Jupiter Rowland @JupiterRowland

Germany (Real Reality™), Dorenas World (virtual reality), OSgrid (secondary virtual reality) Online

Far-travelled on the Hypergrid and convinced of Roth2 v2.


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I understand that you're angry and disappointed now about what happened to your home grid. But even if that grid won't comeback, many of us wish that you could, and be it on a new home grid.

Maybe even your sims could rise from the ashes there if you still have backups. If you have backups, just don't do anything with them that you may regret later.
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Especially if you have a hubby who raids your wardrobe, right?
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I've already planned this to be the separate part 2: Non-tropical beaches.
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Excellent.
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The above only applies to Athena 6 and Adonis 4. But unlike what many of you think you know, unlike what dozens of "Free BoM" shops try to teach you, these aren't the only two BoM mesh bodies.

As for "Not try to use ANY ALPHA - BOM not support alpha yet", this only applies to Athena 6 and Adonis 4 out of the box. Both technically do support alpha masks, but you have to modify them. It's fairly easy, I've described it here: https://opensimworld.com/post/84164

The same may apply to the largely unscripted "0.8.2.1" variants of Ruth2 v4 and Roth2 v2.

As for Ruth2 v4 "BoM", Ruth2 v4 "Business" and Roth2 v2 "BoM", they all have a much more advanced and robust implementation of BoM. They do support alpha masks. Both my in-world sister Juno (Ruth2 v4) and I (Roth2 v2) wear alpha masks on a BoM mesh body daily. And they work. They work so well that while Athena 6 has 208 alpha cuts on the HUD (no head included), Ruth2 v4 only has 12 (head included). You don't need that ugly hack with an alpha HUD and hundreds of alpha cuts anymore.

You don't have to edit these bodies to enable alpha layer support. They both have buttons on the HUD for that.

Also, you can put on Ruth2 v4 or Roth2 v2 while wearing layer clothes, mesh clothes and even alpha masks with no problem at all. I've taken off my Roth2 v2 mesh body and put it back on while fully clothed in mesh plus alpha. On the Hypergrid even. Worked perfectly like a charm without my mesh body or my entire avatar blowing up. And trust me, I've been using Roth2 v2 as my standard "daily driver" body since even before Athena 6 was available, wearing alpha masks nearly all the time.

Granted, if you put Ruth2 v4 or Roth2 v2 on for the first time, you shouldn't be wearing too much so that you can check if everything works like it should.

If you need to know more about Ruth2 v4 and/or Roth2 v2, there's a group here on OpenSimWorld for that: https://opensimworld.com/groups/1014 (in case you've never heard of OpenSimWorld's groups, go here: https://opensimworld.com/groups).
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By the way: The tracksuits work well on Roth2 v2.
https://opensimworld.com/post/85730
One fewer excuse not to work out... *gulp*
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Well, the menswear ghetto goes both ways. On the one hand, it's said that it isn't worth creating clothes for men. Women need loads of dresses, gowns, shirts, tops, skirts, shorts, jeans, capris, slacks, leggings, jackets, coats, cardigans, shoes, boots and so forth, not to mention jewellery. A man only needs one t-shirt, one pair of jeans, one pair of shoes. Why make what nobody needs? Thus it's often painfully hard to find menswear, much less menswear that actually fits you. (I dare you to check your nearest Clutterfly for a very painful example.)

On the other hand, there's more than a grain of truth in this. Many users actually are like this. Lots of women treat their avatars like dress-up dolls whereas lots of men only put minimal effort into outfitting their avatars and even that only once. Some even say it's easy to tell a "crossplayer" (the avatar's gender is different from the user's) if a male avatar actually looks good and has loads of outfits to choose from or a female avatar always looks the same. So at least in Second Life (where, let's face it, most of our clothes come from), menswear isn't as worth creating as ladies' fashion because it won't sell as well. Add to this that far more fashion designers are women, and especially in OpenSim, they'll design clothes for their own ilk first and foremost and often either completely forget or simply don't bother to make clothes for guys as well.

So, regardless of how well the clothes fit on an individual's body, if at all, it's always almost a wonder to see men's mesh clothes being made in and for OpenSim.
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Its a reflection of real life to :). IT would be nice to have a better variety for men and maybe the men should put in a bit more effort in dressing. I reckon we need a fashion show for men, best dress gets a prize :) :).
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I've seen a fashion show with male models. But reduce it to legal content only (which this fashion show was even though all meshes were from SL), and you're doomed. Reduce it to only free content made in and for OpenSim, and it gets even worse, especially if you take what few textured Damien Fate meshes for guys are out there.

Add to this the distribution of mesh bodies. Some 99% of all female avatars with mesh bodies out there are a variant of Athena. Many users don't even know that other female mesh avatars exist. So next to all female clothes are rigged for Athena (those few made in and for OpenSim are either rigged for Athena, rigged for Ruth 2.0 RC#2/RC#3, rigged to halfway fit the system body or fitted mesh).

Men don't have that one body that dominates everything. You often don't know if men's clothes are rigged for Adonis (or its SL original) or Apollo (or its SL original). Or maybe Ares (or its SL original). Or Decadence (or its SL original). Or you happen upon something that's rigged for Maes Muscle Man without saying so. Or it's old enough to still be rigged towards the system body. In most cases, you don't know which body a piece of mesh clothing is made for. And what fits one body often barely fits another one, if at all.

I guess this is something else that repels people from making mesh clothes for men: You absolutely have to rig them for multiple bodies to get a sizable target audience. In SL, you can get away with rigging women's mesh clothes only for Maitreya Lara because that'll cover some 90% of the market. The same clothes in OpenSim will cover some 99% of the market. If you rig men's mesh clothes for only one body, you'll end up with a much smaller market coverage in SL. Even in OpenSim, the dominance of Adonis isn't so huge that you can blindly assume nobody uses anything else.

Combine this with the general demand for male and female clothes. You'll have more demand for female clothes for Lara/Athena than you'll have for male clothes for half a dozen different male mesh bodies.

Interestingly, if you disregard SL and only look at bodies and clothes made in and for OpenSim, the situation changes. As for bodies, we're down to the Ruth2 family for female avatars and the Roth2 family for male avatars. On the one hand, we still aren't talking about one mesh shape each. You'd be surprised how different Ruth 2.0 RC#3 and her direct successor Ruth2 v4 are, not to mention Roth 2.0 RC#1 and Roth2 v2.

But on the other hand, there's still quite a dearth of clothes, especially free clothes. It looks the best for Ruth 2.0 RC#2/RC#3 that got and still gets clothes made either by idealist hobbyists or by users of these bodies who think that all that comes from SL sucks style-wise. (Thus, we're getting to a point where there are more calf-length skirts for Ruth 2.0 than for Athena.) But considering the general demand for women's fashion, you could always create away as you please and find customers. In the meantime, Ruth2 v4 has to make do with clothes made for her predecessors plus custom-made alpha masks plus a great deal of luck. But it works.

At the same time, there's next to nothing for the whole Roth2 line (except for a few clothes Sean Heavy made for his own RothToo which are so clingy that they only fit this one body). So in general, the demand is about as big as that in Ruth2's case because even the very basics are missing. And there certainly are dressmen whom you won't be able to satisfy with basics, so you could happily continue from there. The advantage of OpenSim is that it doesn't have to pay off, it doesn't matter how many customers you have.

To get back to the original topic, bookend-style: I'd like to see a fashion show in which all models are either Ruth2 v4s or Roth2 v2s just to see what can be done with these bodies clothes-wise already now. (Juno Rowland has entered the chat...)
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I have worked a bit with the RUth body, and had to combine differents bist from different versions to get a somewhat decent body. Roth is way harder to work with
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That's probably because especially Roth2 (Roth 2.0 RC#1, Roth2 v2 etc.) is so much different in shape from all the other mesh bodies. The upper body sits so far back that every last t-shirt made so far, no matter which body it was made for, will clip horribly at the rear collar, and there's a lot of space between the upper chest and mesh tops. The groin area sits so far up front that jeans, trousers, shorts etc. will clip in the lower belly area unless you pick a size so big that the space between the butt and the garment gets ridiculous. You always have to wear them with mesh tops, and you can't even wear open shirts.

Still, Roth2 v2 is good to work with because it can use alpha masks like the system body out-of-the-box. You have to hide the body underneath the clothes, but it's fairly easy because you don't have to hassle around with the HUD and alpha cuts, and you can save your alphas with your outfits with no work-arounds or hacks or payware extensions.

Something else that applies to both Ruth2 and Roth2: Forget using shapes as they are. You can't hope to do as you do with Athena, Adonis & Co. You can't slap a preset shape on your avatar and look like a professional porn star. You have to work with the shape until it looks good. That may be inconvenient to those who want to be done with their avatar within five minutes, but it'll give us more individual-looking avatars instead of everyone and their grandmother using the same three preset shapes.
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It is way Different and yes lots of fiddling to get it look sort of decent. Shirts were not too much of an issue on ROth but pants oh boyy! Some of the Athena/Maitreya stuff will work ok on ruth to.
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Go there, it's worth it. Take yourself some time to explore the place by foot, lift, steam boat or whatever suits the situation the most. Pick up some tea or wine for your own supplies while you're there.
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Thank you so much, Jupiter! Much appreciated. And yes there are many free gifts on all my regions, including nice prizes for completing the Adventure Quests! :)
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i will definitely visit :)
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Now I imagine Arcadia Asylum's grungy Checker cab pulling up at your place...
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Hey! Instead of sending out a LM with a group event notice, attach a grungy Checker cab, which, when rezzed, will work as a transporter. Also, when sending an IM about the event, drop the cab into the IM chat box."Here's your taxi!" Very cool!
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Hm, if I ran events, maybe I'd actually do that... send a clean or a grungy cab depending on the event...

What gave me the idea is that we do have two actual taxis with teleport scripts on the grid.
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ooooooo! Want!
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You can get Arcadia's Checkers here for example: hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Steam
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I want! I want! I want!
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Me first! :)
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Not found, at least in area search for "checkered" or cab." Damn, I wish someone would convert Arcadia's stuff into mesh, or is that sacrilegious?
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Strange, I thought I had answered...

Anyway, you may instead look for keywords such as "taxi" or "grunge". Besides, I think visitors currently land on the roof of the very building in which these vehicles are offered in boxes. Go to the edge, take the lift down to the ground and enter the building. The ground floor is chock-full of Arcadia Asylum goodies.
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I'm not sure what it's called. You could search for "taxi". Or, better yet, "grunge". That'll lead you to Arcadia's stuff.

That is, it should be in the same building that you land on top IIRC.
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ZetaWorlds has also banned all grids under the Outworldz domain. However, DreamGrid-based grids running under a different domain or by their IP address aren't affected by the ban (I guess if they do get caught nonetheless, their domain or IP will be banned, too).
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I've just sweet-talked Loru into putting her old clothes back on her new sim (hop://artdestiny.de:8002/Glede). In the meantime I'll come and give the dress plus two other variants to you along with a landmark to Loru's fashion sim.
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I just logged in, and see you dropped off the dress, etc. Thank you so much for taking the time to do that! Appreciate it, very much.
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Thank you sooo much. I am east coast USA time period. Let me know when you would like to meet up. I am available during my daytime, and into the evening til around 3pm grid time. You can also email me at lannorra-sion@live.com.
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Check out OSWRS (https://opensimworld.com/hop/82749; stands for "OpenSimWorkingRadioStreams"). You'll find ready-to-use radios, general ones that cover a variety of genres as well as specialised one. Inside these radios, you'll find station lists. And these stations are all pretty much guaranteed to work in OpenSim, otherwise Shawn wouldn't include them.
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Man, this party completely exploded. We're still 22 avatars, and I think we were twice as many about half an hour ago.
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The only reason for this is visiting HG Safari.
After the birthday the grid will disappear again into its insignificance.
So keep the ball low.
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An actual live sports event in OpenSim. Not as in video broadcast, but as in actually happening in-world.

You won't see this everyday.
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And this is what happens when you (read: I) can't shut your (read: my) yap at OSCC. Don't ask.

That said, I have to agree: Metro has got one of the most gorgeous landing sims out there. It's still my old Metro avatar's home because he doesn't have anywhere else to go... It's just a pity that their many teleportals are underused, and the downstairs club is completely unused. (Yes, there's a club.)
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I can relate to getting carried away. I need one tailor-made shelf for a store, I end up making 32. Juno needs a skin, I have to limit myself in order to not make more than 138 skins.

But hey, maybe someone could use very specifically this or that version.
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So essentially it's a false alert on the side of malware scanners ranging from MSE to subscription-based commercial scanners to ClamAV, and there's no need for DreamGrid admins to have sleepless nights.

Also, I'd like to put an emphasis on the last paragraph. Those of you who are running very old installations of DreamGrid and have never updated, please do so. I know that the typical Windows user doesn't like to update things and prefers to leave everything as-is after installation, but this is a security issue.
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The file in question is the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Runtimes bundled in a third-party, all-in-one "repack" as it's called. I guess it's necessary for running certain applications written in C++, although this should only be necessary for development.

What it does is automatically install the most current versions of whichever MSVC++ redistributables you need, at least the most current at the time the respective version of the repack was released. For instead of downloading the most current versions from Microsoft, it has everything included.

It's hosted on Github (https://github.com/abbodi1406/vcredist). But it isn't open-source. It's a mostly closed-source *.exe binary blob that could contain just about anything without anyone knowing. There is no source code publicly available at all, so you don't know what actually happens behind the scenes without reverse-engineering the whole thing. That's right, someone actually creates binary blobs on their home machine and uploads these to Github. Granted, it's a kind of executable 7-Zip archive, but still, that isn't what Github is there for. Also, it's licensed under "I can't be fucking bothered to deal with license shit, go do with my shit whatever the fuck you want, I don't fucking care".

Even the Readme doesn't spit out what exactly this application does and how exactly it works. I'd assume that it can be deleted after running it and installing what you need because it's only a means of installation automation, but I'm not sure whether that's actually the case.

As it's a binary blob, you can't check its contents on Github itself. You have to download it onto your machine and unpack it for that. So anyone could fork the Github repository, download the binary blob, unpack it, spike it with malware such as the aforementioned Win.Adware, add the new files and replace the modified files in the original *.exe and re-upload it. Github won't notice what exactly happened. Nobody will notice unless they download the spiked binary blob. And then it could pretty well be too late already.

So my guess is that someone has done just that (there are 163 forks currently: https://github.com/abbodi1406/vcredist/network/members). And that whoever slipped you the repack (Was it the DreamGrid installer? And why did it park it under C:\Users?) has downloaded it from the first place that popped up on Google without even knowing what Github (or Git or version management in general) is and how it works instead of looking up the actual maintainer.
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Good advice: Come naked right away. If you aren't daring enough for that, come in swimwear, and when you're ready to strip down to cross the red ribbon, take it off.

For one, that'll save you from the hassle that 99% of all mesh body avatars have with holes in their bodies and having to go home to turn off the alpha cuts because their HUD doesn't work outside their home grid. Swimwear most probably won't need alpha cuts.

Besides, the little peninsula on which you land, the only place on the sim where you're allowed to wear clothes, is mostly gone. You land in water, shallow enough so your head will most likely stick out, but deep enough for you to end up with clothes soaked with sea water. Solution: Don't wear anything that isn't made to get wet.
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Euch auch... gehabt zu haben!
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Aber Koburk sieht jetzt zum Glück nicht so kalt aus. An den Bäumen ist Laub...

Könnte man dieser Tage mal zum Aufwärmen hinfahren, wenn's nicht gerade ein Tropenstrand sein soll.
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