Masami Kuramoto

Pamela Galli wrote: What part of "That's the way it is. I don't worry about things I can't change." do you not understand Masamai? You keep whining about things you can't change. That's even worse. I was offering you to take rippers out of business by undercutting their prices. But then of course, you don't like freebies either, even if they are legit. So it doesn't really make any difference.

Pamela Galli wrote: I don't know what "morally entitled" means. If you read back, I stated that LL (and anyone else who thought about it) understood very well what the inevitable effect of having mesh on the grid was. No, there is no way to avoid ripped mesh from flooding the grid. No way to remove it once it is here. That. Is. the. Way. It. Is. OK, Pamela, here's the deal: The next time you see a ripped item that you think is hurting your business, send me a picture of it. I promise I'll make a comparable legit item from scratch and put it on the marketplace (under my alt account which has payment info), undercutting the price of the ripped item. In return I'm asking you to quit whining. Does that sound good or what?

If you can't find a good tutorial on modeling a shoe, look at tutorials on modeling a car, and apply those techniques to model a shoe. Mind you, I'm not suggesting you should model shoes that look like cars. But you should focus on learning the basic techniques that enable you to model any kind of object, without any specific tutorials. For example, if you can't make a good-looking shoe from scratch, learn how to use 2D references (photos, drawings) in your 3D modeling application. If you don't know how to give your shoe a smooth surface, learn the basics of subdivision modeling. And so on. Then you'll find out that a shoe really isn't much different from a car, at least from a 3D modeler's point of view.

Min Barzane wrote: No i am not afraid of competition,more original creators the better! Theifs like this guy aint competition,they are just greedy BS artists,lazy and to dumb to care about is what they do legal or not!All he cares about is $,fast and as much as possible with minimum effort! Real competition,tru creators,original ones,they don't damage my buisness,they just make me make better creations! If those models were brought to SL by the original creators rather than a thief, what difference would it make to your business? They're still the same models! If you have indeed contacted the original creators, why can't you accept their decisions? If they don't care, why do you? If you find your business in competition with similar Google Warehouse models, you basically have two options: develop a unique style, or accept the fact that your stuff is nothing special. The latter is only a problem if you're in it for the $$ rather than the art.

Ry0ta Exonar wrote: What happened here is that a well-established individual is deprived of the right to sell her items over one month now (both Amaretto and Ozimals could keep on selling) for an alleged complaint filed against her and to clear her name she has to spend huge sum of money. C shot herself in the foot when she filed a takedown notice against H and then chickened out after H filed a counter-notice. Someone should have told C that failure to act on a counter-notice is even worse than failure to act on a takedown, because the party filing the counter-notice has much more skin in the game. Since the law makes it so easy to fight a frivolous counter-notice, there is basically no excuse for not doing so. Complaining about H at this point is a bit like complaining about getting nuked after attacking Pearl Harbor. It looks like C didn't believe her own claims and merely abused the DMCA notification process to get rid of a competitor. Apparently this is how LL sees it, and there is a chance that a court will see it this way too.

Min Barzane wrote: contacting IP holders on Warehouse is close to useless "close to useless" Sounds like you didn't even try. Afraid of competition?

Spibe wrote: It's hard to tell completely unless I'm using it in a situation that would call for it. I just know with my experience with booleans, it's a very cautious procedure. I think that there are plugins out there that might be better. Where'd you get that one from? And does it work with 3ds? Or just blender? Boolean operations in Blender introduce triangles just like in 3ds Max. In fact all boolean operators do that. Those plugins merely perform an additional clean-up pass to merge adjacent coplanar triangles into n-gons. However, you don't need plugins to do that. Blender and Max have built-in functions which do exactly the same. Here's how it works: The nice thing about booleans in Blender is that they are implemented as modifiers. That means they are non-destructive and can be applied in realtime. You can watch that cube clipping the sphere as you move the objects around. In wireframe view you can also immediately see the effects on topology. When you have applied the boolean modifier(s), you can perform the clean-up pass. In Blender this is called "Limited Dissolve". At this point the topology is as clean as it gets. All the coplanar faces have been merged. All the highlighted faces are n-gons created by the Dissolve function. I use boolean operators all the time when I make architectural models. There are other ways to model buildings of course, but none of them makes UV unwrapping and texturing so easy.

Spibe wrote: However Npower plugin seems like it's been released already, but it's just difficult to find. I believe they have it in some sort of bundle that you have to buy. Is this what you are looking for? It's part of a free bundle you can download.

The blocks are probably scaled at the object level. You have to apply the scaling to the mesh data. Select the object in Blender, then press Ctrl-A and choose "Apply Scale" from the menu. Do this for both blocks, then export again.

Hi Rodvik! I'd like to comment on this suggestion given to you on SLU: ONE THING, Rodvik, you should seriously consider: clean up the info hubs. I made this suggestion before, and I'll make it again. Make alts, nooby alts, get them in-world and hit ctrl-H. Leave voice on and listen. Have every linden on staff do the same. Experience for yourself the horrors of banal palaces such as Ahern, soak in them. Understand that once newbs leave the welcome area they land smack-dab in one of the most hostile places on the internet. Wanna save SL? Fix the infohubs. (9 Users Agreed.) This kind of advice is the reason why SLU is the wrong place to ask for advice. The idea that SL needs to be sanitized from the misfits and weirdos that populate it has been nurtured there for quite a while. There is nothing hostile about Ahern infohub; in fact newbies are more likely to be met with hostility if they park their avatars in some shiny residential or commercial area. SLU on the other hand has a social hierarchy, and the above is an attempt to establish a similar social hierarchy in SL. Besides, turning to SLU for advice is a slap in the face of all the people in your own forum backyard. What were you thinking?

In my opinion this is not a bug. Exporting child objects without their parent is an implicit Clear Parent operation. By default, Clear Parent discards the transformation of the parent coordinate system and leaves the child object properties unchanged. The exporter's behaviour is consistent with that. I wouldn't use a mesh object as a parent unless that object is going to be part of the export. For temporary transformations as in your case I would parent to an Empty object instead, because the display size of an Empty can be changed without modifying its scale.

In the shape key specials menu, choose "New Shape From Mix". Delete all the other shape keys from the list. Delete the mix shape key.

Penny Patton wrote: "The first real threat to SL"? Hardly! Remember There, Lively and Blue Mars? Cloud Party is the first real threat because it is the first virtual world that is a 3D website rather than a game. The initial login after clicking a CPURL is so fast, you almost have no time to change your mind. Compare this with clicking a SLURL. It will bring you to a map, then to a sign-up form, then to a download link. The viewer download size is what, 40 megabytes? Then you'll see a setup wizard, click click click... The viewer will likely show you as a cloud in the middle of a grey world on the first launch. No problem, there are no less than 200 settings you can tweak to improve your experience. And then you'll see a flat world without normal maps and specular maps. Congratulations, you successfully made it all the way back to 2003! One word: crap. SL is getting old, and CP is making that painfully obvious.

Not sure what's causing that, but here's what I would do: In Blender, enable "Display face normals as lines" in Edit mode and see if the normals actually point outward. Since the Dissolve tool was used to delete edge loops, make sure it left no N-gons behind, i.e. make sure there is no face in the mesh with more than four vertices. The exporter or importer may be unable to handle them properly. Triangulate the mesh before export if necessary. Reload the exported .dae file back into Blender. This would reveal if the normals were flipped during export. Ask a friend to look at the mesh in Blender. Maybe you are missing something. If none of the above helps, file a bug report to the JIRA and attach the .dae file to it.

Ossian wrote: There is a much more informed and interesting article on Cloud Party here: http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2012/06/25/not-yet-a-party-but-soon/ Good article. However, Gwyneth got one thing wrong: "For example, when a Cloud Party island reaches the 25-avatar-limit, it gets sharded — a clever way to allow many more people to see the same content! — but obviously that means that the next 25 avatars will not see the first 25. They will be on separate islands. If you’re planning to do a mega-event with 400 avatars on the same location, you won’t be looking for Cloud Party to host it." Cloud Party's friends list is designed so that you can easily switch to another shard if your friends are there. Or invite them to your shard. Each of your friends has a set of tracking coordinates that include the shard number. Your own coordinates appear in the URL bar, so if you pass that URL to your friends via IM, they will log in exactly where you are. Last but not least, you can enter multiple islands and shards at once, simply by opening more browser tabs. These things make Cloud Party perfect for hosting a mega-event with 400 avatars. Or even 4000 avatars. There is just no point in drawing all those avatars on the screen at once. It would make region-wide open chat utterly useless.

Jenni Darkwatch wrote: I think I forgot to add a word in there. What I meant was: "If LL provides .deb packages, they also should provide other packages for other distros - complete with dependencies." That's how I understood it. And no, they shouldn't. They should not do more, they should do different. A .deb package would be the same amount of work to set up, it would still work like a .tar.bz2 on distributions that don't support .deb, but it would make a huge difference on those that do. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not expecting this to happen any time soon. What I do expect is that Cloud Party will be eating Linden Lab's lunch in the not too distant future. They manage to be multi-platform without any dependencies at all.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Checked it out. Looks very much like IMVU to me. Dorky cartoon avatars. Not much going on there unless you want to chat. No animations to speak of. You can get a house and funish it, but it looks like eveyone elses. You can't use the furniture, its just decoration. Of course all this may change if they manage to attract content creators and a market for their creations. However, I doubt you'll see a mass exodus from SL to CP.anytime soon. I was bored after 5 minutes. SL's avatars look dorky in their own unique way. However, Cloud Party avatars are just mesh assets, i.e. they are fully customizable, unlike SL where the "Ruth" base mesh is always there and needs to be hidden with alpha maps. In CP you can even replace the entire bone structure with something else. Add the superior material system to the mix, and you're in for some serious eye candy. I predict that Cloud Party will become the preferred platform for virtual music performances. Remember those Chouchou concerts? The ones you could hardly attend because the regions filled up within a second after opening? And if you were lucky enough to get in, it would be a laggy mess, and your viewer would crash right in the middle of your favorite song? Cloud Party will fix that. CP of course is subject to the same physical hardware constraints as SL. The number of avatars in a CP region is currently limited to 25. That's rather low, but it doesn't mean you will ever see a "region full" message, because CP will launch copies of a region if necessary. So you'll have 25 people in the first shard, 25 people in the second one, and so on. Now you may wonder how the band's avatars can "perform" in multiple shards at the same time. Here's how (I think) it'll work: CP doesn't know prims, only meshes, and there are a lot of features shared between mesh avatars and mesh objects. For example, avatars and objects in CP are animated the same way, using skeletons. This means you can create an object that not only looks like an avatar but also moves like one. Now all you need is a script (sort of like an AO) that triggers animations according to a stream of control information coming from a remote website. Install this fake avatar on a stage in your region, and it will appear in all the shards and do exactly the same moves. Add audio streaming to this, and your virtual performance is complete. It will be less laggy, it will reach more people, and it will be easy to join because no special viewer or plugin is required.

Jenni Darkwatch wrote: Just look at the JIRA, or Google for 64bit problems. There's a lot of them. Blaming the users for those is a typical Linux **bleep** dev reaction. I'm not blaming anyone, I'm just saying that it works here. Yes, Google is full of those reports, because many people blame the 64bit architecture first. Just like you did. But since there are 64bit installs working flawlessly, the problem must be somewhere else. I'm pretty sure most of my problems are/were missing libraries. As I said, I don't have the time or interest to spend much time hunting down libraries. It occurred to me to just recompile the viewer in 64bit - presuming that's possible - but again that takes too much time. It's a desktop. It should work out of the box. On 32bit it does. On 64bit it doesn't. I'll check 64bit Desktops again in a few years or decades. As usual, there's an easy way and a right way. The right way is to demand 64bit binaries from LL, because that would also break the 3GB virtual memory barrier. The easy way is to go backwards in time, run Ubuntu 32bit and impose that barrier on all applications, just because of Second Life. Sure, it's easy to blame LL for the lack of a package. However: They should then also provide packages for other distros. You are contradicting yourself. On the one hand you say supporting the fringe is a waste of time, but then you suggest that LL should make packages for Bob's home-grown distro, the fringe of the fringe. No, they should not. They should make one package for the most frequently used and most user-friendly distribution, and leave the repackaging to Bob. A .deb package can still be unpacked and run on the spot just like a .tar.bz2, so nothing would be lost. What would be gained is automatic dependency resolution on all Debian-based systems, including Ubuntu and Mint. That is an audience somewhere north of 20 million. I receive automatic Blender builds in .deb format from a Launchpad repository every day. Why can't LL set up something similar?

One thing I noticed recently is that Maya exports armatures with all nodes of type "JOINT". Blender's importer however expects the root node to be of type "NODE", otherwise the entire armature won't show up. I checked out the COLLADA specification and didn't find any rule that required the root node to be a "NODE" rather than a "JOINT", so I guess Blender's importer may be wrong there.

Jenni Darkwatch wrote: I just recently tried that actually, with Ubuntu 12.04 64bit. SL itself worked - sort of. Streaming music in SL didn't work right (incredibly laggy and choppy). Media on a prim didn't work right. Voice didn't work at all. Since I had a few other applications that didn't run right - namely my MIDI controller software - I just ditched the 64bit partition after a wasted day. I have two computers running Ubuntu 12.04 64bit, a desktop and a laptop, and all of the above things work fine on them (including my MIDI controller). Even PulseAudio stopped causing trouble with SL. So I would assume that it is not the 64bit architecture that is causing your issues. On desktops Ubuntu is useless unless Ubuntu folks can get their act together and install the 32bit libs along by default. I've got no time or desire to hunt down dependencies. Might work better with other distros, didn't have time or patience to try them all to find one that worked. You are barking up the wrong tree. How many 32bit applications do you have? I have exactly two: Skype, which is packaged and shipped by Canonical, so all its dependencies get satisfied automatically, and Second Life. The blame here is firmly assigned to Linden Lab, because they neither ship the viewer as a 64bit application nor package it up as a .deb archive. If they did at least one of those things, all those dependency troubles would be gone instantly. Now you are suggesting that Canonical should preload the entire set of 32bit libraries, just in case. Quite frankly, that is nonsense.

Jenni Darkwatch wrote: With 64bit Linux you will need the 32bit compatibility libraries, and you'll likely still run into problems left and right. On Ubuntu, install the ia32-libs package. To be honest, on a desktop, 64bit Ubuntu is just a royal useless pain in the butt. That is a thing of the past. Running SL on 64bit Ubuntu used to be a problem because the ia32-libs compatibility package did not include all the libraries that SL needed. GStreamer in particular was missing, and that left the SL viewer without the ability to play back parcel audio and video streams. Today however, 64bit Ubuntu can install packages straight from the 32bit branch of the distribution. In the package manager these packages are marked with the suffix ":i386". In fact the ia32-libs compatibility package is no longer needed; it still exists for convenience, but instead of the actual libraries it only contains dependencies triggering the installation of the regular 32bit packages. For SL this means that all the previously missing 32bit GStreamer packages are now available for installation through the package manager. More info here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec

Second Life on Linux requires Nvidia or ATI graphics. You were logged out of the desktop session due to a graphics driver crash.

Qie Niangao wrote: That's awfully optimistic, in my opinion. especially about OpenSim. I suppose it's possible that the developers harbor no illusions about there ever being many users, nor much revenue, but I really doubt the significant effort that goes into it would be much motivated by knowledge that the thing is simply never going to grow. And there's just no getting around it, nobody starts at OpenSim; it feeds solely at the teat of SL's marketing, such as it is. If, say, 90% of new SL prospects are instead diverted to another platform, SL can linger, but it so limits the future of OpenSim that it would take real OCD to keep slogging away at developing it. (That's assuming OpenSim remains based on the SL sim/viewer architecture, not anything interoperable with other, successor platforms. I can't imagine what such interoperability could mean, but otherwise, the rosiest forecast is to be the Apache server of buggywhips.) Just like any other open source project, OpenSim does not need growth and revenue. It can continue existing as a niche product for many years to come, even beyond the end of Second Life. It does currently depend on Linden Lab's viewer software, but if Linden Lab folds, their viewer will still be around. OpenSim will continue to be used by those who want to host "their own" virtual worlds, online or offline. Neither SL nor CP currently offer that. I was considered too optimistic about virtual worlds using JavaScript and WebGL at a time when most people expected Unity 3D to take over the whole virtual worlds market. Now, with Cloud Party as a proof of concept, the elephant in the room has grown so large, it is impossible to ignore any longer. One interesting thing about CP is that the client is open source and can be studied by anyone interested. So I predict there will be a WebGL-based viewer for OpenSim at some point -- and it may actually come from Linden Lab! And I do think that 90% of SL sign-ups would be perfectly happy in Cloud Party. Sure, there are a few who (for whatever reasons) need their roleplay to remain anonymous, but that's not the growth market--unless LL pivots to emphasize Adult content exclusively. As to user-generated content, meh. Yeah, there's lots of it in SL, 90% of it is crap (Sturgeon's Law) and, if the vulnerability weren't already obvious, everything Mesh-based in SL is either already loaded on Cloud Party or can be with trivial effort. The Facebook login problem can be fixed easily by introducing display names and hiding the "real" login names. In fact Cloud Party's support forum is already doing just that. Facebook's policy doesn't have to be Cloud Party's policy. When I talk about terabytes of content making people stick to SL, I don't mean to imply that CP can't have tons of nice content. What I mean is that SL users have grown large inventories over the years, and it's hard for them to give those up, even if a competing world is technically superior and/or cheaper. Creators can transfer content between worlds easily, but their customers can't.

Qie Niangao wrote: (Incidentally, I see Cloud Party as an immediate death warrant for OpenSim. Killing off SL's scale advantage would take a little longer.) Cloud Party is a threat neither to SL nor to OpenSim. To see why, you need to look at what makes each of those platforms attractive. For SL it is nine years or 192 terabytes of content as well as a certain level of anonymity in roleplay activities. For OpenSim it is the appeal of true ownership and independence. Cloud Party is a walled garden just like SL. Few people will give up OpenSim for that. It is more likely that Cloud Party will encourage someone to create a similar WebGL-based front-end for OpenSim. That would make perfect sense as it would complete OpenSim's mission to become the Apache server for virtual worlds, a cross-platform middleware between standard database servers and standard web browsers.

WADE1 Jya wrote: Yuck. Facebook is so creepy. I don't want to be datamined, spied on, monirored, tracked and so on so I'm never gonna be logging into Cloud Party! How to join Cloud Party without giving up your privacy: If you are using Chrome, open a new incognito window. If you are using Firefox, switch to private browsing mode. Log into your Fakebook account (or create one now, using a throw-away email address). Launch Cloud Party and have fun. To end your session, close the incognito window (Chrome) or drop out of private browsing mode (Firefox). This will wipe all of Facebook's tracking cookies as well as any other cookies that were set during the CP session.