mgjackson

Surely the whole idea of a VR sim is flawed - Why would you want to put on head gear and dance about your living room breaking stuff. Its bad enough with the Nintendo game consoles where you have a chance of at least seeing the cat! However, if there was a Matrix style technology that allowed you to 'jack into the net', then that would be a game changer.

> If you're looking for a parcel by the sea, make sure it's protected water or you risk ending up with a nasty surprise like mgjackson did.Fortuantly, my little plot of land does boarder a protected sea and the airport is above me and they've dropped their real land below sea level so I have a nice big area to sail in. The downside is that, well, now I have an island and so its a bit lonely - before the land either side of me would change hands quite often and there would be someone new to talk to. The other issue is the airport obscures the sky, so spoils sunsets and sunrises. Also if I have shadows switched on, my land is constantly in shadow.

I own a small plot on Yuri and rent a similar sized bit of land next door. I assumed it it would remain a sea-themed part of SL and that it wouldn't change much as it boarders an enclosed water sim, with a canal and access to an inner waterway near by as well as having access to Blake Sea However, a large airport has basically been built on top of it....quite why there I've no idea as the land is certainly had a premium price tag and there's plenty of large empty areas elsewhere in SL. I guess its just the joy of land ownership in a universe that doesn't have planning regulations :-)

I looked at quite a lot of the abandoned land and a lot of it wasn't that good. I suppose the other thing is the Linden Homes - they are very popular and why bother hunting for land when you can have a very nice home in a nice neighbourhood. I looked around the LH regions and I didn't see any empty Californian style homes and the trangular Alpine style ones which I had one of also seemed to have quite a high residency.

Yep. I reserved a Nexus 7 at PC World from the demo one that HMV had on display because HMV didn't have any in stock.

I've read a lot about the decline of SL and I guess the hay-day where big brands bought into it* have gone, but from what I can see land is being bought and sold and new things being built. After a lot of searching I've purchased 512 of sea-fronted main land which in real money was about 30 GBP, which does seem quite a lot for something that doesn't exist :-), but I looked at a couple of larger plots which were cheaper but was put off by the tier costs. However, both of those plots and a third near me which was up for the equiv of a staggering 300GBP have sold very quickly. *If I understand it correctly, a few years back it was thought that the internet would become an imersive experince and people would log on with their avatars and would do virtual shopping of real world goods etc. However, that requires a lot of dedicated time in front of a computer and the idea never really caught on. What has happened is the internet has come pervasive, ie thanks to smart phones and tablets its bloody everywhere and you can now even order your weekly shopping while sat on the loo :-)

I see, yes, just flown up to one.

Hi, Silly question but what do those red love hearts on a black background appearing on the World Map mean? Also, where do they come from - I thought the WM was minaturised snap shop of each of the regions. Thanks, Matthew

No, its not that big :-) I just chose a bad spot.

Thanks, my first attempt at rezzing it was in a small harbour which the boat complely filled. It was also across a sim boundary, which in retrospec, wasn't that smart. The boat comes in 2 main pieces, the hull which you stand on, and the top deck and rigging which the avatar wears. As I pulled across the sim boundary, the hull suddenly dissappeared and the remains of the boat sunk, leaving the top of the masts poking out of the water....quite a sight, and no doubt amusing to others watching. However, that enabled me to 'take' the top part of the boat and I've been rezzing the hull in a small dingy launch area, and then wear the top part as its in the inventory. But its not a very elagant way of getting afloat.

Bought a 3 masted schooner and having a little trouble finding a bit of open water where I can rez it. The boat also has a 'stationary' mode where it can be rezzed unattached to the avatar, and not had a play with that yet. Any suggestions? Thanks, Matt

I think there is a problem with SL in that they don't have geographic access points. SpeedTest.net shows I have to a local server 20mb, however a speed test over to California where SL are based (I think!) is only about 2.5M which negates having an ulta-high speed connection as you need to set your viewers speed to way lower than that. If SL had region access points then I'm sure they would provide a better expeirence for their users (perhaps they could make it a premium service to keep the riff-raff out :-))

Hi, I've been on and off second life over the last 6 months and I've always had a problem of the connection dropping despite doing all the tweeks (turning off http rendereing, using Firestorm, having the band width set as low as possible etc) and although I could reduce the problem I couldn't get rid of it altogether. However, have now just been upgraded by Virgin Media to a 20M connection and been given a new Super Hub, the problem has gone away. What I suspect was happening was that they upgraded my service from 10M to 20 a while ago, however the old legacy cable modem couldn't cope with the speed increase and was dropping packets and I guess one of the packets being dropped was a crucial one that SL needs. I also had an elderly Netgear FVS318 router which the Super Hub also replaced and I think that was struggeling with the speed as well. Just thought I'd put this up incase others are going through the same headache. Cheers, Matthew

I found a DirectX driver from www.iz3d.com which outputs 3D. I don't know if it uses any of the graphics cards capabilities or if it just Doing Its Own Thing, but it works with pretty well with another online game. DirectX only - I didn't know SL only used OpenGL, but that explains why I couldn't get it to work :-( Unless there's a TPV that uses DirectX, I guess this is scuppered then.

It does appear that 3D might work without the viewer having to do something special. Have asked a similar question elsewhere and got given a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_3D_Vision "The stereo driver software can perform automatic stereoscopic conversion by using the 3D models submitted by the application and rendering two stereoscopic views instead of the standard mono view. " Presumably required a 3D monitor compatible with an Nvidia card....will want to actually see this before buying it :-)