ChinRey

Nobody from Linden Lab ever reads or responds to questions here, Strigo. This is strictly a users-trying-to-help-other-users forum. If you want to contact Linden Lab about it you can open a support case. You find it under the Help tab at the top of this page. Don't hope for much though. Linden Lab very rarely interfere in disputes between users. Edit: I checked the Treasure Quest ToS and the violation you admit to is very clear there, right at the top of the page and in bold even. No matter how silly you think that rule is, you agreed to follow it the moment you joined the game. If you think about it, it's even easy to understand why they have that rule.

I really hope you have some good spyware and anti-virus programs on your computer. I did a quick Google search for: "coupons.com" safe (a very good trick if you're ever in doubt about a website btw) The search results were ambigious but the overall trend seems to be that coupons.com started as a relatively serious business but isn't anymore (although there was one tester who found soem really suspicious things as early as 2007). You should do as Alwin suggested and contact Linden Lab about it of course but I suspect they've never even heard about this offer. Edit: I had a second look at that page and noticed that those coupons don't use an official Second Life logo, there are no links to Second Life to be seen, for some reason it's always two hours since "A savvy Couponer used a promo code" and the offer is now only valid to January 31st. That's a whole carillon of alarm bells! Oh, and as Bobbie said, SL does have a genuine Premium discount offer every three or four months. Only for monthly subscriptions though and only for the first month.

Martine1988 wrote: Hi. How much do I have to make my ava so everyone can see me? 95000 now, and it says not all people can see me. That message is completely meaningless. I've done some tests an they often go like this: I get a message saying something like "Your avatar render cost is 29,000. You may not be rendered by everybody around you" when I'm all alone in the sim. Then I switch to another outfit and get the message "Your avatar render cost is 96,000. Everybody can see you now." So apparently all those fictional people around me have their viewers set to render a 96,000 ARC avatar but not a 29,000. I wonder what viewer you can do that with. Martine1988 wrote: But 95000 should be ok, not? Usually yes but there's no fixed limit. Keep it as low as you can, especially when you're in crowded places. Martine1988 wrote: I know it's the hair, because I am not really a fan of Mesh hair, because I think it looks dead. ) Yes i read the forum abot that) There's a huge difference in ARC between different flexihairs. Here are a few semi-random examples: It's worth noticing that the two really long hairstyles (pics 3 and 6) both have quite low ARC, and so does the really old one I found at Yadni's Junkyard (pic 2). Also notice the ARC difference between the two very similar ones in pics 4 and 5. The hair in the last picture has one of the highest ARCs even though it has fairly few flexiprims and I think that explains much of the difference. What that hair does have, is a lot of sculpts and it seems they can add just as much, or even more, than the flexiprims to old flexihairs. In other words, if you prefer flexihair you can still reduce your ARC a lot by choosing the right hair.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Now compare Second LIfe to another older, continuous online environment, World of Warcraft: Oh yes, it's certainly not an SL-only phenomena. Any online game/forum/whatever that doesn't manage to renew itself will decline. There is one crucial difference though. There are lots of more recent and modern MMORPG games but even today Second Life is the only thing that can possibly be regarded as a virtual world. All the other generic virtual realities I've ever heard of - existing ones, defunct ones and planned ones - are focusing on single stand-alone experiences. If Second Life dies, the whole idea of a continuous virtual world dies with it. After all is said and done, that's why I'm still here.

Not sure if it's the same problem but one thing I notice is that walking is much slower with the SL Viewer 5.0.0 than with earlier viewer versions and I also keep getting glitches when the viewer freezes for a fraction of a second and my avatar suddenly jumps back a couple of steps when the viewer starts working again. Seems like packet loss but according to the stats I don't have any of that. I haven't updated Firestorm yet and this is all very noticeable when I compare the two viewers directly. Running with SL 5.0.0 is actually slower than walking with Fs 4.7.9. There's no doubt that this is an issue with the latest version of the viewer since any server, connection or client hardware problems would also have affected Fs 4.7.9. I can't say whether this also affects the latest version of Fs. I don't dare to try it until I've tried it.

Most of my alts are named after, and even to some degree based on, characters from a novel I started writing but gave up. My junior "tester" alt, Storm, got her name when I looked out of my window.

Yes, me too but as Amethyst said, we're not going to get it. I do hope you remembered to cancel the tier (yes, you have to do that separately - abandoning land is not enough) before the payment was due though. If you didn't you will have to pay next month too.

Klytyna wrote: Classic culprits are: old trees, new trees by old tree makers, old grass, new grass by old grass makers... As a new tree and grass maker I think I have to thank you for mentioning this. I can't agree that what you say applies to all old plant makers though, nor can I say that all recent plant makers are lag concious. We don't know if the OP's lag issues have anything to do with plants but since you mention it, here are some important rules if you want to cover your parcel with dense vegetation: Alpha masking is essential. My grass fields have a setup script that allows the owner to (among many other things) switch between blending and masking and it's amazing how much difference that makes to the lag level. As a bonus alpha blending also eliminates the dreaded alpha bleeding problem. There is a downside though, alpha masking gives very sharp edges to the plants and can also look bad under low sun morning/evening windlights. Unfotunately there is no perfect solution here. Avoid old inefficient sculpts. No, not sculpts in general. A well made sculpt map is even today often a better solution than mesh for high poly organic shapes like plants and rocks. Unfortunately, three of the most popular sculpt generator tools of the past, Tatara, Prim Generator and Wings 3D are among the big offenders here, Prim Generator because it wastes so many ot the vertices, the other two because they create oversampled maps. Keep it simple. Yes, a dense forest made entirely from highly detailed individual trees can look absolutely wonderful but it comes with a huge cost both in terms of lag and land impact. Think paths and layers. Where are people likely to actually go? Keep the detailed feature plants close to those "paths" and use less laggy plants for the middle distance and background. Avoid meshes with poor LoD at any cost. No matter how careful we are, dense vegeatation will increase the render lag noticeably and that means it's essential to reduce other lag inducers to a minimum. I still think that nobody should buy or sell mesh that can't hold up with LoD factor set at 1. Some other makers feel that is a bit too strict but even so, if the mesh can't hold up even at LoD factor 2, stay away from it.

I don't know why but January is traditionally the month of complaint on the internet, been that way for as long as I've had a modem. It's coming to an end now though so how about trying to see it from a different angle and ask ourselves: what can we do about it?

Whirly Fizzle wrote: Firestorm never had streaming media (or streaming music) disabled by default, but it has always had media and music autoplay disabled by default. That setting hasn't changed Oh, I misremember then. Sorry. Whirly Fizzle wrote: Disabling autoplay by default was brought up at the TPV meeting a couple of weeks ago because of the problems it causes new users and LL thought it was a terrible idea. Yes, MoP is a bit of a Holy Cow for them, isn't it? Certainly a cow.

I'm afraid that it's your responsibility to keep you password safe from others, so don't take it for granted that you will get a refund. You can cancel the membership any time you like though. That won't stop it right away but it won't be automatically renewed. On the positive side: An annual membership costs 72 dollars and for the first year it comes with more than 60 dollars worth of Lindens in weekly stipend and signup bonus. If you keep those Lindens and exchange them once the premium has expired, you can recover most of your money eventually.

Monty Linden wrote: Sounds like 'Misson Control' on SomaFM. A favorite stream. That explains why I've had exactly the same problem with exactly the same stream several times. Media on a Prim is starting to become a serious problem in Second Life. What is the nice way for a landowner to tell their tenants "No, you can't have that lovely media player in your house, it's only for skyboxes and isolated sims."? And what about sims with several parcel owners? Any of the owners can cover a full sim with noise pollution without even knowing it. It's easy to tell people they can just find and block each player but it has to be done and redone every time one of the neighbors adds or replaces a player. Besides, I do believe most users come to SL for some kind of experience not for playing around with the viewer settings. Media on a Prim is of course a huge gift to griefers. If you can find a spot where you can rez, you can cover a whole sim's worth of land with noise. It's a gift to spammers too. Upload your spam video to some website, get a parcel within 100 m of some popular hangout and add an MoP player. You probably want a rezzer that automatically replaces the player with a new one every now and then so people can't block it. Don't like that club near your land? Rez a media player and drown out the DJ's stream with your choice of sound. Keep it up for a week or two (use temporary rezzed players like the spammers would) and voila! One less club in SL. The right solution would of course have been to allow MoP to be limited to a parcel the same way voice and parcel media is and I still don't understand why Linden Lab didn't see how important that feature would be. It's not as if they didn't know about the problem. There's at least one JIRA about it and judging by Oz Linden's replies to it, it seems they just didn't get the point. The second best solution would be to have MoP switched off by default. Then people who actually wanted to see/hear some MoP could switch it on and the ones who don't want it didn't have to bother with locating some well hidden viewer settings to get rid of it. Firestorm used to have MoP off by default and I'm sorry to see they've followed the official viewer's example here - it should have been the other way round. Edit: I completely forgot to mention the "coolest" of all the uses MoP has: Buy a plot in the middle of a Horizon sim and add an MoP player. Before you know it, you have the entire sim to yourself. Land flippers and rental businesses will probably hold on to their parcels for a long time but that's ok, nobody is ever going to buy or rent there anyway. An MoP a day keeps the neighbors away.

I don't know the procedure for that, I've only seen it mentioned occasionally on the forums. But you obviously have to open a support case, you can do it here: https://support.secondlife.com/create-case/ Support cases are processed within 24 hours and you will receive an email as soon as LL has looked at it. Once the sim is reopened, you have a limited time to get there and retrieve your belongings. Of course, there's no need to bother with it at all unless there are no-copy items or other items you don't have backups of in the sim.

DelilahRains wrote: Is there a limit to how many you can put up or is there a problem I am not aware of? There is a limit to how many unassociated folders you can have at any time. If that is the problem, the solution is simply to click on each unassociated folder in the Marketplace Listings window and select "Create listing".

Chic Aeon wrote: Along with Chin's comment on mainland and groups you could each also buy a 512 and then DONATE it to a group that you are both members of --- like a group you made for the purpose. That works too. Yes, that's what I'd normally recommend too since there's much less chance of accidentally clicking the wrong button and end up having to pay double tier for a month. But you can't use tier from two persons for a single land purchase that way. So unless you happen to find two adjacent 512 m2 plots to join, the only way is to donate tier first, then buy for group.

I really hope Madelaine's suspicion is wrong but if it is, you can ask Linden Lab to reopen the sims temporarily so you can retrieve any items you have rezzed there. You won't get back the land or the rent you paid back of course but at least you won't loose any of your belongings. But that's still the worst case scnario, let's hope it's just a temporary glitch.

I've been following this thread with interest but not participated in it until now. A coupe of stray comments in no particular order: Pamela Galli wrote:You don't know what you are talking about, as you would if you have watched the erratic behavior over the last few months. I think "erratic" is a very good description. Fluctuations are only to be expected but the overall pattern looks weird. It looks a bit like somebody's deliberately manipulating the market but the way it happens it's very hard to see how anybody can benefit significantly from it. I'm almost tempted to believe somebody is playing with the exchange rate for "fun". As Darrius pointed out in his blog, Linden Lab could actually have benefitted from an unstable market in the short term and it may be worth noticing that it all started around the time when they obviously had some serious cash flow issues. But the long term effect of such an operation would be negative and quite unpredictable. In a worst case scenario it might even had been the end of the company. I find it very hard to believe they were both desperate enough and cynical enough to try something like that. Monti Messmer wrote: But, no one has an interest in update it - one reason is that "new" games need alot PC power and lots of people on SL use, well, older hardware and they cannot/want not afford new. A bit off topic but a modern vritual reality doesn't necessarily need to have higher hardware requirements than Second Life. Andi Ghostaltar wrote: Sorry, my title may be a bit confusing. I'm talking about linden sellers on the linden exchange rather than marketplace sellers (one in the same really). I think Pamela already answered that but the two go together. Marketplace sales are in Linden dollars so the actual income from an MP store depends a lot on the exchange rate. Andi Ghostaltar wrote: Relying soley on sl for income is a huge risk seeing as its user base is declining. Yes, it's definitely not something that should be recommended to anybody today. But some merchants already have well established stores with a well established customer base and it makes a lot of sense for them to try to keep it going for as long as possible. Theresa Tennyson wrote: This makes it appear that Limit Sells are bought by SL residents whose orders won't show up on the market board and Limit Buys are bought directly from Linden Lab. That may well be the case. LL obviously needs a way to reguate the amount of L$ on the market. There are "natural" ways of doing this, money drains like upload fees, advertising fees and L$ locked away in inactive accounts and fresh supplies like premium stipends and LL's games with Linden prizes. Ideally these should balance each other out but that is never going to happen of course.

SunnyBeacon wrote: Hi. I'm returning with a new avatar after a few years away, and I forgot how land works. Welcome back SunnyBeacon wrote: I'd rather our house/store be on private land I think, as I have bad memories of mainland scenary, lag, neighbors, etc. The situation on Mainland is better now than it was a few years ago but it varies a lot. Some parts are still pure Hell, others can be quite nice. Unfortunately for you, the best Mainland neighborhoods are all themed in one way or another. There are places like Bay City where all the landowners agree to work together to create a conistent community and there are places like my own Coniston where a single landowner owns a large area and effectively runs it as a private estate. If all you want is a skybox, your best Mainland option is probably to find a location surrouned by abandoned land. SunnyBeacon wrote: I vaguely remember from years ago that it was better to sell/rent your mainland land and rent an estate plot somewhere. I can't remmeber how that all works, or if it's changed since then. The free tier that comes with a premium account can only be used on Mainland or for Linden Homes, not on private estates. I suppose the idea was that you could use the income from your Mainland parcel(s) to pay rent for a private estate plot but that's not likely to work anymore since the Second Life real estate market has more or less collapsed. If you try to rent out, you'll be struggling hard to find tenants and if you try to flip land - buy cheap sell at a profit - you'll struggle to find buyers. SunnyBeacon wrote: Can someone advise what our best course of action is for two premium members to end up with a 1024-2048sq/m estate? For an estate parcel? Just rent it. Rent from one of the big serious estate owners to minimize the risk of unpleasant surprises like sudden price increases and the sim closing down. But you have to be aware that even the most serious and reliable estate owner can't give you any guarantees how long you can keep a parcel that size. They can't afford to maintain half filled sims and once the number of tenants in a sim is too low, they have no choice but to evict the few remaining ones and close the sim. For Mainland: Create a group with only two members. Both members deed their tier to the group (and get a 10% tier bonus when they do). Then when you buy a plot, make absolutely sure you buy for the group and not for yourself.

Rabid Cheetah wrote: Using the Linden viewer. Suddenly, out of nowhere, music will start playing. On my parcel, not on my parcel. Not from clicking anything, and detecting sound sources via beacons isn't turning anything up. That sound a little bit strange but try to turn media sources beacons on and you should be able to locate the source(s). What you experience is a typical example of Linden Lab's biggest recent bodged blunder, the updated and downgraded Media on a Prim. An MoP player can be heard loud and clear for more than 100 m around, across parcel borders and even across sim borders and all sensible Second Life users should remember to switch Media off and keep it switched off. But are you saying you already tried that? I think there are some versions of some viewers that won't let you kill MoP no matter what you did but I'm not sure and I can't tell which it was. Edit: I did a quick check of the three viewer/OS combinations I use regularly: The essential kill-MoP function works well on the most recent version of the official viewer for Windows and also the 32 bit Firestorm 4.7.9. With the 64 bit Firestorm 5.0.1 for Mac MoP is not affected by the master volume but it should be possible to get rid of it by unchecking the Media checkbox.

Klytyna wrote: I suspect from a new user to sl pr perspective, that the autoblob feature was a damn mistake... I suspect that is the most well-founded suspicion I've ever seen or heard.

You need to open a support case and ask Linden Lab for help for that. Here's a link to the form: https://support.secondlife.com/create-case/

If yu can't find the menu Rolig mentioned, open Preferences, click on the Advanced tab and check the Show Gird Selection at login checkbox. Some people have reported problems with the password the first time they log on to the beta grid. If that happens, you ahve to open a support case and ask LL to correct it manually.

1x1x141 Digfoot wrote: These are MOTROCYCLE RIDING SIMS~ and tickets filed already with LL have stated we must reduce to below 10 on script time and be above 10 on spare time! NOTHING in either ticket said anything about texture lag. You're not asking about lag then but rather about script failures. As Rolig said, scripts don't usually cause lag because if the server is too busy it simply skips the scripts. That helps cutting down on lag but of course, the downside is that scripts fail to execute and that seems to be the problem for you. I say usually because even if a script itself may be low lag, some scripts can trigger actions that are laggy. 1x1x141 Digfoot wrote: I'm asking about the bubbles in Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U and what their colors mean. Could someone please explain what they mean to me, and if using this is a valuable tool for achieving what LL set forth for us? Unless there are lots of object updates going on all the time, it's unlikely that will help. Object updates come from the assets server network and those are completely different servers from the sim servers running scripts and such. But since you ask: Red: object is being fully updated - quite a lot of data is transferred from the assets server Blue: object is being partially updated - some new data is transferred, some old data retained Green: update is ending - a little bit of data is transferred, just check codes to confirm that all computers involved agree on what is actually in the sim. To get a quick overview of the sim server's load, type ctrl+shift+1 to bring up the Statistics window. Scroll down to the bottom of the list and click on Time to bring up the detailed list of frame times. The sim server works with "frames". It gives itself a to-do list of pending tasks and a time limit, a "frame time", for getting it all done before it starts on a new list. A healthy sim runs at aproximately 45 fps ("frames per second") so the server has about 22 ms (1/45th sec) to get everything done. If it runs out of time, it either has to reduce the fps (causing server side lag) or it has to skip some of the jobs (causing script failures since running scripts is always the first task it skips). Spare time is the time the server has left after all the work is done and before the next frame begins. You want a little bit of it in case some new tasks turn up (they always do) but 10 ms, that's almost half the total frame time and I don't think that's realistic. 5 may be a better goal. Before you look at the script time, you should check what else is keeping the server busy: Physics time can sometimes be a problem. Ideally it should be below 2 but in a sim with pathfinding objects or moving physical objects (like some vehicles are), it may well be much higher. Net time is another potential problem. That's the time the server spends communicating with other computers. Usually it's fairly low but it can skyrocket under certain circumstances. If object updates actually is a significant problem, much of the time used for that will show up here. Agent time is the time the server spends dealing with individual avatars. Expect 0.1-0.6 ms for each avatar in the region. Obviously, the more avatars there is, the higher the agent time will be but since these tasks stack farily well, more avatars means less frame time per avatar. Now, add up all the frame times except script time and spare time. If that sum is higher than 2 ms (and it is), it is not possible to achieve 10 ms script time and 10 ms spare time so I'm afraid the advice you got from LL is a bit misleading. Once you have checked all those frame times - and maybe found ways to shave off a little bit here and there right away - it's time to scroll up a little bit in the Statistics window and look at "Scripts run". That tells you how many of the scripts the server finds time to run. An example here: if it runs 10% of the scripts and Script time is 5 ms (fairly typical figures for an overloaded sim) it means the server would have needed about 50 ms Script time to run all the scripts and that is never ever going to happen of course. I don't think it's possible to reach 100% scripts run and that's not too critical anyway, scripts events skipped in one frame can often be fitted into the next. But if it's lower than 80% you must expect annoying glitches. If it's lower than 50% you're likely to have singificant problems.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: SL's userbase isn't fading. Here are the stats from gridsurvey.com A slow but relatively steady decline, a little bit ahead of and less steep than the decline in grid size, which is what one should expect. This is of course the number of accounts logged in, not the number of actual people. There are several reasons to believe that the amount of bots and mulitple alts logged on simultaneously increases but no reliable data of course so we don't know. Pussycat Catnap wrote: As to SL mainland... it's attraction has dropped for many over the years. It would be interesting to compare the decline of mainland to the decline of private sims. As I said in my previous post, I think it's about the same but with no recent statistics over abandoned land, there's jsut no way of knowing.

Klytyna wrote: The executive formerly known as Phil Linden comes up with the idea of starting SL 2, to put SL 1 out of bussiness, he goes to the bankers and they say... NO! High Fidelity was founded in April 2013, almost a year before Ebbe Altberg joined LL. The list of investors who invested 2.4 million dollars in the project that month includes Google and Linden Lab. Klytyna wrote: It's called Project Stupid for a reason, can you guess what that reason is? Yes, I have kind'a noticed that you're not exactly Sansar's biggest fan. What I don't understand though, is why you're so emotional about it. If you don't like it, stay away from it. Simple as that. If you are worried about the negative impact Sansar may have on Second Life, let's look at the facts: Sansar has been (barely) visible in the news twice, when it was first announced and recently when it seems to be close to release. On both those occasions the decline of Second Life slowed down a little bit for a while. That may have been a coincidence but there is certainly no indication that Sansar has reduced the interest in Second Life so far. As for development, Linden Lab has done a better - or at least less bad - job updating Second Life since 2014 than they have ever done before. Of course, you could argue that the resources spent on Sansar should have been used to create a "Second Life 2" instead. I think that would have been the ideal solution but let's face it, that option was lost long, long ago.