WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

I am looking at meshes and struggling with the piss-poor colour scheme of Viewer 2: something which has been criticised continuously since February. I have taken the trouble to explain exactly why this grey on grey colour scheme is a stupid choice, to no avail. And now you want me to struggle with it to even see meshes? My opinion of Linden Labs choice in this matter, were I to express it to the full extent of my vocabulary,, would be vituperative, obscene, scatological, and calling into question the marital status and species of your ancestors, unto the seventh generation. I wouldn't so much breach the TOS as carpet-bomb it with the 8th USAAF. I don't need anything I've seen on the test grid. Nothing I've seen is worth the eye-strain and frustration. Despite all the hype, you still haven't managed to sort out the most fundamental problems of your product. You are incompetent.

Jack, you keep making this same damn silly mistake with your blog posts. The layout of comments in the blogs is horrible for following a conversation. Somebody mentions a problem, and the reply turns up much later, with the only in-page link being from the reply to the original comment. The only way to read a conversation within the comments is to work backwards from the dangling ends Why can't you get your finger out and set things up so that these comments are either in the forums, as sometimes happens, or the blog comments system has the same layout as the forum comments. It's this sort of inept handling of comments (this instance is still something fairly simple) which makes me wonder if, despite all your claims, you actually read any of them. Or are you just too stubborn to ask anyone how to make it easier?

I sympathise. I rebuilt my 'puter a month or so back, and it does make a huge difference. But a lot of details have changed in the last five years, and I might as well have bought a new machine. Though I got a good deal on motherboard/video in a sale. But if you're going to report error messages, tell folk the OS you're using.

I'm no expert in what's going on, but I've seen plenty of news stories. There are alternative grids. There are ways of an organisation running their own physical servers, and of users sim-crossing in and out of these local grids. There have been tests with huge numbers of users on one sim. Linden Lab can claim reliability, and that is worth something. Will some of the alternatives last? But a sudden CEO change, closing down recent acquisitions, cutting staff, and hiking prices: a guy can't help but wonder. And I've seen places I know cutting back on the number of regions they use. Personally, I can stick with SL without spending a lot of money. It's not an option open to the educator business. As long as Linden Lab stay in business, I can meet friends here. But the stuff yoiu guys do is different.

This looks very close to a relabelling of the Teen Grid, with a few changes to the admin, under the hood. I suspect there have always been problems over the differences between strict age divisions and the dates of the school year, and it doesn't seem as though these will go away, but it looks to be a good answer. Opening up the possibility of controlled access by Main Grid users, under control of the responsible organisations, certainly adds to the potential benefits.

I can foresee a problem here. I've commented before on the problems I have with the colour scheme. For me, it's a huge barrier to using the V2 series. I've seen recommendations for third-party reworks of the skinning, using replacement version-specific XML files. Maybe I can find something which gets me past the colour barrier, but will I be able to use it in the next version? And this incremental release pattern needs something more than version-specific change logs. If you've provided a stable solution to the colour barrier, wonderful. But if you introduced it already, where did it get mentioned? I'm afraid there are times when I think LL's problems (retention of new users for one) have a common factor of lousy documentation. And for those of us willing to help in-world, you really need to think hard about how you communicate the current "stable" release features. These tweaks to the Beta don't matter to the new sign-up, but when you change the default download, make sure we can all find where to look for explanations.

I would recommend http://www.renderosity.com/ as a place to get a start with the creation and texturing of meshes. There are a lot of software-specific forums. You have to register, but it's free.

I'm not so pessimistic about importing "stolen" content. A lot of the mesh models I know of are very complicated. They're not going to work so well, especially if Linden Lab put a limit on the vertice count. There's also a certain fuzziness about the status of some items. If you want a model you can use without legal hassles, you have to pay a significant amount of money for it. There's cheap stuff, mostly for Poser, which you can use and make renders with. And there is free stuff, with some of the same problems of understanding limits on use which exist in SL over items that are copy/modify/transfer. No doubt lawyers will be able to argue, at great expense, whether it is lawful to import a model into SL so as to use the Viewer as a render engine. But, having tried to import items in 3DS format to Poser, I've found it to be a sometimes quite complicated process. This is a lot harder than just using a copybot to steal something in-world.

4096 vertices is a 64x64 sculpt-map. Prims vary a lot, depending on graphics detail settings. A rough guess is that a sphere can be a couple of orders of magnitude less, and looks very crude at that setting. I know Viewer 2 seems to install with a bias favouring frame rate over detail, without any apparent attempt to explain that the ugly look can be changed.

I've been working with mesh objects for years, and some meshes are insanely complicated for real-time rendering. (At least the bits for upgrading my PC arrived today.) Second life is not Poser. For me, the big problem with Sculpties has been texture-mapping. A Sculpty has a fixed UV map (the relation between mesh vertices and the texture), which means that if vertices are unevenly spaced in 3D space, the texture map suffers from awkward stretching. One of the features of a mesh is that it can be built with evenly-spaced vertices, and the UV mapping can simplify the texturing. Do meshes need to have vastly more vertices than a Sculpty? That's how you get the huge files: tens of thousands of vertices, positions defined to 6 or 7 significant figures. And for some purposes, a Prim is still the best answer. The claws on my feet are prims, defined by a couple of dozen numbers. Send them to my 'puter as a mesh, and you'd use far more numbers. Is the bottleneck data transmission or rendering? Interesting times...

Have you actually made a payment? I think that's what triggers the on-file status, as it means that LL can actually go through the payment process which checks the details you gave are valid.

Sorry, the timing of the L$ account merger and the mid-June blip in the Lindex makes your explanation feel like too much of a handwave for me. OK, I know I altered my buying pattern, but it wasn't the sort of sudden change needed to create the blip, not with hundreds of thousands of active Residents. And that's my problem: you use a slow-acting change to explain away something that looks remarkably sudden. You did a good job of keeping the exchange rate stable, but your explanation feels dumb.

There's a wearable helicopter available in-world as well as on XStreet. https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1538706 It's quite easy to fly. There looks to be some weird stuff out there.

Go to NCI Kuula and look at the maps there (behind the Freebies display) It is a bit out of date: some changes around the Blake Sea, and the continent with the Linden Homes, seem to be missing.

That web-link isn't working any more.

It's not just a tiny 0.01 cube. It could be 10.0x10.0x0.01, and you'd be unable to either shrink or stretch it. There are a few tricks you can pull, depending on the prim which is limiting you. If I recall right, Path Cut can let you have a visible 0.01, while the actual prim dimension is 0.02--it's the same little trick as for a hinged door, hiding half the door so that the centre of rotation is at the visible edge. I've seen some older, complicated, models which could now be done as sculpties, and which could have had some of the complexity done with a transparency map. NCI (in the Kuula region) runs a regular class on jewelery-making, which covers methods of using tiny prims. This limit is why some old models are ridiculously huge, compared to an avatar, and maybe part of the reason why some people have such tall avatars.

I agree with this. The NCI classes are a good starting point, and they can help even when you've already done some building, making connections that you maybe haven't noticed. Plus the advantage of a live tutor guiding hands-on building exercises. Pretty well all you have to do to find NCI is do a Map Search for Kuula. Look on the west side of the read, north of the bridge, and there are usually some folk there. They also run many events, competitive and social. Since you've been on SL for more than 90 days, you won't qualify as a newcomer. And the occasional Scrabble games are pretty intense. Maybe there are things you can contribute to, as well as what you want to learn. I shall be at the TGIF dance today, so check the Schedule board (1920s/1930s music, if that matters.)