Difficulty with surroundings. HELP!

[cayleyms]

Hi. I have been on SL for about half a year I have never really had difficulties before, but one time I did. This time is is way different. I can see myself and me walking every now and then it will skip, but the people around me won't show up or they will be purple or blue, and the buildings take a long time to show up. That is for the most part, thanks hope you can help.

[Alyona Su]

It sounds like the place where you are.

Blue/purple avatars are called "Jelly Dolls" - you can turn that off, but you don't want to.The system is protecting your experience - turning that off will cause BIG lag (which is what you describe). Those people are wearing attachments that will cause huge lag for you, so the system turns them into jellydolls. 

As for the buildings rezzing lowly: those are sloppy creators using badly-designed textures. As for walking smoothly then "bouncing" - that is called "latency" - there is too much load on the sim so it isn't able to keep track of you (and others) properly.

I am SIMPLIFYING my descriptions a LOT. But no sense writing a giant wall of text that explains it all. Better to simply recommend (very strongly) that you just go to another sim. if this is your home, you may want to consider moving or turning your Graphics settings WAY DOWN.

[Nalates Urriah]

Alyone is right. I'll give give you some other things to consider.

We have a phenomenon known as Rubber Banding. The avatar is walking along then snaps back a few steps and continues walking. When you see this open the Viewer Statistics panel, Ctrl-Shift-1. Watch Ping and Packet Loss. As both of these increase rubber banding is more likely. This can be either a connection or region server overload problem. To tell which look for Server FPS and Time Dilation further down in the stats panel. Server FPS <44 and Dilation <1 indicate a server having trouble keeping up. Below 35 FPS and 0.9 we can start seeing some problems. The further off the numbers are the worse things get. Bad numbers on the server indicate a server side issue. TP to another regions and the problem likely goes away.

However, if the Server FPS and Time Dilation are good and teleporting to a different region doesn't help, then you likely have a connection issue. Test your connection to the SL servers. http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/

Having a good general Internet connection does NOT mean you have a good connection to the SL servers. And... connection quality changes by the millisecond. So, that you had a great connection yesterday means nothing today. Test it. And... realize it changes often. You may have problems that start and vanish in minutes, hours, or days.

Your connection can contribute to slow scene render. Also, a small cache can slow things down. Make your cache as large as you can. Also, no matter how many people tell you clearing cache is the thing to do... it is NOT. Avoid clearing cache until you absolutely know it is a cache problem. Clearing is a last resort step.

Draw Distance (DD) in Preferences, Graphics can contribute to slow scene rendering. Even the best machines can be overwhelmed by using large DD. For shopping inside stores 64m is reasonable. For outside 128 to 256 m is common. 1024m is used momentarily for taking panoramic photos. At 64m you are dealing with rendering 1 or 2 regions. At 128m more like 9 regions and at >=512 ~ 1024 m you are up to about 25 regions. That is a lot to download and render.

The graphics settings for the viewer that can be saved in PRESETS and easily switched between. Look in the upper right of the viewer's top menu.

Your connection to SL has nothing to do with 'Jelly Dolls'. That is controlled by a setting in your viewer and what the avatar showing as a solid color is wearing. Look in Preferences, Graphics and find Avatar Complexity. In general a setting of 350k is the the default, unless you have a weak graphics system then your default may be lower. You can change it, larger or smaller. However, setting it to Unlimited (bad idea) removes protection for griefer video card attacks.

Experiment and test to figure out what has started dragging you down.