Week Two Questions

Well, I've been here almost two weeks, and I know just enough to be dangerous - or to have more questions at any rate. Generally I'm a quick study, but forgive me if I've missed the "bleeding obvious" boat on some of these questions....

1. First, am I being silly in my expectation that there will eventually be more Mature areas? And that there will be more sims added to the Outlands? Although I am – in RL at least – a pacifist, I'd love to spend a while in the Outlands watching the local fauna interact, but I'd need more than 5 square meters of land to set up my tent ;-) And when I leave the Outlands - to mend perhaps - I'd like a mature area to live in, since I do tend to speak freely sometimes. Besides, I'm working on a line of body jewelry ;-)

2. Why (and by what formula) are some landmarks not letting me teleport? Is there a radius within which I'm expected to only fly? Are there certain sims that one always flys to? I love flying, but sometimes I'd like to jump over to a store and back instead of flying close to 2k with a heavy "scripting physics" headwind. I assume this will be worse as the world grows.

3. Do I have the right to restrict access to my property in a "safe" sim? Does that run contrary to the guidelines? Or do I have to build my Fortress of Solitude in the Outlands? If I live in the Safe Zones, am I required to allow all strangers to wander my halls? Can I lock the door? Put up a wall? How about airspace? Can I make them fly around? The technology exists for me to be rather adamant about my property boundaries. Is that ok?

4. Why have I been on the weekly leader board for collecting calling cards? I have about 130 of them right now. Other than providing an alternate way to "give" something to someone without them being in the area, are there other significant purposes I don't know about? Sure, I can IM from there, but I can do that in the Find window too - and I'm not restricted to those I've met. It's nice to "score" a meeting with some of the bigwigs ;-) but this doesn't outweigh the fact that I now have 130 of these suckers in my inventory. Does anyone have a favorite way of organizing them - besides alphabetically - or a favorite use for them? The formula for determining total game points suggests that these are important. Are they work my constant annoyance of strangers? I've only used them once - to give a newer newbie a landmark to Landmark Island. Otherwise, I just get a heck of a lot of scrolling indicators that everyone I've bothered is either online or off. There are 130 of those messages when I sign on - not much use overall.

5. Where are the Group control buttons? I am an officer of a Group (as much as there ARE officers in my Group) but I don't seem to see the controls. Where can I get an accurate list of the members in my group - since us leftists don't require pre-approval? Where can I change a member into an officer? Where do I go to boot someone out? I'm sure it's there, I just haven't found it yet.

6. I love the recent city created in Kissling. Very pretty. I was even going to rent there, but then I realized that I wouldn't own the property. In fact, since it never rains in Linden, I fail to see much reason to rent. A place to stow my stuff? Maybe, but I don't have much that won't fit in my inventory. Maybe when I open a place of business, I will rent then, But, some scripted things check to see if your the property owner....

7. Some sims seem to be choking in physics. I don't know if the scripts or the objects or the population or what it is that makes them slow, but they are slow. At least they are much slower than the emptier sims. Is Second Life re-scalable? In other words, is it technically possible to have a one-sim county turned into a two-, or four-sim county? I assume they’d want to wait on that, since this is a great way to stress test, but I hope there is that potentiality down the road.

8. Has anyone put together a hot-key, or shortcut sheet? There are some assigned here and there, but I am sure I don't know them all. And are there more coming? I appreciate having one for the map, and for the inventory window, but is there one for the IM window that I am not seeing? And is there a hot key to hit the More button? (Now that I think of it, does the More button always come up as selected by default when the window opens? If so, then does Enter always expand it?) Does anyone here use a third-party macro program in SL - for those items not already macro-able through the Fkeys or chat? I haven't had a chance to test QuicKeys yet.

9. What the heck are the two vertical bars just below and right of the map in the map window? The ones that look sort of like the packet-loss and bandwidth indicators in the main window - but aren't?

10. If I use the debug menu to override the sun, and set it high in the sky, does that affect anyone else's view of the dark? And when does MY version of day and night catch up with THEIR version of day and night? As soon as I turn that feature off?

Having said all that, I must say I love it here. I am firmly addicted, and have purchased a new computer because of SL. (And before you assume it, NO, I couldn't actually afford it.) Two of my kids are now in-world. One of them has as many calling cards as I do now, and a heck of a lot more outfits. I only bring up the points I do because I take the beta tester role seriously - as I always have. My 18 years in technical support (with a few in QA) make me sensitive to interface issues in particular. I am REALLY looking forward to living here - unlike when I beta tested Sims Online, which got real boring once it was finished. (I paid $50 bucks for that and ended up tossing it in the trash. Sigh.)

Thanks, Linden Labs, for some really radical cleverness :-) Sorry to natter on and on.

1. yes there will be more, there used to be..8 i think... but when we had the mas migration of war gamers, they dropped the number to its current level. there will be more do not worry . there are several sims that are mature but not outlands, federal, where i live for example.

2. bug of some sort, probably. scripted physics headwind... heh i love it!

3. yes you have complete control over your property, walls doors, anything. there are scripts to kick people off your property, and there are flags that you can set so that only your scripts run on it. your land is your own little slice of heaven. hmm flying around is tough, you would actually need to build walls that go a long way up, or smart ones that jump infront of the offending avatar. you can set it to no fly, but that only means people can't start flying on your property, if they come in flying, they stay flying unless they stop it themselves.

4. mostly i use them to find out if my friends are on, and im, and pass stuff, all of which you can do using the find command, so they are merely a convinience. someone else is going to have to field the question concerning scores, cause i have no idea, never paid much attention . I organize into two broad groups, ones i use a lot, and ones i use a little heh

5. i will check this one out for you

6. hmm renting doesn't get you much atm, except use of the land, if you do not own. Kissling is in a reasonably prime location and there is room, so it is pretty inviting, especially if it gets built up. i would rent space, if it were in a high traffic area to advertise

7. if i remember right, the max number of objects and max number of avatars is a hard cap, but the actual size of the sim could be changed, i.e. they are 256x256 now, but they could be made to 64x64.

8. wow... there are scattered bits in the forums about the keys, but i think we should defniately put to gether a master list, maybe we should start a thread and everyone can post their hotkeys to it

9. one on the left is a measure of the objects in the sim, and the one on the right is... avatars i think. if it is yellow it is almost maxed, if it is red, then it is maxed. i will check the one on the right in a little bit and repost.

10. the lighting is totally based on you, so you changing the sun position does nothing to the other users. as to catching up, just switch it off and you will be back on the regular sl cycle

heh good stuff!

Because I can't let a Nada post go by without adding my 2 cents...

9. The first one is number of objects, scaled by maximum allowed number of objects, the second is the percentage of land in the sim that is owned.

I think there's hover help for both.

i was just coming to correct myself. and yes there is hover help that tells you the percentage that is used

That accounts for it. I always had a red indicator when flying got hard, though the bandwidth and lost-packets indic ators weren't red. Just the rightmost - "land-owned" - indicator on the map. Now it makes sense. Sure there's going to be some correlation between land-owned and fly-over performance.

My "hover-help" isn't working at all for any of the four indicators.