when i left Second Life, i remade my avatar in Reaction Grid and i expected it would be a pain and it was. i had taken screenshots of all my slider settings and posted them to Flickr (thinking i was a little clever) and created Ener Hax again. well, sort of – my hair and clothing had all been bought stuff, so i had to make that stuff. and i am no clothing maker – that’s why i have had only one outfit for two years – same sports bra and HK underwear! (ewww, but hey, maybe that keeps my carbon footprint small?) =p
just my simple skirt took forever to make. first i did it as flexis but sheesh, what lag! and my hair! lol, it’s still the Raggedy Ann style with hollow cylinders and no alpha tapers but i love it and it makes my little Ener Hax even more special to me (do you also picture your avatar as a little person like four inches tall? i think Ener Hax could easily fit in my pocket and run around with me in the real world – don’t leave her there on wash day!) =D
then . . . we went from a private Reaction Grid grid to being a part of their world grid and . . . ugh . . . i had to create Ener Hax again! it was a little less effort but more frustrating than ever! (my patience is like zero for these things)
now i want a real Ener Hax for my SoaS work and figured that would be really easy – since we have a server, i am able to RDP in and export Ener’s IAR file (50 megs)
then i fire up SoaS and import that IAR file – for this, i do have patience but . . . bah! some of my textures are corrupt! lol, well i have my hair and parasol, so i’m pretty happy! =)
finally, Ener arrives on Sim-on-a-Stick . . . almost! =)
Making portable identities/appearances reliable and easy is key in my mind to the growth of the Metaverse. This business of having to recreate the same identity over and over is time-consuming and frustrating, as you’ve artfully pointed out!
ATupper
6 Oct 12 at 11:18 am
That’s why I hypergrid teleport everywhere with the same avatar.
Maria Korolov
6 Oct 12 at 1:05 pm
agreed ATupper – it is a massive pain and avatars may be seen as frivolous by many outsiders, but to hardcore virtual world people – their avatars are important
Maria, where is your avatar’s account? is it from your own home machine?
Ener Hax
6 Oct 12 at 3:04 pm
i have been dealing with this for a long time. at one time you could use second life inventory and not worry about things as long as it was free. now, second life has restriction to the point where second life inventory is useless unless you create everything yourself including the components. that is plain silly.
also the second life model doesnt not reflect how people can build their own private places. you need two things: streaming and objects that you have in the viewer area. wow and eq is an example of that. i think bluemars has a sandbox and a live server. for games you really need both. last night i saw 100 avatars on wow fighting with mobs. you cant do that with second life or opensimulator.
opensimulator has to break with the second life model. it good for certain thing and not good for other things. like for example, over 15k objects in a region, regions that are large than 256 x 256, and so on.
bristle
6 Oct 12 at 4:10 pm
I had the same thing happen when I first uploaded Excelsior Station to Created Worlds in March (not their fault, corrupted in my OAR file). And CW is AuroraSim based, so corrupted textures are not limited to OpenSim.
About a quarter of the textures got blanked.
On 70,000+ prims.
And I’m still finding them.
Sarge Misfit
6 Oct 12 at 5:27 pm
well said bristle – the SL paradigm needs to be left behind and, as you pointed out, in some ways it has
prim limits, prim size, hypergridding, and megaragions are fantastic ways in which OpenSim has moved beyond SL
portable avatars are something Maria has mentioned for years now (i believe Maria said something analogous to a Gmail account – where one group would perhaps offer a universal avatar)
dang Sarge! 70,000 prims! i am not glad to hear that but am a little less upset about my own experiences with textures. i always seem to have some textures that just flake out – even just on our server oevr the last two years – they just kind of fall apart into really crappy ones. my sim grass terrain is one such example – it became all low quality one day???
well, it is alphaware i suppose! but still! what a waste of time and 70k prims!!!! bummer times a zillion!
Ener Hax
7 Oct 12 at 9:20 am
Well, I found that the easiest way of fixing the majority of the builds was to import the objects from their original files and replace the damaged structures. Another reason to keep XML capability in the viewers.
Textures have been problematic. Even now, with new textures, I get problems. Not that its a huge problem, but enough to be noticeable. One or two are slow to load. Or they ‘blank out’.
Perhaps its a case of slow degradation. Consider, a person creates a texture and then uploads it to a sharing site. A bit of cosmic radiation damages a bit of data enough to affect a pixel or two as it travels from their home computer to the server. The server has slightly different codecs. Another bit or pixel gets damaged. Routine scans and maintenance while the texture is on the site causes a bit more. I download it to my system for use. More “travel damage”. My own anti-virus and maintenance run scans over it on my system. Maybe they used a newer version of PhotoShop than I have, so my own codecs aren’t as good as theirs, more changes to make the texture file readable. I import it into Excelsior Station and use it happily, not thinking another thing about it. Then I archive it as part of an OAR. More changes as it gets written and compressed to that OAR file. I send the OAR to Created Worlds, with more “travel damage”. CW’s servers have different codecs from mine, more changes.
Over time, the degradation continues. Its not anything noticeable, at first. But, eventually, it all adds up.
And I’m not saying that this is any sort of huge problem, despite being a source of frustration. Just that it does happen. And who knows, I could be totally wrong and its something else that causes the problems.
Sarge Misfit
7 Oct 12 at 11:00 am
Cosmic radiation my butt, its LL’s scheme to get more money from it’s residents when land income drops below 20,000 sims from inventory and sim backup.
Kidding aside seriously, there’s no verification of files for errors when they’re written, validation of the file structure and contents afterwards, and a repair option. Burning DVDs every once in a while a glitch happens, the same when running file compression utilities. That’s why DVD and compression utilities have these safegards, so you know if a bad copy happens.
joe
7 Oct 12 at 4:34 pm
I like the idea of an Avatar service.
You might pay a small fee ($2 or less a month) to have a server store your hypergrid avatar (and perhaps inventory) so you can use it anywhere on the hypergrid. The service wouldn’t need to offer any land for the avatar, but might have a small set of regions for sand boxing, etc.
This kind of service would be a lot less expensive to run than a full grid and far less demanding on internet connection speeds, which would put this in the range of small businesses and hobbyist grid operators.
The income could help pay for their virtual world hobby – $35 for an unlimited kitely plan would be covered by just 18 customers (although more would be needed to cover operating cost).
Paul
8 Oct 12 at 7:39 pm
[...] also re-textured the missing parts from last week’s messed up me and embraced my inner child even more with a Hello Kitty embroidered edge on my skirt! *rolls [...]
slowest t-shirt maker ever – that’s me at i live in science land
13 Oct 12 at 6:03 pm
As a completely non technical nerd, I think the idea of an avatar service is great, as it seems to involve all the computery stuff being done for me. The kind of avatar service I would REALLY like to see, and I think could turn into a nice little earner for somebody,is having a techhead take a look at my SL avatar, and try to make me a similar one for OpenSim.I would be over the moon if they would have a look at my inventory and tell me what the hell I can or cannot bring out of Second Life! Maybe they could even refer me to someone who could make me a version of some of my favorite stuff! My reptiles!!! My cat!!! My Sarees!!! My cactii!!! My half assed Frida Kahlo collection!!!! Okay, I’ve had too much coffee. But you get the idea.
virtualchristine
17 Oct 12 at 6:12 am