ChinRey

Optimized mesh, yes. But not always. In any case, render cost is not a factor in the land impact calculation, LI is all about how much load an items is presumed to add to LL's servers and connections, client-side load is completely ignored. In addition to that, the land impact calculation has some serious flaws. Those sky high physics weights attributed to some twisted prims is one of them. As far as I know, there is no indication those numbers reflect any actual physics load increase, nor is the phenomena mentioned anywhere in the HAVOK documentation. Another flaw is that it seems to give assets server load far too much significance compared to sim server load and bandwidth and that is the main reason why prim builds tend to end up with higher LI than similar mesh ones. Even so, yes, it is better than the old prim count.

Ummm... is there sex in SL? Why didn't anybody tell me before?

Oh yes, I agree her trees are well worth the money but it still wouldn't be fair to compare them to a much cheaper work by somebody else I may have posted something she once told me in private and that means I can't really give her name. Sorry.

It isn't. I was actually going to use a Nadine Reverie tree as an example of a good one but decided not to. Her trees are so expensive the price difference would have made it an unfair comparasion. Besides, as you say, she may not sell much but she is indeed famous and her prices are high enough she may well make a decent income from SL anyway. That reminds me of an important point I forgot: the trees in my pistures are in about the same price range.

Ok. I really thought those two pictures could speak for themselves but since you ask so nicely: Both trees are fairly detailed mesh trees. They are not elaborate feature items but nor are they "planar trees" as you call them. More to the point: their designs are of about the same complexity. The trees represent the overall quality of their respective makers very well. I do not know how long the two makers have been in SL but they are both old enough to have legacy names and they both started their businesses long before I entered Second Life. The maker of the first tree is one of the most prestigious names in SL landscaping. He has won several awards and you see his builds everywhere. The maker of the second tree has a small and faithful group of fans but she has never managed to catch the eye of the majority of SL users and I have yet to see any of her trees anywhere in SL except for at her store. This example is not unique. It is fairly typical of what you see in SL. Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any further questions.

How much ping time you should expect depends on where in the world you live, that is how far the signals between your computer and the server have to travel. 700 is way too much though, even in the most remote corner of the real world, you should be able to get it below 400. Does your computer have a firewall? That is the most common cause of excessive ping time. You need to set it up to exclude the SL viewer you use and also the slplugin.exe.

I could point out that you said "always" and "everywhere", in capital letters even, so a single example of the opposite is technically enough. But no, there are numerous examples like this. Both in SL and RL. I can list other examples but others have already started done that so let me ask you a question instead: When you buy something, do you always consider all alternatives and the pros and cons of each? That's what it takes for a free market to always favor quality. My favorite example how a free, unregulated market can work dates back to 19th century England. Some dairies discovered that you could make skimmed milk look like whole milk by adding a little bit of lead to it. Of course, that meant their customers were likely to die from lead poisining after a while and dead customers are usually not good customers. But it was still worth it and there was no law against it. So they did.

Oh yes. Unfortunately, shortsighted development has always been a trademark of Linden Lab. I hope and believe they've learned the lesson now that a rushed jo always takes more work in the long run. I've sen a lot of talk about backwards compatibility on this forum. How about forwards compatibility?

It would only work if the baked texture could be tiled though and I can't see how that can be possible for an avatar. Tiled seed texture will only give a marginal speed icnrease for the baking process and not affect the rendring at all. As for the performance cost of polys vs textures, I think we should put that into perxpective. I agree that for scene objects excessive numbers of resolutions of textures is the main cause of lag and it certainly adds a lot to avatar lag too. But even so: A scene with about 300,000 active static polys (active as in actually rendered on the screen) is moderately heavy to render. You don't really want to go much higher than that and fortunately we hardly ever do so the lag caused by gemoetry is usually less significant than the lag caused by textures. I use a Maitreya mesh body most of the time. It's a fairly low lag mesh body but it still has more than 300,000 polys all on its own. And since those are all dynamic polys, they are much harder for the gpu to manage than the ones wh just sit still and never move or change shape or size. Not all of those polys are active of course but enough of them are that they add significantly to the overall render cost of the scene.Three or four mesh avatars in a picture can easily add more to the gpu load than the entire scene they're in. With baked textures the polycount for mesh bodies can potentially be cut to a quarter of what it is today. Even if they retin separate layers for skin and clothes, it's still a 50% reduction of the polycount. That is a significant performance improvement.

Isn't that how SL always has worked? Seriously, I'm sure I'm not the only one who agrees with Penny that dynamically baked normal and specular maps would be absolutely wonderful. But can you imagine how much work it would take to debelop something like that? My head is spinning just thinking about it.

I think reducing lag is an actual demand from users.

Then you'll probably loose some money since LL charges you a 3.5% transaction fee every time you seell your Lindens for dollars. That is, it is actually possible to make money buying and seelling Lindens. If you work hard and both buy and sell at the best possible rates (best possible for you that is), you can easily make a dollar, maybe even two dollars, a month that way. Edit: What Alwin actually meant is thatyou are not allowed to sell Lindens unless Linden Lab has confirmed payment data for you. That is at some point you must have bouhgt something from them and paid with RL money. You only have to do that once though.

You will need to keep the listen handles permanently open to resize several unlinked items with a single dialog and please don't do that.

Are you using Firestorm? If so, did you clear your inventory cache? That's not the same as the regular one on that viewer.

Here is a mesh tree made by one of the best known and best selling plant makers in Second Life: Here is one by a maker who never really made it: Sorry about the dark pictures. I wasn't going to spend more time and effort than neccessary on this and I hope my point is clear enough.

You try to resize the sofa in your living room.

Are you speaking from experience there?

If it's my post you're referring to I should perhaps made myself a bit clearer. Customer ratings used to be a major factor for search ranking. They aren't anymore but that doesn't neccessarily mean they don't have any effect at all. I don't know if they do, sorry.

Yes and no. Second Life suffered from complacency, bad planning and poor organization for many years but they have started to get their act together. The change of personnel in 2014 (and I'm not only talking about the new CEO) helped a lot there and although things didn't change overnight, almost every big project they've launched since then has been better thought out and better executed than the previous. But the UI design and the insane tier cost are still major sore points that LL doesn't seem to have any answers to. You joined in 2009. LL has made several attempts to optimize performance since then and although not all of them have been successful, some have: 2013: Server side baking. A complete mess at first but once they got it right, it gave a significant performance boost. The effect didn't last of course but nobody could anticipate mesh avatars back then. 2013: Project Interesting. Complete disaster at first (this was still the old regime after all) but it eventually evolved into a serious improvement. 2014: CDN and html pipelining. That was the first project by the new management and an instant and permanent success. 2014: The big library update. Completely overlooked but perhaps the biggest single performance improvement in SL's history. 2016: Quick Graphics. Yes, they messed that one up badly but even in the sad state it is in now, for many it's still the reason they can log on to SL at all. 2016: Bento. Damage control rather than actual improvement but still important for performance. Imagine what would have happened if reckless merchants had kept coming up with crude hacks to add Bento like features. 2017: 64 bit viewer. Coming soon 2017: Server side texture baking for meshes. That one may backfire but hopefully not. All the time - and most important: Constant tweaks under the hood. You only hear about them in Caleb's weekly deployment messages but they add up to far more than any big project. Seems LL is finally beginning to learn the lesson that true progress always comes from evolution, not revolution. I still think it is too little and too late to save SL in the long run. LL had to learn strategic planning and consequence analyzis from scratch and there are so many bad habits to break and so many skeletons to clean out of the closet. All that takes a lot of time and effort. But at least the improvements they are implementing should prolong SL's life singificantly and you certainly can't say they haven't done a single performance optimization.

I don't know who spends more but I know I spend too much.

Might be better to rent a small market stall than an ad board. It doesn't have to cost more, it's much more visible and you may even sell an item or two there every now and then.

Oh yes but Linden Realms is still the second best LL game, only beaten by Pyri Peaks.

Fair enough. The way I (or rather my scripter alt) handle situations like this is that I always make sure we've agreed about the permissions in advance. Both buyer and seller are equally responsible there and it only takes a few seconds of chat so it's no big deal.

Nobody here has any idea whatsoever what you mean by that of course. But since you mention it, there is this rumour that your chances for getting a positive response depends on which Linden has your case. An experienced Mainland landowner once told me to always file support cases at certain times of the day when there was a better chance they would be assigned to a "friendly" Linden. I don't think this is true anymore and if it ever was, it was because some of the old Lindens loved Mainland too much, so much they tended to be a bit ... overprotective is perhaps the right word.

No, that is not possible. You can keep collecting crystals for Lindens as long as you like but if you want to play the whole game more than once you have to create a new alt for each time.