Ceera Murakami

Position it lower on the back, and it should do OK on a female shirt.

The options you choose affect only what you see. Everyone else will see whatever combination fo tags they choose (display name, username, group titles, highlight friends). You can't hide any of that from anyone else. You can eliminate your Display Name at any time, but can only enter a new Display Name once per week. There's no way to toggle it off when you're not roleplaying, and flip it back on when you are.

Mesh in SL supports up to 8 material zones, each of which can have a seperate texture assigned to it, and all of which can have specific UV mapping applied to them. In short, the material zones and UV mapping have to be defined before uploading the model This article in the Mesh WIKI explains how to upload a multi-face mesh: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Uploading_a_multi-face_mesh

SL Marketplace sells resources for use in the Second Life virtual world. What you purchased was a license to use those textures within Second Life, and they will have been delivered to the inventory of your avatar within the Second Life virtual world. Most, but not all, of the textures available on SL Marketplace are licensed ONLY for use within Second Life. If you want textures to use in other projects, like game development or art projects, you're really purchasing them from the wrong source. To get what you purchased into a form that you can use on your computer for other projects, you are going to have to first install the Second Life application and log in to the virtual world, using the same account name and password that got you into this website, (using the "Advanced" mode, if you are using the default Linden Lab viewer 2 of Viewer 3), so you can access your inventory and see the items you purchased. Then read the "End User Licensing Agreement" notecard that probably was packaged with the textures, and see if that texture artist allows their work to be used outside of Second Life. If they do, and if the textures are full-permissions, you can open and view them from your inventory, one at a time, and then save them to your computer's hard disk one at a time, as .tga files.

No. The account that has the money must be logged in, in-world, to transfer funds to anyone else. There is no function to transfer funds via the website.

No, I generally wouldn't. Among my closest RL friends, precisely one is active in SL and enjoys it. And his path and mine in SL virtually never cross in-world, except to chat by IM about things totally unrelated to SL, like planning a RL social activity between our two families, and using SL's IM system simply for convenience. Two other friends tried SL for a while, and gave it up as a waste-of-time money pit that was useless unless you were a content creator and could earn money in-world, or unless you were looking for kinky pixel sex thrills. Both of them did try for many months, and both are very dismissive now of anything that happens in SL. My parents and sister know I make money by building stuff in SL. As far as I know, neither of my parents ever were the least bit interested in looking at anything other than still photos of what I had built. My sister looked at my projects once so she could screen-shot a few locations for a college paper she was writing about some topic that tangentally touched on virtual worlds, but I've never seen my sister in-world, and don't believe she ever used that account for anything past that one visit. A few co-workers have seen pictures of stuff I have built, and been amazed. None were interested in exploring the virtual world themselves. In general, it isn't even a topic I bother to bring up in conversation any more. My own interest in SL is fading badly. I'm only staying because I have a few business clients that I am supporting (though mostly they have moved to opensim now), and because I have maybe 5 friends that I like to socialize with and can only meet in SL.

Coby Foden wrote: What I don't understand is that some designers say that they will hold back their mesh designs until the majority of people have upgraded their viewers to see mesh properly. Lots of users will wait until there is enough mesh objects to justify the viewer upgrade. By this route everybody is waiting and waiting. :smileytongue: The best way for all designers is to start selling their mesh designs at once without any further delay, as some have already started to do so. Flood the grid with mesh objects. Then the users who have not yet upgraded their viewers will have a real reason to upgrade theirs too. And so the mesh will start beautifying SL a lot faster than by everybody waiting for the other party to act. :matte-motes-smile: There will be no lack of early-adopter content creators who will happily flood the grid with mesh products. They are welcome to the headaches and complaints that will accompany their early efforts, and no doubt many of them will secure a nice solid niche for themselves as the best-known maker of one type of mesh item or another. Most of the people who rushed to learn mesh while it was still in Beta testing were people already highly skilled in the use of tools like Maya, Blender and the like. While a few early adopters were starting from zero, most were already running at full speed as they cranked out their marvels on the test grid's Mesh sims. Meanwhile, a lot of creators of traditional stuff, like me, had a choice of diving into an area that we knew nothing about, or continuing to work on areas that we knew well and had current business in. Personally, while mesh was in beta, I was more than a little busy with a contract to migrate 8 sims full of content onto OS Grid, building 4 sims in SL, and building 20+ new sims on OS Grid. My time was far more profitably spent doing what I already knew how to do, instead of setting my old skill set aside to learn a completely new and alien skill set. As I said before, I don't want to deal with the inevitable complaints from Residents whose expectations for mesh products are impossible to achieve because of mesh's current limitations, or because too few of their friends use a mesh-capable Viewer. If someone else wants to blaze the trail with a machete and fight the wild tigers, I am content to let them do so, and follow after them in my motor car when the road has been paved and the area is more civilized.

Venus Petrov wrote: I have a naive question. If someone is griefing from afar, will they appear on one's radar at the true location? ETA: Meaning, as this type of 'ghosted' avatar? They appear on radar and on the map and on the mini-map in their visual location, where their name tag is displayed, even though they are in the next sim over. Their weapons operate from their apparent position. Your weapons don't touch them.

Sadly, if the person can get to ANY parcel in that sim or in any sim touching that sim, they can appear to be standing in your home, and can rant at you and attack you with weapons and cause all manner of grief, and you can't ban them, because they are not REALLY in that location. Their actual location could be as much as 256 Meters away, in the next sim in any direction. But you'll see them and interact with them as if they were with you. This sounds like a combat HUD that I am aware of. It's intended to make you effectively "unkillable" since weapons fired at your apparent location don't hit where you really are. If that is what he is using, your only recourse is to AR him for harassment, and do it every time he comes back, and get your friends to do it too, until LL finally bans his account. Of course, then he will return with a new, unverified alt, and the whole dance starts over again. Idiots like that are why I live on a non-public, privately owned sim, and rarely even visit the mainland.

Afraid? No. But I am also not eager to drink the "Mesh is wonderful" Kool-Aid. I have some tools available to me that can make Mesh objects, and even rigged mesh objects. But I don't know how to use them yet, and haven't had the time to learn how to use them. From my first efforts in that area, I found it far from "Easy". But I also had difficulty making any sculpties more complicated than a simple hard hat with my company logo on it. Making Mesh stuff may be easy for the Blender and Maya gurus that play with that software all the time. It hasn't been at all easy for me to learn. I love the new 64 M prim limit, and will immediately start using that in my personal work, but won't use them in items for sale until viewers that can properly re-size the larger prims are in common use. I won't personally create or offer Mesh products for sale until the majority of users can see and use mesh. I would rather not deal with the flood of complaints from people who buy something that looks spiffy in their Mesh viewer, only to find that most of their friends see it as a pile of random prim trash. I won't personally be purchasing Mesh products until the majority of users can see and use mesh. I would rather not have most of my friends see my mesh stuff as a pile of random prim trash. And I certainly won't be going out in public wearing a mesh dress, knowing that most of the people who look at me will see me as half-naked and with an inner tube stuck to my body, or some similarly foolish or embarrassing look. I won't personally be purchasing Mesh clothing or Avatars until they overcome the limitations of being unable to adjust the avatar or clothes to fit MY body shape. I am no more inclined to adjust my shape to fit some pair of jeans than I am to cut off my little toe in RL so I can wear a pretty shoe that only comes in a too-narrow size. Mesh has a great deal of potential, yes. But it also has a long way to go before it will be usable by the majority of residents. Others can enjoy the bleeding edge of this new technology, and can make their own choices about when to make products or buy products that use mesh. My own decision is to wait for the standards to become clear, and best practices to be published, so I don't waste my time and money making stuff badly or making things that people will complain about. As for "stopping me from creating"? Partially, it has. I don't see much point in making products that Mesh will make obsolete. And I can't tell yet which things that I make will be competitive against Mesh versions (because the traditional way still works better and has a lower prim count), and which ones would be a waste of effort because Mesh can do it far better (because the higher poly count and better detail doesn't come at the cost of insane prim counts). So until I can see what works and what doesn't, my creative work is on hold. I'll tinker with the new toys, as time permits, and look at some things here and there. But even with my building textures, what is the point in making them if they won't work with the new modular mesh walls that everyone demands? I'm quite certain that textures designed to go on normal prims will be worthless on most Mesh products,unless they are nothing more than simple seamless, repeating textures. And the market is already flooded with simple seamless textures.

You're probably not going to see realistic mesh-based quad avatars any time soon. The current implementation of Mesh only allows the existing Human base skeletal bones and joints. There's no way to add the extra joints needed for functioning digitigrade legs.

It is possible to build across a sim border, but I really would not advise building a typical home so it splits a sim edge like that. The added requirements for making it work and the hassles involved just are not worth it. Better to sell both parcels and get a single parcel all in one sim, of similar area. The issues: 1: The two parcels can't share prim counts. So if it was a 50/50 split, half the land area in each sim, but you wanted to have more than 50% of your total prims on one side or the other, you just can't do it. 2: At every place where prims cross the edge, the building has to be made in two pieces, to accommodate that seam. As a simple example, consider just one room, where half is on one side, and half on the other, and you're on the second floor of the building... If the root prim for the building is in sim A, the half of the room in sim B is phantom. When you walk from A to B, you fall through the floor as you cross the sim edge. In sim B, you can't stand on the floor at all. In sim B, you can see the projecting prims, but they don't really exist in sim B, and you can't interact with them. So the apparent solution is to build the room (and the whole house) in two halves. The half in sim A stops at the border between A and B, and so does the half in sim B. Looks great, and on either side the floor works. But walk from one sim to the other and you still fall through the floor! Why? Because there is a slight delay as you cross sim edges from A to B, where sim A isn't able to tell your avatar what exists only in sim B, and sim B hasn't yet had a chance to tell your avatar there's a floor in front of you. As far as sim A is concerned, what is across the edge doesn't exist. Until sim B tells your avatar differently, you act on what sim A told you, and fall through. The soultion is to have the floor extend over the edge from both sides. If it sticks across the edge by 3 to 5 meters from either side, side A knows it has a floor that goes past the edge,and sim B agrees with you. You don't fall. The elegant way to do that is to have the extension pieces be invisible, and the visible floor prims butt edge to edge. That means the extensions have to be linked to the room before you place it at the sim edge, or have to be linked on the same side as the rest of the parts, and then pushed over the edge by editing linked parts. Take a look at the roads in the Rutgers University sims (Rutgers University, RUCE 2, RUCE 3 and RUCE 4). Turn 'highlight transparent' on, and you can see the invisible projections that allow you to cross the centerlines of the roads, which split the sim edges, without falling through.

DanielRavenNest Noe wrote: As far as I know, no, they are not. But people like me have started making replacement avatars with better geometry and UV mapping: Mesh Avatar Foot Closeup - with texturable toenails Has anyone yet found a way to deal with the absolute immobility of a Mesh avatar's face and hands? Can the eyes or mouth move on them? Even my full-prim furry avatars have more expressive faces than I have seen possible so far with a mesh replacement for the avatar body.

Mine would be my first visit to the Ivory Tower of Primitives. I devoured every exhibit in a single many-hours long visit, making a non-stop tour from bottom to top, and then repeated the entire tutorial to make sure I hadn't missed anything. It was an absolute eye-opener for me, and to this day I am grateful for the person or people who built that wonderful place. I'm a pro builder today, but I got my real start there, studing those in-world tutorials.

The terraforming limits are in plain sight on the "About Land" tab for every parcel. Most of the Mainland is +/- 4 Meters from what LL designed it as, and they will never change that. Why not simply place a teleporter or an "Anywhere door" (a type of sit-teleporter that looks like a magical doorway) between your store's parcel and your friend's club? The limitation of a large height difference is no limitatiuon at all in SL, where one can teleport with the click of a mouse. You coulds be in different sims and still be only a step apart for all practical purposes.

Because Viewer 3 is just Viewer 2 with a shiny Mesh coat of paint? Mostly because V3 is 99% still V2, right down to the crappy user interface. Calling it V3 is just PR, to herald the official First Coming of Mesh, which actually came with some releases of Viewer 2.8.

Depends on location. On average? Much less than L$1 per square meter. Land Bots lately are ignoring land offered at just under 0.5 L$ per square meter. On the other hand, a 1024 M2 parcel in Zindra will fetch a far higher price, because the land is rated for all adult activities. A nice piece of waterfront land with navigable water access, in a quiet mainland sim may fetch a higher price. Double-primmed parcels are always worth more. How much is "More" or "Higher"? It's very subjective. There are people out there still trying to sell nice parcels in Zindra, Nautilus or Bay City at absolutely insane prices per square Meter, because they paid insane prices on speculation to get the land. No one in their right mind would pay what they are asking, but they keep hoping some fool will buy it in ignorance, or will buy just to get rid of the nauseating modern tower that the land owner planted there, which doesn't fit the sim's theme at all. There are people that paid L$30 or L$50 or more per Meter, before land prices crashed, desperately hoping to get back what they paid for that land.

Trying to determine if two accounts are alts of the same real person is impossible. You can't conclusively prove that they are, and they can't conclusively prove that they are NOT the alt. Examples: You trying to prove that they are... You might try to trace their IP address, as several so-calld "alt detection" systems that you could buy claim to be able to do. Well, that only works if they access the media stream in the parcel where a sensor for that spy system is located. I always have media and sound turned off, so I could walk right through those spywear loaded areas (and I have) and my IP address and system info would never get captured. And even if you do capture an IP address and associate it with more than one SL Account, they may be accessing SL from a public library, or a net cafe, or a college dorm, a school computer lab, or from a household with seven family members all with their own computers, and a household router. Many unrelated people could be using that same IP address. The address may even get reassigned at random by their ISP, so what was Bill's IP address yesterday (belonging to a gut on the North side of New York) might tomorrow be in use by Mary, who really is an 80 year old woman on the East side of New York. You could try to catch them with "typing style" or "speech patterns" or "knowing something only Bill should know". But two peoiple might well have similar typing patterns, and make similar spelling errors, and Bill may have told all his friends about that secret that you whispered to him last night. At best, you can only "Prove" that there is a strong possibility that two accounts are linked. So how about them "proving" otherwise? You can not "prove a negative". You can prove that something IS, but not that something IS NOT. Let's say you think Tom and Bill are the same person. Tom tries to disprove it by arranging for both Tom and Bill to meet you in SL at the same time, and both be text chatting with you at once. How can he prove that for that test, He didn't get a friend to log in as his alt, and impersonate him? He can't. Even if Tom comes to visit you in person and sits down on your computer and logs in as Tom, and you watch him chatting with Voice with Bill, that still could be a friend of his on the other end, temporarily using the account to fool you? See? There is no conclusive way to prove he is NOT an alt.

You need to obtain a non-censored skin, and wear it. All but one or two of the skins in the Library are censored (and they may recently have removed the uncensored few), because the Library is available to the 16 and 17 year old kids that LL insisted on giving access to the main grid. Go to a Mature or Adult sim, and purchase virtually any skin that you like. The only ones that might be censored will be the ones intended for G-rated child avatars, which may still have painted on kid-style panties.

Actually, someone doing Mesh clothes already ought to check, but I think you could do this with the new Mesh clothing. Mind you, most of the Residents can't see mesh content yet, and about 20% of the grid's simulators won't support Mesh at all for another week or so. And Mesh clothes only adjust to the bone lengths, and so don't fit all people's body shapes. But once all the third party viewers can see Mesh, I can't think of any reason why a Mesh shirt couldn't have correctly textured numbers and lettering on both sleeves. Mesh items are NOT tied to the avatar's UV mapping, but instead to the bone structure of the avatar. The polygon mesh that you design wouldn't have to be symmetrical at all.

Keli Kyrie wrote: This is what it looks like to a person on Firestorm.  And that is why I won't be purchasing any Mesh clothes or even attempting to create any Mesh items for sale for quite a while. Until the majority of Viewers support Mesh, using it can make you look like a fool to others.

Gwenivere Caultard wrote: Do you know how to 'repeat' the texture on your prim? You don't NEED 'bigger' textures to cover a 64x64m prim. You can, in the prim's settings, under TEXTURE... set the texture to REPEAT. So if your texture's some paltry 128x128 pixel wonder... You can set it up to REPEAT across the entire texture as many times as you need, to get that texture looking right. The smaller you go with textures, the better off you are. I never go higher than 512x512... and frankly, I prefer smaller sized textures, to reduce rendering lag issues. I use megaprims very often, and believe me... setting your repeats properly and using smaller texture files REALLY helps reduce region rendering lag. Depends on what you're trying to make with that megaprim. If you're making a field of grass or a plain painted wall, repeats are fine and dandy. But not for a football field that needs to have the gridiron lines marked on the grass. How will repeats help to make a megaprim billboard sign clearer and easier to read? They won't. If the texture needs to be a detailed picture, like a photograph of a model in your new Mesh dress, repeats won't do. That said, lag with really large textures is bad enough that even though I know how to use such textures responsibly, I wouldn't wat to se larger textures in SL. Too many people would put a 2048 x 2048 texture on a wristwatch face, or equally stupid mis-uses, and lag would be terrible around those large textures, for no good reason.

"Safe" is a relative term at the moment. Properly used, Megaprims have been "safe" ever since Havok 4 was released grid-wide. They just had limitations as far as resizing them, but used in their as-created sizes, megaprims had few real problems that normal prims didn't also have, after that physics upgrade. Until the majority of viewers support the latest grid changes, you'll still have problems with megas snapping back if you try to resize them. An unmodified copy of Firestorm, for example, can't deal with megas yet, though there is a three-line XML hack that will allow you to enter numeric values when editing a prim, to make it as large as 64 Meters. Try streaching it even with that altered Firestorm though, and it snaps back to 10 M. So editing them will remain dicey until the majority of third party Viewers adopt the Mesh code, which includes the new 64 Meter prim limits. There's still two of the RC channels that don't have the new code, and apparently won't get it for another week. So until then, possibly as much as 20% of the grid still won't support mesh properly. I did a quick estimate and figure I can save 25 prims just by reworking the roof of my traditionally-styled Japanese home to use the new prim limits, instead of prims limited to 10 M max size. And if I could ever figure out Mesh creation, I can probably make the entire roof as a single mesh part, with an even lower prim equivilent.

@Darren I was also having severely low frame rates with 2.8 and 3.0, until someone asked me to check the anti-aliasing setting in the Hardware options. It had defaulted to 8x, which is extreme overkill. I dropped it to 4X, and my frame rate jumped from 5 to 7 FPS to a much more reasonable 30 FPS or so. Adding the Starlight/Stardust skins to eliminate the sidebar completely and fix numerous glitches makes Viewer 3.0 almost bearable. But Firestorm still performs better and has a better, more efficient user interface, so as soon as they get Mesh capability it's unlikely I'll ever try LL's Viewer 3.0 again.

Clarification, please: In resizing a mesh item, can I stretch it on one axis at a time, like just stretching it taller on the Z axis? Or is it only a proportional resize, like stretching the corner handle on a linkset?