Da5id Weatherwax

@Alyona Su, you say "precisely" but maybe you're missing the point. Nobody is saying LL owes them a living. They are saying "I am an example of this category of contributors who have a role in making SL the kind of environment it is. This can make me stop doing that." and questioning whether this is really a desirable consequence for SL or for LL. From anyone in that position who cares about being part of this community, that is a valid concern to raise.

I am booked to play a RL gig. I assemble a set list, spend two or three hours rehearsing it and tweaking it to fit my time slot to within a couple of minutes. Then, at the agrred time and place, I perform it live. I am booked to play a SL gig. I assemble a set list, spend two or three hours rehearsing it and tweaking it to fit my time slot to within a couple of minutes. Then, at the agreed time and place, I perform it live. "pretend", "free"... Yeah, right. The only "pretend" thing about it is how I look to others when doing it, like a stage costume in RL. The stipend is free money, if you happen to be premium. No other SL income is. I work for it, no less than if I were performing in RL. For me this is LL saying "we're taking more of the door price and giving you less" - which is fair enough, they are running a business. They have to make these decisions. So do I. If it stops being worth my while to perform at their venue, on their platform why would I continue doing it?

As a RL sailor who has been aboard RL houseboats, allow me to mention that purpose-built houseboats such as those simulated as Linden Homes really dont rock in any visually perceptible way unless your anchorage is experiencing a hurricane. They are designed for maximum stability and can achieve this with much more success than a hull that is designed to spend the bulk of its time moving through the water rather than sitting still.

it doesn't answer your question, but a somewhat tedious manual workaround does exist. Prior to export: Snap the origin of each piece to its COG by selecting all vertices in edit mode, snapping the 3d cursor to selected and then in object mode transforming the origin to the cursor. (you can also try directly transforming "origin to geometry" but I've found the two step process is a bit more reliable for getting the blender object origin exactly where SL will put it) Move the entire set so that the origin of the piece you want as the root is at blender coordinates 0,0,0. Note the positions of each non-root component of the linkset. These positions will form the offsets from the roots position for each part inworld. You'll have applied rotation and scale immediately before exporting so you will be working with zero local rotation on everything when reassembling it inworld Inworld: Upload them separately and rez the pieces inworld - you dont have to get them together in the right places, just close enough to link. Link them together in the order you want them, adding one at a time until they are all linked. Drop a script in your root mesh that performs a llSetLinkPrimitiveParams call to apply [PRIM_POS_LOCAL,<offset noted in blender>,PRIM_ROT_LOCAL, ZERO_ROTATION] to each child mesh Your object should now be reassembled in exactly the same relative places you saw it in blender with the links in the order you specified when linking them.

I most DEFINITELY include DJ's in the "performers" category! Listening to a good one live-mixing is an education as well as a pleasure. That's a musical skill as worthy of respect as any other. It's undeniable that they are in a better state to weather increases than a live musician, because they at least have the option, in theory, of playing more hours to make up the difference whereas if I were to try and match the schedule of a successful SL DJ for a week my voice would be so trashed I couldn't perform anywhere for a month. Nonetheless, they still face the same issue of microscopic margin on what are, effectively, the exact same RL costs as performing in RL. Professional gear for their trade has a comparable cost to the gear I use in mine and wears out at the same rate. Any SL income they make comes from either tips or from venue owners who are themselves being squeezed until they squeak. That's not an exclusively virtual phenomenon either, only a tiny minority of RL venues are making enough margin to compensate entertainers well, it's just that in SL the numbers are even lower and when set against the RL-equivalent costs to a performer of live or recorded music it makes the cliff edge that much closer.

Not one of us is replaceable or expendable, really. None of us "do our thing" in SL in isolation and we all depend on others for it to be a success or as rewarding as it can be. If I'm booked to play somewhere I will turn up and play my set whether there are any punters there or not - I've played to empty clubs because that was when I agreed to be there and put as much into my set as I would to a crowded venue. I appreciate everyone that does show up, the unmeshed newbie, the anthropomorphic sea slug, the fashion diva, the demon, the robot or the brazen strumpet working the crowd to try and drum some of her own particular kind of business. I make a point in every set of acknowledging the venue owner and their staff and encouraging folks to contribute to them even if they dont find my music to their taste and dont feel like tipping me. Every single person who spends less time in SL, who decides to forego buying land or who goes from making a modest profit to having to buy lindens to purchase the stuff they want makes life harder on all of us. They aren't buying as many new outfits. They aren't looking to rez and furnish their place, they have fewer lindens in their pocket to drop in my tip jar. If it wasn't for venue owners I couldn't perform in SL at all - you cant set the stream on LL-owned land, street corners and transit stops aren't a music venue inworld! Now, to a limited extent LL clearly understands this - they have left the fee for buying $L alone! Trimming the margins of a merchant might force them to raise prices, but just because prices go up doesn't mean folks will start tipping 110 when they used to tip 100, if anything they'll have less to spare for folks like me and my margins are getting trimmed just like everyone elses. Edited to add: It;s not about LL owing anyoen a living, it's about the kind of environment they want SL to be - which does have an impact on its profitability. Do they want there to be a live music scene in SL? If so, performers are a group they need to not price out of inworld existence by a few percentage points here and a few percentage points there.

I made this point in Grumpity's thread but it bears repeating here. There are more merchants and creators of saleable content in SL than there are performers, so it's natural we are hearing more from them in this discussion. However consider us for a minute. As a live musician my costs to play a set in SL are identical to my costs to play the same set in RL, with the sole exception of transportation costs to get my gear to the venue. SL income is not my sole income but it pays for me to be in SL and from time to time allows me to replace worn out gear a little sooner than I could otherwise. The costs are identical but income is not. The margin in SL is tiny, but every little helps on a musicians irregular income. This is not the venue owners fault, they are on an equally scaled down margin and can't afford to pay anything like what they would for me to turn up and perform for them IRL. These increases are not going to bankrupt me or anything over-dramatic like that, but they are going to decrease my already-tiny margin over my costs. I have no idea at the present if that decrease will take my SL income below my SL costs but the possibility is very real. I want to continue to be part of this community but, like I said, a musicians income is irregular and currently the little I make in SL helps a bit. Changing that to an equally small loss thanks to elimination of my margin in increased fees will unavoidably put my future as a SL resident in doubt. I won't be alone in this, the same will be true of everybody with any kind of "SL business" whose margin is this close to the wire - and that's most of us, whatever line of business we are in.

Indeed, and it makes perfect business sense to do so - but the inability to get into that stable situation on the part of a customer with limited resources can't be dismissed with "That's called planning" because the planning may be perfectly doable but the entry barrier insurmountable.

You're not sounding like a jerk, but rather like somebody who has either never lived it or last had to so far in the past that the memory is not too clear any more. If one was already on an annual plan when one's circumstances changed and resources became more limited then yes, there is a year to put by the next payment and all will likely be well. Starting out from a point of limited resources though, the only option, other than not going premium at all, is to "pay as you go" on a monthly basis - which consumes the funds you'd otherwise be putting aside for the next years payment. The up-front cost forms a barrier to entry even if, once that's paid, it would be perfectly feasible to fund the renewals.

The folks this will hurt "most" aren't those in one particular "SL trade" or another. It's those folks whose margin is already slim. Whether your costs are fixed or dynamic, whether those costs or the income you make as a result are large or small. If your margin is already tiny, even a tiny increase in costs relative to income can eliminate it entirely. That's when active participants in the SL economy cease to participate. If you've got a larger margin - as some, but not all, content creators and some, but not all, land barons tend to have - you will be able to eat this increase with little difficulty and remain on the positive side of the ledger. If your margin is small, whether you're a landlord, a clothing store, a club owner or anything else, this is going to hurt you worse than that other guy.

DJs keep the clubs open so that we can play there, and a good one is WAY more than a "canned playlist" - They may not have rehearsal time to consider (but only "may not" - a DJ who live-mixes is constantly practicing their art) but they put in a comparable amount of time assembling their sets as we do. But the fact remains that they can go for hours and - if they can get them - pull sets effectively back to back. If I tried even getting close to the schedule of a successful SL DJ I'd have trashed my voice within a week and wouldn't be able to perform anywhere, RL or SL, for a month! They also have one other advantage over a live performer - with a decent set of cans they can perform "RL silent" and not care if their set is scheduled for what might be an unsocial hour in their local TZ. If we have neighbors, we can't do that. They make as much as we do an hour, but can put in a LOT more hours earning! I'll support them to my last virtual breath, though, because if it wasn't for DJ's there would be no SL music scene at all and the virtual world be significantly lesser thereby. For my part, for as long as I can keep covering my expenses I'll keep playing in SL. There is nothing like the communities and audiences you find here anywhere else online and it's a pleasure being part of it. The margin is already razor-thin though and any increase in costs is worrisome.

So, we've heard a lot in this thread from merchants and creators, and they have very valid points. Speaking as somebody who was an active creator and seller and who hopes to be again in the near future I can really sympathize. However, that's not why I'm posting. A group that contributes quite a bit to the "second life experience" has been a bit under-represented in this discussion. I'm talking about performers. I am a live musician. It may appear that our costs are low compared to those of creating and marketing content but compared to our income that's not the case. Items on the marketplace can sell 24/7, If I'm not online, on stage and performing, I'm not earning any $L at all. Preparing a one hour set (which I can hopefully then use at several venues) implies a couple of hours of rehearsal before I ever fire up the stream. I pay for my streaming service inworld but all my other costs are RL - fresh strings, ordinary wear on my gear etc. Other than transportation my costs to play a SL set are identical to those of playing the same set in RL.The income is a fraction. This is not because venue owners are stingy, it's that they simply cannot afford to pay close to what I'd charge in RL. The vast majority of SL venues operate really close to the wire - just like their RL counterparts. Many can only afford to have performers play for tips, those that can afford to pay can usually only offer around 1000 per hour. Yes, there are places that can offer more, but they are a tiny minority and competition to get slots there is fierce, particularly if your musical genre is itself a minority interest. Currently, my SL existence is self-sustaining "plus a little bit" - but in all honesty in an hour playing on a street corner I can make close to three times what I'd realize from that same hour in SL. The comparison with an hour at even the seediest RL venue doesn't even exist, it's so far out. When your margins are that small even a relatively modest increase in how much LL siphon off from your income becomes truly significant. I'm not claiming that these increases will put me in the RL poorhouse. I make almost all my RL income in RL, but might they cause my SL income to no longer cover my expenses as a SL performer? Yes, they might. And this is where things get problematic, because while I do wish to continue to be a part of this community and to continue contributing to it, any musician will tell you that for the most part it's not a "financially secure lifestyle" - even the tiny profit from playing in SL helps. But if it were to turn into an equally tiny loss, I guarantee that I'd not be alone in questioning whether to continue.

The end-to-end costs are not doubling. Remember we are already double-dipped on a cashout to RL funds, once with the lindex sale charge and again with the fee to process credit. Prior to these upcoming increases the end to end cost on converting lindens to real-world currency that you could use for non-SL stuff was 5.9% (3.5% on the lindex sale, 2.5% on processing the credit - you get 96.5% of your lindens value into your tilia account and then 97.5% of that into an account where you can spend it outside SL - 0.965*0.975 = 0.940875, 1-0.940875, rounded to a single decimal place = a 5.9% fee) Substituting a 5% charge on processing a credit that figure becomes an 8.4% end-to-end fee, "only" a 42% increase in our costs, not the 100% folks have been quoting. Now, I'm not saying this is a nice or good thing but lets not hammer the lab with wrong numbers. Most of my $L income comes from performing - about 50% in tips and 50% from paid bookings. Now, tips will remain constant - folks aren't going to start tipping 103 lindens instead of 100 - so if I'm to defray the additional costs I'd need to raise my booking rates by about 6%, probably not worth it unless/until the lab pull sufficient increases that I'd have to jack up my prices by 10% or more. However, I am tracking it and if it passes that threshold I will push the button on a rate increase. If that then causes me to lose bookings to the point that my SL no longer pays for itself, then I'm gone. Its a market, and if you can't compete in a market staying in it is a mugs game. As it is, an hour playing on a street corner pays me more than an hour playing to a SL audience. I keep doing it because I'm part of a community here and it is still self-sustaining. If that ceases to be the case, I cease being an avatar.

You're both thinking inside an outdated box, possibly because "that's the way you've always done it" and the fact that the reasons you cite are no longer showstoppers has passed you by. When clothing was mostly textures baked onto the system avatar, then yes you had to use a "demo texture" - now they are mostly objects, and rigged so no amount of tweaking by the end user is going to change their "fit". Stick a script in your demo that says "now modeling a DEMO of $ITEM by $STORE" in hovertext, then take the script out leaving the text and make the DEMO no-mod/copy/trans whatever the perms on the actual item are. Buyer can gift it to an alt simply by passing it to them, not usable as regular wear on account of the hovertext. If you really want to be obnoxious about it leave the script in and have it self-detach after being worn for three minutes. Sure they could evade that by only wearing it on a noscript parcel but that doesnt get rid of the hovertext or let them drop their own script into a nomod item to get rid of it. Zero cost. If there's a cost to you in providing a demo of anything but old-style system clothing, its because you chose for there to be.

The most common cause for a mesh uploading without the rigging is forgetting to check "with bone weights " on either the exporter to create the .dae or in the upload of it to SL. I know that's like asking "have you tried turning it off and on again" but its easy to reach for the upload button and forget one checkbox...

The major difference between "object is phantom" and "child in linkset has no physics" is that a phantom object still exists in the physics engine even though you and physical objects will pass through it. Collisions and volume interpenetration detection still happen. Setting a child in a linkset to physics type "none" removes if from consideration by the physics engine entirely and these detections don't happen at all. The other difference is that entire objects can be phantom, physics:none can only be applied to children in a linkset. The physics engine must always "know about" the root prim.

I dont see the point in charging for a demo and I never did when my store was open, never will when I (eventually) relaunch it.. The whole point is that somebody gets to take it away and try it at their leisure in the hope that they will like it and come back and buy the product. Even a 1L charge for that is an unnecessary annoyance in a market as fragile as vapor. The tiniest things can turn off your customers and turn a profitable business into a losing proposition. Somebody will try a demo for a few minutes and then decide whether or not they want the product it is demonstrating. They might keep it but more likely they'll just trash it at that point whichever way their decision goes. Charging them anything at all for that convenience and for a few minutes use of something you hope they'll buy anyway - when it costs you nothing to provide - bespeaks something about the attitude of the store as well, something I'd rather not have said about any business I run.

Off-topic, but to clarify the history.... RLVa is an implementation of the RLV protocol. The protocol and its API are developed and maintained by Marine Kelley who also maintains the RLV viewer itself, which was originally the only place where its functionality existed. As such, the RLV viewer can be considered the reference implementation of the protocol and something that doesn't work with it can't really call itself "RLV compatible." The RLVa implementation of it was (and still is) originally developed for Catznip and has since been incorporated into other viewers but is not a common code base with the reference implementation - which is why when Marine updates the protocol spec and the RLV viewer it sometimes takes a (usually quite short) while before those changes are reflected in RLVa and the viewers that use it, with, for obvious reasons, the updates showing up in Catznip first and then the updated RLVa code being imported to other viewers in their next release.

Will do. I have an appointment to get to this morning but you can expect me to drop you an IM or notecard inworld shortly after noon UK time.

Just DJ's or are you open to live performers too?

I think folks simply have a hard time getting their heads around a fundamental fact. If it's in your computer memory and you want to get your hands on it badly enough you can. Even for non-geeks there are howto documents and packaged tools to do it if you look around the web hard enough. If you actually know even a little about what you're doing under the hood of your operating system (and to continue the motor analogy, I'm talking "shade-tree mechanic" not "Formula 1 race engineer" levels here) it is so simple as to be trivial. Without touching the viewer code at all. Any mesh, any texture displayed on your screen, any sound played through your speakers? One or two hooks into the graphics and audio drivers via their public APIs and you're done. Animations are less easy, to rip those the easiest way would indeed be to hook the viewer itself but if you're a capable coder and you know the comms protocols between viewer and server you could do it by hooking the network driver instead and mounting a MITM attack on the https channels between viewer and servers. Far from trivial in that latter case but also far from impossible and since the attack was happening within the network stack on a legit client, neither the server nor viewer could detect it or prevent it. It's just data and it has to pass through a known encoding to make it to your display or your ears. When it does, that's when the nefarious coder grabs it. And there is nothing any content creator or LL can do to change this. All they can do is to impose consequences on folks that do it and get caught thanks to re-using their stolen assets on the platform they stole it from. And this is what they do do, whenever they are made aware of it. And yet, folks keep selling unsuspecting content creators the latest brand of snake oil that will keep folks from stealing their work... when, if the people peddling it were knowledgeable and honest they'd know that not only does their "bright idea" not work, it can't work.

Why can't you have both? If, in the name of efficiency, you must write less "readable" functional code, the humble comment can do wonders for readability. Using your "efficient example" //efficiency + readability integer x; integer len = llGetListLength(gSomeList); integer worker; //workspace for list iterator for (x = 0; x < len; x++) { //lines and lines of code // integer worker - global for efficiency. //do a bunch of stuff with worker }

Don't bother. I didn't want to stink up the forums so took my discussion on the subject private. I've no doubt a further attempt has been made to claim this complete balderdash, but thankfully all I see of 'em now is when somebody quotes it. One thing that stuck in my mind after our "friendly disputant" here claimed a law degree is they consistently said "copyright" - ie the right to copy and distribute - as "copywrite" - clearly a mistake no law graduate would make. I even pointed out that Kernighan and Ritchie don't own everything written in c, that LL own the viewer, not Microsoft, even though it calls the libraries built into Visual c++... but it went whoosh. It is an empty vessel, devoid of truth or meaning, firmly sealed against the least chance of rational thought entering.

In our previous discussion I said no such thing. I said that LL's ownership of LSL (undisputed and I never claimed it was open source, nor did I imply any such thing) did not give them ownership of code written with it. It doesn't. As it happens I did own ONE of the companies from which I fired somebody for being a bad programmer. The other times I regretfully had to do this I was the manager of an IT team. You don't have to own the company to sack an idiot, you just have to be in a position of sufficient authority and be able to make the case to HR that no remedial action will make this person into a productive member of the team. Boom. Done. Logins cancelled, please stop by to return the company laptop and security will meet you at the door with whatever contents of your desk drawers and locker are not owned by the company. "Seven companies, two in Japan." Your claims get more grandiose by the moment and now you're beyond ridiculous. Argumentum ad authoritas is a fallacy at the best of times and when even Cartman does it better, probably best to not try. I don't believe a word you say any more. If the forums had an ignore option the sound you'd be hearing would be (found it!) Here's your donut. "plonk!" because you're not entertaining and I have better things to do with my time than pity you.

You do love to "knock", don't you, Steph? As this is the second time in short successsion you've contradicted me on rather questionable grounds, on widely separate subjects, I've taken the liberty of looking back through your posting history and I haven't found any sign you've got much good to say about anyone else's input, only a long string of contrarian views. This time, like the last, you are talking complete rubbish. Like something being "memory hungry" is somehow less of a concern when you've got four times the memory to spare post-mono than before. It still uses the same amount and the goal should be to use as little as possible, don't you think? "No more than a single list" - that's like saying "no more than the stack" or "no more than the heap" - the data required is the data required whatever structure you organize it into. Or are you saying that addressing the same amount of data differently somehow makes it consume more or less space? Not having an eye towards maintaining your code? And then dissing somebody who calls you on it because LSL is not a language used in mainstream scripting? Please. I've fired people with that attitude off teams I was leading more than once over the last 35 years. Sooner or later a charlatan always exposes themselves, often by attitude. Last time we disagreed you claimed to be a law graduate to add authority to statements completely at variance with how the law is applied in a particular area of IT - statements that anyone who had worked in the industry would know were patently false. What are you going to be this time to support sounding like somebody who barely - and recently at that - passed CompSci 101? The genius hacker who can cpio sunshine out their own /dev/null?