In SL you're never too old to learn . . .

[Conifer Dada]

I'm lucky enough to have a good PC these days so I have shadows enabled all the time.  Avatar shadows have always been slightly "off" because they start a short distance away from the feet, as if people are hovering about 15 cm above the ground.  I had always assumed that this was just part of SL - a graphics glitch or whatever.  Anyway I decided to look at the debug settings for shadows and played about with them a bit.  I found one debug setting named "RenderShadowBiasError" which had a small minus value.  I reset it to zero and guess what !!   My shadow began under my feet like in RL instead of starting a short distance away from them.

Then I decided to see if I could improve the shadows in the Egotherapy Club.  I experimented with one window section and changed the texture setting from "Alpha Blending" to "Alpha Masking" to see what effect it would have.  The transparent part of the window texture went black, not surprisingly.  But before I could change it back to transparent the whole building disappeared!  All that was left was the doors and various other items that weren't linked to the building.  I couldn't understand what had happened.  The first thing I did was check "Lost and Found" in my invo and there was the building.  So all I had to do was rez it and then position it exactly where it had been before. 

But . . . the building wouldn't rez because a message came up saying it would make the parcel too full.  This was the exact same club that had stood on this land a few seconds earlier.  Why wouldn't it rez?  It's not as if the prim allowance was used up before when the club was in place.  So I decided to go to a sandbox and rez the club there to see if I could find out what the problem was.  I managed to rez the club that was in "Lost and Found" complete with black window from my experiment.  Then I noticed it had a land impact of 3344 !!  When I changed the window back to "alpha blending" the land impact dropped to 168, the proper value.  So now I knew this, I was able to save the repaired club and rez it on my land and then spend about 20 minutes getting in back in exactly the right place !!     

So the last day of 2021 was not one of my best in SL but after 15 years here I'm still learning new things. 😊

Wishing you all a Happy 2022 

Edited January 1, 2022 by Conifer Dada

[Silent Mistwalker]

I am constantly changing from alpha blending to alpha masking (mainly plants) and have never had the change increase land impact on mesh objects. Sculpted and/or prim objects on the other hand...

 

You're better off with full mesh.

Edited January 1, 2022 by Silent Mistwalker

[Conifer Dada]

I was just fiddling about and I'm not even sure if I clicked to change to alpha masking on purpose - it just happened and then the club disappeared.  Anyway it's all back in place now.  If I was building a new club from scratch I might have a go with mesh but the existing one has evolved over several years and so I'm not in a hurry to alter it !!

Edited January 1, 2022 by Conifer Dada

[Tama Suki]

Maybe it will be useful to you.
You can rez an object or a collection of objects that is in your inventory in exactly the same position as it was before with a simple click.

[Randall Ahren]

3 hours ago, Conifer Dada said:

Anyway I decided to look at the debug settings for shadows and played about with them a bit.  I found one debug setting named "RenderShadowBiasError" which had a small minus value.  I reset it to zero and guess what !!   My shadow began under my feet like in RL instead of starting a short distance away from them.

RenderShadowBiasError did not have much effect for me. However, setting RenderShadowBias to zero did noticeably help with improving the appearance of shadows beginning at my feet instead of a short space away.

[Rolig Loon]

2 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

You can rez an object or a collection of objects that is in your inventory in exactly the same position as it was before with a simple click.

Only if you happen to be using Firestorm, and then only if you are allowed to rez objects at the <0,0,0> (Southwest) corner of the region.  When you use that Firestorm option, it tries to rez your object at the SW corner and then move it to its previous location.

[Conifer Dada]

2 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

Maybe it will be useful to you.
You can rez an object or a collection of objects that is in your inventory in exactly the same position as it was before with a simple click.

Thanks - I'll bear that in mind but I'm going to be very careful not to accidentally delete my club again !

I normally use the LL standard viewer which doesn't have the option to 'restore to last position' but do I use Firestorm for my OpenSim standalone.

 

 

Edited January 1, 2022 by Conifer Dada

[Tama Suki]

9 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Only if you happen to be using Firestorm, and then only if you are allowed to rez objects at the <0,0,0> (Southwest) corner of the region.  When you use that Firestorm option, it tries to rez your object at the SW corner and then move it to its previous location.

I don't know, for me rez the objects exactly where I built them and then took them back to the inventory.
I developed this function as a war strategy. I do an inspection of the battlefield before the fateful appointment that I made with a noble warrior and I place traps around which I then resume in the inventory and then during the fight I make them appear at the right moment.
I assure you that this technique has nothing dishonorable, something like this was also written in the book of the 5 rings by Miyamoto Musashi.

[Rolig Loon]

16 minutes ago, Tama Suki said:

I assure you that this technique has nothing dishonorable

Of course not.  It's a perfectly good function, but it is a special feature of the Firestorm viewer, not available in other viewers.  And, as I pointed out, it does have some technical limitations. If you are not allowed to rez at <0,0,0>, the function will fail.  Read https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/restore_last_position

Edited January 1, 2022 by Rolig Loon

[Tama Suki]

4 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Of course not.  It's a perfectly good function, but it is a special feature of the Firestorm viewer, not available in other viewers.  And, as I pointed out, it does have some technical limitations. If you are not allowed to rez at <0,0,0>, the function will fail.  Read https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/restore_last_position

Mmh. Understand. Rez right i guess they are granted in almost all sandboxes then. But so if one rents a parcel or a sim he should have the rez right I think.

[Maryanne Solo]

3 hours ago, Conifer Dada said:

Wow that's a lovely building!
Betchya can't do THAT in Meta. 
Spesh if ya got no legs. 😖

[Lindal Kidd]

@Conifer Dada. When you changed the alpha setting from blending to masking it (as you later found out) greatly increased the Land Impact of the club linkset. This caused it to exceed the parcel's capacity and it got auto-returned to your Lost and Found. So, don't worry that you simply deleted the club by mistake.

Now, how could that have happened? I could not find any information in the Wiki or elsewhere that would indicate the alpha mode has any effect on the LI calculation. Not only that, but one article (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alpha_Modes_Do's_and_Don'ts) specifically says that alpha masking is much less hard on your GPU than alpha blending! So, even if there was some sort of link there, you'd expect your change to decrease the land impact. But, as I said, there doesn't appear to be such a linkage, because the work of rendering alpha textures occurs client-side, not server-side, and thus does not play in the calulation of Land Impact.

The only thing I can think of is that somewhere in the process, you changed the Physics Type of the club, as well as changing the alpha mode. Physics Type is found in the Features tab of the Build menu. If you changed the type from None or Convex Hull to Prim, you could have greatly increased the land impact value. Or, if you changed the way the parts of the club were linked together, it could have had a similar effect.

If none of that happened, then maybe LL has been messing with the Land Impact calculation algorithm??

[Rolig Loon]

46 minutes ago, Tama Suki said:

Rez right i guess they are granted in almost all sandboxes then. But so if one rents a parcel or a sim he should have the rez right I think.

Right.  If you rent the entire region, you'd be fine.  In fact, you'd be fine as long as whoever does own the land at the SW corner has allowed anyone to rez stuff there.  That's why it usually works in a public sandbox.  By definition, a sandbox is a place where everyone has permission to rez anywhere.  The only problem would occur on a region where the landowner at the SW corner has blocked rezzing.  Then, it wouldn't make any difference whether you had a parcel somewhere else on the region or not. The function smply would fail.

[Quistess Alpha]

46 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

The function smply would fail.

Worse than simply failing, it tries without doing any sanity check, and if your thing you're rezzing is no-copy, SL might not return it to you if it's feeling grumpy that day.

[Jennifer Boyle]

5 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

Maybe it will be useful to you.
You can rez an object or a collection of objects that is in your inventory in exactly the same position as it was before with a simple click.

THANK YOU! That will save me so much time, not only when I get something returned because of a mistake, but doing things like decorating for Christmas.

ETA: Sadly, it turns out to be useless for me. I tried it out at my house. It didn't work. When I tried it, the system said, "Can't rez object at {0, 0 , 0} because the owner of this land does not allow it, Use the land tool to see land ownership." The land at the corner of the sim at 0, 0, 0 is owned by Governor Linden, the land group is LDPW, and building on it is restricted to group. Firestorm support says it only works when one has rez rights at 0,0,0. :((

Edited January 1, 2022 by Jennifer Boyle

[sirhc DeSantis]

15 years eh. I Still can't walk in a straight line so learning is for ever (you will always find me in the kitchen in RL too - mostly)

[animats]

2 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Now, how could that have happened? I could not find any information in the Wiki or elsewhere that would indicate the alpha mode has any effect on the LI calculation.

In the beginning, everything was alpha blending. Then came Materials. Materials include the ability to set alpha mode. So, there are "classic materials", with color and texture only,  and new materials (normals, specular, projectors, alpha mode, etc.). As soon as you use any feature of new materials, the "new land impact" calculation is used. Make a prim toroid (donut shape), it's 1 LI. Give it any material property, and it will go way up in LI as it switches to the new land impact calculation. That kept the introduction of materials from increasing the land impact of old objects. Only new objects that use at least one Materials feature.

Internally, the moment you do anything that involves materials, a block of data about materials becomes associated with the object. That data has to be downloaded from the sim via a separate HTTP request. So materials do make both sim server server and client do some extra work.

Edited January 1, 2022 by animats

[Lindal Kidd]

AHA!  The omniscient Animats comes through again! Thank you, sir. In my reading, I did see that bit about Materials properties, but nothing that explicitly said that using Materials affected the LI of an object.

[Jennifer Boyle]

I just learned something from the FS wiki that I think is very useful:

"You may wish to add a link to some or all of your Outfits.
There isn't a viewer option as such, but there is an easy way to do it.

1. Right click the item you want to add to an Outfit → select Copy.
2. Go to your Inventory Outfits folder. Select a number of Outfits using Shift+Select (will select all Outfits in a group)…
3. …or Ctrl+Select (will select only certain Outfits).
4. Press Ctrl+V to paste. (Do not right-click to paste; this will not work in this situation.)"

[Lindal Kidd]

Firestorm also has a find and replace links function. It's super useful when, say, a new version of your mesh head or body comes out and you want to update all your outfits that use that head or body.

[animats]

4 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Animats ...

This comes up regularly at Creator User Group, where there have been discussions of changing the land impact formula. The hard part is doing it in a way that doesn't break existing content by raising its LI and causing existing objects to be returned. That's much of why Project Arctan never happened.

[Silent Mistwalker]

22 hours ago, Conifer Dada said:

accidentally delete my club again !

Best way to prevent deleting the building itself again is to link it and lock it. This can be done in linked sets if your build exceeds the link limit or distance limit, but you have to lock each set.

Edited January 2, 2022 by Silent Mistwalker

[Doris Johnsky]

23 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Only if you happen to be using Firestorm, and then only if you are allowed to rez objects at the <0,0,0> (Southwest) corner of the region.  When you use that Firestorm option, it tries to rez your object at the SW corner and then move it to its previous location.

Mine doesn't. It puts it back exactly where it was.  I've deleted SEVERAL things by accident.  Including a skybox at 3K meters. 

Edited January 2, 2022 by Doris Johnsky

[Solar Legion]

The movement action that accompanies the Restore option is done so quickly that one does not notice it unless that corner is build locked.