arabellajones
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Posts posted by arabellajones
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Just a minor update: I have seen one avatar with a reported complexity of around 2.5 Million!
Because of the hassles I had over changing compexity, I didn't bother trying the No Limit option and having a look.
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Am I correct that the distances for the LOD changes depend on the size of the object?
I know I have had simple mesh objects vanish at quite short distances. And I have sometimes uploaded the mesh with the Medium LOD set at the same level as high.
What really hurts are the incredibly complicated meshes some people use. I see that the Lindens are talking about how people should use normal maps to get the fine detail. That looks like being one of those very high-end skills that they think we all know. There's a hand-wave about using a high-res model to generate the normal map, but I've not seen anything about which programs might do it. Blender, I suppose, but they're not really communicating.
There's a bit too much "everyone knows" thinking in what the Lindens say
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I am wondering just how much of the hard-working talent is focused on Sansar...
The MLK Day suspension of support services was classed as "Maintenance". which is just wrong, but at least we got the reminder.
Monty, I remember meeting you a couple of times, in-world. The Lindens I have seen recently just aren't memorable.
They seek him here,
They seek him there.
Avatars seek him everywhere!
Is he in Sansar, or is he in... Well!
That damned elusive Linden swell.
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So nobody follows the official Win10 method? Is it different from the method used by previous versions of Windows? Is the last-installed-viewer approach something that works on all Windows versions?
(Yes, it may be different in Linux, but since the Linden viewer just doesn't run at all on my machine, I could care less.)
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That would cover the telescope example. I do know that scripts can set the camera position, many vehicles have scripting that does that. And then sometimes it gets lost at a sim crossing, and there seems to be no way of restoring the scripted cammera position, which seems very strange.
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And that's the cinematic solution, whether for a telescope or binoculars. At least they do have a magnified image in a movie. The real view never looks like the Hollywood version.
I was a bit surprised, the first time I used a pair of binoculars. Things were bigger. And that is the whole point.
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Is there any way for a script in an attachment to change a viewer setting?
I realise this could be horribly abusive, but there are some UI awkwardnesses. I am thinking of such things as a telescope attachment, which modifies the field of view in mouselook as an obvious example of such a use. What I have in mind is a less clunky control for the Max Complexity setting: instead of the short slider with a huge range, having a set of radio buttons.
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If can be hard to set a particular Maximum Complexity. It uses a slider with a high and messy granularity. You can't get a simple number such as "300,000" The step-size isn't a clean 1000 or 10000. It's annoying.
Some sliders have an alternative numeric input box, and the code for that seems to have a built-in maximu of 100,000. Is that enough? Not really, I have seen some mesh clothing below 10,000, but most Avatars I see are over 100,000
So set No Limit. This does work, but leaves you vulnerable to somebody wearing an attachment that aims to crash your graphics.
I have found an answer, which is a bit scary. I'd rather have a working numeric input option in Preferences. If you want to set a neat round number, you have to use the Debug settings.
Debug Setting: RenderAvatarMaxComplexity
This is what the slider changes, it's nothing wildly dangerous, but any time you want to change Debug settings you risk messing with the wrong entry. So be careful.
I would far rather have a proper numeric input box in Preferences, as an alternative to the slider.
300,000 is a far easier number to remember and use in a conversation that 295,442 (which I can only say is close to the number that the slider gives).
After I set the maximum this way. I have only seen one jelly doll, somebody at over 400,000, and I might be able to set it down at 200,000 without affecting many more people. I do hang around with Furries, and their Avatars can be a bit higher complexity than a human. It's quite possible for a furry to be lower complexity than a human.
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That new auto-update system looks like a good idea, simple, a bit of lag before starting a project, but all quite predictable.
Now all we need is an announcement of when it is actually working. Not yet, I assume.
I am a bit grumpy about the bizarre thinking that sometimes seems to come out of Linden Lab about content-creation. Good documentation will help us, and it will help future Lindens who get the job of fixing a problem.
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I was trying to figure out which animation in the Firestorm AO was overriding a Priority 4 animation I had made for a suitcase. The wildly swinging arms were turning it into a deadly weapon.
I checked the "Avatar Info"
A few animations, the built-in ones, were labelled with a name. The rest were using a string in UUID format set to all-zero, most recent to be run at the top of the list.
I can't run the SL viewer on my Linux machine, it just won't start. Every other viewer with a Linux version runs fine. I am told that the SL Viewer does the same thing by design.
I found another TPV that does return valid UUIDs for the label-string. It is better than nothing. Why they don't use the filename for an animation in your inventory, I just don't know. The problem, I discovered, was a non-Linden walk, full permissions, set to Priority 4. Of course, I couldn't directly test the Firestorm AO, but I could find links in my inventory.
I was told that this no-UUID feature had been done to stop copybotters. I am pretty sure that every viewer gets the UUID of an animation, rather than frame-by-frame updates of Avatar position, and once the viewer has the info, it is trivial for a copybot function to access it. So this excuse looks senseless.
And if the Animation Info doesn't tell you which animation is which, what's the point of even having it available?
Am I missing something, some sneaky trick, or do none of the programmers actually create or test Second Life content. I know a lot of people outside Linden Lab were involved in the Bento design and testing. How long before some random Linden breaks it?
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This 14-day policy does make some sense. But where is it documented?
Where is any of this documented?
I'm not sure that "Simon Says" is an adequate model for system documentation (and there are two different versions of the song anyway.)
Anyone who comes in, waving their arms, and pointing at some undocumented claim, allegedly made by a Linden, thet they can't link to, and that can't be found by a search engine, doesn't look very reliable to me.
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The Google Calendar page can still be found via the Google Calendar site, but it looks like an automatic version of the formerly embedded calendar that hasn't been swtched off. It hasn't matched the rolling restarts I've seen over the past few works, or which got announced on the new status system.
It doesn't seem a reliable source any more. And I have not found any link to it from any Second Life web page, but some people were pointing at it with glee as all the warning that anyone ever needed.
The lack of warning on the Status page, and from the Twitter account was pretty dumb.
If it was a security issue which didn't change the server version why was it only done to the RC channels? Is the rest of the Grid insecure? Though I don't think that any computer system can ever be 100% secure.
I got very annoyed about the uncritical thinking exhibited over these information sources I described what I had seen, why I didn't trust the sources they were pointing at, and I seemed to get surrounded by men claiming that Linden Lab was perfect, on sod all evidence.
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For me, the Visual Outfits system is essentially lipstick on a pig
I have a lot of outfits. but the Linden system is flat. Each outfit is a quasi-folder, but there's no way of organising outfits. You can do things with outfit names, but you're still scrolling through a big folder. Does adding pictures in the Outfits window change anything that matters?
I don't use the Outfits folder. I have a folder in my inventory, with sub-folders, that have useful names like "Aviation" and "Sailing". That "Aviation" folder could have subfolders for "Vintage" and "Airline" and "Fast Jet". And in the "Vintage" folder there might be different sets of outfits for "WW1" and "WW2". I set up the folder in the right place, get the set of clothes right, use the outfit save function to put the links intp a known place, and the copy and paste the links.
I like the idea of having a complete body, and then a whole range of clothing sets for that body, but I can see it getting a bit complicated/
The last time I tried to count them, I had reached 180 outfit-folders when I stopped.
Notoriously, Phillip Linden had just the one outfit, and needed help to update it. It doesn't much surprise me that the Outfits system with the range of clothes that customers use. The rest of the inventory has the folder hierarchy that microcomputers have been using since the days of 8-inch floppy disks.
Pictures? What'[s the point?
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Thanks for the warning, and trying things out. Yeah, that is a possibility.
Everything is working today, no problems.
It may have been something very simple, such as a mistyped filename that somebody at Linden Lab fixed, but they're so laconic that they make the Spartens look garrulous. If they did fix something, we'll never know.
And the same for Project Sansar. Though if some reports are accurate, that it depends on the latest VR headsets, I doubt I shall ever be able to use it. The hardware will be way beyond my budget and getting a sufficiently fast response from a server in the USA will require an internet that breaks the laws of physics.
I thought people who were talking about a 40ms ping time were talking about the reaction time of the servers, and that's a target they can do something about. But I have also seen that figure used as the upper limit for total round-trip time, with huge frame rates (which imply huge bandwidth). Thought it's possible that people are confused of the two different measurements.
Worst case: VR is going to be like 3DTV back in 2012-13, something that sells a lot of hardware, but flops for lack of content. And if that happens, how much have LL gambled on it? Can they afford to lose?
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They've done work on the web site.
The look of this particular part hasn't changed, except that the Opera Browser is showing everything: every word of every pop-up and drop-down, with no attempt at formatting.
I expect that none of us like changing web browser. We set them up to match our proferences. Although Opera does seem to be getting a little bit unusual.
I am not holding out much hope for improvement. The Shopping drop-down on the Dashboard still references XStreetSL for one option.
I don't know what it's like to work at LL, but I know of other SL-related groups that seem to want to imitate them, at a superficial level: things like a dependence on a customer-accessible JIRA.
“The best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”
On what I have seen over the years, LL feels uncreative and stagnant. Maybe it's a sustained communications failure, but it keeps happening. Sure, some people will be working on Project Sansar, but it's feeling a bit late for people to still not be talking about it.
This web problem, Opera works fine everywhere else I see. OK, if you want the latest streaming video, you have to use something else, but this web page isn't streaming video. Is testing that difficult?
If the Lindens can't cope with testing different web browsers, is Project Sansar going to be worth bothering with? They're not really doing anything to excite me.
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"But again, just wear all the avatars from the menu on after the other and you have everything nicely stored in your regular clothing folder, fully wearable and with all the right names. It takes a few minutes if you want to grab them all but you only have to do it once."
And this can be considered good UI design?
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There is a difference between something being known and something being publicised.
The Lindens don't, for instance, recommend people use the JIRA as a help resource
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One possinle awkwardness over a Clean Install is that there might be stuff you didn't want to lose, things like conversation logs.
My conversation logs are in /firestorm/arabellajones_resident/ and are .txt files. Simplest is just to copy all the stuff in .firestorm except the cache into another place. (It won't be .firestorm under Windows, but it will be a "hidden" folder, I expect.) I'm not sure how any bad stuff could do anything, not anything that has been delivered from Second Life, but I expect tedious detail from the usual suspects.
Point is, "Clean Install" doesn't mean you have to delete everything. The Viewer install process will look for those files, and if it doesn't see them where it expects, will create a new set with default settings.
The cache can be huge. Don't bother with keeping a copy of that.
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They've been doing this for thirteen years. That, I am told, was long enough for America to put a man on the Moon.
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Have a look for a file called "user_settings/colors.xml" that should be storing what you want to keep safe. There may be something more in the folder that has your user-name.
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Firestorm does have a back-up system for settings, but I don't know how well it handles debug settings.
I don't remember just how the folders are named on other operating systems, but my Linux box has .firestorm and ,firestorm_x64 in my Home folder. I vaguely recall Windows had settings and cache in different places. Anyway. there's a subfolder with my username that stores logs and some settings, other settings affect all users of the viewer, and maybe it's enough to back up everything except the actual cache.
So backups are possible, might include debug settings, but it looks as if the Lindens don't care enough to bother. I may write a shell script
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Some clothing items used by the Initial Outfits are very well made. For instance, a 40-fold reduction in complexity for a pair of boots, compared to something that looks similar in the Marketplace.
Unfortunately, not all of the outfits in the Library are easy to access.
Problem One: All the outfits in the Initial Outfits folder can be accessed through the "Choose an Avatar" menu option. (There are variations in the name with different TPVs, but they all seem similar enough to be recohnisable.) But that tool doesn't appear to use the name of outfits, and they all have names in the Library. Maybe you can recognise the face, but what if you want a text label, for example, "I'm using the Diesel Bill boots from the Library."
They're a nice pair of ordinary ankle boots, no big heels, no extra straps, and low complexity.
Oh, you right-clicked on them, and chose "Wear", and nothing happened. Should it? Try the Derrick shoes. Right click and wear works for them. What's the difference?
This is Problem Two. Some items you can get at without using the that "Choose an Avatar" tool. Some you can't.
People were telling me it was easy, and nothing they said worked did work.
It looks like a difference in item properties, specifically what copy permissions are set. The entry in the Library is owned by Alexandria Linden, and none of us users are Alexandria Linden. But some items are set so that Anyone can copy them, some are not. If that copy permission is there, I can do all the usual right-click things, and an accessible copy is made in the normal Inventory (the "Choose an Avatar" thing does the same for the whole outfit.)
Note that last sentence: whichever method you use, you end up with the same result.
So I can't see why there needs to be this difference inn the permission setting. OK, there might be a few items with different settings for the Next Owner, but however you get it out of the library, you're the Next Owner. All this choice of "Anyone: No Copy" seems to do it make life awkward.
It rather looks as if the "Choose an Avatar" tool behaves as if it were the owner.
I've given two examples. There are others. It looks as though the August 2016 outfits all have this problem
Without the names of the outfits visible in the "Choose an Avatar" tool it's trial and error finding the outfit with the right footware. It's about as useful as the foldername/filename for your editor being EMACS. (I remember it as "Eight Magabytes And Continuously Swapping" and there is some meaning buried there, but it's hardly obvious) OK, instead of EMACS, use vi. Or nano. All editors, but hardly obvious names. What, you're using icons on your desktop? Fine, so describe the picture... Voice or text, it doesn't matter. And you have no way of changing the icon, you're stuck with what the programmer chose. Good luck if you're colour blind.
Anyway, that's what the Lindens have ended up with. On some things they're worse than MS-DOS 2.11
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Restarts this morning, and actually taking place, yet Caleb is still saying there is no roll planned.
I can see that they're slightly different things, but it doesn't give me much hope for any useful improvement. That's twice we've had rolling restarts with no apparent change of code, and Calab apparently not knowing.
I shall stop before I provide a lengthy example of inappropriate content. Suffice it to say that I am English, and there were people at school who could give Johnny Rotten a run for his money. And I know abould that place in Austria.
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And they're doing main channel restarts anyway?
Don't you guys ever talk to each other?
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Ubuntu 16.04 No sound at all?
in Second Life Viewer
Posted
First check I do is to try playing a sound locally. but that's usually a more Windows-oriented check. Linux is far more reliable/ On the other hand, I have had a speaker fail.
I can't even get the SL viewer for Linux to run, and I was told, when I asked Support, that it was an unsupported beta, so I don't bpther with it. Firestorm and Cool VL Viewer both work fine. Their Linux versions just install and run