Nalates Urriah

@2Tessa Thanks for starting this thread. It is awesome seeing how neat some of the early avatars were. From my first year in SL... (shudder) I was doing a bit better making my avatar a couple of years later. This is from the era where I was into combat games, NOR was my favorite. We had some awesome battles. In spite of all the lag these were great fun. Losing a battle often left one at the mercy of some really dark people, which introduced a whole new level of tension to the competition. And the RP story telling was WAY creative. When off the battle field I went for a more feminine look. I think this is my last avatar before I started buying mesh, hands and feet were first. Then a body and lastly a head. I have kept some of my early outfits for the pre-mesh looks I really like.

I find many of the people I meet have nothing to talk about. I find that somewhat surprising in SL since there is so much going on. Sharing knowledge... I am curious what it is you are expecting. I have one friend that I have known since my first year in SL. I met her playing in NOR. We always have stuff to talk about. But I don't talk to her about Blender of making mesh clothes. She could not care less. Nor about scripting. While I know lots about both subjects these aren't subjects most of my friends are interested in. So sharing is very much a two-way thing. I also have been around SL long enough that I am a bit burned out on teaching SL basics. Then there is the frustration of dealing with people that want to hookup but have no idea how to flirt, play, seduce, or use their avatar. And never bother to learn. And one doesn't just start teaching those things to another. That two-way thing has to be working. I am convinced SL needs sex ed and like mesh upload one should be required to understand the in-and-outs before being allowed to buy genitals. SL is meant to be fun. Spending all of ones time teaching others soon becomes drudgery.

Better with a dark forum background... Dancing at Hydra...

Oh so cute... Wow... Awesome Elegant...

@Shuandra Winger In the viewers Preferences you can set responses to incoming and out going text to assist with RP and for various alerts. Look in Preferences->Chat and check in all the tabs. There are various HUDs and attachments that modify chat. Translators and RLV collars commonly modify and/or restrict chat. Various game HUDs and Experiences modify chat. I suggest you switch to the 'default Ruth' avatar to clear all attachments and see if that resolves the problem. Developer (Alt-Ctrl-Q)->Avatar->Character Tests->[male or female] If you have RLV enabled the switch may not work. Also, if you are in a region with active Experiences the fix may not work. So you may want to try changing your avatar/outfit in the Linden default SL Viewer and do that in a Linden region like Furball that has no Experience active.

Looks familiar but I am not making a connection. HOWEVER... Google thinks: LINK Unfortunately Google recognized the image as an avatar... so the results were limited to other avatars... which sucks. To do your own searches use images.google.com PS: This is a more funner image search...

Tweaking face shape is a rather esoteric skill. I suspect most of us seldom tweak our face shape once we are happy with it. There are artistic guides for getting proportions that fit the human eye's concept of beauty.

@pron1234 Wow... that is a look. Happy New Year... may your viewer never glitch... 😄

In-world you can search for ballroom dancing. I consider most of the resulting places more romantic than not. RMS Titantic aka Ship of Dreams, Milonguita @ Retrospect, Foxies - Formal Ballroom, and Japan TEMPURA Island The in-world Destination Guide has a Music & Clubs category. That will take some trial and error testing. I suppose it makes a difference whether you are taking someone out or going to meet someone.

Welcome to SL. 🙂

There are a number of things to learn about SL that will make life here much easier. Asking for help is one of the best. Making friends, as in Friending, is very important. Keep a list of those friends outside of the viewer. If you ever lose access to SL, Support will ask for the names of 10 of your friends as an easy way to verify you are you. I suspect several people will be willing to meet up with you in-world. The problem is being online at the same time. Since people in SL live all over the RL world it helps to say what time zone one lives in RL and/or when you are online using SLTime. And remember when talking time or money within SL to specify which time-zone or currency you mean. So, if you want someone from the forum to meet you in-world say when you will be online. Day and time... and then be there. Remember. You do not know when I will be on the forum and reading your post. Make it easy for us. I suspect several will IM you or post here that you are welcome to IM them in-world. You are welcome to IM me whenever you are in-world. Asking for help or just saying "hi" works for me. Understand too that I am often busy when in SL. So, I may not be immediately available. But we can schedule something. We have in-world tutorials and YouTube has loads of tutorials. In-world; Firestorm's New User Region (Social Island - usually lots of people there that can help. As does their Firestorm Support Group = SLURL meaning use it when in-world. Copy and paste into viewer.), Caledon Oxbridge (Self-help available 24x7)... and there are loads of specialized tutorial regions in SL. These however will get you to broader help sources. As much as I dislike YouTube for its Cancel Culture they have been good to SL. There are tons of tutorials about everything SL. The great thing about those tutorials is they are there whenever you want to refer to them. I forget things so I have a load of bookmarks to various YouTube tutorials. Wish you fun and hilarity in your SL... 🙂 and welcome to SL.

You are correct. However, when you change regions the viewer updates all the info it got from the previous region. It breaks the stream if it is the viewer handling it. Only streams handled by user scripts and the internal browser survive the region change. Basically it is simpler to open an external browser.

It is possible. But it is WAY simpler to launch Spotify and turn off parcel music. The problem with carrying sound in-world is the region simulator. The sim is a computer connected to the Internet and has its own IP Address. When you establish a stream into a region the remote server is using that sim's address. When you move to another region the receiving address changes. One then has to re-establish a connection to the remote server. Remote streamers like Spotify and the streamed music servers are not setup to rapidly switch to new addresses. They expect the receivers address to be fixed for the session. The only device that uses rapidly changing IP addresses is the network that cell phones use. In that scenario the phone company is handling all the hand offs and maintaining an end-point-to-end-point consistent connection. The result is neither you nor the streaming service see the connection changes. This suggests that something like what you want may be possible if we get a good viewer app for our phones. However, I fear the sim to sim travel in-world will present the same problem for a phone app.

I am one that wanted to keep the look of my Classic head and yet go with a mesh head. It is complicated. The viewer camera and our memory, or at least mine, are the main complications of the process. For the camera learn to use the Ctrl-8, 9, & 0 keys... zoom out, reset, and zoom in. Pressing Ctrl-0 four or five times eliminates most of the camera distortion seen in a close up look. With the camera zoomed take a picture. Save or upload it to SL. Put it on a cube. Attach the cube to your shoulder or neck and position it near your face. Size the cube so the picture face and avatar face are near the same size. Now you can make detailed comparisons between the old and new looks. I did this because I miss too many minor details when I try to look at one, put the other head on and look at it. I think a majority of humans need a SIDE-BY-SIDE comparison not sequential comparisons.

This is one of those things we can't get data on. The closest we get is when someone says they were... 'disciplined' for whatever. Of course no one has ever misrepresented the facts of such a discipline. But since such discipline would have a financial impact on the Lab, I suspect it takes more then a short avatar walking around in an adult region to elicit a reprimand from the Lab..

If you were in SL pre-2012 then not much has changed, except for the labels. Mesh bodies are attachments. The more recent bodies have a button in their HUD to enable BOM, Bakes On Mesh, which is like the old server side baking, SSB. The actual change is removal of the limit that baking (SSB) could only be used with the avatar. More later... Originally skin, tats, underwear, etc were worn by the avatar as System Layers. SSB composited all those layers into one greatly reducing the texture load the viewer had to handle and the system had to send to everyone. Along comes mesh bodies which are prims that can only use a single texture on any given face. There was no simple way to wear skin, tats, underwear, and the other system layers on a mesh body (which is a type of prim - try adding multiple textures to a cube. You'll see the problem.) Designers solved the problem by making a body for each layer. We call it onion skinning. Each body is a TINY bit larger than the body copy inside it. These bodies are so close together there is no easy way to select a tattoo or shirt layer. HUDs are needed to apply textures to the correct layer. We call those Appliers. During this era of SL we simply hid the SL or system body with alpha layers and wore a mesh body. All these onion skin bodies and the numerous textures they required was a massive hit on overall system performance, that grew worse every day. The Linden solution is BOM. Now we once again wear system layer skin, tats, etc. just as we did in the early days of SL and the BOM bake service puts whatever is on the classic/system avatar on the mesh body, provided BOM is enabled on the mesh body. So... what has changed is one now needs to buy skins made for use with BOM and click a BOM button in the body's HUD. Otherwise things are pretty much as they were pre-2012-13. You'll see designers saying BOM Ready or included or whatever. In prior days they would have system layers included. Appliers are for the older mesh bodies made before BOM was a thing. Now appliers are used only with mesh bodies when we want to apply materials. Body skins are mostly interchangeable. The body and brand are not all THAT important. However, some mesh heads look way better with skin made for the specific head. Demo everything. Play with a mesh body demo and the classic avatar. Dress the classic avatar with system layers; skin, tat, shirt, pants... then add the mesh body and find the BOM button in its HUD. Once enabled all that you wore on the classic body should appear on the mesh body. Other than the language of mesh and BOM there isn't much new stuff to learn.

Focus puts out a monthly magazine, has contests, events, gallery showings, in-world group, and a group on Flickr. They are reasonably active and generally fun. Their events offer better opportunities for meeting people and talking. In places like Backdrop City it is a bit tougher to get people talking. They are often intent on the image they want to create. But, consider asking for help in local chat. Ask for someone to pose with you for a shot or ask how to tweak the Windlight. Surprising how many people in SL are actually helpful souls.

In Firestorm the setting is Preferences->Move & View->Show avatar in Mouselook. This is not likely going to result in what you may expect. The setting causes your viewer to render the avatar for you. You have to look at your toes to see yourself. I need to be able to lean my head forward to actually see my toes... 😏

@Dorientje Woller Beauty is a thing of personal preference... a subjective thing. @Aster Rae Health is a well defined term implying certain measurable traits and the bodies ability to perform activities. We have massive statistical data about what happens when one's weight moves outside defined statistical limits. While a chubby person can be relatively healthy, we know the chances of that continuing are slim and it is far more likely they will have health problems as they age. Within SL you can be any size. In a digital world heath requires very different criteria for evaluation. So... we can get by with a subjective evaluation based on our personal preferences. Pushing that into RL causes people actual harm.

We have lots of fun and helpful people here. But, we also have our share of jerks. Enjoy and remember to be careful.

The chat window is not an attachment. So, editing a HUD and zooming the viewer's attachment/HUDs frame is not going to move the chat window. You most likely moved the chat box behind the buttons in the window. You'll Likely have to move buttons to find your chat window. There is also a file that stores the window locations hidden in the viewer files. That file can be edited. I can't find it just now... 😬

@Sparklecatzz You need to file a Firestorm JIRA bug report. Do your best to find a repeatable process for this bug, if you want it to go away... If it ALWAYS happens when you walk across from region 'A' to 'B', make that part of the report. The idea is to make it possible for a FS Dev to reproduce the problem. So give them lots of information. If they can't reproduce the problem, it is unlikely they can fix it.

When you see glitching open the Task Manager and look at the Performance tab. I have found my C-drive usage at 100% during glitching. There are other causes of glitches but this seems to be a more frequent lately. I find that every so often the Windows Diagnostic Execution, Policy, Service, and System Host go nuts and take over the C-dive for extended periods, like 10+ minutes. You can run the Resource Monitor to find what is using the hard drive.

@iRaynaa The way one troubleshoots this type of problem is basically detaching everything one has attached to the avatar, which is what Orwar is suggesting. Then add things back one item at a time to find the source of the problem. Make sure the builtin AO in Firestorm is disabled. If removing everything doesn't solve the problem, stop all animations: (Firestorm) Top menu = AVATAR->AVATAR HEALTH->STOP... a next step is Stop & Revoke. If that fails to solve the problem, TP to a different region and try Stop & Revoke again. If these steps don't solve the problem, come back and ask for additional help. These steps solve most problems, but there are additional things one can try.

Has anyone got any DATA on how many people use SL's Live Chat per day and specifically on holidays? 😳 If one doesn't know, how does one make any kind of decision on whether they should be providing service on holidays or not? If you want support on holidays, how much would you be willing to pay per month to get it? Oh wait... you want it for FREE... included... which if included in memberships then spreads the cost across all of us, whether we ever use the service or not... and how many of those wanting holiday support service complain SL memberships are too high? So many people never think things through. 😢