[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

Not sure how breakfast is a pet peeve, but my usual breakfast is a cup of hot chocolate to get me started (an idea I stole from the French) and then, after a shower, a couple of freshly cooked frozen croissants and a couple of cups of freshly ground black coffee.

 

[Advice, please, on normals]

I'm afraid I've never really understood how to use llGroundNormal or the RC_GET_NORMAL flag in llCastRay.   

If I want to rez something flush to a sloping surface or to lay flat on some sloping ground, how do I do it, please?  

[Any Thoughts on what the concept of 1000 Island dressing might be?]

Since Thousand Island Dressing is pinkish, maybe we'll get Barbie dream houses, like the movie

[Notes on the WelcomeHub]

11 hours ago, animats said:

Once the employer starts controlling hours of work, volunteers become employees and have to be paid. AOL ran into this years ago. They settled with their "Community Leaders" for US$15 million.

The article to which you link, though, suggests that it's a good deal more complex than simply "Once the employer starts controlling hours of work, volunteers become employees and have to be paid":

Quote

That class-action lawsuit, Hallissey et al v. America Online, Inc., attracted approximately 2,000 community leader volunteers, said Greenberg. America Online’s defense was, as expected, that “volunteers” are not entitled to the same protections as “employees,” and they petitioned the court several times to have the case dismissed. The crux of the case was this definition, and it’s a complicated one.

There are many factors to take into consideration when deciding whether someone is considered an employee, an independent contractor, or a volunteer under the FLSA: factors like the permanence of the relationship between the worker and the employer, the amount and nature of control the employer has over what the worker does and how he or she does it, and who profits from the relationship, and how. What the employer would like to call its workers, and what the workers would like to call themselves, are irrelevant.

Linden Lab has access to its own in-house legal advisors and to external counsel.  Presumably they're aware of Hallissey et al v. America Online, Inc, too, and have taken care to ensure LL isn't lining itself up for a multi-million dollar lawsuit. 

[Notes on the WelcomeHub]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Thanks, I had noticed two apparently separate stories in the thread, wasn't sure if they really were 2 tellings of the same story.

Possibly there were.  I had in mind the one to which I'd just responded, for obvious reasons, but it may well be that there are several different stories floating around -- without any details it's difficult to keep them all straight!

[Notes on the WelcomeHub]

7 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

It is history repeating itself. This sort of thing went on with the original program and the revamped ones. 

In other words, it confirms people's prejudices, based on what has happened in the past, with different programmes.

[Notes on the WelcomeHub]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If the Mentor is saying in open chat (not IM), things like "Stop talking over me", "Stop trying to help", etc. then they are breaking what should be the FIRST Rule: set a good example.

Instead, they are making themselves look bad, making the Mentor program look bad, embarrassing themselves, and both the New User and the person trying to help should be embarrassed for them.

Disagree? #FightMe

We are told, 

Quote

She got a PM from a couple Mentors to lay off. She  PMed back only trying to help.  One Mentor got pissed off and told her to leave

So at least one Mentor was using IMs, and we're not told how the other one was communicating.   Nowhere is it said that any of this happened in open chat, though.   It may have done, but we're not told that.

[Notes on the WelcomeHub]

1 hour ago, Alwin Alcott said:

in a different discussion this would be taken as victim blaming.

No, it's a simple request for context. 

All we have is a second-hand account of an incident which the person retelling the anecdote repeats without any detail whatsoever, and because it's so absolutely detail-free, I can't understand why so many people are giving it so much weight.

Haven't people heard that SL dramas are frequently multi-sided thingies?

[Notes on the WelcomeHub]

20 hours ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

Someone told me she went to check the new welcome area and was helping a new person.  She got a PM from a couple Mentors to lay off. She  PMed back only trying to help.  One Mentor got pissed off and told her to leave.  My friend did lodge a ticket explaining what happened and explain she didn't want to be in the Mentor program due to the commitments but just pop in now and then. Now she is thinking heck with them and maybe bail from SL.

What helpful advice was your friend giving the new resident?  

[Avatar detection - is it rezzed?]

8 hours ago, lilyblackbush said:

Thanks. I was thinking about that one but wasn't sure how reliable it would be. Try it and see I suppose.

I've used the avatar's z axis primarily to check if their attachments can hear and respond to messages from my scripts after they arrive on a region.   It's always  proved reliable for that.

[Need Help Making Stats and Leaderboards for Game]

11 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:

If your system can make use of an experience, I'd recommend the Key-value-pair functions over using google sheets. . .

Depends what you're trying to do, I think.   KVP is great if you're interested in storing, updating and retrieving particular records, but not so great if you want to look at lots of records at once.    So I'd use KVP if I want to keep track of individual players' scores, but Google Sheets (or Big Query in extreme cases) if I wanted to produce a league table, at least if it's one of any size, or track all my sales records.

[Avatar detection - is it rezzed?]

1 hour ago, lilyblackbush said:

Hello, is there a quick and easy way to detect if/when an avatar is sufficiently rezzed for llGetObjectDetails to return accurate results?

It's just that I am working on a script that uses those details to determine program flow and have found it throwing up dodgy results where the target avatar is still rezzing.

What I am hoping, therefore, is that a while(not rezzed){llSleep(0.1);} loop will solve the problem, but i can't decide on the best 'not rezzed'' condition to check.

Ideas anyone?

I'd try llGetAgentSize

Quote

• DEFAULT_AGENT_HEIGHT in indra/llcommon/indra_constants.h is 1.9. 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, so:

vector agentSize = llGetAgentSize(uuid);
if (agentSize.z == 1.9) {
    // avatar is probably Ruthed
}

So, if (agentSize.z != 1.9), llGetObjectDetails should work (though I'm a bit surprised if(llGetObjectDetails([some_parameters]) !=[ ]) doesn't work too).

[Mainstream failure of SL & Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Sansar and other PG worlds fail socially because the lack of sex means people self censor.

I can't speak from experience of the place but that certainly doesn't coincide with what I've heard about SL's Teen Grid.

[Have You Ever Received A Message From SL?]

Isn't a weed simply something that's growing where you don't want to be?

[Favorite development environments?]

I find Sublime Text invaluable, primarily because of its formatting and  shortcuts and code completion it offers.   

I am, though, having a problem with Sublime Text 4 and Makopo's plug-in.    

I want to use K&R style for the formatting and my default Sublime Text colour scheme.   

However, Preferences>Package Settings>LSL/OSLSL always reverts to ""User Viewer Theme" every time I re-open Sublime Text and, although K&R Style remains checked, it doesn't seem to have any effect.  Neither does unchecking it.   

Anyone got any suggestions as to what's over-riding it? I've poked round and changed things were I can, but I'm getting nowhere.

[NUX Avatar]

51 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

It occurs to me that the success of the Senra avatars in attracting new content depends in large measure on the ultimate success of the mobile viewer in attracting large numbers of new users. If there is a surge of new users who stick around long enough to want to customize their avatars, they are not going to start by forking over thousands of L$ for a (maybe, slightly) superior mesh body and head. Eventually perhaps, but only long after they've spent much more than that on clothes, etc., tailored for Senra.

To my mind, the Senra avatar will remove a large barrier to new user retention, no matter what viewer they're using.   

I shudder to think how many people must be put off when, on asking, "how do I customise my avatar to get it to look something like all these good-looking and well-dressed people I see around me?"  are told "First you have to buy US$25 or $30 worth of L$ and use them to buy a mesh avatar and head for the top brands, or search around for freebie or introductory ones, but you can't really use the one Linden Lab  provide".

[NUX Avatar]

To my mind  there's bound to be a large change in the market because suddenly anyone who wants to try their hand at making clothes or accessories will be able to get hold of a dev kit to make stuff they can sell to anyone.

A great deal of rubbish will, of course, be produced, but so, too, will some good stuff, and it seems inevitable that, regardless of what established creators do, we'll see talented new creators making clothes and accessories for the new bodies because an artificial constraint on their entering the market has been removed.

Time will tell, though.

 

[NUX Avatar]

1 minute ago, steeljane42 said:

I know a few small/medium creators who dropped maitreya last years despite it being the biggest female body out there. It's what Sammy and Arielle already said pretty much. Their sales dropped only by 10-15% after excluding what is most used body on the grid at the start, and later even increased as they started to release more stuff, because rigging didn't take as long anymore.

It and the fact who you see around most popular clothing shopping events on the opening days (hint: it's Reborn and Legacy users in 85% cases) points on a simple thing: not all people shop the same/as much. It'll be even more so for the freebie/default body. Basically having it does not mean shopping for it.

It seems to me that the market for mesh clothes is about to change quite dramatically, since your potential customers stop being "everyone who has bought a body made by one or more particular creators who'll give me a dev kit" to "everyone in SL, and particularly new residents who've decided they might want to stay a bit and buy some clothes in addition to those in their inventory when they start."

 

[NUX Avatar]

3 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

Well again, the creators I know are doing it for actual income in real life. So if they create for a bunch of bodies, you have to take into account upload fees, and other fees like event fees and even land fees. If they rent or own land. So if they upload for said 100 plus bodies and didn't get back what they put into it, it wouldn't be that profitable for them. They would wind up losing money. 

Yes, but that's my point -- if time is the constraint, why waste it rigging clothes for a load of different bodies, or making skins, when you rig them for the one body that you know everyone possesses, regardless of whether they also own any of the resident-made ones?   

I'd have thought the obvious course of action in those circumstances would be to stop supporting the bodies for which your sales were worst, rather than to refuse to cater for the largest possible market.

[NUX Avatar]

8 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

It comes down to workload, most creators I know are just one-person shows. So they also need to worry about their health and even themselves. So having time for themselves is necessary. That being said, expecting creators to create for 100 plus bodies in SL. Is a rather large and impossible ask. 

So why would they not use their limited time to create for the body they know they can potentially sell to everyone rather than one they know they can sell only to some people?  

[NUX Avatar]

Since I don't make clothes, I'm probably missing something obvious, but I'm struggling to understand why anyone, when offered the opportunity to expand their market to everyone in SL by making outfits for bodies that everyone will now have in their inventories, rather than for the much smaller market of everyone who has bought a particular body, wouldn't jump at the chance.

 

 

[NUX Avatar]

32 minutes ago, Caeruleiae said:

Oh good-hopefully that will actually happen. It would be nice if people could start creating for the nux avatar sooner rather than later in the year. This is especially important-I think-for people who might be having a slow time as far as sales are concerned which seems to be hitting a bunch of people pretty hard lately. A bit of refresher for creators will be a good thing.

I don't really trust ll's ability to make good clothes or hair but honestly I wasn't counting on them doing so to begin with haha. I think the market and creators in sl will do a fantastic job of working with the bodies to create better skins shapes clothes hair and accessories than ll ever could or even should. Although it's nice they are working on some so new people-especially-have something to work with right at the start.

Here's the bit in yesterday's Meet The Moles where he was talking about the new avatars

 

[NUX Avatar]

1 hour ago, Caeruleiae said:

I'm guessing the projected release date for these still sits at- soon - doesn't it?

I don't know what the biggest differences are between last year's preview and this one-I can't discern any myself other than the shape itself is just poorly put together this time. Were-or are-there any real differences in the actual body? If there aren't any differences that would mean it didn't need to take this long at all-or that it's not actually as close to being done as they said.

I'm glad ll is making it-but I do wish they'd just release it already or stop hyping it up until it's actually done. At some point people will stop accepting soon as a good answer to -when will it be ready. Ll is the boy who cried soon. 

I think Patch said they hope to release it in the second half of "next month" (which I assume means July, since he was speaking on June 30).

One obvious difference between this year's preview and last year's is that last year there was no female body to show us.    Patch also said that they'd been producing a whole wardrobe of different clothes, hairs, etc to go with the avatars, which we haven't seen yet. 

[Parcel level bot detection]

/me registers a scripted agent that runs around the region asking people to check all the squares containing traffic lights in the picture it's showing them.

[Parcel level bot detection]

1 hour ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

Exactly, so there is no value in detecting registered bots, and there is no practical way to detect unregistered ones.

However, despite being told that by several people (including me) in earlier threads in these forums, people were still complaining that LL weren't giving them the same ability to prohibit registered scripted agents that estate owners have.

Regardless of what practical benefits this brings parcel owners (or estate owners), it gives people the sense of control for which they were asking, which was the point of my quoting Khrushchev's supposed remark to Nixon about the solution to complaints about imaginary lakes. 

(Come to think of it, I've seen something attributed to Aliester Crowley, which I rather prefer, about how the magician persuades someone afflicted by imaginary snakes that he has an imaginary mongoose to deal with them).