Bay City Post, Edition 79

WELCOME to the seventy-ninth issue of the Bay City Post

- Keeping you updated on the best city on the Grid!

Mole appreciation day

On August the 31st the Bellisseria community organised their first Mole Appreciation Day (aka First Annual Mole Day Party) to thank them for the work they have done so far for Bellisseria and it's growing community.

More then 70 people showed up including at least 7 moles, breaking the sim.

This means that the moles now have two events every year to go to, and get worms. Bay City celebrates Mole Day each year in the beginning of February.

The more mole days the better! Our critters deserve plenty of worms!

Editorial-

From the standpoint of Bay City it might appear that Bellisseria is stealing the best of Bay City. For parts that is true, but is it bad?

Bay City has grown a community from the day it was created. We share experiences that are hard to compare with other communities. The Bay City Alliance is the leading force behind our initiatives, including this newspaper.

Bellisseria is new and fresh. The community is fragmented into 20 groups with 20 different websites. It will take some time before things settle down and Bellisseria has a sustainable community. 

It is good that Bellisseria grows it's own community. I feel it can "borrow" as much from Bay City as they want to grow that community. Next to that, Bay City can not block initiatives from the community of Bellisseria.

One of the cornerstones of the Bay City community is it's relentless effort to support "good causes" most notably Child's Play. None of the actions of the Bay City Community has a commercial intent. I expect the same from Bellisseria.

There is much that differs between Bay City and Bellisseria. There much that unites us. When Bay City can help, Bay City will help.
Go Bellisseria!

Topaz Oasis

The furry community at Topaz Oasis has sealed a cultural exchange treaty with Bay City. Part of this treaty is the placement of the Bay City Post newspaper vendor as a gesture of good will. Bay City kindly supports this initiative and provides the newspaper completely for free!

Topaz Oasis is home to the United Furry Outpost (UFO) and AGRA racing.

Feel free to explore Topaz Oasis.

Hot Bay City Nights

The sad news is Hot Bay City Nights didn't make it this year. 

In previous years it ran a whole week and required a lot of volunteers. This year, despite best efforts (begging and offering slow cooked sweet marinated noobs), not enough volunteers were available.

Also there was that thing called RL, heavy overrated but a force to be reckoned with.

Please keep your agenda free for 2020!

The Experience Teleporter

We wrote about this a month ago. Please read it again as it is so fun to use! I am using it in trap-doors, ladders and the entrance into the castle made with a mega prim. Getting the key to work is a bit fiddly, specially on a different parcel. Try and try again and it will work.

Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest is supported and organised by the Bay City Brewery. Keep an eye out on the events in Bay City to find out when and where you can get your beer and do the polka. You can expect it at the end of September.

Your reporters have been hard at work to investigate all the news from our Fine City.

Police and Fire Blotter

The BCPD and BCFD have been extremely busy as T.J. describes

Epic Flights

Is it possible, four continents? Our explorers found out the hard way.

Molewatch Special Feature: The Road To Bay City Part 1: The Rig

Marianne McCann researches the deeper history behind our Fine City

About: Privacy

Privacy in this world is tough.

Bay City Cruis'n

Dakota Schwade discovers the origin of the moles in Moloch?

Experiencing a Bug, and BoM Obscurities

Qie Niangau zaps a bug and wears tights

Proclamation Emperor Michael I Re:Privacy

Our esteemed Emperor Michael the First rants about banlines

Epilogue

Previous Edition

Health and Safety Statement

The Bay City Post fully respects your microbiome. It is handmade by qualified authentic artisan journalists. The active ingredients have been studied by leading orthodontists without any direct harm to the environment.

• The owner of the Toxic Taco has escaped capture using a jet ski. Food and safety inspectors were left behind in a row boat.
• In and around the Docklands people with tires on their feet can be found zapping around at high speed, setting the tires on fire. Be cautious when you are around there.

Editor Vick Forcella

190902

Experiencing a Bug, and BoM Obscurities

Some folks with their own Experience scripts may have noticed a particularly nasty bug that's a real head-scratcher when first encountered. It seems that with some recent server update, all rezzed-in-world scripts compiled to any Experience lost record that they were compiled to that Experience. The scripts keep running using the Experience for which they were compiled, but they can't be recompiled (nor shift-drag copied, etc.) unless re-introduced to that Experience.

Turns out this doesn't really affect that many end-user scripts because most folks just use whatever Experiences are already compiled, and a lot of Experience scripts (such as the AVsitter auto-attach scripts I often praise) are usually embedded in object inventories, not rezzed-out on their own, so they weren't affected.

New objects don't seem to be affected now, but currently it's not clear whether there's any way for the Lab to fix the already damaged objects. If you're interested you can watch developments at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-227526 for updates.

Much wider attention is on the new "Bakes on Mesh" (BoM) feature for attached mesh bodies and heads. This enables direct wearing of skin-tight textures and alpha masks, just as the old system avatars used, rather than the much more complex and limited "applier" scripts and "alpha cuts" HUDs that mesh attachments needed until now.

Much has been said about BoM already, but some things I think have been under-reported. First, in addition to the oft-cited improvement in rendering efficiency, the feature overcomes a constant source of user frustration and support problems: the unpredictable interaction of multiple layers of blended alpha textures. This comes up all the time when people try to wear makeup and tattoos, say, on overlapping layers of their attached mesh. All those problems go away when those overlapping transparent layers are simply baked on top of each other into a single displayed surface texture.

This also completely eliminates a problem inherent to how Advanced Lighting is implemented, limiting how many projected light sources affect a blended alpha surface. If you've ever noticed make-up, for example, looking weirdly coloured depending on where it is in a scene with complicated lighting, you've seen the problem -- which you WON'T see anymore with baked-on textures.

Finally, a note about BoM and Materials: if creators of BoM skin, make-up, tattoos, clothing, etc. want to include "Materials" effects, they should simply supply the normalmaps and/or specularmaps directly with their products, so folks can manually compose their combined normal- and specularmaps for the baked surface layer. These assets have zero value as "stolen" content, so the creator loses nothing by doing so, however much they may have been trained to "protect IP" at all cost. Mesh avatar makers understand this and provide a way to apply those manually composed material maps (at least this applies to Slink, which was "first out the gate" with BoM so I could test the existing built-in Materials applier on the skin layer, and a single-layer Omega applier for Materials will also work).

The reason this process still involves manual composition is that there's no simple rule for combining the "bumpiness" of normalmaps layered on top of one another. An under-shirt might be tight enough to reveal skin-layer bumpiness, but its own ribbed collar may not be revealed under a tight jacket, for example. It's still up to the user to decide which bumps should show through, and that means combining the normalmaps individually. (Most end-users may not want to do this themselves but creators of quality assembled outfits will surely follow this process for their customers.)

Reporter Qie Niangao

190902

Bump 'n' Go: A simple Experience teleporter

I like to think it's useful for readers to learn about Experiences because Bay City has a high concentration of landowners, and landowners can enable Experiences on their parcel. There are also a large share of Premium subscribers, and they're eligible to define and use their very own custom Experiences.

Before enabling a custom Experience on your parcel, it must first be created -- an easy process, well documented in the knowledge base: https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/experiences-in-second-life-r1365/#Section__4

One thing you can do with your own custom Experience is to make a simple collision-driven teleporter. Of course you could instead use other events besides collisions to trigger teleportation, but it's a neat trick to just walk through a fake door or fall through a "hole" in the floor and end up in a totally different place. So let's take the simplest collision-triggered Experience teleporter script as an example:

_______________

vector destiny = <56, 15, 2222>;

vector facing = <50, 15, 2222>;

default

{

state_entry()

  {

llVolumeDetect(TRUE);

  }

collision_start(integer num_detected)

  {

key collider = llDetectedKey(0);

if (ZERO_VECTOR == llGetAgentSize(collider))

return;

llRequestExperiencePermissions(collider, "");

  }

experience_permissions(key agent)

  {

llTeleportAgent(agent, "", destiny, facing);

  }

experience_permissions_denied(key agent, integer reason)

  {

if (17 != reason)

llRegionSayTo(agent, 0, "NO PERMS, reason: "+llGetExperienceErrorMessage(reason));

  }

}

_______________

That script would be placed in an object that, when the avatar steps into it, will teleport that avatar to a particular point in the same region (the "destiny" coordinates) oriented towards the "facing" coordinates when they arrive. So first you'll scope out where you want the avatar to go and which direction she should look on arrival, and change those two vectors to fit your situation.

(HINT: Don't set a "destiny" that's the EXACT same location of another teleporter because then you might arrive, collide with that teleporter, and be immediately teleported somewhere else -- or right back where you started. If BOTH ends specify each others' exact locations, it can be tricky to escape without relogging somewhere else.)

There are lots of ways to elaborate on this theme. For example, if this will serve the uninitiated, it wouldn't hurt to check first whether they're already enrolled in the Experience (llAgentInExperience), and if not, give them a little pep talk in chat before requesting experience permissions of them.

This form of teleporting also works for destinations in remote regions, but if you're unlucky, the destination region might be offline at the time. (There's also a separate step for finding the global coordinates of the remote region, and some trickiness with how the "facing" parameter is used, as well as a built-in "flyslow" animation that may need to be stopped.)

If there are a bunch of origin-destination pairs on a region, they might be networked to discover each other. (ADVANCED: They can even discover each other on very distant regions, using the "Key-Value Pair" persistent storage built-in to Experiences; that's how a network of walk-thru teleportation orbs work on Virtual Railway Consortium sites around the SLRR.)

Reporter Qie Niangao

190805