Nalates Urriah

When people blow the dust out of their computers some of it gets blown into and settles in SL... and THAT is where SL sand comes from...

They aren't even using a SMART search.

I don't remember there being a PLAY option for gestures in inventory. But with my memory of such things avoid giving that mush credibility. Ctrl-G pops up the Gestures panel which is where I typically see the Play button. From inventory open the gesture to get it in the Gesture Editor where there is a play button.

Using the world map... just search on sandbox... sandboxes won't work

@Benson Gravois All the published limits in SL are on a Wiki page: Limits. What you are looking for is here. These are for the SL System and Linden made default viewer. Some third party viewers can do things a bit different as there are viewer side enforced limits and server side enforced limits. Only the viewer side limits can vary.

I know that one.... been there...

Well.... it used to be simple... then things got better... sort of and obviously the simplicity or better is WAY debatable. There is not an easy way to implement an UNDO button. The tech is too complex to go into here. But there is a simple work around. We can save an avatar setup as an Outfit. I have a basic nude avatar outfit which I use as a starting point for outfits. These base outfits are made for the various bodies, heads, skins, and tats that I use. I also have one body/outfit that I use for experimenting. So when I find I suddenly can't find where something went, I can revert to the starting point body/outfit. There are basic components of the avatar that cannot be removed, only replaced. Consider. If the skin were removed what would the avatar look like? Basically it would be an invisible avatar. Then people would be complaining about losing their avatar. So as a logical step the Lindens made it so an avatar has to be equipped with the basic parts needed to render the avatar. You misunderstand what 'save' means in this instance. In SL a different paradigm is in use. In SL people "CREATE". There is no imposed limit on what can be created and users have often surprised the Linden engineers with what they come up with. This makes it ridiculously difficult to create save slots similar to what you likely have used before. So a different paradigm is used. Once the SL Paradigm clicks you'll find things much easier.

You've run into a BOM thing. Items in inventory with pants and shirts icons are System Clothes, which are from the pre-mesh-days of SL. These items are sort of painted on the classic avatar body, aka the system or default body built into the viewer. Our mesh bodies fit over the system body. BOM (Bakes On Mesh) transfers... relays... projects... whatever... the system layers (skin, shirts, pants, etc) onto the mesh body. If you wear a system item and it doesn't show then you likely do not have BOM active on the body. The history of SL is one of steady progress and change. Initially all avatars were System Avatars and there were no mesh bodies. Clothes were either System Clothes - simply textures painted on over the skin texture, or prim or sculpty clothes. When mesh was added we got about 3 styles of mesh clothes. First were standard size clothes made for the system avatar. We adjusted the shape of the avatar to fir the clothes. That sucked. Then we got mesh bodies and mesh clothes for those bodies. But we have Appliers that were used to place system-like clothes and skin on the mesh bodies. For appliers to work mesh bodies had to have numerous layers (onion skin over lays). This solution created very high ACI/ARC (Avatar Render Cost). BOB was developed to reduce ARC. BOM allows us to move back toward the simpler System Clothes concepts. It gets tough for the new people to sort through.

I have used both an XBox controller and a SpaceNavigator with Firestorm. The SN is much nicer to use. You can see it in action in this video: https://youtu.be/5SLN2eMtngg?si=q1uvxf9S11tGQaX7&t=345

I used to do lots of SL Video. See it here. As you look at my older and newer work you'll, hopefully, see a difference in quality. Practice improves quality. Started with FRAPS and moved to OBS. For work I have Adobe's tools. So Premiere Pro for video, Audition for audio, and Photoshop for editing still images. But there are free and cheap tools available. And some that cost a few hundred to purchase. It isn't so much the tools as is it is the talent that is using them. But better tools make it more fun. My first video was a tribute to NecronomVI (barely SFW) in 2014. I used FRAPS, Firestorm with a mouse, and Adobe. Later I got OBS as the developer of FRAPS stopped developing and Windows left it behind. I also changed to using a SpaceNavigaor for camera control, which made it nicer and easier. There are many people that make SL Video or aka machinima. Lots of tutorials online. For VLogs to be popular you need interesting and frequent content. YouTube's SHORTS have become very popular. They are 30 seconds to may be 5 minutes. Regularly appearing new content is the key to building a popular channel.

@TrishSummers It depends on what the avatars have sat on. Strawberry Singh, aka Strawberry Linden now, has a blog with instructions for posing avatars NOT sitting on furniture but using 'poses' purchased and run by the viewer. Her tutorials are here. Plus there is lots of other stuff too. Then there is SL furniture... meaning all the stuff an avatar can sit on, couch, chair, bed, car, etc, Depending on which posing software the designer used, there are different ways to adjust our poses. Some make it easy and include controls in the furniture's menu. The blue dialogs that popup have a button for ADJUST or some variation of that. This will let each person in couples poses/animations adjust their 'pose' in X, Y, & Z directions. Depending how the furniture is positioned the orientation may or may not match the world x,y,z. I'll often open the mini-map and figure out the orientation and how the adjustments move the avatar. Other times I just trial-and-error it. Typically you can select whether to move the avatar position 1, 5, or 25 cm per click. You also have the choice to save your personal position for the current pose/animation. Often you can save the change you have made across all the poses/animations. I find the later a bit flaky. While it is often possible to find and move the pose balls via system edit (alt-ctrl-T to toggle invisible-visible, right-click the ball and edit) these edits are not saved. The next time the pose ball is rezzed it returns to its default position. But often this is the quickest way to adjust a pose for a one time photo. When couples are playing on furniture one or the other will adjust position. If both try to adjust as the same time it just gets silly. Because of the exaggerated differences in avatars in SL it often impossible to fit two avatars together in a believable way. I won't dance or hook up with avatars that are way larger or smaller than me. There is another way to adjust an avatars sitting position. You can adjust Avatar Height. (FS: right-click the avatar, select Appearance->Hover Height). The downside is you have to adjust back when you stand. And it only works for up and down (Z axis).

@AmyPinkLegend Slink use is on the way out. I am definitely a Slink fan. The Redux bodies were/are the technology leaders providing low ACI and low script count while providing a wide collection of tools for working with the body. BUT... if you never got the tools... there is no legal way to get them. Whoever told you the body looks old... its in their head. I suspect if you don't tell them which body you are wearing and they don't use a "What Is She Wearing?" they won't be able to tell which body you are wearing. . However, now that we have PBR rendering in SL Viewers and other 3rd party viewers are adopting PBR we will see clothes designers start to take advantage of that tech. Which means the clothes on Slink bodies WILL start to show their age. I think Belliza and Maitreya LaraX are the the most similar to Slink Hourglass and Original. While I still mostly wear my Slink bodies and still buy some new clothes for them I am shopping more and more for LaraX. I sort of boycott Belliza because they are restrictive in who they will allow to make clothes for them. ppppffftthh!

I didn't start tracking until early 2012. I added a feature to drop out the numbers of a massive drop in users when the servers go down. I started tracking because I saw a seasonal variation in the number of concurrent users. There is seasonal variation. More users during North American winter and less in summer. This variation appears to have changed during the pandemic. But I have had problems with my in-world data tracker. I suspect Midnoot's graph is more accurate than mine. Peak use is about 2 to 3PM SLT. Minimum use is about 2-3AM SLT. Depending on when North American users are logged in they will see the numbers in the mid to high 40,000s. Others are likey to see from the mid 30k's to mid 40k's. I catch the high and low concurrent user numbers for the month by querying the SL API. Not sure where Midnoot gets the numbers. The pandemic broke the trend. The most significant change appears to be in the minimum number of concurrent users. 2024 will likely show the trend as resuming or permanently broken.

OBS Studio is the ONE! You can keep things simple or get as advanced as you want.

A simple image editor is PhotoScape X. There is a free version and a Pro version US$40. Technically more complex and more creatively diverse are GIMP & Paint.Net. Both free. There are numerous pro editors, like PhotoShop. Search for image editors.

In many cases, it is a matter of time. Eventually, your name scrolls out of the ban list. Depending on a region or group's popularity it can be days or months.

I have yet to figure out the fascination with mirrors. They are an interesting new tech in SL... but in a world where my makeup and hair remain perfect, what's the point? Wait... are the models to be painted with watercolors? Or did you mean nude models for a painting done with watercolors? 🤔

Let us know how it goes... best wishes.

Not everyone uses a dark theme. When you post consider using a format that works for light and dark themes.

Unfortunately, that is about the only way. I assume you will open inventory, find the AO in one of your outfit folders and copy it. Then you can paste it as a link in all the other outfit folders. If that is too tedious... I make Add and Remove Outfits. I use these for things I may want to add or remove from whatever outfit I am wearing at the moment. I have a SciFi Eye and Hand Effects that is a collection of 11 parts. Another is Wings and Butterflies. And of course all the sex stuff. These allow me to right-click such a folder in the Outfits panel and Add to Outfit or Remove from Outfit. You could make one with just AO and then add it to any outfit you wear that is missing the AO. Save the outfit and eventually, you'll have them all updated. It may seem less tedious than doing them all at once. Regardless, however, you do it, it's going to be a bit of work.

It can be tedious waiting for your AO to play the part of the animation you want. I've found I can speed up or slow down the animations using Firestorm. Try DEVELOPER (top menu - Ctrl-Alt-Q to reveal/hide) ->Avatar->Animation Speed->... You can increase or decrease playback speed in increments of 10%. It helps. But not as simple as I would like. Being able to move a playhead through the animation would be great. In the camera, there is a Firestorm option to Freeze Frame. The result is a static render. It is a bit fuzzy and tricky to learn to use Freeze Frame. But experiment to learn. Ignore the fuzzy. Your snaps will render at whatever setting you select. When I know I will primarily be taking images I use Black Dragon and its POSER. I let an animation play until it is close to the pose I want then I trigger the POSER to start and tweak my pose. It is still not a perfect solution. But it is really handy.

There are script 'weight' scales in the marketplace for free. They usually say something about being under (yay) or over (boo) 3MB of scripts. When it comes to performance issues things get complex. There is viewer, server, and network performance. FPS is mostly a viewer-side thing. Script performance is more a server-side thing shown by Percent of Scripts Run and free script time. Sailing when less than 50% of scripts run per frame... SUCKS! Scene render time and mouse/keyboard responsiveness is more an indication of a good or poor network connection. But, these are not PURE distinctions. Many of these factors mix viewer, network, and server performance. I suggest you not get overly concerned with performance or avatar render cost (ARC/ACI) It is nice to be considerate of others. Thanks. But if you are exploring a region with you and one or two other avatars in it... it doesn't matter. A region with 20+ avatars is a different case. When crossing regions we easily run into the limits. The number of items we wear and our script weight has a big impact on how quickly and successfully we cross. With scripts the number and size are factors. However, it is the amount of DATA the script is using that slows the transfer. I haven't read the system code to know whether the body of the script is transferred. I doubt it. But, the data is and it is unique for each user of the script. While the script code is reusable among users the data isn't. So... depending on what you are doing and where you are the important performance factors change.

Most FPS games are highly optimized for a single style of play. So guns and vehicles are highly optimized. The surroundings, clothes, avatars, animations, and just about everything in the game except movement are downloaded to your computer when the game is installed. You'll also find that play areas in FPShooters are either small or procedural-spaces. Plus the entire space is pre-installed and never changes. The result is in a FPS there are a dozen or so guns. SL, literally, has thousands of different guns. All that information about which gun and where it is attached and which animations are associated with it has to be communicated to every SL player. For a FPS the communication is very terse 'this gun'. The FPS game on your computer already has all the info about the gun. The variety of clothes available in SL is enormous. The possible combination of colors and textures for a single shirt is huge. The SL system is designed to handle that variety. FPSs are optimized and the possibility of that measure of variety is eliminated. Basically a FPS is designed to minimize the information needed to be exchanged between players. SL to provide the creative space people like can't do that.

OUCH! THAT is a NEEDLE.

I disagree... it is possible. It gets complicated and ambiguous if one attempts to circumscribe the real subject. Which in these forums leads to arguments from and misunderstanding by those with a weak attachment to reality. SL to some degree is an escape from reality. So the less attached seem to like it here.