Jupiter Rowland @JupiterRowland

I've notified Satyr. Let's see if he even manages to receive the note.

Another thing, quite sad actually, is that many still useful freebies may perish when OSgrid's asset database is purged. I'm not talking about old SL stuff that came in in the second half of the 2010s, and that's broken anyway because its very import was botched already.

I'm talking about legal content, be it mesh objects that aren't even that old, but not available in any stores anymore (Arcadia Shop, anyone?), be it old but still useful layer clothes, many of which were offered by their creators no-transfer (I hope someone saves Festa 24H and keeps the owner and creator tags intact), be it many of what few mesh clothes were made for OpenSim from scratch or imported with an official license from the original creators.

The general attitude in OpenSim seems to be, "So what? Let go of that old crap! We'll just rip newer, better, shinier, sexier stuff from SL!"

In fact, many OpenSim users seem to actually anticipate this happening to the whole Hypergrid, or they even demand it. A total purge of all content that's considered "outdated", including any and all layer clothes, including any and all skins and make-up and tattoos that aren't made for LeLutka EvoX. Everything that was not stolen from SL in the last two years must go. If PBR wasn't so hotly debated, I guess the vast majority would wish for the entirety of the Hypergrid to brandish only PBR textures until the end of the year.

But there are also those few idealists who prefer not to resort to stolen content. Who prefer to use actually legal content instead. Who support and promote OpenSim's own creativity (which, by the way, is not only Linda Kellie stuff from the late 2000s, no matter what the copybotters' propaganda tries to tell you). Who want to demonstrate how far you can go with legal content. Who are often also individualists with their very own avatar styles. And who know that layer clothes still do have their place in 2025's OpenSim, what with Bakes-on-Mesh being omnipresent now.

The general message to them is that they're brain-dead, moronic, completely retarded pieces of horse shit who are too fucking dumb to use OpenSim correctly.

a) Mesh bodies, heads, hair etc. are either stolen from Second Life (even though many would swear under oath that Athena was scratch-made in OpenSim) or SO ABSOLUTELY MOTHERFUCKING GUT-WRENCHINGLY HIDEOUS THAT YOU FEEL LIKE FUCKING GOUGING YOUR OWN FUCKING EYES OUT WHENEVER YOU SEE ONE! Everyone who uses one of these bodies is either a dumb and clueless newbie who hasn't found "the good stuff" yet (implying that "the good stuff" is harder to find than Ruth2 v4) or too stupid to use "the good stuff" (implying that LaraX is harder to use than Ruth2 v4).

b) Layer clothes are old, outdated crap. You must never, never ever wear any of these. You must always wear everything as mesh. No exception. If you've got layer clothes on, you're clearly too fucking dumb to understand how avatars in OpenSim work. And if you have to resort to layer clothes for anything skin-tight because it isn't available as mesh rigged for your body, you've got the wrong body, and you must toss it NOW.

c) What do you want to do that you need layer clothes for? Wear a skirt or a dress with stockings or tights?! Like, tights are for grannies, and so are stockings unless maybe when the garters remain in plain sight! Female OpenSim avatars MUST always dress as sexily as possible, and that means showing more skin than not! And yes, always and everywhere, even on snow-covered Christmas sims!

I've really got the feeling that not only any and all legal content allegedly needs to die, but so do entire ways of equipping and outfitting avatars. And OSgrid's asset database purge is seen as a perfect first step towards achieving this.

One thing that struck me about this whole story is how OSgrid residents are informed about the situation. If at all.

Originally, people were only given four weeks to save their stuff. This implied that not coming online every two or three weeks equals inactive enough that purging your inventory without you having a chance to save it is justified. This was extended to a bit over five weeks. From what would have been a bit over three weeks at that point, barely enough for those to notice who show up once a month or so.

But: The only official sources of information were and still are the OSgrid news blog (which, AFAIK, doesn't even generate a feed, so you actively have to take a look at it every few weeks or so, even if there's usually nothing happening on it for months), the OSgrid Discord (which not nearly everyone has joined) and the OSgrid login screen. Worse yet, what the OSgrid login screen shows is so vague that nobody will pay attention to it.

There wasn't a single push notification. OSgrid has everyone's mail addresses. But they don't make use of them, not even in such cases of emergency.

I guess most OSgrid residents who learned about all this did so through third-party sources, especially OSW.

There WILL be OSgrid residents coming back in a few months or years and wondering why their inventories are empty and probably even their sims are wiped clean with only the barren land remaining. Many of them won't have backups of anything. And they'll be furious about OSgrid taking such steps without notifying them.

I really hope that Aaack Aardvark still keeps an OAR of his now-disappeared ArcadiaShop.

Looks like the stylesheet is broken.

Is Satyr tinkering around with the website right now?

They deleted the post a few hours later and went back to their original plans to wipe everything clean.

You may also go to that dump sim, put the items that you want to save (and that you know are intact) in boxes and pick them back up after the reset. That's what I'm going to do. Besides, I'm in three grids now with practically identical avatars. I can always send stuff back and forth between them.

What's broken in your IAR is probably broken in your inventory already. Just try to change clothes on your avatar and see what happens.

OSgrid has spent eight months offline from 2014 to 2015 after a RAID array in their asset server had failed. It took that long for the data to be rescued.

And yet, we're still here. In fact, if that crash hadn't occurred, quite a few grids would have spent more time in insignificance or not exist at all. People didn't sit and wait for OSgrid to come back twiddling their thumbs. They simply went elsewhere or made their own "elsewhere".

If OSgrid closes, other grids will grow a lot. And we'll have one or two dozen new grids in no time. If the Hypergrid lacks capacity, it makes capacity.

Besides, I think only newbies only have an avatar in OSgrid. I'm pretty sure that even the entire grid staff have backup avatars elsewhere. I know quite a few grid admins with fallback avatars on other grids (even though these fallback alts are often older than their main avatars). That's nothing to be ashamed of.

Eh, I've got most of what I need on two avatars anyway. And the non-OSgrid ones are the ones with god mode access so I can send "myself" no-copy or no-transfer stuff that isn't available anywhere anymore.

What's problematic: a) The few no-transfer things that I've only got in OSgrid, and that aren't available in-world anymore. b) My many outfits.

Nope. If this came to pass, we'd all be white system bodies, like those "unclouding" avatars, because we wouldn't even have the textures for standard Ruth. Skin, eyes, hair and shape would have to be automatically created on the spot.

I've seen pictures of a Metropolis avatar that had last been used before their inventory purge. Not pretty.

At yesterday's Wolf Territories grid meetup, Lone Wolf said something about 87 OARs having recently been uploaded to new sims in the Wolf Territories.

Probably completely unrelated. [/Sarcasm]

I hear ya.

Change clothes on your avatar, and there's at least a 50/50 chance that something either is missing from the asset DB entirely, or it has missing textures.

Better yet, the OSgrid admins don't want us to go where these assets come from, put them on there and go back to OSgrid, the standard way of fixing them, because that seems to mess with their efforts.

That isn't even that difficult. If your machine has some decent oomph, Firestorm 7 is faster than Firestorm 6. Even on my hardware.

Changes in Second Life inevitably have to be taken over by Firestorm for Second Life. If Firestorm for Second Life changes something, then so does Firestorm for OpenSim. There's only one common codebase for both; they're just compiled using different build flags. And if Firestorm for OpenSim changes something, then OpenSim itself has to follow suit in order to still have a good, compatible viewer.

Thing is, when Second Life introduces a new feature, it currently tends to also remove an old feature. This means: Firestorm for Second Life has to remove it because it can't co-exist with the new feature there. If Firestorm for Second Life removes it, it also disappears from Firestorm for OpenSim. And this means that OpenSim itself will have to change accordingly.

This happened when EEP was introduced: Windlight was removed because it couldn't co-exist with EEP.

PBR was not quite the same, but similar. PBR was also taken as a chance to reduce the complexity of meshes in Second Life. I mean, Second Life had already supported Blinn-Phong normal maps that simulate bumpy surfaces or small surface details. It has optionally been part of the Advanced Lighting Model for many years already.

But hardly any creator used them. Instead, they kept building their stuff for potato computers, for the old Forward Lighting which doesn't support bump maps or normal maps. They added surface bumps and surface details to the meshes, making them ridiculously complex, so that their creations look great on absolute toasters with on-board graphics at the lowest graphics settings possible. These super-detailed surfaces actually bogged computers down more than a bump map or a normal map could.

So what Linden Lab did was: When PBR was introduced to the official viewer, the Advanced Lighting Model was hard-coded to on. The old and simpler Forward Lighting was fully discarded. The one justification for content creators to build with 500 surfaces what could just as well work with two surfaces plus a bump map was removed. And the Lindens told the Firestorm devs to follow suit if they still wanted Firestorm to be allowed as a Second Life viewer.

Since Firestorm for Second Life had to introduce PBR (to please SL users) and remove Forward Lighting and turn the ALM permanently on (to please the Lindens), Firestorm for OpenSim had to do the same. Again, one and the same codebase.

And since Firestorm for OpenSim had to introduce PBR, OpenSim itself had no other choice but to introduce PBR, too.

By the way, there used to be a time when Firestorm for OpenSim had its own codebase. It saw exactly zero maintenance. Firestorm doesn't have dedicated, specialised OpenSim devs. They've got 20 developers. 19 of them are only in Second Life. Only one is in both Second Life (primarily) and OpenSim (when necessary). This ended with two options. Either Firestorm for OpenSim is discontinued altogether. Or it's merged with Firestorm for Second Life again. Fortunately, they did the latter.

Another by the way: Firestorm 7 doesn't require brand-new, top-of-the-line graphics hardware. I'm using upper-mid-range hardware from 2018. Six-core Ryzen, 16GB of RAM, Radeon RX 590 with 8GB of VRAM. Anyone with an actual high-end gaming rig would call this a hopelessly outdated toaster. But it runs Firestorm 7 with ALM permanently on just fine, even with shadows on. And you don't have to fire up all PBR bells and whistles at parties.

VIER Sockenpuppen anlegen auf Vorrat, nur um Dorena anzugreifen. Sehr mutig.

Dummes, dreckiges kleines Stück faschistische Scheiße.

Du sitzt wahrscheinlich den ganzen Tag zu Hause und hobelst dir mit der linken Hand einen auf Goebbels' Sportpalastrede, während du die rechte Hand brav zum Doitschen Gruß erhoben hältst.

Und im Gegensatz zu dir Hosenscheißer traue ich mich, das hier mit meinem In-World-Namen zu schreiben.

Übrigens: Dorena und Anachron haben schon Morddrohungen erhalten wegen wesentlich weniger, als was du stinkendes braunes Arschloch hier abziehst.

You should know a thing or two about screaming for attention.

Deleting your sims from OSW and re-listing them every couple weeks to always have them among the newest ones, if you can't have them among the most popular ones.

Then you should also die the fascist way.

Hung from a motherfucking gallows. Like back in 1946.

It's pretty obvious to me what's happening here.

First of all, there are those who'd love to return to the 1950s when one could be as openly racist, classist, sexist, xenophobic and social-Darwinist as one wanted to be. The good ol' days when not being cis was a mental illness and not being straight was a crime. They're conservative and proud of it, but actually backwards-oriented. Deeply right-wing, but in denial of that because they consider themselves apolitical.

In fact, they'd probably love to see democracy as a whole abolished so they wouldn't have to drag their arses to some stupid elections every couple years, just to put their crosses in the same place as in the last decades, in the same place as their parents and grandparents. Everything to the left of themselves is highly suspicious, not to mention that it goes on their nerves and against their ideals of what the world (the part of the world that they observe anyway) should be like.

They're joined by unabashedly right-wing extremists and fascists who'd love to return to 1938. Who want to take these matters into their own hands. Who present what they and the conservatives perceive as the "left wing" as dangerous and even violent. Who are eager to fight that "left wing" in any way they can. And who inspire the conservatives to do the same. Of course, the conservatives don't recognise outright fascists unless the latter wave swastika flags. Instead, they take these fascists for every bit as "non-political" as they themselves think they are.

And before you know it, you have a joint anti-anti-fascist front from which emerge things from allegedly non-political counter-events to implied death threats. And I'm not kidding a bit about the latter.

By the way: During the Reichspogromnacht in 1938, many of those who had voted Centrist applauded to the fascists, cheered for the fascists, even joined in themselves. But I guess that was "non-political", too.

P.S.: Any attempts at active sabotage against this event are not non-political. They're not "removing politics from OpenSim" or however you'll try to gaslight it. They're very much political. Because they're direct and open support of fascism.

Reminds me of the farms in-world that are half-dead because their owners haven't tended to them in months and never set up NPC farm workers either, but who still keep them around because they may actually have forgotten about them.

Always makes me want to jump in as a farm hand and fix what can be fixed.

Because As We All Know[TM], everyone to the left of Friedrich Merz is a leftist, and everyone to the left of Gerhard Schröder is an extremist.

Or for you Americans: Everyone to the left of Richard Nixon is a leftist, and everyone to the left of Hillary Clinton is an extremist.

Social politics in any shape or form are out-right, unfiltered МДЯ☭ЇꙄМ-LЭИЇИЇꙄМ. What the world needs now is social Darwinism, xenophobia, everyone duking it out against everyone else until only the strongest and richest remain, all under the iron fist of One Glorious Eternal God-Emperor.

And, of course, all environmental protection measures that have been fought for since the 1970s and all workers' right that have been fought for since the 1870s must be abolished, too, to strengthen the economy. The massively increased revenues will definitely trickle down to the common people. And climate change and pollution are delusional ideas that came from pinko commie tree-hugging hippie potheads. None of this exists.

Right?

Seriously, I hope it won't take too long until the Max bodies come out. OpenSim needs mesh bodies of its own with useable devkits and hopefully without the "quirks" that give Ruth2 and Roth2 users headaches.

AFAIK, none of the big names in SL actually make anything themselves. If they don't use AI, and most of those don't because they need much better quality than AI can produce, they have art students in East Asia do the job for them. Usually for free. All they do is rig it if necessary, assemble it, script it if necessary and make box art.

But still, they declare themselves the original creators and exclusive intellectual property holders. And they defend their intellectual property on stuff that they haven't really made.