Innula Zenovka

I've now read the exchange of messages, and the original post, and it's truely bizarre. There's nothing you wrote that any reasonable person could construe as encouraging people to abuse customer support, unless it's considered an abuse of the support facility (as opposed to the staff) to encourage people to ask questions of customer support they could get answered elsewhere. But, while I can fully understand why Customer Support staff everywhere wish their customers would learn to consult the manual before asking about stuff that's answered there, the fact is, customers don't, and that's what you have first line customer support for. LL, as far as I can see, has taken the view that it's best to have residents acting, in effect, as first line customer support where possible, trying to filter out stuff that can easily be resolved and thus leaving LL's support staff more free to deal with things only they can help with, which is sensible enough, but that does depend on resident helpers' goodwill. To my mind, the high-handed attitude displayed in the messages to you that you reproduce on your blog is an abuse of that goodwill.

I've now read the exchange of messages, and the original post, and it's truely bizarre. There's nothing you wrote that any reasonable person could construe as encouraging people to abuse customer support, unless it's considered an abuse of the support facility (as opposed to the staff) to encourage people to ask questions of customer support they could get answered elsewhere. But, while I can fully understand why Customer Support staff everywhere wish their customers would learn to consult the manual before asking about stuff that's answered there, the fact is, customers don't, and that's what you have first line customer support for. LL, as far as I can see, has taken the view that it's best to have residents acting, in effect, as first line customer support where possible, trying to filter out stuff that can easily be resolved and thus leaving LL's support staff more free to deal with things only they can help with, which is sensible enough, but that does depend on resident helpers' goodwill. To my mind, the high-handed attitude displayed in the messages to you that you reproduce on your blog is an abuse of that goodwill.

I think it's the servers, too. I get this problem now and again, and I can always normally fix it simply by tping to another sim and saving/uploading stuff there. Usually when I tp back it's fixed back home, too. I'm not sure if tping away and coming back fixes it, or if it's just it's righted itself in the meantime. Certainly whenever it's been more persistent on my home sim, either restarting the sim or logging out, rebooting my cable modem and logging back in has invariably fixed it.

You need a pose stand, certainly, and a lot of time and patience (I spent ages tweaking my lashes till I got them looking anything near what I wanted). I would particularly recommend using CONTROL+0 to zoom in more closely than you can otherwise do with the camera. And if you use that, you have to use CONTROL+9 to reset the zoom to default -- neither the Escape key nor relogging will do it. ETA -- there's nothing to stop you using both prim lashes AND a matching lash tattoo AND a matching eyeliner tattoo, of course, as suggested here. That has the advantage that it helps mask some of the gaps you may otherwise notice between the eyelash and the avatar (I see she also suggests wearing two pairs of lashes, which I might experiment with).

Rodvik posts here, too, of course, now and again. I think it's just SLU is a large and active forum where many established content creators and landowners post, not least because people can speak more freely there than -- for obvious reasons -- they can do here, sometimes. Also, it's been suggested that his posts in the official blog sometimes get considerably more attention at SLU (which mirrors them) than do they here.

Glad we were able to solve the problem. Use the Volume Detect work-round instead of the phantom child script you've got, not in addition to it. If you want to reverse the effects, I think -- from memory -- that turning the whole linkset phantom using the edit tools and and turning it back to non-phantom would remove all the effects of my little script (I know it unphantoms stuff if you do that, which is why I stress it's no use if you want to switch between phantom and non-phantom child prims, and I assume -- though I've not tested it -- that it also removes any lingering strangeness about collision events, if that's an issue). If you wanted to be sure, I guess you could unlink the prim in question, use a revised version of my script to set llVolumeDetect(FALSE); and then relink it.

He certainly posts at SLU now and again, as do Soft and Oz sometimes.

It's because the llGetPrimitiveParams/llGetLinkPrimitiveParams calls can't read the sculptmap's uuid unless the object is full perms to the owner. The phantom child workround I use when sculpties are involved -- which doesn't work if you need to switch between phantom and solid, and causes general strangeness if any scripts in the same object use collision events, but is otherwise perfecty reliable -- is simply to drop this into the prim I wish to phantom before I link it up as a child. As I said, it shouldn't be used if you want to switch between phantom and solid, but otherwise it's ok. default{ state_entry() { llVolumeDetect(TRUE); llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName()); }}

A note to anyone from LL who may be reading this thread. The Scripting Tips forum is an invaluable resource to scripters. Void is not only a wonderful scripter who is amazingly generous with her time and expertise, helping the rest of us; she's also pretty much the reason that Scripting Tips has survived these last couple of years. Many of the Scripting Tips regulars moved over to SLU when the old Residents Answers closed, and the only reason we kept on returning to the official forums, at least to talk about scripting, is that Void made it very clear she was staying on here and going to do her best to make it work. Which she has done, brilliantly. If Void goes elsewhere, I am certain that most scripters will follow her -- she's taught many of us much of what we know, after all, and we want to continue learning from her and discussing things with her -- and that will be a pretty severe blow to what is still -- and largely because of Void -- a great resource.

To develop Chosen Few's line of thought, lsl functions that involve reading the uuids of textures -- surface textures or those of sculptmaps -- behave differently according to whether the textures and object are full perms or not to the owner of the object containing the script. I've been caught like this a couple of times -- things that work perfectly well for me when I'm making them don't work when I give them to my alt for testing. I'm not saying this is what's happened but what you describe certainly would happen if the script is trying unsuccessfully to read the uuids of sculptmaps that are full perms to you but not to your customer. Without seeing the script, I couldn't be sure, of course, but that's what I would suspect.

Charly Muggins wrote: I am fairly new to these forums, Pamela. Are there other places that are as informative and perhaps less tight-sphinctered regarding cultural protocols, and if so, perhaps you or someone else could direct me to them? The two main third-party forums are SCII and SLU, SLU is, I think, larger and more active than is this place, though it's not to everyone's taste, certainly. I like it there a lot, but, as Pamela suggests, fights there can get rather bruising.

The way I do this, following a hint in the wiki article on llGetAgentSize, is attach(key attached) { if(attached){ vector v = llGetAgentSize(attached); if(v.z!=1.9){ //my owner was probably already logged in before I was attached } } } The idea is that 1.9 is the default height, and, as the wiki explains, "This will be the z value if an avatar's shape has not loaded yet. It is possible but extremely rare to see a fully loaded avatar with this exact size". It works remarkably, and surprisingly, well.

It's possible to do some pretty amazing things with water reflections, though, given the right circumstances, as Zonja Capalini shows:

New LSL functions are described in the release notes for the server version in which they are introduced: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Server_Release_Notes I normally keep an eye on the Second Life Server forum, where a thread giving details of the present week's releases is pinned to the top.

Richard Lacombe wrote: I did use Genetica to create the 16 frames 4x4. The strange thing is that if I uncheck stretch textures and stretch the object, the image still stretches along with the object regardless of whether I repeat horizontally or by meter. I will need to resort to these recommendations and see what happens. I am determined to get this right... Unfortunately, llSetTextureAnim resets the texture repeats to 1x1 when it's running, no matter what repeats you've set on the prim (or by using llSetPrimitiveParams or whatever). llSetTextureAnim overrides everything and makes it 1x1 (and doesn't put reset them when it's finished, so it's sometimes necessary to switch between a static and an animated texture, if your device has an on/off switch. There are supposed to be some work-rounds for this, but I've never been able to get them to work satisfactorily and have always ended up making a texture to fit the size and shape of the item to which I want to apply the texture animation. I know you said you've made your own, but if anyone else reading this wants to convert an animated gif to a suitable .tga while the site Rolig mentions is offline, if you use Windows, there's a handy free tool by Goonta Maltz that does exactly the same thing you can dowload, the Gif to Second Life Animated Texture Programme

I don't quite understand what the problem would be with that. You rez it 1 meter above your head, or whatever, and, assuming the follow script is correctly done, it should follow you about. Since you mention it's a follower, I'm assuming it's both physical and phantom. Have you excluded the possibility that it's rezzing and then immediately falling through the floor?

Assuming you've checked it's actually hearing the message about what to rez, and that you're sure you're somewhere you can rez stuff, the most likely explanation is that you're trying to rez it more than 10 metres away from you, probably inadvertantly.

Was it Eternally Damned? That was one of the leading vamp regions back in the day, certainly, and, while I remember going to some great parties there, I know they went in for really serious RP.

As I understand it, whether an item infringes on someone's copyright is a factual question, not a legal one. That is, the court is being shown two items and being asked to decide whether one is to all intents and purposes an unauthorised copy of something someone else has made, with a couple of minor details changed -- or an original work that happens to look not unlike someone else's original work, because, after all, any one broadsword is going to look similar to any other broadsword anyway. The court might use precedents in assisting them to how to interpret the law relating to this, but ultimately the court's looking at two items and trying to decide whether one's a rip-off of the other or not. And since one of the items hasn't yet been made, it all seems a bit hypothetical. But I still think it's ultimately a pragmatic question. Nintendo has pots of money and a legal department that is, it would seem, very vigorous in protecting Nintendo's IP rights. And, for what it's worth, I would think that, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, if someone at Nintendo were to see an item and think "he's ripped off our sword" rather than "hmm.. that looks rather like our sword, but I can see it's not", then there's only going to be one practial outcome.

I guess the pragmatic answer to "can Nintendo claim copyright of the sword?" is that they can certainly claim it, and it's up to a court if they uphold the claim, should the maker decide to dispute it, that is. And Nintendo are certainly in a better financial position to make such claims in court than is any private individual. On the other hand, there's a limited number of ways to make a broadsword, I guess, and any broadsword is going to look not unlike any other one, so the important question is "is this a broadsword that looks pretty similar to the Nintendo one but not suspicously so, or is it a copy of the Nintendo one with a couple of minor bits changed?" To my mind, actually saying "this is inspired by the master's sword in Legend of Zelda" is asking for trouble, and best avoided unless it's absolutely necessary to draw attention to the fact.

Without testing it I can't be sure, but, from memory of my experiences with permission requests, I'm pretty certain that each request fires a new run_time_permissions event. If in doubt, I check first and only ask for permissions if I haven't got them. Certainly that's how PERMISSION_DEBIT works.

The problem is that you're asking, in effect, for legal advice -- which I don't think anyone here is qualified to give -- about whether an item that's not yet been made might infringe Nintendo's IP rights if you go ahead an make it. And you're asking for advice about two separate things -- one, "is the design of my sword so similar to that the original that it infringes Nintendo's copyright?" and, two, "can I use the phrase 'Legend of Zelda' in my marketing without infringing Nintendo's trademarks?". To my mind, though, those aren't the questions you should be asking at this stage. Since, if you go ahead and make this item, it'll be Nintendo who file the DMCA takedown request with LL, if one is filed, and since it'll be Nintendo with whom you'll have to fight it out in the courts if you resist their takedown application (and if they go after you for damages, of course), the question I'd be asking is "What's Nintendo's attitude to my doing this?" And I'd be asking it of Nintendo themselves. Having just read the Wikipedia article about Nintendo's attitude to protecting their IP rights, I have to say that I doubt your proposal will meet with their approval, but better to ask now, and be told, "forget about it" than not to ask and find Nintendo's legal team on your case some way down the line.

I think that when sims get restarted as part of a rolling restart, they get restarted using a snapshot taken shortly before they went offline for the update -- that's the point of the warnings about not-rezzing non-copy items. Certainly I've a few times returned to a sim that's been restarted like that and found that the last five or ten minutes' worth of building I did just before the restart has vanished. What happened, exactly, with your item? You bought it and it stopped working. Was it rezzed on the sim and it wasn't working after the restart? And what sort of item was it -- I'm just wondering if there's a specific reason you suspect it was the restart that caused the problems.

My impression, for what it's worth, is that there's still a lot of serious vampire RP, including Bloodlines, but it's mostly confined -- understandably -- to vampire and lycan sims. So most of us don't get to see much of it. I'm not into vampire stuff, particularly, except I spend too much at Avid, but my business partner makes a lot of vampire and lycan anims, so I get to talk to the customers sometimes. Certainly they seem to spend most of their time in SL doing vampire and lycan stuff on their own sims, and not really interacting that much with the rest of us, at least not as vampires and lycans. And when I do go to the vampire sims, they seem pretty impressive places. I don't think the serious vampire role players have much time for vamps who hang around Ahern and Waterhead hassling new residents and generally making a nuisance of themselves, and I think such behaviour is now as atypical of vampires as is similarly irritating conduct at such places by non-vampires atypical of most non-vampire residents. Certainly the vampire clans generally seem to have taken on board the wholly justified criticism of "spampires" and "mosquitoes" a couple of years ago.

Storm Clarence wrote: I agree Innula. But I look back at some older threads on Vampires and it is the general consensus and the advise to newer residents to: "NOT ACCEPT BITE REQUESTS." Why is that? You would have to ask the people giving that advice, I guess, but perhaps the idea was to discourage spampires from making a nuisance of themselves by pestering people with unsolicited requests to bite them.