Shockwave Yareach

@Jeroen: The mainland is mostly mature with a smattering of G sims inside of it. You are correct that you won't be able to walk on the Mature parcels and you will have to teleport everywhere. But with the LL solution as it already is, you cannot set foot on Mature parcels in the first place, much less cross them. So my solution doesn't change that. All it changes is add "you cannot even see them" to LL's "you cannot enter them" approach. This is to finally give adults in Mature sims some protection and peace of mind. Plus, logically, if the sims aren't considered safe for teens to enter, then they shouldn't be considered safe to even see either. And remember, you will only have the limitations of a teen account for two years. After that and for the rest of your life, YOU will be worried about lawsuits and cops accusing you of improper relationships with a child for as long as you are in SL. Having neighboring sims appear as offline for two years to buy you 70 years of safe enjoyment in SL is a very small price to pay. And it prevents the adults who were promised an adults-only world to play in from having to worry too much about what children may or may not see while they just go about their (legal) business after LL unilaterally changes the contracts yet again. It's a tech solution to a complex sociological problem. And while yes, a teen can lie and still get into mature, any lawsuit is preempted by the simple question "Did you commit identity fraud to access materials you shouldn't have accessed?" If the teen has to admit to commiting fraud, LL and the rest of us are safe. If the teen doesn't have to break any laws or rules and still sees inappropriate content, then the law absolutely and without question will come after LL and the rest of us.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6242? You are opening up a tremendous black hole of legal jeopardy here, for you and for all your customers. Any store that's in Mature and bordering General can be Cammed into and purchases made. Any home in mature and bordering General can be Cammed into and the residents spied upon. And when the teens' parents catch their kids watching virtual porn, without the kids having to defeat any sort of protection at all to see it, you can be assured that they will be calling the authorities. The authorities then will be coming after you (for failing to safeguard the underaged from inappropriate material) and after us (for providind the innappropriate material, even if we don't know the kids are perv-camming us.) The only way you are going to make the mainland Kid-safe without turning it completely General is by modding the server code so that Mature and Adult sims do not pass back any data at all to Teen accounts. It's a very simple change to make and prevents teens from perv-camming anyone or even making improper purchases at stores bordering G sims -- you cannot press BUY on a prim if your viewer doesn't get the prim's data in the first place. Likewise, you can't perv cam someone if you cannot see them to begin with.

@wayfinder While I have no use for the names change being put in, it's really not so dire from an impersonation standpoint as everyone seems to think. When the display name is visible, so too is the account name. While I could change my display name to yours, everyone would see me as Wayfinder Wishbringer.shockwave yareach. At least that's how my 2.3 beta shows it. So as long as you cannot shut off the account name visibility, the potential for abuse seems very low. This appears to be a case where the lab actually listened to the customers about abuse threats and took them into account, which I hope to see more of in the future. Had LL listened to us earlier, all this shrinkage and mass exodus would not be taking place. So here is hoping LL continues to listen to us when we scream X will cause Y unless Z is done, and actually does Z along with X. It's about time they realized that ignoring customers turns them into excustomers.

@Jack: If you are counting on Twitter for your trouble reports, then you are really making a serious mistake. One, not everyone has or wants a twitter account. Two, it's poor company policy to count on another company for your internal troubleshooting reports -- that should be entirely inhouse. Three and most importantly, the extremely short message size limitation on Twitter means that the person cannot describe the problem in any sort of detail; your reports are limited to "Monitor caught fire" and "can't login", which are useless from a debugging standpoint. I run the beta's because I want to see SL improve. But if you think I will be able to help further by using twitter and trying to cram all my details into that itty bitty message, think again. I'd be happy to fill out a Beta Tester Glitch Report comment on the website where I can give you all the details about the problem. Since I cannot do anything but go "Uh Oh" on Twitter, I won't even bother. Heck, I'll even email the problems to Beta2.3Glitch@secondlife.com. How hard would it be to set up a couple of email addresses for us to send problems to, hmmm?

@Lamona Since on my Viewer 2.3 beta, both names are visible, I don't see much room for actual abuse. And clicking on a person to open their profile shows both names in the profile as well. So long as both account name and display name are visible, it'll be difficult for anyone to try and impersonate anyone else. I could try to be Lamona Proctor . shockwave yareach, but nobody with a lick of sense is going to accept that I'm you since my account name doesn't match the display name. The issue bears watching since griefers are quite clever at finding edge cases and exploiting them. But it's a snap (to my eyes at least) to see that the two names are not the same.

Morgaine: Reload the page and then stop the video. The java test sees if you have the bandwidth necessary for the streaming. And if your bandwidth is gobbled up by the video transfer, guess how much bandwidth is free? And thus the java program decides you aren't eligible because you don't have the bandwidth. Just reload the page and stop the video a couple of times. You'll get in.

Although this opens the door to SL for anyone running a weaker computer (even a netbook can handle this), I foresee a massive problem with its widespread application. This requires enormous bandwidth. For those of you new to the tech, what is being done is the actual rendering is done on a specialized computer someplace else, and that video is then streamed to your web browser like a Netflix movie. Imagine playing a BluRay disk and streaming the video out over the internet to Aunt Bertha in Miami -- that's the Readers Digest explanation of how this works. This takes huge amounts of bandwidth to pull off. And as more and more ISPs start putting usage caps in place, a person doing this will be able to hit that usage cap in just a couple of hours playing. Hard even to socialize when you can only use it a few hours a month tops. If some way to defeat or outlaw usage caps isn't implemented, I cannot see this increasing user numbers more than 5% at max. And if the long-standing problems with how LL manages the grid aren't fixed, only a single digit percentage of those people will remain. If your fanboys and diehards are finally going, how long do you expect people who can take it or leave it will last? It's an interesting tech demonstration. But the bandwidth caps on all our ISPs doom it from the start. Unless you folks know something about the future of those caps which the rest of us do not know, or have a trick to compress the video even further so we can play on it daily for a couple of hours without hitting the limits Comcast and other ISPs impose (although better encoding requires powerful home computers for the decoding, which takes us right back to square one again).

Well, there will always be a need for the average user to have some land if they want a home to decorate. Be it rental or owned, if you don't have a place then you can't rez your DreamHouse and set it up to your satisfaction. No dream house, no need for furniture, plants, trees, paintings, TVs, etc. Granted this is entirely reliant on the Entertainment and Role Playing folks, but their money is as green as anyone elses. For the businesses, I think a simple change in SLM is all we need. Anyone gets the first 12 items into SLM for only a percentage, just like we have now. After that, you get 30 items per parcel that you OWN (not rent) with no additional fees. If you rent, then you can pay a listing fee equal to the tier of a parcel per 30 items listed. This would make for a level playing field where there is no cost difference between running an inworld store and having only the SLM store. And those of us who are just tinkerers or otherwise starting out still get the same "first 12 are free" slots to get our businesses off the ground. Today there is a cost advantage to being only in SLM; a cost advantage that negates the need to have any land at all. If LL wishes to save its business model, then it needs to make it so that the first 12 items are commission only and you have to pay tier to list more (and the commission is removed.) This makes owning a SLM store with 200 items the same price as having an inworld store with 200 items. And if you have the inworld store with 200 items, you get an SLM store with 200 items for free if you own the land. Pricing would need to be carefully considered, but the big picture is to make SLM and inworld stores cost the same while giving everybody a free commision-only dozen slots that everybody can start their business with. Once started, the creator will need either inworld store or pay for more space to sell more products. Just be sure to eliminate the commission if the slots are paid for. I'll pay a commission or I'll pay a fee -- I'll not bother at all if I have to pay both simultaneously.

Michele: If that was the cause of the downturn, then WoW would not have made Blizzard 1.4Billion Dollars last year. And Microsoft wouldn't have made 450Million in PROFIT on their gaming division alone. And the movie industry wouldn't be reporting record ticket sales and income. During times of trouble, people like to escape their problems with entertainment. Happened in ww2. Happened in the great depression. And it's happening now. People are spending incredible amounts on video games, internet games, MMorpgs, movies... What they are spending less time and money on is SL. And that's not the economies fault, nor is it the users' fault. It is solely LL's fault for their gross incompetence in how they've run the grid the past 2 years. And so their customers have stopped voting with their wallets and are now voting with their feet. Blaming the economy is a convenient scapegoat for LL's mismanagement. But simply looking around at other entertainment venues and noting their astronomical profits shows that it simply isn't so.

Unless I actually get to OWN the islands and all right attendent (as was promised when I first rezzed here), then I'll just hold onto my 1000$. I can buy a lot of fun toys with 1000$ that I don't have to worry about the lab taking away for one capricious reason or the other.

StoryOfOh: I'm one of those well-funded oldies. And the LAST word I would use for inworld shopping, then or now, is the word "fun". Use search to look for men's clothes. TP to a place. Place is closed. TP another place. Store owner changed product lines and didn't bother updating search. TP another place. Place is now a private residence and I seem to have interrupted someone's quality time (no kidding - it happened). TP another place fast before getting ARd. Finally, a store that has men's clothing. Unfortunately every single thing is an urban look I wouldn't wear if my bandwidth depended upon it. Give up in disgust. Time elapsed: 1.25 hours. Items purchased: 0 Or I can go to Xstreet, look through a couple of pages, pick what I want and it's delivered right to where I'm standing. Far superior. Time elapsed: 0.1 hour. Items purchased: 1. I think the ideal solution is for people to have no more than 1/2 of their wares on the marketplace, and have links to their stores. I'll admit the browsing is much better in an inworld store than a website - easier to just scan and examine stuff. But when I need to buy something, I need it then and there. I don't enjoy wasting hours of my free time doing something unenjoyable like hopping from store to store to used-to-be-a-store praying I'd find what I'm after. Offer me some stuff I can get on the marketplace and links to the inworld store I can browse if I like what I've bought, and I'll be happy.

Shanna: The trick is simple -- the denial of access is done during login. If you set the viewer to Bob's Fishmarket Viewer before you log, then the login server says oh, you aren't on my naughty list so go on in. And when you are inside SL, you can change the identification back to Emerald once more. It's more steps than most people want to do. But it's possible. Although why anybody would continue to run Emerald when Phoenix is available (and far far safer) is puzzling. Does this person want their computer to be taken over by Phox or something?

Another nice feature -- many of the buttons you are used to having in the 1.23 interface on the bottom can be returned to the bottom of 2.2. The only buttons missing I really want to see are stop music, start music, stop movie and start movie. I've been running the beta for a few weeks and it's solid now. And those of you screeching like banshees you won't ever use v2 have a decision to make. On one hand, you can leave SL when all nonV2+ viewers are deprecated. Or you can stay with your friends and groups and learn a new (albiet nonintuitive) program. What's more important to you -- your friends or not hassling with the new program? Like it or not, that will be the decision you will all have to make soon. If it helps make the decision, I LOATHED V2.0 so much when it came out I had to avoid the forums to keep from saying naughty words. I didn't use it. V2.1 came out and I found it more tolerable. With v2.2 and the optional buttons on the bottom, detachable menus and buttons that you can actually see, I actually like V2 now. I don't love it -- there are still several UI issues that keep me from giving it 5 stars. But it does earn 3.75 stars. And the work under the hood that gives me much better performance, that gets 5 stars from me. If you are someone who hated V2 because of the first decrepid version, give it another try with v2.2. You can customize it to look much like 1.23 and it's worlds away from the first 2.0 version.

Answer: You are moving at Velocity X. When VelX < -4x(posX), you are about to cross to the West. When VelX>4x(256-posX), you are about to cross to teh East. Similar checks for North and South give a cardinal direction solution to the problem. While corners remain a problem, we can try to walk before we run (or as the case today may be, crawl). Yes, you preload your state to the next sim you are moving toward. And certainly you can cause additional traffic between sims by sitting at 2,2,20 and walking in a circle. Rather a boring way to spend your time, and it won't affect anyone or anything except to cause a bit of extraneous data traffic between some sims. But shortcomings or not, it's a good sight better than today's no-solution solution. Adds: And if the sim keeps a log of what sims have been preloaded with whose data and only sends it once, that case gets eliminated. The only case then is the one where you change your avatar before you make the sim crossing. And in that case, the two states do not match and the recieveing sim requests the current state from the departing sim, much as is done today. And yes, this will have a lag associated with it.

The big change in V2 is that stuff that used to have easy to find buttons is now hidden in menus. I didn't used to have to Hover the mouse over the volume control to find the 5pixel wide gear icon (that means who knows what) to be able to turn down only the music and not the movie I'm trying to listen to. I used to be able to just press the Movie Stop button. Then they went the extra step of making the buttons not look like buttons. Some of the problems in V2 have been fixed with 2.2. But it is still not a user friendly and easy to use program. And unless they return a few buttons to the bottom of the screen like they used to have, it never will be. Me, I run the latest V2 beta, helping to debug it. Once you get past the hump and understand the new paradigm, V2 makes sense. For example, you click on your inventory and THEN press upload -- after all, you are uploading something into your inventory. Not all the problems are fixed, no. But it is usuable once you figure it out and whether we like it or not, the entire 1.23 train is gonna stop some few months in the future. The ideal viewer would have a second window for the tabs, the buttons of 1.23 on the bottom, detachable menus (the beta has these), better representation of a button, and any background color EXCEPT GOTH BLACK. "Interesting. The ship has black panels with black lights illuminating the black letters to tell you what the buttons do." "Don't push any of the buttons!" "Oh." "what happened, Earth man?" "A black sign with black letters on a black background popped up saying "Please don't push this button again..."

If you "preloaded" the nearest sim with the avatar's state when they are 4 seconds from crossing, then the simcross problem would be dramatically improved. And if you sold stand alone islands that are not connected to any other island, had no land heightmaps (use megas for faux ground) and were 1Km per side, the racing crowds, boating crowds and flying crowds would buy them in the hundreds. Imagine being able to fly for more than 10 seconds without turning. Imagine being able to have a real dogfight instead of just spinning in the sky. It's easy to do. It's compatible with all the existing viewers. And if you solve the "which sim to cross to" problem by ignoring it in favor of independent stand-alone 1Kx1K island sims, you can increase the cash flow into SL almost immediately. The prim and people count are no different than in a regular sim -- only the MaxX and MaxY constants get changed. Air and sea people won't care that there's no ground and the car racing folks can use megas to create instantly changable tracks.

Are you sure about that? I recall turning on the HTTP Textures feature in 1.23. It didn't do diddly then, but I remember digging through the advanced menus to turn it on. It's not in a regular menu; you have to turn advanced on with the Ctrl Alt D first.

@Moni It's not a different direction at all. You have never been able to edit textures in the viewer, yet they've been part of SL since day -842. You have never been able to edit sounds in the viewer. Yet sounds have always been a part of SL. You have never been able to edit poses. You have never been able to edit animations. These have always been part of SL and have always needed external programs to create/edit the textures, sounds, poses, animations... So what's so different about sculpts and meshes? As a builder, there are far more mesh creation tools in the wild, free and commercial, than there are sculpt creation tools. And unlike sculpts, mastering meshes gives you a credible skill you can use in the real world -- movies, cartoons, architectural simulations, videogames... Some jobs require ability with Mesh. No job I know of requires ability with a sculpty. People learning and mastering the Mesh inworld will be able to show off their skill and their portfolios within SL and land real jobs paying real cash because of them.

I'm running the beta of the new 2.2 viewer and it's improved dramatically in the short couple weeks it has been out. It has gone from a crash festival to completely stable. And yes, I have noticed less lag in my sim. Getting more groups is a welcome change as well. Keep up the good work. We have been wanting a number of tech improvements for a long time. While it doesn't address the dreadful leadership of the organization, it does give us hope that the tech side of the system will finally get some much needed repairs. And I, for one, am glad to finally see these repairs and more like them in the future.

SSE2 has been on every Intel processor since 2001, and AMD processor Athlon64 or better since 2003. Just how old is your computer? Sounds to me like you are running an AthlonXP2400 with an AGP graphics card. And as hard as it is to pay the money nowdays (especially for certain programs from certain companies that don't deliver what they advertise or promise), a computer that old is ripe for replacement. It is not like an oven. It doesn't do the same thing today that it did 50 years ago. A computer that's 5 years old is about out of drive space and sufficient computing power to play modern games. My old computers get waterfalled to the kids. The Kid's computers become my lab boxes in the garage. By the time a computer has been waterfalled out of my garage, it's 12+ years old and not even Goodwill will take it anymore.

I would be interested in going premium again if I could make 100m prims. After LL learns to stop screwing up the grid every six months, that is. But I don't pay for bad customer service, spotty reliability, and terms of service that say they can take millions of dollars of property anytime they wish for no reason whatsoever. No, no I'm not the least bit inclined to pay good money for bad product like modern day SL. But if they wake up and make a seperate continent for G, M and A instead of just mixing them up on the mainland, recognize that nobody spends 4+ figures without ownership, and let me make mega prims, I'd be willing to restart my premium once again. As you may guess, I'm not exactly holding my breath. But I am holding my wallet, and have been ever since the Voidsim debacle. LL has done nothing since then to make me want to buy land again -- and in fact they've made it so buying land in SL is a sucker play.

Yoz: you may want to publicize the fact that Premiums do not get purged if there is a hiccup in their credit card, then. I've wondered why it is that someone who paid more for SL got treated worse -- the basic account is safe from inventory loss and banning when the wife loses my credit card and I have to change numbers all over creation. Having a 10 day grace period before closing an island would be a good idea too. What if the wife loses my credit card the day before tier is due? I'll be happy to pay you! Just let me get the new card in and give you the new number. I'll certainly be less inclined to do that though if 3 days later I get the card, come in, and find you've already turned off all my islands and sent my renters running.

As glad as I am to see this long overdue attention to the superstructure of SL, the policies like doubling prices on education and non-profits, forced relocation of teens to the main grid (supposedly for access to the educational sims that just got the axe), broken search and ruinous business and customer relations are far more important. When a business sells you something for 1000$, you expect that product. When the company then forcibly takes that product from you and substitutes another poorer product with no option for a refund, it's plain and simple fraud. All LL has to do is make every new major initiative its own continent and leave the existing customers with their existing TOSs alone. You sold us sprockets - we expect sprockets, not cogs. If you won't give us the sprockets we paid you for, then refund us for the purchase price of the land and we'll be gone. Otherwise, expect to hear from many more lawyers and stare at many more of our posteriors as we leave you to enjoy your predictable yet empty SL and foot the bills all by yourselves. The policies have to be fixed first or there will be no-one left to care about the meshes, the shadows, the mods allowing 500 people on a sim, etc.

I am not judging any of you at all. I'm stating factually that the main grid is and was created for adults only. It is not a safe place for you to enter. And your entering puts us adults in jeopardy as well. The only way it can be made safe is either destroying everything we made and owing us tremendous refunds for all our land, or making it so none of you teens can get or see any inappropriate material. We were sold land on a kids-free make believe world. If you spent thousands of dollars for something, you'd want what you paid for as well. You teens cannot enter a handful of places, like bars and tobacco shops. Get over it -- soon you will be able to enter them as you become adults. And you'll then also be able to enter SL as well. And when YOU are an adult and have to shell out YOUR own money for SL and realize that little Timmy can put you in jail with only a phone call (no evidence required), you'll start to understand that we adults weren't being unreasonable at all. If LL had created a G continent like so many of us asked and begged a year ago, I would be welcoming you with open arms. But that's not what happened and LL is putting me, you, and themselves at considerable RL legal jeopardy. And whatever good you point to from the merger, the bottom line will always be the legal real life issues. The threats of perverts preying on teens in PG. The threats of teens camming into M. The mainland is not and cannot be kid-safe. Not without commiting fraud on all the existing customers and telling them that they can no longer be what they want and do what they want, even on their own property. You do that to make the adult grid kid-safe, and adults have no reason to remain here anymore.

ooh, that never dawned on me. That LL is trying to become a Game company? After all the screaming they've done about Second Life not being a game? Really, if that's their plan, then once again they need to consider my New Continent for this brave new world. Create a gaming continent and let the Teens and Adults mingle there. Set the new rules ONLY on the new continent and leave the people already on the old continents and islands alone. That would be workable. That would be fair. That would prevent everybody from going out and getting lawyers to haul LL to court over fraud charges. I would even enjoy such a thing -- gaming was something I thought would be fantastic in SL, but found quite disappointing. You cannot put the gaming world in the existing mainland, unless you want the Hills of Bones to be broken up by the occasional home with lollipops and batmobiles on the lawn. Yeah, that's a lovely gaming world right there. If LL wants to make money, they can KEEP their current customers and create new gaming customers by leaving the existing customers alone and create the new gaming continent for mixed use. And then the entire new landarea can be used for whatever game SL creates, with a few user created areas for taverns, weapons shopping, spells, clothes, etc. And then the teens won't see anything they shouldn't on mainland while still able to buy G rated stuff in the marketplace. Everyone wins. Everyone's happy. Everyone keeps paying money to LL because they are having fun. So clearly, LL isn't going to do this.