Prokofy Neva

It used to be that a land parcel had a prim limit and you could not go over it in any way (unless the land was grouped, in which case you borrowed from other empty parcels in the group). So if you had a 4096, and it had a 937 prim limit, you could not put out the 938th prim, you would get a "bounce" sound inworld if you tried this and a mention. Not so with land impact. Parcels that have a mixture of old prims and new mesh have land impact that can go way over the limit. And show "prims" still remaining on the server to use. On a sim where I own land, there are 4 groups; several parcels are over their land impact limit, and beyond borrowing from another parcel in that group, yet over -- and possibly to create problems (in the Linden water for boats). I've had this complicated issue more than a year ago and had to destroy a build. Now I see it coming back. Why doesn't the land menu have a hard stop for land impact? Note: I don't need an explanation for the difference between prim count and land impact -- I know about it and already read extensively on it. I also don't need tips on how to reduce land impact by removing a torus or linking objects -- I've read about that, too. What I want to know is WHY the Lindens cannot create a hard stop on the land menu for land impact. If this sounds crazy to you and maybe a server glitch, IM me in world and I will show you.

I see the Lindens rolled out the Experience thing. So here are my questions: 1. Are there modules available for free or for sale where dummies can just plug in an aspect of these Experiences, i.e. ready-made gathering game where you customize your own objects to be collected, just add the script, or a ready-made kill game where you make the monster and add script, etc. as you would add a door script to a customized door? 2. If not, can you have someone else script the Experience for your sim or can only you do it as the owner? Can you transfer an Experience to another avatar? Can you put it on a sim without being the individual or group owner? What group permissions would you have to give a scripter so they could come and do this for you? 3. Can objects be dual use, i.e. for a non-premium member, they merely dispense an ordinary notecard from a give script, but for those with premium and Experience, the object does more, i.e. starts a collection game? 3. Aside from games, can this be used to make tutorials flow better? The problem I have for tutorials or help sims is that everything involves either clicking and having to say "yes" to get a notecard, or clicking and getting a speech from the talk script that must be read in chat, or a drop-down blue screen. So I wonder if there isn't a way to make this more seamless, you click and the speech is like a talk bubble of a cartoon character or you click and don't have to say "yes" to every notecard or things like that. To make it more frictionless.

Have your very own little mainland island with open Linden see and nice neighbours and views all around. A bargain at: $3000/wk/10,672 sq m/2,442 prims 4 weeks - 10% discount. $10,800 or about $40 a month, less than what you pay for Mainland or Private Island anywhere. Set up PayPal payment if you like. Great boating all around in the Hidden Lake sims of the Mainland. Terraformable about 4+/- meters. You can have skybox, pets, store, home, music/ban/plant etc -- and best of all join and start building right away, no waiting, and leave any time, refundable for a small cancellation fee. This is where you need to be, with the flexibility and freedom of the Mainland! http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Maryport/53/215/34

Ebbe, I find it profoundly disturbing that you continue this discussion for days without answering the question I and other land owners have posed to you: what is the plan for compensation or transition of sims? You answer about content, scripting, Linden dollars, but you don't answer about *the way in which you yourself make the bulk of your revenue* -- tier. When land barons buy islands, they have a formula for when they can expect to make back their initial investment over time, sometimes it may take a year depending on whether they will have a niche community, high-end content, low-cost rentals, competing with the very oversaturated market. Now, you might say it's not YOUR problem to worry about how individual businesses rise or fall in a separate "player" economy, and it's not your job to shield them from loss or hold their hand against the effects of normal market realities and fluctuations. But hey, when YOUR COMPANY is what is going to cause a GIANT TSUNAMI in the market, you have to have a responsible policy. Such as the Lindens had on two occasions before -- and both times under pressure from a concerted land baron faction a) compensation for telehub land b) access to the grandfathered price for islands for a longer period. Originally, LL was just going to let people suffer their losses after ensuring that the top barons got a wink and a nod and figured out to move quickly from rental to sales of telehub land to avoid major devaluation. Originally, LL was going to just let it's own special friends on an SL Dev list get the old, lower price for older servers when it moved to a new generation of servers. Both times, LL was forced to do the right thing and be fair and open and not close the market by having a policy that people were not massively screwed by its own actions. So what's YOUR PLAN for the sims? I realize you may not be able for proprietary reasons be able to explain whether there will be stand-alone "simulators" or geographically contiguous simulators or homestead sims or whether there will be bubbles or cloud parties or holodecks or whatever. Understood. But, you know, a frame for content and avatar interaction -- whatever the form it takes -- will be the thing that you must provide the 1:1 or 1: to some fair formula compensation/transition for. Will you? And it's not good saying, well, SL will be around for many years to come, so those who bought islands can make make back their purchase price and ease into the new world in an orderly fashion. But that's absurd, because just like when there was the opening of SL and it drained out There and The Sims Online, and Open Sims drained out SL to some extent in some areas, so when SL2 comes out, there will be a stampede there by those who are most portable, and customers will simply ditch higher price rentals and go rent from the new land baron class that will be privileged to be first in your New Shiny because they will have the right hook-ups. This happened on a large scale within SL when LL rolled out the cheap void sims that rapidly got massively purchased by land barons and massively overfilled until finally LL itself had to develop a new product and roll back the massive exploitation of its own too-cheap and low-capacity product. Until it did that, those who bought full-prim islands or mainland sat empty taking losses, or left SL. So what's it going to be? Massive bad press for your brand again and loss of customers, or, as Mitch Kapor always said, masochism for the user base? Perhaps you can't count on the masochism of the user base this one last time. Before Linden Lab itself helped to destroy Gaming Open Market, GOM in fact was our insurance against being screwed by game companies that banned us or took our stuff as it was a place to hold wealth or cash it out and transfer it to new worlds. If there were still GOM and other third-party exchanges, the transition in fact could be easier. But those were killed off deliberately to make yourself a monopolist in the market. Once again, YOUR OWN chief source of revenue comes from tier -- not your cut of content sales, not subscriptions, not necklaces and mugs and tablet titles. You know it and I know it. So why are we land owners the LAST people you are talking to here?

Well done!

Every time this debate has been had over the years, you insist that you know more about it than anyone else, and your source of knowledge is an inside track to Linden staff. Leave aside the awfulness of that proposition -- that only Linden friends and insiders get to rise in search and that this is called "skill" -- what you keep failing to note is that you didn't have enough land to test your concepts across large enough samples. My rentals groups literally had hundreds of parcels on dozens of sims, of all sizes, so I could see that first of all, indeed larger parcels did indeed do better. But there were other things related to ideological notions, perhaps tied to formulas of how an ad was written, whether it was a coherent sentence or just a string of key words -- those may have been deliberately punished. I had a test office parcel with one sentence "Our rentals are always refundable" that somehow got to the top in search constantly, even though it was a small parcel with little traffic and had only some freebies on it -- and even though in the rentals business, refunds are not something people search for necessarily. I know because I used to not use the word at all. I had thousands of happy customers who put my parcels in their picks because they had some good and memorable experience there -- the picks were used as people's inworld story boards. And that's why some of them did well in search. They weren't paid for this or gamed in any way; they put them in willingly. But although this was an organic and genuine phenomenon, I was punished by having it removed because some top slots were gamed. I myself, like numerous other people, used search/places to shop and explore and simply discounted the first 5-10-15 spots that were botted, gamed, paid for, Lindenized in some way by being mentioned on the blog. I simply ignored them, the way I ignored -- wait for it - the paid ads that first hit my eyeball at the very top of the Google page or the very top of the side of the page. The Lindens messed up search for most people, business owners and customers. The economy never recovered.

Dear Ebbe, Re: "Goal is to empower creators to do any content we can". So I see you are making the same mistake as the early Lindens, and other platform providers for virtual worlds like Blue Mars. What you fail to realize is that the content creation class of only perhaps 2-5% of the users can't drive the economy; people expect in an open-ended simulation that isn't a structured game that they will have "real-life" functionality like making a living and having something to do. People come into virtuality to do three things: a) play war b) play house c) play store. These are important human functions you can't erase from online existence. SL has fortunately downplayed a) because WoW existed and has been very good at b) and c). But "store" has to involve not just content creation but land, as *there must be a way for unskilled laborers to find participation in the world economy*. If you think that's not a serious problem, you're forgetting where your bread is buttered: tier. There is no way that other title sales, subscriptions, fees for currency or sales tax on creation sales will make a revenue stream as large as land. All media faces the problem that it can't live on subscriptions and classifieds especially online, and must use big advertising, which is the equivalent of sim set-up fees and tier. Think of tier as advertising revenue for media like TV or radio or online news sites and you will understand it better, because you seem to want to ditch it. No virtual world has never made it on either freebie/freemiums/hugely low-cost server offerings (and they've all tried). Because unless the company can share power with pro-sumers who *take care of their customers for them* they cann't function. LL is especially poor on governance and CS -- if you want to understand just how badly, go ahead and try to shaft the tens of thousands of land owners picking up that slack for you now with hundreds of thousands of users. Now I want a simple answer about the sim transition: is it 1:1 transition? pennies-on-the-dollar one-time compensation? Because it sounds like the contiguous geographical model is going to be ditched in favour of bubbles or "on-demand" Unity style sims or cloud parties or whatever. So if there is no 1:1 transition formula possible, what's the offer going to be on sim compensation? Unless this issue is resolved FIRST, you won't have revenue for development, you will shaft the future customer base. Time for the real-life media to get moving on covering this issue now so that you can start providing more crisp and clear answers. Finally, it sounds like you were spooked into this move and this premature leakage (which was about the open source fanatics trying to force your hand on that question) because of fear of FB and Oculus Rift and its "billion". But none of us peeped because it's entirely unserious. You forget that we've seen Google's Lively come and go with a resounding crash and absolute failure -- we were there. Google, with its billions and its capacity, failed miserably because they wouldn't share power and allow enough customer control and a market, including in land, which is essential. Metaplace, a much kinder and smarter VW, also came and went and failed as did its more farm-like island sequel. Remember Vivaty? Remember Small World? Remember Metaverse? Unless a company has a vision of sharing power and land for sale, no one cares. Everyone knows that if it's not a war game, it will be dull -- nobody wants to come and gawk at your 2% FIC content that they can't even size or edit or adjust, let alone make and sell their own stuff. If I wanted a ViewMaster, I'd go on my closet and find my Disney one from when I was 8 years old. No one can react to your leaks with anything but the most pragmatic approach of setting all available land to sale and also content, and ceasing all new purchases of content and land. That's because you don' t have an inclusive transition plan for the people who pay your revenue every month. Prokofy Neva

I would demand compensation because a) they have a history of doing this already b) that's the right thing to do c) they should be interested in not killing off their customers with a bad-faith action like this. And I'm the least of their problems as a tiny rentals business. This is an issue of principle with continents of sims 100s by count. Those people should care. They are only watching warily, thinking it will be far away in the future, or they already made their deal. But since not everybody is a big land owner, the issue must be raised early in the process, often in the process, and addressed properly. Remember, this story was leaked. It was not planned. It was leaked by people with a clear agenda to force the Lindens hand into open source at least of the browser. That's all that was about. I notice a lot of Social Darwinism in the sluniverse.com comments and elsewhere, to the effect that "If you can't manage your business like us high-end content creators, and you were in the server rental business, too bad so sad, it's progress, it's Silicon Valley disruption, guess that sucks for you." Sorry, but that's not acceptable. People who paid the bills around here for years need to be treated properly.

o every single texture you've uploaded for years will need to be redone, so all those 10 L fees are for naught now o there are plenty of cheap newbie rentals for $1.99 US per month, I have them, others have them too, they are all over, that is not the issue. The Linden Home option is only $9.95 a month with a house and spending money. Really not expensive. o you're merely saying your business costs to maintain a store for viewing is too high and cuts too much into your profits. Then you're in the wrong business or the wrong place. If you went on Renderosity, you might find much less business cost. o the reality is as I've explained that business costs for access platforms everywhere in Silicon Valley for middlemen, secondary vendors, people with ebooks, whatever are high. 30% for Amazon just to start in the US. This is life in the real big city which we've been sheltered from for years o the Lindens are not going to make land less expensive, they will either keep it expensive to pay their server costs, or change to a subscription/time/access model that will still mean high costs somewhere for some people. Remember, Ebbe said low land costs means high sales tax -- and frankly, that is NOT something he can pass on to your customers, but not to you. You will be paying the Silicon Valley entry fees which is a creator tax, a license cost, something like that.

Here's what's going to happen. The creator authoritarians who are only too happy to have the masses and the land barons who serve them screwed over in this move, and to shed them and the land model while they go to creator paradise and make new gadgets and baubles and make money, are going to get a very RUDE awakening. They will discover exactly what you've just said -- they've been in libertarian/communist paradise for 10 years, and it's about to get real. Silicon Valley real means HUGE cuts by the platform provider for the service of making your wares show up in search. I pay Amazon.com 30-70% in fees to collect my payments for my e-book for sale there. that's a whopping cut even at the low end, and almost not worth it at the high end (some countries take that much). So once you start paying those kinds of fees to be in Linden search, essentially, and essentially be licensed to create and access the market, suddenly, you will wish you had not spat on that land model so hard...

Well all that was deliberate, to try to move the revenue stream away from the land model, which they hate and detest though they depend on it, and move to a sales tax/currency exchange tax/subscription model. The Lindens need to learn, however, that this is not where their current bread is buttered, and need to stop shafting customers who pay bills. That means they to plan FIRST how they transition fairly, with compensation or 1:1 exchanges, THEN make their world accordingly. Not visa versa. Land is a model that is a good thing because it enables masses of customers who aren't skilled coders or designers to come in and have a job and something to do. Without that, SL is a Renaissance Faire where you gawk and stare and buy a few overpriced baubles and then go back to your hovel.

No. Not "well, duh, " Qie, you're wrong and he's right. It's appalling that the CEO of a company would not tell vital news to his most faithful and high-spending users who bother with the forums, and instead go to an elitist, highly closed third-party forum to chat only with high-end coders and graphic designers about his plan to make an even more elitist world and shaft this one. Here's my bottom line on this: o I'm selling any land that is not currently rented or needed for prim land immediately. o I'm not buying any more land or content o I'm demanding 1:1 compensation for sims in the new world, or, if they do'nt have sims (and they likely will not), some relevant and fair equivalent OR cash on a certain pennies-to-dollar basis for purchased sims as compensation. And that frankly should be the attitude of every land owner and particularly the big sim rentals businesses, full stop, and they should not argue or squabble about this but close ranks, put it on the table, *or walk*. I don't see any evidence that any of them got an insider chat and heads up about this, but they may have, that's a question to ask. But the vast majority of rentals, clubs, live music, mall etc sims are being shafted with this "backward compatibility" and "new world where the creator is customer" news. It's a world where *you cannot take your sim with you, much less your content*. Every penny you've spent here is lost, except possibly as good will to keep a group of customers that you might port to the new world IF you have money to invest AGAIN what you just ALREADY spent. Land owners need to be really, really clear on what's happening here and not have illusions about it.

You could try the apartments for a dollar a prim in Ravenglass or low cost apartments in Refugio. Teleport to Ravenglass Rentals Office

I've been in Second Life for more than nine years now. And for much of that time, I have run a small rentals business on the mainland -- mainly mainland parcels and mall space, although I have a few private islands. And I'm baffled over and over again as to how people acquire the expectations people have when they come to rentals. Perhaps people can explain to me. I realize that with private islands being the overwhelming majority of offerings, people get used to "buying" (it's actually renting from the island owner) a parcel that they then fully control. But there isn't a script that connects a payment event with a group invitation event, is there? That has never been something they've cracked in LSL -- that you pay a box, and instantly become a group member able to set prims. What happens is that people put their own group as the owner of that parcel, or set it to their group, and that's how they set prims. Unless I'm mistaken, there isn't a script that connects expiration of a rental box with clearance of prims on land. That is, there might be something that puts a number of minutes into the land menu, and connects that to payment -- I'd be interested to know. But this is what I find over and over again, that people think: "I should be able to return the prims of the previous tenant on this parcel even before joining a group" Why would you be able to do that? That would mean you could return group-set prims including the manager's rental box and any management prims like plants. No manager would set it up that way. You'd also be able to return your fellow tenant's prims on a whim. "If I pay a rental box, the previous tenant's house should automatically disappear." How? Is there really an LSL command out there that says "when payment event return all prims on parcel no payor"? Really, guys "If I join a group I should be able to return other people's prims even if set to group, and also control the parcel completely" A key problem with this idea is that if you had TOTAL control, you could sell the land out from under the group owner paying tier. Or put a parcel in search and cost him $30 a week with your store in the sky. So obviously these have to be managed carefully. "If my rental box expires, all my prims will instantly disappear and return to inventory" This idea is so deepset, so profound, that I have to figure this does happen in island rentals on some automatic basis. "Someone else can pay my box even though my box isn't expired" Yes, I realize there are boxes that take multiple avatar payments. But then...anyone can pay them. Not just you and your roomie, but anyone -- meaning they can then take away your parcel. So short of configuring a box with two names if there are sub boxes, what to do? I think single payor is better. The other one can pay after it expires. "My prim counter will tell me how many prims I have" The problem with this is that on group land, you are not limited to that parcel's limit in a group -- a parcel can borrow prim allotment from a commons or spare prim lot and such counters may not work. i realize there are very sophisticated rental systems with some of these configurations, although I'm not aware of anything that has "payment event=group membership". You could have a bot dispense an invitation to an open group or the landlord could manually issue one. Or you could have the first level of tenancy open in an open group to start out, and then manually move the tenant up to resident status with more powers, i.e. return non-group prims, ban, deed media. Again and again, I find people have the most elaborate, complex -- and unfounded -- ideas about rentals. They live in fear, thinking all their prims will disappear if a box expires. They feel without even being given return powers they should be able to walk and return everything that "doesn't fit" for them. Thoughts?

That isn't the issue. Here's the script, that used to work if you just changed the word in the quotation marks: string itemName = "Test"; // Replace the word in quotes with the name of the item you want to give. default { state_entry() { llInstantMessage(llGetOwner(), "Rice Krispie"); } touch_start(integer total_number) { llInstantMessage(llDetectedKey(0), "Delivering " + itemName + "."); llGiveInventory(llDetectedKey(0), itemName); } } Now, even if you reset the script, it keeps giving this error message: Unable to give inventory: 'No item named 'Test'.'. Something has gotten corrupted or no longer works.

$25/25 to $100/100 prims for your shop in an ancient lighthouse tower! Come and rent cheap space at one of Second Life's original Old World sims at the Magnetic Centre of Second Life on the mainland! The tower of Alexandria is one of the Seven Wonders of the World in ancient times. A great place to put a branch store or start a new business. This is one of the most original landscaped sims of the Mainland with a river running through it, open seas with icebergs floating, and hills and flatlands. There is a newbies infohub where we have tutorials, the International Bazaar, a shopping mall and starter rentals as well as a money tree which ensure plenty of visitors. Teleport to your new rental! Just one dollar a prim for $25/25 stalls, $50/50 towers, or entire floors with fly-in and teleports at $100/100 prims. Extra prims available. IM Prokofy New for the group.

The one I have stopped working, I don't know why. I am careful to put the name of the new object within the quotation marks, but it just won't work. I have GIVE ALL CONTENTS but I don't want customers to get the item, and then every script inside the prim, too, especially if I have HOVER, TALK, etc. scripts. I need a script that reads the agent and just gives them the one named item, which SIMPLE GIVE used to do. Can't find in the library.

Thanks, a simple and clear explanation that instantly worked like a charm. Obviously I Googled this for half an hour and looked at a bunch of help forums before I came on here. It was only because even the Knowledge Base, the Wiki, various other links in Google didn't give me the answers that I came here. I fail to see anything wrong with asking this question here, and getting an answer here. It's not a basic question but a more sophisticated one and it's about where folders are produced from the viewer.

I've never understood why Linden Lab constantly gears their product to exotic hipsters and geeks who buy computer parts on New Egg and build them themselves, or else hugely expensive custom computers, instead of gearing it for the masses who have to buy at Best Buy. Best Buy *only* has computers with Windows 8 now. You don't have a choice to get Windows 7 if your computer card finally burns out for the final time (after two years of running SL). You have to get Windows 8. And you don't have the time to fuss with how you could dial back to 7 because you have work to do, life has to go on, you are not a geek. Why can't they just walk a mile in our shoes to Best Buy and make their product fit with Best Buy/

Where do you find the chat logs and other avatar files for Second Life in Windows 8? You know that folder that is users/name/appdata/roaming etc. Can't find it for the life of me. Also, anybody else have this huge annoyance? You can't access IMs for people immediately if you bring up their profile from going into "edit" on an object. Or even sometimes from search. You get a little icon of a "lock". Then you have to *log into Second Life through the view inside their profile* (wild, eh?) in order to access their IM. Imagine doing this all night long with customer after customer as you try to give them notecards, merchandise, etc. Just annoying as heck. Customer Service didn't know what was talking about.

Have your own shop for Christmas, no waiting for the group like other malls, the group is open so move right in. Come to the beautiful church yard of St. Paul's Cathedral in the lovely sim of Grace for your store rental. You get to have your own shop name and music, and best of all, the search ad is INCLUDED in the price of just one dollar a prim. $150/150 prims and also one larger space for a bigger store of your own. Ask if you need more prims.

One of the great things that precludes critical thought in Second Life is the notion called "knowier-than-thou" in geek circles. I think it's probably predicated on vast, vast stores of insecurity, that come from people who in fact are self-taught, or at least, not recognized computer professionals working at IBM or something, but just kids who learned online. There's a terrible, crushing, overwhelming drive each time some critical discussion begins for some of the participants to prove they "know more"; that others are "clueless"; that "they know less" and -- "science" and "math". There's always this haughty, exasperated sigh, as if the person telling you about something as mundane as a toilet flushing only in a browser is somehow describing the celestial architecture of the ages. I'm just not snowed. I'm not worried about asking questions and trying to force obfuscators and insecure geeks into telling things in laymen's terms so that we can all get to the bottom of issues that impact the society as a whole. It's what society demands of every other walk of life, whether medicine or education or car repairs. The browser is now doing more things and doing different things. This may or may not have compelled the Lindens to change the TOS *and we don't know that because they haven't explained themselves*. There's an enormous amount of speculation about this *precisely because they never talk, and too many people think they speak for them*. Duh, we know that there have been many attempts and successes at copying over the many years that the Lindens have inflicted their open source cult on us and their embrace of third-party viewers that should have been locked out long ago. I've been in SL now nine long years, and I'm familiar with everything from Copybot to Thug Lyfe to Onyx. It's more than fine given all that to question whether the Lindens' new "Interesting" solution is opening up new vistas for copying. Not that they care as much about their users getting copied as they do claiming copyright of their uses' content. I'm going to try to fish out of this discussion some of the hard facts and useful points to reblog, disregarding all the sheer, unadulterated psychotic nonsense that occurs in these types of discussions because of people trying to prove they are smarter than you about some mundane technical thing.

Um, temporary means temporary. It means it is not kept permanently on your hard drive.

Yep, I know that. it's where you go to read your conversations which are in text files, it's where you can access other files. And, hey, let me suggest that if data in this case is overwritten, why, that's the same as being"thrown out". Just saying.

I'm really glad these are gone. No one resident should be able to encroach on not only all the public roads of SL with their business, but also encroach on private lands everywhere. It's like the Bush Guy (for those of you who remember the "Impeach Bush" signs all over SL in 2005, which were placed on small parcels of land set to ridiculously high prices, and then made to blight the view eveywhere, especially on hills and beaches. They were awful, and the issue wasn't Bush or freedom of expression, but extortion. It took the Lindens way, way too long to finally arrive at a policy about this -- it was literally years. AMT's vehicles were from the same exploitative manual of how one person could put themselves and their business endlessly in the view. AMT used to sell those cars and the cars were a moveable free ad on public land -- finally the Lindens made her get rid of that. But she could still have the run of all the sims. Why? Because Lindens wanted to promote road use, especially as they improved them, and didn't want to look like they controlled user content. But they piled up on some land, they crashed into things and got stuck, and they were always "off topic," i.e. a bus would go on water, a car would go on the railroad. It's much better when real people drive the cars and you can socialize with them and compare notes. You can still take trains, there are some great ones, if you want to tour Second Life.