Kwakkelde Kwak

Ok, so not as major as was suggested then, a simple alpha mask on the avatar and it's fixed as far as the lack of "invisiness" goes. I don't see any shadows glitch though, or does the now useless invisiprim cast shadows or something?

I'm hearing two different things here. Did anyone of you actually see the glitch with the new settings? So does the old invisiprim now appear as a normal invisible prim (alpha) or does it appear as a visible prim (no alpha)?

Penny Patton wrote: You are absolutely incorrect on this assumption. Understandably so because the appearance editor is not designed in an intuitive fashion. For instance, there are multiple sliders that affect avatar height, making your suggestion that "50 on the appearance slider should be x height" utterly impossible. Here is an article explaining how the appearance editor works, which might clear things up for you. That's why I specifically said "with my shape" and "didn't try hard" and intentionally said 1,60 AND 1,65 meter. I am well aware of the fact not only body height determines the avatars overall length. The short version is that avatars can be anywhere from a minimum of 4'01" to a maximum of 8'10" tall. Currently, LL starts new users at 6'8" to 7'1" with the human starter avatars. So that means your 9 foot avatar can't be made anyway (just kidding on that one) So according to those two figures the average size is 6'5.5" or 1,97 meters. That is 1 cm less than the number I gave earlier, less than half an inch. Due to a combination of social stigma it's very rare to see avatars under 6' tall, even more rare to see avatars under 5'10". If that's the case I don't think changing any numbers or scales or words or values (apart from the non technical ones) will make even the slightest of differences, we'd need a psychologist. And I'm telling you that the builds I showed you are not possible otherwise. That "handful of prims" you save adds up FAST and the amount of space it creates for you to work with would require you to spend far more money to get around otherwise. And I'm telling you that other builds that look fabulous are not possible that way. I've built plenty of sims and I have used the occasional megaprim here or there, sometimes quite a lot even, but I have never had to waste prims because they were too small. Not after the "new megaprims" arrived, which is already years ago. Yes it takes up less space, I don't deny that, so you could do with a smaller plot that costs less, but you stubbornly deny there's a flipside to that and not a mild one either. You can build equally gorgeous sims, sure, but you wind up with far less to do in them, unless you spend the money to add additional sims. No you can build superior looking sims, because you have more prims at hand as soon as you use more land.

I am familiar to various extents with various of 3d programs, Blender and Cinema4D aren't among them unfortunately. I would like to add mesh probably does not have a bigger landimpact (cost more prims) than a sculpty. It depends on the object and on the size though. Either way, with mesh you can layout the UV map any way you want, so you can match your texture. For a sculpty you will have to bake a new texture, but I wouldn't know how with the programs you use.

I'm not quite sure if I understand you completely...but what I make of it is this: you changed the UV map of the sculpt. That's not how sculpts work. A sculpt has a set UV map (a perfect grid) so your texture will have to be adjusted to that. If you want custom UV maps, you will have to use mesh instead of sculpties.

Penny Patton wrote: This would mean, for the first time in SL history, that it would be possible to create 9' tall avatars that actually look 9' tall instead of "slightly taller than average". It would also mean it's no longer possible to make short avatars. As soon as an avatar as small as you is considered normal, what will be considered small? I am not as small as you an my avatar has a height of 30. That makes me 1,72 meters (measured by prim) in SL while the average height of a RL female is about 1,60. I didn't try very hard, but with my current shape it means dragging the height slider to 4. So if you ask me, you are doing the same thing all the people with tall avatars are doing, which is reducing a good part of the possibilities. The only way to overcome this is making the average avatar 50 tall. That way you can go up as much as you can go down. The height won't be 1,60 m, with my current shape that translates in 1,98 meters I'm sorry but this is entirely nonense right here. There was never a "point of no return" because there is no reason to change the appearance editor sliders to resize avatars thus breaking content (though I do think they should change the arm sliders on women, to allow correctly proportioned arms on taller female avatars. Worst case scenario is everyone See the above. If 1,60 or 1,65m is the average, that has to be at an avatar height of 50 or you have the same issues you describe, only at the other end. 1) Provide new accounts with properly scaled/proportioned avatars. 2) Fix the height display in the appearance editor to do what it was supposed to do in the first place! 1) I somewhat agree. But I wouldn't use the "meter" as a measuring stick. I'd like to see characters in a range of 40-60 in avatar height for the default avatars. 2) Chosen has replied more elaborately than I ever would..nothing to add at this point. I would be repeating you both. Also, I'm not sure how you can possibly argue the building benefits of working to scale when you've seen the results yourself. In that other thread I linked you to three locations, and even provided screenshots, demonstrating what can be done when you utilize scale well. And as I replied, it doesn't show anything besides it being a nice build which happens to be "to scale". (A thing that doesn't work in 50% of content in the first place). It does not prove building to scale results in something better than anything else. Let's say you built twice as small as someone else would. That indeed saves you 75% of the tiers if you decide to use a quarter sim. That would mean you only have a quarter of the prims to work with, so in that case I really don't see your claimed gain in detail, on the contrary. On top of this only using a quarter sim to do the same build and assuming your 3 neighbours do the same, you'd be living on four connected homesteads really since you'd have to share a single CPU and its memory between four "sims". That won't exactly result in better graphics as you somehow seem to claim. If you build twice as small and decide to keep the entire land, you gain a lot of room, agreed, but I don't see how you get more detail, apart from saving a handful of prims because you don't need that second and third 64 meter prim to make your floor. That can be overcome by using megaprims anyway, about any size you can imagine has been made, up to sizes well over a sim. The extra room you have would be empty though, unless you free up some prims by lowering the detail on the original build. Actual examples of in-world work speak much louder than any words possibly could. I don't see how the volume makes any difference when what's said is besides the point. See the first paragraph of the above and my earlier reply in the other thread.

I think we agree on a lot of things, but it's quite boring and, more importantly, useless on a forum to constantly agree with eachother.... we have jiras for that, where one can vote on ideas they like. In my opinion the forums are for thinking out loud, exchanging ideas and points of view and throwing some personal preferences into the mix. Nothing scientific, nothing philosophical, that way it would take two days to prepare a post and another one to write it down. But the problem remains.... You say 1.5 to 1.8 whatevers for a female avatar could/should/would be normal. To Peggy that sounds reasonable. To me that already sounds smallish. For a lot of others it sounds too small. And I don't feel like I'm in any position to tell anyone what size they should be. On making an avatar look well proportioned (by itself, not compared to other things) I think Peggy has a point, it's possible, yet restrictive to make a adult human with human size IF the "blurp" you mention is a RL meter. But LL's point of no return is in distant history. Changing the avatar sliders right now would break an enormous amount of content. You can say what you want about LL, but backwards compatibility is high on the agenda. All arguments on extra available detail and better graphics by building smaller are simply not true as far as I can see. You free up some room, that's true, but at a cost. I dont see all this as a major issue. I build the way I think is right and so do others. If there's a different approach, so be it. If there's a different scale, so be it. But if people build irresponsibly or say things I don't agree with or things that aren't true, I'd like to comment on that...all for the good of SL. Not so long ago I was building a sim and I warned the owner about the primlimit. Not because of my builds (pat on my own shoulder), but because of the items built and placed by others. What was the simplest solution for the owner? adding another sim...and later on yet another. That's certainly not my approach, but who am I to judge? EDIT how could I forget..the forums are here for questions aswell..maybe that's the most important part:)

Is everything besides you oversized or are you, as the only "object" not matching, undersized? People 2.4 meters long visiting a place built around avatars like you and me will feel the exact opposite thing, then are they oversized? or is the sim undersized? Proportions matter, and not a scaling factor or unit. Recently I built a powerplant with parking lot, including a couple of cars and trucks already scaled up 25%. That looked pretty good to me. that was until someone in some insane car drove up, bigger than the truck. I didn't look at the person inside very closely, but even if the avatar was 2.4 meters long, that car was far too big. It made the entire build look freakishly small, or at least the parked cars, the ones that were oversized already.

Coby Foden wrote: Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Welcome to SL building 101...make your items mod so people can scale it to their surroundings:) /me looks at Kwakkelde with unbelieving eyes (o.0) ... ... goes back sitting on the oversized couch which she cannot resize as the couch is not her property ... :smileysad: That's very sad yes, but that probably means you don't fit the rest of the sim aswell.... At least it makes sense to me the couch fits its surroundings..... Again this is in no way any indicator of a meter having to be a meter.... it just means the things in SL are out of proportion. It will never happen that avatars will be human scale. In RL people will buy a big 4x4 to counterbalance their erm shortcomings or insecurities....in SL they make themselves bigger with a matching foot long plastic wiener...until someone else is even bigger then they make themselves ...well...bigger...oh and they buy that 10 meter long 4 meter wide 4x4 to match.... I said this before and I still haven't heard a single arguement making me change my mind. The biggest problem with SL is the fact is is completely built by residents...but that's also what makes SL SL and SL is a great place because of it.

Coby Foden wrote: I vision the following happening: 2.6 meters tall avatar will go happily building stuff which feels right for them. Cool! :smileyhappy: 1.5 meters tall avatar will go happily building stuff which feels right for them. Cool! :smileyhappy: After a while 2.0 meters tall avatar comes to see their work. He has this strange feeling that nothing is really right for him. Not so cool. :smileyfrustrated: Welcome to SL building 101...make your items mod so people can scale it to their surroundings:)

Perrie Juran wrote: From a lot of things that I am both seeing and reading a lot of things MESH are still Beta! So perhaps the title is still appropriate. [sarcasm] I didn't mean update the title! I ment update the mesh! [/sarcasm]

Haha, you can have a hug back Chel!

Chosen Few wrote: If you REALLY want to get into it, even the current scientific definition of a meter in RL (the distance traversed by light in vacuum in 1 ⁄ 299,792,458 of a second) is relative, since time itself speeds up and slows down in direct response to gravity. The original definition of a meter, the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second, was abandoned because gravity is not the same everywhere on Earth, which means the length of the pendulum will have to vary, depending on where you are. The current definition suffers a very similar problem. We just haven't come up with anything better yet. Relativity is pesky. Time and space are fluid. There's no such thing as absolute space or absolute time. Therefore, there is no such thing as absolute distance or absolute size. I didn't want to go there....yet:) Rest of the post...well spoken.

Just noticed the Mesh Forums title still says: Share best practices with Residents already using the Mesh Import beta in Second Life. Time for an update you Lindens :)

Penny Patton wrote: And I've explained why this is a bunk analogy. We're not talking about going to ridiculous extremes, we're talking about working at the ideal scale based on the limits of SL's tool set. Again, rediculous extremes clearify a point. If you don't understand that, it's your loss. Again, w e're not building in a vacuum here we're talking about SL, an existing tool set. Scale everything up and extend your draw distance in SL and you have that much more geometry and texture information to process. And remember, the amount of geometry possible in a given area does not merely double as you double draw distance, it increases by a factor of four. Yes so does building everything twice as small... You seem to keep retreating to a more limited definition of "graphics quality" despite the thread clearly being about the broader sense. In any case, I put my money where my mouth is. You can go to all those locations and see them for yourself. Milk & Cream was more about putting as much detail in an open environment as SL's tools allow for, and it predates mesh import, so the framerate isn't as good. Not as bad as many other SL locations, tho. I never retreated and I don't like that word on a forum anyway, we're not at war. I see graphic quality and aestatic quality as two seperate things. I haven't changed that point of view during this thread and I won't. Both are needed for a good build. As far as the aestetics are concerned I am in agreement from the get go. I don't see how your example(s) "put your money where your mouth is". All they show is you can build a pretty, usable environment using a 1:1 scale. It does in no way prove 1:1 scaling is the best thing there is.

They didn't..hehe this is part of that eternal rather annoying discussion.... A foot isn't a foot, it can be many sizes, so why is a meter so rigid? A meter is something that can be measured inworld, in real world that is. So in SL that is 100% impossible so the meter can't be defined. They could have called it a LindenMeter to avoid confusion, but nobody has ever stated the meter we use in SL is a METRIC meter and even if that was the case.. again....there's no reference at all as I said so it's still not defined.

Qie Niangao wrote: The only part of memory that's shared among instances of identical Mono-compiled scripts is the script program itself, not its data memory. When you think about it, that's kind of obvious: those script-specific strings, lists, etc have to live somewhere. So, really, for the vast majority of scripts the sharing just doesn't help all that much because so much of the memory is in the data, not the program itself. Ofcourse, that IS obvious, but it was indeed the script code I was asking about. Next question pops into my head... Does anyone know what "a script" costs? When you make the most basic of scripts it already costs quite some memory. More than I think the code in that small script uses...just curious Also, to an earlier point: I wouldn't bet too heavily on the shared memory ever being factored in to script memory limits. The more or less insurmountable complexity there is that those instances may come and go -- and because the memory is allocated per parcel but the sharing is per sim, it's possible for a script to be deleted on one parcel and push another parcel over the memory limit. I guess, theoretically, the sharing benefit could be artificially constrained to per-parcel, thereby sidestepping this problem, but to be honest, I wouldn't expect it to be worth cluttering up the sim's parcel representation any more than it is already. As far as I recall the limit was or is supposed to be per parcel, but this is really inefficient use of available memory and the exact opposite of what LL has done with shared CPUs for homesteads and open space sims. So I think you are completely right here, it probably won't be implemented that way.

Coby Foden wrote: The size of the meter is not arbitrary in any way. It is exact, it is important. Meter is a meter everywhere - even in SL, it's the exact same meter we use in RL. That's not for you to decide, although I agree it would be very helpful if it was the case and where possible I use an SL meter as a RL meter. The meter is based on the earths circumference. SL is flat. Currently the meter is defined by complicated things like vacuums and speed of light.. We don't have vacuums or speed of light in SL. So a meter can be anything in SL. You can't replicate RL on a screen and make it look realistic. You miss all sense of space, especially indoors. Ever photographed your living room? It looks a lot smaller in that picture than it really is. So to make up for that you need to adjust certain things. Even with your RL measurements avatar, I bet a door 90 cm wide (which is pretty big) and 2.3 meters high looks rediculous. Ceilings 2,5 meters high? Even in mouselook that looks far too low. On top of that you need room to maneuvre. In RL a passage (either between walls or between furniture) can be less than a meter. Try that in SL...

You're quoting something that has got nothing to do with what you write, the quote is about how much prims it takes to build something. In some cases, probably a lot, I 100% agree on what you say, but your arguement also means that building at not 1:1.5, or 1:1 but at 0.5:1 would be even better, or 0.1:1, or 0.01:1. If you want a lot of room to run around, more land is nice, but in an urban sim or a forest you'll find yourself with a lot of space you can't fill because you simply ran out of prims. Unless you free up some prims by lowering your detail, which was what I said:) More room without the additional prims to fill it up is nice if you don't mind living in a desert (which isn't neccecarily something bad). Islands further apart on a watersim would be nice. Two villages on the outer edges of a sim opposed to one, a nice english hilly grass sim, I can think of plenty of uses. I never said building smaller doesn't have any benefits, I just said it won't have a significant impact on graphics quality.

Hmm, glad to hear you want to be efficient on script use:) ... but there's more to that than avoiding llListen. You mentioned changing one or two lines in the script. As I understand it the script now uses llListen and you want to replace that. I think that's very possible, even when the parts aren't all linked. You could replace the chattery talk and listen with linked messages or llSetLinkedPrimitiveParams. If the prims aren't linked, use a very simple relay turning the command received by llListen into again llMessageLinked or llSetLinkedPrimitiveParams.

The download weight is partially reflected in the avatar draw weight. The download weight, or streaming weight as it seems to be called in the wiki, is based on the size of the object (how many people can see it and at what LOD) and the number of bytes a certain file costs to stream by itself (that would be pretty much 100% geometry and normals I guess). The draw weight is this number with a couple of modifiers applied for shine etc. The only thing completely not shown is the amount of texture memory I think. Shouldn't be too hard to include that I guess. Oh another question more related to my OP... If a mono script is used twice, the second will only have the weight of "a script" on the RAM. Is this still the case if the script reads a notecard or has variable ehm variables (integers or strings or whatever that change as the script runs)?

Penny Patton wrote: Let me see if I can rephrase this in a way that is more understandable. Your whole argument is based on the notion that land is not a static size. I thought I was pretty clear, obviously I wasn't. My entire point IS based on the fact a sim has a certain size. If your avatar is 10 times smaller, a sim is no longer the current 256x256 meter, but 2560x2560 meter, that is 100 times bigger. Where one would currently feel at ease with 4 houses (or trees or rocks or whatever) on a sim, they'd need to build 400 houses now to get the same density. Yes there would be more houses, but only a hundredth of the prims for each of them. No room for detail left. Building larger costs you more money. This isn't an opinion, it's not how I "feel", it's cold, hard geometry. If you want the same amount of houses on a plot this is true yes, then you'd need more land. But you would have more prims for detail if you kept the same plot with houses just as big, but less of them. Second, think of how making everything larger affects Level of Detail. When objects are far away the engine renders them with lower detail models to save processing power. Smaller objects are downgraded to lower detail models more quickly than larger objects, because you will notice it more in larger objects like buildings if they suddenly drop to a lower detail model. If everything is larger, it's being rendered at higher detail, more polygons, over greater distances. Right there is a hit to your framerate. Sorry, but to me this sounds like complete nonsense. Everything is relative. If I set the draw distance, I look at my framerates. That is determined on how much geometry is on my screen and how many textures. If everything has a certain size, I set the draw distance to a factor something times that size. If everything is twice as big, I set the drawdistance twice as far and get the exact same things on my screen with the exact same framerate. Even the LODs would be similair, afterall the bounding box is a factor in the algorithm and things would be twice as far if they were twice as big. Everything twice as big? Then LOD kicks in twice as far. Twice as small? same thing. The argument about avatars being 10 times smaller is a strawman, we're working with SL's tools as they are. Which means there is a sweet spot for detail versus area. That "sweet spot" is right about 1=1 scale with the SL metre. In SL you can see examples of this here! [couple of nice pics} (These are all from the same quarter sim build that has been frequently mistaken for a full sim builds Even Hamlet mistook it for a full sim build when he wrote about it on New World Notes!) Here's another example, believe it or not the following is from a 2048sq.m. parcel that only supports only about 400 prims! [more nice pics] All of the above fits into the blue area in this overhead view. 2048sq.m. The orange are additional off-sim prims hosted from my 463prim parcel. I showed these very screenshots to a Linden once and they said, "What game is that from?" Ever hear of Doomed Ship? The 1=1 scale RP sim? People say you can get lost there for hours, and they're right! Nearly the entire sim is the detail of this screenshot, yet if it were built to typical SL sizes it would require four sims to hold it all. [and yet another one] None of these builds would be possible if they were built to typical SL scale unless far more money was spent on sims to host them. The average SL builder cannot afford to buy more land whenever they want more area and detail, so the scale issue affects their ability to create impressive graphics. This is precisely because land is static in SL and we have minimum and maximum prim and avatar sizes. That last one, Doomed Ship, is a full sim build, meaning even the 64m prim limit would be hit many times over if the sim were up-scaled to typical SL sizes. That means more polygons that need to be rendered, which means less detail and lower framerates. I used a factor 10 because exaggerating is the best way to prove a point in most cases. The only thing you show here is that there are some excellent builders in SL, not the stated fact 1:1 is a "sweetspot". Most SL builders can't make so much of so little prims. Most people run into the prim limit before they have half the looks of that and even if they had twice the prims to use it wouldn't look that good. That's about talent, not about size or scale. Even in a full sim most prims won't be bigger than 64 meters and I don't see how a factor 1.25-1.5 would have a great impact. If you build 1:1 instead of the current 1:1.4 or so, the biggest prim would be virtually 90 meters instead of 64, so to stretch a sims length you'd need 3 instead of 4. Anyway, we have megaprims at almost any size. Aesthetics are always tied to the technical side, and visa-versa. A large part of why SL appears so ugly to many is LL failing to understand that basic truth. My position will always be based in that when the topic of SL's graphics comes up, especially as framed by the OP of this thread. You forgot to mention what the truth is.... unless you mean all the above and I really can't agree on that. Let's say I build a very smoothly animated turd with nice turdy textures and some excellent steam and let's assume I am a good builder who knows how to keep the framerates at a good level. Then compare that to a supermodel which jumps around like a disabled frog because it's animated at 4 frames per second, using 300 1024 textures so the framerate drops to 5. I would like to state the first of the two results in great graphics, but isn't much to look at from an aestatic point of view. And vice versa. I thought I made clear what I see as "graphics quality". I can't and won't argue on the fact that supermodel has more appeal. And I cerainly won't argue on the fact you can make that model look just as good graphically as the turd. This is all about artistic talent and about efficient resource use, two completely different things. If one can combine the two they can call themselves a good builder.... and they can build things like you showed in the pictures. (Assuming the framerates are good in those sims)

I think you mean if the non-RLV permissions thing can still bother you when you take off the collar? That depends... The script with the permissions in that case is worn by the "master", it's not in the collar. So if the collar is set up that way, with an attachment worn by that master, that's certainly the case. It will work as long as the master doesn't reset the script and as long as you are in the same region. The thing is, the script in that case has got nothing to do with the collar really. The script is run by the other person, so at some point you will have had to say "Yes" when you are asked to grant permissions...

For the door... Instead of flooding the object with scripts, if you want a more realistic looking door and still only want to use one script, try using a mesh door or even sculpted door which is a single object, with the pivot point (rotation point) on its side. Beware if you use mesh, the whole object will act like a mesh, concerning landimpact. This can have some unexpected results. The llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(Fast) would also work ofcourse, but that requires a new script.

It must be sunday, I am completely missing your point... Can you please clarify/elaborate?