Drama Be Damned :D

So, I finally hit a wall over all the complaining of the SL folks that are joining Openlife and I wrote this post as an answer to people who somehow seemed to believe we, in Openlife, should be on SL time. I will either be hated or applauded for this, and honestly I don't care. It amazes me sometimes that people just don't seem to "get it". Sure that is MY perspective. Doesn't need to be yours. Here is my reply:

OK. I'm going to play "devil's advocate" here simply because I seem to be in a feisty mood this eve and also because people stop by my sim and seem to think I SHOULD say what I think _ LOL. So, here it is. No apologies.

WHY should we think that the folks on the OpenlifeGrid actually WANT us SL folks? I am THRILLED they took me. I am HAPPY I got here before the real rush. I am GRATEFUL to be here at the beginning when things are happening and history is beging made.

WHY CAN'T WE JUST LET THINGS HAPPEN AND BE HAPPY WITH THAT?!?!? Yes, I know I am yelling. I honestly get pretty tired of SL people (and yes I am one in practice if not in spirit) giving their lists of wants/needs/must haves/demands. This was NOT our world from the beginning. WE JOINED IT! We can make a difference, certainly, but the world doesn't need to CHANGE for us -- we should adapt to it.

That's my belief. Others can have their own. Those who stay will make the difference.

The Cobbler's Bench

My script engine is still broken but INVISPRIMS are working (yeah) and I wore my heels for over an hour with no disappearing feet (bigger yeah). So what to do today? Make a new version of my favorite boots.

Now I am not the best builder out there. I'm not big on bells and whistles and not a huge fan of sculpties that sometimes take forever to turn into something, so my shoes are fairly simple. I try to pay attention to the details and to the FITTING which is what that picture above is showing you.

Building Tip:

Making shoes is a bit tricky on any world. Prims don't exactly line up as you wish they might and you have to balance strategic details with aesthetics. When you DO get your shoes finished -- be they the simplest sandals or the most complex buckle boots, you need to FIT them. Not only do you need to fit them for yourself, if you are selling them or giving them away -- you need to fit them so others can wear them easily.

I can't tell you how many shoes I have tried on that one foot fit perfectly and the other was WAY off. There is no big mystery there. The left foot simply isn't harder to fit than the right. The designer most likely got tired of fiddling. So fit that first color of a style, go away a day, check it again and make sure it is as good as it can get and THEN make copies in other colors. No point in having to fix six pairs of shoes when you could just get the first one REALLY right :D

On the PLUS side, it seems like attachments come much closer to a real fit in Openlife than on Phil's grid. So you don't have to rotate forever to get your shoe in the general area of your foot. This is a BIG help and my thanks go out to whoever fixed that.

On the minus side, our pose stands here (and even the poses in the library) don't seem to work all that well -- or at all. I've made myself a Tpose of sorts and uploaded my own in order to fit shoes, You CAN fit them when you are just standing but that is pretty tricky and you need to be up for a CHALLENGE :D

See that piece of foot showing through the one shoe? That is what you need to watch out for. Also your foot coming through the bottom of a sandal when there is no invisiprim -- or the invisiprims not covering all of the foot you want to disappear. You also need to watch that the soles of the shoes line up with the floor and that during your maneuvering you have kept the bottoms level -- in ALL directions.

AND speaking of invisiprims, if you have problems getting the server to accept the invisiprim code, you can take a pair of shoes where the script did work (an on a good day issue) unlink it from the finished shoe and reshape it to your new shoe. Works well and gets your shoes up and running.

Meanwhile I have a whole new Fall outfit on with BOOTS and that makes me feel good!

The State of the Openlife Nation - Dec 10

As always I prefice this with the disclaimer that I am not in the know. I have no inside track. I only have the posts and the blogs and the chats and such to go by. So no CREDIBILITY here, but perhaps a pulse of the nation sort of thing :D

Tomorrow is a server update - 4pm UTC

This update will bring all regions to the new 3DXServer 0.6.8 software. It includes a long list of bug fixes and improvements (to be released after update).

So hopefully we will all be happily surprised with more stability and things working that did not work before. If there is indeed a list, I will try and find it and post it here.


The "Take a Copy" permissions problem noted in this forum post seems to be a continuing problem for the moment. An important part of Sakai's message includes the note that:

The transit of items from non-creator and non-respective permissions will be addressed shortly. -> Note Openlife does not have an in world credits system at this point while there are still permissions issues to address.

SOOOO -- we won't be getting currency by mid December it seems. No great surprise and no giant loss either.


From reading other blogs and posts and chatter, it seems that we each have our "what we need" lists -- and of course they are very divergent. Are we ready for prime time? I don't think so :D Are we ready for the next group of folks from the mini sim fiasco to descend? Most likely not.

That doesn't mean they wont. And some will stay and some will no doubt leave and life will go on. As someone mentioned on a comment to a blog, there have been a LOT of improvements in the last month. The tech folks are understandably swamped with land orders, regular maintenance and the like. Stability is still the number one priority it seems and that works for me.

We will get to prime time when we get there -- and hopefully be able to embrace the journey that takes us to the forefront.

Mirror Images

For those of you wondering -- that's Samara on the left and Sam on the right. Does it matter? Maybe not to us, but it might to them :D

This was so much fun to do. First I had to get Samara in world and decked out with clothes and skin and shape and such, then make the pose, them make a "mirror image" of the pose (not so easy and I decided exact just wasn't REALLY necessary), make pose balls for the poses and take the picture.

Have to admit I am enthralled. Must be a narcissistic thing. Yep, must be. And as a bonus, I have my first set of pose balls for Movements, the animation shop.

Body Doubles

Getting your shape from Second Life (R) to Openlife -


While some of us are very happy to have a whole new persona in Openlife, others prefer the familiarity of our old selves. Getting your shape from one grid to another isn't all that difficult. It simply takes a bit of time.

If you are using Second Inventory to transfer goods and you have made your own shape or have a full perms shape, you most likely can use the program to accomplish the transfer. For those of us who don't use Second Inventory, it is still fairly simple.

If your computer is up to the challange, simply open up a copy of your Linden viewer with yourself in world. Then start the Openlife viewer with the pod person avatar (wink).

THEN:

In OL - Open your inventory (Ctrl + I) and from the top menu, choose Create > New Body Part > Shape. It will be called New Shape. Find it in your inventory, right click and WEAR it. Right click on your avatar and choose APPEARANCE. This will take you to the screen shown above.

In SL - Right click on your avatar and choose APPEARANCE. This will take you to the screen shown above.

Then, tab by tab, go through all the fields filling the numbers from your original avatar to your new Openlife avatar. It is a good idea to check the field names often to make sure you aren't one slot off. This can make a HUGE difference in the final out come - well of course it can!

Save periodically. Currently there is NO point using Save As, since it doesn't work. Renaming your new shape before you are completed doesn't work yet either. The best you can do is continue to save your avatar as "New Shape" until you are all done. THEN you can change the name to "Samara Nov 08" or whatever. BE PREPARED for the shape name to revert back to "New Shape" however. Sometimes this can be very frustrating.

If your computer won't run both programs as the same time, you can take notes of your OLD shape parameters and type them into the appropriate slots in the OL appearance editor.

If you make several shapes on your way to your perfect OL shape, you could find yourself shapes shifting (literally) from time to time. This happened to me and has happened to others. Eventually, especially if you delete and purge ALL copies of shapes you don't want, the database will accept YOUR shape as yours. Hopefully this will be remedied sometime soon as it is a very uncomfortable thing to keep having to change BACK into a shape you left yourself in.

Getting an Openlife Account

Getting an account and avatar for Openlife. Written for a not terribly techie friend and added to the blog for others to find as needed.



Here are steps:

Go to: http://openlifegrid.com/ which currently looks like this:



Choose the Register for Free button (see big red arrow in the screen shot above) and make an account. This is NOT your avatar's name. You make your avatar(s) separately.

After you make an account and record your login and password somewhere for safekeeping, go to the Toolbox and then the Avatar Toolbox and pick out a first and last name for your avatar. Make a password for the avatar; (this is for logging into the viewer). Choose a START location if you wish. The default is Orientation Island I believe.


You also need to download the viewer of course. Use the DOWNLOAD button (currently on the side all the time but a new website design is coming so just look around for DOWNLOAD if it has moved). Download the viewer that matches your system.

Install the viewer. Run the viewer. Put in your avatar names and password and make your first trip to the Openlife Grid.


Note: Currently you can sometimes have problems getting in - especially to Orientation Island and other new folk locations. You can type in different locations in the viewer for starting. Feel free to use Fantastic if you like. It is usually online.

Meet Samara

This is Samara. Some of you may already know her, and others of you may get a chance to meet her soon. While I had no intention to have BOTH Sam and Samara in Openlife when I joined, the idea is growing on me. I am wondering just how different they are -- and I suspect that there actually ARE a few differences.

Sam didn't have a lot of time in OL today but she did manage to get some new animations made and inserted into the daybed.

BUILDING HINT: She also figured out that the sit scripts without pose balls that include rotations seem MUCH harder on the sim than the one she adjusted from Mac's code (without rotation). Part of Fantastic's "mission statement" will concern low impact living on the OLG which means -- to me -- that if a script is obviously problematic, it get's tossed. I would rather have the sim up and running (and it has been consistantly for over a week - yeah ) than have all the bells and whistles of Phil's.

SAMARA took over the computer looking for a new 512 lot for her soon to be "minimal" life at Phil's. She is vacating her old digs and moving away and onward in most respects, but will keep her free land for herself and her homeless buddies.

Expect to see her soon with her twin on the OLG. This should be fun.