Ardy Lay

Un-Deliverable Packet? Yeah, I know the Internet uses "best effort" algorithms to deliver most traffic. "Best-Effort" traffic is pretty much the first to be discarded when a queue's capacity is exceeded, and that happens constantly on the very "bursty" Internet. I am very much aware of this as I have been forced to resort to leased Ethernet private lines to connect remote sites. No amount of VPN and "predictive algorithms" and "forward error correction" applied by the person previously doing this work had been successful at getting the UDP data through intact. When you are dealing with real-time, live, audio and video transport and don't have the luxury of delaying delivery until the lost packets can be resent, as is done with "reliable" UDP transports like SRT, you find other ways to succeed, or you fail. End-to-end QoS is only available on "engineered paths" that currently cost more than "private lines". Sometimes the simplest solution is the one that works. You can take that both ways. Zal's tactlessly delivered missive has some evidence that they have "been there, done that", at least theoretically. I once got angry at being ignored on the same topic and rezzed a commercially available avatar head on the floor to demonstrate the problems caused when update traffic is sent to many agents. One seemingly benign object was scripted with texture and geometry changes in such a way as to generate many "full updates" per second. Multiply that by the number of agents present and BOOM, outbound network traffic volume increased to saturation at the simulator, and there were only 40 main agents and 12 child agents at the time. I later repeated the deed using the same object and saturated a simulator with only 25 agents present, but it took slightly longer for people to realize something wasn't right. There are many details to consider. Most people have a tendency to preach their pet problem or solution as the truth, but I suspect that, with all the various capabilities of client devices and network paths being used, multiple solutions will have to be implemented as none will remove all the causes the way my one solution removed the one cause on my point-to-point application.

I am getting too old for this sort of workflow multiplicity. Perhaps there should be a warning: "Don't bother remembering how this works because it will never be required of or available to you again." I don't know. Maybe that's okay these days. So much of the stuff I have had to learn over the years is much more difficult for me now because someone put a "wrapper" around it that I don't understand so now I cannot do what I have learned without breaking stuff for the people that only learned the wrapper.

See BYOIPv4. Maybe Linden Lab has some? Oh, looks like LL was using addresses belonging to Level 3 and Metronet. Ow.

I am reading network equipment documentation about Quality-of-Service configurations and keep finding myself wondering about the terminology used. For example, why is "Best-Effort" used to describe the traffic class that gets the worst service?

I just tell them to grow all their own food. They either go away or say something weak like "That's different!"

Hmm, there's Windows Defender Firewall, which is not what was mentioned, and there is Windows Security, which does allow exclusions: I do not have any exclusions defined and I do not have any of the symptoms people keep saying are caused by not having exclusions defined. I suspect those symptoms appear if the hardware takes longer to do things than mine does. By many people's standards, I spend an insane amount of money on hardware.

Runs fine on my computer with Windows 11. When I am having issues, I look at the forum and so are other people, so I just chill for a while as the world burns or whatever then try again later. Now, "runs fine" doesn't mean I am perfectly happy with what I consider "bugs", but, I tend to write bug reports then forget them.

Windows 11 indicates Second Life Viewer is not HDR content. I thought it was.

Wow. I came back and looked at my post with a machine that doesn't do HDR at all and ... oh wow. Yeah, that snapshot is HOT with color on it. I am going to have to keep this in mind. My snapshots are TOO POWERFUL! Oh well. I am a cartoon character, after all.

We can finally properly model darkness as a lack of light.

This is usually what I do but I am also spending most of my time or parcels where I set the environment. It sure doesn't hurt to try. Do make some effort to adjust your display for good contrast and color and look at some calibration samples before judging Second Life rendering. I find that most of the computers I have been asked to fix have been monkeyed with to not stress unprotected old eyeballs on white web pages.

Hmm, perhaps I should increase the size of the "Disk cache." Texture memory: 15296MBDisk cache: Max size 1638.4 MB (100.0% used) Oh, I see. It's set to 4096MB and just hasn't gotten there yet or has purged textures that haven't been used for a bit.

I should probably add that I am not using your monitor to view Second Life. I am using my monitor. That can make a huge difference! This setting is very colorful. Like, it's Kodachrome advertisement colorful, and that is quite deliberate. I use a monitor rated for HDR-1000 that has been color-calibrated recently. It looks so good compared to what I was using that the old monitors got relegated to back-office work.

I don't feel like I am having troubles with it. Second Life Release 7.0.0.580782 (64bit) Release Notes You are at 217.1, 168.2, 61.6 in Lusk located at simhost-0492fe10b030d1133.agni SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lusk/217/168/62 (global coordinates 255,705.0, 256,680.0, 61.6) Second Life Server 2023-06-09.580543 Release Notes CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K (2995.2 MHz) Memory: 32509 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10/11 64-bit (Build 22621.1992) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/PCIe/SSE2 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 31.0.15.3168 OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 531.68 Window size: 1919x1169 Font Size Adjustment: 96pt UI Scaling: 1 Draw distance: 64m Bandwidth: 10000kbit/s LOD factor: 4 Render quality: 5 Advanced Lighting Model: Enabled Texture memory: 15296MB Disk cache: Max size 1638.4 MB (100.0% used) J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.4 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.02.13 Dullahan: 1.12.4.202209142021 CEF: 91.1.21+g9dd45fe+chromium-91.0.4472.114 Chromium: 91.0.4472.114 LibVLC Version: 3.0.16 Voice Server Version: Not Connected Packets Lost: 2/5,319 (0.0%) July 25 2023 15:27:26

loupe vision It's like tunnel vision in that one focuses so much they miss what others are seeing. It's a hazard to oneself in many ways. In the real world a jeweler can die in a fire when perfecting a piece of jewelry. In Second Life, perfection is often the enemy of usable.

Dark at mid-day? Really? I don't see that at all, unless I have shadows enabled and I am in deep shade, like, in a house or under a huge tree or under a rock. What's the dynamic range of PBR compared to what we have in older viewers? I am seeing that the dynamic range seems to be much greater. Sunlight is BRIGHT, except where it doesn't fall. The inside of a sealed box is dark at Noon, if shadows are enabled. The irrational background illumination on all objects from all directions is apparently gone, as it should be. Script those local light to shut off when the Sun is up to lessen the burden. I love messing with people that override environment to Midnight then complain about the darkness! Where it's dark, add a light source. Where it's cold, wear appropriate clothing.

In this world of meaningless and superfluous standards, maybe we should create one more? The render cost scale to rule them all! Uhm, never mind that. There is already a comic about it. I just use the avatar render time chart to know that my friends whom I want to see have the avatars that take the longest to render, and, thus, I do nothing about it. Well, I did spend a few thousand U.S. Dollars to build a new computer for the sole purpose of running Second Life on it, but, silly me got a curved 5120 x 1440 display for the GTX 4080 and SL won't let me "zoom out" because it already has a 180 degree field of view at that aspect ratio. Also, the Intel i9-13900k is bored and loafing most of the time. When the camera moves about there is a flurry of CPU activity when the worker threads discover all those idle cores and go nuts sucking down lots-O-watts for brief moments.

Is all this hooliganism in mesh attachments why some of them delete themselves when rezzed on the ground for inspection?

The quantity of time required to render my avatar on my computer is varying from 63 to 120 microseconds, without me moving the camera. There are 4 avatars here dancing. Until you know that my computer is an Intel i9-13900k with an NVidia RTX 4080 GPU that time doesn't mean anything to you. It might still not mean much. When I move to another region and sit on a pillow it takes a few more microseconds to render my avatar.

I use LL's viewer. It displays how long the rendering each avatar in the scene takes, in microseconds, and has a setting to not render avatars that have taken over a set amount of time. Not sure how it might decide to again render an avatar if they reduce their complexity so they will take less than the limit time to render. Is this some of Beq's work contributed upstream?

I remember a wild ride when a bug-fix to LSL caused a widely deployed vendor script to reset over and over. The script was written to be reset by an unfiltered llChanged event. The script changed the texture applied to the object it was in to indicate to users that the vendor was temporarily out of service while the script was resetting and loading product information.

Sorry about the poor image quality. The computer I used to capture them doesn't have a real GPU. Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Wait for this guy to load completely. Step 4: Load your own saved outfit. For example, Leonard is selected here. This is Leonard:

An un-punished crime... If there is no enforcement, then there is no correction. Currently the creators of this stuff think they are in charge. Next time some ass tells me to "Crank up the volume LOD!" I am gonna... I am going to .... what? What can I do? Not buy their crazy? Too late. They already got my money and won't give it back because I am failing to follow instructions. "Leave a negative review" doesn't work either because they get those removed and reviews with details don't work anyway because so many people have been sucking down the rhetoric that states that Linden Lab doesn't know what they are doing, use (third party viewer) and these special settings to fix all that stuff Linden Lab cannot fix. It's really a big mess. I think I should be able to submit a report to a special task force that takes these items, examines them, then SPANKS the item's creators for a period of time and with intensity proportionate to their crimes! Uhm, some of them would probably like that though.

Can each instance have a unique cached texture header index yet share the texture particle files for data beyond byte 600 in each encoded texture? I have often wondered if the texture header index for the first 600 bytes of each texture really improves anything. I remember having to slog through that when asked to test Second Life Viewer caches for corruption in the textures. I had to assemble the things from the index file and the particle files then pipe them to a reference decoder then gather the resulting errors and warnings to give developers a list of textures that the current build was corrupting. That was some bug-hunt. Maybe the texture cache doesn't even do that dance now. I haven't checked recently.