Scouts To The Rescue Over Billing Confusion

Back on December 14th I pointed out that Local Payments were coming to an end. Local Payments, were a billing method for people outside the USA, which allowed people to pay tier and fees in a local currency. The information in the email advised people to update their payment information.

However there was a missing step, which seems to have caused confusion, it did for me anyway. The issue was that when I went to update my information, the information was already there on my account. I left it there, I didn’t see the point in adding it again when it already existed. D-Day passed, billing went fine and then came the second email, with a title of Final Reminder (which is always worrying):

Dear Ciaran  

This email contains important information that affects your Second Life account and requires action in order to continue any payment transactions with Second Life.

Due to the conclusion of the Second Life local payments beta program, it is required that you add a new credit card or PayPal account by going to your billing information page on Secondlife.com:

Although our local payments beta program ended  for a small group, we have extended the deadline to update payments information to another date.

If your payment information has not been updated, your next automatic payment will fail, and you will receive automatic delinquent account messages notifying you of this failure. You may update your payment information at any point, but to prevent this failure, you must do so by a certain date.

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit our Knowledge Base.

Best Wishes,

Linden Lab and the Second Life Team

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SOPA Fallout – The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

The fallout from the postponed SOPA legislation has at times got ugly, at times is has shown the bad and there has been a very little bit of good. There are also other external factors that show current legislation has teeth, uncomfortable teeth I should add. Yahoo News Reporting that Megaupload has been shutdown is a little disturbing, although really it’s for the courts to decide exactly what they’re guilty of, a Dutch citizen being arrested in New Zealand and a Hong Kong based website being shutdown suggest there’s not much need for SOPA. Those who had legitimate content on Megaupload are out of luck too, which is one of the problems when actions like these occur.

Then there’s the very disturbing case of British student Richard O’Dwyer as reported by The Daily Mail , who is fighting extradition to the USA to face charges related to running a website that posted links to downloads of copyrighted content. The website was allegedly managed from the UK and hosted in The Netherlands, so quite why he’s fighting extradition to the USA is baffling, if his activities are illegal or a case for the courts, any trial should be happening in the UK.

These issues are happening now, without the need for SOPA or PIPA. Yet Hollywood wants more, the MPAA Twitter account links to articles supporting their stance on SOPA, do they support the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer?

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Creating Basic Mesh Steps In Blender Using The Array Modifier

This is going to be a very basic tutorial, I am not going to cover super efficiency, texturing, UV Mapping or anything like that, although if you want your steps to be bloody useful, you’ll want to learn those aspects. Nor will I deal with reducing vertices, removing doubles and other tricks, although they’re useful, I’m not a teacher, I work in education but I’m not a teacher! Really what I want to do here is show how useful Mesh can be by demonstrating how to create a basic set of steps that will come in at One prim. Ideally Torley would be doing this with friendly greetings, however I’m not Torley and I’m not friendly!

I should also point out here that if you don’t know how to login to the beta grid, you should learn to do so! The beta grid is great for playing with Mesh as you don’t pay for uploads there, so perfect your Mesh on the beta grid. Details on how to login to the beta grid are here, but please note, you’ll need to pass the Mesh quiz for the beta grid too, even if you’ve passed it for the main grid!

Ok so to start with we need to open Blender, then press the N key so we get the properties up, which will show this menu:

Blender Props

The x, y, z dimensions work just like they do in Second Life, you have to do something to make them ideal, but it’s just like setting them in Second Life. For my steps I’m going to use settings of 0.750, 3.000 and 0.500 for my x,y,z settings, which is a nice size for step, choose whichever settings you think work best but remember this is for just one step.

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llSetMemoryLimit Mono And A Bit Of Confusion

I’m going to talk here about a relatively new scripting function, llSetMemoryLimit, this may not work the way one thinks it does, but it basically sets the upper memory limit your script can use. I’m far from being a scripting expert but this looks like a function that people should get used to using where they can, even if it might not actually save memory for a sim the way we may think it should, I’m not sure how the server handles the space.

Anyway, when you create a new script, if Mono is ticked, it has an upper memory limit of 64kb, if you don’t compile the script as Mono, it compiles as LSO, and that has an upper memory limit of 16kb, with LSO it’s a hard rule, all LSO scripts have an upper limit of 16kb, llSetMemoryLimit won’t work with LSO, with Mono however you can set a lower limit. In this post I’ll show how this works with a very basic script, a notecard giver.

I’ll start by visiting LSL Wiki and going to the llGiveInventory section. LSL Wiki isn’t as up to date as the LSL portal but I often find the discussions and examples on LSL Wiki more helpful. So all I want is a notecard giver, I rez a prim, go to the contents tab, click new script, get the default hello world script, delete everything and replace it with this (with apologies for the horrid coding style):

default
{
state_entry()
{
}
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llGiveInventory(llDetectedKey(0),llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_NOTECARD, 0));
}

Then I make sure there’s a notecard in the contents of the prim and when I touch it, I’ll get a Notecard. However this is a Mono script so it defaults to an upper memory limit of 64kb:

Default Mono Script Limit

So let’s look at how we can reduce that using llSetMemoryLimit()

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