Prokofy Neva

And the response is -- that's great, but not everybody likes that look. It's a look that works great for 1920s Berlin. It's not a look that works great for everything. Photorealism often just looks terrible in SL because it doesn't fit with the rest of the world which is Linden-made (like roads and trees) from drawings or a "fantasy" look for a virtual world. Photorealistic textures substitute the photo for the prims -- but then that means the feeling of heft or depth or weight disappears and you feel as if you are moving among postcards. It doesn't matter if those postcards are hugely convincing and competently done. They still have a feel that doesn't fit in many places. Prims give you more of a feeling of immersion because each individual object has dimensions on the grid; the sculpty is often something you can't place another object on and ditto the mesh because it has no solidity. This is something that no one ever talks about and for some people spending a lot of time chatting in IMs or just dressing their avatar, the look and heft of the world doesn't matter. But it does to others, especially those who grew up thinking in terms of "prim craftsmenship". Constantly affirming that photorealism "looks better" and shows off 3D tools better just doesn't matter, because these are questions of feeling and taste and custom, and people either like it or they don't.

This is interesting, but sad (for an old-timer like me) that the Game God will not descend into the World this year and do one of his walkabouts. In the past, whether it was Philip Linden or M Linden, they would actually come inworld for the birthday and give a speech. Now, to be sure, you couldn't get near the sim unless you knew somebody who knew somebody who knew a Linden, but you could at least press your nose to the glass on the next sim over, and if they put 4 sims together, that meant at least 160 lucky people would get to be present for the event. In the old days, they used to have relay radios put on sims where you could hear the Great Leader speak as in a Fireside Chat. It was fun. But now he's only viewable not in real-time, on a machinima prepared by Draxtor. So it's like a canned televised message from the president, not live. It would be one thing if the world was so big that it no longer made sense to appear for 160 or 16,000 spread out on many sims with radios. But the world is smaller and has shrunk. Then as for his "state of the union" address -- well, half a billion dollars in user-to-user transactions is a great story and a great secret in Silicon Valley that should get more attention. But this "creativity" fetishizing loses sight of the fact that 10 percent of the population are making most of the content for the other 90%, and that it is really far more about consumers and amateur creativity of decoration, lifestyle, RP, etc. than about the physical act of creation on Blender or whatever. It's also true as others have said that the new tools of mesh and materials and such are elitist and are no longer doable inworld. If somebody has jimmied up some inworld facsimile, that doesn't count and probably only works for certain photorealistic textured buildings or something, not complex stuff.

I see the advertisement for the 10th Anniversary of Second Life shows people in a jacket with "10th anniversary" and the logo. Are they going to have these available on the Marketplace or are they available somewhere already?

Come to the SL Public Land Preserve, which was founded in 2004 to help keep some mainland areas open and free for recreational use. Start in Carlisle next to the Ravenglass tower where you will find a big tree house with a list of landmarks of all the locations, about 30 or so. Just type "Carlisle" into the World Map and you will land near the docks. Most of them are old-school Old World in prim with not too much sculpty and mesh, but some here and there. Mainly prim though, which I prefer myself.

Yes, it's very realistic, yet still exotic, real and virtual somehow. I'd love to know what the different materials used are in the objects. Mesh? Sculpty? Does anyone use prims anymore?

Eyesorce? Yeesh, wait until you see Google Glass, speaking of Eyesorce!

I'm happy for Linden Lab to do anything they need to do to make money and stay in business. I'd like them to sell the ad space to resident businesses both on their website and in the welcome and infohub areas. I've been saying this for eight years and it gets boring to repeat, but the Lindens have to figure out how to make money for themselves and resident businesses together, that way both succeed. Why let have Google make money, and LL make only a bit of click revenue from gold sellers and engineering programs that will lead to few conversions when they could sell ads for stuff that people want and will buy and will pay for.

I try not to leave things that can be edited by tenants because I have an open group and that means then editable by griefers. I guess we are being driven to buy mesh products then.

Oh, I totally get it about the box-dragging. Especially because this was done by someone else, not me, with Phoenix viewer, which I refuse to use, so they couldn't do "select only my objects" and they may indeed have missed some. But it was off by like 400, so that seemed odd. What I object to is others speaking as if they have "the absolute truth" about mesh and its readings. I don't claim the truth. I don't speak as if it were an absolute truth. I say that in fact there are questions to have, you have to keep an open mind, and the last place to get an accurate and unbiased answer will be Lindens, who have a stake in this not being true, and certain builders/merchants, who also have a stake in this. I don't see in fact that all the 2000 prims on the 4096 *are* accounted for. Since the *other* now empty parcel turned up 145 prims that just didn't exist inworld but seemed to return, I think it's possible on the other one. These two lots never showed overrages. They never overaged into a third parcel that was supposed to be kept empty for the river and boats to pass. This build has hardly changed, especially in recent months. So for this to be happening *now* means some even occurred, or the software changed. I will go on looking at each object and the build and figure it out eventually. Odd duplicates are always an issue, I've seen that before. That happens when you rez a lot on a build tho, and this hasn't had hardly any changes. The only thing I found underneath the ground before on the other lot was an invisible copy of something that had once been rezed and deleted. That was odd. It didn't rez invisible, so it made a second invisible copy. You can't look at lists of names of objects on the mainland. That's the frustration.

No one changed it. But if a torus now reads as 37 and not 1, although the set of circumstances that make that happen do not appear to have occured, that might be an explanation. There is one object that enables insertion of other objects into it. SO that might have been griefed.

There is no mesh in this build. There is no linked mesh in this build. It's an old build of 7 years, and the objects inside the building are all prims based, with a few sculpties, and no mesh objects. There are no mesh objects even on this sim to my knowledge, although there could be in the stores in a separate land group. Viewer1 is still supported, but being phased out. But I'm on v3 so that is not the issue. Nothing was changed in the physics. The builds were all unlinked in fact. I started to link up some of them merely to copy and save them for fear that the build would all return due to this issue. Yeah, I get it that this "shouldn't" happen. That the reading "should" book prims in the same way if mesh/physics/scripts blah blah are not involved. But it did. And when that happens, instead of rushing to justify LL or justify furniture and prefab makes who don't want any customer to get the idea that suddenly all their objects "weigh more" or "take up more land," you have to keep an open and curious mind, which is what I do. I don't "need" the readings to be different. But...they are. There is the mystery of the 145 prims that returned but yet don't realy seem to be there. There is the mystery of the Phoenix viewer photo that Jadeclaw made that captured every prim, and showed right on the viewer in the highlight what the land impact should be -- 1800 something -- and then the reality of what it shows actually on the land menu inworld: 2200 something. Each and every prim in the build will have to be examined. In each every object inside the buildings will have to be taken back to inventory and also looked at to see how it is impacting. Given that the build itself doesn't have so many prims, and the objects with the high prim counts were already removed, it seems a mystery at this point. But those who need fervently for the new Land Impact never, ever to read wrong because then it would mean there were bugs in their software or impacts on their business are not the people to get the story from on this. In needs an independent and objective investigation. I don't have the time to undo the entire build now, as I'm busy and traveling, but in about 3-4 weeks, I will get to it and take it all apart. At this point, my working hypothesis is that there is a bug in the software as played on that channel and that it is giving the overrages suddenly in the reading and that when I remove everything, and the land will appear empty, and it will not have a build in the sky, then it will show 200 or 400 or whatever non existence prims, just as the other parcel did. Now, this might "go away" if some other channel was put on it (which is why I asked for but didn't get that); it might resolve for other reasons. Meanwhile, I see the exact same thing happening on another sim now. Fortunately that sim has a big buffer. No one is required to believe me about this but the minute it impacts one of you directly, then you'll get it. I suspect if it *is* a bug, that you will see many, many more people experience it and we will start to hear more cries. But given that the oldbies and their legacy builds don't log on, something like the return of the Ivory Tower of Prims could occur and the tree could fall in the forest without anyone hearing it...

Thanks for this public service, Jenni. It seems to me, however, that what *politically* is really happening here -- once you get through all the technicalities -- is that readings of "how much prim space remains" on a leased server, i.e. "what the land impact is" -- can very likely change for the *higher* or the *lower* -- but quite often *the higher*. Phil thinks that if an object goes from 2 prims to 4 LI while remaining the same object, or 16 prims or 18 LI while remaining the same object, merely "opted-in" or "linked differently," that "it doesn't matter". He likely doesn't want any one to stop buying primmy furniture for fear it will use up land. But it is using up more land. The Lindens have basically just raised tier by making the existing offer of server space in fact less. They obviously want to work very hard at hiding that news And so does the creator/scripter class -- they want to book it to FUD and "misinformation" if people see the new LI as basically halving the product and keeping the same price. But that *is* the news. And it's bad news -- a torus isn't 1 prim; it's a whopping *37* LI; 2 prims become 4, etc. This isn't trivial; it's not anecdotal; it's system wide; it has repercussions. This explains while an old legacy build from 2005, which has been obviously there mainly unchanged in its main components since then -- for more than 7 years -- and which had never been over its parcel limits could suddenly show nearly twice the number of prims and thereby use up a buffer and make it impossible for boats to pass. A chair that was 22 prims was now showing as 28; overall, a viewer that highlighted and showed the number of objects as 400 plus and 1800 something LI on the viewer, in fact inworld was showing 2200 on the actual land viewer, using the latest v3. If you suddenly have to get rid of half your prims or 1000 prims, you end up having to cut the build in half, and figuring out how to fake-link prims to get them to force the "favourable reading" and all the rest described here. What a racket! What a pain! How awful! This is exactly what I'm going through now. http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2013/01/not-our-world-even-if-our-imagination.html Most people on a smaller parcel in a rental somewhere aren't going to notice much. Perhaps they'll not be able to put out as much stuff. Or maybe some stuff will actually book as lower now, so they cancel each other out. I've already had some tenants on the mainland get exasperated at "new readings" of their formerly prim-compliant lots. I come, and I'm perplexed, too. You count the prims in the objects by looking at edit -- but the land impact is higher, sometimes by hundreds, forcing prim overrage in a group that wrecks havocs on group rentals on mainland. The Lindens and their chief apologists keep telling people the Party line: that the new reading system only affects mesh; that old legacy prims are essentially grandfathered; but wait, scripts might cause some different readings...and then they begin to mumble (which is why Jeremy Linden's article is so unclear -- it's deliberate -- ANYTHING but tell the customer that the product is now diminished but sold at the same price). Everyone knows what happened to cereal boxes in the recession. The price of cereal went way up, especially after some droughts. So instead of putting higher and higher prices on the boxes of cereal so that they would become ridiculous, like US $8.00 or $10.00, to keep them at $5.82 or $6.89 or something that looked plausible, they just reduced the size of the box, and also put less cereal in it but fluffed it up with air. When you get home and put your "new-sized" cereal box to a "legacy cereal box" in the cupboard, you see how you've been robbed -- when you open up the box and find half of it is air and there's about two bowls of cereal inside, you realize just how badly. The same thing has happened to Second Life.

The answer for "to whom" is supplied by Second Life: no one, and therefore *delete*. This is the right answer to give to communized property, you know? The exception is if the item is on transfer. Then it is supposed to go back to its original owner who deeded the item. In practice, this doesn't always seem to happen. Don't pose the server questions it cannot answer or it deletes...

Deeded items that are non-transfer are deleted by the system if they return from the parcel to lost and found. If you make a mistake in changing the land groups this can happen. So be careful. I *think* that if you try to take group and buy it with another group, the items don't go anywhere. So fix the items first. Do you really need them all deeded? Deeded items have problems often.

That's strange that you can't return an unwanted object. Did you try going on the about land menu and tabbing to "objects" and looking at the prims on parcel and returning that way? Objects can ghost and seem not to return and sometimes you have to do it that way. But it sounds like this idiot has rooted his prims on his land so that they aren't technically on your land but just displaying there. So abuse reporting him by going to HELP at the top of the screen and ABUSE REPORT. Be sure to click off the screen shot. Label it as obscene in mature or whatever seems appropriate in the list and say "encroachment" in the report box. If you don't get action in a day or two, have friends come over and abuse report it until it works, sometimes a chorus is needed.

The rate that these few companies buy at now, either with bots or in person, is now down to .1 or .01. It is absolutely rock bottom unless prime land.

IM me inworld, I have a better free script for doors that you can reset so that no names would be in it until you give it the command for a name.

What is Alpha Sorting? Oh, never mind, I don't think I want to know. Um, Governor Linden land for $1/ has indeed changed the market -- it's made it plummet to absolutely bottom -- and below. You can no longer sell your land to bots except for about 0.01 per meter. Greater region controls? Really? Where? What I'm seeing on viewer 3 is just hobble after hobble to the landlord work flow -- too many steps to adjust group membership powers, prims on land, etc. etc. Concierge has gotten better, to be sure.

Well, the Lindens started this ill-advised Governor Linden $1/m glut in the belief that it would free up all that unused abandoned land, especially from Zindra migrants, and get it under tier faster than the auction especially from people on sims who were existing owners. But in fact, they are now victims of their own success as I said in the other thread, because they drove the price of land down so far that not even any bots will come fetch it even at .5 or .2 or even .1. There's like one bot that will come when it is nearly at 0, and maybe one or two live people who will come if it is choice land. They've got it to rock bottom now. Philip's dream -- he hated aribtrage. For anyone considering the sale of their land, they rapidly see, within a day or two even if they leave out good land at .5 per meter, there is no point. So they abandon it so as not to pay the tier.

I can't see how this possibly has anything to do with putative new Steam players. In order to come into Second Life and figure out that there is a lot of abandoned land on the Mainland and then figure out the pricing on the auction, you'd have to really be following Second Life for awhile, and in depth. Most people don't go on the Mainland, they go to Linden Homes at the beginning or to island rentals. So it seems that a supposed motivation on the part of the Lindens to "get rid of the yellow" just doesn't track. This Steam player would have to have mastered looking at the map, flying around the Mainland, comparing prices, etc. etc. Just doesn't track. As we know from Tyche Shepherd who does the grid surveys, only five percent of the Mainland is abandoned. That actually isn't very much. It just seems like a lot when it's on your sim. I don't have a scientific count on this, and maybe Tyche will soon, but it seems to me that the Lindens are auctioning off more land lately rather than abandoning it. I've seen a large parcel that seemed to sit forever in Grace, more than a year, suddenly go purple. I see other purple that didn't seem to be there before I thought they might keep in "maintenance" for ever. I think it's more about two other factors: a) just trying to squeeze more revenue out of the grid -- the purple lots can be sold for dollars or if for Lindens, a higher price than abandoned b) selling lower on the auction because Governor Linden is now a victim of her own success -- land prices have dropped to ridiculous amounts -- 0.50 per meter won't attract bots anymore or even savvy buyers live, and even 0.01 isn't guaranteed to work, showing up as "0". Abandoned land sits there at $1/m for a year -- I just tracked some pieces like that.

Of course the Lindens read the forums everyday, der. If for no other reason than to swing the ban hammer or delete scythe now and again. Surely they watch for big fires and report them to the boss. Reading the forums is an endurance test, however, even for a good-willed and even obsessed Linden. I have yet to see this group complaining here draw up a 7-point or 10-point agenda that they all have consensus on, to hammer out something that is realistic and doable, but also may contain some aspirational things the Lindens can't do, but could explain why they can't better. I have only experienced this inexplicable glitch with the non-delivery/refund thing once myself, even selling stuff every day, but I'm not a big seller, I just make stupid little stuff for pennies. I guess I'm not even getting the mechanics here of why stuff doesn't work like this: 1. receive payment 2. validate that payment is received 3. then ship item Am I seeing things or does it appear that the item ships before payment is *validated* i.e. showing on the "My Accounts" as a "plus"? It would seem that all inworld sales work this way -- first the "ka-ching" noise of the cashregister, THEN the thing flies off your lot or out of your inventory. When you pay inworld, FIRST you pay, then, after a few seconds or more, the item comes to your inventory with a message. So why doesn't the Marketplace work that way? I also think the group has to work up their red lines and their consensus on what they could cave on. I don't think any special certified merchants should be the result of this exercise. I also note that when there was a lot of griefing and problems with gambling and lack of clarity of what was legal gaming, the Lindens decided to solve the problem by meeting twice a week inworld for about 2-3 months until they got a handle on the problems better and reassured the public. Two times a week is a real burden for this reduced staff, but they could say they'd do it for 90 days until they reach improvement metrics.

Some SL history for you young whippersnappers and those who don't remember history and may be doomed to repeat it -- as to what happens when you demand -- and get -- a meeting with Lindens and demand -- and get -- a list of your requests: In 2005, the Lindens decided to deprecate the telehubs, because they wanted to introduce point-to-point teleportation. They didn't inform the public they were going to do this. They continued to sell scarce and valuable telehub land on the auction and accept payments from unwitting merchants. They continued to roll out new sims with telehubs, place the bid higher than for other land on the auction, and accept payments. Anshe Chung cornered the market on a lot of this land as she often did with higher bids, but instead of renting a lot of it, she began to sell it instead for a higher price. This was either because she, like other sharp-eyed power players spotted the implications from the Lindens new improved map features that showed buildings, and realized they would move to PPT, or else she had an inside tip, or both. Long story short, many merchants got caught with a lot of suddenly very worthless land they'd paid a huge amount for when the Lindens announced the removal of telehubs -- which were hated by an old guard of early adapter merchants with stores in remote places on old sims, because they enabled newer merchants to more democratically enter a free market just by paying highter telehub mall prices. Most transactions in Second Life were happening at telehub malls, and despite the horror stories of lag and blight, that's where most people shopped. A group of land barons demanded a meeting with the Lindens over the telehub and other issues of the day -- everything from a demand to have a corporate ethics manual (people were tired of Linden staff endorsing some of their friends in business and throwing them more revenue that way) to an end to the practice of having invisible Lindens enter sims to spy on people. The land barons got their meeting. Let me tell you that it was quite a sight when a dozens of land barons on a fully packed sim faced down Philip Linden and Robin Linden, and stood up and said they would take action if he didn't meet their demands. The forums went wild with hatred of land barons and jealousy that they got a meeting. All they did was get organized and be public about what they did, which was normal in a democratic society. The scripters and oldbie designers who already got their meetings with Lindens in real life or inworld on their alts secretly were fuming. The result? Well, not a real lot. A sort of half-hearted corporate ethics manual was made, but it didn't deal adequately with the issue of residents-turned-Linden who didn't abandon their conflicts of interest in huge businesses or influential social projects. But on the telehubs, the Lindens -- after their minds were concentrated by getting a letter from some lawyers noting that they could face "bait and switch" charges under California law -- and ads from Anshe saying "Turn Your Back on Governor Linden" threatening to stop buying Mainland on the auctions, the Lindens decided to provide compensation. They agreed to buy back the now-useless telehub land at the reasonable price of $6/meter. Not great, when it sold for $20 at the time or more, but it was something. The Lindens got back at the revolting landlords -- they then suddenly land-glutted with dozens of pretty white sand sims in a separate area off the mainland -- but still mainland -- called "bulk sims" -- so that Anshe was forced to buy this higher-priced land, even with her coffers filled with compensation from the telehub malls, and thus not get ahead as originally planned. Then later, the Lindens had to eat some of their profits again over the island pricing scandal (they were about to raise the price and were going to let developers inworld on their SL Dev list get an early whack at last-minute sales and grandfathering). Then the Lindens got their revenge back by changing the homestead pricing. There's much more to this story which I've blogged about in the past, but the moral is: Yes, you can demand inworld meetings and maybe get them. And yes, it makes sense to go to the Lindens with demands, and even lawyers. They do respond. In part. Then they get revenge. Never forget: it's their game. I think personally on the Marketplace issues, that there has been just too much hurry to ascribe ill will to Lindens at the helm here, and not willingness to see that their business interest requires a fast and furious move to the Marketplace to try to change their model of sole reliance on server leases to one in which move revenue comes in the form of digital content sales commissions. It's sad, and short-sighted and all the rest, but it's their business, not ours, and they aren't required to help our businesses, and don't, and it's better to accept that and move to other grids, or adjust. In a world where first voting on the JIRA was shut off, then the very view of the JIRA was shut off and limited to only a very select short list of scripter friends, you can hardly say that communications are two-way in other aspects of SL. They aren't, and this is indicative.

Right now, I'm looking at the menu on my homestead, and comparing the collision scores of my beloved sion chickens, that Falcoln Linden has called "nonperformant" (!) versus some NPC characters being tested with the new pathfinding scripts. And here it is: 0.410 sionChicken 0.410 primavimator 0.450 swordsmen NPC 0.450 Agave Plant Pathfinder 0.410 sionchicken 0.410 sionchicken 0.460 Agave plant pathfinder 0.450 primavimator Now, I am not one to fear colisions. Collisions are the heart of Second Life! Without collisions, there is no Life. It's more about minimizing them, no? But I do turn a weather eye on Linden pronouncements that there latest Shiny Thing doesn't impact sim performance -- see Windlight, for example. On this sim, with these NPCs wandering around and two avatars, TD is still optimal 99 and FPS is 45. Script time is 2.83 and spare time is a generous 16.739. What's not to like? Perhaps someone could tell me the optimal range for the Pathfinding statistics now: AI step time 1.45 skipped silhouette step 8/sec characters updated 87.7

PS I had to wonder that if you have the ability to make any thing on a server take on a standard optimal shape in the code for the best physics, regardless of its actual manufactured shape or how it renders inworld (I'm presuming) then...why aren't *all* things rendered on the server made the optimal shape behind the scenes to optimize the physics?

Do not dis my chickens as "nonperformant," Falcon. My chickens are not "nonperformant". They don't navigate by bumping into things unless people get in their way. Your little pathfinding beasties cannot hold a candle to my chickens. My chickens will fight your pathfinders any day of the week. My sim or yours.