for me. You prefer chat popping up on the screen, and a chat bar at the bottom, without a scrollable record of what's recently been said? Have at it! The 3.2 chat bar can open with just the text entry field, and you can position it at the bottom edge and leave it there, just like it used to be in V2. What people say will appear on-screen or in chat bubbles or whatever your preference is, and evaporate after a period of time. Just like 2.x did. (The only thing you can't do is actually dock that floater in the lower button bar area, which would probably be a good option for people that like a disassociated chat text entry field.) I agree with your suggestion for configurable dividers between the buttons, when docked on the edges. Being able to cluster them in logical groups is a wonderful idea! The avatar selector is dead useless to me. Maybe if, as you suggest, we could configure it with outfits WE create, it would be worth having. I would only want to put some of my outfits into it though. I have way too many clothes and avatars to use a huge graphical representation for each one. In the current form, as a fixed list of library avatars, it's the first thing I throw away when configuring my preferences for 3.2. I will also agree we should have a choice where notifications appear. I rather like top right, because it isn't appearing under the HUD controls for my furry avatar. But I see no reason not to offer choice there. And honestly, for those that just love that modal sidebar, I see no reason why that shouldn't remain a configurable option. Just don't force everyone to do it that one way. Second life is used in many different ways by many different people, for very different reasons. No "one size fits all" UI option will work for everyone.

Linden Lab experimented with a way to use a web browser to access SL. It failed miserably, and the only approach they had that seemed to work at all required a "farm" of PC's that you would connect to as a virtual desktop. Each concurrent connection required a real computer at the other end with a good graphics card, running the full client. While it meant that an end user could access that link with a really crappy computer, it just wasn't sustainable for any real volume of customers to use concurrently. Representing and navigating through a real-time 3D virtual world is too complex a task for a web browser to handle.

A restart should NOT affect sim contents. Only a "Rollback" would do that, and only for recently placed items. Sounds more like an asset server problem, to me. I'd contact support.

Have you checked your lost and found in inventory? It could have possibly been returned accidentally because someone tried to create too many prims on the parcel. In theory, prims rezzed by the land owner at an earlier date should have priority over prims rezzed later by anyone else. In practice, sometimes a parcel full error canm return the wrong prims. I recall one rental property that I helped manage, where the parcels each had a pre-fab house on them, created by me and owned by the sim owner. Renters had free use of the house, but couldn't delete or remove it. Then someone rezzed a large vehicle that had an 'attached' prim-heavy part, and when they docked at their rented parcel and disembarked, they dropped more prims than the parcel could hold even if it had been empty. Their house and several plants got returned - to MY inventory!

"Bluesteel" isn't a class of server hardware. It's a sub-group of servers within SL that certain in-development versions of the SL Server code are released to first, for real-load testing, before making those changes final for the whole grid. Likewise, Le Tigre and Magnum are concurrently used to test two other branches of the development code that is in the "release channel", and soon to be used on all other servers. Bluesteel, Le Tigre and Magnum make up a small part of the whole grid (about 10% each). The other 70% of the grid runs the official release version of the server code, incorporating approved changes that 'graduate' from these three sub-groups. More info on these release candidate grops can be found here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/BlueSteel http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/LeTigre http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Beta/Magnum The actual hardware used for servers is in a rolling refresh, and most of it has been upgraded to new hardware recently. The exact mix I don't have data on, but it has nothing to do with the beta RC channels. It is still true that more Homesteads are run on a single server core than full sims are. That is why a homestead has fewer resources. Full sims run one sim per CPU core. Homesteads run 4 to a core, and get 1/4 the resources of a full-use sim. 'Openspaces' or 'Void sims' - meant only for navigible water areas and other very low-prim, low occupancy uses, run even more to a core. (8 per core?) The newer "Class 7" server hardware has 8 real cores, Xeon @ 2.4GHz, with 32GB RAM. The older Class 5 servers had half as many cores, and less RAM (16 GB).

Because the website isn't being maintained well? No one is botherig to keep the technical writing and documentation in sync any more with the viewer version. V3 is just V2, re-branded to differentiate it because it has Mesh. It has all the same issues as V2, though in the latest dev version of 3.x they are begining to adddress some of the worst 'features' of V2.We will finally be able to eliminate the sidebar, and to chat with a chat floater that has a text entry field as part of it again.

A couple of other points: If you create a group for parcel access, make sure the group has at least two members at all times. The safest way to do this is to add one of your own alts as a second member, as soon as you create the group. Any group with only one member for more than 48 hours will get disbanded, and can't be revived. Ban lines only work to 50 M above the terrain surface, for individuals not explicitly banned by name. So ban lines by themselves do nothing to protect skyboxes. This holds true for any sort of parcel-level access restrictions. If you ban an individual explicitly by name (such as a person who repeatedly harrasses you) that ban only works to 768 Meters altitude. Scripted security devices have to be owned by the parcel owner, or deeded to the group that a parcel is actually deeded to, in order to actually ban and eject intruders. Scripted security devices can act on the parcel access restrictions at any altitude, to ban and eject any intruder within their scanning range. Usually this is a max 96 M radius, and should be set to stop all effects at the edges of the parcel, so you don't try to affect people on neighboring parcels. So to protect a skybox you put the security device in or close to the skybox. You would have to place several of them in an array of different altitudes to keep intruders out of your airspace entirely. No matter what you do, there are still ways to defeat these security measures, or to appear to defeat them. There is no real privacy in SL, unless you control an entire sim that is not connected to any other sims, and at the sim level set the sim to no public access.

A couple of other points: If you create a group for parcel access, make sure the group has at least two members at all times. The safest way to do this is to add one of your own alts as a second member, as soon as you create the group. Any group with only one member for more than 48 hours will get disbanded, and can't be revived. Ban lines only work to 50 M above the terrain surface, for individuals not explicitly banned by name. So ban lines by themselves do nothing to protect skyboxes. This holds true for any sort of parcel-level access restrictions. If you ban an individual explicitly by name (such as a person who repeatedly harrasses you) that ban only works to 768 Meters altitude. Scripted security devices have to be owned by the parcel owner, or deeded to the group that a parcel is actually deeded to, in order to actually ban and eject intruders. Scripted security devices can act on the parcel access restrictions at any altitude, to ban and eject any intruder within their scanning range. Usually this is a max 96 M radius, and should be set to stop all effects at the edges of the parcel, so you don't try to affect people on neighboring parcels. So to protect a skybox you put the security device in or close to the skybox. You would have to place several of them in an array of different altitudes to keep intruders out of your airspace entirely. No matter what you do, there are still ways to defeat these security measures, or to appear to defeat them. There is no real privacy in SL, unless you control an entire sim that is not connected to any other sims, and at the sim level set the sim to no public access.

Group names can't be changed. This is because Linden Lab rather short-sightedly coded SL's servers and viewers so that group names and avatar names are the actual "unique key" that the software searches on for identity. Even though all groups, individuals and the like have a unique UUID key, the code as written can't support merely reassigning a new name to an existing UUID key. That UUID was something they added later, for scripted ID checks. But THEY just check avgainst the actual name field too! The only thing you can do is create a new group, invite the members of the old group to join the new one, and transfer any deeded property (land or deeded objects) from the old group to the new one. I'd advise keeping at least three people (with at least one being the owner) in the old group for a month or so after the transition, to make sure you have all the land and objects properly transferred, before disbanding the old group. Once the old group has only one member for more than 48 hours, it will be disbanded and that group name can never again be exactly re-created or reactivated.

No solution. Avatar physics (jiggly boobs and butt) is incompatable with a Mesh avatar, since avatar physics only affects the default avatar's mesh body. Avatar physics is also incompatible with any sort of prim attachments on the affected area (like prim nipples), because it can't affect the attachments the way it does the rest of the body.

When you delete something, it goes to the Trash folder. It stays there until you deliberately empty trash. Look in the trash folder, locate it, and choose "restore" to put it back. You may also have accidentally dragged that Sneakers folder to be inside some other folder. Try searching your inventory for "Sneaker", and you may be able to locate it. (I once dragged a whole folder full of dresses and they ended up in a sub-folder inside my animations folder, instead of my clothing folder, and stayed there for weeks until I thought to search by name.)

Use llVolumeDetect in the curtain itself, or in an invisible prim covering the curtain, and use that to trigger the curtain to open, and then auto-close later. default{ state_entry() { llVolumeDetect(TRUE); // Starts llVolumeDetect } collision_start(integer total_number) { llSay(0, llDetectedName(0) + " is at the door."); // Tells you who penetrated the prim }}The above script says the person's name when the invisible prim it is in is walked through. Just put your code to open the curtain where the llSay command is.

Your example wasn't an in-world image. What was in those images is impossible in SL, because it can't include avatar reflections. There are some places in SL that appear to have a mirrored floor or wall, that reflects the prim objects in the area. As the other replies already stated, this is a prim-hungry illusion that requires building an upside down mirror image duplicate of the build above the floor, and using a semi-transparent floor. The 'reflections' in the floor are merely the prims of the inverted build below the floor, seen through it. The only surface in Second Life that can display any sort of "real" reflection is the surface of Linden water, if reflections are turned on in your graphics effects. They only look impressive while the water is rippling and distorting this reflection. If you alter the water settings so the water is perfectly smooth and flat, you'll see the reflection is inaccurate. The angle of incidence and reflection isn't quite right, and stuff in the reflection is at the wrong distance from the surface. Calculating real-time reflections is horribly expensive in terms of graphics calculations. The Lindens have tried to make a way to allow a prim surface to make reflections, and have always failed for one reason or another.

You should not need a credit card to use PayPal. You DO need a "verified" PayPal account, which means at PayPal's end you have to link it to a secondary funding source, which can be a bank checking account OR a credit card. If you have a Verified PayPal account already, and you formerly had credit card info on file with Linden Lab, their system might not have cleared out the old credit card info completely. There was another post recently with a very similar problem. The poster said they got an error saying the credit card payment couldn't process, when trying to add PayPal as a payment method. They contacted billing and it was fixed by Billing flushing out the old credit card info, at their end.

If you save it as TIFF 24 and then save that back to png, that should remove the alpha channel. Also, some apps call TGA the "Targa" format. That may be how Fireworks does it. Haven't used Fireworks myself in so many years I'm not even sure if I have it installed any more on my Mac system. (Am not on that system right now, so I can't look.) I'm fairly sure Fireworks does have that "Save for Web" option though. It should be in the same menu as Save and Save As, but as another choice in that menu. Might also be called "Export"? Tomorrow, when I am more awake, I'll try to check my Mac and see if I have Fireworks any more. If I do, I'll see if I can give you more explicit advice. Oh, and just as a laugh, it's been so long since I used that Fireworks graphics program, that when I read your post, I didn't even think of that as referring to an application. I was thinking you were designing SL Pyrotechnics, and was wondering in the back of my mind why you would want non-alpha textures for the particles in them!