Category: News-Opinion

Playing with prims: the new 64m limit

Posted on by Inara Pey

We’re all aware that mesh is chugging down the road in Second Life. What some haven’t twigged to as yet is that with it is coming a new maximum prim size – 64m on a side.

Now, the ability to rez and size prims to beyond 10x10x10 has long been a feature of other grids, and the fact that we’ve not been able to do so within Second Life is simply down to constraints placed on the system by LL rather than any inherent issue with the grid itself. This has traditionally left us with the thorny issue of mega prims, which, as well as being the subject of much heated discussion over the years within the Lab as to whether or not they should be allowed, are saddled with limitations – as anyone who has attempted to stretch a mega will know.

So, what does the new prim size mean for mega prims once it is rolled out? Well, pretty much the same as it does now:

  • Any “legally cut” mega (i.e. those created using the exploit Linden Lab allowed a few years ago when building the likes of Nautilus / Bay City) that are sized within the 64m limit can be safely cut,  tortured and stretched as per a “normal” prim, without it demonstrating any “snap back”
  • Any mega over 64m along any axis can he cut and tortured, but will snap back to 64m when stretched, but can be resized to anything under 64m

Of course, it also calls into the question the need to continue to carry vast stocks of pre-cut megas between 10 and 64m on a side in your inventory (or indeed, within a repository external to your inventory) – which is also to the good.

Overall, the behaviour is pretty much as one would expect, and in some respects nothing to write home about. That megas coming in under the 64m limit can be stretched without snapping back does mean that those who have used them in builds shouldn’t need to go around replacing them all with freshly-rezzed prims if they don’t want to. However, be careful with mega prims created using any skew (usually 0.79) to achieve the final shape, and for some reason these can exhibit a .05 to .1 degree rotation when linked with “regular” prims that have been enlarged.

That said, there are potential benefits to revisiting and revising some builds that use megas. Often it is necessary to compromise in the use of megas and “regular” prims to achieve a desired result. Providing things can be kept to within the 64m limit, this is no longer necessarily the case, as the images below demonstrate.

Built with megas & “regular” prims: 633 prims
Revised with the new prim size: 134 prims recouped

Of course, there are still some limitations – you can’t hollow-out a prim beyond 95% and nanoprims still require a lot of cutting and slicing of small prims, but on the whole, this is a step forward for traditional building in SL. What is a shame is that there doesn’t appear to have been any upward shift in the calculation for determining the maximum prim linking distance.

If you want to have a play with the new prim sizes ahead of the mesh roll-out you can. If you join the Mesh Volunteer Group, you can access the main Grid mesh sandbox area (Surl), which supports the new prim size if you use a suitable Viewer, currently comprising:

Or you can try either the Beta grid mesh sandboxes or, if you know someone on the Main grid who has a sim involved in the Mesh/Live Volunteer project, you could ask them if you could use some space to fiddle with prims.

Objects created using the new maximum prim size *can* be rezzed elsewhere on the Grid – but cannot currently be resized in any Viewer. Regardless of whether or not the Viewer you are using supports the news prim limit, if you attempt to resize a large prim on a non-mesh enabled sim, it will snap back to the 10m limit until such time as mesh is fully rolled-out.

Meeroos: LL’s CS shoots itself in the foot. Again

Posted on by Inara Pey

I hate wagging the finger at Rodvik, I really do. But there are times when it has to be done; and this is one of them.

As has been the talk of Twitter, Malevay,  the creators of Meeroos recently came under a form of attack: one day old avatar accounts with names closely approximating the official “Meeroo Resident” asset management account started to be used in attempts to cash-in on the Meeroo success – right under Malvay’s own noses. You can read about the situation in detail here.

As a result, the Malevay raised a series of tickets against the culprit accounts – and to cut a long story short, someone at LL’s Customer Support reacted in a totally lackadaisical and inexcusable manner and simply banned all account names looking like “Meeroo Resident” without thought or consideration as to the possible consequences. The result: the official Meeroo asset management account also got banned, with potentially serious repercussions for all involved.

How this came about is unclear, but what is apparent is that it smacks of sloppy enforcement and LL’s Customer Services end, and a lack of checks and balances to prevent avoidable mistakes occurring when dealing with people’s accounts. As Crap Mariner points out, are LL’s Customer Services incapable of carrying out the most rudimentary of checks on accounts prior to blocking them?

Insult was added to injury when the account was apparently reinstated on the QT without the account holder receiving any communication from Customer Services. They simply found out when they another periodic attempt to log-in to the account and see if it was there.

Now, this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened; numerous people have reported they’ve experienced their accounts being suspended without warning, only to be subsequently reinstated equally without notification, for no readily apparent reasons.

Back when the new “communications platform” was launched, people  – like Darrius Gothly – who accidentally violated the community standards for the platform were horrified to find members of the Customer Services team were publicly chastising them and using screen captures that clearly showed personal information – although why the heck Customer Services should need to capture screenshots was, and remains, a mystery. At the time, Amanda Linden tried to excuse the situation as “working out the kinks” in the new system. And explanation which, frankly, floated on the sea of scrutiny about as well a brick on the Atlantic.

This most recent incident involving Meeroos has many questions around it; to be fair, a lot of them are unrelated to LL’s Customer Service operations per se. However, it is and will be the actions on the part of LL’s Customer Services that will continue to receive a lot of attention – and a lot of criticism – both for the original account blocking error and the manner in which it was silently reinstated.

Had this been a one-off situation, people might be a little more forgiving, but it is not, as pointed out above. Rodvik identified customer services as being one of the Achilles’ Heels of Second Life. This situation with Meeroos demonstrates that this is very much still the case, and that it really is about time LL were seen to be tackling the problems, rather than people being left feeling they’re still only talking about tackling them.

Redzone: closure of a sort

Posted on by Inara Pey

As headlined by Tateru Nino, the RedZone farrago both returns and gains a measure of closure.

Michael Stefan Prime (Aka TheBoris Gothly and Zfire Xue) – identified as the man behind the RedZone tool by other SL users – has been remanded into the care of US Marshalls and a four-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to four out of seven charges of parole violation, specifically:

  • Associating with Shawn Cahill, a three-time convicted felon, in violation of standard condition 9 that he not associate with any person convicted of a felony.
  • Failing to allow the U.S. Probation Officer to inspect any personal computer owned or operated by the defendant in violation of the special condition directing him to do so.
  • Failing to notify the U.S. Probation Officer of all computer software owned or operated by the defendant in violation of the special condition directing him to do so.
  • Beginning employment without prior approval by the U.S. Probation Officer, working for cash, and engaging in employment that did not provide regular pay stubs in violation of the special condition directing him to do so.

Interestingly, as recorded in court documentation, the prosecution moved to dismiss three other violations when Prime pleaded guilty and waived his right to any evidentiary hearing relating to the four charges above. The three additional charges comprised:

  • Committing the criminal offence of Possession of Stolen Property 1st degree on or before March 23, 2011, in violation of the general condition that he not commit another federal, state, or local crime.
  • Committing the criminal offence of Trafficking in Stolen Property 2nd degree on or before March 23, 2011, in violation of the general condition that he not commit another federal, state, or local crime.
  • Associating with Shana Bobo, a three-time convicted felon, in violation of standard condition 9 that he not associate with any person convicted of a felony.

The first two of these charges relate to earlier convictions against Prime, although it is the third charge, relating to one Shana Bobo, that is liable to generate further speculation among SL users who have followed this case and the entire RedZone situation, given Prime’s involvement with a female SL user at the time of RedZone.

Details of the original case against Prime, which lead to his imprisonment and eventually the violation of the terms and conditions of his parole as a part of the entire RedZone affair, can be read on-line.

There are still issues surrounding this entire sorry affair – not the least of which are vulnerabilities within the Second Life software environment and the fact that four months down the road, Linden Lab still have yet to incorporate the Media Filter code that is readily available in all responsible TPVs, which can warn users of a potential threat to their privacy.

However, as far as RedZone itself is concerned, this will hopefully see closure brought to that particular sorry affair without people feeling the need to dig further into this individual’s past and engage in trial-by-forum, which came to undermine much of the good work carried out to try and stop such exploits and identify in-world sims where people could find themselves open to data-scraping by the RedZone tool.

“Social” web profiles live today

Posted on by Inara Pey

At the start of July, I reported on the development of the new “social” web profiles. Linden Lab have confirmed that the new profiles will be officially live from later today.

In typical LL form, the news was not broken via the LL website – although we may yet get an update there at soe point – but rather via the LL Twitter feed, @my_secondlife:

The new web profiles bring a number of interesting features to your profile pages at http://my.secondlife.com, including a Feed capability that allows you (and those to whom you allow) to make comments on your “Feed” page & the home page of your profile.

This system is interesting, but not without its limitations at present. One of these is that in order to see someone else’s comments made to their own profile, you need to Friend them first. This means that any content creators using their Feed to make product announcements, etc., are going to be getting a lot of Friendship offers – which could be irritating in the first pass, and lessen the overall impact of the service. That said, Fredrik Bjork (Fredrik Linden) has indicated that features that will allow “non-user profiles” for stores, etc., will be added in time.

One thing that has been added since I first looked at these features is Twitter integration: if you have a Twitter account, you can make a comment on your Profile feed and have it appear on Twitter. Similar integration with Plurk has been promised.

I’m still not totally convinced as to how these new features will be received by users; I rather suspect that those of us already using the likes of Twitter are probably not going to be greatly influenced by the initial offerings – and may not even be tempted away at all, for reasons Tateru Nino explains very succinctly.

Nevertheless, keep an eye on your web profile and see what you think when the new options are live.

ADDENDUM – 26th July

  1. For those wishing to opt-out of the new FEED option of web profiles, you can now set your FEED privacy to NOBODY – meaning no-one can see your feed or comment on it. Go to http://my.secondlife.com/first.last  – log-in if required, then select SETTINGS on the left of the window, then click the PRIVACY tab and set FEED to NOBODY in the drop-down list of options.
  2. Plurk integration is now available.

Google’s bosses want G+ to “replicate real life”

Posted on by Inara Pey

As Botgirl Questi reports, the reason things have been so topsy-turvy on Google+ (some pseudonymous accounts being suspended then being reinstated; others being suspended and remaining so, others apparently being removed), appears to have gained some clarification.

It appears, to precis, that Google wants G+ to mimic how “ordinary people” interact in the real world.

Wow.

So innovation has now become a matter of mimicking, rather than enhancing or actually, well, being innovative. Givem all the possible options Google could opt to take when looking at building a genuinely innovative, progressive and encompassing social platform, the one that claim to have opted for seems to be little more than a wimp-out.

Obviously, there are clear reasons for this – as Tateru Nino commented the other day – in relation to capturing those who have been engaged in Facebook. This is also the possibility that Google’s conservative approach is because most people are, well, conservative, when it comes to making friends in RL. But in taking this approach, the fact is that Google is hardly likely to set the world alight – and they may actually be aware of this, hence the current flip-flopping over the matter of pseudonymity we’re currently seeing in terms of some accounts being reinstated as the beta progresses.

Even so, one cannot help but think that in taking up this stance, Google are potentially leaving a very large opportunity open for someone else to take-up.

Botgirl Questi closes her post with a quote from Marshall McLuhan regarding looking back at the future. I’d like to add my own to it, this one from Jim Steinman and made famous by one Marvin Lee Aday. It may not be as illustrious as the quote from McLuhan, but it still tends to sum Google’s position up:

Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are.

Mesh roll-out to commence “in days”

Posted on by Inara Pey

Oz Linden has indicated that Linden Lab will start rolling out the code to support mesh on the Main grind “in days rather than weeks”.

To help prepare the way, the Lab have also issued a new page on the wiki for those wishing to help with the roll-out. Among things worth noting:

  • Testing applies to users owning FULL private sims  – No Homesteads or Openspaces. In addition, some sandboxes will be set-up for mesh testing
  • Uploaded objects may be destroyed or broken permanently, and may no longer work after the full mesh deploy in August
  • If you move rezzed mesh objects from a new mesh-enabled version to a sim running the current release version, they may be destroyed or broken permanently – and this includes vehicles and attachments
  • During this phase of the rollout, LL may alter the Prim count for mesh objects and cause objects to be returned to inventory – not this might by any objects on a parcel / the sim, not just mesh objects
  • Sims may be rolled back during this initial roll-out with little or not warning.

Full details, including how to volunteer, can be found on the Mesh/Live Volunteer wiki page.

(with thanks to Opensource Obscure)