UPDATED--NCI's Big Damn Glossary 1.1 (12.29.08)

NCI's “The Big Damn SL Glossary”
Version 1.1
Updated 29-Dec-08

Edited by Becky Pippen and Carl Metropolitan

Definitions contributed by Becky Pippen, Candie Apple, SuezanneC Baskerville, Lindal Kidd, Marianne McCann, Carl Metropolitan, Yumi Murakami, Oryx Tempel, and Slack Zapedzki. Thanks to the NCI Land Officers and the Resident Answers Forum for fact-checking and assistance.


16m2 – adj, The smallest size of land parcel that can be created in Second Life. Often used for single prim servers or eyesore ads. Also see Ad Farm.

Abuse – n, A violation of Second Life's Terms of Service or Community Standards. Also see AR (Abuse Report).

Access List – n, See Admit List.

Ad Farm – n, Clusters of rotating towers of advertisements, considered by many to be an eyesore, now restricted and regulated by Linden Lab.

Aditi – n, The name of the server network known as the Preview Grid, q.v. (formerly called the Beta Grid).

Admit List – n, The list of those allowed in an area that otherwise excludes everyone by use of a script, or enforced by land management tools.

Advanced Menu – n, A normally hidden menu in the Second Life client that allows access to extra debugging and advanced commands and settings. The Advanced menu can be toggled on/off by typing Ctrl-Alt-D (or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D for Linux).

AFK – adj, “Away From Keyboard.” Describes a resident who has left his computer to take care of some task in Real Life (RL). Typing “afk” in chat sets your Avatar as “Away” and displays the word (Away) next to their name. After 30 minutes of inactivity, you will be automatically logged off Second Life. Also see Anti-Idle.

Agent – n, Geeky term for your logged-in presence on a simulator. While “avatar” refers to the shape mesh and its appearance and requires the cooperation of a sim server, “agent” refers to a successful login to the Linden Lab grid and does not necessarily require a connection to any specific sim or an avatar representation (e.g., for text-only thin clients).

Agent Domain – n, A set of Linden Lab servers that manage logins to Second Life, manipulation of avatar inventories, profiles, and other agent-specific information. Closely related to Agent Storage Cluster.

Agent Storage Cluster – n, The databases on Linden Lab servers that hold all residents' inventories, profiles, login information, and other agent-specific data. Closely related to Agent Domain, q.v.

Agni – n, The name of the server network that contains the Main Grid and Teen Grid. (Compare with Aditi for the Preview Grid.)

Alpha – adj, Transparent, from Alpha Channel (q.v.).

Alpha Channel – n, A special channel of a texture file used to indicate transparency, marking which parts of the image should be clear and which should be opaque.

Alpha Ordering – n, Or, Alpha Sort Ordering, this refers to a quirk of OpenGL (which the client uses) that causes two surfaces with alpha channels (q.v.) to be incorrectly rendered as if the farther one were nearer the viewer. This is often seen when parts of hair, skirts, and shoes flash in and out of existence as the transparent areas in the scene move in relation to each other. (Also called Alpha Flicker or Alpha Blink.)

Alt – n, “Alternate Account.” Many Second Life residents have more than one account for a variety of reasons, including: keeping one’s business life separate from social life, role-playing, avoiding harassment, keeping track of L$ (bank alts), and being able to work uninterrupted by Instant Messages.

Animation – 1. n, A file or in-world inventory item that moves or animates your avatar. You can use animations to make your avatar walk, sit, clap their hands, dance, blow someone a kiss, and much more. 2. n, The automatic movement of a texture across the surface of a prim, initiated by a script in the prim and rendered by the client.

Anti-Idle – n, Refers to staying online for a long period without being automatically logged off. This is accomplished by wearing a scripted gadget or disabling the option at Client->Character->Character Test->Go away/AFK when idle.

AO – n, Animation Overrider; a scripted device that contains replacements for the default walking, sitting, flying, and standing animations of your avatar. Some also have other functions. Some AOs can be customized by loading your own animations. Some AOs must be turned off before engaging in poseball or other animations, since the animations can conflict with one another.

AR – 1. n, Abuse Report; a formal report to Linden Lab of a violation of community standards or SL terms of service. 2. v, The act of filing an Abuse Report (“I AR'd the guy.”)

ARC – n, “Avatar Rending Cost.” This is a number in the range of 1 to about 20,000 that is an approximation of how much processing power is consumed by a client to process and render an avatar, including all the avatar's clothing, attachments, including scripted attachments. This number can be displayed in the standard client by enabling it in Advanced->Rendering->Info Displays.

Asset Server – n, The database that tracks all Second Life objects in-world and in inventory. Overloaded asset servers can cause search, inventory, rez, teleport, and Friends list failures.

Attach – v, To connect an object from inventory or in-world to a certain place on your avatar's body, or in the case of a HUD, to some location on the user's screen.

Attachment – n, An object (clothing, weapons, jewelry, shoes, HUD, etc) that can be connected to an avatar at a specific location, or in the case of HUD, to a location on the user's screen. Typically the location is set by the creator of the object, but may be changed by the owner.

Auto-Return – n, A feature on land parcels in which objects that don't belong to the land owner or group are returned to their respective owners' inventory after a certain period of time. This helps reduce intentional and accidental litter on land parcels. The parcel's auto-return time period can be set in the Objects tab of Preferences.

AV – n, Also “avi”, an abbreviation for Avatar, q.v.

Avatar – 1. n, The animated being that represents a Second Life resident in the virtual world; the digital representation of your virtual self in Second Life. 2. n, A “costume” or outfit; a full set of avatar body parts, clothing, and/or attachments that provides a specific look.

Avatar Imposter – n, A feature in the Second Life client where distant avatars are rendered as simplistic two-dimensional representations to improve performance in crowded areas. The distance threshold can be set in the Custom settings on the Graphics tab of Preferences.

Avatar Key – n, The unique identifier assigned by the SL database to each Avatar, the Avatar's UUID.

AWG – n, “Architecture Working Group.” A group of Linden Lab employees, Second Life developers, and interested residents who are working toward a set of protocols that can be used to make the Second Life grid more robust and scalable while allowing interoperability with other grids.

Baked – adj, Refers to the mechanism within the client where the various layers of skin and clothing are collapsed into a single texture, uploaded to the servers, then downloaded to anyone within viewing distance. This causes newly donned skin and clothing to look clear and sharply defined, then fuzzy, then sharp again. The end result is that everyone, including you, sees the identical clothing texture.

Ban – 1. v, The act of explicitly forbidding entry to a land parcel. 2. v. To add someone to your ban list and thus eject them from your land. 3. v. Permanent removal of someone from Second Life (which can only be done by Linden Lab).

Ban Lines – n, Lines of floating red letters spelling out “no entry” that appear on the boundaries of a land parcel that your Avatar is not allowed into by the owner.

Banlink – n, Distributed ban sharing system developed by Travis Lambert and Mera Pixel that allows subscribing locations to selectively share ban lists with other trusted locations.

Ban List – n, The list of those banned from an area, by use of a script, the parcel or estate land management tools, or by Landban, that otherwise allows visitors.

Bay City – n, A planned community of city-themed regions on the Sansara continent of the main grid, built by residents under the management of the Linden Department of Public Works (q.v.). The community design emphasizes aesthetic beauty, accessibility, and a synergistic blend of residential and commercial use.

Beacon – n, An indicator of location. These take many forms, such as a red circle on the map and mini-map displays, or a tall fuzzy red line and an arrow showing the final location of a teleport destination, or tall lines of various colors with wireframe crosshair boxes when View->Beacons is activated.

Beta Grid – Obsolete name for Preview Grid and Aditi, q.v.

Beta Viewer – n, Obsolete name for the Preview Grid Viewer, q.v.

BIAB – n, “Business In A Box.” Often sold to newcomers as an easy way to make money, BIAB packages may contain merchandise that is poor quality, out of date, stolen from the original creators, or available elsewhere for free.

Big Spaceship – n, A real-world company specializing in user interface design, contracted by Linden Lab to research, design, prototype, and test improvements to various Second Life websites and user interfaces.

Bling – n, Jewelry and other attachments scripted to emit particle based shimmering “bling” effects.

Blingtard – n, Pejorative term for a user, often a new resident, who wears too many blinging attachments.

Blog – 1. n, An online journal of information. Linden Lab's official blog is http://blog.secondlife.com and contains official announcements about Second Life upgrades, new viewers, planned downtime, new policies, and much more. 2. v, The act of adding content to a blog.

Body Part – n, A component of an Avatar; shape, skin, hair, eyes, and/or prim attachments are Body Parts that combine to create an Avatar's form. Different body parts can be created and saved to a user's inventory and switched between as the mood strikes.

Borked – v, adj, Messed up, broken. “The teleport function is borked again.”

Bot – n, An alt account run by a computer. (see Landbot)

Boxhead – v, The act of wearing an object, usually a package prim, on your head or other location. Package prims are meant to be rezzed on the ground, but newcomers often mistake them for the object(s) they contain, and try to wear them instead. Originally the default attachment point for objects was the head. Later updates of the Second Life client changed that to the right hand.

BRB – v, adj, “Be Right Back,” shorthand meant to imply that the speaker is away from the keyboard for a moment, but will return very shortly.

BTW – “By the Way”

Bug Triage Meeting – n, A process where bugs are sorted, prioritized, and processed for import into Linden Lab's internal issue tracking system for deeper consideration and a first step towards an issue being fixed in the official Second Life viewer. This often occurs in several weekly meetings of Linden Lab developers and residents in conjunction with the office hours meetings of several Linden Lab employees.

Build – 1. v, To create/make something out of primitives in Second Life, 2. n, An object comprised of one or more primitives, 3. n, An engineering term for a specific version of the Second Life (or other) software.

Bumpmap – n, An extra texture layer on objects that adds “bumpiness” to them. This can provide the illusion of detail by resembling wood bark, cut stone or a number of three-dimensional surfaces. Second Life offers only limited bumpmapping.

Busy Mode – n, A mode where your Avatar does not hear nearby chat, where IMs receive the “busy mode” response, and all inventory and teleport offers are automatically declined.

BVH – The file format used for creating animations.

Cache – n, A disk file on your local computer that retains copies of textures and other data when they are first encountered and downloaded so that subsequent visits to the same location will render more quickly.

Cage – v, To trap an avatar in place by rezzing (q.v.) an object that surrounds them. Caging an avatar who has not consented to is an AR'able (q.v.) offense.

Cage Gun – n, A gun that fires a Cage (q.v.) that rezzes around an avatar, trapping them. The quickest ways to get out of a Cage is to either a) teleport to your home location, or b) right-click on a nearby sit target, and you will be popped out of the Cage and seated there..

Calling Card – n, An item with a resident's name that goes into the Calling Card section of your inventory. Calling cards serve as a contact list of sorts. Double clicking on a Card opens an IM window to that person. Offering a Calling Card is similar, but less personal than offering Friendship, and can be done from second level of the avatar pie menu.

Camera – n, The particular viewpoint from which you see the Second Life world. Normally, your camera is behind your avatar. Second Life allows you to move your camera around in many different ways to see things from many different viewpoints.

Camping – v, The practice of earning small amounts of $L by sitting on a chair or engaging in menial activities. Merchants use campers to make their store look more popular on the grid map.

Capability – n, In the software protocols that connect a client with the Linden Lab servers, a capability refers to the granting of access to a specific server resource (a data item, object, service, etc.) by a server to a client.

Central Database Cluster – n, The set of Linden Lab servers that includes the Asset Storage Cluster (asset database), Central Database Cluster (profiles, regions, groups, classifieds), Agent Database Cluster (inventories, agent login information), and a few other minor databases.

Channel – 1. n, An integer number that refers to the Chat Channel (q.v.) used by scripts or avatars. 2. n, Refers to the variation of server or client software in use. Examples of server channels include the main grid server, and experimental server versions currently being tested on the Preview Grid. Examples of client channels include the main viewer and First Look viewer.

Chat – 1. v, Communicating by text between avatars and objects. Normal chat can be heard by avatars and objects up to 20m away. Avatars can chat by entering text in the chat bar at the bottom of the client screen. Objects with scripts can generate chat text that is heard by avatars and other other objects in range. 2. n, The text that you enter in the chat bar or generated by a scripted object. 3. n, v, The text and the act of communication between avatars and/or objects using default chat (20m radius) or any of its variations, which include Whisper (10m radius), Shout (100m radius), and llRegionSay() in a script (region wide). Also see Chat Channel.

Chat Channel – n, One of the “pseudo-frequencies” that objects and avatars can chat on. Avatars normally speak on channel 0, and can only hear chat on channel 0. Objects can chat and listen on any channel. SL supports are 4,294,967,294 possible channels, ranging from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647.

City Sims – n, A set of four Linden designed sims (Sistiana, Barcola, Miramare and Grignano) meant to represent a city. These mainland sims have a Simulator Object Bonus (q.v.). Approximately half of each city sim is composed of Linden-owned low-prim streets and walkways, allowing owners of the available space to use twice the prims they normally could.

Class 3 Server – n, An older type of server hardware (see Sim, definition 2), running two regions per server. Class 3 servers have mostly been replaced by Class 4 and Class 5 servers (q.v.).

Class 4 Server – n, An older type of server hardware (see Sim, definition 2), using two AMD dual-core Opteron 270 processors, 2 GB of RAM, running Debian Linux, with a 100 Mb network connection to a 1 Gb network uplink. Class 4 servers are still in use in some places, most notably on the Preview Grid for testing. Cf. Class 5 Server for the more common type of server used for most newer regions.

Class 5 Server – n, The highest-performance sim server hardware in use at this writing (see Sim, definition 2). Each server machine contains a processor board with two dual-core Intel Xeon 5148 processors, 4 GB of FB-DIMM RAM on a 1.3GHz memory bus, and a SATA hard drive, running 64-bit Debian Linux, with a 1Gb network uplink. Each core supports one normal region or four Openspace regions, for a total of four normal regions or 16 Openspace regions per server machine.

Classifieds – n, A way for residents to advertise their products or services for sale. New classified ads may be placed by clicking Edit->Profile->Classified in the Second Life viewer. You can search the classified advertisements in the All tab of Search (Ctrl-F). Classifieds are ranked by the amount of L$ spent to purchase them weekly.

Clear Cache – v, The act of setting the SL client to clear its local storage of SL-related data and textures the next time it is started. Often problems with slow-loading textures can be fixed by clearing your cache. Clearing your cache can also make missing inventory items reappear.

Client – n, Second Life consists of two software parts. The client, or viewer, resides on the user's computer. The server resides in a remote location.

Client Menu – n, A special menu in the client that is now called the Advanced menu, q.v..

Clothing Layers – n, Jacket, shirt, pants, undershirt, underpants, gloves, socks, shoes, skirt, skin, and tattoo--the parts of your avatar that are worn on top of its body and created and edited in appearance edit mode. You can create different Outfits (q.v.) of clothing and save them in your inventory, then switch between them as the mood strikes. You can even design your own clothing and upload the textures to Second Life.

Coalesced Item - n, An item in your inventory that is a collection of many objects. When more than one object is returned to you from someone's land, the objects are often combined into one or more consolidated objects so that you won't receive a multitude of individual items. A coalesced inventory item appears in your inventory window with an icon that looks like a stack of cubes. The name of a coalesced inventory item will be the same as the name of one of the objects inside it. The only way to determine what objects are contained inside a coalesced object is to rez the coalesced item.

Colo – n, A real-world facility where servers, networking, and communications facilities are housed and managed. Portmanteau of “co-location”.

Combat Region – n, A region where the parcel “Safe” setting has been disabled, so that avatars can sustain damage (q.v.), and where weapons and combat are allowed.

Community Standards – n, The agreement all residents subscribe to which determines the limits of appropriate behavior while playing the game. The Community Standards are incorporated into the Terms of Service (q.v.) by reference.

Concierge Service – n, A higher level of customer service and assistance available only to island owners and mainland land owners paying more than 125US$ per month in tier. This service level includes Lindens dedicated to Concierge support duties and toll-free Concierge level-only phone help.

Concurrency – n, The number of users simultaneously logged onto Second Life at any given moment.

Console – n, Any of several windows that can be made to appear on the user's screen to display details about the internal operation of the client. These are useful to investigate client performance problems. Consoles may be enabled/disabled in the Advanced Menu (q.v.) or with keyboard shortcuts, and include Frame, Texture, Debug, Fast Timers, and Memory consoles.

Contents - n, One of the tabs in Edit mode. Go to this tab to see what items, such as scripts, textures, or notecards are stored inside an object. You can move things between your Inventory and the contents of an object if you have Modify permissions. If you need to edit a notecard for an item, you would do this in the Contents tab.

Copybot – n, A gadget and a technique developed from the efforts of the libopenmv (formerly libsecondlife) project, consisting of scripts and client-side software capable of making unauthorized copies of objects that were meant to be non-copyable or non-transferable. Its use is a serious violation of the TOS.

Corsica – n, The name of a mainland continent north of the Nautilus continent.

Covenant – n, Stipulations made by the private estate land owner of what the next parcel owner may or may not do with the land. A parcel's covenant may be seen in About Land, Covenant tab. All the residents who live in the area are required to agree to abide by the covenant. Covenants typically describe the types of buildings and activities that are allowed in the area, and are written to ensure that the region remains attractive and enjoyable by all residents. Also see Zoning.

Culling – n, v, Refers to how a viewer doesn't bother rendering objects, avatars, particles, and other visual elements that are hidden behind other solid objects. It's a performance feature.

Cyber – v, Short for cyber-sex. The practice of engaging in sexual roleplay using chat and Second Life avatars and animations.

(continued)

Well--the forum software doesn't seem to want to let me post replies to this.

And it seems to be random and not terribly related to the length of the post, either.

I can't even just post the "D" section... Probably some special character that breaks the forums.

Screw it.

If you want to see or comment on it, the Glossary is at: http://blog.nci-sl.org/

It's possibly fallen victim to this forum problem, (assuming that's not been fixed yet) -

/327/60/299391/1.html

What a great resource - and an awful lot of work.

What scares me is that I scanned down the entries and knew what all of them meant already. What are we going to do with these dedicated brain cells if something ever happens to SL?

A vote for https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-917 might be in order, for those that haven't voted.

At least it's been assigned now. Let's hope for a quick fix.

If you do have comments on the glossary update, please post them here.

Thanks.

Well, Carl: if not for the problem of not being able to post past "D" I wouldn't
have so soon discovered the NCI blog which is great.

- I

Bay City - I'd say West Sansera
Blog - comes from the phrase "web log"
banlines - what of the green ones?

City Sims - Shouldn't this area definition mention Nova Albion as its name?