Knutz Scorpio

Actually it's not hard to find land at less then 1L$/sq.m, just spotted a 512 at L$121 (0.23L$/sq.m). It looks like one of the less desirable plots I've seen, still saddening how land prices are dropping. You can find water side and water parcels at 1L$/sq.m in the less prestigious areas, you will probably have to spend more time searching for these and they likely will not be in sailable waters, but they can be found.

For me the free 512 tier + L$300 weekly makes it worth it, by buying it yearly I think I get more out then what I pay in. The premium only sandboxes have come in handy, never have had to use the more advanced support and hope I never do. Can't say the premium gifts are worth much. Thought the dune buggy and railroad hand cart were far too high in land impact, having to continuously tap an arrow key to keep the hand cart going was a hassle, and the dune buggy was nearly totally uncontrollable.

Wall height. If you mean distance from floor to ceiling then 5 meters seems to be the norm, can't get much lower then 4 without loosing the cam in the ceiling due to the crappy default avatar cam placement. For windows I tend to go all glass or mostly glass in the direction of the views I want, like a scenic lake, and mostly solid wall towards the stuff I don't need to see, like someone's failed attempt at a futuristic cyper night club. I think all exterior walls should have at least a minimal amount of window in them. I tend towards open floor plans with some definition of areas. An area intended to be more private, like a bedroom, could be walled off from the rest. I think a well laid out floor plan has no need for hallways, and hallways tend to cause problem with that default avatar cam placement. I think it's more flexible to design houses with just great rooms and bedrooms and such and the owner can subdivide and add the kitchens and bathroom and such if they feel they need them, or just enjoy the larger more open rooms. Bigger houses versus smaller ones, can't really say one is better then the other. Some like to have all their living area closed away inside away from public view while others like to have something minimal surrounded by forests and gardens. Seems really hard to have all the living space I want unless it's a really big house so I typically go multiple levels. I tend to agree with someone's post about teleport between levels being a cop out, I'd like to add that actual stairs between levels seems more elegant then ramps. To me split level homes seem more impressive. For textures I tend towards stone and stucco and other masonry, probably because I really like castles and cathedrals and such. I like the look of stone that's old enough to have all sharp corners worn off, and moss and ivy on exterior walls adds character, but I think the grunge look is just yucky. Another note about textures is look out for ones that have an alpha channel in them although they are suppose to be solid. I had a hardwood floor texture that I thought was great till I noticed the windows below showing through them, major let down. I like doors that are more then just flat boards with a texture. A little shadow baking at the corners and edges can add some realism, but window frame shadows and such baked in makes it feel that the light can never change. Light switches and power outlets I think are a bit much.

For me it's anything that amounts to "want to be a vampire?"

From the near vertical drop of terrain to a really flat area I'd guess it was on a sea floor somewhere? The last time I visited <0, 0, 0> was when I tried riding seated on top of an RC car going at top gear and speed toward a steep incline of the road that sent me air born across not one but two sim crossings (a sim corner). Seemed like a good idea at the time, and it proved a good idea to get the copy OK RC car cause I never got it back.

Your computer and OS is definitely not too old for this, when I have to use Windows it's Windows XP (I'm such a stubborn old fart). About not wanting to fiddle with the OS network settings, can't blame you there.

I had very similar problems when I first tried to view mesh to see what all the hoopla was about, what solved the problem for me was using Google's public DNS, read about it here Link to Google Public DNS site A DNS, or Domain Name Server, is what takes a web site name, like secondlife.com, and returns a network address that a network app can actually use, secondlife.com -> 216.82.2.17. Why did using Google's DNS solved the problem for me? The answers I got essentially boiled down to "it's better" and "it's faster". Hope this helps.

That music allow/deny dialog is what gets me, it pops up in the middle of the screen bringing you to a stop and you can't do anything till you hit allow or deny AND then deal with the dialog that pops up after that. A great majority of the time I couldn't care less about whatever is playing on that parcel, so why not just dump the allow/deny dialogs down in the corner with all the notecard, landmark, and group invites I ignore.

I'd miss the cool cars and bikes in my inventory and the miles of mainland road out there I have yet to explore. I'd miss building in unique areas and seeing what others have built. I'd miss those rare moments when I actually feel like socializing and go out to the night clubs to listen to the music while watching the wildlife. Probably lots of other things I'd miss that I can't think of right now, but I wouldn't spend too much time missing them before getting out to the other grids. There are a lot of other grids out there, but being that many of them are running on unmodified opensim on a few computers in some basement I suspect they'd get crushed by the sudden influx of SL refugees and the grid list would shorten considerably. Of the surviving opensims a couple would thrive and grow to where they can offer just about everything SL does now, and with actual competition they'd have to work much harder towards customer satisfaction. But what I'd really hope to see, resulting from the sudden freeing up of SL customers, is simulated worlds that have finally advanced past SL and opensim.

Biggest reason I've been premium is mainland. I get my biggest kick out of checking out parcels for sell and dreaming of what I can build on them. I try to restrain myself before buying yet another tempting plot and so far have managed to hold myself back to about 5k, and the steeper hill side it's on the more tempting it is to me. Occasionally I burn out and tier all the way back down to a Linden Home, but after a month or two I get crazy bored in those places and am back out on the mainland again. Another reason is to throttle back my spending. With the 300 linden "allowance" I'm far less tempted to make impulse buys and instead just wait whatever number of weeks to save up for it. Makes it much easier to resisting hitting that circled L$ button that they so conveniently placed right in my face.

It will probably help to build your lab in a sandbox first before going out looking for a parcel of land. You're probably going to find that due to the scale of the typical avatar and its camera placement a room that may seem medium size in RL may be unusable in SL. You'll probably find that you have to keep desks and tables a fair distance away from walls to avoid loosing your camera in the wall when walk behind them, for example. You will not be able leave it setup in the sandbox, but you can link it all together, name it something more meaningful then "object", and take it into your inventory.

A big reason I tend not to buy something from Marketplace if I can't see it in world first where I can right click edit it to see what its real LI is. Too many creators couldn't care less about optimizing their mesh models.

This idea takes me back to when I thought it would be a great idea to buy a shiny Sheriff badge from the toy store and try to boss everyone around while wearing it, their response was to give me a wedgy and leave me hanging by the waist band.

Can't believe I forgot this, a link to thread I started a while ago on pretty much the same thing. Of the freebies I tried I had the best luck with the taxi cab, though I got tired of everyone else expecting a ride. :smileywink:

It's pretty hard to say what vehicle drives the best, it seems to vary from night to night based on network conditions, what's been done to the servers lately, how much my computer feels like pissing me off, etc. I've cruised mainland on my bike all night long in the past with just brief impromptu gymnastics at some of the sim crossings, but in just a couple of hours last night I crashed three times with my bike getting tossed into my lost+found folder and me having to find another rez zone. I've got two cars that cost me $L 2500 each and a bike that was something like $L 1500 and I think they actually drive better then any freebies I've had. Considering I have to slow down at the sim crossings to minimize the problems there I don't think I've ever taken them out of first gear, and I usually crank the steering control way down so that a tap of a key doesn't send me into a hard steer right into a no-script land parcel. One thing you need to look out for with the new mesh vehicles is the actual Land Impact. Mesh has given creators a way around the 32 prim (now Land Impact) limit, as long as the physics model of the vehicle is no more then 32 then the sky is the limit on the rest. I've seen cars with land impacts beyond 500, I passed on a free motor scooter when I saw its land impact was in the lower forties, and the last premium gift was a railroad hand cart that I believe was mid-forties in land impact. I know these can be done with a much smaller land impact, I've seen a very nicely done car with a land impact of 21. And about the blue oval. Is it just me or can you get away with outright copying something from RL as long as you leave the original manufacturer's logo off? Not that I'm complaining.

Someone placing their business in an area zoned for residential, and vice versa, could be AR'd by the residents. (/me hastily adds when hearing laughter in the background) And improving how ARs are handled would definitely help this and problems with ugly neighbors also. I've read that some do see results of ARs, apparently it takes lots of time waiting and lots of people complaining.

A couple ideas on this. 1. Less insane tier steps Don't know how many times there has been a nearby small parcel that I've wanted to buy to incorporate into mine, or just to prevent yet another ad board from popping up right in front of my home, or just for the added prims. But in order to buy it I'd first have to double the amount of land tier yet again, in my case paying tier for another 2048 sq.m just to buy up some little 16 sp.m micro parcel. So I just let it go keeping my fingers crossed that what ad board pops up isn't too ugly. 2. Some sort of zoning If you're putting up a store chances are you're not that worried about what's around you, but if you're looking for a place to build your dream mansion you probably don't want ugly looking stores around you, and someone will probably be more likely to buy land if they are certain that if a neighbor moves out some ugly looking store isn't going to drop into its place. Now I'm not saying all stores are ugly, but from what I've seen the majority of them appear to have been slapped up quickly to get merchandise out for sell as quickly as possible with very little consideration towards its outside appearance. And likewise they are definitely some really ugly houses out there, but I feel the general home owner tends to want to improve their place as they are able, and having nicer looking homes around them would encourage that. I'm definitely not suggesting another forced Zindra style relocation. Maybe all that interior land away from roads and water that has sat abandoned for years could be given to business where the view doesn't matter because there just isn't much to view. And as a last note on zoning make everyone put those skyboxes up out of view, something like 500 m above land instead of just 50. 3. Clean up and beautiful mainland. I think that all of mainland would look more appealing if all the abandoned land was cleared of the junk left by previous owners, AND some vegetation was added. It doesn't have to be an involved landscaping project, just tossing out some random trees and bushes and the parcel would look much better then the barren parcels I often see now, and it might make less obvious just how much of the sim is abandoned. I know I'm going to get yelled at on this one but maybe come down on those with the most ugly looking parcels. Those who really don't care how their ugliness is effecting their neighbors, or worse yet deliberately trying to impact their neighbors with their ugliness. To me it seems to make more sense to risk pissing off that one person and risk loosing them as a customer then to just let that person drive off all their neighbors. And extend this to other resources such as avatar connections and server memory for scripts, could just add code to the server that doesn't allow a small parcel to use up 99% of a sim's resources.

I did give CP a quick try last night as an anonymous login. First thing I noticed was that the cloths didn't appear to be painted onto the avatar. Of course as an anonymous I couldn't playing around with building. Think I'll risk the wrath of Zuckerberg and create a false FB just for a real CP login. And the spell checker just suggested replacing Zuckerberg with Seersucker. Hm...

Link to Cloud Party forums .... and a more official looking web site.

There's usually at least two slots for DNS addresses, a primary and one or more secondaries, and it's probably best to have both slots filled (8.8.8.8 as Primary DNS and 8.8.4.4 as a Secondary DNS for example).

Last thing I can think of trying is clearing the viewer's cache. Under the Network tab in Personal Preferences there's a Clear Cache button though I usually go to the extreme and just delete the cache folder. Forgot to mention taking note of the old DNS settings because I'm use to seeing that set to auto-detect from the ISP. I don't think my web browsing improved noticeably after setting my DNS servers, but it cleared up the inviso mesh problem. Of course that was way back before V3, they've probably solved that bug and introduced a dozen others. A few notes about viewers, I've been using FireStorm and Phoenix newest versions both of which seem to have no problems displaying mesh, though FireStorm seems to use up all of my 2GB system memory after a couple of hours and has to be restarted. I'd really like to use V3 but it uses up the memory much faster. Miss the good old days when 0.5GB of memory was considered a lot.

What solved this problem for me was changing my DNS settings to Google's public DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), and there are plenty of other public DNS servers you can use, just search for "public DNS".

One of my alts I have not set a home for so when I hit ctrl+alt+h he gets sent to a random info hub. Can be interesting to observe whatever crowd is there at the time, occasionally I come across a new info hub though that hasn't happened in a while, and often a quick scan of the surrounding area turns up something new and interesting.

After looking over this list of active grids at Hypergrid Business I can't see Second Life doing any better then with the name it has now.

Seen plenty apartment complexes, skybox stacks, etc. while wandering mainland and none of them seemed to have more then one or two units rented out. With how easy and cheap it is to put a freebie house or skybox on or over your tier free 512 parcel of land I can't see any appeal of sharing a parcel and its resources (such as prims) with other renters. I've seen apartment buildings that were actually just empty facades except for the luxury penthouse on top that looked interesting.