Socially|Mundane

I've been thinking about my favorite pet-peeves of Second Life for a while now. No, I don't mean all the Linden Lab SNAFUs or the Second Life Viewer bugs or the general wonky nature of the Second Life Grid.

I'm referring to those things in-world, usually the cause of which are residents themselves. So I am going to work my way through my top-ten pet-peeves list. But rather than just plop a bullet lists here, I'm hoping to elaborate on each, so you know why it's a pet-peeve. And that if any apply to you directly, you'll understand why it's a pet-peeve and so irritating not only to me, but likely many, many others who come into your presence.

Number three my list are "Strobing Textures" A.K.A. "Sloppy-assed Builds".

One of the most irritating things to me in Second Life are the 'strobing' textures on intersecting prims. The classic example of this might be a wall where one section overlaps another section and the textures in the overlapping area flicker wildly, often when you are not even moving and the picture on your screen is static.

The is simply caused by the textures being at the exact same focal plane in the digitally reproduce three-dimenstional envirenment and the software (and your computer, by extension) isn't sure which texture it should be showing you.

Since it is a digitally-created three dimensional environment, think of it in three dimensions: width, height, depth. We all know 'depth' it the placement of objects further away from you as they run-off into the distance.

The software viewer, and your computer computes where these objects would be placed if it were the real world and what it should look like based on our position, looking in that direction.

So, each object has a 'rank'. This is real simplification, but helps me explain. The object that is (theoretically) closest to you might be number one. The next farthest object, even if by a virtual nanometer, is number two. The next is number three and so on.

The is all based on what is called the focal plane.

Imagine a camera as it sees the world through the lens. Notice how either everything is in focus? This is called an infinity focal plane. What you see in the picture drawn by Second Life is in this method of "focus."

However, with higher-end cameras, you must focus on your subject. As you turn the focus dial, the sharpest, in-focus portion of the image slides forward and backward based on your turning the dial. The 'slice' of the picture is a perpendicular, vertical plane called the 'focal plane'.

Even though the Second Life viewer presents what you see as an end result as an infinity plane (everything is in focus) - in order to create the proper perspective of these digital three-dimentional objects, it has to use a "focal-plane" method of placing them on the digital landscape.

So count up from the nearest object to the furthest away from you. The problem is if two objects collide - that is overlap each other, the digital 'focal-plane' cannot decide with object is closer in order to give it a higher rank (lower number). So the software fights with itself.

This causes texture strobing.

It's irritating.

it happens, sure. But the pet peeve is when it is so obvious, so sloppily done that the person creating the build cannot possibly miss it, and yet they leave it anyway. The answer is so drop-dead simple that anyone who's spent ten-minute learning to create and link prims knows how to stretch one or both of these so they do not overlap.

Holy shinola, Batman!

Talk about careless, lazy people in Second Life. And I really do mean that. These people are really lazy and careless as in 'screw you, I really don't care and I'm so effing lzy I spk w/ initials and u r a jerk and my frst name is lc inits."

The initspeak and lc names are up-and-coming PP's, u k w/dat?

Besides stretching your prims to they buttress up against each other, there is another solution. I overlap prims often if it makes my building routine more efficient. The simple answer is this: if I have a 10x10x10 (width x height x depth) block half-buried into an identical block and i am getting the oh-so-annoyingly-obvious texture-strobing...

I simply edit one of the blocks and in the size set of numbers, change the appropriate (if not all) settings from 10 meters to 9.98 meters.

Tah-dah! Instant fix. Strobing textures strobe no more and the "seam" is so negligible the only people who will ever see it are the ones to built it: specifically me and only me.

So, all you really lazy-assed, sloppy builders out there: first impressions are everything. if you want me to be at your place (or buy your prefab or other product) - as soon as I see strobing textures: okay, I admit. i just cannot poof out of there fast enough. really.

The point being if your are too lazy or simply uneducated enough, or simply too lazy to find the answer to the fix in the quality of your presentation... what does that say about the quality of everything else about you?

Certainly there are those learning. I mean, if I come to a place that strobes all over and I see it's only a week old, hey, congratulations on your first build. Really! Congratulations! Good for you!

However, if it's a dive that has been around for a while, you know, a dump?

Need I say more?

Dipshit, lazy-ass builders.

[Note: Images displayed are not examples of sloppy builds, but the opposite. These are excellent and interesting builds by which such benchmarks are made. —Ari]