Penny Patton

Freya Mokusei wrote: Ishtara Rothschild wrote: The creators of those shoes need to be swamped with IMs and notecards by angry customers. Strongly disagree. This won't encourage anyone to update their products, especially those who've been on the grid for several years. If they're even still in-world, or creating. The creators at this point owe their customers nothing, and likely created their products long before alpha layers were even conceived by LL. They're not to blame. (No-one is.) I would say that this should be a lesson for all of us, content creators and customers alike, moving forward. No-mod attachments are always a bad idea. To the people suggesting Firestorm or other third party viewers, should this turn out to be an official deprecation of invisiprims so that they no longer render properly on official viewers, using a third party viewer to get around it could be just like Emerald Viewer's additional attachment points. You may see yourself fine, but if everyone else sees a broken avatar you're not really solving the issue, are you?

I agree and disagree. I agree with Qui that this all could be handled so much better, but I disagree that all shopping should be kept in-world. Some things, by their very nature, are just better handled with a 2D interface. I'd rather shop on the Marketplace for the same reason I'd rather shop on Amazon rather than running out to a dozen real world shops. Does Amazon make the real world less of a world? The other side of the token, however, is that some items must be seen in-world before an educated decision can be made with regards to purchasing said item. I will not buy an animation off the Marketplace. I will browse the Marketplace for animation sellers but then go to that person's in-world shop and check out the animation first hand. Hopefully better changes can be made to properly integrate the Marketplace into the rest of SL. I miss OnRez's in-world vendors that connected right to your On-Rez shop.

In addition to all the other reasons given, sometimes it's as simple as wantin to rename the skin to add some keywords that make it easier to find when searching your inventory. A better question is what reason is there to set a skin no-mod?

Jaylin Wytchwood wrote: Void Singer wrote: Anita61 Anatine wrote: [...] Becuase of the menus in our beds they can't be resized, you'ld end up in the wrong spot trying out you favourite position! ;-) please hire a better scripter, it can be done, and without too much trouble. Still unpractical having to adjust every animation... Id like to see a System that automatically adjusts every position of a 300+ animations piece of furniture so you still sit exactly right, in relation to each other. You really want to have adjustable poses regardless of the bed itself being mod or not. No two avatars are alike, which means anyone who cares about whether or not the animations line up properly is going to want that level of control anyways. Making the bed mod in addition to that opens up your market further. No one refuses to buy moddable items in SL. Plenty refuse to buy no-mod.

This is a very good question, and while I doubt there's a single, clear-cut answer I do believe some aspects to this are already appearing. It helps to realize that Second Life's "Friendship" feature was always flawed and in need of an overhaul. The reasons for this are already being amplified by the new social features added to profiles. SecondLife's "Friendship" feature never offered much in the way of organization. The whole name shows how limited the system is. We have a "Friend list" where we add "friends". How many people on your "Friend list" are actually friends? How many are acquaintenances, business associates, contacts relating to group projects, etcetera? Instead of a "Friend list" we should have a "Contact list" in which we can organize our contacts into categories based on our relationship. Simple Instant Messaging clients offered this functionality in the 90's and it's long been clamoured for in SL. We need the ability to manage our privacy levels based on those groups. I'll certainly want to share more with actual friends than a random stranger I met very briefly and may never speak to again. The new social features make this an even more pressing matter. We should have new non-contact list features as well. What if I have a favourite builder and I don't knpow them personally so I'm not on their Contact list, but I want to follow their public feed? There should be a "Follow" feature linked to the new profiles in this way. Of course, it would be subject to the privacy settings each ndividual user sets up. These are just a few of the more obvious thoughts on the matter. I'm sure we'll see a lot more in the coming days.

You can trigger SL's imperfect facial animations using gestures, but only for a moment. I'd like LL to add the ability to actually define your own facia animations via the appearance editor (with more options than are currently possible) and set length of time for them to be present after triggered.

Venus Petrov wrote: OK, you have taken time to get the right lighting, pose, and angle to snap your smile. When I see someone inworld with one of these random smilers, they are not posing for photos. They are smiling and everything and nothing. Different scenario. Your snaps look nice. I used my own custom windlight settings but those are all from my day cycle at the time I took the screenshots, not deliberate choices in lighting. That is a good point, however, the vast majority of people use LL's default windlight settings, which are not kind to the avatar at all. SL in general is capable of looking so much nicer when you have well made sky settings. However, you are also right that in the first screenshot at least I use a much bigger smile than I'd wear casually. The second screenshot is a less emphasized smile I do wear around more casually. Not all the time, but when I'm particularly happy. I also set up a smaller "closed mouth" smile that I wear more often. That one uses just an adjusted version of my shape rather than a facial animation. I suppose the point I was trying to make is that I agree, a lot of people walk around with a scripted facial animation and they put little or no attempt in to make it look good, but at the same time it is possible to make it look good and that in real life people do occaissionally walk around with a big, toothy grin. Too often, avatars in SL have that blank, emotionless stare to them and I find that even more unnatural. I'd like to see more done with avatar facial expressions. If I were LL I'd probably find a way to let people create custom facial expressions via the appearance editor and have them triggered by gestures in such a way that your avatar's expressions were affected by your chat text. Put in a smiley and your avatar smiles until you type a trigger for another expression.

Like most things in SL that often look awful "out of the box", the use of an expressions HUD for smiling, laughing, etcetera can look good if used right and with a little work. Here's my avatar wearing a "smiler". And another;

For instance, I'd like to give kudos to the above post.

Regarding AOs, the best solution has always been TPVs which support client-side AOs. Phoenix has this feature, as does Imprudence. I suspect most other TPVs do as well. I'm not sure if Firestorm does yet, but it should be on the way as one of that viewer's features. Actually, I've yet to see a 2.x based viewer with a client side AO yet so I hope Firestorm has it. I've sorely missed client side AOs for several reasons since I switched to 2.x viewers. They're much easier to use and more convenient in addition to being script-lag free.

Here's a screenshot to prove that correctly sized shapes don't have to "look short". All of the heights shown are correct "prim based height, which is about half a foot shorter than the incorrect height shown in the LL appearance editor and many scripted height detectors.

I'm in the middle of writing an article about the appearance editor and getting good proportions from it when making a shape from scratch, which is basically what you need to do when scaling down from SL's supersized default shapes. I'll try and share a few tips here. First, ignore the height displayed in the appearance editor. It is wrong. LL has acknowledged this is a bug it intends to fix but they've yet to actually fix it. I recommend using a prim to measure yourself, as prim sizes are measured in metres which can be converted to feet/inches. Second, it helps to have a good understanding of human proportion itself. SL's appearance editor provides no help whatsoever in this regard (a painful early misstep by Linden Lab that they have yet to correct) so to make a good shape you really need a better than average understanding of the human bodyshape. I recommend using Google to image search for "human proportions" or "figure proportions" to get some illustrator's guides to human proportions. This is a good one illustrating four different body types, from "average man" to "super heroic". It helps to know a few basics to human proportion. Most of these proportions can be deviated from to within about 3 inches while remaining "realistic". Much more than three inches and you begin to look odd. 1. The average human is 7-7.5 heads tall. 8 heads tall is still realistic, but is not as common and considered idealistic. 2. As seen above, whether "average" or "idealistic", the width of the torso (to the outside of arms while at your sides) is two head units wide. 3. Your "wingspan" (the measurement of your arms from fingertip to fingertip when stretched out side to side) should be equal to your height (from the bottom of your feet to the top of your skull). The way SL arms bend sinks the shoulders into your torso slightly, so allow another couple inches. On men around 6' this means setting the arm length slider around 60-70 or so. On women it means setting the arm length slider around 90-100. Because most avatars have extremely short arms this may seem strange at first, but keep your arms at a proper length for even a few minutes and it begins to look natural and much better than before, because this is consistent with the human shape you see in every day life outside of SL. 4. The size of your hand is roughly the size of your face (bottom of chin to halfway between eyebrows and hairline). Yes, most avatars have scary small hands. 5. Your legs should be about half your total height. Guys can go to a as much as a few inches shorter than half overall height, women can go to as much as 3 inches longer than half overall height . Most avatars have legs that are way too long. 6. Your feet should be about as long as your forearm measured from beginning of wrist to start of elbow. Most avatars have scary small feet. Pussycat Catnat took an earlier post I made about getting good proportions and added some helpful screenshots. In the article I suggested that using prims to thoroughly check all proportions helps in creating much more appealing shapes than if you try to simply "eyeball" everything. I highly recommend checking out the blog post here.

Video card creators tend not to support OpenGL as much, focusing on DirectX performance with OpenGL as more of an afterthought. leliel Mirihi wrote: Penny Patton wrote: It also uses OpenGL instead of DirectX, meaning it lacks a lot of features that make high end games run better. Such as?

Pussycat covered a lot and I'm probably just rewording what she wrote but it really does help to understand why SL is so laggy. First, you need to understand that there are different kinds of "lag". A low framerate, when SL becomes "choppy" like a slideshow instead of smoothly animated, is often referred to as "lag". This is your computer struggling to render everything on-screen. Even powerful computers can have problems with this for several reasons. First, SL relies as much or more on your processor as it does on your video card. It also uses OpenGL instead of DirectX, meaning it lacks a lot of features that make high end games run better. Second, since all content in SL is user created and very few SL users are professional game makers, content in SL is not optimized for efficiency the way professionally made videogame model/texture work is. Despite often poor visuals, the content in SL is extremly high poly compared to videogame models. That is made worse by the fact that SL content tools emphasize speed in streaming over efficiency in polygon counts. SL's unique prim and sculptmap modeling formats are both extremely fast for streaming, but horribly inefficient as far as polygon counts are considered. Fixing this sort of "lag" requires a high end gaming computer and lowering graphics options. You may wish to turn down the number of particles rendered, the number of avatars displayed before SL replaced them with simplified "avatar imposters" and the various graphics detail sliders. Server lag is when the SL servers themselves, the "sim" you are currently in, is bogged down with avatars and content vying for server resources. Several things cause this. First, the number of avatars in the region.An SL region/sim can hold up to 100 avatars, but performance takes a huge drop around 15-30. This is because the server needs to track everything in the sim and stream that data to each and every person logged into that sim. Second, SL currently places no caps on scripted content, yet a sim has limited RAM for handling scripts. When that RAM is used to capacity, the server begins using hard drive space, which slows things down considerably. Unfortunately, fixing this requires everyone to be responsible in their script use. Some sims post signs that display how much script memory avatars are using. You can keep your own script memory down by avoiding needless scripts, like resizer scripts in attachments, unused HUD attachments, hidden scripted attachments you're not using, etcetera. Some sims even place rules on how much script memory an individual avatar can use, and will eject those exceeding that amount if they refuse to reduce their script use. This seems harsh, b ut can be the only way to maintain good performance in a sim. Finally, there is bandwidth lag. Multiple factors can also affect this. First, the number of avatars in a region. The more avatars in a single sim, the more bandwidth needed to stream all the sim information to each and every one o them. Second, the number and size of texture maps in a region. That needs to be streamed to each and every avatar, poor use of texture maps can use excessive amounts of bandwidth. Finally, your own connection can be a factor. If your connection is slow, if you're downloading stuff at the same time, if you're on a wireless connection, these can all make SL laggy. SL's content is not pre-installed on your computer, it all has to be streamed to you as you wander around. Why is SL so ugly/has such bad graphics? Again, SL content is all created by the users. The result is that most areas in SL and most avatars are pretty ugly compared to professionally made visuals. Other areas have pretty good grahics. I recommend visiting Insilico, Doomed Ship and Bentham Forest. Unfortunately, LL shows off the bad graphics rather than the good. The human starter avatars are all 7' tall with extremely bad proportions and inconsistent quality in textures and attachments. LL's own environments (like the welcome areas and tutorial areas) have design issues professionally made game environments take steps to avoid.

Perrie Juran wrote: If there was ever a SIM that Linden Lab should have kept alive, It was Nemo. Maybe there are some SIM's out there that comes close (New Babbage for instance), but personally I haven't seen anything else the level of Nemo. I would love to see more places that come up to the level of artistry that Nemo had. You should take a look at Insilico and Doomed Ship. Saiwa Red Mines was shaping up to be that level, too, but it seems to have disappeared from the grid. Nemo was a masterpiece, but there are others on that level and even beyond. I was going to recommend the safari sim Cap Estel, but it seems to not be allowing visitors at the moment. The landscape has changed in the world map so maybe a new build is being done. Blackspot Shipyards is worth seeing, as is Hangars Liquides. There's plenty of other sims that came and went that were Nemo quality as well. Greenies, the Baron Grayson sims, The Shipyard and more. I'm surprised at how few of these sims get into the public eye. I doubt Nemo would be nearly as well known as it is had it not been featured for so long on the SL homepage. (Actually, it still is even tho it's been gone for a while, unless I'm mistaken.)

Been building a lot lately. One of the projects I've been working on has been redoing what was a clubhouse for some friends of mine. I took their club, "The Milk and Cream Clubhouse" and turned it into "The Island of Milk&Cream". They had a whole quarter sim to work with and I love sprawling environments with lots to explore, so I built a floating island that rests edge to edge with the parcel boundaries and set about filling it with all kinds of little nooks and crannies to explore. Zoomed this far out you can't even make out avatars on the island. A quarter of a sim is a huge amount of space. Like all my builds, I love to showcase just how large SL can actually be. I "put my money where my mouth is" when it comes to my articles on building in SL. No Photoshop doctoring of these screenshots, either. This is how good SL can look with shadows, my custom depth of field settings and my custom windlight day cycle. I've always wondered why LL has never tried to upgrade their own windlight defaults to make SL look this nice. I put lots to explore in this build. In addition to everything on the surface of the island, like the dairy farm and the treehouse club, there's various quiet spots in the forest like a campfire that seats up to 10, quiet cuddle spots along the river bank, and the more curious and observant might find the island's three hidden secret areas. You can't see it from this screenshot, but this hidden grotto is filled with animated effects. The water is several layers of ripples, waves etcetera. Particles spray from the bottom of the waterfalls and the cavern walls are covered in an animated reflection effect from the water's surface. I also make extensive use of sound in SL. A rickety series of ladders and scaffolding creaks under a howling wind. You'll hear the various rivers and waterfalls before you see them. A campfire crackles in the darkness. There doesn't seem to be much concensus in SL about sound volume so some areas make all their sounds really loud so you need to turn your speakers down, others use sounds so quiet you won't hear them unless you crank all your volume options up. I've tried to keep the volume of the sounds around what you'd find in a videogame, so if you just finished playing Mass Effect 2, Dead Space or Fallout: New Vegas you shouldn't need to adjust your volume to enjoy the sounds here. There's still a lot yet to be done. I plan to redo the airship dock and the treehouse itself once 64m prims and mesh are available. Still, there's p0lenty to see now. The build does have its share of adult content tucked into the barn, the treehouse's private rooms, and the hidden areas and tends to draw a lot of "colourful" avatars, something to keep in mind when exploring. You can visit the Island of Milk and Cream here.

Also, the sliders are not consistent between the male and female meshes. A perfectly proportional 5'5" woman would need the arm length slider set between 90 and 100 to have proportional arms. A perfectly proportional 6' tall man would need the arm length slider set between 60-70 to achieve the same proportions.

There is no way to easily equate the sliders with real world measurements. For example, the height slider is one of about four sliders which affects your height. I've made shapes with a height of 0 on the height slider which were taller than shapes with a height of about 10. Also if you play with certain sliders, again the "height" slider is a good example, you'll notice that it is not a smooth rise in height as you move the slider towards the tallest end of the scale. In certain places it "jumps".

Coby Foden wrote: At first this normal human proportion may look a bit strange in avatar as our eyes have been "ruined" in seeing lots of avies with too short arms. I made my arms long like this and I can say that it looks beautiful and natural. Not anything like orangutan :matte-motes-big-grin-wink: This is definitely true. Around 2008 I started more thgoroughly checking the proportions in my own shape and lengthened my arms appropriately. It looked odd for about a minute One major benfit to a properly proportional avatar is that most animations used in SL are created in third party software, software which provides the animation creator with properly proportional shapes to make their animations with. What's that mean to you and I? It means that most animations in SL will actually work far better with a well proportioned avatar. Those "hands on hip" poses that wind up shoving your hands into your midsection actually work! That hand brushing fingers through your hair standing pose that instead has your avatar sliding your hand across your face? With properly long arms it actually works!

My main complaint with the current LL viewers is that LL really hasn't been bold enough with the new design. It's still the same old SL Viewer, just the textures are a little snazzier, the menues have been reorganized for the better, and most of the previously freefloating windows are now shoved in a sidebar that is itself a mixed bag of pros and cons. Although they renamed "File" to "Me". it's still set up like a file editing programme. That's just silly because SL isn't a file editing application. They also rushed headlong into trying to make SL look more like a web browser, just as web browsers themselves were abandoning the interface LL was mimicking. So now we have a nonsensical "Address bar" that is one of the first things I find myself getting rid of when I customize the interface preferences. SL has far more in common with videogames than it does with a web browser or a file editing programme. Why doesn't LL pay more attention to what videogames do?

I've never heard of anyone worrying about "efficiency" in their voice calls when they just want to see a loved one's face on the other side of the state/country/world. You've got a tug and pull with video chat. People want it for things like personal communication with friends and loved ones, on the other hand pretty much nobody wants to use it for non-personal calls, like ordering a pizza, complaining to the power company about a bill. calling a co-worker when you've just crawled out of bed and have your hair sticking out everywhere, etcetera. With SL and the whole "3D web" idea it's a bit different. When I'm shopping in SL, I actually prefer to use the SL Marketplace on the web. It's so much easier than hopping around the grid trying to hunt something down. Often I'll look something up on the marketplace and then head to the owner's shop to see the item in person if necessary (a must for animations). 2D interfaces and 3D environments are apples and oranges, serving very different purposes, which is why you'll never see virtual worlds "replace" the web, but what they add could be used to compliment the web and virtual spaces for entertainment have their own appeal so I wouldn't rule out virtual worlds becoming mainstream with time. Actually, virtual worlds already are mainstream in the form of videogames it's just a matter of time before the more "social sandbox" ideas gain traction.

I believe Linden Lab is still planning to limit mesh uploads to verifiable accounts, those being accounts with payment info on file or Premium accounts. I think they even said you'd have to apply for the ability to upload mesh, and the right to upload mesh could be revoked. What this means is that people will not be able to upload mesh models they do not have the proper rights to without consequences. Probably one of the most sensible approaches LL has taken.

I wrote a somewhat related article expanding on my observations about camera placement in Second Life. "A Matter of Perspective" I also posted this same article here in the forums, under "Second Life Viewer" because while it affects content creation, it's really more of a viewer issue. I only touch on the scale issues I went into detail with in this article as it's more about how why "over the shoulder" has become the industry standard for third person games, how the SL camera interacts with environments, how it impacts our ability to navigate environments in SL and some explanation of how the camera works with regards to "CameraOffset" and "FocusOffset".

Shiori Carter wrote: I think its the opposite, those with there arms to long looks like apes trying to walk. So, you can push you arms down, but it just does not look right in SL to me, like i said, you look like an monkey. It's actually, in most cases, physically impossible for a female avatar to have arms that are too long for her body. Especially with the ridiculously oversized avatars most people have due to the defaults starting near 7' tall. An avatar with an average woman's height of 5'5" needs the arms set around 90 to get proper arm length. The taller your avatar, the longer your arms need to be to remain proportional. After about 6' you need to push the slider past 100 to maintain proportions, which, of course, you can't. Most SL women are well over 6' tall. With men it's more possible, as the arm slider for men is skewed differently. Men needs their arm slider at around 60 to remain proportional on a 6' male shape. If that looks "ape like" to you, then either your perception has simply been skewed by spending too much time in SL where freakishly short arms are the norm or you believe every man, women and child you see in your everyday life looks "ape like" as, outside of thalidomide victims and other physical deformities, basic human proportions are pretty universal.

Ishtara Rothschild wrote: I blame the default values. If you set every slider to 50, you should end up with something that looks like a perfectly healthy and anatomically normal human being, but instead you end up with a... no idea what it is exactly. All I know is that Linden Lab has dubbed this creature Ruth and that it appears to be physically incapable of wiping its own butt. Actually, that's incorrect. With an all-50's avatar you wind up with something far worse than Ruth. Heads too small, arms too short (moreso on the female mesh due to differently skewed proportion sliders between the sexes), hands and feet too large, pointy ears...these aren't even human.