Bitsy Buccaneer

Tagging onto Pamela's post here because I agree with it and there's something I want to throw in to the conversation. Like her, I don't accept the either/or mindset. Part of this is because of the special nature of virtual worlds. If a customer modifies a creation, even perhaps going so far as to make obvious changes to textures, the original art is not lost. It might have become something else in that specific iteration, but the original art probably still exists in several other places in SL. (Like the customer's inventory if it's copy. :matte-motes-smile:) So a creator can pour her heart and soul into a piece and then let it out into the world without her artistry being compromised. It's not like RL where there is only one original. Mod make sense both artistically and business-wise, for others and for one's self. It isn't either/or.

The bullet point heading is Anti-Competitive and Abusive Behaviour. The practice is abusing the marketplace system as it stands (using it for advertising whilst encouraging customers to shop in a way which means the seller doesn't pay LL the commission). Demanding that a commission be charged in-world as well seems a very strange solution to what is essentially one person's objection to the way the bullet points are titled.

HarrisonMcKenzie wrote: And as far as I can tell, the entire kid clothing market also sells with no-mod, so the argument that my business will hurt if someone else sells with those permissions isn't a valid one. Pussycat is telling you that the ENTIRE kids' clothing market lost her alt as a customer because something she needed wasn't available. Not just you, or your friend, or someone else; the entire market. This will be invisible to you and the rest of the kids' clothing market because it's not like she (and others in a similar-ish situation) would have bought lots of things from you and stopped. They never would have bought much in the first place, if anything. The only way you guys would know is if she told you and you actually listened to what she was saying. She's told you now, btw. Did you listen? Go back and reread the last line of Penny's reply to you above: "I hope, then, that I've been able to illustrate that just because you did not think of a situation where mod perms add to the product does not mean such a situation does not exist." The examples she gave you of her many uses for mod rights in clothing are ILLUSTRATIONS of the principle. Pussycat gave yet another example, another illustration of how a market dominated by no-mod makes it very hard to impossible for customers and potential customers to do something slightly different. I will add in a third consideration: How you see your creations on your computer with your graphics card is not neccessarily how I will see them on mine. And that's before we get into things like graphics settings, shadows and windlight. These are all things which tend to change. People get new computers, often better but sometimes less like a switch to a laptop for pratical reasons. SL adds new shiny.... like shadows and windlight. Maybe in a few years materials will be so prevalent anything without it looks flat, we've seen that sort of thing happen with changes before. Moddable items can be adapted to the changing tech and new expectations. Non-mods will start to look old and tired. And one more, since you want illustrations of the principle which are very specific to your particular market. Ever set your mesh t-shirt to full bright or glow because it looks really cool at midnight settings and it entertains you to go around SL for a while that way? You can't if it's no-mod. The kid in me loves doing daft things like that, for all that my av is ostensibly an adult. Finding out that the kids' clothing market will restrict my creativity in that way means I won't be starting a kid avatar. Every winter I find my work shifting towards fun, silly and colourful things. This winter's project is something for the young at heart and I had thought a kid avatar might be fun, something new and also foster that. Now I'm thinking why take on the limitations of that market when I can stay a grown-up av and have more fun? Basically you guys have lost another not-yet customer. But hey sincere thanks for the warning, better to find out now before I bought the body. (It wouldn't have occurred to me to check the entire market to see if I could get mod clothes for it. I would have just kept looking, thinking it had to be out there somewhere.) Are you starting to understand the principle yet? Just because you haven't thought of uses or reasons for mod doesn't mean they don't exist.

Adding this in to the database.... I have just discovered a wee icon at the top of my computer screen (it looks sort of like a stylised eye, or maybe not but I can't think of a better way to describe it). Clicking on it gives me the option to use either NVIDIA web driver or OS X native graphics driver. The tick is next to NVIDIA web driver, so it seems I did something which somehow switched that back and that might be why things are working so much better for me. Don't dare change it lest I bork something. At some point in my earlier search for a solution, I apparently managed to install the NVIDIA Driver Manager (it appeared in my System Preferences). That is my best and only guess as to what the wee icon is about. Don't really understand all of this (I like using Macs because generally they just work and don't require all of this mucking about and it wouldn't if it weren't for blasted SL grump), so I will just leave this here as something for others to try if they are stuck to. Good luck everyone. Will sign up to test Kokua in the New Year, Gavin.

But I was replying to your attack on Penny. So if it was wrong for me to talk about you, then it was wrong for you to talk about Penny. Likewise it is also wrong for you to attack me as you've just done. Please be careful how you read my tone and that of others. It seems to me that you are ascribing emotions to us which aren't there. Certainly you are with me. Since you've read every word of Penny's blog, you must understand how strange it is to write something like "Penny thinks I should make it copy/mod so users can make it 20 stories tall if they want to!!" Can you at last chuckle at the irony there? Please? If nothing else, it would help you understand me. As for the topic at hand, I prefer copy/mod for many of the reasons already cited. I also brought up this in my reply on the top of page 3: "Mod lets each of us not only adjust things to suit our personal tastes, individual uses, graphics cards, graphics settings and preferred windlight, but to adapt when any of those change..... Bottom line - how you see your creations on your computer is not how I see them on mine. Your decisions might be perfect for you, but that doesn't mean they will be perfect for everyone else." SL is not a static environment. Changes that they make (like adding in the advanced lighting, shadows and materials), new computers, all of that affects the way things look. We are not all seeing the same things the same way. That is part of SL. What was cutting edge, best practice two years ago may be (partially) outdated today. That is also part of SL. Mod lets us adapt. I also mentioned the shared creativity which I believe is the greatest strength of SL. Someone makes textures, someone makes prims/sculpts/mesh, someone makes animations, someone scripts, someone else combines these pieces to make something which fits their own vision, tastes and needs and hopefully works for others as well. That is pretty amazing to be able to do. I don't feel the need to mod everything, but I am so grateful for every single piece of furniture or clothing I've modded along the years because they got me started in thinking about adapting and building. Even the ones where I ballsed it up and learned from my mistakes. Make that especially the ones where I ballsed it up because those are the ones I learned the most from. :matte-motes-smile: No one person is ever going to be able to make something which suits the needs, tastes and preferences of everyone else. When something is moddable, it lets more avatars enjoy it (like swapping out sits for ones more appropriate to a child or furry avatar say). I and many others believe that this is a very good thing a great deal of the time. Like many others, I completely acknowledge that there are times when no copy and/or no mod is appropriate. My 2nd to last hunt gift could be used as both decor/art and RP items. I asked RPers for guidance on things like perms and it was agreed that certain of the items needed to be no copy. So that's what they were. Hopefully I made the best choice for the most people. If it wasn't for some, I don't mind re-doing perms. I think you have been reading in terms of a particular, much treasured project, and perhaps one that you have much of your sense of self wrapped up in, while the rest of us are writing more generally or about our own experiences and preferences. Perhaps your treasured project is indeed something which is most appropriate as no copy/no mod, but it really isn't fair to the rest of us to read our posts as if they were about your particular project. We aren't writing about this project. We couldn't be until you brought it up and even now, I don't think any of us know enough to say much.Think about it this way, if most of the grid was no copy/no mod, then the focus of your "wonderful awesome plans" (to use your words) would be that bit less unique, wonderful and awesome, right? That's not what you want for your project, is it?

entity0x wrote: Penny Patton wrote: Agreed. If someone wishes to sell no-mod that is their business. That said, if that is how they choose to run their business, I'll be taking my business elsewhere. However, it is my belief that many people choose to release no-mod due to some fundamental misunderstandings with regards to how SL works (see anyone who claims they only release no-mod to protect their content) or due to a belief that it will somehow negatively affect their salesand that's why I think this is a topic worth having a discussion about. Penny thinks I should make it copy/mod so users can make it 20 stories tall if they want to!! And breathe. So you haven't seen Penny going on about the benefits of scaling down to get more out of a smaller parcel? She's been writing about it for years. The irony of your throwing such hyperbole is amusing, but it does indicate you don't understand what she's on about at all. It might help if you read her writings more carefully and thoroughly. They might not change the way you create, but you've just spent a lot of time and energy on ranting here against something you seem to be taking far too personally and understanding her intentions would have saved you from that. Time and energy which could have been better spent attending to the RL life things you mentioned or otherwise getting closer to getting back into creating. There are reasons why some creations are best made no copy or no mod, like game items, combat systems and such. If your desire is to position your works in the realm of fine art rather than consumer goods, then perhaps it does make sense to make them no copy, no mod. What you should take from this thread and Penny's blog is that you will limit your market in doing so. But from what I think I understand of your project, you WANT to limit your market. Right? So it's really not fair to Penny or yourself or anyone in this thread to react as if it somehow threatens your planned awesomeness.

Are you trolling us or do you really believe all that? And how did you get from people wanting the option to mod to everyone throwing away your precious textures?

entity0x wrote: I agree with the practical aspects of modification and copy. I just think it very strange that someone would want to go to great lengths to change, hobble or rebuild a product they purchased because thats why they got it in the first place. You don't actually know why someone got something in the first place. I repurpose things all the time. It's fun and suits my style of creativity. Being able to do so is why I am still in SL. I know I am not unique in this, modding is important to a lot of us. Think about it, modding is important enough in virtual worlds and games (and real life) that people came up for a word to describe it. There's also the frequent "I like most of this, but it would be perfect if only..." scenario. Mod lets each of us not only adjust things to suit our personal tastes, individual uses, graphics cards, graphics settings and preferred windlight, but to adapt when any of those change. Has your SL been static? Are you still doing the same things you were when you first joined? Are you still using the same computer? :matte-motes-smile: Do you expect to be for the rest of your time here? Bottom line - how you see your creations on your computer is not how I see them on mine. Your decisions might be perfect for you, but that doesn't mean they will be perfect for everyone else. Shared creativity is the absolute strength of SL. No mod limits it to playing mix and match with elements, but just look at how invested many SL shoppers are about this even if they never think about creating something from scratch. Individualising things matters. Modding prim & sculpt builds, retexturing them, playing with prims and sculpts, and then texturing purchased full perm mesh were all vital steps on my road to creating original mesh. They got me thinking about creating. The person who wants to mod your no-mod table might be on a similar path. Is your artistic vision so precious you won't allow them that?

NVIDIA + Sierra + SL = [expletive deleted]. Welcome to the club of those who bought their Macs at the wrong time. :matte-motes-angry: Plus lots of people are having lots of problems since the beginning of the month, like mesh not rezzing. I suspect that may have something to do with increased traffic for Christmas shopping and lots of frequent TPing by lots of avs for Advent calendars. Others tell me that can't be it of course. Whatever is going on there, SL is having extra problems of late. Gavin Hird explains the NVIDIA + Sierra + SL problem in the thread Pamela linked to. He suggested the Open Sim version of his Kokua viewer (link in that thread) and it is much more stable for me. Cool Viewer is also working for me at the moment. I keep graphics minimised in general, and unticked various things in the graphics section of Preferences. When I need more graphics capability for some reason, I take that specific up and don't TP until I've lowered it again I also pay attention to when I've been using graphics intense software like GIMP or Blender or watching a lot of telly online and reboot before I go into SL. The situation has gone from being a nightmare "do I buy a new computer (really don't need one cause my 4 year old Mac is still going strong aside from SL), do I leave SL, arrgggh" to a nuisance, at least until I get my butt in gear with creating again. Bouncing between GIMP, Blender and SL is a real pain given the GPU issues. And we do need to turn shadows back on now and again to see how it's going to look to other people. Try Open Sim Kokua or Cool Viewer and if mesh isn't rezzing, TP out and back in again cause SL is a bit borked at the moment anyway.

"Classic" avs aren't on their way out by any means, though some users will insist they are or should be. Seems like there will always be people who look down on others for not being up on the latest trend and mesh bodies are the trend this year. Before that, it was mesh boobs and butts, which have been superceded by the full bodies. The new avatar skeleton rigging has just gone live this week (Bento) so it will be next year's shiny. All of that change makes for a confusing Marketplace. Mesh bodies have utterly fragmented the market so every clothing, shoe or "skin" purchase requires figuring out if it will even work for you. It's added layers of vocabulary (and not necessarily with concensus) to indicate what is what. This is relatively recent, so older Marketplace listings and sales vendor textures don't reflect the new vocabulary. Before mesh bodies and appliers, a skin was a skin was a skin. Now you need skin appliers for any and all mesh body parts, including a mesh head. Unless of course you're using your av's classic head, in which case you need a co-ordinating skin.... Omega is the closest thing we have to a universal applier system. (Appliers put textures (for skin, clothing and tattoos) on mesh bodies.) Not all mesh bodies work with Omega though. Some bodies have a lot of support from skin and clothing creators, some don't. Some creators don't create for classic avs anymore. Many still do. It is incredibly confusing so don't feel like you have to rush into anything. There are a couple of big hunts, dozens of Advent calendars (the Fab Free blog has a list) and piles of Christmas gifts out at the moment, so now is an excellent time to experiment for free or inexpensive before making any mesh body/classic av investment decisions.

Hi Gavin, I'd be happy to do what I can to test. Will have more time in a couple of weeks though. Should I sign up via the kokua site?

It's December, so it's pre-Christmas and Advent and some avs are teleporting around like mad. That has to add to the server demands. A few years ago, LL did something with groups and the next Advent the group server borked. Because groups were soooooo slow (or impossible) to add, there were complaints in chat from those who were overdoing it with dropping and adding groups as they went along collecting their piles of goodies. It seems likely the two went together. Maybe the changes they made to increase LI didn't take the madness that is December into account. My problems with slow rezzing were worse at the weekend when traffic was higher, better during quiet parts of Monday. I'm in the UK.

The trick that lets you change the wording is called Photoshop. (Or GIMP or any photoimagining software with a Text function.) Sounds like your friend's account has been hacked (after long absence) and someone is trying to scam the friends list. Probably best to AR your friend and say that you think the account has been hacked. It will probably feel weird, but it's better than letting someone cause trouble in your friend's name.

You're not listening to anything anyone here is saying, Suki.

Just avoid the hubs then. You won't be missing much. Some thoughts: Changing rooms tend to be quieter (often empty) than sandboxes. Use search to find one you like. Places like Builders Brewery have classes on how to build in SL. (I think Helping Haven is another.) Go to a basic level class and follow along. When you have questions, ask. The teachers are there to help after all. :matte-motes-smile: Before the class starts, there will be students sitting around waiting. Say hello to one or two and compliment something in their appearance or profile or ask a question. Do you see how a controlled environment like that will be easier to manage than the free for all of a Hub? Other places have classes on other subjects too, like the Mieville community has classes on different bits of Victorian life. I know of them through the Historical Hunts group and they are very warm, welcoming and accepting. If you like playing an animal, check out some of the Tinies communities like Raglan Shire. Or maybe you could RP a stray animal like a dog, cat or fox that wanders around family RP neighbourhoods. It wouldn't be a big RP thing, just a small thing for people to RP around. Have you discovered MM boards (Midnight Mania) yet? Creators set them out in their shops with a target and a gift. If a certain number of people hit the board before SL midnight, everyone wins the prize. There are groups dedicated to letting others know about these boards and similar sorts of things. You could try joining one or two (might take a while to find a good group) and, when you were ready, posting about the boards. It probably sounds confusing now, but you would quickly make sense of it all once you saw it in action. It would be a daily activity for SL plus give you some low pressure speaking practice. Those are just a few ideas that came to mind from my time here. There are ways for you to use SL, it's really just a matter of finding your niche.

Some ideas: Wear platform shoes. Use the hover slider to raise yourself up a bit and hope no one notices that your feet don't touch the floor. Hang out with sensibly sized avatars cause maxed out sliders tend to make for distorted and strange looking avs. The gotta be taller than all the other men arms race has a lot to answer for. Scale your environment down and adjust your camera angles. Try rezzing the body (make sure you have a copy in inventory in case you muck it up) and see if you can make it relatively taller that way. You might be able to if the creator made the body (not just the shape) modifiable. If the creator did, you're in luck. But there's no way anyone else can do it for you without getting into serious IP violations because it would involve passing the mesh body back and forth. There's no way anyone can alter your shape past the slider max. Think about it. The sliders only go so far.

Try again today. Lag tends to be worse on Saturday and Sunday, especially Sunday. I couldn't manage all three leaps when I made my building alt (additional account specifically for building projects), so I just left her there in frustration. Tried again a month later and I did it on the second go. I can't rule out quirks of the internet on my end, but I do know there were several avatars around when I was first trying and no one when I finally succeeded. And since you posted on Sunday, which tends to be the worst day for lag in SL, you may well have better luck at a quieter time. Third party viewers (Firestorm, Kokua, Singularity, etc) have other options like double click to teleport and over ride constraints on flying. SL maintains a directory of third party viewers; you can find it through a web search. Like the name suggests, they are viewers made by others for use in SL. Hopefully there's a way in the tutorial area (read the signs, go backwards and reread those signs) to bypass it as well. Once you leave you can't go back though, so short of making yet another new account I can't check for you. You can always bail out of the tutorial, carry on and ask questions in the forum or inworld. The rest of the tutorial doesn't teach much, though it does have some lovely aquariums. If you can try again when the majority of Americans are likely to be asleep or elsewhere though, you might get through with a minimum of fuss and something approximating a sense of achievement. :matte-motes-smile: (note to oldbies: This isn't jumping up like you would to get over a fence or up oversized stairs. It's using forward and up keys at the same time to leap over three large gaps and having to start over if you don't get the timing and positioning right, the kind of thing that's common in console games and rare in SL.)

Besides creating the item, you also have to worry about rigging (getting it to move well with an av) and fit. The fit part of it is rather complicated with all of the different mesh bodies in addition to the classic av. I think those are expected to be fitmesh as well now. (There will be info on fitmesh elsewhere. It's an attempt to make worn mesh sort of size adjustable.) The clothing market has become fragmented and awkward. You don't have to try to create for all of that of course, but it does help to understand it somewhat. Have you looked into purchasing texturable full perm mesh clothing? Lots on the marketplace, some dreadful, some excellent, most in between. Unfortunately many don't have demos and, unless the DAE files are available to purchase as well, you don't have control over UV layout. But if you can find ones which suit your preferences, they can be a useful way to get a start, especially for those whose skills are in texturing. Unrigged mesh can be resized manually, like prims. (Rigged can't, thus the need for either fitmesh or set sizes. Probably should have worked that into the first paragraph.) Things like jewellery and hats rarely need to be rigged so there are fewer things to worry about when making your own. And fewer things to worry about can be very helpful when learning all of this. :matte-motes-smile:

I like the idea. It would make it easier (for me at least) to remember to look in on a store to see what's new or go back to explore something when there's more time. I would have used this a lot when I was buying full perm mesh for projects.

Experimenting with some of the settings helped greatly during my brief adventure with FS. I think the ones which may have helped most might have been under View in Move & View in preferences, like Transition Time and Smoothing. It was trial and error and guesswork, so I might have that completely wrong, but the FS default settings were a nightmare for my computer and changing things helped.

agentronin wrote: I do not know how to get rid of elements of that avatar I no longer need, such as its skin. Skin, shape, eyes and hair base all influence the head and are very much used and needed with mesh bodies. Newer mesh bodies tend to be something called fitmesh, which means they change based on the underlying SHAPE. So that shape can really change how a fitmesh body looks. The mesh body demo may come with an example shape to use. But you can also use any other shape, including one you make from scratch, one someone else made, or an existing one you've modified through the appearance sliders. This has all become immensely complicated and overall the people of SL seem to be in the process of further complicating it exponentially. Hopefully in time we will also get better at helping new residents learn how to navigate their way through it all. If it feels overwhelming, don't worry about it. Take each step when you're ready and if you want to. Getting a feel for the appearance sliders is time well spent IMO, whether you decide to invest in a mesh body or not. You can spend as much or as little time on it as you fancy, but it will help you understand more about how all of this works.

Have you looked at +elua+?

Thanks Gavin. The open sim Kokua test viewer was mostly stable this morning. A couple of glitches but no crashes, even in two mesh heavy builds that usually take me down. :matte-motes-smile: I really hope people are slow to increase their LI usage. More polys on sims will just make things harder for those of us who bought our Macs at the wrong time. Going to enjoy the small relief for now and worry about how compromised visuals will affect creating later. Thanks again, you're a star.

LolitaFrance Anthony wrote: I just changed back to using my human avatar, after ... several years. .... I guess there's no work-around for the issue. I'll just permanently use my tiny avatar, with an Avatar Rendering Complexity of 25529. I refuse to look like a gummy bear in the shape of a person to everybody around me, while I look normal to myself. The part in bold is the entirety of your problem. You are wearing hair and shoes which are several years old. Standards for those in particular have changed a great deal in recent years. Update them to better choices and your complexity will plummet. System clothing doesn't add much, if anything, to the ARC. Flexi skirts do. Jewellery, especially the old prim-heavy ones, can be outrageous in their rendering cost. The work around is just learning how the costs work and making better choices in what you wear. If you can't be parted from that particular hairstyle or anything else, lower your complexity in other things till you find a balance which suits you.And it's not a big deal if others can't see you in all your glory. Those of us who tend to keep our settings low while we shop or travel around probably have our minds on other things.

Thanks for how much effort you're putting into this Gavin. It's much appreciated. Is the Open Sim viewer you linked to the one at the top of the page, where it says Looking for the latest version? I've been trying that one out. Will try the driver from your other link as soon as I feel up to it. Thanks for the links. The rest of this is for anyone who might find it helpful and in case someone from SL peeks in. Do they not realise how serious this can be? Or is it just not as sexy as Sansar and increasing LI? Cool Viewer is generally the most likely to be stable for me at present, or at least with what I was attempting to do tonight. It still crashes ridiculously often and sometimes it can be a game of trying out a few viewers to see which one will play ball with the particular circumstances. Not which one will work best but which one will let me be in that part of SL at all. I found instructions to make a wee app to sit on my desktop to clear my GPU cache before logging in. It helps, but using it hasn't yet become habitualised as part of logging in to SL. So if I've been doing something graphically intense and forget to clear the cache before starting up SL, the GPU (I guess) crashes and forces a reboot. As in the computer restarts itself. As in programmes shut down without saving. That's an impossible situation for working with GIMP and Blender to create content. Even with the whole cache-clearing routine, going between GIMP and SL or Blender and SL to see how something looks inworld is too much for it. If I can't get a driver to work, I don't know what I'm going to do.