Noob Moments

Tell us a story of you making silly mistakes. I'll go first.



I haven't been in world for the longest by far -- but I've been here for a few months, and kinda figured I knew my way around well enough to not get in trouble. I never played with physics, though....

So tonight I started decorationg a room. I wanted an unkempt opium den ... the strongest feature being loads of pillows thrown all over the place. But who wants to sit and position, size, and rotate every single prim? Works well for structured builds, of course, but this was supossed to look like chaos!

Ten minutes later, I had about between 150 duplicated prims floating near the ceiling of a 12 square meter room. I set the material to rubber, and enabled physics.

Apparently, these suckers can and will phase through walls with enough force. Some will even return to your lost & found, reporting that it went offworld while several sims away.

If you find a bouncing crushed velvet pillow on your land, I'm terribly sorry, and red with embarressment.





Next!

I did this with millions of dominos, I was still getting them returned months later. I even get one ever now and then, and that was from about 6-7 months ago!

Just recently, I was test-flying planes and got stuck in a seated position so that instead of walking, my butt just kind of slid along the ground.

Months ago, I got stuck in some really odd animation states when I was testing cross sim sit teleports, so I new that I could relog to fix it.

But this time I decided to ask someone nearby if they could see what was happening. I wasn't sure if it was something that got screwed up client-side or if it was visible to the world.

Well, the person was very kind. Told me that "yes" she could see it and was nice enough to give me a prim with a stop animation script.

These are more like "Stupid Noob Tricks". These three are by none other than "your truly", myself.

1) Free penguin rides.

There's a penguin in "Katie's Korner" that skates in a circle. If you sit on its head, you get a 360 rotating panaromic view as it gives you a ride.

2) Noobs on Trampolines

Goto an area like "Motu Pita" which is completely "off-limits". Fly up and just drop. You'll bounce forever as the game keeps rejecting you from landing.

3) Cow Sitting (not Cow Tipping)

Sit on the cows at Miru Airport.

Physics is actually a fantastic way to make objects randomly "clutter," which can add some nice depth to a scene. Try the stone material next time, though.

When I was new, I built this elevator that I really liked. Lots of sphere and hoop shapes in there. It was physics based, right... So I go to remove a crossmember I didn't really like anymore, but I didn't select it properly and so the entire linkset delinked and sent each piece of the elevator flying in every direction. I wanted to cry.

One of the earliest times I rezzed a pile of watermelons, Francis Chung was nearby and took out a gun and shot it. Watermelons scattered all over, I was really distressed because I didn't want to wreck people's property. I was still under some sort of misconception then that a watermelon slice might go flying through a window and break stuff, in addition to interrupting an amorous couple inside. Over the following weeks, I got them returned to me, one after another--I did some hunting around too--and I received some amusing IMs in the process which led to new friendships.

Before that, on one of my first days, I was stuck for hours trying to figure out how to texture just one face of a prim. Eventually someone came up and offered to do it for me, but he gave back a (no modify) copy of my own object and asked me to pay L$100. I couldn't accept and he flew away, not telling me the "secret". I eventually learned how. (And this is before "Edit Linked Parts" existed.)

I never wore a box on my head accidentally.

BTW, the "making stuff physical, freezing it where it lands for a more organic look" is such a great technique. Only current prob I can think of, besides potential pillowy chaos, is the 0.010 m bounding box limit due to the physics engine, so things may be a bit floaty.

yesterday I deeded one of my huge 4096m² builds to my group. Then I looked at "About Land" and saw I had over 450+ objects not in the group! I panicked because I thought I had five minutes before autoreturn destroyed my build. I was fumbling for buttons and right-clicked on the teleport, not remembering I had to touch it first... I get into the lower skybox and am clicking on objects so furiously that they're moving around (wrong button held down while clicking) and I'm panicking the five minutes is almost up...

...THEN I remember to set autoreturn to 0.

I once spent a fair amount of time trying to get avatars to adopt custom poses by rezzing toruses, setting them phantom, positioning them around the av's limbs, setting them physical, and moving them around. I figured the engine would be forced to move the limb to avoid an otherwise illegal collision..

I would post the traditional "let's test my script that does llDie()" problem here but I'm sure it's an old chestnut.

That one time I crashed the sim I was working in so hard, it required a rollback. TWICE.


Adam Linden told me I was fired, and I'm only a resident.

I remember my first time crashing a region. Accidentally, of course!

What happened was I was trying to build a bouncy table to put some pancakes (these giant breakfast goods I'd just acquired) on, and I was unaware of some of the more sensitive limitations of Havok back then.

The table had coils of twisted tori for legs, and as soon as I made the works Physical, the pancakes started to bounce--but not in the way I expected. I soon found myself frozen, then logged off and back on, and the region (Gualala) wasn't up.

Shocked, I sought refuge with friends and asked for what to do, what to do. They gave me advice from back in the day (dating back into '03), stating "The first time you crash a sim, you're a pioneer, the second, you're a griefer".

Lindens weren't 24/7 then so I waited and waited, and finally I saw Uncle Linden on and IMed him about what happened. I also sent in an abuse report on myself with an explanation of what happened.

Several moments later, Gualala was back up. Whew!

I'd mention a top-secret West Trade Imports product involving myself, a prototypical working 19th century carriage, Garnet Psaltery, and an inadvertently exploding Zebra avatar.

But I think that if I say more, she should say it, or not at all.

When I started to build scripted things, I made a little flying robot that followed me around, in Obscure sandbox. The little critter was 27 or 28 prims, quite detailed, and I was stupid enough to not get a backup copy before I put the script...

So, the robot somehow delinked, and all the tiny physical pieces on it found themselves in uncomfortable colliding positions. No wonder it exploded, showering me and my friends with shrapnel.

In those ocassions the "Shout" feature is really useful...

If I ever crashed a sim, it wasn't because of pioneering efforts or adventures in physics.
I have left messes, usually on border crossings, but the only times I've been responsible was when I discovered the ZX4 chopper gun still crashed some sims. But it was never a hard crash.

The worst thing I can remember doing when I was relatively new, I had bought a lovely house and in my wisdom decided to retexture it. I had amost finished, was just doing the last windows when I forgot to *select texture* and re-textured all 150 prims in transparent glass..

Like Enabran I wanted to cry lol

I'm not a newbie but I still have my moments...
I decided one day i wanted to build a large flat platform but I (being lazy) wanted to take a shortcut so... I took out Cadroe Murheys shapemaker, I then took the existing 'Shape block' inside that was to be rezzed out of the shape maker and replaced it with,

a 9 prim 10X10X0.070 tortued flat torus that made up a round edged platform and made sure it had the 'shape block' script inside and renamed the platfor 'shape block'.

The platform alone at 9 prims works great but here is the catch, I ALSO had an alpha texture i created to look like webbing using a rotated ultra repeated string texture (much like hair).

well i had it all set and put in my coordinates ( i honestly thought i stated 4 sides and not 400 )

well i got the last setting typed in and hit the return key on the word torus of all shapes.

The results was horrific!

That thing rezzed over atleast 400,000 polygons within seconds, kept rezzing and rezzing and the last thing i heard was "Shut that MFin Thing off Hunter!"

I couldn't move I couldnt speak, i couldnt even IM a linden to get help so i had to call the toll free number. the linden i was speaking to about the problem stated at first they didn't see what I saw, and i thinking this platform might go on forever at this point . Then the linden turned around apparently because over the phone they stated 'OMG! now i see what you mean.."

this unfortunately was at a sandbox during peak hours as well so obviously a rollback had to be done and where NOBODY could even move or function anything that was built prior was lost.

no more shorcuts for me for a while or atleast until they get a 'Numbers' check in our interface

OMG This is such as amusing thread. I'll share -- even though this is horribly embarassing!

When I was new, no one really took the time to explain how to move items from a box to your inventory. I had just excitedly bought some expensive "parts" and wanted a somewhat private place to unpack.

So I went into the ocean, and got my boxes out. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but the parts got lost somewhere between the box and my inventory.

I was really upset bc I couldn't find them, and mortified at the thought that someone would come along and see Katt Kongo's bits and pieces scattered all over the ocean floor.

I did find them several days later though, after I shared the experience with a few people and someone laughingly explained how to use highlight transparent.

Hahaha! Only in Second Life. The visual for this is highly amusing.

Pym

No! Say no more! Pleeeeeeaaase! The memory gives me palpitations to this day

hehe - same here - built my first flying pet, added the follow script, let go - and WHOOSH - gone!

My pride and joy - the only completed version I had of the build - and the only (albeit obviously buggy) version of the script - went flying out of the sandbox - and I swear I heard a sonic boom as it took flight

4 months later, Chip found it on his land and returned it - Thanks dood

When I was getting the hang of scripting, I made an object which ran a sensor around itself, and stored the location of every other object it saw. Then, you could drop the other objects into the scripted one's inventory and it would re-rez the same configuration using them. It didn't take that long to write, and it seemed pretty obvious, but another friend told me how useful this was, and I got keen to develop it.

Then I found out about the "sensors only show the 16 nearest objects" thing. And even if you get around that by having the object spin around, it still might not catch everything, and there's still the "objects can't have more than one thing called Object in their inventory" thing.

Moral of the story: if there's something that seems obvious and it hasn't already been done, it probably isn't really obvious after all.

after a deep breath i'm willing to admit that it was a little over two weeks after signing in that someone explained to me what that large red cylinder, that always disappeared when i approached it, was.

Oh, that's triggered my very earliest memory of the lot.

Arriving and looking for places I might get clothes, and seeing "prim hair, prim skirts, prim dresses".

Immediate comment to non-official helper I was chatting with: "It seems like a lot of places sell formalwear here."

If they laughed they didn't say so - thank goodness.

Well... I was messing around with the freebie radar shades shortly after joining SL. A friend and I were browsing at Pirate's Cove (ok, he was looking around and I was figuring out how to set the shades...). I typed in zap... everyone, me included, in the shop went flying to the edges of the sim. I felt like such a dork by the time I finally figured out to just detach the darn shades

My biggest, most embarrassing Noob Moment was when I met Cory Linden -- he's the VP of Development at LL -- in RL, not too long after I started playing SL, and I began telling him all of the great ideas I had for how to make SL a better game.

Little did I know just how freakin' many proposals LL fielded every day for "feature enhancements".

I die. O my hair falls out and my flesh rots and my bones are cracked by the hungry ta!a'an. He drops me behind him all around the forest and nothing will grow where his excrement from my marrow falls. As the years pass the forest dies from the poison of my remains. The soil washes into the sea and poisons the fish, and all die. O the embarrassment.

To his credit, Cory was quite the gentleman and did not even so much as roll his eyes heavenward, but calmly discussed each and every one of my brilliant suggestions with me.

Perhaps this explains why I never participate in feature proposals.

Jess