[Doubt about the GDPR law and scripts accessing external databases.]

Without wanting to rehash the deleted thread, my interpretation broadly agrees with Casper's. Like him, I deal with sensitive information (special category data, in my case), so I am erring on the side of caution. I do also hold actual personal details that are undeniably within the scope of GDPR.

I do know that, once you have decided something might be personal data, making it anonymous is not easy. I think you would be better off asking elsewhere, as it isn't an SL-specific problem.

My suspicion is that you are correct, and hashing is insufficient. I anonymised some survey results by removing direct identifiers, separating out the responses to each question and scrambling the order, so that noone could build up a profile of information on any individual respondent.

 

If the process is reversible at all, even with extra information, it's not anonymised for GDPR purposes.

[My thoughts on mainland]

Quote

Here is a list of your transactions from the last 30 days:
March 5, 2018   Recurring Mainland Fees (up to 2048 meters): $15
March 5, 2018   Adding 20.0000% VAT (United Kingdom) for "Recurring Mainland Fees" charge of $15
March 5, 2018   Premium membership (Annual): $72.00
March 5, 2018   Account Billed: $90.00

 

No, VAT is not charged on Premium subs. I assume LL think it's worthwhile just taking the hit, and paying it themselves.

[Do you have advanced lighting enabled?]

I have it on all the time, even on my Atom tablet with integrated graphics, which hits 25 fps (but slows to a crawl if I leave the sim I manage).

I notice when people send me snapshots that most of them clearly don't. The same group of people seem to also have quite low expectations, so I design things to look great with ALM, and merely OK without.

Local lights are the biggest pain to equalise. I sometimes spend longer tweaking the lighting in a build that I did building the darn thing...

[Nostalgia: Who remembers the "Midnight" sims?]

On 8/13/2018 at 9:28 PM, Raindrop Drinkwater said:

There was also a set of educational sims about weather that I liked a lot -- great for skiing. Can't remember the name.

That was Weather Island, by the Weather Channel - I still have a pair of those skis knocking about in my inventory.

[Too Many 1024 Textures and the NEW (please hurry) Land Impact rules]

1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

So basically, you are demanding the right to copybot older items...

Note, there is a world of difference between "modify an item you bought" and "download it, edit it, and reupload it as your own work so you can sell it to others", which is exactly what you are asking for.

Legalised copybotting, legalised theft of Intellectual Property.

Just because the Copybot-Grids allow this doesn't make it a good idea, and indeed it's why many content creators AVOID thew Copybot-Grids.
 

I have some sympathy with him, I have some older prim items that have had flipped permissions bits, so that a no-copy yes-mod item is now trans only. The prims have also shifted out of place. I still occasionally search for the (long since left SL) creator's name in hope of tracking them down so I can ask permission to rip my own purchase so I can actually fix it and use it again. I really really liked it. It doesn't logically follow that he wants to sell it to others - I know creators are justifiably paranoid, but there are other reasons to want to break copyright.

That said, it's still the wrong thing to do.

[Optimisation: Tris vs Vram]

17 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Textures (in an ideal world with a functioning cache) are one time downloads. If you purposefully don't roam much then most textures will come from local storage.

When you find the ideal world, sign me up

17 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Textures (in an ideal world with a functioning cache) are one time downloads. If you purposefully don't roam much then most textures will come from local storage.

The viewer is constantly streaming data from SL. 8KB per sec on an empty region ranging up to a couple of hundred KB/s on a busier one with people moving about (or people on neighboring regions), object updates etc. That racks up fast.

Ouch, that would indeed do it. I think I'd still like to keep them reasonably low though - you still have that initial download, and it will give me more confidence when assuring people that their busted internet cap is not my fault, no matter how much they want to believe that it is.

[Optimisation: Tris vs Vram]

37 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

You're fighting a losing quest with that on SL. The individual file downloads are not what gobbles up your data (and I'm not including voice).

What does? (I assume you're not counting music or media either).

I'd always assumed downloads accounted for at least some of it. The textures don't magically appear, they have to be downloaded from the CDN.

[Optimisation: Tris vs Vram]

Thanks, I guess I could have found that out myself.

Download size does directly affect users on metered or capped connections. I've known avs who ration their use of voice, and plan visits to new sims depending on how much data they have left this month. It seems alien to me on my 80/20 VDSL connection, but I do admire their persistence and dedication.

[Optimisation: Tris vs Vram]

My focus on memory is partly a proxy for download size, which I haven't found a good way of measuring. I'm hoping that by optimising for texture size, I'm also indirectly optimising for download size. I know that in an ideal world we'd all have caches the size of Mars, but I can't realistically enforce that on everyone else.

[Optimisation: Tris vs Vram]

Yes, it uses smooth shading, but I wasn't intending to bake a 1024 texture - it seemed better to take a long thin seamless texture and tile it down vertically. The actual model I made in Blender is very short and squat (a bit like an elephant stood on it), then stretched out inworld.

The low poly model is a plain cylinder with a normal map baked from the high poly model.

I know how to make textures seamless, and I know how to do a simple bake in Cycles, but wouldn't have a clue where to start with baking a seamless texture, if it's possible.

EDIT: Not everyone seeing normal maps is a positive in this case - anyone who doesn't will just see a cylindrical column, without knowing that anything was amiss. I've always felt that a graceful degradation of the experience is best.

[Optimisation: Tris vs Vram]

Thank you for such a clear and concise answer!

[Optimisation: Tris vs Vram]

I admit I'm in the exact opposite situation to the majority of SL creators, but due to the audience my work caters to, I have to severely optimise, for both complexity and texture size. My target av has a computer which barely runs SL at all, and potentially uses an expensive, metered connection.

With that in mind, how do I find the balance between adding geometry to a build or faking it via a normal map?

I'm leaning towards the latter, because the extra textures don't download for people not using ALM, and because even normal textures can be reused, but is there any point at which the overhead of the extra texture becomes more of a problem than extra geometry?

ii

This is a slightly ludicrous example, because I didn't properly optimise either the geometry or texture size, and one is a sculptie I used for comparison, but the columns in this image are as follows

	Triangles	Vram
Left	64	516 KB
Middle	576	4 KB
Right	2048	20 KB

I'd really appreciate some expert advice, because I'm a novice modeler, and most of what's been written on the subject seems to be about the evils of using twenty 1024x1024 textures on an earring with 50k tris - an important subject, but it seems a little hard to apply down here at the other end of the telescope!

[What are some old (pre-Facebook/Youtube) Internet things that you use?]

Virtual bubble wrap.