Ceera Murakami

A furry named "Yiffy Yaffle" walked right up to me when I first landed in the sandbox of "The Forest" sim, and immediately helped me to locate the store in the sim where I could get a furry avatar, told me where the local free stuff depot was, and most importantly, told me where in the sim was the parcel that a dear friend of mine considered her home, enabling me to become a decent-looking furry and high-tail it for my friend's parcel, so I could meet up with her in SL for the first time. And I am indebted of course to Mariko Saito, who was the friend I came here to join, and who taught me much about SL. And also to one dear male fur, who shall remain nameless, who showed me how pose balls were used. (And who inadvertantly showed me how not to use them as well. Some of the results had me laughing, instead of feeling 'frisky'.)

Viewer 2.8 and above has this privacy mode control, and the Firestorm Mesh Beta also has it. Not sure about any other Viewers. "Parcel privacy" can apparently be toggled by anyone with sufficient parcel land priviledges for that parcel. I don't know what the controlling factor is though. I have a new alt that is in the land group for my parcel, and can set home there and rez prims there and the like, but she can't change the privacy level. Another alt that is an officer in the land group can, however. (EDIT: You must have the group role ability to toggle About Land > Options settings to toggle the parcel privacy on or off.) There are problems still with Parcel Privacy as implemented: It makes it rather strange if you're walking through an area, and happen to step onto a "cloaked" parcel. Suddenly that lawn that you thought was empty might be the site of an all-out orgy, that materializes with no warning. And for those in the orgy, you also appear with no warning to them that you're about to enter their 'private' space. So unless combined with ban lines, it can create some very awkward moments. It only applies to ground level, in terms of preventing access, because while it apparently would cloak one 3,000 M high skybox's occupants from another skybox on a neighboring parcel and at the same altitude, there's no ban lines that affect strangers beyond a height that is 50 M above the terrain. So "Joe Pervert" will still see the collection of green dots on the map and minimap, and can fly into the parcel and perv out anyway.

Technically a Meter is a Meter, even in SL. For a practical consideration, however, the vast majority of avatars in SL range about 125% of the scale of people in real life. Even the default Library avatars are taller than they should be, because, historically, little attention was made to making avatar scaling and proportion accurate when SL was first designed. Another annoying set of factors is that scripts that report avatar height report the height of their eyes, not the height of the top of their head, and if you aren't in Mouselook mode, the follow camera is looking at everything from several feet above and behind the avatar, which scerws up perception of scale. Add all that up, and what most experienced builders have settled on is a scale of 1.25:1.00 - meaning that if in real life something is one meter long, in SL you would make it 1.25 Meters long. That scale works well with a very wide range of avatars as they exist today in SL. Note that if you actually scale an avatar properly, as measured against a prim in-world, and if you keep that avatar in mouselook al the time, stuff you build at an exact 1:1 scale looks and works just fine. But your home would be percieved as "too small and cramped" by anyone with a typical-sized avatar, and not in Mouselook.

When you stare at a car or a bus or some other thing in real life, and start figuring out how to build it out of prims and what textures you'd need to make it.

What do you mean? Are you trying to say that the avatar never ceases being a fuzzy white cloud at the center of the screen? Sometimes it takes a while for that to snap in the first time, while the client is busily loading the textures and shapes needed to display the avatar and the surrounding area. In this case, opening your inventory and trying to search for something will sometimes make that snap in faster, as it forces the viewer to access the asset server right away, and get details about what is in your inventory, which includes all the details about your avatar's appearance (clothes, skin, shape, etc.). You may also be having problems due to a buggy Viewer version. If you loaded the default Viewer 3.0 release, that one is brand new, and still has a lot of bugs. You may want to try an alternative viewer: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers

The only way to eliminate your web profile is to delete your SL account entirely and quit second life. Web-based profiles are an integrated part of your avatar's existance, whether you like it or not. If you go to my.secondlife.com and set your Privacy settings so "Nobody" has access on the two "feed" options, and so only "Friends" or "Second Life" has access to the "About", "Real World", "Interests", "Groups" and "Picks" options, then other web services like Google won't collect data on your profile, and it will only be accessible form outside of SL via the my.secondlife.com website. If any of those options are set to "Everyone" then the whole Internet has access to that web profile data. If you enter any data in the "Interests" area, they will spam you with "Recommendations" of people that you might like to contact, with similar interests.

Here's one imperfect and partial solution... Make the necklace so the part that goes from the collar bone around the back of the neck and back to the collar bone is normal prims, and shaped to drape over the shoulders. Make the front loop of chain as an alpha texture on a flat flexi prim, with the base edge along the collar bone, and tilted outward slightly so the curve of the flexi flows out far enough to miss the breasts, when standing normally. If you carefully adjust the stiffness and gravity settings of the flexi part, you could have it so when she bends forward, the chain loop appears to swing away from the body, and when she leans to the side, the loop would distort somewhat to the side. Where this will fail is that the loop will, if she leans back, vanish into her chest, since an attachment can't detect collision with the avatar. It will also fail in that it would need careful tweaking of the flexi part's stiffness and gravity to fit different avatar shapes. All in all, this might be a solution for a personal item that you're willing to heavily fine-tune, and use for certain specific situations. But it wouldn't work well as an item to sell to general users, because adjusting the flexi parameters is too esoteric. You'd need a pretty cleverly scripted and well done adjustment HUD to make it easy enough for a typical customer to make it work for them.

I doubt you would be satisfied with the results, except for posed still photography. Mesh doesn't do 'flexi', and can't respond to gravity, so that billowing cape will remain poofed out like a plastic shell. I can see how you could do the three attachment points. You'd essentially do a fully-rigged attachment that follows the avatar skeleton, keeping the wrist and neck points close, and making the cape shape flow or streach from those points. But there would be no way to make it move like cloth, that I am aware of.

The concept of mesh clothing and Mesh avatars is wonderful. LL's implementation of the concept is severely flawed. Mesh clothing won't go mainstream until Mesh can be designed and imported in a way that adapts to the entire avatar's appearance slider settings, and not merely the subset related to avatar bone lengths. There's too much variety in body shapes for clothing designers to be forced to offer clothes that only fit a very specific set of apperance slider settings, and require masking out all or part of the avatar's actual shape to force the items to fit. No matter how cute the shoe is in RL, I'm not cutting off a toe to wear it, just because it only comes in narrow widths.

Mesh clothing won't be mainstream until it adjusts to all appearance sliders, without any of this nonsense about forcing users to conform to a particular size. None of your sizes would fit my female avatars. Even if we matched on the settings you're basing on, there are other sliders that also affect fit that you're missing, like breast bouyancy, and cleavage. It just does not work. You could make 100 "standard sizes", and it still won'tt fit a lot of people, because your idea of what follows with what is different than someone else's. Here's just two of my partial shapes, noting your sliders plus the two other ones that are critical for the fit on the breasts. --- "Size Ceera, Human" --- Torso Muscles: 60 Breast size: 32 Breast Bouyancy: 34 Breast Cleavage: 10 Body fat: 0 Love Handles: 28 Belly Size: 0 Leg Muscles: 50 Butt Size: 27 Saddle Bags: 27 --- "Size Ceera, KZK Vixen" --- Torso Muscles: 58 Breast size: 72 Breast Bouyancy: 48 Breast Cleavage: 24 Body fat: 7 Love Handles: 20 Belly Size: 0 Leg Muscles: 51 Butt Size: 30 Saddle Bags: 36 With either of those two, none of your choices would fit. Even if you matched my numbers perfectly, but chose some different default for breast bouyancy and cleavage, it still wouldn't fit.

You have to log off and log back into the website as the new avatar. the blog/forums and the main part of the website use separate login cookies, so even if you log off here as avatar A and log in here as avatar B, you still need to do it again in the main part of the website, where you purchase L$. The website can only do what you tell it to do, and has no other way to know which avatar you want to affect, other than logging off as one and back in as the other.

In addition to what everyone else said, avatar attachments remain fixed in relation to their attachment point, and can't truly 'pivot' on that point to obey gravity. A flexi prim can dangle down, as if sort of obeying gravity, but its base will remain fixed in relation to the avatr and the point it is attached on the avatar. So for example if you make a flexi kimono sleeve, intending it to hang naturally when the arm is horizontal, that flexi part won't hang as naturally when the arm is vertical. It will come off in an arc, instead. And since animation effects are all client side, what you see at a given moment isn't what anyone else sees. Taking a dance as an example, you and your dance partner won't be seeing your right foot stepping down at the same instant. You'll each appear to be in sync on your screen, because your computer is doing the client-side calculations to display both of you on your screen. But if you could see her screen and yours side by side, the "two couples" would likely be out of step with each other.

kurt7D8 Avon wrote: Now on display I have two names, my old one and my new one. Do you think I'm just waiting for the old one to be purged? There was a note to that effect. That is how Display Names work. If there is any difference between your actual Username and your current Display Name, then both can be displayed, and most Residents with a Display- Names capable Viewer opt to see both. Think about it this way. You walk into a club, and there's ten people there all with the Display Name "John Smith". You seem to recall that your friend "kurt7D8 Avon" was using "John Smith" this week as his Display Name. Is one of those people your friend? Well, you could mouseover each one, and check their profiles. If you can find each of them, in a laggy, crowded club. Or you could mouseover their name in chat each time one of them speaks, and try to remember which one is which. Or you could do what most people do, and display both names, so "John Smith (kurt7D8 Avon)" is instantly and visibly different from "John Smith (Peggy Patton)". Now imagine someone IM's you. You're showing only Display Names, because you think that's what you prefer to see. You get an IM from "Polly Avon", which is the same name as your SL Partner, or is maybe the name of your business partner in SL, and they say they need L$5000 to cover the tier on your shared parcel. Are you going to remember to mouseover their name before sending them the money, to make sure that the person is really "Polly Avon (Polly Avon)", and not "Polly Avon (DetestableScammer)"? That is the kind of impersonation that many people were worried about, when Display Names was first proposed, and it still is a possible issue.

As I recall, a change in capitalization is one of the few cases where the Lindens normally WILL allow a name change. Try sending a message to Torley or one of the more accessible Lindens, and ask. The worst they can do is say no. But something like changing "john" to "John" was at one time quite possible to get them to do for you.

20 characters is all that will display for a group title. Verified in Firestorm and in Viewer 3.0.

Ceera was a vixen before she came to SL. She was a role playing character elsewhere. But even though she isn't usually Human, and even though my profile clearly states she's Partnered in SL (to Mariko Saito, played by the same friend that was Lady Marianne in the earlier role playing venue), and Married/Monogamous in RL, she still gets hit on by all sorts of guys (and quite a few girls, too). Dug out some images to share: Ceera and her Partner, Mari, before we came to SL : 2005 versus 2008 : New vixen form in 2009 : New Human form in 2011 : 

You are correct, Peggy. The only way to get them from one computer to the other is by copying the directories and files from the old computer and installing the copied directories and files to the new one. It can't be done without physical access to both computers, and can't be done via any in-world method.

There has to be a transaction record, if the money was actually removed from your account. Check your transaction record again, here on the website. Sometimes there is a delay of 20 min or so to have it show up. You can't always trust the in-world indications given by the Viewer. Sometimes a viewer will seem to indicate your L$ balance has dropped to nothing, when in fact it's all still there. Re-logging usually fixes that.

Actually, yes, it can be done. On your computer, there will be a "SecondLife" folder containing the preferences for each account. On Windows, the default location of that folder is C:\Documents and Settings\accountname\Application Data\SecondLife , where accountname is your login account on that computer (not your avatar account). Inside that folder is a sub-folder like "dwalk13_resident", which contains your preferences and chat logs. The path most likely includes a hidden folder at the "Application Data" level, so you have to include hidden folders when you search for it. Copy that folder to the same location on your new computer, and the chat logs will follow you. Note that if the new computer is a different OS or OS version, like moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, the path may be a bit different. But the existance of a SecondLife folder will be there, as long as you've logged in at least once from that computer.

Flexi how? So it appears to hang from the top edge, like a cloth banner? So it appears to flex from the right edge, like a flag on a flagpole? The big problem is that flexi flexes from the Z=0 point. Any points in the Z=0 plane don't move. So, for example, if you want to re-create a banner that is fastened to a rail on the top edge, then the bottom of the prim needs to be the top of the banner. You could then taper on X and flatten on Y to get a tapered or pointed banner, but if not tapered to a point, the bottom will stil be flat. The only way I see to do what you want, with the flexi working from the top edge, is to use an alpha texture to shape the bottom edge.

Try Serenity Woods, or Rocket City Furmeet.

Second Life has been hacked numerous times, but it hasn't often amounted to much. As others said, there have been breaches of the account security that forced LL to force all users to change their passwords. LL claimed that no actual account passwords or financial data was exposed, but knowing real names and e-mail addresses for accounts did make it far easier to to further attacks to compromise account security, so they had us change passwords to be safe. There have been hacks that briefly allowed things to be created that shouldn't be possible. The initial creation or Megaprims was one such hack, as was the later window for creating them. There have also been numerous hacks that allowed hackers to circimvent the permissions system and make full-perms copies of restricted-permissions content. Those have actually been quite harmful. The land auction system got hacked once, allowing one person to onbain many regions of Mainland at fire-sale prices, with no competition. LL had to take that hacker to court in the real world, and they confiscicated the sims he stole. Griefers that crash sims or crash multiple regions are doing a type of hack attack, too, though at a fairly primitive level. So it does happen, but unless LL has to force everyone to change passwords, they generally don't publicise that it happened. They just roll out a new server patch to close the security loophole, or force a viewer upgrade on everyone suddenly.

If you lock it down the maximum amount, then via my.secondlife.com anyone can still see your user name, display name, avatar photo, payment status, and SL Birthdate. If you uncheck "show in search" in the old profile version, or restrict everything to "Secondlife" or to "Friends", then external sites like Google won't spider your profile data and display it in their searches.

You can only control what you see. You can't force others to only see your Display Name. If I were to meet you while using the old 1.23.5 Linden Lab viewer, I wouldn't see your display name at all. I would see you as "ellerc Resident". This is also true for any other viewer based on 1.23.5, but which has not added extra code to deal with Display Names. It is also true for large amounts of scripted content in-world, from store greeters to slave collars to contest boards, all of which could be blind to your Display Name. Penny is right about the initial release of Viewer 2.0 being so bad it drove people away. I still dislike it, though I'll admit they have improved many of the problems in the initial release. Still, if I want an efficient Viewer to build with, that doesn't take scores of extra mouse clicks to do common operations, I'll stick with Viewer 1.23.5. Viewers 2.x and 3.0 still have some atrocious UI glitches that are simply the result of bad design choices, and which won't go away short oif scrapping huge amounts of 2.x code and starting over again. With a Display Name capable viewer, each individual has a choice of seeing the other people's display name, user name or both, and whether or not they also want to see group titles. Most people that I know keep both displayed, both over people's heads and in chat, so they can tell who you really are, no matter how often you change your display name, and so strangers can't use a display name to pretend fraudulently to be someone else. Some areas always display both, sich as when you bring up someone's profile, or when you look at prims owned or created by them.

It is only for three months. If you don't cancel or change it to annual before that three months expires, it will auto-renew at the normal $22.50 per quarter rate thereafter. It appears that you can, however, at any point during that three months choose to switch to annual billing, which would renew at $72 per year, or the equivalent of $18 a quarter. That is the best deal, financially.