Nalates Urriah

SL20B is interesting this year. Lots of interesting and pretty stuff to see. ~2008 is the year Myst Online was closing and the Dni Explorers were finding new homes. The year I came into SL.

No... Anyone can abuse the system. There are griefers that intend to crash your computer by overloading the render process. It is why we have a Max Complexity setting in the viewer. The minotaur avie may have been trying for realistic fur. Or they may have meant to be a problem. The idea of using Animesh for more realistic hair certainly allows for animation. But creating an armature in the hair as suggested is render expensive and IMO doesn't move us toward more realistic.

I am sure the memorial celebration will be epic...

Awesome look and image.

@DeWayne Deed There are limits to how much a mesh head can be adjusted. Thus the need to demo numerous heads until you find one that is close enough to your look that it can be adjusted to what you want. Rowan's suggestion is good. Take a picture and put it on a cube. BUT... use the camera controls to change the camera when taking the picture and comparing the pic and the demo head. Use Ctrl 8, 9, and 0. Experiment and see how they affect your look. Generally using Ctrl-0 five or 6 times gets you a good close-up with minimal distortion.

Yeah... we have that. It is called animesh. The problem is the render cost. (Ref)

To change passwords one needs to enter their existing password. While in someone else's account via computer glitch you would still need their password to change it... While it is a good idea to change one's password periodically, I'm not sure this glitch is a cause to change now. My idea of dealing with computer issues is to change as little as possible when things are wonky. I'll wait until I know things are working correctly.

How many of you remember the problems the Lab had when they tried to get the avatar's feet to stay on the ground? The avatar isn't designed for interaction and detailed collision detection. The calculation load for that type of detection is overwhelming. It is why we do not have cloth in SL. Those of us that work in Blender and other 3D modeling programs can see the impact on performance when we start trying to animate cloth. It isn't the animation system that is the main problem in SL. It is the collision detection system aka the physics engine. In RL things are a bit elastic. Plus we have eyes that detect where things are. So he can be tall and I know if I need to sand on my tippy toes to kiss him and our lips meet. Plus he is compensating too. There is a lot going on that we just can't duplicate in SL with the computers we have... at least not in real-time. There are animators and furniture makers that make things fit as well as possible. Some sex HUDs calculate how to position hips so things meet mostly as intended. But we run into a problem when we want avatars to be hooked up and to kiss. It is possible to set cuddles to focus on kissing and the most explicit sexual animations to focus on aligning the hips. But even then it is not perfect and requires some adjustment by the user. So most only ever try to get close and then allow users to adjust things. I doubt we are going to see our highly flexible SL constrained to the point better avatar positioning is possible. And there is Henri's point. We cannot adjust animation on the fly.

They have a group: Topless Crusiers. One needs to be a group member to get the notices, including the launch and destination points, a map of the route, and the USB waypoints. After the sail, there is a dance. Get to the launch early. You can pick up passengers or get a ride. one can participate as a passenger and that often is more fun than sailing. There is a Master of Ceremony there that helps and does the count down to the 'official' start. While some race there is no serious racing. Serious as in rules are not enforced by referees or course monitors. The idea is to have fun and friendly competition is part of the fun. But we are allowed to make things easier by changing the wind. Those wanting to learn about sailing set and live with the wind settings given in the cruise announcement. The group uses the USB (Ultimate Sailor Buddy) navigation HUD. Available in the marketplace. Links are available at the launch points. There can be 20 to 40 people participating. Always on a Tuesday, the day regions are restarted. Time: 1:00 PMslt. All free. I usually tip the MC/DJ for all the effort they put into making the cruise and dance happen. The group is a bit clicky. I find I have to put some effort into making friends at the dance. Picking up passengers at the start is much easier. These days I don't make it to the event often.

I suspect you'll find people with similar interests in the Builder's Brewery and Blender-Avastar groups. I also suggest looking through the Creation section of the forum.

If the skin has no HUDs or boxes to rez in-world then it is most likely a system layer (also BOM) or plain texture. Plain textures can often just be dropped on an item. Rez the item and drag the texture from your inventory. In other cases, the item, like the head, may have to be edited and a face selected to add the texture all from within the build panel. If you haven't learned the basics of texturing a cube, then this will sound overwhelming. It shouldn't be. It is simple enough. But you have to go through it once. I suggest you rez a cube and play with setting its color and textures. You can throw the cube away when you're done. So have no fear of messing up. Be brave and persistent. I notice the head and tails are edit-OK. So editing them is likely how the designer intended the textures to be added.

Well, it comes across as real... and I think humorous.

Let's see... there is Topless Cruising Tuesday... seems to make the guys happy. The prearranged routes improve one's sailing ability. 😄 Then there is GTFO (F=Friehgt 😊) where you play a game of freight delivery/transport. Learning how to drive and play with others. Flying 🥰 is an excellent way to explore SL. There are various communities and RP groups for flying, sailing, ballooning, and driving. There are debate, religious, and philosophical groups. If you find any that have progressed beyond the group echo chamber stage 🙄, let me know. There are fashion groups of multiple flavors. Loads of tech groups specializing in the various skills needed in SL.

Some animators provide their animations in 3 sizes; small, medium, and large. I have not seen any furniture makers that use "sizes" of animations. Certainly, none allow selecting of size per sitter. There are some HUDs and furniture that make an adjustment for avatar height. They essentially either try to calculate where each avatar's pelvis is and adjust heights to get a match or calculate pelvis-to-eye distance and try to match eye-to-eye height. Many of the perfectly matched-up avatars in pictures are posed using one of the posing tools like Black Dragon's POSER. Or they are posed in a render other than the SL Viewer. Some of us tweak camera angles to make the illusion that things fit and touch correctly. But my avatar cannot scratch her nose unless I make her a custom animation.

There are easy ways and more difficult ways to handle your lighting in SL. You have been around SL long enough I would think you would know about Windlight/EEP, which most of us use for taking photos in SL. The override you ask about is for controlling the position of the sun. There is another setting that allows you mouse-click-drag the sun to any position. To change the lighting in a region click World (top menu)->Environment->[select one of the 8 options] If you go with Personal Lighting... you get a control panel that lets you adjust all the Windlight settings.

Why do you think they didn't consider you and alts when they looked at the stats? My assumption is they looked at all users.

We'll have to see how it goes. I don't see how they are doing anything significantly different this time around than last. When the Lab turned off the last previous mentor/helper teams they explained the stats revealed those using mentors left sooner than those that did not use mentors. Eliminating mentors increased retention. 😵 Which doesn't make sense to me. But it is hard to argue with simple stats. The Lab has provided lots of training and learning aids. Yet an age old problem in computer support is getting people to use what is there. People just do not read what is in front of them. I think the big restriction in using help is in being able to find what one is looking for. I generally want to know a very specific thing. I do NOT want to dig through pages of stuff to find an answer. Maybe someday we will have a AI to answer questions and get one to the right information. You can try it now using Bing's AI. try asking "How do I turn on the lights in SL?" then follow up with "How do I make the world brighter?" Bing's AI does a decent job of answering. I used to pop down to the Help Island and ask questions. Most of my "How do you..." questions got answered. For complex problems I learned to go to the forum and search for the problem. I think all of my problems were ones someone had already run into. So I could find the answer by searching in Answers. Later I learned about the JIRA. If there was no answer in Answers, then I would usually find it in the JIRA. I don't have any stats from the Firestorm Support team. I do think they have The Best Support Group in SL. They do seem to provide the best support and provide some supervision of those helping. The SL Knowledge Base is better organized than the forum's Answers for finding answers. But the Answers section is a better place to ask for help and get a response. I am also convinced people are getting dumber and losing the ability to communicate and think. It may not be that long before we start growing tails and swinging from tree to tree...

True, that information CAN be sent. But it is not part of the link. The browser and network interface are including that information in the data packet and software on the receiving end is unpacking that info on the server side. So if the link is clicked on from inside an incognito window or one is using a VPN different info is received from clicking on the same link.

Literally nothing. URL = Uniform Resource Locator, this is the information that defines where on the Internet a resource resides. It is a pointer, like a note in a book's bibliography. We may be able to infer information about you by what you point to. But there is nothing in a URL you post other than what you put in it. [ ] codes are generally referred to as forum markup or codes and aka BBC, bulletin board code. The actual URL will look like this: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/500082-coding-help/ The https: tells the computer to use a specific protocol for communication. The //community.secondlife.com tells the computer which computer the resource is on. There is a huge Domain Look-Up System that keeps track of every computer on the Internet that hosts resources. The .com section of the system knows about the computers named SecondLife. The SL computer knows about the community computers that host this forum resource. Those computers interpret the rest of the URL. The /forums/topic/500082-coding-help/ is pointing to the folder (forums) and the subfolder (topic) and another folder (500082-coding-help) that contains the resource. This is a forum and there is some behind-the-scenes server magic happening to get to the resource so this page's URL is atypical. And usually, there is a resource name like: wonderfulpage.html In the forum and places in the viewer, we use [ ] BBC notation to create a LINK. So as previously pointed out [URL (single space here) description] creates a clickable link like this: description (this one deliberately does not work). So the link points to a resource and contains no information about where it came from, other than where you find the link. So because you see a link in my post you can deduce I created the link or copied it from somewhere and pasted it here. But none of that deduced information is in the link.

Yes... Penny Patton has a blog (The Digital Pasture) and she writes about how to use textures on things you buy and build. See her post Textures & Lag, but check out the entire site.

You didn't do anything WRONG. You were being silly and dumb. We've all done that... in my case, multiple times.

There is a reason the default is 1.00 in the SL viewer. Real-time rendering of 3D worlds is still a heavy load on even the newest computers. The use of LOD reduces the amount of information that has to be downloaded and the amount of effort the computer needs to render the scene. The viewer and servers send ONLY the LOD model needed for the viewer at a given distance. Bumping up the viewer to 4.0 forces the system to download the high poly model even if it will only cover a 10x10px area of the screen. The computer cannot show the detail contained in the high poly model. But it has to render every polygon anyway. Unfortunately, this affects more than the user setting their viewer to 4.0. It affects everyone in the region. Fortunately, network speeds and the addition of CDN make it tolerable. Still it sucks because most have no technical knowledge of how these systems work. When things disintegrate at a distance it is because the designer did not know how to use LOD. Setting your viewer to 4.00 covers up the bad design. The lame designer can get by with the top-level high poly LOD model. Models 2 to 4 are supposed to degrade the model gracefully and maintain the shape of the item only omitting details. But good LOD design is a manual process for any complex model. The automated stuff just never does as well. You are using poorly designed LOD models. If you use the viewer's upload tools to make your LOD models this is what happens. In 2013 most of the modelers in SL were making all four models in Blender. When done right a 1000 poly house (LOD 1) can be incrementally reduced to 12 to 18 polys (LOD 4) and maintain its shape. Pro modelers may reduce the house to 1 polygon and plaster a picture of the house on the polygon. Of course, one has to be able to know from where the house is to be viewed. More often a model is reduced to 5 or 6 polygons and images for the low poly model. When I make a couch or chair I go for a 5 poly LOD 4 model.

3D modeling for real-time games gets complicated. In the 2012 era when mesh was being added to SL the Lab was still fanatically devoted to getting better performance. At the time they were explaining what was being done and why. Residents were figuring out how to use that information and how to stretch things to do what they wanted to accomplish. So, we got posts like this thread: Finding the information is a bit of an esoteric skill... So, I've made it easier for you muggles. 😄 Drongle gets into the Scuplty vs Mesh debate. @Bagnu PLEASE take the mesh discussions outside this thread.

Now in 2023, I see some people trying to sort out how to work with mesh and manage its render cost. In 2012 and for the next 3 or 4 years residents were figuring out how to tweak mesh and get the most for the least render cost. A resident that did considerable testing to divine what the viewer was doing with mesh and LOD was Drongle McMahon. See @Drongle McMahon posts in the period 2012 to 2015. Drongle's last post was in 2017. Bummer. Drongle was a major asset for residents to turn to. I suggest you open Drongle's forum content page and read through posts for the information you need. This is not the best way to learn this stuff. It is totally unorganized. Drogle was answering and asking questions pertinent at the time. So, there was a bit of a sequence at the time. I have not found anyone that gets as deep into the tech as Drongle nor that explains it as well nor bases their thinking on the deep testing Drongle did. Drongle looks into Sculpty vs Mesh. At the time Sculpties were still a thing and people were delving into the intricacies of how far sculpties could be pushed. I suggest that if you find a particularly helpful post you link to it here and say what helped. DO NOT post in those old threads. If you want to discuss a point, start a new thread and reference the old stuff.