"Your only limit is your imagination."

No, the big difference is that in a level-based game everyone can be level 60.

In the real world, not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. In SL, there are few if any jobs other than astronaut, but why do you think this means everyone can be one?

Well, you probably can improve your imagination with enough effort. Or take up drugs or booze, which at the least do wonders for the writer's block. And anyone *can* choose to do hard work and become dedicated to a task.

But without extraordinary motivation, most people won't bother to change.

Shaking hands and other interactions that require 2 or more avies to be in synch don't work too well in 3D games which have free movement of player contolled avatars. In games like TSO it does work, because, a) it's not 3d, and b) both avatars are taken over by the system, synched and then the interaction is performed. You generally don't find a lot of non-npc personal interactions in 3d "games". Sure, we can rather clumsily reproduce "sex" and hugs, etc., in SL, but it's pretty crude. I agree that being able to shake hands would be nice, maybe one of the hug creators will come up with one. In the end though, I would hardly call the lack of interactions supplied by LL as "devastating" and that was the point I was trying to convey in my response.



No, I've never played rag doll kung fu. And "you" don't think of your body movements in Poser keyframes either, or the plethora of numbers involved in anims - in reference to your statement about appearance mode and numbers. The sliders do say things like "larger nose", "sunken eyes", "more wrinkles", "less freckles", etc., by the way. One doesn't have to focus on the numbers unless so inclined.

I still stand by my statement that it's counter to your own line of reasoning to decry appearance mode as too hard, and then suggest importing a Poser tool. Am I against a Poser tool in SL? No. But I do realize that they have many, many bugs to iron out (which is much more devastating to SL than a lack of handshakes or a appearance generator that a minority doesn't care for), and Poser would want them to license the technology, if they let them use it at all in this manner.

I simply said that we would hear about it. I didn't opine one way or the other, as to whether I think it would be fair or not. Rest assured, we would hear about it, if they add a Poser tool into the client.

It is also worth noting that the build tools were part of SL when it launched. It is a fundamental part of SL if we are to build the world. Later, they gave us the ability to import anims. We can't really import builds, unless you use Jeffrey's .obj importer script, and that gets quite involved, and is limited. I see building and anims as two different animals.

I can't be level 60.

I don't have the where-with-all to reach level 60. I've tried, in something like 12 or 13 MMORPGs. Again, it's got a heck of a lot to do with motivation, in SL or anywhere else - RPG's, Real Life, what have you. Should Blizzard make leveling easier for me because I am less motivated than the folks who are driven to make 60?

As far as "astronauts" go, I think your ignoring the fact that the bulk of people with businesses in SL are not "astronauts". Most fall into the middle or lower end, and only a few make it to "astronaut" - Anshe, Nephilaine, Francis, Aimee, and a few others who are both skilled and motivated.

At any rate, I've asked you before, and had the question ignored - how would you "fix" the "problems" you see in SL?

Aww, and I thought we were going to have a good discussion here, minus all the posturing.

For a bit less than half-a-second....

It's harder to make things in SL than it is to get to level 60 in any game.

It's just hard! There's really no way around that. It isn't hard for everybody, but the general overall difficulty of it is greater than the difficulty of other online games/environments. I know bunches of people who left, in large part, because it was hard. In combination with the fact that its limited, in terms of productive things to do.

Now, given that it is hard (if you do take that as a given, as I do), then that means even more need for other things for people to do. And a whole bunch LESS derision for the things that people do come up with - Tringo, money balls, T&A contests, that others may find entertaining and productive - would help, too, imnsho.

The stuff is hard, AND not everybody is motivated to do it. Nor should everyone be. Therefore, I say let's stop elevating creators to some kind of God-like status over all the peons, and deciding who the "astronauts" are, and just quietly and respectfully keep accepting their money for the things we make. While saying THANK YOU.

coco

While we're doing that, let's also stop calling the creators awful names, claiming they're attempting to destroy SL through unwarranted influence over the Lindens, and disparaging them for the business choices they make.

That's completely subjective, and there are different kinds of "hard". I think that for someone like me, who abhors level grinds, and prefers groups of 2 or 3 players, or no groups, getting to level 60 is hard. Which is similiar in SL. If you network, you can learn and accomplish things at a quicker pace than if you go it alone. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I just don't care to do that in WoW, and some folks don't care to do that in SL.


Note that I didn't say SL is not hard. SL is SL. Not everyone will be a successful land tycoon or content creator. Not everyone wants to be. No one was ever told it would be easy if you wanted to have a successful business. Which is why I speak about motivation. I am motivated to learn the hard stuff in SL. I am not so inclined in MMORPGS. It's all a combination of aptitude, motivation, patience and perserverance.

I don't see this frenzy of derision you describe. I don't deride the things you describe. Some folks dislike tringo. Some hate sex in SL. So what? They're just the opinions of a few. You give their words so much more power by repeating them over and over. It would be nice if everyone who debates this topic from the other side didn't have to be talked to as if they were some hater bent on the eradication of Tringo or T&A.


I wasn't "elevating" anyone. They have elevated themselves by virtue of delivering a good product and having good customer service. I know you identify with certain brands in RL Coco, you've mentioned Q-Tips and the like, so you should understand this. They are recognized because of their superior product. Those people are some of the most successful business owners in SL. Why does simply mentioning them draw a response not unlike that of a vampire to a cross? I will remind you I didn't bring the term "astronaut" into the mix.

The only people I see using words like "peons" and the like, are those who are get all bent whenever someone talks about having to work hard to be successful. That's hardly treating people like peons. It's telling people who think that Second Life is too hard or unfair that there are no free handouts. Linden Lab doesn't sell Anshe's land. They don't build Juro's homes. They don't make Neph's clothes.

I appreciate what folks are saying but there's a few things you haven't considered.

a) The adage that "not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up" applies to everyone - hard work can't beat it. Even if everyone worked hard, not everyone could be an astronaut because there are still only so many space missions. Although SL can infintely expand, customers' time can't - it was already hard to find things, given the generic product descriptions people see around, and the 1.7 texture loader has made it even worse by making me occasionally wait half-an-hour for a shopping district to rez. Now, there are forces at work to resolve this, like SLEx, but still..

b) I'm tired of being told that "work = success". I have done a lot of work since I started on SL. I've gotten a fair amount of money and at least something of a reputation by doing so. But the actual effect of that has been that whenever I log in, there's work to do, and it's not always (in fact, not usually) my choice what the job is. Now, I imagine that for some folks, spending all their SL time working and then cashing out would be exactly what they want to do, but it isn't for me. I wanted to work to be able to support doing other stuff in SL. But then a find that a) to avoid letting down customers I have to spend all my time working, and b) even when I get the L$, when I want to spend them to (for example) customize my av, I'm still limited by what other people have chosen to provide - and then judged according to the standards of a society where "looking good" requires people to make their own things, because the people who can create clothes and similar hold up their best or most original things for themselves.

I think you've managed to reverse the inputs necessary for success in SL.

Second Life is first and foremost a creative medium. In order to enjoy yourself creatively, you need to create things that make you happy, that follow the orders of your muse. Ideally, you should have periods in Second Life where, when you're stuck doing things in the real world, your mind is racing with possibilities that keep expanding with your latest SL project.

If SL is drudgery for you, well, why bother?

I would submit that enjoyment of one's work is absolutely essential to the success of all the "big" names in Second Life. If you don't have a passion for what you're making, you're not going to make it with the same zeal and exuberance that you would otherwise experience. It's work, all of it, yes. But it should be thrilling, enjoyable work that pays you enormous dividends when you see it beginning to crystalize.

If you come to SL with the immediate intent of making it just another job, well, you're going to have a really shitty, boring Second Life.

I think everyone who is really, really good at what they do is good at it because it started out fun for them. I know it's this way for me. I never expected to go into business in SL. I never expected I'd find a product I'd truly enjoy developing that was sufficiently unique to make a splash in the market. But I did, quite accidentally, find a demand. With a lot of refinement and improvement, I marketed to that demand. The results have been satisfying.

In short, stop trying to make money for money's sake. Wait until you stumble upon your amazing opportunity and then work that into your own personal fortune.


(Yeah, yeah, it's too hard, it can't be done, everyone else got there first, I don't want to compete. Okay. Let's just get all that out of the way early on. )

Have I? Are you sure? Since you're a "capitalist" (pig or otherwise ) I'm sure you appreciate that to succeed in a market, you have to do what the market wants, not what you want.



But this is exactly the point, you see. Most of the things that would make me happy to be working on, there's no point me bothering with, because I know my skill levels are such that I have no hope of doing them at any acceptable quality level. Collaborating isn't an option because the other person would be doing everything. And if I'm spending time just building random other things to get practice then, well, that's drudgery too, except I can't sell it.



That's not my intent. My situation is in finding that I can't produce the things I really want to, and my solution is the same one people take in the real world: get a job doing the things I can do and then buy the stuff I actually wanted with the money I get. Of course, in SL it doesn't quite work that way because of the common "creator exclusive" situation, but if it's the best I can do, why not?

I mean, I've seen people get tier-free land for building the stuff I actually did want to build, but I wouldn't be able to build it that well. Well, actually, looking at the builds I thought they were a bit crap and I could do better, but obviously I can't, else I would be the one with the land. And it's irrelevant anyway, because the site in question is apparantly a market failure and thus no-one else would invest again and it'd be a bad idea for me to do so myself. (So I've gone second best by offering to help out the person who did build it. It'll be following orders again, but closer than I could do otherwise.)



Oh, I have an "amazing opportunity" that I'm working on. It's not the one I originally wanted to work on, and it's got a heavy drudgery-delight cycle, but the potential level if I get it work is very high. But, again, it's a job.

Such a conflict doesn't exist for me. That's the neat thing about creative enterprise.



That is by far the crappiest excuse I have ever heard.

This ugly, toilet-looking thing was my first effort.



It sucked. I knew that. I made it over again.



The next version is okay. The one I'm working on right now is even better:



You only get better with practice. That level of refinement didn't come to me in my sleep. It came from months and months of trying, tinkering and banging away at different design approaches. It took a lot of work. But I found it worthwhile.

Sitting back and saying "I'm not good enough," just isn't good enough. If that's what's holding you back, the only person you have to blame is yourself.

Go....... HERE.

Heh. Not sure what better panacea to recommend for this issue than that link right there. Good work.

I love that site.

Im partial to the catchy music.... I dance a bit in my computer chair... seriously, how can you not!?!

"But this is exactly the point, you see. Most of the things that would make me happy to be working on, there's no point me bothering with, because I know my skill levels are such that I have no hope of doing them at any acceptable quality level. Collaborating isn't an option because the other person would be doing everything. And if I'm spending time just building random other things to get practice then, well, that's drudgery too, except I can't sell it."

Nonononononononononononunhuh.

While I agree with much of your point of view, that part is nutty. You can't possibly increase your skill levels without practice.

Also, you don't spend your time just building random other things to get practice. First off, I don't know what the NON-random other thing would be, so I'm not sure which other thing you would be not starting with.

But let's say you don't start with that. What you do start with though, is not a "random other thing." You just start smaller, but still with things you like.

I started with a bowl - "Taboo Bowl." It still sits in my stores for sale. I sold a couple of them when I first made them, but to a friend - haha, they were charity sales, really. (Charity on the part of my friend.) BUT - I also gave some as gifts. It's nice to be able to give something you made as a gift! I mean, it really is a very nice bowl! Just, you know, ANYBODY can make a bowl. (But my bowl is very pleasing to me, as opposed to other people's bowls.)

But I can still put them in my stores, and I can still give them as gifts. I have a new friend now in the game, who I convinced to move in next to my shop, and he - well, he shows immense promise! And doesn't know it. He's not going to get any more success with some of his stuff than I had with my Taboo Bowl, and that is going to discourage him perhaps, but he has already made some stuff I bought and needed, once I told him what I needed. So, if he doesn't lose interest, he should do quite well.

All this is to say - you have to begin, unsurprisingly, at the beginning. There just isn't any way around that.

This is all assuming, of course, that you want to build things at all, and of course, it's ok not to want to. I would be happy to get with you in game and help you hone your skills, your style, and what it is you really want to build - i.e., give ideas on whether or not the item will sell, etc., and how to make it sell better, in (I promise) my slow-going and non-pushy way. If it's scripting though, I can't help you much there!

coco

P.S. Reading on in the thread, maybe you are farther on down the road than I originally thought, and my offer would seem kinda insulting. But anyway, I'm well down my own personal road, and I gotta say - the drudgery-to-delight ratio is still pretty crappy! lol

P.S. What is that thing, Enabran? Does it vibrate? j/k

You may be able to help more than you realize.

Scripting isn't the same as building, by any stretch, but the philosophy for skill development is exactly the smae. You have to start small, tinker a bit, and start anew. Over and over until you can yank pieces out of one script and insert them painlessly into others. Eventually you can write the most complex scripts from scratch.

I had very, very meager beginnings with scripting. I'm still not that good at it now. But if you'd told me a year ago that I would one day script 95% of a complete product, I never would have believed you. Today I'm able to do pretty much whatever I need in scripting. But I didn't get that way by lamenting my suckiness.

So your advice applies here too. No one can succeed without continual practice.

'Zactly!

...

Just when I think I've already got all the features ladies need.

Actually, heh, it's hard to market a robot to women. My greatest breakthrough on that note: including pastel colors.

Yep, yep, and I did start very small (from TOTAL IGNORANCE), and, through tinkering, now can:

. Set a script to give notecards.
. Make floating scripts work.
. Make floating scripts match an EXACT HUE on the item.
. Put on a basic poseball.
. Make an item talk.
. Make windows dimmable.
. Take scripts in an out of doors to make them announce, or not announce.
. Put scripts into the item itself when only one person need sit on it. (As far as I have been able to tell, if you want two or three people sitting on a couch, you need to add poseballs.)

And probably some other stuff.

Right now, I have a wonderful line of furniture totally stalled because I want the pillow to act as a poseball. I can't get the x/y/z and all that to work right. I've tinkered with it, and I haven't succeeded. I just can't figure it out. I need the person to click on the pillow, and then actually sit to the left of it.

I also had to go ahead and package my laundry sets without the hampers opening. I really, really wanted the lids to open, but couldn't find anyone to help me make them do that, and couldn't figure it out myself. And since the hampers were just one item in the set, I finally went ahead without it. Sigh.

But there's a time limit on this stuff, see. I can only "tinker" with trying to make a script work so long, because most of my time is spent creating the item to begin with. Eventually, the item either has to go ahead and get packaged for sale, without the script I wish it had, or else it goes on hold for quite a while.

I'm SOOOOO anxious to finish my furniture set, but I REALLY REALLY want that poseball to work right. I'm hung up on just that one part. It irritates me NO END. I've been hung up on that for about a month now.

Meanwhile, there are other irons in the fire, other houses to make, SCADS of other ideas that I want to get around to making, so I can only spend just so much time tinkering with trying to figure out scripting.

But, as you can see, I've come a long ways (for me) in scripting, just in having learned those things listed above.

coco

llSitTarget is a pain in the ass. Anything including rotation is with regard to LSL, because it uses some wildly counter-intuitive math called quaternions to manage rotation. Even more frustrating is that the object editor uses degrees, so you'd assume that values from one would correspond to the other. Evidently they do not.

My best advice is to try and make the pillow as close to 0,0,0 rotation as possible, then set the offset vector where you want the sitter to end up when they sit (which, at a guess, would probably be <0,0.25,0> or <0.25,0,0>, depending on orientation). If you get *that* working, then you can start fiddling with rotation. The LSL wiki has some sample code that will convert degrees, like you see in the object editor, to quaternion rotations, which is what LSL uses. Look up "rotation."

Hard work certainly can beat that Demotivator poster.

In FL, if everyone wanted to participate in space exploration, some would choose to be astronauts, some would be rocket scientists, some would be ground crew, and so on. Our entire economy would revolve around this goal, and we would accomplish it. The reason we have a bureaucratic disaster called NASA and a useless space station and a shuttle that should have been retired 15 years ago is that not everyone does want to be an astronaut. Daydreaming is not "wanting". You have to prove you "want" something by chasing after it. Judging by their actions, most people would rather be programmers and lawyers and McDonald's burger-flippers, and space exploration is an underfunded, not-so-important part of our civilization.

Being an astronaut is not some Cracker Jack prize you get without effort, and if you don't, you're boned by bad luck. It's hard. It's *REALLY* hard. If you didn't get there, it's because you didn't try at all, or because you didn't try hard enough. I'm smart and fit, so in college I joined the Air Force ROTC. My vision was that if I could make it, I'd become an astronaut. If not, I'd just fly jets for a few terms, which would be pretty good, too. And then I discovered that my temperament is poorly-suited to military discipline, and I didn't loathe myself enough to put up with it for that goal. So I switched to this other thing I liked doing, where I'm subject to no discipline but my own. Nobody else made that happen, I chose it myself.

If you're not doing what you wanted, you chose it, and you could choose differently.



I'm tired of hearing that gravity keeps me on the ground, and yet I still cannot fly without a plane in FL. The laws of physics do not yield to my whims.

Just like imagination, hard work alone is not a guarantee of success, but it is one of several required components of success. You need all three of vision (imagination, long-term goals, making your ideas concrete), hard work, and dedication.

SL sure makes it a lot easier than FL, though. In FL, if you dig ditches or pick fruit or flip burgers, you're going to work very hard and still be poor. That might be the only thing you know how to do, and you can be too tired to learn something else. Getting advancement in someone else's business takes a lot of time and politicking. To start a business, you need a license, and construction work is slow, and people don't pay you on time so you have cashflow problems. No matter what you do, it takes a minimum of a decade to go from entry-level to professional. Slow goddamn level grind in this "Real Life MMORPG".

In SL, you don't have to work for food and rent--even with premium and tier, it's less than you spend on a few lattes every month, big deal! So you have time and freedom to learn whatever you want to do. But SL's not full of Cracker Jack prizes, either. You still have to work hard. You still have to be dedicated. You still have to have vision to come up with new things nobody else is making or doing and think ahead to even bigger goals.

As for looking good... I look really good (by gothic zombie standards, of course, and from my point of view, those are the only standards that matter--all you pink, grublike, unrotted fleshers are disgusting). What you see in my avatar and site portrait is all off the rack in SL, and cost me about L$1000 (I've since spent maybe L$500 more). If I was obsessed with looking even better--say I wanted a dripping, rotted zombie look--I'd put in the hard work of learning how to make ripped-up clothes, and photograph some rotten meat as a base for a face and body texture. I'm not a competent painter (because I'm not dedicated to becoming one), but I learned photography and digital image manipulation.

When posed with a problem, solve it, don't complain that the problem's too hard.

Hard work can beat 95% of anything, sister.





You know, I think you just either like to complain or SL isn't your cup of tea. Which is fine if its not, but you seem to have every excuse under the sun why you can't enjoy what SL CAN do.

Its a game. It may also be a virtual world, but its a game. An open ended game where you can do exactly what you want. Don't want to be bothered with customers? Don't sell anything. No one is going to give you $L for nothing - oh, wait, you get a stipend every week. So you do.

If you want to have more $L to be able to do what you want inworld, exchange it on LindenX. $L is a currency, and currency has value, be it a real-world dollar equivilent or a period of someone's time or an item of arbitrary worth. If you're not willing to expend the time, or don't/can't make the item of worth, then exchange real-world dollars for it. Those are your choices. You can bemoan the state of a society that depends on currency all you want, because almost everything you said in the second paragraph applies to the RL as well, but them's the breaks.

Not every successful person in life is an astronaut. In fact, most of them you never hear about. The gal who owns the McDonald's down the road. The guy who is the general manager of Macy's. The orthopaedic surgeon. The machine shop owner. The school bus fleet owner. The karoake bar owner. The NYSE day trader. This astronaut line of thought is, pardon the pun, really "out there". It's not a valid metric for success.


Yeah, and I'm tired of being told that "sandbox luck", or "early birds got the worms", "4096 account holders", or any other of a number of excuses = success.

The bottom line is that if you don't want to work for it, don't expect SL to automatically become your cash cow. Many of the most successful folks in SL do this as a full or part-time job. So if you aren't inclined to do that, you really have no right to try and trivialize their success by trying to insinuate that they got it through anything other than devotion of time, practice, and stick-to-it-ive-ness.