SL-ice.net

When you live in an apartment in SL or on someone else’s land, your things can get returned to you by the owner or other officer.

This article explains how to find the things that were returned to you.

When things get returned to you, they go into your Inventory’s Lost and Found folder. SL groups your things together and changes the names of your things, making it harder for you to find them. When SL groups things, it is called coalescing. The following explains coalescing and how to find your things…..

(NOTE: The text in this article is based an article in the Second Life Support Portal)


Missing Inventory: Coalesce Feature

The Coalesce feature activates when a group of objects get returned at the same time. Before a group of objects are returned, they are stuffed into a one or more objects, then returned to your inventroy.

How to find missing

1. Click the Inventory button.
2. Inside of the Inventory window, select “Sort” and then select “By Name”
3. Now select “Sort” and then select “By Date” (This makes sure the inventory is sorted by date).
4. Locate and open your Lost And Found folder.
5. Take the first object in your Lost And Found folder, drag it out. A public sandbox may be a good place to do this.
6. From top to bottom, work through the list of objects located in the Lost And Found folder until the missing objects are found.

It’s possible that your things could rez above or below you. This is important when you are in an apartment or some other place that is inside. It is best to do this when you are someplace on the ground. Float up a little so that you can see if your things rez above the ground.

The rest of this notecard gives you an example about how the features works - it’s not necessary to read this to find your things…

A resident is renting land from a landlord and has the following objects on their rented land:

* House
* Kitchen sink
* Table
* Chair
* Object

Later this Resident decides to move and ask their Landlord to return all objects owned by them. The Landlord complies and returns all objects to the Resident.

The Resident checks their inventory and the objects are missing! Or are they?

When these objects were returned, they were stuffed into one or more objects, then placed back into the Resident’s inventory.

These coalesced objects will inherit the name of one of the objects that they contain. In this case the object could be named house, kitchen sink, chair, fork or object.

Twenty new condos are available at Sky Mark Condos in Cristat! The new condos are priced at L$70 and L$149/week.

The condos are located over waterfront property. They have the same layouts as the popular Sky Mark Three and Sky Mark Five condos.

Unfortunately, it looks like a combination of SL stability issues and a slowing in-world economy are leaving most of the new condos empty, so this is a great opportunity to get a great deal (I am offerince 40% more time on new leases!).

Imagine a programmer creating systems that move people, improve people’s lives, entertain, and make people feel secure.

Imagine delivering those systems…in boxes! In fractions of a second. And handling the financial transactions easily and securely.

Imagine buying and setting up and using those systems: a simple click of the mouse to buy, open a box, a few clicks and all set. No installation, no CDs, no downloads.

Support? Completely automated, friendly….and…..effective.

Happy customers? Absolutely!

If you can imagine this….you can imagine…. 

Second Life.

Except for the land, Linen water, and Linden trees, the content you see in SL is entirely created by its users. While the SL experience is, in and of itself, great it is the content — the people, buildings, decorations, vehicles - that brings SL to life.

A group of independent developers has been working for months to understand and mimic the communications that occur as people ‘play’ SecondLife. They have been doing this because the understanding of how SL works can lead to new ways of using SL as a platform for not only business, but also enjoyment. Imagine animating your avatar based on your hand gestures, or automating certain operations of your SL-based business while you are offline.

The group of independent developers have been instrumental in discovering and reporting exploits -  security vulnerabilities - to Linden Labs. One such exploit was the ability to bypass the L$10 upload fee when uploading a texture, image, or animation. Imagine the unfair advantage a user has over others if she were exempt from the upload fee. In addition, imagine the havoc that a user could create by uploading millions of textures or other assets (SL refers to textures, objects, pictures, animations and other content as assets) - imagine the strain that would put in SL servers, possibly denying others from logging in or getting anything done in SL.

Your view of the world changes as you walk, fly, or otherwise move through SL. Your view changes because the SL servers download information about the land, prims, and avatars around you - they download that information to your SL client that is running on your computer - it works in a way that is similar to viewing web pages in the Internet.

The SL servers have always sent this information to your computer and the ability to read that information has always been present. It just has been hidden from most users.

SL changed a few days ago with the availability of a convenient way to capture the information that gets downloaded to your system as you move throughout the world. This method acquires the information that gets downloaded and then uploads that information back into SL on your behalf. This means that people can now easily copy everything they see in SL - they can make an exact copy of just about anything in a couple of minutes and need very little skill to do so.

There is a catch. Remember the group of independent developers I mentioned? They created a test application that performs capture and upload and made it available among themselves. Someone, or some people got a hold of the program and made it freely available and are selling it on a popular SL web site.

Looking through the Linden blog, content creators are upset and want various things done to address this issue including banning the independent developers. Content creators are also discontinuing from selling their items in-world out of fear that anyone can copy them and resell them.

The reality is that the ability to copy things in SL has always been present. When you look at a great building, sculpture, article of clothing, or someone’s hair you are seeing textures and prims. Textures have been easy to acquire for more than 8 months now. Prims have always been relatively easy to copy - manually - even if you don’t own the items you want to copy. It just takes time and patience.

There are scripted solutions available too. It is possible to take an object you own and create an exact copy of it using some simple scripting.

As I said earlier, the newly available method for copying makes it simple to copy anything that is made up of prims or textures using a couple of simple steps.

So, what’s the problem? SL survived texture theft and it will survive prim duplication.

People are discussing copyright violations, filing DMCA-related complaints, and fair use. The fact is that if someone really wants to copy something you have made, they are going to get it - end of story.
We, the content creators of SL, have a great advantage over those who copy - we can create new things. We have customers that appreciate our work.

Moreover, seeing how others make their things is great since it helps make our creations better. When I started SL, I looked at all the freebie items to get an idea of how things are made. Freebie things are often high-prim and it took me a while to realize that there are very efficient ways to make things using only a few prims. I taught myself to learn the art of making low prim buildings and furniture. Now, that knowledge is broadly available and can only work to increase the quality of our creations since the black art of building is now ‘open source’(granted it is forced, but it is forced for everyone now so people no longer have a competitive edge by making their things no modify).

This could impact sales, like sales of music when services like Napster started. However, the fact remains that, today, recordings and movies still sell, rent, and make people rich. A small fraction of consumers go to the trouble of locating, downloading, and using pirated content. The rest still buy, and buy willingly since they appreciate the quality of what they are purchasing.

Am I concerned about people ripping off my creations? Yes, of course! At the same time, I am excited to see what new opportunities this will create and the overall increase in quality that will come to our world.

What is SecondLife? Here is a fantastic answer….. 

Source: an anonymous reply to a story that appeared on Slashdot on October 15, 2006.

“2nd life is like The Matrix. It’s a reflection of real life, but without the limitations of real life. You can defy gravity and create things at will. In addition, you can utilize the advatage of a computerized world. For example, one person creted a “universal translator” on it. You set it to the language you want to traslate to, and everything that is said to you in that language is sent to Altavista’s BabelFish site, run through the translator into your language, and appears on your screen in the game within seconds in your language, and everything you say is automatically translated to the other language, too. You can hold a concert for friends across the world by streaming in audio. Anyone in the world can come just by sitting down to a computer and turning on 2nd Life. These are just a VERY small peak into what 2nd Life can do. Professors are actually holding college courses in 2nd Life, utilizing the fact that anyone from anywhere can get to it, and using the ability to manipulate the in-world to help illustrate their points.

Need a purpose? A “gaming” aspect to your online time? Users have created their own games in-world that you can go to and do, too. And that’s the thing. Users create them, they don’t need a corporation to support them, so new and inventive ideas are everywhere. Any creative outlet you can think of is all housed in one world, faciliated by the tools that Second Life provides, and the fact that anyone can come to what you put up, instantly, from anywhere in the real world, just by sitting down to a computer.“

 

I have met people in-world that have their draw distance set at 512m (that’s 2 sims!) on the mainlnad and complain that they can barely move.

Since there is a lot of ’stuff’ on the mainland reduce your draw distance as much as you can (CTRL + P, select the Graphics Tab). I usually have my draw distance at 96, and sometimes 64 is really busy places.

Also, ensure that you have the latest drivers for your graphics card! SL imporved a huge amount for me — so much that I enabled all kinds of cool features including rippling water - SL looks better than it ever has

It’s easy to loose sight of the bigger picture in light of the current issues SecondLife is facing: security breach, forced password resets, and now a bumpy update to 1.12.5.

The fact is that we SL citizens are very fortunate. We have a world that is free of barriers to entry: we don’t have to pay anything to access SL, SL is the complete deal - no feature-limited demos, getting SL up and running is fast (a quick 25Mb download and simple install), and registration is quick and easy.

Once in the world, every single resident starts with equal abilities — everyone can modify their appearance as thy like, change all of their clothes, create things, write scripts, and of course interact.

Our abilities are limited only by how much effort we are willing to put into ourselves or our creations. There are no reviews, upload fees are minimal, and we can do business with others from the moment we first rez.

We want to enjoy SL in whatever way is meaningful to each individual. Businesses want to succeed, and there is a large base of consumers that want to help make great SL businesses successful since they often enhance the SL experience.

LL, I believe, wants to be successful too - a lot of passionate people want to make SL an even better place for more people. Accepting change is part of our second lives, and sometimes the transition from where we are now to where we want to be can be hard - but SL gets better each time we emerge from one of the many transitions.

Take a step back and enjoy the freedom to be who you want to be, among friends, in great surroundings, in a freely accessible world.