Penny Patton

Blaze Nielsen wrote: Frankly, I prefer the tall look to the short, dumpy "real" proportions you are advocating. My aesthetics strongly favor the tall look. "Real" proportioned women in SLlook like midgets to me, even without a comparative avatar standing near them. When it comes to scale Earlier I pointed out that I in no way advocated any body type and asserted that it was possible to get the "tall look" with shorter avatars. If the avatars in this lineup look like "short, dumpy midgets" to you then...well, that would actually be kinda frightening.

Dresden Ceriano wrote: And have you gotten anywhere with it? I always find this question, and similar comments, kinda odd. If I had posted a tutorial about sculpt making, efficient texture mapping, or how to do low-lag scripting, would you ask the same question? If you're really curiuous, I believe you answered your own question by the end of your post. The trend is undeniably, if slowly, towards more correctly sized avatars. Regarding all the other questions you asked, every single one of them is answered the first post. You'll actually find some of your questions in large, bolded lettering followed by an answer.

Honestly, I find most of the complaints about Viewer 2 to be based solely in the complainer's unwillingness to get used to a new layout, even when that layout is superior to the old. There are some valid complaints about Viewer 2 (the broken height display in the appearance editor, the broken functionality in some of the build tools, the delay between clicking an object and "edit" becoming available for clicking, etcetera) but in many ways it's actually superior to V1 now. It's definitely not the same viewer that 2.0 was. There's actuallye a tonne of UI customization options now, far more than 1.x had. If anything, my major complaint with Viewer 2 is that it's too much like Viewer 1. Seriously, it's not a huge change, UI-wise. Both viewers are based on the thinking found in file editing software UI. SL is not a file editing programme so there's no reason for this. LL needs to take a look at what the videogame industry has been doing with UI design for virtual worlds for the past 15 years now.

Well...I'd already uploaded this picture before you corrected your post so....darnnit, I'm gonna use it! Anyways, seriously, I tried to lay out the issues addressed in an as objective and detailed way as I could, explaining exact cause and effect between scale, land value, how much we pay for land as opposed to how we use our land, even screenshots to show I'm not just blowing smoke, those are actual SL builds created putting everything I've said in the article to use to get as much detail and much content into the limited amount of land available. Anyone is welcome to pick any statement up there and try to find a way in which it's inaccurate. I've been trying to point out these issues for years (since about the time I joined SL in 2005) . I'm sure there's plenty of people in this forum who can vouch for that.

Ummm, this thread IS posted in Building and Textures.

Josh Susanto wrote: I essentially agree with Penny about the inconsistent proportions, although I have argued with Penny about whether it wouldn't just be a simpler solution to have LL declare the Linden meter to be equivalent to 2.5 English feet. My response to that is the same in the article I wrote at the beginning of the thread, the problem with simply declaring the "linden metre" to be larger is twofold. 1) It does not address the inconsistent scale created by camera placement, inconsistently up-scaled starter avatars and the inconsistency between AgentHeight (which is known to be broken) and every other use of the linden metre in SL (land, prim sizes, etcetera). 2) It devalues land. I would like the ability to resize no-mod objects, tho. That would be great and solve a lot of problems, not just those related to SL's scale problems. I'd also the ability to rip scripts out of no-mod objects. We used to be able to do that, but then SL broke it, then later decided the break in functionality was actually a "feature" and left it despite how it now breaks content.

In exactly the same way I'm not advocating people all adopt monstrously large space demons, or lanky young spaceship engineers. These were just examples to illustrate other points.

Blaze Nielsen wrote: Penny, would you also argue that a woman should be "average sized" around the waist? Take a look at the average girth of a middle age American woman and we may change our minds about wanting "realistic" proportions:) And, like art directors who do fashion advertising, stretching the vertical dimensions of a model is common to get them even taller and leaner. Frankly, I prefer the tall look to the short, dumpy "real" proportions you are advocating. My aesthetics strongly favor the tall look. "Real" proportioned women in SLlook like midgets to me, even without a comparative avatar standing near them. When it comes to scale, I say to each his own. As Peggy liked to point out, this is a virtual world. You can get "fashion model proportions" out of a 5'5" tall lavatar that you would not be able to distinguish from a 7' tall avatar without them being side by side. But also as I pointed out to Peggy my article had absolutely nothing to do with preferences, and even less to do with body types.I certainly did not advocate "dumpy real" proportiopns over thin proportions so I don't know where that comment came from.

@Peggy Paperdoll I really think you misunderstood the point of this article. It has nothing to do with personal preference or "representing real life size". It is a guide explaining the very real, very practical implications of scale in SL. A content creation tutorial. Also, quick look around SL shows that problem is not merely that everything is oversized, but that it is also oversized inconsistently. It is not uncommon to find yourself standing in a room where every single piece of furniture in the room iis out of scale with every other piece of furniture, the room itself and your avatar.

Really trying to understand this, but I don't see how trying to combine script processing cost with visual rendering cost is anything but a bad idea. Please tell me this isn't going to only apply to mesh objects? Because that would be actively discouraging efficient content creation by my current understanding of all this.

I've posted a more complete version of this article on my blog. This article is intended an informative post about the practical and aesthetic implications of scale for content creators in SL. It is not a judgement against large avatars, only an objective assessment of the affects of scale on SL and how both content creators and Linden Lab would benefit from encouraging the trend towards properly scaled avatars. If you're new to SL you may not have realized it yet, but scale is really, incredibly "off" in SL. If you're an experienced builder you probably realize it but aren't aware of all the ways in which it affects you. How is Scale Broken in SL? New users coming in to SL may notice that the Appearance Editor displays your avatar's height when you go to edit your shape. If so then you've seen that the starter avatars are shownb to be around 6'3" for the women, and up to about 6'6"-6'7" (About 2m tall!) for the men. Those are some exceptionally tall avatars! But it's worse than that. The height displayed in the appearance editor is broken. It's actually giving you a height about six inches (0.15m) shorter than you actually are. So when it says you're 6'7", you are actually 7'1" (2.16m) tall! To put that in perspective, the average man in North America is a mere 5'10"/ 1.78m and the average NBA basketball player is a miniscule 6'6"/1.98m. Case in point, here's my avatar next to the "average guy" in SL. My avatar is 5'7"/1.70m, which is tall for a North American woman. That's just the difference of a couple of feet. The male mesh can get as tell as 8'10"/2.69m. So how does this affect you? I. The Practical Issues: Land 1. Land in SL is finite. - Yes, yes. Anything is possible in SL, but only if you can fit it on your land. Since land is a set size, when you make content and avatars larger you are effectively making land smaller. When you double the size of something you are increasing the amount of area it requires four times. Four 10x10m rooms can fit in the space of a single 20x20m room. 2. More land costs more money. - Your double sized house won't fit on a 512sq.m. parcel? You need to pay more money to incease your land until the house will fit. 512sq.m. is actually a lot of space. Chances are, if your house was not double sized it would fit easily into a 512sq.m. parcel and still have room for a comfortably spacious yard. You are effectively paying more money for less land when you up-scale. 3. Larger environments spread people out more. - People often complain SL feels like a ghost town, with many sims going empty a majority of the time. Reducing how spread out people are due to rampant over-scaling would reduce this issue by condensing, on average, four sims' worth of content to a single sim. II. The Practical Issues: Building 1. Larger builds require more prims - This, of course ,does not apply to small items like chairs, cars, hats, etcetera but you better believe it applies to environments and other large-scale creations. If whatever you're building goes larger than 10m at any point up-scaling begins to waste prims. A 10x10m room that requires 6 prims jumps up to 16 prims if you scale it up to 20mx20m. When you're talking a whole house you are likely at least doubling the prim count. 2. Larger builds mean less detailed environments. - As you probably gathered from the above, since a larger build requires more prims this leaves you with fewer prims to work with in creating detail for your environment. Because of this you do not expierience the imaginary issue of "unused space" when working to scale, because you wind up having the prims free to fill that space with additional content and detail. Scale a house down to 1=1 scale and the prims you free up allow you to landscape a yard and add more furniture inside the house. If anything, scaling up leads to unused space as you don't have the prims available to flesh out the environment. 3. The default camera adds an additional metre or two that you need to compensate for in environments. - 8' tall avatars already require a lot of upscaling of the environment to compensate for, but SL has abysmally poor camera placement. The camera floats at least a metre over your head, looking at a downward angle on your avatar. That's extra height you need to compensate for when setting ceiling heights in a build. As a resident, this limits where you can go in SL without experience camera clipping issues that prevent you from being able to see inside a build without going into mouselook. Existing sims such as 1920's Berlin, Doomed Ship and others already recognize these scale issues and have made a point of working to a smaller scale. In doing so they have been able to create environments that would require, both in size and detail, 3-4 sims if created with SL's usual scale problems. To illustrate the above points on a smaller scale, I was able to take Pre'Fabulous' "The Old Barn" and cut the prim count by about half when I shrunk it down to half size. I was able to do the same for my own shop's building in The Wastelands. This also helped me change my shop's build from a single building taking up the entire parcel, to a much more detailed landscape including two bombed out structures, an off-sim landscape, and allowed me to create and detail two additional rooms to my shop's scaled down building. The above four pictures are all of a 2048qs.m. parcel, the build is a total of 463 prims. That's only twice the size of a 512sq.m. parcel! (Remember, twice the size is four times the area.) The shop area (the last three pictures) make up only a small portion of the build. The landscape around the shop is fully fleshed out with burnt tree husks, bombed out structures, a water tower, a military tank, etceter. Here's a top down view of said 2048sq.m. parcel. My avatar is the black dot in the middle of the red circle. The orange area is the off sim landscape. The blue rectangle marks the parcel area, the smaller green rectangle is a 512sq.m. area overlayed across the shop building, illustrating how the shop itself can fit easily inside that amount of land. III. The Practical Issues: Avatars 1. Larger avatars have more issues with proportions. - The appearance editor sliders are not made with thought given to how large avatars can be in SL. Because of this, some of the sliders cannot keep body proportions in check on oversized avatars. The arm legnth slider on women is the primarily culprit. Arms are skewed much, much shorter for the female avatar mesh than the male mesh. A properly sized male avatar can achieve a correct "wingspan" with the Arm Length slider set at around 60. A properly sized female avatar requires the slider to be set between 90-100 o the slider. Several sliders increase avatar height, arm length is not affected by any of them. So when you increase the size of a female avatar who already required an arm length of 100 to be proportional, it becomes entirely impossible for her arm legnth to be proportionate to her height. 2. Building attachments around large avatars limits who can use your attachments. - Most content creators build attachments to sell around their own personal avatar size. This is a bad habit. This limits your customer base, at least your satisfied customers, to avatars at least as large as your own. It is easy to scale an attachment up, but can be difficult, or impossible to scale an attachment down. Create an "attachment building" shape that is around 4'5"-5' tall, as small as you can get it while retaining adult proportions. Build attachments around this shape, then scale them up to fit your own avatar when you box them up for sale. This will ensure that all avatars of at least the size of your "attachment building" shape are able to wear your attachments with ease. IV. The Aesthetic Issues 1. Coherent scale allows for better looking environments. - Scale is a part of design and composition. Good design means better looking environments. Currently SL has no coherent scale. Things are not even consistently up-scaled. Avatars are scaled up to about 1 and 1/3 larger than realistic. Furniture is often created around individual avatars, meaning it can be made for avatars anywhere between 6' tall and 9' tall. Environments are often done to fully double scale. Vehicles tend to be a mess of scale, either too larger or too small for any given avatar or their surrounding environment. All of this contributes to SL just looking like a mess. Even the best of SL environments often suffer these flaws. 2. Cohesive scale makes more immersive/engaging environments. - Wiuth the mess of scale described above any sense of immersion is shattered, or at least greatly reduced. A small minority of RP sims recognize this issue and build accordingly, with amazing results. When everything (environment, vehicles, furniture, avatars) are all in scale together, consistently, it creates a much stronger sense of immersion, of "being there". This is one reason why videogames and other virtual worlds place far more restrictions on character size, or remove the ability to change size altogether. 3. Coherent scale allows you to use scale for deliberate effect. - "If everybody is tall, then nobody is tall." Height is relative. But when there's limits to size and everyone crowds one end of the scale, you wind up limiting options. In SL, most people tend to crowd the extreme tall end of the spectrum, 7' to 9' tall. This means it's impossible to create a giant avatar that towers over the average person without resorting to crude hacks. Let's take a look at how this affects SL in the setting of a role-play environment by showing two characters from the sci-fi/horror sim "Doomed Ship". A gigantic demon beast and a human engineer. Here's how it looks if the "human" is the size of your average SL man. That gigantic demon winds up being only about a head taller than our measly 7'5" human. Sure, the demon is bigger, but not by much. And that's not even a human with maxed out height. Let's take a look at this same pair if the human engineer is only about 6' tall. Now there's a huge difference! Without any hacks or cheats, we have a tremendously intimidating demon beast that literally towers over our hapless human engineer. Avatars can be anywhere from about 4'5" to nearly 9' tall while retaining adult proportions. You can go as short as about 3' tall with dwarf/child proportions. Moving the size of the adult average avatar more to the middle of that scale, as opposed to the extremes, allows for a wider variety in sizes. A more creative and diverse population of avatars. Why is this posted under Building and Texturing? It is SL's content creators who are in the second best position to drive trends. The trend in SL is already shifting towards smaller avatars. It's becoming more and more noticable, but it is still a slow transition. As more content creators recognize how scale conciousness benefits them that will make it easer and more desirable for the average resident to scale down. But isn't it too late? Won't scaling down now break all kinds of content? No. Content is already broken due to scale, as illustrated above. An 8' tall avatar is not in scale to a double sized house, or to furniture created by a 6'5" builder. Most moddable items in SL can be scaled down with only a modest amount of effort. No-mod items are generally a bad idea in any case and should certainly not be an excuse against much needed improvement. Anyone who has been in SL over the years should realize that new, better content tends to lead to older content being phased out over time anyways. Sure, old content may get phased out over time, but wouldn't we be stuck with content even more oversizred if we all scaled down right now? Anyone who has already scaled their avatar down can tell you it is not nearly as big an issue as people tend to think. Also, there is no way to scale down all SL avatars en masse anyways. Anything done, by the residents or by LL themselves, will only speed up a trend. Time will take care of the rest. What could LL do to fix this problem? LL can do a few key things that will, again, give the existing trend towards smaller avatars a much needed boost. 1) They can improve the camera placement. All it takes to vastly improve the SL camera placement is changing a few numbers in the debug menu. Anyone can do this easily, but only a very small minority tend to change defaults so it would be ideal if LL changed the defaults themselves. Instructions on how to do so are here. 2) LL can provide properly scaled avatars to new residents. Seriously, the starter avatars need to be replaced anyways. LL needs to give new residents good looking, properly proportioned avatars if they want to shake SL's reputation for poor graphics, addressing the scale issue head on with new accounts would be a large step in that direction as well. 3) They can make better use of scale and proportion in their public works projects. This does not mean making buildings and welcome areas too small for existing over-sized avatars. A theater or an auditorium isn't going to have 3m high ceilings and most Welcome Areas/Infohubs tend to be primarily open air environments at any rate. 4) They can fix AgentHeight so the appearance editor displays correct avatar height. - Jira Entry. But why would LL want to address this problem? Wouldn't it reduce the amount of land people want to own? Not in the slightest.You need to consider how value and cost impact demand. Have you ever actually heard of a resident saying, "Gee, I wish I had less land!"? Probably not. If anything, people always wish they could get more for the amount of land they do own. They are already paying what they are willing to pay based on both their ability to pay and the value they attribute to land. They would not tier down if they realized they could do more by reducing the scale of their avatar and build, they would continue to fill out the space they own, just with more content. That is how demand works. People are willing to pay X amount for a minum amount of perceived value. What they're willing to pay does not go down as perceived value rises. If anything, it will rise to meet their ability to pay. In addition, as the value of land skyrockets so does demand. People who previously wrote off smaller parcels of land because they believed they could not use it for anything worthwhile would be flocking to the land store once they were shown the possibilities. Encouraging better use of scale is win/win for everybody. Residents win with a larger, better looking SL with greater diversity and creativity possible with avatars. Content creators win with greater freedom and flexibility in creating content for SL, and a better understanding of scale helps them to create content that can be used by all avatars regardless of size. Linden Lab wins most of all in greater demand for land of all tier levels, and a greater influx/retention of new customers drawn in by a better looking and more engaging Second Life experience.

What I know about SL: SL is a great idea that still needs a lot of work and polish before it reaches beta. What success SL has had is due primarily to unrestricted user created content and the deep level of avatar customization possible. SL needs better default settings across the board. Sky settings, default avatars, camera settings, etc. all need to be replaced. Presentation is important if they plan to market SL. Adding value to land increases demand for land. Up-scaling everything for bad camera placement and oversized avatars greatly reduces value, therefore demand, in land. Starter areas, default avatars, orientation areas all need to be redone to wow, impress and engage new users to increase retention. V1 and V2 aren't that different. They both resemble file editing software more than virtual world interfaces. LL should take inspiration from videogames. LL can't dismiss much needed features (like swimming or AOs) just because someone sells a kludgy alternative to fill the hole LL left. SL needs scriptable "NPC" objects that act like bots but run directly off the sim server, these would be far less of a burden on the system than bots hosted outside of SL and LL could provide specific tools to allow content creators to use them in ways that make SL far more interactive, immersive and engaging. The new user experience should include an interactive orientation which guides a new user through a series of tasks, guiding them through setting up their avatar, guiding them through learning movement, and ultimately teaches them to head out in search of user created content on their own. Done right, this would result in greater new user retention, and impart to new users a better understanding of how to find people and content in SL on their own. LL should provide official, optional tutorials on building, scripting, etcetera. Instilling good content creation habits and encouraging more people to get into creating their own content. This benefits LL in the long term by creating a population of more engaged and invested users creating better content which in turn draws in more users. If LL encourages people to use efficient mesh modelling over polygon intensive prims and sculpts, it will add yet more value to land, make SL far more detailed and immersive while increasing performance, making SL far more marketable. SL could be far more successful and profitable than it was at the height of the hype bubble around 2008. The upcoming new starter avatar set Rodvik announced will be a good yardstick as to gauging how well LL understands what they need to do.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: "Properly sized" as to what standard? SL or RL? My bet, in the context of a RP sim in SL, it's to the SL standard. Properly sized would mean realistic human standard. Dogboat Taurog wrote: Penny Patton wrote: Peggy Paperdoll wrote: Perhaps it's where you hang out or who you hang out with..........or maybe it's your attitude. I don't know, but since I'm shorter than you and I've never had a problem (never been AR'd or even questioned) I'm taking this thread as some attempt at drama or that you are not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Like I said in my previous post, it's not nearly as bad these days as it was a few years ago, but you still occaissionally run into overreacting idiots, harassing any avatar under 6'8". You mostly see it in adult sims, but I've also seen it in moderate sims. Just yesterday I was in an RP sim where someone was complaining about a "child avatar". Turns out it was because the avatar was only 5'5", otherwise nothing childlike about them. Even more annoying, the sim this occured in actually promotes properly sized avatars, so 5'5" is the ideal height for an adult, female avatar. the guys are normally 7 foot tall the women 6 foot 6, (average in sl for adults) its an amazon world. rooms are generally 5 metres high and the furniture is scaled to suit. 5'5" is a 10 year old in Amazonia. In SL land is a finite size and prims are limited to 10m to a side. So, land is "larger" relative to a 5'5" avatar than it is to a 6'6" avatar. Moreso compared to the 7-9' tall avatars that make up the bulk of SL's population. Giant avatars combined with poor camera placement lead people to upscale environmentsz to double size or larger, which effectively makes a sim 1/4 it's size compared to one where everything is done to proper scale. To put it simply, larger avatars pay more for less.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: Perhaps it's where you hang out or who you hang out with..........or maybe it's your attitude. I don't know, but since I'm shorter than you and I've never had a problem (never been AR'd or even questioned) I'm taking this thread as some attempt at drama or that you are not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Like I said in my previous post, it's not nearly as bad these days as it was a few years ago, but you still occaissionally run into overreacting idiots, harassing any avatar under 6'8". You mostly see it in adult sims, but I've also seen it in moderate sims. Just yesterday I was in an RP sim where someone was complaining about a "child avatar". Turns out it was because the avatar was only 5'5", otherwise nothing childlike about them. Even more annoying, the sim this occured in actually promotes properly sized avatars, so 5'5" is the ideal height for an adult, female avatar.

The whole issue with "child avatars", especially as it relates to avatar height, is ridiculous. First, adults around or even under 5' tall are not altogether uncommon. Second, SL avatars tend to be ridiculously large, which is bad for a number of reasons that directly impact us all and should be obvious to anyone who has taken gradeschool geometry. Couple of things, tho. The height displayed in the appearance editor is wrong. So are any height detectors that rely on AgentHeight alone. In truth, female avatars can be up to 8'6"/2.61m tall with shoes, or 8'/2.44m tall without shoes. A lot taller than merely 1.93m. Men can be up to 8'10"/2.70m tall, but they're usually around 7-8' tall on average. Also, what is this perverse witchhunt against child avatars? That goes back a few years to when SL was the target of a disreputable German tabloid which tried to paint SL as a haven for child porn. LL overreacted and basically lead everyone to believe that if they even suspected ageplay was occuring on your land they would delete your land and ban your account, even if you had no idea. To my knowledge LL has never, not once, actually done this, but it's made a lot of people extremely paranoid. The witch hunt isn't nearly as bad these days as it was just a few years ago.

Bree Giffen wrote: You're right. We just need a new body mesh. Which I doubt will happen as it may break all content related to our body mesh. Maybe the new mesh feature coming out (hopefully) will allow us to have a better proportioned avatar. I have found that the body thickness slider does help with some of the narrowness. We already have two body meshes, a male mesh and a female mesh. LL could simply add an additional male mesh and an additional female mesh. The new meshes might require new textures for skins, clothing, etcetera, but the old content would remain useable with the old mesh. No broken content. Mesh import will not help the situation much at all. It will be like having an all-prim body, with no ability to wear regular avatar clothing, skins, etcetera. Buying a new skin would mean buying the same mesh over again with another texture map. For clothing you'd be limited to clothing made specifically for that particular mesh.

Marianne Little wrote: I do wish that we had better shapes, and more sliders. I agree wholeheartedly that we need better starting shapes. I honestly believe LL should supply a small assortment of well made, properly scaled and proportioned shapes not only as part of the starting avatars, but as templates users can choose from when creating a new shape. These shapes should cover the range of short to tall (as in about 4' to 6'4" to encourage better scale), skinny to super heroic muscles and as fat as is possible with the mesh shape itself. About six shapes for each gender. This would give all users a much better starting point when creating the shape they're aiming for, rather than wrestling against the poor settings we find in the current and past starter avatar shapes, or trying to take a thin, athletic shape and try to make it anything but. I don't believe, however, that we need more sliders. Instead, we need better built-in proportion tools. Such as the ability to lock proportions within realistic human range (and unlock said proportions for exaggerated, or non-human avatars), guides that show how many heads tall our avatar is, how long our arms should be given our height. If LL ever decides to finally give us improved avatar meshes, I hopy they vastly improve the appearance editor, there's plenty of room for much needed improvement. How many people know that if you make a woman shape too much taller than 6' it becomes impossible to create proportional arms? That the arm and leg sliders are skewed to different extremes depending on whether you're using the male or female shapes? That "50" does not represent "average" on most of the sliders? Not many, I'd wager.  Pussycat Catnap wrote: Height may be about preference. But proportions are about anatomy I'm gonna disagree that height is purely about preference, but I'll leave it at that unless someone really wants to start another height thread.

It's worth noting just how messed up ideas of avatar shape really are. Most avatars in SL have arms that are far, far too short for their bodies. This is so common, that if you have someone stretch out their arms to human proportions, the person thinks they look too long (at least at first) just because they're so used to SL's super short arms. Also, my very own avatar has regularly been called a child, a dwarf, fat, squat, etcetera. This av, this av right here! To be fair, I've only been called these things by people with avatars exemplifying observations like those in this thread but seeing as how this is considered "fat" by apparently a significant portion of the SL population, it's probably not so surprising that you see so many avatars, men and women, with waists as thin as their undersized heads. Men seem to have no trouble bumping up the shoulder width slider as far as it goes, however.

Most people stretch the avatar shape out way too much, it looks like they were all put through Willy Wonka's taffy machine. The Lindens are every bit as guilty of this, but it seems pretty clear by now that LL either doesn't have an art staff or does thier best to keep the art staff far away from anything where they may have a positive impact on SL. It is actually not only possible to create avatars that aren't stretched out like this, but simple even. If a bit time consuming. I've posted an avatar proportion checking guide here, which a couple of others have turned into blog posts elsewhere.

Torely's video only covers half the process in adjusting your camera. Here's a thread I made a long time ago about adjusting your camera settings in SL. If you just want to return to the default view, go to these two settings in the debug menu and click the "Revert to Defaults" button. That should work.

Unfortunately there's no really good solutions to the flaws of the avatar mesh. It's in dire, critical need of replacement but LL has states they've no plans to do so. Some Lindens have even suggested that mesh import will solve the issue by allowing people to upload their own meshes, which shows a terrifying lack of understanding of the problems that would create. Thjere are user made sculpted body parts (hands, feet, chests, heads) but they all come with limitations and problems. Like ugly seams where they meet the av mesh, no animation, not working with avatgar clothing....

@Flux As someone else said, LL used to give financial incentive for traffic created by user made communities, but the system was gamed to the point where it served no purpose except as a financial liability to LL. I would like to see LL take an active, non-automated role in helping communities, but at the same time they want to appear as if they're favouring friends of employees over quality work. @Shockwave It's kind of pointless for them to lower prices in the current situation. People already supersize avatars and content in SL to the point where, for all intents and purposes, people are voluntarily shrinking their land to 1/4th it's size. When people are voluntarily paying four times as much for land than they use it for, why cut costs?

LL did a terrible job setting up age verification in SL. There are two ways to "Age verify" in SL. One is to go through Aristotle's identity verification, where you provide your SSN, driverse license, etcetera to prove you are who you say you are. The second is to simply provide a payment method with LL and use it once to purcahse some in-world money (As little as a couple dollars' worth). Prior to age restrictions in SL, LL gave land owners the ability to restrict people based on account age and whether they had payment information on file with LL. When age restrictions were added, LL added a misnamed feature to require "age verification", but what it really means is that they require Aristotle's identity verification. So, a parcel can actually be restricted by either. Artistotle identity verificaion, payment method, or both in addition to the rating of the sim. Confusion came in to how LL implemented adult content requirements. A lot of people still believe they can have adult land in moderate rated sims if they set the parcel to adult. This is false, but people do it. A lot. Some people think they're required to set the "admit only age verified" feature even when in an already adult rated sim, This is also false. Thankfully, no place that makes these mistakes is actually worth visiting in SL. There's plenty of content out there utilizing the basic adult verification features without the additional layers of unecessary restrictions on top.

It's not rendering the monsters that's the problem, it's everything else. There's no way to convincingly animate in-world creatures, all animations are cheap hacks that look poor compared to any game made in the last 10 years. Scripting in SL is slow and glitchy, meaning you'd run into lots of issues getting everything to run smoothly, especially the moment the first person with 20MB of scripted attachments wanders in complaining about the lag then getting mad at anymone who points out its their scripted attachments dragging down the sim. As far as populating a sim with NPC creatures and characters goes, bots are the only answer and they're no answer at all. A bot places as much a burden on a sim as a human controlled avatar, is at the mercy of the same unreliable scripting system and to top it all off bots require you to host them on a separate server you need to keep running all the time. Untill LL gives us NPC objects, SL will remain little more than a chatroom with graphics.

LoveAngeL Lyre wrote: "Identity Verification" except of the following page: http://lindenlab.com/press/releases/08_29_07 in August 29, 2007. They report the term "Age verified" (Age verification - using driver's licence number, or Passport, or National ID card number or the last four digits of a Social Security number) and "Account Verified" (Payment info on file - CC or verified Paypal account with Xstreet or Second Life). So i consider that it is good to follow the official terminology of LL trying to avoid misunderstandings especially from new users and from users who haven't English as first language. The problem is LL's terminology, which has lead to the confusion present here. This same topic comes up again and again because LL has made all references to the features in question so poorly written and the terminology so confusing. LoveAngeL Lyre wrote: In addition LL nowhere in knowledge base's or wiki's pages relative with age verification, reports the restriction "Restrict access to residents verified by payment information on file" although it exists, with the only exception a great chart by Rand Linden which posted for first time in June 2, 2011 (some days ago). chart I'm not sure why you'd question the existance of a feature (especially one so easily confirmed just by looking at SL's parcel restriction options) even while admitting you'd found mention of it from LL.