Shockwave Yareach

One toke over the End of Line, sweet jesus. One toke over the End of Line...

The gross incompetence of SL's management is a given. But even if they went and said "turn all the new toys on today!", only those with the newest LL viewers would be able to see them. This would create a haphazard world where some people start walking into walls they cannot see, ignore warning signs that are not visible, see avatars differently from other people on other viewers, etc. If you think I'm a LL cheerleader (boy howdy!) please take a look at my writings for the past 3 years. I've screamed at the top of my virtual lungs that LL is running their product into the ground and destroying it, and recent history bears me out on this. I've even been temp banned due to my acid pen, which I struggle to keep in its holster even now. What I think needs doing is keeping the 2.5 code under the hood and fixing most of the UI. I'd go even further and simply seperate the entire sidebar into a daughter window with all Messages as tabs on the top, so people with dual displays can have everything up at once and laptop folks can have the world window in front and below the comm window, and be able to see the flashing tabs that signal an IM. But regardless of the state the viewer will be in, it IS all of you rejecting the V2.5 codebase that are holding up the improvements in the world. Unless LL wants to see a world where what you see depends on what viewer you run, they have to wait until everyone is on board with viewers (any viewers) that can render the new stuff. And by insisting on sticking with an old viewer, you cannot render the new stuff. So the new stuff cannot come out. It makes no sense that so many of you complain about problems with crashes and lack of reliability when you won't step out of the old jalopy wreck that's responsible for so many of the problems in the first place. Much improvement has gone into the code underlying 2.5 yet you'll never experience it because the UI isn't what you are used to. Fine and dandy. What people want to run is their own business. But don't try to convince the world that it's the lab's fault nothing is being changed or improved when it is all of you on 1.23 after all this time who are the ones refusing to change and standing still. The lab has updated its code -- you guys running 1.23 have not. So no matter how you butter the toast, the new visual toys are not out because so many of you won't run something (TPV or LL) that is capable of visualizing them. Unless there's a magic trick which embues mystical capablity upon the 1.23 code, giving it psychic ability to be able to run code not written when it was completed to render items not thought of when it was completed to generate rasters unheard of back then and with protocols undreamed of and compressions of 1000:1 using algorithms unimagined when 1.23 was finished. I would love to know how 1.23 codebase is able to incorporate all the new features coming out. Many have been my efforts to add a magic scrying mirror to my code, and I always get a "ERRor -- futuresight.lib not found" problem when compiling.

I don't know what issues you are talking about. I'm running on a top end computer with a top end card myself and my picture is fantastic. Bugs? 2.5 runs for hours and hours on end with no complaints and no faults, better than I ever could do with 1.23 (which always crashed after 2.4 hours). I never said 2.5 was flawless. I've never seen any viewer from anybody that was. But except for the UI issues (seriously, what's so hard about the two buttons bottom right for Play/Stop of parcel music and parcel video?) I get outstanding reliability, fps, and picture quality. Other people's milage may vary but my results have been so stellar that I put up with the **ap interface to have them.

Ossian: the odd thing is, I'm not even all that excited about Mesh myself. I may start playing with google Sketchup after it goes live, but otherwise I'm not concerned. I am concerned that all progress and improvements in the world have ground to a stop because people don't like the UI of V2. Me, I use V2, because like all the rest of you I too am a creature of habit. Once you use it awhile, it won't bother you. So here we are with the following connundrum -- people can be happy with the dead end V1, or they can be temporarily unhappy with V2. One has a future and the other doesn't. I'm the first to admit that much of the UI in V2 isn't what I like. But the great improvements under the hood are worth it imho.

Odd. That's what I'm running, and I have everything at max or near max. gorgeous picture.

Boiled down, Mesh could be done today if everyone was running a V2 viewer. But since there is wide rejection of all the good of V2 because of some bad UI decisions, we are stuck in a hodgepodge universe where some people have viewers capable of meshes but most people are not. The prim equivalency question also hasn't been resolves as far as I know, only a proposed direction. The only way this will be solved is by the Lab's announcing that in 3 months time, nothing prior to V2.5 will be able to access the grid anymore. TPV makers will have that much time to move their codebases and modernize their products, or be left behind. People are creatures of habit (which is one of the problems with V2 UI) and won't change something that works unless they have to. While I normally detest such high handed methods from LL, they've been far more brutal over stupider issues than this in the past. So why stop now? It's been a year since mesh was prototyped. Either get it into the world or abandon V2. Pick a direction and move already. I personally have only a few dislikes with the UI of V2. But then, I'm used to working with complex "designed by blind octupuses" interfaces in industrial settings. A few tweaks to the UI of V2 would fix many people's complaints. But whether the UI is clumsy (it is), designed by sadists (it isn't) or written by demons in some middling level of hades for our torment, if we want toys like Mesh, Shadows, dynamic lighting, transparent skins (so we don't need invisiprims to hide limbs in order to have unusual avatars), improved particles or shared P2P folders, and who knows what else, we have to close the chapter on 1.23 and get this vehicle moving once again. And hopefully some enterprising TPV will put a 1.23 UI onto the 2.5 code and make everyone happy. But enough is enough. It's time to **** or get off the pot already.

I understand your frustration. But there is MUCH under the hood of the V2 code that is not only great, but necessary for the future of SL -- mesh, dynamic lighting and shadows for example. And like V2 UI or not (and it leaves much to be desired IMHO) we are ALL going to be required to use the V2 codebase sometime in the near future. The entire 1.23 interface will one day be deprecated and you won't be able to get on without a V2 viewer of some flavor. So it is best to just take a slack week and start getting used to the V2 interface when you don't have to stress about things. That, or get used to doing the things you did before SL. I normally detest highhanded actions by the lab. But it has been a year now and very necessary updates to the world are being held up by the rejection of V2's rather clumsy interface. I don't see why a TPV cannot be made that has V2 code but a 1.23 interface. The fact that nobody is doing so leads me to believe that there isn't any real way to do so. Either way, it's time to **** or get off the pot. We can either abandon the improvements to SL and abandon V2, or we can all just get used to the interface and enjoy SL even more with the new toys it has to offer. And there are many many toys we'll enjoy, as soon as we stop complaining about how clumsy the steps are leading up to the toy store. If I were in charge, I would announce that the TPV folks have 3 months to update to V2.5, as everything earlier will be unable to enter the grid when that time is up. I've said repeatedly that when Pheonix offers a viewer with the 1.23 interface and the 2.5 core, I'll run it and never look back. I'm still waiting.

Computers use 1's and 0's, represented by the presence or absense of a charge. This is the crux of the digital world. Even if this Vortex thing was correct/provided time travel/cured aids/fixed the national debt/removes unsightly blemishes, not a single computer/modem/network/hard drive/monitor on Earth can make use of it. So let's stick to tech that we will actually see/have/use over the next quarter century rather than yank the man's chain; I'm sure he has lots to do.

Welcome aboard. Here are your traditional gifts as established by Katt Linden; asbestos underwear, Troll repellent, spf5x10^5 sunblock, burn creme, and some rose colored sunglasses. But we do hope you don't wear the sunglasses -- been too much of that in the lab already I hope you and your staff have the programmer chops to fix what needs fixed. A good way to improve LL's income quickly is a megaIsland, which is 512mx512m. Only the SE corner has landmap (a standard map) and the rest is all empty sea as far is the viewer is concerned. But this is easily fixed with megaprims to create a faux land floor. For those interested in racing, flying, combat or boating, these will sell like hotcakes. Sell it at the same price as a regular island and the same limits on prims and visitors, and watch the red ink shrink. And the crossing problem with these is simply solved -- they are stand alone only and no crossing is possible to any other sim. Best of luck to you!

The secret to the chain particle is that you have to have the UUID of the target item in the script. Then the particle can be drawn from the origin prim to the target prim. Most systems like CuffMeister and the like have scripts in the cuffs and targets that allow them to tell each other what UUID to throw particles to. use this to find the UUID of your experimental target anytime you touch it so you can slap that key into your experimental generator touch_start(integer num) { llSay(0,"uuid = "+(string)llGetKey()); }

The charge of fraud is correct only in that the original landowner owes his renters refunds. If he refuses or ignores calls, then you can file a TOS violation on him. But the hard truth is you are going to have an expensive lesson in SL. You aren't going to get money out of this guy and LL isn't going to get involved -- they've avoided involvement in matters graver than this. So you are likely going to just have to chalk it up to experience and move on. A suggestion is to rent with groups that have been inworld at least a few months. You know that the land owner isn't going to just up and disappear most likely. But there's nothing to protect the renters from being ripped off by a fly-by-night landowner. Just remember that the new land owner didn't get any of the money, so it's not his fault. The guy who took the money and ran, it's that guy's fault. But you aren't likely to be able to get your L back from him.

The fault is in OpenGL, something the Lindens cannot do anything about. The OpenGL libraries are what LL and other programs use to tell the graphics card what to do. And every manufacturer of graphics card has their own OpenGL interface for their cards. My 2c -- ATI has long had grudging support for OpenGL and has in years past screwed it up terribly. Nvidia cards on the other hand handle OpenGL just fine. I got rid of my Radeon and put a GTX260 (now a 460) in its place, and lots of problems I just suffered with (like the triangle mess) just flat out disappeared on the Nvidia card. While you won't be rid of the transparency issue as long as SL uses OpenGL, Nvidia has a superior implementation of it. BTW: The usual workaround to them is to have only the outer image have transparencies, and the image of the level below be a nontransparent JPG. Since the second picture has no transparency the ordering glitch never appears and you have a perfect "Look through the holes at the next texture" image.

"So, you are a tiny neko, and he is a 20 m long dragon. Does this size difference and species difference cause any problems in your lives?" *sniff* He was so nice when we first met! Now he's nothing but disrespectful!" "That's not true! I've never said one cross word to you, ever." "Now now, people. Yelling isn't going to solve anything, and in fact just makes things worse. Now, you say he's disrespectful? How is he disrespectful to you?" *sniff* "He won't close the lid." "Oh for the love of... not this again?" "The Lid?" "Yes, the lid." "Well miss. I daresay most, er, males, have a problem with putting down the lid to the toilet after they are done." "Toilet? Who is talking about the toilet?" "yeah. We're talking about the lid of our communal casket!" "Casket?" to dragon "Are you sure this guy is a SL marriage counselor? He doesn't seem to know very much about relationships in SL." "Hey, he just might not understand the intricacies of neko/dragon/vampire RP." "I'll bet HE knows to close the lid, at least." "I'll bet HIS casket isn't over 20m long, either!" "Hmmph. Too bad other things aren't 20m long." "Now, now you two..." "So much for that lie about 'size doesn't matter'!" "People!"

I use 2.5.2 now. I run on an i7 with 6gig of ram and a gtx460 graphics card on a 64bit win7 OS. I've never had a lick of trouble with it crashing, and my fps are (deservedly) great. What SL wants more than anything else is CPU speed and Ram. And as cheap as both are today, there's little reason to continue trying to run SL on a 1Ghz P3 with 1gig of ram. V2.0 had lots of problems, yes. 2.5.2 has far fewer ones. And while the UI leaves something to be desired, the speed and reliability improvements under the hood are worth putting up with that. Since 2.3, I have not crashed once. Not a single time.

My best results have come from using a megaprim that's 20m long, 3m tall and 6m wide. I turn the mega into a cylinder and apply a sandy beach texture (one is in your library -- they can be purchased many places as well) to it. I then rotate it into place so that one end goes under the water and a good couple of feet are exposed above water. Then edit the land around the prim so that the transition from beach to grass isn't a straight line. And use rocks to hide the ends of the prim. Tada, a lovely beach. Further realism can be created by using scripted waves. And no, I don't have any to sell -- use search.

And people wonder why I stay off of mainland. HEY LL! You might want to actually investigate before banning folks. The last time I looked, calling someone "Daddy" was not a) child sex play, b) offensive language, c) banned by the TOS.

Now how can we possibly respond to this? We have no idea what your interests are or what you would like to do inworld. My best suggestion to you is to look at the Search line and punch in a few terms that might interest you. If you are into dragons, type in dragons. If you are looking for anime, try that. Note that Search is somewhat broken inworld. But it'll be good enough to give you a few starting spots and a few answers to "what's in here that I may like." Note also that adult terms (bondage, etc) require you to verify as an adult first before you can search for them. So if you try a few of them and get nothing back, that doesn't mean that the material isn't present in SL -- just that you cannot find it until you prove you're an adult and are permitted to see it.

It's "Copyright", not copywrite... What will eventually come to pass is the same thing that the anime and Manga crowd in Japan had to put up with. For a long time, Japanese law forbade using real product names in movies and in manga. It did not matter if you had permission or not -- you couldn't have Minolta appear in a comic book. So the artists began showing the following props and products instead: Mimolta Kobak xerocks Coda Cola Minkey Mouse Owdi Toyrola Boing aircraft We will probably end up the same way. And honestly, it's not a big deal. In fact, finding the fake products in Manga and Anime became part of the fun -- a where's waldo and what is his real name game. Disney may not like me selling a Wall-E robot. but if the colors are slightly different and his name is Well-A? Then the Disney lawyers can rage all they like -- not a copy of a copyrighted work anymore in any way shape or form.

There was an update to the viewer last night - 2.5.2 - and that seems to have me working well once again.

Let me just add that I had trouble logging in all weekend, and when I did get in, the grid was extremely slow. Put down a prim, and it takes 45 sec to rez. Move the prim, and it moves back after some amount of time. Group messages were impossible. I don't know what was done on Friday. But things have been very broke for me and my friends. I polled them (slowly) and they were all experiencing the same thing on Sunday.

Viewer 2 installs Uninstall SL delete the Second Life directory under C:\Program Files\ Empty the trash can to ensure stuff is truly gone Go to where the cache is kept: Ref: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clearing_the_cache to find it. Delete the entire Second Life directory, cache and all. Download the latest installer and install it from scratch. The biggest problems with updating and having several viewers is that most point to the same cache folder. And every program seems to handle caching differently. So if viewerA stores file Y which is a sound, but viewerB's cache loads file Y thinking it's a texture, the viewerB takes a mighty dump because it's not coded to handle lots of "bizarre exception" problems well. Yes, it takes time to relearn what we've been doing automatically. And yes, some of the V2 UI is pooptastically written (getting rid of the Music and Video buttons tops my list). But the program is very stable now and gives me spectacular FPS at mid settings on a less than spectacular computer (4 years old). Just wipe the SL 1.23 stuff off your machine and force yourself to learn the 2.5+. You'll never bother unless you have to, and at some point in the future, you WILL have to use 2, be it from a TPV or LL's viewer. So find a week where you aren't critically busy and give yourself some time to familiarize yourself with the new layout before it gets forced on you by the labs. It took me a week to where I was doing things as automatically as I was before. But I am still just as quick to do X as in 1.23.

Well, it IS possible to do what you want in certain cases -- sorta. When you own an entire island, you can create the land heightfields in your own computer and then upload it to SL. That then allows you to have the land design in your computer and gives you the ability to change it at a whim. However, in practice, you will find that once you've built stuff on a parcel of land, changing it around and ruining the builds already there is one of the last things you want to do. It may take seconds to change the land, but it takes a week to move stuff around and fix the island again -- the prims and their location don't change when the land does. This is why one of the most important things when buying an island is to spend a week and terraform it right the first time. Because once you put out 10,000 prim, you don't want to mess with them anymore than absolutely necessary. Then there's the whole issue about how stupidly expensive a private island is, and how you can kiss your money goodbye when you spend the 2K$ (because you don't actually own it, according to LL) to acquire it...

Deej: I didn't see her comparing you to her grandmother. Rather she was pointing out that we are creatures of habit and we don't like change. Thus the grandmother example where she continues to use a very obsolete piece of gear because that's what she's used to, even though a vastly superior solution is available if she'd only but take a little time to learn how to use it. I didn't see condescension as much as parable and example.

I run 2.5 solely. And it's not difficult to use once you understand that the objective is to make things more logical. What you have to do is delete entirely your 1.23 stuff and avoid the temptation of falling back to it. We are creatures of habit and when faced with a better thing or using what we know, we'll stick with what we know. Give yourself a week when you aren't uber busy inworld to learn how things are done in 2.5 and refuse to fall back to 1.23, and you'll pick up the new ways in just a couple of days. Doing things in 2 is different rather than more difficult, although I admit some of the changes stink. But the harsh truth is this: at some time in the near future, only V2 browsers are going to be able to enter SL. This will be necessary to have mesh visible inworld, which is currently stalled due to poor customer acceptance of V2. Hopefully Pheonix will be on board with Firestorm. But whether they are or aren't isn't important -- what's important is that sometime, V2 WILL be a requirement to go inworld. So it is wise to just get used to the new layout and get it over with.

Not having the other side of the story, I cannot say one way or the other that one party or the other is at fault. But I don't know many club owners or managers who are eager to throw out customers or ban people without reason. It tends to kill your club if you do so too often. I have, however, noticed a number of new residents arrive thinking that SL is no different than WoW, and that they can shoot anyone and insult anyone and be as offensive as they want to be because it's just a video game. They don't grasp (or don't care) that there are people on the other side of the avatars here -- no NPCs anywhere in SL. You say you were heckling the DJ -- clearly you and only you thought it was funny what you were doing. I would suggest you just find a different hang out and get to know people before you start insulting them. You may think heckling the DJ is funny. Shoot, I heckle the ones in our clubs, and they heckle me when I DJ as well. But that's because we are all friends and my friends get to poke some good natured fun at me. Total strangers coming in and complaining repeatedly that my music sucks won't be viewed very positively by the staff, or the regulars at the club. Just as you would be offended if I came up to you out of the blue and started insulting you. There is a difference between friends ribbing one another and a stranger being nasty to someone they don't know.