Tommy Rampal

So Im embarking on quite a wide scale project, but its severely encumbered with time due to lack of funds. I was thinking of taking up small scale virtual real estate to hopefully get a little income and land mass to work with. How should a newcomer come about this? Where is the demand? General, moderate or adult? Themed, partitioned or whole islands? Invest in one or aim big? Or is the economy hindered and I should avoid it completely? Thanks guys

I also figured out, that if viewer settings have object detail set to the lowest; the mesh constantly fluctatates between low and lowest. Which made me a bit concerned...

I noticed that differing materials cause the button to be greyed out, this is included for custom physics.

So I'm still a bit confused about setting LODs. It's not fully dependant on distance, right? It also depends on the client's preferences. So I've been battling with myself on how to set my LODs for my building exteriors (walls, frames, etc). By default on the lowest setting, Secondlife provides auto-triangled LODs that are almost unrecognisable as a building (shape change due to loss of vertices; even a simple triangle for lower vertice meshes. I tend to find myself setting the triangles to these settings: High: 100% trianglesMedium: 50-100%Low: 50%Lowest: 25-50%Typically, my personal rule is: always raise the lowest triangles until the mesh is reasonably identifiable. Is this good practice for not-so complicated meshes?

This isn't really a good pathway for me, as I rebuild my complicated meshes to simple boxes/watered down versions (e.g. a wall or stairs) to save unnessecary physics loading. Though I took your advice on uploading the entire mesh as a linkset, then used that as a reference when uploaded the building again, piece by piece with specific LODs and physics.

The physics would need to vary, especially it being a building too right? Does the upload window support that?

Yikes... That sure seems long-winded... Is there not an easier/more straightforward way?

So I'm designing a mesh building of quite a large scale, and have split this up into seperate meshes so that it is less harsh when texturing. I have set my scale to how I want it in Secondlife, so I don't have to worry about scaling after uploading. Though one major problem I am facing right now is trying to take the position coordinates from Blender and recreate it in Secondlife, so it is as accurate as it can be. This doesn't seem to be as straight forward for me. Upon selecting 'Set Origin to Geometry' in Blender, it doesn't seem to set the same origin/pivot point as what Secondlife would upon uploading the mesh. So I don't have any true positioning differences to take to Secondlife. Any advice guys? Thanks for your time!

So after driving me mad, I've turned to the forums for this one. Using Blender 2.9, it worked normally (and uploaded fine) until, for some reason, it no longer uploads and freezes my viewer with the message 'Missing required level of detail'. I've actually went ahead and rebuilt the mesh from scratch, still no luck. Is this normal that it freezes the viewer, forcing me to close it? And is there an easy fix?

This helped, thanks. But, with the priority and walking situation... I noticed that on Viewer 3.0 (which doesn't show any leg movement when the body parts are not zet to 0) showed differently to third party viewers, which showed the leg movement as in the preview (Phoenix Viewer)...

I've just tried uploading a combat/defensive pose (it is in a 7 frame loop) at priority level 2. When the user moves I want them to appear walking still (so the animation doesn't always stay dominant). But when uploaded, for some reason, the animation is static throughout movement, no walking animation (particularly in the body and legs) takes place? What am I doing wrong? Thanks for your time again!

I've been wondering recently as I have been dealing with HUDs that have a heavy inventory use and contents, mainly animations. I was wondering what is the general limit of object inventories and how do they have an effect on scripts, if they do? Thanks again!

It happens without fail when reattaching, but works as expected when the script has been reset. I put an llOwnerSay when the events are triggered, and it just spams out for the duration of when the control is being held (when it should be once). When working with the script above, it should be easy to recreate the issue.

I believe you can get your mesh upload privelleges revoked for this too.

I discovered bvhacker has a pretty useful tool when trying to compress animation size. Resample to 1/2 frames literally cuts the frames and framerate by half, which in most cases work great.

I swear level & edge is broken. When I reattach the control script, teleport or relog; it triggers if clauses that contain the level & edge test as if it was being held, which breaks my double click tests: if(lastKeyPress == CONTROL_RIGHT && llGetAndResetTime() < .5){ // Double click} * This works fine, until the script is reattached. Resetting this script when the problem arises fixes it and the control events are activated through state change when required (which will revert back to default state on_rez/attach), so should I not even worry about this problem?

Maybe they can offer premium packages? 'Creator Premium' and 'Consumer Premium'? So you sacrafice a bit of your L$ allowance for free uploads (kind of like a top-up based mobile phone tariff)?

@Ceera. Can't LL treat a % of premium payments as a static upload cost (e.g. an automatic US$ to L$ transfer, then instant L$ payment), but the user doesn't see it?

Increasing land prim allowance, in my opinion, would cause mass confusion and varying server stress. I'm unsure how LL treats dud assets (uploads people aren't happy with, or no longer use) but it would definately encourage more creating and more in-world hours (compared to jump shipping to third party/beta grids).

So the guys at Linden Labs are trying to make premium membership worthwhile, while their recent efforts are cute, it's really just a novelty; not enough to buy me into it I'm afraid (I'm just your casual builder). For one, why not make premium memberships worthwhile by adding an upload allowance (adhering to a fair usage policy of course)? That's a real appeal to creators, compared to sandboxes that really don't appeal to everyone (land owners for one). "Premium Members; you could build for free, and now you can upload for free!"

So uploading my speed adjusted animations means secondlife will clamp them at 30? I think i read on the wiki that it can be 45? I mocap combat animations at 1-2 seconds at a time, so this would still benefit from the 30fps with minimal loading time right? Regarding loading time, isn't it literally text data being downloaded?

So there's been a few animations I've made where I've found that they are too slow or too fast, and have tried to come up with an easy way to optimize their speed. The quickest method I've found is to tweak the frame rate to odd numbers (e.g. 30 into 37FPS), to fine tweak the speed. Though most of my animations are around 1-2 seconds at a time; is this a good idea, and are there better alternatives out there? (e.g. adjusting the speed without changing the frame rate) I'm unsure how Secondlife treats my animations on upload with odd framerates, though, they look ok.

I have been having some hassle with interactive animations (hugs, handshakes etc) and varying avatar sizes. In most cases, my animations work together fine but a lot of the time I find that avatars with drastic height differences find that the animations are completely off, e.g. the hands do not meet or limbs go through bodies. I know animations and body parts do not use any kind of physics or magnetism, but has anyone come across this problem and found an alternative/hack? I was thinking of using a script to detect height differences, and if that's the case play a different animation (with the hand aiming towards a different angle). Does this seem practical, or are there better solutions out there?

I also noticed, with the script in my original post, it works fine until randomly it spams out (if attack() { llOwnerSay("Attack"); }). I think it is caused when the object that holds the script is reattached, or on teleport/logging in and out. Any idea why this is triggered? It seems anything inside the held if clause is executed continuously, ignoring the start check to make sure the control event is executed once.

Really well done. It gave more of that fun 'The Sims' style effect, which is essentially what LL should be aiming for.