Cinos Field

Unless you're a furry, anyway! Quite a lot of furry body parts come with UV maps, and the bodies with freely available dummy models. It's not too late to join the fuzzy side!

The equivalent of that for the default viewer is to relog. Basically what SL does is it sometimes detaches stuff you have on but leaves a "ghost" attachment for you. Same reason your hair might fall off when teleporting, and you still see it but nobody else does. The attachment refresh fixes that; as far as I know the only thing the default viewer can do is relog. That's assuming it's not a script error in which case neither strategy works, but Maitreya can't possibly have left such a big issue in their flagship product...

In my experience talking with newbs - both ones i encounter in the wild and ones I introduce to SL - it's basically half the mechanical difficulties and half not having any idea where to go to find people to do what they want with. i.e. say you join SL and want scifi roleplay. Where do you go? You'd have to get lucky with search, or rely on word of mouth. If you want to be a DJ, where do you go? And so on.

I do tend to approach people as the shape they are, at least at first. So I might ask a giant dragon to maybe not eat me rather than saying hello. Or I'll greet a human avatar with "hello, human!" if they're an unusual sight. It feels more natural, and I at least personally like it when people at least acknowledge what I look like rather than just doing the generic approach. If it's subconscious I can't really say, but it can at least result in more interesting conversations than just going "hello, how are you?".

It is also worth noting that the only truly successful/monopoly-level Facebook project is Facebook itself. The Oculus VR thing fell rather flat compared to Vive and SteamVR. Whatsapp is relatively popular, but they have a relatively small share of the chat market given all the competitors. They didn't reach anything like a Facebook-level dominance in that market. Instagram I'm not really aware of statistics of. Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who uses it, but at the very least they also don't have anything like a monopoly in the image upload site category. Size alone isn't enough to push out all the competitors, as we can see by them having failed several times already. Facebook is primarily just Facebook. And SL has, like I said, certain draws that Facebok is afraid to embrace, so it's entirely unlikely that it'll even compete in the same market.

As much as one might personally disapprove of SL's optional adult activities, that alone will ensure that Facebook can never outcompete SL in the virtual world department. It turns out humans greatly enjoy adult activities!

Personally, having been here for 15 years, I kinda feel like it's friendlier now. For example, I don't get shot into orbit while having my home sim crashed by random passers-by. But that's really neither here nor there...

Not really *that* much harder given that there are about 2000 Belly sims last I checked. And I think 8000-ish of Mainland? Either way it's completely unreasonable numbers to explore manually without the handy list provided!

I went ahead and tried this event. Ran through about ten Belly sims. Didn't find a single bucket. Gave up. I also see no particular reason why us Mainlanders can't rez buckets, but whatever, it's not that big a deal for me.

Playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent as a teenager completely inoculated me to fictional horror. That game was so scary it practically burned out my horror receptors. Nothing, absolutely no media scares me these days. My personal health does though. I mean, I'm alright, but the moment I have a stomach ache I start worrying about increasingly fantastical diseases...

I do like companies getting involved with SL again, it at least brings in some new stuff and hopefully money for LL's bugfixing coffers, but NFTs are... nothing. They're literally nothing. For a comics company, I feel like a better prize idea would surely be like, a free digital subscription to their comics.

It's pretty obvious that the Lindens support the gambling aspect and the gacha ban was merely to cover some very specific local law. Yes, functionally and ethically the new gachas are just the same but legally they aren't. Though I've at least not heard of anyone willingly playing them yet. The biggest ex-gacha event I know went to straight direct sales instead and seems to be doing pretty well.

Great first step! Now include it for the client itself, the portal to our actual virtual lives!

I still feel like the only reason SL isn't massive remains the newbie experience. It's just so hard to get into, no matter how you slice it. The first impressions are just always terrible with the default animations and avatars and the total lack of funds to buy anything nice with. Compare to some baby cyberworld platform like VRChat, which doesn't really offer anything except standing around in an avatar - so people clearly don't require that - but it's as simple as log in and go, and because it uses motion tracking the animations are good by default.

Average Jane might not care about optimization, but the fact that it has mod permissions alone is definitely going to be enough to at least keep Belleza well in the black. It's the only moddable mainstream body!

This is totally awesome. If you strip the body down to just what a furry might use as a base (i.e. no hands or feet) it's only 42k polygons. Even for humans, stripping the onion layers and the boob options nobody uses should do wonders. Now if only TMP and Maitreya would do the same... then again, if they don't, Belleza should rapidly recover a lot of market share.

What, you thought you all looked bad? Try having a non-standard SL texture for your body. That gaping void of horror on my cheek is actually an eye socket. But where we're going, we don't need eyes.

This is currently happening to me on Firefox. Clearing the cookies helps, but only for a day or so, and then it starts getting stuck at "The page isn’t redirecting properly" It's really irritating.

Yeah, but the stipulations for which it'd be allowed specifically mentioned that it needs to unlock between plays. So would the hud one that stays locked to you by necessity be allowed, then?

Well, it is very easy to script. I'd make one but I'm still not convinced that there wasn't some kind of miscommunication between the lindens and the lawyers...

The idea is clearly to keep paying the machine until you, by random chance, get the rare, as it was before. Imagine a slot machine where you know if your next few plays will win or not, but in order to see if the fourth or fifth play will finally be the jackpot, you'll just have to keep playing. That would instantly be torn apart by hordes of hungry lawyers. Why this one is okay, only the Lindens really know.

I am also noticing that the conveyor system must unlock between buyers which means sniping will be possible. The ways of the lindens truly are mysterious.

I seriously have to imagine the lawyers misunderstood the question.

Ah, brilliant. So gachas were banned but actually gachas are allowed if we call them conveyors instead. What was the point of this whole thing again? A very niche wording of a law somewhere? Was it the word that got banned, specifically, then? The blog post definitely needs updating on what mechanic exactly is banned, because it clearly wasn't the randomness as a result of payment.

Your daily reminder that the blog post defines gachas as "a chance-based outcome as a result of a payment." which the conveyor fits to the very letter.