Da5id Weatherwax

Second what Rolig said... But here's a couple of thoughts to get you started. Branching menu systems are memory-hungry. Think about putting your menu in a separate script to your "functional code". Your functional code then needs to worry about only two things. Kicking off the process with "Hey, this guy's using the menu" and getting a response back. The only responses that need to be sent are the endpoints of your menu system (including "menu timeout") - your functional code doesn't need to know whether the command to "Do McGuffin" was selected from the main menu or from page 3 of a nested-4-deep submenu. Secondly, remember that a 'submenu" and "another page of the same menu" really aren't that different. You display another menu with different options. Coming up with a design that uses a somewhat generic "DoMenu( ... )" subroutine which takes care of populating the text and option lists, establishing the listener, setting a timestamp for checking timeouts, making sure a timer is running to check for timeouts and finally making the llDialog() call will save you a LOT of brain-ache down the road. If the result of a menu selection is an endpoint, notify the main script and clear down all menu handling because you're done. If the result requires a fresh menu, whether a different page of the same one, a submenu or a return to a higher level that's just a fresh call to your DoMenu() function with different parameters. There's LOTS of ways to design it and unless you come up with something really weird you're not going to see much difference in efficiency one way or the other, so the one that is right for you is the one that you can get your head around and keep straight in your mind the easiest. Remember that you're going to have to maintain this code as well as write it!

This. There's a thing I've been working on, on and off, for literally years. It's actually "almost ready" to hit the MP and I'm equally "almost ready" to climb back on the treadmill of being a serious SL merchant again. After it does go on sale I have no doubt I'll continue working on it, might even add features that justify the price going up a bit. Before reading this thread I'd already decided that redelivery was going to be a good thing for it. It will be mod perm, apart from the scripts, but is complex enough that breaking it while modding it will be easy. That's no problem because it will also be copy-perm and folks that break it can rez a new one. That complexity also means that as a fallible mortal it's quite possible there might be bugs I need to fix. I can try and build in an auto-update system to get those bug fixes out to my customers or I can just say "Check the marketplace for a newer version and redeliver it to yourself before reporting a bug" which saves unnecessary script activity in an already-complex object and is another area where I'd much rather not worry about bugs (not that there won't be any, it's just that if there's a bug in redelivery it's not on me to code the fix as it would be if the bug was in my update protocol!) So what if the price has gone up? I don't care what price you bought your original copy at. You'll get the latest, most fixed version on redelivery with whatever new features I've added. Call it a "thank you" for buying it when it was a "less established" product. I'll still keep my own copies of the earlier versions around of course, so on the (hopefully) rare occasions where I've changed something and and the customer prefers the old way they can contact me and I'll get them a new one of that version, with the understanding that I only support the most current. Until LL change something on the grid that breaks the old ones they don't HAVE to redeliver an update if they don't want it. I like this. It puts updating via redelivery in the owners control rather than trusting to whatever auto-update code I might write. These are things I would appreciate as a customer, so they will be there for customers of mine. Penny pinching and chiseling every last cent out of your customers pockets may seem to be good for your bottom line in the short term but it's almost never good business.

I think you misread. ngons were never involved. in my post n was the models material count, not the number of sides of a poly, which the uploader *should* convert to independently texturable "faces" without trouble so long as 1<=n<=8 - but very rarely this glitches out and cross-links them so that you texture one and it nails some aspects of another - when that happens there seems to be nothing wrong with the model in Blender, so can;t find anything to "fix" to make the problem go away apart from trashing it and starting over.

Not far off the US minimum wage for that hour, indeed. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we actually could make this close to RL rates for our SL time. But, let's face it, nobody does. Not scripters, not mesh artists, not texture artists, not animators, not entertainers or performers. If we tried charging anything close to "real" costs we'd never sell anything, never get booked to perform. We'd love to. We don't. None of us do. Even a really skilled voice actress working as a SL hooker would be hard pressed to manage it, although the cynic in me suggests she might get closer than anyone else.

Offering that service and being paid for it is fine. And you do it the right way by being temporarily granted edit perms on the landowner's items or by placing items that can be transferred to the landowner after they are placed. Doing it with items that remain "yours" after the project is complete and being paid for leaving them there may be technically ok but it sure isn't ethical and if it's not made clear up front that it is what you are doing - that you are, in fact, NOT selling the items, just the decorating work - is ripping off your customers, especially if they are not particularly experienced and may not be aware how you're scamming them.

You want the minimum keywords that make your product turn up in the right searches. Otherwise you are contributing to making search work poorly for everyone. An Omega skin only needs the omega keyword, it shouldn't need all the omega compatible body brands listed and doing so should be considered reportable keyword spam even though the product clearly is compatible with all those body brands. Something made to fit a specific body should list that body, of course, but when you have a box with versions of the same item for 20 bodies packed in it that becomes a problem. Having all the "right" keywords on it does put you right on the cusp of keyword spamming. Maybe then there's too many products in one box?

I would guess that merchants indeed have no recourse against this kind of thing - which is not because the landscaper is doing nothing wrong, it's that the "wronged party" isn't the merchant. It's the landscapers customer. They are being sold a shoddy service, performed with materials not fit for the purpose. You sell a copy perm item you're granting a license to rez as many copies as they like, wherever the land permissions let them do it. Whether that's their land or somebody else's. But the landscaper executing a project with items that cannot be transferred to the landowner most definitely IS doing something wrong. If all they are selling is a design service and not the items to execute that design then they should not falsely advertise otherwise. If they then put their items out according to the design, those are still THEIRS even though they may be leaving them around for others to use, with all the downsides LittleMe mentioned above - What they are actually selling to their customer is still only the design, not the build. The DMCA may not be involved but LL's rules about deceptive advertising and fake products on the marketplace sure are! A landscaper putting out their own items to demo the design is one thing. But when the landscaper walks away they should be leaving behind items owned by the landowner. If they can;t transfer the items used in the demo, then they should either be leaving the landowner with a precise shopping list and parameters to rez each item or using the "purchase as a gift" option on the marketplace to get them into the landowners hands and be temporarily granted edit perms to the landowners objects in order to place them properly. If I were selling landscape or decorative items and I found them being used the way that has been described here I would be peeved. I'd be tempted to blacklist the designer, report their listings for false advertising and make my products available to their customers at a substantial discount so they could make good the poor work the landscaper had performed. And I'd say so up front in MY ads too!

If you want a trampoline to "work" on nopush land you could maybe use a sort of "pseudo-vehicle" - Trampoline rezzes an invisible sittable plane as a separate object above its surface, you "sit" on that and it plays a jump anim, becomes physical and launches itself upwards. When it comes down it detects a collision with your trampoline and applies a fresh upwards impulse. Make it clean up by deleting itself after you unsit (the trampoline then rezzes a new one.) For completeness make it unsit you (and therefore go poof) if it ends up too far away from the trampoline or takes too long between detected "bounces" once activated.

There's a lot of rocks in folklore that you need a strong stomach if you're going to turn them over and look. They don't have to be nursery rhymes about entire families perishing from the plague or the "fairy tales" that somehow managed to have all their innate blood and thunder swept under the rug by the victorians. I'm a folk musician - I sing about shipwrecks, mine explosions, famine and warfare, about sex and death and about what perils lurk beyond the walls of the mundane world. All the while we drink, dance and celebrate life we weave through it the threads of its ending. And, as often as not, quite a horrible ending at that! "Natural" can be "good" but it's only ever "nice" by coincidence.

I'm available to record a version of "Chicken on a Raft" (Furry on a Raft?), "Blood Red Roses" (Bloodlines Posers?) or "Drunken Sailor" (Drunken Linden?) for vol II of Blake Sea Shanties

Wow... it IS bad isn't it? Just walked past your place out of nostalgia - my main store used to be on the parcel next to yours (years ago) and its way worse than I ever remember.

Of course what I meant to say was that having spent over a half century achieving such a towering pinnacle of maturity and possibly even gravitas one can act immaturely and get away with it....

It's ok to keep getting more and more mature until you turn 50. Once you crack the half century you quickly realize maturity is way overrated and get rid of it as quickly as possible.

I'm a guy, and when I'm not a large anthro predatory cat most of the rest of the time I'm a borg... so I tend to avoid suffering the "random tasteless hit on" thing. It annoys the heck out of me when I see it happening though. It's embarrassing. I mean, come on guys, yes, she's pretty, even beautiful, but wouldn't that be even more reason to at least make an effort to not be a complete creep? Aside from the fact that you're much more likely to have an enjoyable time with her (even if it doesn't go anywhere other than chatting) by just being nice, polite and maybe getting to know each other, you're making the rest of us look really bad here.... Let me educate you about something important. Pretty women know they are pretty and it has nothing to do with "conventional" stereotypes of beauty either, it comes from within and being happy with who they are. This means they probably already know that you find them attractive before you so much as open your mouth. You don't have to be crass about telling them so. Save that compliment for when it really means something, when she know you well enough to be certain that when you go "wow..." you really mean it.

Whichever direction you choose. Evaluate the costs and benefits and make a business decision. Now, it seems to me that you are perhaps overestimating the revenue loss from allowing redelivery of an updated item (only a minority of your previous customers would buy the new shiny version if the one they had was working well and they had to pay for it) and discounting the benefit in support costs (since redelivering an updated item as the first troubleshooting step means you only have to actively support the current version). On the other hand, if you were so minded you'd be able to update your old listing to say in large font "This item has been updated and the new version can be found here (link)" possibly adding "This version is no longer supported." - this would mitigate some of the sales loss of a new listing as the search prominence of the old listing would still direct potential buyers to the new one and your existing customers could still redeliver the version they have. What you can't do is have your cake and eat it - you can't get the full benefits of an existing listings prominence and force existing customers to pay for a new version while allowing redelivery. It's your business, you know your sales numbers and your customer base better than anyone else, so you get to make the call which way to go. Other people with different business numbers might choose differently but so long as you are making the right call for your business, it's no skin off your nose is it? If you're playing, why should you care either way? But if you're running a business, run it like a business - which means making judgement calls like this on a regular basis.

I sing in 4 SL venues each week, an hour-long set of traditional and modern ballads which usually works out around 13-15 songs which I accompany on one of my two guitars. Am I any good? The miserable state of the tip jar some weeks would argue not but other weeks are a real confidence boost . I've never been asked to leave a pub music circle or booed off the stage in RL and I've been performing live for 30 years so "good enough" is probably honest For the second question the answer is a definite YES. There are plenty of awesome vocalists streaming to the grid. Too many to count and some of them I just listen and am awe of their control and musicality. I'm not naming names because I'm certain there are many many more than I could list - If you go looking for 'em you'll likely find somebody I've never heard.

I don't think this discussion will ever go away, because there's always going to be a wide range over which folks opinions will vary as to what's "reasonable" and what's "being a jerk" but what it comes down to for me is that different people have different reasons for wanting the limits they set on access to their parcels and those are none of my business and not my place to criticize. Whatever they want to set up they can, using parcel access controls and.or "security scripting" in ways that could be creatively unobtrusive or as subtle as an asteroid impact. You may not be able or willing to secure your parcel - or parts of it - in ways that will never interfere with passing traffic, but if you're going to create a hazard, mark the hazard. It's very little hassle to do this in ways appropriate to your inworld setting. For example: If you can't (or don't want to) avoid your land-based security overlapping what would otherwise be navigable waters, keep at least one safe channel and spare a few LI to place marker buoys so sailors know where the safe channel is and can avoid "running aground" on your "security reef." I'm sure most SL sailors, if they saw a landowner had taken the time to place a few port and starboard buoys or even just a cardinal marker where a corner of a protected parcel jutted out into water, would honor the marks and steer a course accordingly.

I've seen this on some meshes I've uploaded, where the model in blender has N materials, it uploads as having N faces but when you try and select them and texture them individually some of them appear to be weirdly crosslinked. It's happened rarely enough to me that I havent been able to reproduce the error reliably - or I'd have posted something about it somewhere by now, possibly even filed a JIRA if it looked like an import bug - but when it does it has proved impossible to fix apart from completely trashing it, going back to blender and recreating from scratch.

With a little ingenuity and script-fu that's workable around, but the designer would have to plan for it and you'd need to get a little crazy - like have one tiny part of the combined whole rez the rest and then propagate the config. You could then have this tiny trivial part be mod perm but what it rezzed not be.

I think, Ample, your reasons for selling furniture no-mod are all good ones. They are the reason that a lot of the "equipment" I used to sell was also no-mod, particularly the technical ones about resizing, linking, retexturing. These days I probably wouldn't sell as much of my stuff no-mod, even with those concerns. Part of it is that I've decided that when I get back into the market I'd much rather sell everything with copy perms. So if they break it messing with it they can trash the pieces and start over. In fact the business of copy perm is what it boils down to for me as a former, and potentially future, seller. If I'm going to sell something no-copy, and my customer can't unpack a fresh one in the event of "SL happens" then I probably should sell it no-mod so a product they can't replace can't be inadvertantly broken. Copy perm, however, let 'em use it however they want which means mod perms. If in the process they break it, well, there's a fresh one right there in their inventory and maybe they will find a use for or learn something from the pieces of the busted one. Not saying this is how YOU should think, of course - just saying where I got to from where you currently are

LOL - so wrong it's almost not worth answering - your agreement with LL specifies the legal venue - and guess where that is? Since it's part of your contract with them that gives them a license to your created content it governs any dispute with them over copyrights.Like if you objected to the license you granted them to your code. The source code format is plain text. NOBODY owns that. What happens in the engine with it, that's LL's stuff operating on your stuff. I believe I Said they own the spec and the engine.. that absolutely does not give them ownership of everything running on it. Unless microsoft owns your viewer running on windows? I'm sure that Billy's Empire would like to automatically own everything running on windows but they don't. Anyway, it's off-topic for this thread. Contact me if you wish to continue the discussion but let's not hijack.

incorrect. They have a license to it, on the same terms as any other content you create, but the copyright on scripts you create is yours. LL operate under US law and registration of a copyright in the USA is not required for it to belong to the creator. Your original script code is "(c) you" from the moment you type it unless you were hired to write it. If your final script is derived from another that you have rights to use in that way, so are your additions and you can set whatever licensing terms you see fit apart from the license you grant to LL since that's embedded in the user agreement and TOS and any restrictions imposed on you by the license(s) you have for source material you didn't write - like the GPL's requirement to pass on source code, for example, which would prohibit you sharing any script derived from GPL licensed stuff no-mod unless you also included the means to access the source from elsewhere. LL "own" the LSL specification and the script engine, not your scripts. They don't own your code any more than Kernighan and Ritchie own everything ever written in c.

I think, as soon as anyone starts trying to build technical means - beyond what is already built into the perms system - to restrict what is done with a script or object we start getting into areas where a great deal of effort is expended for little gain beyond inconveniencing legitimate and license-compliant users. One of the principles of digital security - or indeed about ANY kind of security - that I pounded home at every opportunity when working in the field was that if you want compliance out of your users, you make it the easiest way to go. Even the most willing user will naturally seek to work around inconvenience, and half the time they'll swear on a stack of scripture that they are complying with your policy and believe it too, while they are blowing huge holes in your carefully designed security procedures in the name of "convenience." The classic example of this is, of course, making password rules so complex that it's almost impossible for a user to come up with compliant but memorable passwords. As soon as you do that, I guarantee you'll find them on a post-it somewhere around 50% of desks if you look hard enough. The same principle applies in SL, albeit in different ways. Onerous and convoluted technical restrictions encourage violations even by people with no nefarious intent. It's even more of a hiding to nothing when you realize that most of the "bright ideas" people come up with to "protect" stuff wouldn't matter at all to somebody who was intending to circumvent them and knew even a little about what they were doing. This is very different from things like the AVSitter code, which doesn't operate to restrict but to validate that it's got the rights to work properly - that's a totally different question and one much more amenable to scripted validation. But if you have licensing terms and you're trying to do silly things to prevent folks violating them then why not start from the assumption that your customers are mostly honest? If you come across a situation where the license is being violated you've recourse to make 'em stop and LL will help you with that, they have to! That was the approach I took a few years back when I was actively selling scripts and builds and I never got burned by it while making enough sales to afford the rent on a half sim for my main store and workshop! There was one - just one - occasion where somebody broke my rules, which I found out about when one of their customers tried to come to me for support... I explained the situation, apologized that one of my customers had sold them something dodgy, gifted them a legit copy then both provided the requested support and DMCA-ed the violating products off the grid. The person I'd helped insisted on paying me for the legit copy, even though I hadn't asked. You catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar. I'm not saying you're wrong to want to protect your stuff and it's entirely up to you which route you go down but it might be of value to weigh up the amount of effort you have to put in to "make something secure" without "breaking it" against the actual value of the return you get from that effort.

I make stuff, I script stuff, I texture stuff. Mostly for me. For example, the guitars I made aren't "for sale" they are exact copies of my RL guitars (even to the slight damage on the headstock of one of them thanks to an inept baggage handler) for me to use on stage in SL. I also buy stuff. Some things, I don't give a rip whether it's mod perm or not. A piece of clothing that fits right and looks how I want, well, that I'm usually going to neither need nor want to mod it. I would love to make my own clothes as well as purchasing them but getting hold of the dev kits for the bodies I wear is, shall we say, a bit of a challenge so it's way less hassle to find something "good enough" on the market. Clothing that's heavily scripted I'd prefer to be able to mod. Other stuff that is attached as part of my avatar I definitely DO want the option to mod. One of the bodies I use has a tat layer that I will never apply anything to so to me it's useless geometry. I delinked it and got rid of it on the copy I wear day-to-day. If I couldn't have done that, I wouldn't have bought that body. I haven't done - and wouldn't do - a thing to the creators artistic vision, just permanently disabled a feature that I will never use. Nobody will see the difference, except perhaps in their framerates. "Props" etc, I'm hugely biased towards mod perm but it's not necessarily a deal breaker if I can't tinker with it. Likewise buildings and furniture. But I'm not a "typical SL consumer" in any sense of the word. (If such a thing even exists) I know what I want from products and buy accordingly, each decision made on its own merits. Other folks have different criteria. If they are a particular creator's target market and I'm not, that's fine by me. There are enough creators out there that make good products that fit my criteria to keep me happy. Just as there are enough customers out there for creators with a different philosophy to suit them too.

I see nobody has given any specific replies so, since I perform live in RL and SL I'll take a stab at it. You've got streaming sorted, so let's not go there. Let's just look at your audio setup. What you have is an audio source on the computer (karafun) a mic plugged into the XLR input of your mixer and you want to mix those two sources together and send the result out on the stream. You need to be able to monitor exactly what is getting sent to the stream - this is essential because as a vocalist you will be modulating your vocal dynamics and it's therefore on you to balance it with the mood and volume shifts in the backing track. You MUST be able to hear what you're broadcasting, and you must hear it monitoring the mix at your end, not trying to listen to your own stream (Don't even think about trying to listen to your stream in real time - the lag will kill you since the stream will buffer up to 30 seconds of audio before retransmitting it) You have a couple depending on the capabilities of your hardware. I'm not familiar with your specific mixer so I'll try and cover all the bases. 1: Doing the mix on the computer. Karafun does not include its own mixing functionality, relying on windows own "mixer" - In this case you are basically using your X502 as nothing more than a microphone preamp with some basic EQ. You will set up BUTT to take its input from the windows mixed output. You will monitor your performance over your speakers or headphones plugged directly into the computer. When performing you MUST mute all other apps on the computer, especially SL or you'll feed back any audio they generate into your stream. Windows audio passthrough, the pathway that gets your vocals onto the stream, often has a few milliseconds of lag to it, so this can negatively impact your performance. That makes this very much the "worst option" for a clean and properly synced stream. 2: Do the mix on the mixer. This is a much better option and the one I have to use because I play my own instruments as an accompaniment much more than I ever sing karaoke. For this to work with a computer backing track, ideally the USB connection must be fully bidirectional and you must be able to handle the computers output as an input channel on the mixer simultaneously with independently routing a mixed signal back to the computer. Setup karafun to output to the USB device, not the computer speakers. Monitor your performance with headphones plugged into the mixer and balance your mic levels with the playback levels there. Output your main mix to the computer via USB and setup BUTT to input from it, not from windows audio mix. In this case what you are effectively doing is exactly what you'd do to perform live in RL, except instead of your mixer feeding a set of external speakers, you're sending the output into the stream. 2b: If the USB connection isn't bidirectional. You'll need to use a separate computer input or output (in addition to the USB device) and a separate channel on the mixer. Plug your computers line out into an input channel on the mixer, make karafun output to that device. otherwise as above. Alternatively plug your mixers main output into your computer's line in, have BUTT broadcast from that, otherwise as above. Download something like streamripper, fire up your stream and sing a couple of tracks while recording what is being rebroadcast from the streaming URL. When you play it back does it sound like what you heard on your monitors while singing? If it does it's working and provided the land music URL is pointing to your stream, folks in SL will hear you properly. If you're out of sync or you're hearing other computer sounds on the stream, something's misconnected or misconfigured.