[Aditi Problem]

Some things to try -

different viewers - Firestorm is reputed to use the most in computer resources ('heavy'), while others like Singularity, Cool VL and Kokua are said to be lighter

having a clear out/box up on the main's inventory. too many items in a folder seems to cause problems even more than a high inventory count in general.

a low inventory building alt for Aditi. I really like having an alt with an inventory structure geared towards building. It's akin to having a clear desk instead of trying to work in a jumble sale.

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If any of these help but can't be a permanent solution for whatever reason, they might help you narrow down the source of the problems and find better fixes.

[Objects of the dead]

Friends with health problems have left SL for reasons like hospitalisation and haven't returned. I don't know what happened but there's no way I'll ever remove their names from my friends list. Because there was no physical memory, and nothing in the physical world to remind me, the digital one becomes more important.

There are things from friends still living that I treasure, wee gifts, photos and things they made, that I'll keep as long as SL is going and will stay in Bitsy's inventory long after I'm gone myself.

[Vampire bite with no warning or knowledge.]

My point in asking about the competing system was if they have something equivalent to a points per soul system without needing a HUD on the victim, then Bloodlines wouldn't necessarily need the victim to have a HUD either. I still wonder if perhaps Phil, Dillon and BilliJo might not ALL be right, just for different periods in time.

[Can realistic velvet be rendered using materials settings & maps?]

Try asking Gerard Tunwarm of Texture Me True. He understands fabric better than most and started working with materials when they were first introduced.

How high can contrast be turned up on for materials? I'm far from expert in their use, but that's where I would start experimenting. I think I would also focus on trying to get the effect in strategically located parts of the object/garment rather than over all, so a bespoke texture for each rather than a multi-purpose fabric texture. But then I'm looking at the gorgeous rumples of that picture and thinking oh the tris!!! The LI on that will be deadly.

[Vampire bite with no warning or knowledge.]

Thanks for looking me up Billi. I appreciate it.

Does the other vampire system, the one where people can be bitten without having any interaction with it at all (from their side) not work on points then? I thought their vampires wore HUDs which collected the equivalent of points too. The bitten don't even have to accept the bite request in their system, let alone wear a HUD.

[Vampire bite with no warning or knowledge.]

Could it be that the hud was a later addition, perhaps to stem some of the criticism? The system seems to have changed through the years and Phil and Dillon have been around for a very long time.

I'm curious if I'm in the database, would you please look me up Billi? IRCC I avoided bite requests and was given a garlic necklace fairly early on.

[How many of you use Advanced Lighting / Materials settings?]

I turn it on and off depending on what I'm doing. When I'm making something, I try as many different settings as I can think of. When I'm shopping though, I tend to have settings reduced to speed up loading so I pretty much always look at demos and rezzes without the fancy stuff first. Sometimes I remember to turn it on before I buy.

Every day use, it will probably be off though cause it makes the computer run hotter, and the fan louder.

[Avastar for free?]

Have you used this Bastioni plug-in to make anything for SL? If you can and you're happy with it, and you'd rather not pay $27 for Avastar (for any reason or none at all), go for it.

I've never seen anyone write about Bastioni in the forums, so if you do use it, you'll probably have to look elsewhere for help and then adapt it to suit SL's particular needs.

If you want to know more about the merits of Avastar (that's STAR not STAN, btw), search the forums for conversation about the kinds of things you'd like to use it for. The information you're after has probably been discussed at length already, several times over - it's even been nodded to in this thread, with Callum's post being a reasonable summary of majority opionion. Avastar has a very good reputation for working with SL's quirks, customer support from Gaia, and additional help and advice from SL creators.

[Eye Issues]

There are a few things which can only be replaced, not detached or removed altogether. They are part of the software running SL at a very basic, fundamental level.

Your avatar has to have a skin, a shape, eyes and a hair base. Mesh body parts are attachments worn OVER all of this. The mesh body parts need their own skin as well. The system (pre-mesh) skin, system eyes and hair base will be made invisible by the mesh stuff.

Yes, it is confusing. Welcome to Second Life.

[How to put a house with additional objects in a box?]

/me gets a bit too excited about the quality of //explanation in the script Rolig linked to . so helpful for learning, thank you Rolig you're a star

[IMVU to Second Life - Male Avi help]

21 hours ago, Virtualnsanity said:

I am not even up to noob level yet. I have sooooo much to learn. Its kinda daunting. Am i ever going to learn enough to enjoy this place properly or am i better just spending all the time it will take on enjoying imvu? Decisions decisions. Thanks again. 

Just a vote for Skell's last paragraph just above. You can enjoy all of SL without having to make all of the complicated mesh head/mesh body decisions, and your favourite things to do (or your favourite people to hang out with) might change what you want for your avi.

Also, mesh clothing covers a mesh body. Depending on what kinds of clothing you wear, it might not matter.

[If avatars were required to eat and rest]

Meh. /me makes full perm energy bars and drip-feed espresso so those of us who are making the world for you to enjoy can get on with it without having to worry about feeding the av as well as the mind behind it.

[Gta v sux]

Read the 'sux' as a way of getting around profanity filters. Not sure if that dates my internet usage.  So the 'v' quickly became the Bridget Jones' Diary abbreviation for very.

I'll make no claims as to Ms Jones being the origins for that usage, just that it appeared around the time people were being annoying about the movie and it seemed to be connected, and I quite like the interpretation where someone comes into the SL forums to rant about GTA using Bridget Jones slang so I think I'll stick with till proven otherwise.

[Path Cut/Slice -- Build Issue]

There are days Whirly appears to approach omniscience.

[These numbers have got to be wrong]

Might be useful to throw in the observation that a lot of communication in SL happens while people's avatars are doing different things in different places and talking through groups or IM. I made no lasting friendships going to hang-out places (though I know others who have) but lots through groups and several through my store.

Which leads on to another observation. The friendships that began because of my shop didn't happen while I was standing around. They all began with people who took the time to drop me an IM, which led to a conversation around shared interests, which led to a friendship request, which led to many more conversations. None of these friendships would have started if they'd had to rely on face-to-face real time introductions.

In that way, SL can be more like an internet forum than RL. So it's probably best to not think about it in terms of who's in a particular location at a particular time, but how you can make contact with people who share your interests.

 

[SL vs Social media]

Yeah, youtube broke their algorithms a while back (or maybe Google broke them for youtube). I won't defend that at all. It used to be a good way to explore non-mainstream music but the current algorithms don't want to co-operate now.

[SL vs Social media]

You know how SL can be very different depending on what you do, where you go and who you spend time with? Social media is the same way. It's not hard to avoid the stuff you don't want to see (whether it's dinner pics or political arguments) if you're careful who you follow, friend or like. Does help if you choose a name that RL people won't find you on too. But it doesn't have to be the equivalent of hanging out at a griefer sandbox.

[How to you make things disappear?]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Except...I found something that doesn't work with that. If you have a scripted object that you wear, let's say in the case I'm trying to solve a rake, and it is in your hand, it simply won't disappear. On the ground by itself it will, but if you "add" or "wear" it, it won't. So I don't see how I can get "temp" to work to disappear things.

I don't know how merchants do it.

Good questions, Prok. I've been trying to get my head round all of this myself. As far as I can tell worn and rezzed have different script commands, which means (if I'm understanding this correctly) a wearable will behave differently when rezzed unless the creator took the time to script for both.

I've seen information saying that llDie is the only option for deleting rezzed objects, but there's a lot of obsolete info floating around. I'm hoping there's something less harsh now but haven't found it.
 

[Do You Prefer Living On Mainland or a Private/Homestead Sim]

I've met many interesting people who wandered by while out exploring Mainland, including someone who's become one of my dearest friends. The good people outweigh the annoying ones, so Mainland is my preference. I'd lose a lot if the only access to the sim was TPs.

[Hover, Hover and Shoebase]

In lieu of a better solution, or for other notes - if the item name can't be modded to include additional information, use the folder name to record useful info. Try to be consistent with any abbreviations though. Helps with making sense of it later.

[Note to landlords - Hurricanes Homeless in RL & SL??]

21 hours ago, GraceAlexis said:

I took just as much heat with my comment I made on it so kinda hurt that you then just attacked me and my family

Grace, that wasn't an attack.

It sounds like your emotions are understandably frazzled right now and you just want SL to stay the same while things go crazy around you. You want a place you consider a refuge from RL to be there. It wasn't, and the upset you're feeling about the RL stress and danger is getting tangled up in this.

Is that close to what's going on inside you?

If it is, may I suggest another way to look at this? What in the situation can you actually influence or control? If you (or your friend/s) own land, you have control over it and don't have to worry about landlords. (Other people being understandably difficult to control because they have their own needs of course.) That might make sense for you and/or your friends in the future.

You had control over what you did when you discovered what had happened. You said that the property manager was there immediately. How did that conversation go? Did the property manager give you the option of paying for your friend and getting access back? The furniture and all of that can be put back when its owner returns.

Which leads into the thing I think you most need to keep in mind right now - you'll get your refuge back. It might be different, but it's really about friendships not prims, right?

Those are some things which you actually have control over. IMO they're more likely to be better solutions to this time when so much is out of your control.

Sending good thoughts to you and all who are living through this.

[Help me on how to start learning?]

Rolig is spot on with learning prim-building basics. Sometimes a prim or two is the best solution to a problem and the more familiar you are with them, the better chance you have of spotting it. Prims are also great for blocking out furniture designs in world, which can help you get relative proportions right the first time, which means less fussing about re-doing UVs in Blender.

Seeing how other people solve problems has been very helpful to me, so things like building classes have been good. Even if I'm not all that interested in the end product, there's often a wee gem of knowledge or advice along the way which helps me figure something else out. (Add Helping Haven to the two Rolig mentioned, btw. Shout out to MT Mimulus who does great scripting courses there.)

Even more helpful has been working with FP mesh other people have made. Thank you L$60 Weekend deals for making that affordable. There are so many steps in going start to finish with something like animated original-mesh furniture that it helped me to be able to learn the different components separately. A lot of the lessons have been what not to do or what doesn't work with the textures I want to use. Plenty of frustrations along the way, but ultimately easier and less time spent than adding those lessons into the middle of scaling Blender's Himalayan learning curve.

Studying other people's work has also been invaluable in helping me figure out what's possible and therefore worth searching out an answer for.

As for learning Blender, for me it was a matter of trying out dozens of different tutorials until I found a teacher (BornCG on youtube) whose approach worked for me and the right projects to work on, ones that were simple enough in the right ways for me to be able to finish. Living with the objects in SL helps me figure out what I can do better so I really recommend starting with simple things. Trying to take on too much too soon can lead to using poor practices, like using certain 'cheats' to lower LI but requiring users to up their graphics settings to see the items.

That's my wee story. I hope something in it is useful to you or others who read it.

 

[Second Life questionnaire]

Scripting library makes sense, @Rhonda Huntress, especially if it was set up to show how the different bits work together. That's the part I struggle with most. It didn't occur to me at all while reading your synopsis of the questions, but I'm quite happy to accept it as an addition to my reply.

The library of school papers has potential. Imagine a bright spark confidently handing in one he found on Gor for anthropology class.

[Heads Up - You might want to check your sims after the downtime.]

Is this an estate thing? Our mainland sim is fine. The bulk of the LI is probably prims though, so that might be another difference. Right now I think I'll be glad Morgan never got around to learning Blender.

[Second Life questionnaire]

17 hours ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

It is ...odd.  It starts of with generic things. Name, age, sex, marital status, education, email (lol, as if) How long have you been in SL, how often do you log in, yada-yada ...

Only missing birthday and mother's maiden name for basic identity theft....

But this couldn't be a scam, no.

Would explain the cluelessness about SL though.

Quote

What are your suggestions for promoting effective libraries’ services on Second life? For Second Life:

And that's it.  If you have any ideas about how to run a library in SL he would probably be interested to hear them.

SL is very good for some things. SL is really poor for others. It's good for visual, weak for complicated texts. Someone really clever and with too much time on their hands might make a 3d portal to access websites for the text, but a decent website already has a useful hypertext interface which is far more scalable.

IMO it's better suited to largely visual endeavours like museums. Given the struggles SL museums have faced to get much of an audience or financial support though, how much worse would it be for a library? Putting the artworks/books/teaching materials in settings which aren't overtly educational seems to reach a wider audience.