Playdo - Merry Christmas from SuezanneC Baskerville - from Playdo Spineworld

Playdo - Merry Christmas from SuezanneC Baskerville - from Playdo Spineworld, originally uploaded by SuezanneC Baskerville.

Playdo - Merry Christmas from SuezanneC Baskerville - from Playdo Spineworld

I just started using Flickr instead of Photobucket lately, and this is my first blog post from Flickr to my Blogger blog instead of my Wordpress.com blog.

Playdo looks to me like it would be for kids but the chat suggests to me that's it's more like a dating chatroom.

Second Life: What good is the big grid?

With teleporting to keep you from having to traverse the simulated space in Second Life, and a new presumably far more effective Google powered search system to make it possible to find things without needing to look at a map or learn where things are by flying around, and it being impossible to simulate traveling inworld from one land body to another,  just what is the purpose of having one grid for Second Life at all?   You can't travel all across the grid, any significant travel occurs via teleporting, you can't even see all the sims on the map at one time, much less paddle your simulated canoe from one continent to another, so what's the point of having all the simulations be said to be in one big rectangular simulation?

Blogged with Flock

Replacing Google

I have read that Google will be replacing it's static text ads with animated images, flash, and video ads. Whether this is true and when it might come about I don't know,but if Google does this then I won't have any reason to use Google instead of the alternative search engines, so this prompts me to wonder what the alternatives would be for those who don't like moving stuff on the screen such as video ads?

I'm registered with Microsoft's Office Live Basic, which give you Windows Live Mail. When I go use my Windows Live Mail, there are moving ads on the screen, and I hate it.

I have a Yahoo Mail account, same thing, after I try to use it for just a minute I think, well, even thought Gmail lacks folders because of some pigheaded ideologue on it's staff, at least it doesn't a bunch of video ads or animated gif ads or flash ads.

So will any other search company rise to the challenge of meeting the demands of those who hate moving or noise making ads?

Save Sky Eclipse, crasher of sims: SL Jira VWR-2281

Second Life user Sky Eclipse has a problem: something about their account or their avatar causes the sim they are in to crash.  The sim they are in crashes as soon as they log in to it , if I understand the problem correctly, leaving them no way to do anything like remove attachments or delete the last few items they acquired. 

The only solution for this problem lies in the hands of Linden Lab: either fix Sky Eclipse's account, or fix the sim crash problem such that Sky Eclipse's account remains just as it is but the sim Sky is in doesn't crash.

There's a Second Life Jira issue to vote on related to Sky Eclipse's problem. The Jira issue is at  https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2281 ; if you'd like to help Sky Eclipse by convincing Linden Lab to devote resources to solving this problem go to https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2281 and vote for the issue. (Only members of SL can vote for SL Jira issues, so if you aren't an SL user, just join SL at secondlife.com, then vote for Sky's Jira issue. )

There's a forums.secondlife.com thread on this topic at http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?p=1661915#post1661915 .

The Sky Eclipse Jira issue VWR-2281 reads as follows
:

Second Life Viewer - VWR
 Sky Eclipse's avatar crashes regions EVERYTIME she logs in, regardless of where she logs in
Created: Friday 02:42 AM   Updated: Saturday 04:58 PM

Component/s:    Crashes
Affects Version/s:    1.18.3
Fix Version/s:    None

File Attachments:     1.  debug_info.log (4 kb)
2.  SecondLife.log (161 kb)

Environment:     « Hide
CPU: AMD K7 (Unknown model) (1396 MHz)
Memory: 256 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 6200/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 2.0.3

Hipihi 5th Resident Convention

Technorati Tags: Hipihi, Chinese virtual world, Chinese Second Life, virtual worlds, Second Life Blogs, virtual environments, virtual reality, Asian virtual worlds

Hipihi just held it's 5th resident convention.  I was unfortunately unable to be there in virtual person though I was their in actual spirit - i.e., I wasn't able to attend because the meeting time was while I was at work. 

Above is a shot of the meeting.  I recognize a number of the names floating over the assembled avatars.   I believe that is the most people I've seen in one place at one time in Hiphi to date. 

 

 I have posted an essentially unedited Google Language Tools translation of the transcript provided in Chinese in the Hipihi forums at the IdeaShape forums, in the Residents sub-forum.  IdeaShape is at  http://www.ideashape.cn . 

 

Below is a picture of the volunteers gathering.

 

A belated Hello and Best Wishes to those who gathered for the convention and thanks to the volunteers for the help they've given me in having the opportunity to be part of the beginning of a new virtual world and to meet and chat a bit with folks in China that I'd not likely have met elsewhere.

Some Hipihi pictures

I stayed up all night this day, only going to bed after sunrise.  In addition to my usual obsessive checking of RSS feeds on virtual world news and reading the Second Life forums and such, I took some pictures of a build in Hipihi, stored them on a Photobucket account, posted them on my Wordpress blog, and uploaded them into the Hipihi facebook group's photo storage area.

Taking the pictures in Hipihi was fun enough; taking screen-shots is one of the easiest ways to do something creative feeling in a virtual world.  I used the snapshot function in Hipihi to take pictures, but this gives me pictures with program generated names rather than custom names, and to compound the naming annoyance, the program generated names are in Chinese, which is logical since I'm using a program with a Chinese interface, but makes the names even less useful than program generated names in English would be.  Those who've used the Second Life snapshot-to-disk feature will be familiar with a similar naming aggravation; SL's snapshot feature let's you name on picture, then names the rest of the snapshot-to-disk shots you take with that name plus a number, so if you happen to run into Philip Linden and take a shot of yourself and Philip together and name it something like "Philip and me", then later go to your "Furry Gorean Mech Sex Fun Time" session and take a few more snapshots to disk, they will be named Philip and me 2, Philip and Me 3, etc.   Or more commonly, one would get one picture taken in Ahern named Ahern, then the rest of the days shots taken all about misleadingly named Ahern 2, Ahern 3, etc.  So to make the naming process easier, it is much nicer to use a screen capture program like Snagit or Irfanview. 

 Snagit is great for taking screenshots, but it doesn't quite do absolute best possible job for getting the pictures to a specific folder at Photobucket if you have a free Photobucket account, as I do.  If you are content to have the pictures show up in your general, non-specific folder at Photobucket, and move them later, though, Snagit handles that quite easily.  If that suits you ok, you don't even have to end up with a copy of the screenshot on your local hard drive, you can just press printscreen, take and edit the shot with Snagit, email it to your Photobucket account, then when you are ready you can go to Photobucket and rename the pictures and move them to the folder of your choice.  That works fine, or if you have a paid Photobucket account you can use FTP to put pictures on Photobucket, and I would think that Snagit's FTP feature would let you FTP the pictures right into the proper subfolder at Photbucket right from the start.    Irfanview is a free screen capture program that allows you do much the same thing.  Irfanview also does a number of other nice image related things in a very impressive way.  Everyone that wants to do image manipulation on a zero budget should check out the many features in Irfanview.

 

Right now I'm running on at great length because I am using Windows Live Writer to compose this blog post.  Torley Linden recommended Windows Live Writer and that prompted me to try it.  It is certainly far easier to use for posting a big long bunch of words than the editor built into Wordpress.com's free blog's editor.  I've used Wordpress.com's blog post editor in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, in Firefox, in Opera, in Netscape, in Seamonkey, and in Maxthon 1 and 2, and I have to say, the Wordpress.com's blog editor is terrible. It stinks. The text doesn't display properly. Lines stop breaking for no reason.  If you write a long post, the toolbar is scrolled off the top of the screen, requiring you to scroll back up and then back down.  Taking the screenshots of the Hipihi Chinese architecture build  and getting them on the internet was not a problem or burden, but creating the post that shows them on my Wordpress blog was quite miserable and tedious.

Thus, I am now going to explore using Windows Live Writer to post some pictures on my Blogger blog.  So far I haven't posted any pictures but just writing this using the Wordpress.com's editor would have been torment, so already the process has been improved a great deal.

I used Photobucket's "check the selection boxes and then make it generate image display code" feature to get the code for what should be full sized images which link to my Photobucket site, then pasted the text for all the pictures above at one time into Windows Live Writer.  Once the pictures displayed in WLW's editor, I right clicked one, which cause d the image properties editor to appear in the right WLW pane.  I set the display size down from the original 1024 by 768 to 512; the WLW editor automatically scaled the other dimension down proportionally to 384, unlike the image property editor in Wordpress.com's editor.  The WLW image editing window stayed right at hand as I went down the column of pictures and type 512 in over top of 1024.  So far, it appears to be working just right.

 

Now to see what happens when I actually save this to Blogger.

 

First I've saved a local draft, having a copy on your local drive give a feeling of security that removes some stress from the process.

 

Well, the above is not what I thought I would get; I thought I'd have links to the full sized pictures on the photobucket site, but they aren't links.  This was just an error on my part, not a problem with Photobucket, Blogger, or WLW.  I will try again.

 

The next set will use the clickable thumbnail image code option on Photobucket.

 

 

 

 

 

I don't like the above small thumbnails.  Let's see if I can make them into bigger thumbnails without too much trouble.  My thinking is that I can edit the image properties and just type in a bigger number for the width, similar to how I shrunk the full sized images up above. Insert a line break after image and I hopefully will have the pictures 512 across, with the images being links to the full sized images on photobucket.    

 

Well that didn't work out, it did work in a technical sense, but scaling the picture up from the small thumbnail image doesn't produce an accptable image quality at all.

 

I'll try another approach. First I paste the raw urls for all the pctures, generated by Photobucket, into WLW, then work with them once they are conveniently in the WLW editor.

 

http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-ornate-textures-in-a-Chinese.jpg
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-view-across-the-courtyard-fr.jpg
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-aerial-view-of-Chinese-archi.jpg
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-texturing-detail.jpg
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-view-through-a-curved-gate.jpg
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-view-through-the-windows.jpg
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/Hipihi/Hipihi-columns-in-perspective.jpg

Now that was easy, but it's not what I want. Hopefully though I take those urls and make them into half sized images which are links to the full size things easily enough.

Well, I think I can see a way to do what I want, but not as easily as I'd like.  The half sized images above are big enough to look ok.  The automatically generated thumbnails which are links work fine, they just aren't as big as I'd like, and WLW doesn't scale them up very well from 160 to 512, which is not too surprising.  The easiest way to accomplish something similar to,  not quite like what I want, using the tools at hand, would be to have a plain link, the ones above, with a half sized image right next to it.  That wouldn't be hard to do for one image, or even the seven links above, but for displaying hundreds or thousands of images on a blog like this, the process really needs to produce perfect results, totally automatically, with the absolute minimum of effort, with all the very minimal effort being applied in one step. 

I'm sure there is a way to do this, I just don't know what it is at the moment. 

My public Photobucket account is at http://s198.photobucket.com/albums/aa245/SuezanneC-Baskerville/ . I have another account but it has a few pictures that I don't want others to see, and it has a whole lot of pictures that no one else would want to see.  I've not found a sufficiently easy way to record all the pictures there, delete the private and bad ones, and set the folder to public. This would be so simple if Photobucket just had the ability to designate some folders in an account as public and some as private, but alas, it doesn't.

That's it for this post.  Writing this whole post using WLW was less troublesome than writing the much shorter post on the Wordpress blog.  If you want to be a part of virtual world history, try the Hipihi beta.  If you want to post pictures of the Hipihi beta or write much in a Wordpress.com, don't use the built in editor, use Windows Live Write.  

 

 

 

   

Is this why Second Life's forum's vB Code is turned off?

Second Life's forum, at forums.secondlife.com, has had it's vB Code turned off for a while now.

The Second Life forums use vBulletin brand forum software, verson 3.0.5. "vB Code" is  vBulletin's form of BBCode, which allows forum  posters to easily insert links, images, apply formatting, etc. in forum posts.  No explanation has been given by Linden Lab.  A statement was made that vB Code would be turned back on, but no further word on the subject has been issued. 

Possibly it has something to do with the information presented below taken from http://forums.nexcess.net/showthread.php?t=596

JELSOFT SECURITY BULLETIN
http://www.vbulletin.com/
January 21st, 2005

This email contains important security-related information.
Please read it carefully.

* vBulletin 3.0.6 / 2.3.6 Released
* Performance Hit Since PHP 4.3.10 / 5.0.3
* Your License Information
* Contact Us


------------ VBULLETIN 3.0.6 / 2.3.6 RELEASED ------------

vBulletin 3.0.6 and 2.3.6 are security and bug fix
releases. They fix a recently discovered XSS issue
regarding BB code parsing.

All versions of vBulletin prior to 3.0.6 and 2.3.6 are
vulnerable. The only workaround is to disable BB code
parsing in signatures and all forums where untrusted users
can post.

The page at http://www.vulnerabilityscanning.com/vBulletin-BB-Tag-XSS-Test_16280.htm says:

Such versions are reportedly vulnerable to a
cross-site scripting issue involving its BB code parsing.

As a result of this vulnerability, it is possible for a remote
attacker to create a malicious link containing script code that will
be executed in the browser of an unsuspecting user when followed.

This may facilitate the theft of cookie-based authentication
credentials as well as other attacks

If this or a similar security issue is really the problem, is there a good reason why Linden Lab couldn't just say the vB Code has been turned off for a security reason and won't be turned on until the forum software is replaced, which may well never happen?

 

Virtual World moguls meet across shared Surface in Metaverse Poker Room August 16th, 2007 (virtual news, aka fiction)

A story at http://blogs.cisco.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-c.cgi inspired me to write a fairly lengthy comment so I figured I’d repeat it here.
=============================================
Odd that I see a reference to http://blogs.cisco.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-c.cgi along with a reference to Cisco’s Telepresence technology just shortly after posting in my blog about my notion that it would be interesting to see Linden Lab link it’s San Francisco and Boston offices using Cisco’s Telepresence system.

What I had in mind in my idea was creation of a permanently linked area, a distributed place in the Linden Lab offices where for example Philip Rosedale might walk past in San Francisco and John Lester in the Boston Linden Lab metaverse room would see him walk by if Philip was in the shared location place in the Boston office.

Instead of a desk or table physically located in both Linden Lab offices serving as the shared, co-mingled focal point of the distributed location meeting area, a Microsoft Surface unit could be used instead, synchronized so that the San Francisco and Boston Surface units functioned as if there was one Surface simultaneously. Hence John Lester could sit in shared presence area in Boston and see Robin Harper, for example, displayed life sized on the Cisco Telepresence system’s monitor, apparently sitting across the way a few feet on the other side of the of the Microsoft Surface table unit.

By maintaining the telepresence link permanently, the nature of the shared location virtual place is changed from one that is created on demand in which to hold preplanned events to one that is more like just a normal part of the office, normal except that to a human it seems like one place but it has widely separated physical locations.

Why would Linden Lab have an interest in such a thing? Well, because it’s a metaverse idea and Linden Lab is a metaverse company.

I’d like to see this shared location space extended to other companies that are working on the creation of the metaverse, so maybe Hui Xu would sit down in front of the Beijing metaverse room’s Surface and see Nicole Yankelovich sitting in Sun Lab’s metaverse room in Menlo Park. Philip Rosedale would sit down at the San Francisco site, and John Lester in the Boston area.

Then the Friday night metaverse poker game would start.

Forterra bases National Security division on Orlando

In an unusual and unprecedented move, virtual world developer Forterra, Inc. has decided to model it's recently formed National Security Division after the city of Orlando,Florida.

This make no sense, of course, after all, the city of Orlando is much too large to model a division of a private company after, the employees would be so far apart they'd have to drive to use the corporate bathroom, but apparently this will be the case based on how the Forterra site expressed it, and I quote:

"SAN MATEO, Calif. (August 9, 2007) - Forterra Systems, the market and technology leader in private virtual worlds, announced today the creation of a National Security Division that will be based on Orlando, FL."

Let's hope that the role Forterra plays in the processes involved in making the people of all the world's nations secure doesn't involve careful proofreading.

Punch SuezanneC Baskerville?

Link: PlayMyGame

Libertarian Party forums - forums for all 50 states, etc., plus virtual world libertarians

I've made a "Libertarian Party forum" which I originally intended to show the structure of the sort of forum that I think the U.S. national Libertarian Party should operate.

The address of this forum is http://z8.invisionfree.com/Libertarian_Party .

This forum in just a demo of what I want the LP to operate, yet it is a perfectly functional forum, and it might still be of some value or amusement, so I am announcing it's location.

If you'd like to see if there's any value to a forum of this sort, you might try posting in the forum for the state you are a LP member in. A brief word or two on the origin of your state and or local Libertarian Party, how to join your local party, the state LP's statement of principles, state platform, etc. seem like they'd be good things to start out with. Maybe you could get a friendly opponent to join you and start a doctrinal argument, forums are great for having doctrinal arguments in, and some folks enjoy watching the fur fly.

There's a virtual world libertarian category with a forum started for the Second Life virtual world.

Try the Hipihi beta!

In response to Newsweek's article on Hipihi at http://international.talk.newsweek.com/default.asp?item=654607 I'll just say I'm having a nice time in the Hipihi virtual world beta test. The main site at www.hipihi.com is understandably designed for Chinese speakers, but if you don't speak Chinese, don't despair, here are some links that might help:

Chinese language primary web site: www.hipihi.com

English language forum sponsored by IdeaShape Studios: http://www.ideashape.cn (third party, run by Second Life member Jolly Heron)

English language MSN Hipihi group: hipihi@msn.com (also started by Jolly Heron)

English registration: http://www.hipihi.com/application/application_en.jsp

English Help and Support pdf file: http://www.hipihi.com/download/HiPiHi_World's_Help_and_Support(2007.7.20).zip

Download client: www.hipihi.com/download_client.html

English interface guide:
http://221.11.104.147/bbs/Topic.aspx?BoardID=2&TopicID=7

Hipihi skin & clothing templates:
www.hipihi.com/download/avatar_templet.zip

Hipihi company email addresses:

For general info, email info@hipihi.com
For support with installation or operation, support@hipihi.com.

The SuezanneC Baskerville forum in the group forums at forums.secondlife.com, http://forums.secondlife.com/forumdisplay.php?f=280 has some posts about Hipihi, which you can access if you are able to use the Second Life forums, and my blog at http://suezannecbaskervillle.wordpress.com might be of interest or use to some re Hipihi.

The other Hipihi users and the Hipihi company's employees have all been quite pleasant. The program looks to me like it has every chance of succeeding, and I'm hoping that the Hipihi company and Linden Research, maker of Second Life, will work together to further the creation of the worldwide, global, 3D internet, aka the metaverse, by making portable avatars, portable currency, and portable objects to the extent possible and profitable.

A note to the open source community: please start now convincing the Hipihi company to open source the Hiphi viewer. Linden Lab's had good results with their open sourcing of the SL client, why not learn from each other's successes? Libsecondlife and opensl need their libhipihi and openhiphi complements.

Hipihi is a must see for any serious virtual world enthusiast, student, or creator.

Merging unrelated Jira issues is a bad idea.

Merging unrelated Jira issues is a bad idea.

Folks have taken to merging Jira issues made by separate people, that concern completely unrelated matters, into one proposal.

This unwise practice eliminates the ability for people to express their support or lack of support for separate, distinct, unrelated ideas by voting for some of the ideas and not voting for the other ideas which have been included in the merged issue.

Any unrelated issues that have been merged together in this fashion should be reopened separately, to gain votes or not, on their own individual merits, as their individual authors intended.

A permanent end should be made to the intellectually defective practice of merging unrelated ideas into one.

Bryce 5.5 Now Available On Downloads.com

	Online Store Gallery Free Tutorials

If for any reason you cannot view this email, Click here to view it in a standard browser: http://www.daz3d.com/newsletter/2007/dn/newsletter6_12_07.html

Anarcho-Capitalist Stefan Molyneux on "Free Talk Live" 6-13-07

I received the following group notice from Chumly Chandrayaan of the SL in-world group Anarcho-Capitalists:

Group Notice From: Chumly Chandrayaan

Tomorrow, on Wednesday June 13th, the prolific Anarcho-Capitalist podcaster, writer, and philosopher Stefan Molyneux will be a guest on the show 'Free Talk Live'. Stefan Molyneux is the host of the "Freedomain Radio" podcast (nearly 800 seperate audio files), the author of 70+ articles and several books. You can listen to free talk live through a feed in the Gimme Liberty Bar in the region Sorens (coordinates: 237, 173, 76). The show starts at 7:00 p.m. central U.S. time.

Be there or be square!

That location in secondlife linkable form is secondlife://237/173/76/

Second Life Jira Issue MISC-35: Allow default view looking at front of avatar

Second Life Jira Issue MISC-35: Allow default view looking at front of avatar

Here's the text of my new feature issue:

Allow us to select a default camera position and focus position that would let us see our avatars from in front instead of always defaulting to having the camera in back staring at our butts.

Torley Linden responded:

This can currently be done using a scripted FollowCam attachment.

I'm pretty sure Torley is wrong. I find no evidence that such a scripted device exists. My attempts to produce such a thing failed. I think the camera controls are designed to prevent one from being able to do this. Torley has not supplied any examples of scripted FollowCam attachments that behave in the manner Torley described.

Every single other 3D program with avatars and a virtual world that I've ever seen has some form of this ability.

If anyone can tell me where to find such a script please do so.

Please stop by the SL Jira site and vote for MISC-35 .

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-35

SL Jira issue - MOTD on IM open - VWR-1149

There's a Jira issue created by Timeless Prototype, VWR-1149 that you might want to vote for.

When a user chooses to IM another person, as soon as the IM window is opened it should display the recipient's MOTD text that they will have entered in their preferences.

The text should be able to include http:// links that would open up a browser and could be used for FAQ pages etc.

It is essential that the MOTD appears before any messages are sent by the user. [Edit]It should display the MOTD regardless of whether the recipient is online or not.[/Edit] The idea is to reduce the massive number of IMs that come through to individuals, also known as "IM Storms".

Example use cases:

A person with a great deal of SL customers all asking the same questions: sets their MOTD to "Thank you for your interest in our products, if you are about to ask a question it is most likely answered already in our FAQ: http://www.example.com/faq.html. Please check that before sending any messages. Questions that are answered in the FAQ will not be answered via IM. Thank you."

A Linden Lab employee: "Hi, I am responsible for facilitating communications with open source developers. If you need some other kind of help from a Linden, please visit this page to directly contact a more appropriate member of staff: http://www.example.com/contacts_and_roles.html"

An RL business manager: "Please direct all queries via Joe Bloggs or Jane Bloggs as I am currently away on holiday. You can also contact us in other ways by viewing our contacts page: http://www.example.com/contacts.html"

An estate manager: "My hours of duty are from 18:00 to 21:00 PDT. For help outside these hours, contact Joe Bloggs"

In order to simulate reality one might need to have some idea of what reality is.

People don't agree on what reality is.

The universe is a seamless whole. There are no isolated parts of the universe that don't interact with the rest of the universe outside them.

When you try to simulate reality you are limited by the size of storage and computational speed to trying to simulate only small parts of reality.

If you simulate a city block sized area, then how do you explain the gravity ? If you just say it's by fiat, then you aren't simulating reality very well. If you include the body of a planet in your simulation then it will need to behave as if it where a real chunk of planet material of some sort. If you come to the edge of your city and can't go any further, how do you explain that within the framework of your simulation?

One part of many description of reality deals with macroscopic objects, the sort of objects that one sees in daily life on earth , the cups and saucers and books and baseballs and such. These objects appear to behave in somewhat the manner described in Newtonian physics. Thus to do a good job of reality simulation one needs to simulate macroscopic objects of the sort one sees in everday life. One also encounters substances in reality, so one's vr system needs to simulate substances.

Reality can be seen from different levels, focusing on areas and time durations of varying extent. In reality one can focus in on a onion skin with a microsope and some dye and see the cells and and cell components, so in a virtual reality, if you've got onions, you'd best have some cells, and you'd best have some microscopes too.

Sculpted Prim Forum - Second Life Jira WEB-135

There was a proposal in the Second Life Jira Issue Tracker for a sculpted prim forum with sub-forums for topics specific to different modeling software.

Sculpted Prim Forum - Second Life Jira WEB-135

The proposal is titled "Sculpted Prim Forum". It reads as follows:

A new Content Creation forum for discussion of Sculpted Prims seems logical.

There could be stickies or sub-forums for each major third party 3D modeling program used to create and edit sculpted prims for discussion of issues specific to each third party modeling program.

This would reduce the scattered placement of discussion about sculpted prims in the RA, texturing, building and other forums.

Torley Linden rejected it, marked it resolved, "Resolution: Won't Fix"

Torley's explanation for rejecting this idea is

I'm open to suggestions here, but if we're going to have one for sculpties, then from historical experience, we'd inevitably get follow-ups asking for sub-forums for flexi-prims, voice, etc. So, I suggest simplifying and starting new threads in Content Creation, generally Building, as appropriate.

Additional cultural aspect here: sculpties have been discussed extensively on the wiki, so that's another avenue:

Torley then mentions the high number of views the sculpted prim talk page in the Second Life Wiki has.


The reasoning in Torley's rejection eludes me. The evidence in the Jira shows no such proposals for the other issues Torley mentions. Torley is rejecting the sculpted prim forum based on imaginary requests, requests that exist only in Torley's mind. Further, rejecting a request for a forum because one imagines that people might in the future request other forums makes no sense. If that was the case one would have to reject the creation of the very first forum ever created, since it's existence might have spurred the creation of other forums in the future. The reason that people would request a forum in the future for different topics is the creation of a forum for sculpted prims worked well - if the creation of a forum for sculpted prims didn't work out, it is unlikely that would motivate people to request additional forums for other topics.

If people propose the creation of a forum for flexi-prims in the future, then that request should be considered on it's merit, not on the basis of potential but non-existent requests that might or might not be made in the future. Flexi-prims are variations of the same sort of prim that has existed since SL was started, and don't require the use of external software in their creation and editing, while sculpted prims are a new breed, not actually prims at all in the sense of prims being extrusions of lines, circular arcs, etc., and do require the use of external editing software with attributes quite different from the in-world object editor.

A good comparison is the Animation forum. The Animation forum was created in response to a change in SL that created a new type of entity, the custom animation, which required the use of external software, and I believe that has worked out rather nicely. It might be a good idea to use this model from actual SL history as the basis for one's thoughts on the appropriateness of creating a forum for sculpted prim discussion.

In addition, WEB-135 was made at a time when the jira system's login procedure was faulty, and the forum's BB code has been turned off, making it more difficult for people that support the idea to simply click on a link and log in and vote for it.

It's not surprising that the sculpted prim talk page in the Second Life Wiki was seen by lots of people, people can read the wiki without logging in, and the wiki is indexed by Google. If high readership is considered good, this suggests not that there shouldn't be a forum for sculpted prims, but rather that forums.secondlife.com be made viewable without logging in, and thus also indexable by Google. I've supported this idea for a long time. This would make a tremendous amount of useful information on how to use Second Life easily viewable by a large audience. A better measure of how effective a communication system a talk page in the Second Life wiki is would be the number of people posting questions there. That number, for the Sculpted Prims talk page, is not so impressive.

I suggest that those who want a sculpted prim forum make comments in the jira at the existing proposal mentioned above requesting that WEB-135 be changed back to unresolved status, and also that someone other than me create a new proposal of the same nature. Preferably someone real popular with a sunny disposition and lots of friends who can get the vote total up to at least a few hundred in a short time.

The Second Life Jira Issue Tracker is at jira.secondlife.com .