If you are someone who has spent much time in Second Life and cares about it's future, please go to Project Open Letter and consider signing this. It has already been sent to Linden Lab, but it's time to speak up and tell them that they are squandering the world they created.

In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.

With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company's policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.

There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:

* Inventory loss - this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue - we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.

* Problems with Find and Friends List - we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.

* Grid stability and performance - teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.

* Build tool problems - the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough - we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.

* Transaction problems - inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.

We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Your EZ Animator stopped working. The buttons seem frozen or it no longer animates you or your friend. You are getting a strange "run-time error". Most likely, whatever is wrong can be fixed by resetting the scripts.

If you have an EZ Animator Deluxe and you are wearing it. You might try the /99reset command. However, if you are getting a script error, this will not work. Instead find a sandbox where you can build and do this:

1) Drop your EZAD onto the ground

Right click on the EZAD and choose "Drop"

2) Select your EZAD

Right click on the EZAD and choose "Edit"

3) Reset Scripts

Go to the Tools menu at the top of your screen and select "Reset Scripts in Selection"

4) Hit close

When the scripts are done being reset, the close button will highlight. Click it to finish.



Then just right click on the EZAD and choose Take to get it back in your inventory. Wear it from your inventory and it should work like new. If it doesn't, contact me via IM. I may need to come take a look at it.

If you have spent any time in Second Life, one of the first things that you will notice is that the avatars walk funny. Many people describe it as a "duck walk". It looks awkward and silly and most importantly it doesn't look like someone walking.

One of the first things that people often want to do once they join Second Life is get a decent walk (right after getting a nice skin and a fabulous flexi-prim hair). One way you can replace your duck walk is by finding some boots with a walk replacer built in. This is a fine solution if all you want to do is replace your walk, but if you want to replace your other default animations like sitting, standing, flying and jumping, you will want to use an Animation Override.

An Animation Override (or AO) is a scripted object that you wear. You load it with animations and it uses those animations to replace your default ones automatically. So when you walk, sit or stand, it plays the animations you choose.

Setting up an AO usually is confusing to the first time user. In addition to putting animations inside, you need to alter the notecard contained within. The notecard has a series of labels with blank lines in between. The blank lines are for you to fill in with the names of the animations you want to use. Two things to keep in mind:

1) The animation names must match what you put on the notecard EXACTLY, including spaces. The best way to insure this is to copy the name from the properties window (right click on the animation and choose properties, then copy the name by selecting it and hitting CNTL-C).
2) You cannot add or remove lines from the notecard. Just fill in the blank lines with the animation you want to use. The script looks on particular lines for particular information. If you add or delete a line on the notecard the line numbers all shift and the script will be confused.

Once you have made changed to the notecard you need to load it. Refer to the manual which comes with the AO to find out how to do this.

The two most common ones are probably the Wet Ikon which contains the Franimations AO script developed by Francis Chung and the ZHAO by Ziggy Puff who adapted Francis's script for the HUD. Both of these products are free. Go to Animation Warehouse to get a ZHAO or Reverie to get a Wet Ikon.

The EZ Animator Deluxe that I sell contains a customized version of the ZHAO script (with permission from Ziggy). It is important to realize that the AO portion of the EZAD is just one component of the device. If all you want is something to use for your walking animation and standing poses, I would try a ZHAO first. The EZ Animator Deluxe is more of a full featured animation device and I would hate for someone to spend 1499L, only to realize that the ZHAO would do perfectly fine for them instead.

Moved to new blog

"Unpacking your EZAD and a quick tour" has moved to new blog.