Ceera Murakami

Avatars and objects in Second Life are larger than in real life, by default. There are two main reasons for this. The default visual perspective of the follow-camera is a couple meters behind and above the avatars's eyes, and this makes everything "look small" if it is scaled accurately. And the scripted command that is used by virtually every "Avatar Ruler" to report an avatar's height actually measures only to the height of their eyes. Add to this the fact that by adding prims and scripted attachments, some avatars may be as large as a full-grown dragon, and the end result is that most buildings, vehicles and furniture in Second Life are scaled at 1.25 to 1.5 times the "Realistic" size. Most people simply accept this, after a while, since trying to make an "accurately sized" avatar gives you a form that is too small for most of the world around you. My own preference is to go with a realistically-scaled avatar, based on eye height as reported by an avatar ruler. Ceera's default form is 5' 7" tall, by that measure. That makes her actual height, as measured against a prim, closer to 6' 1", but puts her at a scale that works with the way most of SL is built. But I have other avatars that are child-sized, teen-sized, or as tall as the appearance sliders can make them. It just depends on what that character is supposed to be. As a builder and content creator in SL, I tend to make buildings and furniture at a 1.25:1 scale versus real life, meaning something that measures one Meter in reality is a 1.25 Meter prim in SL. I find this works with the majority of avatars on the grid, and is a good compromise between ultra-tall and strictly-accurate sizes. I think it is wrong to equate "that person is shorter than the average height in the room" with a knee-jerk response of "That's a child avatar! Get out of my sex room!". I have a very good friend in RL who is only 5' tall, yet unquestionably an adult, even though my 15 year old daughter is taller than her by several inches. And in SL, where not all avatars are even Human, heights change a lot. Most furries, for example, tend to be smaller in stature than Humans, even as adults. The height of an avatar is affected by several factors: The obvious factor is the Height slider, which does a proportional scaling of the whole avatar. But neck length, torso length, hip length and leg length also contribute to how tall or how short you actually are, as does the gender of your avatar, and any shoes or other attachments that you may be wearing that affect your height. Here's the defaults and the height ranges that can be reached with just the appearance controls, as reported by an avatar ruler (so this is actually the avatar's eye height) : ====================== Default height for the "Male Outfit 3" avatar is 6'5" tall. From that default, move the height slider to 100 and he is 6'11" tall From that default, move the height slider to 0 and he is 5'2" tall By streaching every body part that affects height to max values, he could be 7'4" tall By compresing every body part that affects height to min values, he could be 4'1" tall ====================== Default height for the "Female Outfit 3" avatar is 5'7"" tall. From that default, move the height slider to 100 and she is 6'5" tall From that default, move the height slider to 0 and she is 4'9" tall By streaching every body part that affects height to max values, she could be 7'0" tall By compresing every body part that affects height to min values, she could be 3'9" tall ====================== Smaller avatars, called "Tinys" or "Minis", can be made by using a scripted attachment called an animation overrider (or AO) that compresses the body into a folded up ball, and interprets normal movements commands in ways that appropriately move attached prim arms, legs and other parts. Note that these tiny avatars can not use the same animations for sitting on furniture, dancing, or other activities that other avatars can use. There are special animations, furniture and vehicles made just for these ultra-small avatars. Small butterflies and other "impossibly small" avatars can be made this way. Gigantic avatars are also possible, again by using an animation overrider (or AO) that raises the body off the ground, and possibly also compresses body into a folded up ball, and which interprets normal movements commands in ways that appropriately move attached prim arms, legs and other parts. Some of these gigantic avatars may be 50 M tall or more! But as with the tinies, these giants are much more limited in how they can interact with animations and furnishings and vehicles.

I have several friends in real life and in SL that I don't agree with at all on politics or some other subjects. We simply agree to either avoid those topics when we interact, or state our opinions and then 'agree to disagree'. My best friend in real life is a fellow that disagrees completely with me on politics, and who adheres to a religion very different from my own. We still enjoy each other's company, and see each other pretty much every week to hang out and have fun with my family and his. Being friends with people who always agree with you on everything is boring, and greatly reduces the list of possible friends. In SL, I have several people on my Friends list who I don't agree with at all, on many levels. For example, I'm a fox furry. (A Kitsune, to be precise.) My character is also a Lesbian. (Well, bisexual but leaning heavily to a rather dominant Lesbian). Yet one of my 'Friends' is a very macho Gorean Master. Goreans don't generally allow furries in their sims, and treat most women as chattel, there for the pleasure of males. In spite of that incompatibility, I'll still put on a Human female avatar and dress and address people according to their rules, as a free woman, and visit him in his Gorean sims, to discuss building and sim management issues. He and I both agree that I am there as a guest, and not to do Gorean role playing, and that if anyone tries to force that on me, I'll leave. Sure, he still flirts with me and makes sometimes crude comments. He is what he is, and can't help how he treats women. I try to take his comments as he means them, as a complement to my attractive appearance, even though he and I both know that there's no chance at all of his avatar and mine ever having a successful 'relationship'. Talk about oil and water not mixing... It doesn't matter to me if someone else differs in opinion on religion, politics or sexual behaviors. If we have a common ground in some other area, we can still be friends.

LL's plan from day one on the Display Names and new name registration was to eliminate surnames. The way you do it now is to just mash things together, and add a number if you must, and then use Display Names to make it pretty in-world. Let's say you want to be "Paul J. Franklin" in-world. Register as "PaulJFranklin", or if that is already taken, as "PaulJFranklin29" or "PaulJFranklinNJ", and then in-world, set your display name to "Paul J. Franklin". With all single-name login accounts, you get a default 'surname' of "Resident", but that is only for backward compatibility with the old Viewers and old scripts, so if a script returns the old surname value, it will display "Resident" instead of nul, and if you need to enter a surname, you enter Resident rather than leaving that field blank. If I meet "Paul J. Franklin" in-world, and I am still on the old 1.23.5 Viewer, I would see you as ""PaulJFranklin29 Resident". With a display names capable viewer, I would see you as "Paul J. Franklin (PaulJFranklin29)". For a limited time it remains possible to use some third-party registration sites to obtain 'real' surnames from the last available set of old lists. I made two new accounts a week or so ago that way, and they work fine. But eventually that option will fade away. Probably once LL released Mesh, the older viewers will become obsolete, and everyone will be forced to use a viewer that can see display names.

I used to be very active in a text-based fantasy role playing forum, where you could be just about anything you could imagine, from an ultra-powerful God/Goddess, to a helpless kitten. The site itself was PG-13, but it wasn't uncommon for players to do an 'off-scene' interaction with each other via ICQ Chat or some other private communication, to play out parts of the interactions that were too 'adult-rated' for the forums themselves. One of my two main characters in that forum, also named Ceera, had established a relationship with another player's character. We referred to each other as 'companions' and went on adventures and dates together in the role playing sessions. Her character was a Kitsune, and mine was a human magic user who could shape-shift, and who, when out with my Kitsune friend, tended to assume the form of an anthro vixen, to match my friend's species generally. We really enjoyed role playing with each other and with our friends, but the forum itself was slowly closing down, as the founding members (including the person who owned the domain and paid for the servers) lost interest and moved on to other things. I noticed eventually that my friend, like many of the other people who I played with, was spending less and less time in that set of forums. So I asked her where she was spending that time, and she told me she had started playing in Second Life. I had heard of Second Life several years earlier, but at the time didn't have a computer that had powerful enough graphics to access the grid. When my friend said that was where she was preferring to spend her time, I looked into it again, and found that the computer I now had was just barely capable of accessing SL. So I set up and account and went in-world, in to follow my friend. We soon met and continued our role playing in Second Life, sharing a home and enjoying the more visual environment and the freedom to express ourselves as consenting adults when the mood struck us to do so. Soon after that, the text-based forum we used to play in shut down, and we switched entirely to interacting with each other in SL. A year later, we became Partners. I've been in SL over 5 years now, and she is still my Partner here. All of this has always been with the understanding that the relationship we where acting out was a fantasy between the two fictional characters, and that under no circumstances should it be expected that more than platonic friendship existed between the two people typing at their keyboards. It's worked pretty well for us.

Darren's answer is incorrect. Irene has it right. LL posts an authorization request to your card, but they don't bill the card, and they retract the request after they have verified that the card company would have been willing to pay them that $1 USD. For a matter of a few minutes, your available credit limit on your card is reduced by $1. But it pops right back again, once they retract the request. They do NOT actually charge you $1 and pay it back to you in L$. If you set up credit card info and soon after that saw L$250 appear in your account, that is probably because you bought a Premium membership, and the L$ is your stipend payment or else it might be a sign-up bonus. At one point, if you agreed to enter payment info at the time you signed up for a brand new account, LL would pay you L$250 or so as an incentive for having payment info on file with them from the beginning. I don't think that has been the case for years, but they may have re-instated that policy.

The problem with creating a unified upper and lower body template is that the scale isn't quite the same. Or more precisely, the length of the seam where the two templates join isn't. This is the result of LL adopting the UV mapping from a really old Poser figure, one that was really badly done, as their standard for avatar texture mapping. In short, if you tried to make one 1024 high x 512 wide full body template, it simply would not work. The patterns won't align, and even if you tweaked the scale to make the over-all length of that seam match, individual points along that seam still won't match, and the seams are not on the texture edge. The only way I can imagine to make a single unified texture would be to make a new UV map, and then have a filter or a macro that re-maps what you draw onto the actual UV map of the two individual upper and lower textures. There is an easier way, though. There are several 3D applications that allow you to paint directly on the 3D figure. Take a look at Chosen Few's replies in this post, for more information on 3D painting programs: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Texturing/3D-Paint-Program-Inquiry-Mainly-PSCS4/m-p/494551/highlight/true#M2082

They seem to be late paying it out today. Just checked one of my accounts that gets a stipend, and that I knew the exact balance for on Monday, and no, the stipend due today had not been paid yet.

Nope. As a matter of fact virtually 100% of PG Mainland sims are either edge to edge with mature sims, or within 1 or 2 sims walking distance from Mature sims. The ONLY LL-owned sims I know of that are 100% PG are the recently migrated former teen grid sims. Among privately owned sims, a lot of Universities and 'public places' are PG, but it's difficult to find anyplace residential that is all-PG. It just isn't financially sensible for a landlord to own nothing but PG properties, in what has for years been an 18+ environment. When they first announced the all-Adult rated continent of Zindra and the Adult Content maturity guidelines, residents pleaded with LL to make a PG-Only continent, instead of or in addition to the adult-only one. LL flatly refused the idea. Residents pointed out how the PG mainland sims were scattered among and surrounded by Mature sims, and begged LL to change that, and make each continent only one rating. LL refused that idea, too.

Unfortunately, it is a very common experience here. People get tired of SL. Or they can't afford to keep paying for their land. Or they get a new job and can't access SL from work any more. Or they lose their job. Or they get married and are embarrassed to let the new wife know this is one of their forms of recreation. One person I knew, ( I finally found out what happened to them years later ), had been extremely active in SL, had lots of land (multiple sims) and suddenly vanished, losing all her land and inventory. She had ended up on a mission to China, and spent more than 6 months in a rural area with no Internet access. The only real advice I can offer is that if you really like someone, and they feel the same, find a secondary means of contact, like ICQ Chat, AOL, e-mail, or even exchanging hand-written letters by postal mail. Because if they do vanish and you have no alternate contact info, odds are you'll never be able to find them again.

I should also add, they won't let you re-use the name of a dead group. The new group name would need to be different by at least one character. Such as "TO JE PRDEL*".

No one in the Answers forum can help you with this problem. You will have to open a help ticket with Linden Lab for that. Sadly, I don't think they will help you. I have never in the 5 years that I have been in SL seen Linden Lab restore a group after it was deleted due to not having at least two members.

Yes, they archived the old forums. Here's a link to the old GD forum: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussions/bd-p/2176 It does appear that we can no longer see the original archived forums. That GD section only goes back to jan 2010.

I just edit the individual linked prims, like any other prim. Flexi or not, there's no reason you can't move things one prim at a time to adjust the fit to exactly suit your avatar. Personally, I detest resize scripts. They cause unnecessary lag and script load, and for an avatar whose shape isn't close to what the designer thought was 'normal', they virtually never result in a good fit. The first thing I do with resizer scripts is to delete them entirely. If the item is no-mod, and can only be adjusted with those scripts, I don't buy it in the first place. Or if I buy a 'no-mod/resizer scripts adjustments only' item by mistake, I trash it entirely and don't buy from that merchant again.

Oh, I should add that while my avatars are not at all a representation of the "real me", my homes in SL almost always have all the features you would expect in a real home, including kitchens and bathrooms. My current home is a very simple traditional-styled Japanese design. Just three rooms and three 'closets' - but one of those rooms is a 'kitchen', with a sliding panel in the floor covering a charcoal cooking fire, and in the closet in that room there's woks and other Japanese kitchen stuff. No bathroom, though, because in a traditional Edo-period Japanese home, that wasn't a dedicated room function. My previous home was a much larger and modern-designed mansion. It had a full kitchen, a dining room, a dinette nook, a living room, a 'home office', and a small bathroom on the ground floor, with just a toilet and sink; Upstairs were two bedrooms and two full bathrooms, with shower, tub, sink and toilets. I really didn't use the toilets - that was just to make the room look complete. But I like having my home as realistic as possible. You could eat in the dining room (scripted table), if you wanted to, and my housemate and I sometimes would sit down to a meal together, as we chatted together. It added realism to the role play of sharing a home together.

Absolutely fantasy. Most of mine are not even Human. My main avatar is a three-tailed Kitsune.

RE: swedishfox In the Blogs, only Lindens can create new threads. You should be able to make new threads in the Answers and Forums areas.

Ohhh, that looks useful! Of course, you could change "DOOR" in both the script and in the prim names to allow more than one of these in a linkset. As presented in your post, if I did a case-sensitive search and replace and changed "DOOR" with "Bedroom door" for one script, and with "Bathroom door" for another, the two doors should both work and co-exist happily in the same linkset. I have used that trick before with linkable doors using my own scripts. As an added elegant touch, you might try using llSetObjectDesc( "open" ); to set the description of the door prim to open, or llSetObjectDesc( "closed" ); to set it to closed, and then use llGetObjectDesc(); to determine the current open or closed state of the door. That trick makes the state persist even if the scripts are reset or the linkset is picked up into inventory while the door happens to be open, and then rezzed back in-world. Without that trick, taking the item and re-rezzing it, or resetting the scripts, can make the script think it is starting with the door closed, when in fact it is open, and can make the door move the wrong way, going out of position and into the wall when you try to close it, instead of closing. I'm popping in-world now to test a variation of your script that used that modification, and will post it here when I have one that works.

Well, I just eliminated the image of me in my black cheongsam from my uploaded images, and that also killed it here. This is a VERY serious problem. How can we display images useful only to a single post entry, if we then have to permanently keep those images in our account's "Uploaded images" queue? Three months from now, will I remember that that image of a badge background or some other odd illustration was a necessary part of an Answers forum accepted solution, or will I cull it as unneeded trash? Is there any way to see ALL Blog threads, regardless of what category they are in, with the newest ones at the top, like we can do now for the Forums and for Answers? Is there any way to see a combined listing of all Forum and Answers threads, regardless of what category they are in? In the old forums, we could do that, and when I am looking for active threads to read and reply to, I couldn't care less if it is categorized as "Forums" or "Answers". I just want to read the most current changes, and possibly reply as appropriate. With the current formatting, I have to check out Forums-All, Answers-All, and each Blogs category separately? Why?

Why is there no ability to reply to a specific poster in the Blogs? If, for example, Lexie or Torley makes a comment, and I have a reply specific to them, but their post is 50 posts back in the blog thread, there seems to no longer be any way to link my comment in the blog to their post. With 'uploaded images' in our individual avatar accounts as the only way to include an image in a blog, Forum or Answers post, what happens if we later delete the image to make room in our images area? Does the image cease to be hosted and visible in the Blog, Answers or Forums? Many of those images are useful only for that specific post, and we would never have a reason to re-use them. If they vanish from the post because we 'weed' our unused images, that cripples the usefulness of images in Blog, Forum or Answers posts. A test image should appear above this line. I am going to delete it from my uploaded images after making this post. We'll see if that eliminates it here or not.

If you choose no "theme" at all, you can use any background image, and there's a pre-defined set of text formatting that is black for the name, grey for the title, and lighter grey for the rest of the text. If you ever try to use one of the stock themes, you're stuck with some elements of it, and no way to change it. Choosing "Bayfog" at that point will at least allow an image to be seen properly as a background, and gives you the text colors you see in my badge. The darker rectangle and diagonal blue stripes at the right of that rectangle is a part of the Bayfog style that doesn't go away if you use your own background image. The white square and red triangle (my business logo) is my "avatar" image, and the text "Builder and Texture Artist" is a part of the background image that I created. Here's my image, by itself: There's apparently no control on our side for most of the formatting. And to make it worse, Answers and The Forums use different sized areas of the badge image!

The Kudos function isn't turned on yet. No one can use it at this time, no matter what ranking.

I created a HUD a while back for one of my University clients. As the wearer of the HUD walked through an SL orientation course, at the completion of each lesson station, the HUD recorded their progress. If they completed all the stations, they could collect a prize from a station at the end. And they didn't have to complete them in any specific order, though the trail walk presented them in what I hoped was a logical progression for the material. The same method could be used for your hunt. When the wearer attaches the HUD for the first time, it learns their name and UUID key, and sets a communication channel for the lesson stations. The HUD sets a channel unique for each wearer, so the huds don't cross-talk with each other. When the wearer touches a prim for the "item giver" his HUD tells the giver prim the channel to reply on for that specific user's UUID, and touching any station (or walking through a volume detect prim, or whatever method that station uses to determine success) also detects the UUID of the avatar, so the station knows who to reply to. They get given a notecard (or a prize), and the giver prim says a code word on that wearer's channel, so his HUD can record the success for that station. The status was recorded in a 12-character text string, kept in the description field of a non-root prim in the HUD. Each character represented one station. A 1 indicated task completed, 0 for task yet to be done. The HUD displayed numbers for each station, with a star overlaid on the completed tasks. At the final station, the station queries the hud for that status code variable, and if it matches what it should be, they get a prize for completing all the stations. If not, it tells them they have more stations to complete. Kind of complex to set up, but you can have a sim full of people all using their HUDS at once, and each avatar only needs to communicate with one station at a time. Go to the "Rutgers University" sim and try the orientation course, to see the concept in use. Station one gives you a brand-new, un-personalized HUD. After you wear it the first time, The HUD remembers who you are and what channel you use, even if you detach it and put it on again later.

Thank you Mags, Wilhiam. Yes, it's a very tranquil and relaxing place. I love it there.

That's a lovely home, Wilhiam! I used to live in a lovely re-creation of Hikone Castle, which is a vary famous castle in Japan... Sadly, I had to cut back on my land, and that castle is no more. I moved into a much more modest traditionally-styled Japanese home, on the beach. That projection you see sticking out toward the sea, on the plateau above the house? It's a diving platform, for diving into the sea and swimming. I have some lovely off-sim rocks and waves as scenery. The house is on the corner of the sim, and I also have a 'stables' left over from the castle, up that stone ramp on the plateau above the beach. A closer view of the house. I built the house, and I also built that castle in my first picture. The two fox statues at the left of the home have been moved behind it, where I built a small shrine to the Japanese Kami, Inari. Since my avatar is a Kitsune, Inari is a Kami that I am closely linked to. Traditionally the good Kitsune serve Inari. A closer view of the shrine.

Very nice write-up, Suella! Well done!