Nathan Adored

This discussion brought to mind something I saw recently in a tutorial video for DAZ Studio 4 that it'd make sense to have in the SL viewers. I think it might have been in the first or second video you get sent to when you first run the program. Briefly they showed a bit where you could take the avatar, any avatar, in there, slide a slider on it, and the av went instantly from adult to kid and back, with all the parts of the body (arms, legs, head, etc) changed to the right proportions for that age. He slid the slider one way, BOOM! Instant kid. Slide it the other way, BOOM! Instantly adult again. I saw that and thought, "Wow, I so wish we had that on SL!" Seeing as how my persona is based on a character who's been through multiple time warps that made him younger again or older again, it'd be handy. But it would definately make it much easier to have realistic-looking kid-avs. So many times, someone takes the provided grown-up av they're given and tries to kid-size it, but gets it all wrong.

Yeah, theres a great many profiles I've seen that have stuff clearly not suitable for RL kids to see. Some of it in the About: and 1st Life: fields, some of it in Picks and stuff.... and quite a lot of this probably in profiles belonging to ppl who haven't logged in since dirt was in beta. Awhile back, I came across a Brazilian lady in world who had in her 1st Life pane, a PHOTO of (presumably) herself.... with her privates plainly seen, and her 1st Life photo was of her and some other naked people. I remember looking at that and thinking "Gee, I'm not offended myself, but some RL kid's mother or father is going to have a conniption fit if they see that over their kid's shoulder!" For 7 or 8 years, SL maingrid was specifically limitted to 18+, and all those gazillions of parcel and sim descriptions, profiles, and whatnot were written accordingly. It is going to take a LONG time for all that stuff to get weeded out. It would make sense for all prior-to-the-changeover-to-teens-here profiles to be made hidden by default, at least to RL teens, until each individual user manually changes the flag back to visible again, presumably after he's taken anything adult-ish out of his profile. And, on a different note.... WHY the bleepity bleep does this blog STILL default to you receiving email notices of every post here after you post? I have to come in every time and turn it OFF again! I want to turn it off and have it STAY off!

Well, the Pheonix devs are busily making their version of Snowstorm, which they call Firestorm, have a 1.23-ish GUI and stuff, while adding all the neat functionality that Pheonix viewer has, but of course keeping all the underlying new technology of the 2.4 viewer. I'm looking forward to that one coming out of beta.

Ah, according to Pheonix's blog, their viewer DOES currently support more groups here... but you have to manually turn it on in Debug first. Oo http://phoenixviewer.blogspot.com/2011/01/42-group-limit-is-officially-live-on.html

So, anyone logged in using Imprudence or Phoenix right now: do you have the 25-groups limit still? Does it still show as "x out of 25 groups" on your Profile pane?

So, in a 1.23 viewer, you can't add more than the 25 groups? Even if you're on a TPV that DOES let you join more than 25 groups when you're on an OpenSim grid using that same viewer? Is the limitation at the viewer end (i.e. it's merely hard-coded into the viewer like some of them had the 10m prim limit hard coded, but don't anymore) or is it something at SL's end that has it hard-coded into the mechanism at the server that 1.23 viewers interact with when you add groups (and where, presumably, the 2.4 viewers connect to a completely different group handler mechanism at SL's servers)? I remind you that sometimes you get presented with a join-this-group notice when you're not expecting one at that moment. You buy a complicated product from a merchant in world, shortly thereafter you get a notice to join their support group. The exact interval between buying the product and getting the join notice is impossible to predict, because it happens whenever the merchant logs in and sees you bought his or her product, and sends you the join notice, and you may not even know that that product has a support group until you get the notice. (I.e. you know some do and some don't but you've lost track of which is which.) And the group likely isn't one where you can go find it and join at your leasure, because it's one where they hand pick those that they offer membership to: those who have bought a particular product from them. And the offer to join disappears if you can't act on it right then. I.e. you can't just table it, log out with the 1.23 viewer and log in with the 2.4 viewer, accept the group invite, and then log out again and return the the 1.23 viewer. You're up a gum tree without a paddle here. I HOPE this is just a temporary limitation, and that one or more of the 1.23-codebase TPV viewer makers like Imprudence or Phoenix come out post haste with an updated viewer that DOESN'T have that 25-groups-only limit baked in, or that they already ARE coded such that the 25-groups-only issue would just magically disappear once SL upped the group slots. If it is a hard-coded limit at the server end with a group handler that's presented only to 1.23 viewers, then I hope one of the programmers at LL just quietly takes out that hard-coded limit at their end, post haste. I'm not yet ready to go to a 2.4-codebase viewer, largely because I'm waiting for a sufficiently developed version of Firestorm to come out.... and I gather that's still 3 or 4 months off.

all mesh beta participants would need to incur a 6 month or longer delay before they could engage in mesh related commerce while the rest of the residency gets up to speed. Why? oO If LL did something like that -- made all particicipants in the closed beta have to wait 6 months after birthing it before they could participate in the thing they helped birth -- you can bet it would dry up to nil the pool of willing beta testers NEXT time LL wants to introduce some major new feature, because everyone who's knowledgable enough to be of help in such a thing -- from their being part of the technical crowd that are directly a part of the highly experienced SL community that would USE such things -- would now have to factor in that they'd now, at some point in the near future, then be sacrificing 6 months of their future OUT of the playing field simply for the priviledge of helping LL out of the kindness of their hearts in helping birth a potentially, revolutionary new feature in SL. Or it would mean that the only ones that would come next time are those who don't have the knowlege or expertise TO know what needs to be done... because all those that DO have the technical knowledge (those that know what the SL market needs, etc) would run for the tall grass just to prevent themselves from being locked out of the market for six months later. I'm sorry to be blunt here, but if LL put in place such a policy, it would be reckless and irresponsible of them! And it might well drive all such developers to the OpenSim grids! Seriously! Okay, so someone will get an advantage over you. Hell, LIFE IN GENERAL has people who have an advantage over you! There is nothing you can do to stop that, except impose some sort of beaurocratic, monolithic, government-imposed everyone-must-be-equally-misrable-and-poor policy onto all its citizens. There is just too much of a mentality in todays world that says "Gee, that guy is richer than I am, that's just wrong!" "Gee, that guy lives closer to the beach than I do, that's just wrong!" "Gee, that guy has a nicer computer than I do, that's just wrong!" and somehow think that things would be better if NOone was richer than they were, or lived closer to the beach than they do, or had a more powerful computer than they do, and so, rather than trying to help more people get richer, help more people be ABLE to move to a place closer to the beach, or be able to get a better computer, they wanna make sure everyone else is pulled down to THEIR level. If that's the planet you live on, then I'm sorry, I don't WANT to live on the same planet as you do! addendum: That said, I wouldn't mind if LL strongly encouraged those who'd been in the closed beta to actively help those that weren't get up to speed on things, tho. In any event, it is pretty clear at least one of the closed-beta people ARE fully intending to do just that.

Well, they might at a later date add the ability to make them hollow, change their cuts and twists and tapers, and such, and make the rigged-to-a-skeleton meshes deformable by script. They DID after all add on some capabilities after the fact to other neat new in-world-rezzable features after they'd been introduced. Remember when, to make an object fullbright or glow, you had to do some sort of hackish thing at the moment of original creation? That was before my time, but I saw references to it having been that way once. And, apparently, there IS a way someone developed of making sculpies flexxy, but I haven't seen it done.

Okay, can someone suggest a good, Collada-mesh-capable 3D modelling program that is A, cheap or free and B, very easy for a novice to get a handle on and make decently complex objects with on a short term basis? As in, install the program, and be making good looking objects by the end of the day?

Prokofy, if there have been any statements by LL that the old system for making things (prims, sculpties) was going to be phazed out, I'd love to see you provide a link to it. I seriously doubt anything of that sort has ever been said, or is even being planned. In fact, I'm pretty sure they've said things to the contrary. In any event, I, personally, am looking forward to Mesh imports, and have been looking forward to it for months. For one thing, it will allow better avatars, and better clothes, and also I expect -- and indeed COUNT on -- Mesh support to show up on OpenSim soon, too.