ChinRey

Woops, I got this thread confused with another recent one. Corsica is still one of the most recent continents though (and Chic said "oldest", not "first" ) and it actually illustrates very well what happened to mainland continents towards the end. You can see how the LL land developers started in the west full of motivation and ambition and then gradually lost their heart as they worked their way eastwards.

The difference between the standard viewer and Firestorm is mainly the user interface. Under the hood they are pretty much the same. But as Rolig said, it's always a good idea to have more than one viewer anyway and you shuold try a few different ones to find out which you're most comfortable with (don't take anybody's advice at face value here, choice of viewer is very much a matter of personal preferences). As for the connection problems, the stats show a mildly overloaded sim. Not so much that it should cause connection problems but enough that we can't completely rule out the possibility that it is server side. The question is, does anything in aprticular happen in the sim right before you're logged out? Something that can cause big load peaks? Rebooting the router is still the first thing to try though.

That's only because there still is so much poorly made mesh out there. Good mesh will look good even at lower settings. And as Rolig said, increasing the LoD can seriously reduce any computer's performance. How much, depends on the surroundings, sometimes it's barely noticeable but sometimes it can reduce the frame time by as much as 50%, maybe even more. Or to put it another way: with LoD factor 4 you need a fairly high end game computer to get the same performance as you should have gotten out of a mid/low range desktop computer if it wasn't for crappy mesh makers. The problem with the skirt in the picture doesn't seem to have anything to do with LoD though. Pamela's probably right that the maker made it with flat rather than smooth normals, forcing him/her to use four times as many polys as necessary and still not get it smooth. We are not allowed to speak badly of any named person, creator or not. Complaining about poor makers in general is ok.

Can we? I know exactly how you feel btw. I'm afraid my solution is to stay away from SL as much as possible. I have to be there a few minutes a day to keep an eye on my rentals but once that is done, I log off as fast as I can. Every now and then I get struck by optimism and try to log on to get some work done or to have some fun. But there are so many people who want a little piece of Chin Rey and nobody give anything in return. Once I have handled the queue of IMs, all I have left for myself is frustration and I've probably forgotten what I logged on for anyway.

Sure. I was there earlier today. Assuming you are using the standard viewer, open rpefernces and int eh Advanced tab, check the "Show Grid Selection at Startup". Next time you launch the viewer you have a nice new grid selection menu on the startup screen.

There is a way to see which of your friends are online. Just log on to the Second Life website an check your friends lsit there.

No, they're not case sensitive.

That doesn't stop many others from making mesh. I'm sorry I missed this question until now. I'm actually familiar with that particular houses since we tried to use it on some sky paltforms at Coniston and yes, it does have faulty physics and also rather dodgy LoD. In the end I got so tired of it I just made my own 1 LI houses instead.

Yes, you want an applier HUD to apply clothing textures to a mesh body. If the body is modifiable, it is possible to change textures manually but it's not something you want to do since the HUD should be readily available. Omega developer kits with "blank" applier HUDs are quite cheap and most mesh body creators give away basic developer kits with blank appliers for free. But you also need the UUID for the texture you want to apply and that can be a bit tricky if you're talking about converting old system clothing. Unless you have full perm copies of the textures, the only legal way is to ask the creator and there's nto much chance they'll be willing or even able to help. As for the illegal ways, I hope you don't expect us to give advice about that on this forum. Let me jsut say that it used to be very easy but last year LL made a rather significant change and today it's a rather complicated process. It's not really worth the bother even if we ignore the legal aspect of it.

Should be fairly easy to find out if that is correct. Open the simplified "traffic light" perfomance panel and see if it's the connection ro the viewer that is slow.

3,252,872 triangles is a bit on the high side for an entire scene. The huge difference between 3D modelling in general and game/virtual world modelling is that in a dynamic environment the model has to share the available computing powers with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other items. Render time is also more critical. When you're working on a single static model, it doesn't matter too much if it takes a second or two to render. In a virtual world render time is measured in milliseconds. Ideally you want the fps (Frames - that is re-renders - per second) to be 40 or higher and definitely not lower than 20. When you're modelling for Second Life it's probably better to focus on triangle count than vertice count. The reason is that the way SL handles triangles is a bit shady so it's hard to predict how many you'll end up with after the build has been uploaded. It's impossible to give any exact answer how many triangles is acceptable of course but for a sofa... if we say for a background "space filler" sofa, 100 triangles, a more upfront part of the furniture 200-500 and for a centerpiece sofa that is the focal point fo the entire scene about 1000-2000 - that should get us into the right ballpark. Umm, you do use smooth normals, don't you? That'll save you a ton of vertices and triangles for something like a pillow.

It's hard to give an exact figure but I'd say that by normal advertising rates on the internet an ad on the MP front page should cost about 0.25 L$ for each time it is displayed, possibly less. The ad has to show up 400-500 times every day to match that. I haven't used enhanced listing for a while so I don't know what it is realistic to expect. Does anybody have any data about that?

As hard as it is to believe, Gaeta 5 is actually the newest finished continent, except for Zindra and the Linden Homes sims (if you count them as continents). It was supposed to be part of an archipelago of five large islands but LL's heart wasn't really in it. They finished island no. 5, did some half-hearted attempts at no.1 and then they lost interest.

You don't need a premium membership to rent a parcel. When you rent, somebody else is the "owner" of the land and you don't deal with Linden Lab directly so what kind of membership you have doesn't matter. You have to have a premium membership to own land on mainland. As far as I know, you don't need to be premium to own a private estate but private estates are only sold as full sims and that may be a bit too much for most people.

It can't be effective too. A few years ago I kind'a ... mentioned in passing ... to one of the best known good old plant makers in SL that while I truly admired his sculpt works, his meshes were way below par to put it mildly. He actually saw my poitn and agreed. The meshes he makes today is just as bad as they were back then. A few months later I had a similar talk with another of the best known good old etc. She didn't agree with me - not at all. So I spelled it out, explaining the hows and whys with all the gory details. She wasn't happy about that, I wouldn't even be surprised if she cired once or twice during that session. Today, well I won't say she's the best mesh plant maker in Second Life because there are so many great ones few people have heard of butamong those who sell well and make their meshes themselves, think she's in a class of her own.

I probably should have too but I'm jsut so sick and tired of all those fakers peddling their garbage on MP to unsuspecting buyers. I just don't bother being diplomatic about it anymore. Here's a message to everybody who make mesh in Second Life: Have fun, build whatever you want and always try to improve your skills, no matter how good or bad you are at it. But do not under any circumstance try to sell anything that forces whoever has to look at it to increase their viewer's LoD factor beyond a reasonable level. Because if it does, it isn't worth a single Linden Dollar and then charging is cheating.

I wouldn't recommend going higher than 1.25 and preferably not higher than 1. I can accept Chic's suggestion of 2 but never higher than that. The only function that LoD factor has, is to compensate for poor quality mesh and sculpts and it comes at a significant performance loss. Firestorm chose to go for a higher default value than the standard viewer and instead reduce the graphics laod by disabling other features. That may have made sense a few years ago when everybody were trying to figure out how to make mesh with no help or documentation from Linden Lab. Toay however, no reasonably competent contentcreator with any respect for themselves or their customers will sell mesh with faulty LoD. If you buy some of that garbage, demand a refund (you probably won't get it of course but you never know). and tell them to learn how to make mesh before they start charging money for it.

Yes but as unbelievable it may sound, there are bugs in the SL software. It is very unlikely but we can't completely rule out the possibility that the OP's land was bitten by one of those.

Obejct-Object Occlusion is that culling mechanism I mentioned that objects hidden behind other objects. Disabling it helps in a case like the one you had here since the furniture is never removed from the scen and don't have to be reloaded. But keeping track of all hidden objects can add a lot of work for the poor comuter so, as Arton said, you don't really want to do it as a permanent solution.

I've heard abut this RL thing. Is it any good?

If you want to try the paid-for enhanced listing options, go for the cheapest weekly payment option first. Keep a close watch on your sales figures and also on how many times your ad is actually displayed. It shouldn't take more than three or four days before you notice that it's just a waste of money and that'll give you plenty of time to cancel it before the next payment is due.

Yw. I think I'm going to follow up with a little bit (or maybe rather a big bit) of some basics that too few builders and users in Second Life seem to be aware of. A scene in Second Life is consists of big and small triangles. The ground of a sim is made from 131072 triangles, the sky is displayed on a screen made from several hundred triangles (and yes, that's far more than is actually necessary), each prim can have anything from eight (I think) to 1024 triangles, each sculpt has aproximately 1000 (exact numebr depends on stitching type), a mesh can have up to 174,752 of them (but fortunately it usually has far less). The bare system avatar has about 7000 triangles, add a fitted mesh body and mesh hands and feet and a few other "essential" attachments and we're talking several hunded thousand triangles for each avatar. It's very rare for a scene to have less than a milion triangles and it's not unsual with several millions of them. Ideally we want that scene to be redrawn 40 times a second or more and definitely not less than about 20. There is no computer in the world that can manage that. Fortunately the viewer has several mechanisms to simplify the scene. Objects outside the camera's view can be omited of course, that helps a lot. Objects hidden behind other objects are culled. That means the computer has to figure out exactly which objects are hidden - a bit of work but still well worth the effort. Objects that are 100% transparent are safe to ignore. Draw distance eliminates objects that are far away - hardly ideal but necessary. Second Life's culling mechanisms are rather crude and inefficient by modern standards but most of the time they do the job well enough. LoD is one of those culling mechanisms, it's the system the viewer uses to eliminate details that would have been too small to be noticeable anyway. By increasing the LoD factor, you bypass that mechanism, adding suprefluous triangles all over the scene. How many depends on several factors. In some scenes icnreasign the LoD factor hardly adds anything at all, but often doubling the LoD factor increases the number of active triangles by 20, 30, 40, even 50%. Unless the scene has some special complicating factors, any computer in Second Life should be able to handle 200,000 active triangles without too much problems. A good game computer should be able to handle 500,000, maybe even more. But the moment you're pushing the graphics processor beyond its comfort zone, its performance starts to drop at an accelrating rate and you don't have to overload it very much before you get serous problems with render failures (like the ones this thread started with) and/or frame rate dropping down to almost a standstill. Then there are those complicating factors. The graphics processor saves a lot of time and effort by reuising data from oen frame to the next. That's easy enough for things that don't move around very much but flexible triangles - the system avatar, fitted mesh and fleixprims - just won't stand still and their size, rotation position and shape have to be recalculated all the time. If I rememebr correctly, the render cost formula stipulates that a fitted mesh triangles add 1.2 times as much load as a static one. I think the actual number is a bit higher but in any case it's a significant load increase. Of course, the triangles has to be colored too, not just drawn. The graphics processor ahs to combine the data from the texture, from the various shaders, from the normals and from any extra surface maps the object may have to determine exactly what color each and every pixel on the screen should have. Some very rough numbers based on some very rough tests (if anybody have better data, please let us know!): 200-400 pixels worth of regular texture or specular map or 300-500 pixels of alpha texture or normal map equal one mesh triangle in terms or raw render load. But please note that these are very rough figures and also that there are a number of factors that may increase texture induced render load a lot. (For reference, a 1024x1024 texture has about a million pixels, a 512x512 a quarter of a million and a 256x256 65,536. You can do the rest of the math yourself ) Yes, I know that was a long lesson and a complicated one too even though I simplified it a lot. It is an important one though. You don't necessarily need to remember all those numbers but a basic understanding of what the poor graphics processor has to do and what can give it problems is eccential for anybody who wants to build efficient content for a virtual reality. Now, back to the start. In my first post I wrote that it might be the cpu, not the gpu that was causing problems in this case. The reason was that the scene seemed so simple. Even if the funriture was so overloaded with polys it would have looked solid in wireframe view, there still didn't seem to be enough triangles and textures to cause any gpu any serious problems. But I may have been wrong because I forgot taht there is an avatar in the picture and it's one that looks like it may have quite a lot of fitted mesh attached. Remember I said a mesh avatar can have several hundred thousand triangles? and that flexible triangles are harder on the gpu than static ones? With LoD factor 4 you force the gpu to handle pretty much everything ther at full LoD and although we need more testing to say for sure, there is some evidence that some of the other culling mechanisms are less effective for avatar attachments than for rezzed objects. I don't know for sure but I wouldn't actually rule out the possibility that the avatar alone puts so much laod ont he gpu it has problems handling the rest of the scene. It may be possible way to test that theory by switching Advaned Lighting Mode on and see if that fixes the render failure. Yes, I know that sounds illogical but try it if you want to.

That's the old style system hair hidden inside your avatar's head. In SL we're all hairbrained. Simply making hair base alpha isn't an ideal solution btw because if the hairbase is big enough to extend outside your avatar's head it can still interfere with anything you wear on your head. Better make sure all the sliders are set to zero too so you're sure it's small enough to stay inside your head.

Like everything else it's also a question of skills. Hattie Panacek or Ex Machina uses Substance Painter for all her textures and since she's very lag concious, she always tries to keep the resolution down. I doubt you'll find a single 1024x1024 on any of her works and yet her textures look absolutely gorgeous. She's in a class of her own when it comes to making every pixel in a baked texture count but we can all learn fromt he masters to improve out skills. The first step is what Klytyna told you: scale the textures to the size you are going to use before you upload it. I'm not sure how flexible Substance Painter is there but you probably want to save in twice or four times the resolution you want and then use an image editor, like Gimp, Photshop, Paint.net (if you're on a Windows copmuter) or GraphicConverter (if you're on a Mac) to scale it down. Programs like those offer several different ways to merge the pixel and which one you choose can make a huge difference. Then of course, just for the sake of completeness, do not use the jpeg file format, save either as png or tga for the final texture and always stick to lossless formats throughout the process. And make sure there are no rogue alphas.

The basic answer is that even if you try to deactivate the LoD system by increasing the LoD factor, your computer still has to find time to process all that data and the higher you set the LoD factor, the harder it'll have to work. When a object enters or re-enters the view, it is first rendered as a basic prim shape, then at the lowest LoD and upwards until it reaches the LoD level it's suppsoed to have. Usually this happens so fast you don't notice it but if the computer is too busy, it may take a while. Sometimes the process can even time out so you're stuck at a too low LoD level and the only solution is to force a reload the way Arton and Chic suggested. Reading your computer specs I suspect it is a cpu rather than a gpu issue in your case but the solution the same anyway: make proper LoD models and set your graphics prefs to something your computer can safely handle.