Toysoldier Thor

Totally agree with you Medhue, If LL's concerns was that the Customer Jira was used too often as an opinion posting place, then they could have simply resolved the issue with a link to a respective forum posting with the same Jira #. But again, I suspect that this was not the reason why Rodvik shut down the JIRA. The problem with people posint opinions on a Jira has been around for years and LL did not seem overly concerned about it - just ignored those comments. Rodvik shutting down the Jira is just a more visible example of is policy to "CLOSE / LOCK DOWN COMMIUNICATIONS FROM LL". He sees the customer Jira as a form of "customer meddling into LL internal operations and knowledge". Rdovik is executing a strategy of separating the long & strongly established unique culture that LL had fostered since its inception of having very open and multi-lateral inter-communications between LL and its customer base. I would agree that this relationship between LL and its customers is quite unique in the industry but it has become an entrenched and critical relationship since LL's current staffing is the size and skills depth it is now because it has relied upon the massive knowledge and skills that the community willingly offers to LL. With Rodvik shutting down this open relationship and moving LL to the kind of CLOSED COMPANY relationship that he is used to at EA, he has completely missed the fact that his company survives on this OPEN COMMUNICATIONS model. BTW - do not be too surprise if over the next months, the LL User Group meetings will be stopped and that the WIKI's and BLOGs from LL would no longer be updated, and that even the forums might be pared down to minimal forums. Rodvik wants to clam up is company and shelter LL's customers from LL internals.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: Czari Zenovka wrote: Hey, Deja I think one of the reasons many people are outraged is because this decision cuts off an avenue of communication from resident to Lindens. From reading most of the posts on this decision, both here, on the SLU forums and various blogs, it appears that the Lindens, or more likely Rod, are saying, "Go away, you're bothering us." Then there's the whole technical side where many bugs/issues within SL were noticed first by residents, a jira was submitted, others perhaps contributed to the issue, and a resolution was found either sooner than it would have been if a Linden just happened on the issue or at all. In Toy's VLM thread he lists the URL for the most recent UG meeting he attended and, from reading that, one can see even some Lindens are clueless about why this happened and they also concur that a lot of great "group think" in debugging came from the jiras. Yes it was very clear in both the UG I attended as well as what I heard about and read in earlier UG meetings. Even though they did not clearly speak out against the new policy - it didnt take a rocket scientist to realize that gagging the jira WAS NOT their idea. ( a critical typo in my posting - I said *was and I meant *was not - that changed the entire meaning of my posting. Sorry about that. It seemed quite clear that the JIRA GAGGING was NOT their idea as they said they would miss it as it has a lot of logical value to both them and the SL customers.

Czari Zenovka wrote: Hey, Deja I think one of the reasons many people are outraged is because this decision cuts off an avenue of communication from resident to Lindens. From reading most of the posts on this decision, both here, on the SLU forums and various blogs, it appears that the Lindens, or more likely Rod, are saying, "Go away, you're bothering us." Then there's the whole technical side where many bugs/issues within SL were noticed first by residents, a jira was submitted, others perhaps contributed to the issue, and a resolution was found either sooner than it would have been if a Linden just happened on the issue or at all. In Toy's VLM thread he lists the URL for the most recent UG meeting he attended and, from reading that, one can see even some Lindens are clueless about why this happened and they also concur that a lot of great "group think" in debugging came from the jiras. Yes it was very clear in both the UG I attended as well as what I heard about and read in earlier UG meetings. Even though they did not clearly speak out against the new policy - it didnt take a rocket scientist to realize that gagging the jira WAS NOT their idea. (* critical typo in my posting - said *was and I meant "was not )

Deja Letov wrote: Jacob Cagney wrote: I am not sure why anyone is surprised, stunned, whatever. Rod is a gamer. Rod comes from a gamer backbround. Rod hired gamers when he took over as CEO. 99.9999999% of gamer companies do not have public bug reports. I agree with this. The way SL has been going lately, it wasn't long before they started adopting the ways of other gaming companies. To be honest...as a gamer...I've VERY rarely used the Jira. I tend to file support tickets or post something in the forums, since that's what I do with other games. Sure when someone posts a link and wants me to go vote on it, I will just to be supportive. But this change, really won't affect me, since it's not a system I use regularly. I'm not saying I agree with it and I honestly think it sucks...but I guess I just don't see the same "the sky is falling" attitude about this. I guess maybe it's more or less going to affect people who have had major bug issues to report or who regularly follow jira's? Ahhh but Deja..... This is where you are not correct (statement in red). Because you personally dont use the JIRA and actively participate in the jira to report bugs and work with LL on jira issues to diagnose and resolve SL grid, Viewer, and Marketplace problems, doesnt mean it doesnt affect you. It will. You might not participate in JIRA's but a smaller but quite dedicated portion of the SL community actively engages in many jira issues and works to identify, report, diagnose, and resolve countless SL-wide problems via the jira. I have seen many very serious SL / Marketplace issues solved thanks 100% directly because of LL working with this smaller portion of SL residents via the jira. Many of thes solved bugs directly impacted you. If the jira did not exist - you would have suffered many times for much much longer from serious bugs on the marketplace when LL deployed DD and maturity filters and search "improvement" and the move from xstreet to MP, etc. etc. etc. You would have suffered much longer from viewer bugs, and the countless LL created bugs from new server code releases if these SL residents with a lot of skills and talents and problem solving skills did not assist LL staff in isolating the problems and fixing them. So I hate to be blunt but.... Rodvik gagging the customer jira will 100% affect you in the months to come (as long as SL stays alive). There is no question about that. LL staff is very small and their skills talent pool is not deep enough to develop and support the size and complexity of environment that SL has become. THEY NEED SL STAFF as freebie support staff. Rodvik has just fired 100's of volunteer staff from LL's support team. He is just not sharp enough to realize he did this.

Kampu Oyen wrote: ...... But I don't think Rod is behind this. Rod 1) is not a moderator of this forum, 2) is assigned no open JIRA's , and 3) has no documented record of straight-up lying to merchants [as 1) is 2) has and 3) does the person I think is behind this]. Moreover, there's no compelling reason for Rod either to hide the JIRAs or to ban merchants for talking about Valve looking at the JIRA's.... A) There's no compelling reason for Rod to do such things, because, if the Steam deal doesn't go through, Rod can also blame a bunch of other stuff on the individual he will then be in a position to show caused damages to LL, thus protecting himself from some degree of scrutiny on those other points, provided he can get everything smoothed out quickly enough. OTOH... maybe we shouldn't rule out Rod so quickly... B) There's no compelling reason for Rod NOT to do such things because if the Steam deal goes through, he'll finally have enough revenue flowing to sue the pants off of the individual currently identifying as CTL, thus solving the same problem for Rod, if perhaps not as quickly. And now that (User Name) already has CTL desperately scrambling to do futile and inciminating things like ban people and hide JIRAs in order to get the Steam deal to go through, it is here, finally, pointed out that maybe she shouldn't want it to go through anyway if it means both more incriminating evidence and more money for Rod's legal people to sue her with. Congratulations to her for the overreaction. Maybe she can fix it by unhiding the JIRA's? I doubt it, but what can it hurt at this point? Maybe she can try to convince everyone that they were never hidden in the first place. Maybe? Kampu, THERE IS AMPLE REASON to know that clearly Rodvik is behind this stupid move of JIRA GAGGING. I dont even know where to begin on the evidence that this clearly a Rodvik directive. I am surprised you would even suspect otherwise and it has been mentioned in many discussions as to why its Rodvik. The question I will ask you is to turn your statement around - after all these years of having jira, now would anyone else at LL be behind this? What would compel any other LL staffer "with enough authority" to execute this stupid move? Do you honestly believe that the general LL staff want to see jira gagged? LL has used the resident jira and all the vounteer efforts / participation from their own customers for years to help them identify and solve their problems faster and more effectively. LL staff has often used the jira as a way to sluff off annoying customer problems, bugs. and proposed features by telling customers to "file a jira" and then go and ever look at the jira. LL effectively uses it as one of the most effective direct open methods of LL / Customer communications. In fact I see it often in the LL User Group meetings where the entire agenda is based on local chat referencing JIRA # for the group to talk about. So..... why would any other LL staffer NOW want to gag it? It must be someone new to the game at LL and someone with motives that do not relate to years and years of current operations and a person with high enough authority to be able to veto all the LL staff at lower levels that would have been against gagging jira.... RODVIK. Rodvik is from EA and in his old world - the entire concept of direct open communications and interactivity with their customers is a huge no-no. EA would not allow a customer to see as much of the inner workings of their operations. EA would not allow customers to have so many direct personal multi-lateral communications with their customers like what has been the entrenched culture at LL since its inception. Rodvik has taken his entrenched EA culture to LL. It must make Rodvik's skin crawl to see all his staff having so many direct communications with its customers. In the first 100 days of Rodvik's rule at LL he came in and pretended to be an open book and join the LL culture by directly communicating with all his customers is so many ways. But it was only an act so that he could "learn". But if you look back in the past year, you will see a lot of evidence of Rodvik putting a stop of have his staff directly interact with LL's customers except via "customer classed" restricted formats. The Commerce Team has been one of the first to be gagged as they do not communicate with Merchant at all. LL has backed out of more and more SL inworld events - they did not even participate in their own SL8B birthday (which they have in all past years). And not the Customer JIRA is being gagged because Rodvik does not belive that customers should see - much less actively participate in - LL's product/service bugs. That is like airing a company's ugly secrets. Rodvik hates this. This is not a theory - Rodvik "IS" executing a "close up communications with the customers" policy. The evidence is clear. It doesnt matter to Rodvik that logistically speaking - his staff has been using the countless person decades of free skills and effort to help LL develop and support its own service. Rodvik dont grasp that. Rodvik just wants his customers not to see the inner workings of LL. As such, dont be surprised when Rodvik shuts down LL User Groups. Dont be surprised that a lot of the SL Blog and Forums get removed. The blogs are rarely used already. Rodvik will be shutting down any "rogue" communications and at worst replacing them with highly restricted systems. Rodvik's "convert SL into a gamers platform" is another critical reason why Rodvik directly executed this move. He is integrating into STEAM in desperate hope that the performance hungry Gamers will come streaming into the SL grid. He doesnt want the Gaming community to see any evidence of all the countless service bugs on file at LL. To Rodvik - this is embarassing. I am very confident is saying that not only are LL staff not the ones that suggested gagging the Customer JIRA, but there likely was an intense internal feud / debate between LL staff and Rodvik and his inner circle of cronies that are executing Rodvik's policies. But that the JIRA Gagging went thru anyway makes it really clear that Rodvik is the one to blame for the gagging of the Jira. There is only ONE PERSION THAT ALL FINGERS POINT TO...... RODVIK.

Yes this is great news to know that VLMs are not longer an "IF" it hits the SL Grid but now a "WHEN" does it hit the grid. And you are correct about the JIRA link on the VLM Awareness LOGO/POSTER. I mentioned that in my blog that thanks to RODVIK's bonehead move to this week to gag the JIRA system - the ability to look at and get updates on the VLM JIRA are not possible any longer. I can update the logo to remove the JIRA link.... but the good news is that the need for the JIRA is not as important as it was since LL has already reviewed and agreed that VLMs should be developed. related to this issue on not being able to see JIRAs, at the Server User Group, the Lindens themselves believed that a lot of the issues tracking and discussions should move to the Forums now. I suggested LL create a new main Category on the community forums called "The forums formerly known as JIRA" and create categories like viewer issues, server, marketplace, etc. Here is the transcripts of the meeting.... http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Simulator_User_Group/Transcripts/2012.09.07 I actually felt real bad for the attending Lindens as well as the Linden staff (cough cough - are you all believing what I am actually saying here ? ) because it really became clear in the meeting that shutting down the JIRA was not their idea at all. This stupid idea was created right at the top by Rodvik. And even during the meeting we were not able to even point to existing JIRA issues to talk about nor could Linden staff ask residents to update the JIRA follow the jira. Closing the JIRA will hurt the LL staff as much as its going to hurt us.

I will update the VLM JIRA to inform everyone about the progress of VLMs..... Ohhhh Hold on !!! Wait !!! Rodvik took that capability away from us SL residents. We cant use JIRA's to keep the community up on new features and bugs. Thank Goodness Rodvik hasnt yet removed the Forums. That will be our Christmas present.

OK Folks !!! Some sorta Awesome news related to the concept of VLMs on Friday and even followup info.... At the SL User Group I poked the Lindens for and update on VLMS (like I have been doing almost every week with the answer we all normally would expect - "we are looking into this idea"). Well this week I was shocked to get a different answer from Cheesey and Andrew Linden... LL has finished the phase of investigating the idea of VLMs and they have determined that VLMs are feasible enough to warrant moving it to the next phase of determining DEVELOPMENT PRIORITY !! I asked if this is good news and Cheesey said "yes - that is progress". After the meeting I did some further investigation and asked a Linden if he/she seriously saw VLMs having a legit hope or am I wasting time pushing this idea. I was told that he/she was surprised how much traction the VLMs got internally. The LL techs grasped the concept and value very quickly and that the VLM solution could potentially help LL with several other functions (especially the centralized VLM-MS service). So it sounds like VLMs might see the light of day some day ..... now comes the problem of development priority at LL BUT THIS IS GREAT NEWS considering the level of hope most of us - including me - thought the idea would have. zero.

OK Merchant Folks..... I attended one of the LL User Group meetings and I brought up the stupidity of the recent JIRA changes. The LL staff managing the UG were already expecting the questions were gonna be asked and had a response prepared. In fact, if you havent gone to a UG meeting, the whole meeting involves posting JIRA's that all attendees can click on and read and then discuss and then even post updates. They pointed out that this decision on the JIRA was not made by anyone at the UG and they strongly recommended that any SL residents that want to provide feedback to the decision makers of this recent JIRA change should fill out and submit the survey. http://lindensurvey.force.com/support/JIRASurvey So Submit and submit often and tell others to submit. My suspicion is pretty strong - as I mentioned in my blog - that this decision was not one that the LL staff wanted. I mean, LL staff used the community often to interact with problems on the SL grid. In order for these LL execs reading this survey to take us serious - we should post survey results with actual examples of WHY the new system is bogus.

Over the past year since Rod's influence has started to become visible in the company's plans, decisions, and operations, anyone that loves to watch the evolution (or in the case of LL - the devolution) of a company's lifecycle has been realizing that "The Emperor has no clothes". When Rod appeared on the scene, there was an overwhelming consensus that since Rod was this TOP DOG from EA, what better selection could LL have made for a CEO to save LL from its years of lost wondering in the woods to corporate maturity than to pick renowned expert in one of the industry's top gaming companies. I will admit that even I was actually excited that maybe ROD WILL UNDERSTAND AND RIGHT-SIZE WHAT SL IS ALL ABOUT. Although his roots is "gaming", he would have intelligence to quickly realize the technology / market space that LL's SecondLife exists. That its not another player in the crowded "gaming" market. And that with some infusion of mature sr. management guidance, LL's could finally find its way out of the woods, stop the heavy bleeding of SecondLife and re-establish it as "THE" 3D virtual world community to participate in. But again, Rod's questionable decisions at LL over the past year and his inability to resolve the biggest on-going issues with the grid (lag and stability and a collapsing economy and horrendous customer support etc) are showing that "ROD DONT GET IT" Its clear now that Rod's plans from Day 1 has always been to turn SecondLife into another GAMING PLATFORM with maybe a few unique aspects to the platform which SL offers and no other Gaming world has. Even though his first 100 days he put up a great show to the community that he wanted to learn what LL was all about and grasp the unique aspects of what makes SecondLife so addictive to the members of the community and use his talents to improve the platform that this community thrives on, IT WAS JUST A PR SHOW. Rod clearly doesn't understand the SL community. He is clearly not a business savvy person that grasps the idea to improve the satisfaction of service for your loyal customers before you seek out and look for more. He doesn't grasp that the SL Community has always been and moreso not continues to be LL's largest crutch is provide the actual support of the platform that LL's developers constantly de-stabilize with their constant desire to add new shiny features. In that light, ROD doesn't understand that the JIRA process as it has been set up is one of the most power support arms that LL's limited resources have to solving problems. He only see the community based JIRA process as a huge exposure to his bid to turn SL into a competing GAMING PLATFORM. I am sure in his mind, Rod looked that the JIRA and said: "OMG - how will we be taken serious by the STEAM / GAMING community if they see in the JIRA system how bug-ridden out platform is - how many un-resolved technical problems SL has??? THIS HAS TO BE HIDDEN!! " So despite what I am sure to predict was a lot of "OMG ROD YOU CANT DO THIS - OUR RESIDENTS FIND MOST OF OUR PROBLEMS AND DIAGNOSE MOST OF OUR PROBLEMS VIA JIRA" from the LL tech staff, Rod has other plans and has a single-minded mission to turn SL into the next gaming platform and to be accepted by the leaders in the gaming industry. All Logistics aside, in Rod's mind, "We must hide the fact that SL is riddled with countless unsolved bugs and more new ones as Rod infuses all these great new technologies like Mesh, PathFinder, Material Systems, etc.. Sadly, this move will pretty much overwhelm LL's tech team as they will no longer have the continual flow of uncalculating I.T. technology and Business and Community skills and talents that they were able to tap into by letting the SL community openly participate in the Resident JIRA. LL's staff can no long even reference JIRA's when talking to their most talented tech residents that freely and willingly participate in LL's user groups and beta's and forums to resolve show stopping grid-impacting problems that LL creates. As such, I would have to agree with many in the SL community that this has to be the single most prominent bone-head move made by Rod. The buck stops at Rod so its very safe to say that a decision of this magnitude has to have been at minimum blessed by Rod but I am pretty sure it was MADE by Rod. There is no doubt that SL's business model has been slide to demise over the past 2ish years (1800 sims abandoned last year and recent report that 800 sims abandoned in the last 2 months is a clear sign). This decision by Rod just through a gallon of bacon fat on the slide.

Deja Letov wrote: I agree...plus Toy is kinda pretty as is. @Deja... Actually I do look awesome in my accidentally purchased & non-transferrable tear away silks (dont ask - that is a whole nother story) @Tamara... you have a good point as you can see 100% proof where this thread went when a "GUY" entered the thread We men do need a place where we can compare pixel strap-on parts (its not that the ladies of SL would ever chat about fashion and how good their avi looks...snikker) But honestly.... I am just poking at you all a bit in jest.. I just found it very interesting how in the virtual fantasy role play world of SecondLife, even the idea of "Womens Networking Clubs" cannot be assured of the purity of their membership since its a well known fact that there are so many SL residents who completely roleplay the opposite gender to their RL. I will now bow out of this thread quietly....

Deja Letov wrote: I think it was done just in the spirit of all the other business network groups out in the real world...there are a ton of them. But don't you worry...if you make a mans group I already own a giant missle I can strap on lol lol !!! you are surely in !!

hmmm Deja.... if i do recall the LL Gods bless the women Avi's with all their needed pixel parts. Its us poor men avi's that LL decided would all be born as both aphallic and eunuch. If I ever decide to create a "Network of Business Men in SL"... I would encourage you ladies to strap on a Male avi and all its parts and join our group, since the intellect, skills, talents in the business world - even in SL - can be found on both sides. I would personally hate having a business networking group that leaves out a wide swath of extremely talented people simply because LL blessed them with all their pixel parts in SL. I'm just saying

I am interested as well.... < me dawns his "Woman" avatar and sneaks into this exclusive club > Welcome to the virtual world of SecondLife where many of SL's roaming women on the grid could be men PS - dont worry.... one of your joined female avatars will not be me

I saw you and "ISA" listed at new registered users that wanted to be validated. I validated you both. Obviously the threads in the forums are older (june 2010 and earlier) but you can get a flavor of how well it was working for a while and how the topics in the private merchant group could give more freedom for merchants to talk without LL overseeing / moderating nor customers watching. I could easily send a bulk email to that membership to ask the 87 members (some likely have left SL) if there is any interest in re-igniting the merchant forum. Sadly as great as it would be for this MERCHANT group to be alive and well, I would strongly predict that - like last time and like most other user groups/forums - about 10% of the members will be actively posting content and discussion and the rest will just quietly lurk and not get involved. This is what kills most groups quickly. I tried REALLLL hard to stimulate thread talk and posts but unless there was a critical mass of merchant members, the amount of new content generated was not enough for the lurkers to stay interested and not enough for the active participants to interact with.

here was the list of forums in the SL Merchant Group (including most of the forums you cant see unless you were registered)...

Yes Deja, back in late 2009 I founded an SL Merchants group that was dedicated for Merchants of SecondLife. It was called the SL MERCHANTS group. It started as a simple Google group. Within a couple months with ~ 100 users registered I noticed that the Google groups was not an effective place for hosting the community. So I moved it to a new platform with several private and a few public visible forums. http://z10.invisionfree.com/SL_MERCHANTS/index.php?act=idx The reason I created it in the first place was because of the major Free / Clutter Tax Roadmap that LL Commerce Team roled out that was single-handedly the most explosive hated policy to be announced by the Commerce Team (during the Pink Linden's era ). Myself and several other noticed that the SL Forums run by LL was too restrictive and did not allow Merchants to communicate privately among themselves and more importantly to speak freely about strategies that were not in LL's best interest (i.e. moving to competing Merchant sites and grids and establishng a Merchant's association). The private forums were very popular for a while with great discussions and no fear of LL Moderators overseeing us and removing content they didnt like. I even established forums that were public and ALLOWED merchants to post new product announcements for anyone to see. But eventually the anger on the Freebies Roadmap / Clutter Tax died down, several merchants / products left, and it became clear that the roadmap was yet another poorly conceived and impossible to execute strategy. Interest in the external Merchant group died out and everyone went back to this forum. It would be great to have this SL Merchants group come back to life but it is near impossible to reach the critical mass of users / conversations needed to keep it alive - like SLUniverse is able to do. If you want to see all the private forums and threads in the old group just IM me and I can approve your registration.

Well I have been working with and learning mesh for 8 months and I even occassionally peek in and contribute to this forum at times (when I need help or want to share what I learned) and I even did know the general inworld mesh algorithm no-no's that linking Mesh with anything else like non-mesh prims & sculpts & scripts often causes horrible things to happen with LI (in addition to countless other factors that penalize the use of mesh inworld).... But until this week, I didnt know what a "Tortured Torus" was other than I knew that I created one in the past as art statues. I didnt know that even though a linkset of prims says one type of object "convex hull" that it doesnt mean all the prims in the linkset are not convex hull. Nor did I know how to fix it until I kept fiddling with the various combinations of linking until the massive LI dropped. But then again I would guess I am like a large portion of the mesh creating population (i.e ex casual sculpty makers) that are not heads down MESH ONLY creators. Mesh is just one of countless things I do in SL and my RL around SL. I do sculpties, textures, write some scripts, assemble some prims, do SL/RL/Digital art, participate in SL's art community, sing karaoke, go to live SL concerts, participate in the Merchant community of SL, etc. etc. etc. I maybe create a mesh creation every couple months. Maybe if my prime focus in SL was to create mesh then I would focus all my time on following and participating in MESH forums and reading all the threads and going to the LL User Group meetings on mesh...etc. But sadly i am not.... so I come to the forums like this when i need to and ask the dumb questions some of you mesh loyalists have known long time ago (likely even before mesh was officially released) and have been asked countless times before.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: Thankfully I had 3 expert mesh builders come to my gallery to witness what I did as they didnt believe it either but they all saw what I saw. I can't help wondering how they were experts if the issue was the physics weight/setting of your items. That's a well known issue to say the least and has been written about on the forums many many times. It shows how horribly demanding the physics can be if you don't watch out. At least now it's shown in landimpact, unlike before. Anyway...glad you got it solved. They were good experts as all three of them immediately said it was the physics of the "tortured torus" - a term I had never even heard of prior to their visit. They even saw the info that showed it was high (something I didnt know how to check). What stumped them in the 10 minutes of their visit without full rights to my legacy linkset was that they said "change it from prim to convex hull" and I told them (because that is exactly what it showed) that the linkset already was set to CONVEX HULL. And what seemed to have fixed the problem was to ignore what the Edit window said about the linkset being CONVEX HULL and flip-flop it to anything other than convex hull and then back to it (or as Theresa said - to NONE as well). Final point that might shock some of you .... the vast majority of mesh creators likely DO NOT follow this forum nor all of its created threads on a daily or weekly basis... if they do at all. So even though you are correct that maybe this issue was extremely obvious to you and the forum loyalists and it has been spoken about "many many times" in this forum, it really doesnt help when most mesh creator dont follow this forum unless they need help. There is a reason that this topic has come up "many many times" in this forum and I can safely predict that it will come up many many many many more times in this forum in the months and years to come (as it would also be coming up in the other SL mesh forums that you likely are not a part of)...... because the vast majority of Mesh creators have not been on this forum nor do not watch this forum and only come to this forum if they encounter this problem and need an answer.

Thanks to the advise, I re-textured my model at the pre-merged Subtool stage (i.e. I textured and baked normals and specularity onto each component of the model prior to merging into one). This allowed to to adjust the wing to the body and fix the glitch that Drongle noticed. I am also now able to change the position of the wings at any time. Another unexpected side benefit of texturing prior to merging the subtools is that I can now bake the normal/specularity maps into the texture at each component which avoids the common overlap distortion that happens with ZapLink. I also was able to reduce the import of the model into SL a little bit further by reducing the lower and lowest values a tad smaller. With dragonflies there is no need for any physics so the less the better. Here is the final version that I will be using to make a few colored designs in hopes of selling a pack of them. I also totally changed the texture on this version...

OK Drongle... Here are my tests on an older linkset. I dont think the old prims were a factor. I believe Theresa was correct. I did have a few more older animated art pillars that used my tortured torus prims that were still rezzed inworld prior to the pathfinder upgrade you mentioned. One of them had 6 prims (5 prim 2 of them tortured torus & 1 sculpty). When I linked it to a 3 LI mesh statue (I added the mesh to the older prim linkset) the total LI went from 9 to 212. Even when I added the prim linkset to the mesh - LI was still 212. THEN... I simple dragged a copy of the old linkset to make an identical new copy of the linkset and did the exact same linking. I did not unlink the linkset. The results were identical. LI = 212. THEN.... I took the old linkset and completely unlinked it and then simply relinked the linkset. Then I linked this refreshed linkset to the mesh and the count was still LI = 212 THEN... I unlinked EVERYTHING and relinked ALL of the prims and mesh tegether as one. And the count was STILL LI=212. I was completely lost so I took the entire linkset with the mesh at its count of 212 while in Convex Hull and switched it to Physics shape of NONE. And surprise surprise..... the count dropped down to LI = 8 I thought... ok let me switch the entire linkset back to CONVEX HULL and it should go back up to 212..... It didnt. It stayed at 8. If I switch the shape type to PRIM then the count flew back to 212. But swithing it back to convex hull or none brought the linkset back to 8. It seems when I changed the entire linkset to NONE from CONVEX HULL - that fixed things - even if I switched it back to convex hull. PRIM broke it again. I guess it was the physics type that was the root cause.

excluding the facts that LL doesnt penalize for the use of one type of poly vs another and that neither is any harder to work with than the other.... Is one type of Poly a better poly for efficiency? I thought Quads on a model were actually two Triangles anyway. Am I wrong?

Drongle McMahon wrote: I would call it a bug if the recalculation isn't being done until a linkset is unlinked. If we can find a reproduction that doesn't destroy itself, we could make a jira and see if they will fix it. I don't suppose you have another copy of the linkset rezzed somewhere from before the change? Even then it might be difficult because copying makes a new linkset and would probably trigger the recalculation in at least the new copy. Hmm. Yes I suspect it is a bug but if so it will be one that diminishes in impact as time goes on. I will have to look around my store/gallery to see if there are some examples. Problem is that very few of my builds would use tortured torus. Ohh hold on there might be! I will check when I get back inworld.

Dilbert Dilweg wrote: I am sorry I didn't mean to give you the impression that your method is any way bad or trying to argue your methods. The downside for me when using the decimate tends to make unwraping clean seams harder when setting up kits for customers. no offense. sorry lol Ive used decimate many times . nothing wrong with it .. except for limitations I experience.I am sure I have a lot more to learn , Have a good day You dont have to apologize - I didnt take it wrong. I really did want to know that the disadvantage was for an automated decimation deciding to use triangles? Is there a disadvantage that I am missing? I didnt mean to post to make you think i took your posting as an insult.

The design of the pants looks good but I was going to say what you already suggested... your pantlegs seem to have a lot of loops .... I would think your pant legs could have got away with less than 1/2 of them in the shin and thigh zones (no bends and no major geometric changes that a texture with a normal map could simulate. Regarding the Quads vs tris... I am not sure how this is a downside to decimation. In about 1 or 2 minutea of my effort using the Decimation and the Sculptris poly reduction tools on my entire dragonfly, I was able to get my model down to an extremely low poly count... a poly count that LL's mesh LI calculation tool full recognizes and brings my SL mesh in at an extremely low LI value. And in SL it seems to rez very well and efficient. I didnt have to waste 10, 30, 90 minutes optimizing my model. So exactly what is the downside toi my model, me as the creator, or my future customers?