Hair Fair 2011 is coming up fast, so be sure that if you are a new hair store, or even an older one, if you have not signed up yet to be a part of this once a year HUGE event, do so now. Applications close on March 31st, so be sure to get your store registered. If you are making hair for the first time, and are not sure how to go about being part of Hair Fair, please contact one of the Hair Fair committee members and they can discuss it with you.
To apply for Hair Fair 2011 go HERE
This is IMPORTANT so please, if you are a content creator and even a customer, please read. Also please help spread the word.
A few years ago we got hit with a very annoying bug, I did a post on it back then, and it helped those that read it. The bug is a perms bug, turning modify items into no modify items, even though they still show in inventory as being modify.
ok no pics, just a quick help post.
LL Viewer 2.5 BETA has the new profile in webpage built in, some of you might be trying for profiles and finding yourself with a handshake problem.
Which results in no in world profile, and only the website. This caused my earlier mentioned problem of not being able to go directly to residents via edit or properties…it also gave me the problem of no mod rights abilities.
HOW TO FIX IT.
1. open Internet Explorer ( it has to be IE cannot be other webbrowsers)
2. Go to https://my.secondlife.com and log in your avatar
3. then go back to your viewer , you don’t need to log out
4. Now open a profile and you will see it loads like a webpage but inside your viewer.
5. Click the Actions button and choose set privacy and you have the mod rights options
6. Actions will also give you the chance to IM etc so YAY we are saved.
Mel and I have discussed this in length, to mod or not to mod. As a scripter, business owner and builder he has very strong opinions about what we put into Second Life, and what each person takes from it. He holds very true to those convictions, and even though he has done work for some big businesses in Second Life, he will and has also turned down a lot of jobs because of not wanting to make things that will just add to the strain on our resources.
Read what he has to say, and maybe look at what you are doing, and ask yourself what are the reasons behind your perms choices. I have found often that perms are based solely on what others are doing, but it is a big world, and there are still many stores out there that are allowing mod on their goods, and it makes such a difference when buying.
TO DESIGNERS
The designers of second life have gone a long, long way down a dark path. I’m talking about permissions – specifically the near extinct permission to modify. I think there is some hope yet for this neglected little check box before it vanishes from SL entirely, but it’s going to take some self-examination from the designers of SL, and a little education if there is to be any chance of recovery.
THE COST
The first cost, is of course, the issue of ownership. If you purchase something in the real world, you own it completely. You get to do whatever you want to it… squeeze it, stretch it, paint it pretty or set fire to it and toss it off a building. In SL of course your ability to do these things in the best of scenarios depends heavily on your grasp of the building tools. If you’ve got the skills, though, you can make great use of them making the things you wear truly reflect your unique persona through immaculate fitting or other sorts of customization… unless the item is not modifiable. I’m sure that you as a designer and resident of SL have run into at least one situation where “no modify” put a wrench in your works.
Second life would benefit immensely from a simplification of the clothing layers. Modern SL clothing is cut using alpha maps, as the built-in sliders for trimming the clothing leave messy edges and are not really usable. The functionality that is worth keeping is the ability to change bagginess in various areas. Beyond that, there isn’t really any reason not to put all clothing on meta layers. A meta layer would be a single clothing article with 3 texture spots which would be by default a transparent texture. The 3 texture spots are of course legs/feet, torso, and head. The meta layer could then be applied to the avatar on a new set of clothing layers marked simply from 0 to 10, or 20, or whatever it is deemed necessary to fully outfit an avatar.
The benefits of this sort of change are many, beyond just the verastility of being able to put your undies on over your tattoo, or your shirt on over the bra that only came on the shirt layer because the designer was apparently high. For example, it is common practice for ambitious designers to put their clothing items on all layers – to allow for the kind of versatility of this new system (although it falls short). This means that for a single shirt, for example, you’ll have 3 inventory items: an undershirt, shirt, and jacket version. This means 3 assets the server needs to keep track of. A designer who uses this as their standard will generate about 2.5x as many assets to create an outfit as one who don’t offer items on all layers. This could be massively reduced, much to the relief of overstuffed fashionista inventories, asset servers, and sim servers the metaverse over.
Existing clothing might be able to be ported to the new system, although it would require experimentation to determine for certain. Lots of (ancient) clothing that does depend on the sliders to trim the clothing would wind up breaking if those sliders were no longer effective, since it is impossible to translate the sliders to a system that include shirt and glove components together. Thus it may be necessary to allow older clothing to continue using the old system of shirts, socks, underpants, etc.
Unfortunately this would mean that the new system would need to be flexible enough to allow people to create their own layer ordering to be able to put new clothing items under or over the older clothing layers, however this creates another opportunity to improve the versatility of older content. Since it would be necessary to create a layer organizer to allow people to choose the order in which clothing items stack, it would be possible to wear several shirts at the same time layered on different strata, allowing older clothing to be just as versatile as newer meta layers. This would also allow people with overstuffed inventories to go through and delete unnecessary duplicates of items that were created on all layers.
Notes:
# An additional feature allowing people to update their clothing to meta layer clothing might be worthwhile, though permissions would need to be investigated to ensure abuse is not possible.
# It could be possible to leave the layer limit as a very high value (like 50) if the clothing layers were not broadcast to the server until fully baked, like Emerald does when clothing layer protection is enabled.
Mel Vanbeeck
VOTE NOW http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-5059
