Polenth Yue

I wouldn't be surprised if there's no demo before the next theme releases. Work is pretty far on and they could do with those houses now, rather than delaying for reveals. Though if they did do one, they could clone working regions, rather than needing to build something new. They could also be having secret mole parties with all the money they got from Abnor's lost wallets.

The way the rules describe them is: "Excessively overt or system resource-intensive interactive systems consisting of in-world scripted objects that communicate with one another to procreate (e.g. breedables) or grow (e.g. farming) to produce other products or consumables" In plain language, it grows and produces seeds for more plants, so it's one of those. The rule isn't about how they look or what they're supposed to be (plant, animal, fungus, rock, default plywood cube, unknowable cosmic horror, etc). It's about what they do. PlantPets are temp rez, though I'm not sure about Potted. I've seen enough PlantPets at people's houses to say that I don't think they've really been enforcing it, though I've avoided placing them out regardless. I do place food givers and those are temp rezzers for the most part, which can end up with the temp items on the ground if people refuse the attachments. That's another kettle of fish though. A lot more things do some temp rezzing than people think.

Only blue dots matter because I have to run towards them shouting "Bear!!! And/or trading card!!!" before they can escape. But if scripted agents did turn a different colour on the mini map, I'd think, oh, that's nifty. I do look at bot profiles and immediately I can see they're a bot, so a tag wouldn't matter much. I never look at the number of people logged in. I've never teleported somewhere based on there being many people. I go because it sounds like an interesting place. Useful? Not often. A lot of the big issues were handled by giving people control over bot visits and ways to detect them. Help keep new residents? No, they don't care about the maps, they've got a shoe box stuck on their right hand. I'd like to see a more general official help group, like the new Belli help group, as it's been a great way for some of us to answer a few questions without needing to be full-time mentors. Make people talk to each other again? I'm a mushroom. People won't stop talking to me. They tend to assume that I'm going to be friendly and I'm not looking for sex, both of which are correct assumptions. Which suggests to me that the primary reason that people are shy around strangers is not bots. It's bad experiences with other residents. Make clubs happening again? Too many clubs are human only, so I don't have any interest. However, I've not had issues at parties in the fantasy community. People talk. But how do I find these events where people talk, Polenth?! Right now, we have to hope people will see event suggestions here or keep up with the official blog. It'd be nice to have a year summary of the big events where people could easily find it and plan ahead. A lot of those events happen every year.

My understanding is when they say it's not being applied to breedables, they're not saying that shops that sell breedables can run regular gacha games. They're saying that randomness is okay in the context of the breedable system. You know you're buying a purple cat, but other features of the cat might be random. When the breeding happens, there will be randomness in which traits are passed on, because it wouldn't be much of a breeding game if there wasn't. Skill levels depend on the breedable. KittyCats have a basic genetics system, which does need some skill to understand. I'm a biologist, so it really just came down to analysing the charts for which things were dominant to what. But it's a bigger learning curve when people skipped science. If nothing else, people go away having learnt to draw a Punnett square.

Magellan Linden's blog is still available: https://secondlife.blogs.com/magellan/

I'm undecided how I'll do colours, though I'll likely make a tintable one so people can sort it that way. This is because it's debatable which colour/shade would be best (and likely different depending on the decor around the house). I've listed the main one first, but there are variations in shades between items and summer has some very different colours. You won't be entirely sure what shades the treehouse will be until you've seen all the seasons. (Non-glowing parts and items also change colour and those colours aren't always the glow colour.) Spring (March / April / May) - Green Summer (June / July / August) - Yellow / Pink / Peach Autumn (Sept / Oct / Nov) - Orange Winter (Dec / Jan / Feb) - Light Blue The exact crossover of the season is technically ending the last day of the last month in the season and starting on the first day of the first month. The time I saw it happen, it was before midnight rather than on the dot. In a similar way, you'll notice not everything switches to night mode at the exact same time and some items can get out of sequence.

Breedables are the ones for that, but keep in mind you're limited to two in regular premium homes and four in premium plus homes. The food also costs money for most of the systems. For pets where you just do animations for looking after them, but they don't need it and can't get sick, the Teegle animesh animals have those things as options. You can get grooming stalls and feeding troughs for the horses. The downside is your land impact will fill up fast with this sort of pet and accessories.

I'm already decorated for this Shroomasoween and have the stuff ready for my winter garden switch, so I'll sort a treehouse for next year. Not sure which I'll pick yet, but I like the included shelves as someone with a lot of knick knacks. I need to make some bracket fungus for that trunk though.

When it comes to activity, fantasy (pre treehouse) had more candy buckets than the other quieter themes. The forum tends to focus on fantasy, but that misses the bigger picture. It's not about whether people like dark green and crystals. Newbrooke, chalets and sakura don't have these things and had fewer candy buckets. Those themes are pretty different to each other, but what links them together is that they're all neither mainstream American houses or American tropical/rich dream houses. Those tend to be the areas where themes do best, because it hits a large group of customers. Newbrooke is an interesting case study here, because it is an American style, but not one most people live in and not exactly the luxury house people expected. The sort of modern houses people wanted were the fancy ones with the curved edges and glass, not repurposed shipping containers for basic housing. The theme started out popular despite that, but it didn't last. Which isn't to say that smaller niche themes shouldn't be created, as those hit a wider range of customers (I would pay for less tier if fantasy didn't exist and have held off on upgrading to premium plus). But it does have implications for future development. It means you're unlikely to get your science fiction Mediterranean French castle English cottage hobbit hole when current themes have space. Themes that aren't too different to current popular themes are more likely. What I hope is we'll see other additions to current themes. Cottages in chalets would be a way around that request, without having to do a whole new theme.

The default for KittyCat boxes is an actual box or special item (not with the picture) and no hovertext. The image and hovertext are options in the menu. It'd take a few menu clicks to revert them and remove the hovertext.

I very rarely put in reports. That's because I'm a spirit of the rules person, so I don't report as long as it doesn't appear to be causing a problem and isn't at risk of escalating. I've found plenty of examples in the former category, where they were technically over the limit, but clearly as pets in a decorated house. I don't draw attention to those. The limit could be a bit higher without causing major issues, in my opinion. However, the examples in this thread are in the latter category. They're new breeding setups with no signs of the house being in use for other purposes. Many breeders have a hard time sticking to small numbers of pairs, so it's optimistic to assume it'll stay there. It's better that they find out about the rules now, before they go full horse house. In the end, I'm a cynical pessimist, and you're never going to persuade me that I should trust that people will do the right thing and it won't end up with breedables crammed into every last space.

That isn't how it works. If you don't report a problem with a region, it'll just stay broken. They need people to help out and let them know when there are problems or things that will become problems. They wouldn't have created the rules if these things were not becoming problems. I'm not a fan of trying to shame people for caring about their stuff in Second Life. It's okay to care about things that are not life-threatening. That includes wanting a region where we have a virtual house to run smoothly, to not get randomly teleported home, and other things like that. I hit an instant ban/teleport orb during the hunt and it messed up my viewer to the point of needing a clean install. Which won't kill me, but I'd rather not.

You have to use one of the provided houses, but the land impact for those houses isn't taken from your parcel allowance. So it makes no difference to what you have available to use. EDIT: I didn't see Abnor's reply when I posted and can't delete, but if one answer is good, twenty are better!

Treehouses are the new fantasy house style! So cozy cottages, only up high and giving maximum garden space. That confirms one of the things they were working on. There's still the suspiciously theme-sized covered area and a few other random working regions that might be something.

They'd been working on a new Victorian island, but that seems to have halted whilst the other stuff goes on. It's just south of Merrymount.

When people talk about the group, it is almost always Bellisseria Citizens (founded by Gingir Ghoststar) unless otherwise stated.

The issue they're always going to have is they don't have time to create and maintain a series of very complex rules, so they set a simpler rule that'll cover it and be usable. That means they won't test every breedable to see how many can be placed without any issues and set numbers for that specific type. They aren't going to enforce rules that say selling is okay as long as there isn't more than one customer at a time for a total duration of ten minutes per day. Or that it's fine if the business doesn't turn a profit. Or if profits are below a certain threshold. These things would be terrible to assess and maintain. It's not terrible to have different areas for different things. I decorate in the home, have a shop on mainland, and keep the breedables to a friend's region. It's not bad to live on the mainland or a private region. It's the best option if someone wants more freedom. Anyway, someone was complaining in chat that a friend's breedables got returned, so it is being enforced.

In visiting all the released houses, I didn't see many items that were genuinely moving as far as the server is concerned. Most use movement that is handled by the client (phantom rotation, texture animation, real animations for animesh, particles), stuff that needs a simple script (faces are made visible/invisible to give the impression of movement) or only move on touch/sit. When people do put out ones that really roam, they keep the numbers down, because they're decor and it'd be weird to have a hundred of them. For roaming animesh, it's also because there's not enough land impact for many of them. This isn't a big area causing server lag. Not that all breedables cause it either, but the horse houses were a problem, so the rules changed. It'd also be hard to argue that a bare house with only breedables isn't commercial (and if looks aren't an issue, mainland would be better for that anyway... they could set up the shop on the same parcel).

Here are the stats as promised. I did this by wandering rather than lists. I visited every released region. I did the ranch theme twice at the beginning and end. Other themes once, with some spot visits to prime areas (like coastal locations) when I was getting the last few. So areas I searched earlier probably have more out now. Ranch: 155 Houseboat: 136 Stilt: 105 Traditional: 90 Log: 89 Victorian: 87 Fantasy: 36 Camper: 33 Newbrooke: 30 Sakura: 22 Chalet: 16 Specials: 2 (BBB and Auction) Total: 801 The order they were visited in was ranch, fantasy, victorian, sakura, traditional, log, stilt, houseboat, newbrooke, camper, chalet, ranch (second sweep). Mostly, the list is as expected. Areas with more residents had more candy. The current hot new thing (ranches) had the best haul. The one that stands out as different to last year is newbrooke didn't have a lot, especially as I visited near the end when the most buckets would be out.

I hit 800. I took some stats about where I found them, but it's sleep time first. The batcat is mine though!

They're KittyCats, which are breedables. The ones with the cardboard back are kittens in boxes, so they're not active breedables and not covered by the rules (as I understand it... they're just in storage in that state). The ones with the hovertext and an age are active and way more than is allowed. The flat version is just a low prim model for people who don't want the full cats roaming about. Which almost always means it's a breedable farm, as people with pets want to see their cats.

It's usual for objects that don't rez until you're close, which is how the buckets have been designed. For the big numbers, there's no getting around needing to search. Even if you use area search or a finder hud, you're still going to have to move around each region and visit most regions. You also can't move too quickly, because things need to load. Last year, I saw various people shoot above me at full fly speed and then complain in chat that there were no more buckets and they'd searched everywhere three times. I was still on my first round of searching and found all the buckets they'd missed. This is a tortoise and hare game in that respect. Things that make you go fast might seem like a good idea, but you miss too much and don't get the numbers, so it's the tortoise who gets the bat cats.

The point isn't thinking the new theme will be fantasy. The glimpses we've seen don't look fantastical in any way. It's that they've also got copies of the current fantasy regions online to work on them. Which implies there might be an update to fantasy. My guess would be new house styles as the most likely addition.

People are talking about it less on the forums, but that doesn't reflect inworld. People are chatting in groups and I know they're visiting my house (I see the "sales" on the gift and I get IMs). Keep in mind a lot of the extra chat on the forums was due to issues in the previous years, which have mainly been removed by going over to tier prizes. That means people can get on and enjoy it. I'm competitive in the sense that I want to get all the candy and the last prize, but I don't miss the whole top ten thing. It's meant I could take time off at the start to get my gift ready. I've also done more other Hallowe'en rides, walks and hunts. This is a much nicer setup this year.

No official confirmation, but I hit 400+ from searching regions and have about half the themes left to go. 800+ is a reasonable estimate.