ChinRey

Spibe wrote: Is there a lag-free viewer? A lag free sim? A grid that's directly related to SL? No, no and no. Spibe wrote: I use the default viewer for uploading mesh. I was wondering if there is anything better? The uploader is the same for all viewers, except some third party viewers have reduced upload functionality for various reasons. Spibe wrote: I was wondering if there are any methods to reduce crashing, and actually get the models to load. I can't seem to get them to the point where I can see their preview picture. How many triangles and vertices does your model have?

I don't think I can recommend specific rental groups here but search for skybox on the Marketplace and look in the Real Estate category and you'll find lots. The problem is to find a serious rental business, lots of shady operators here. Can't help you there, sorry. I do know that the one that has some of their skyboxes right next to my land in Windermere is a serious one but I can't mention names of course and besides, that's just one of the good ones.

wherorangi wrote: not like in the golden days when the realms was in beta. Could make about 380L a hour then Wow! 48 is the best I've managed so far. 40 is fairly easy but I think you need a bit of luck to get much more than that. Still, lots of people keep their SL and RL money separate for various reasons and you can make enough to rent a nice little house and buy the things you need with Linden Realms money. I'm beginning to think this is a better option than those fishing games people are playing. It's certainly more fun.

Drongle McMahon wrote: and bugs have to have much higher priority. Of course! It wouldn't really be SL without the bugs, would it?

Alt is short for alternative account or something like that. You are allowed to have more than one account in SL and each account is treated as a separate person. There is a limit to how many alts you are allowed to have, I think the maximum is five for each household, but if you really need more you can ask LL for permission to have them. There are several reasons why people may want to have alts. Role players may want to have several separate characters, builders and scripters need alts to test how their builds and scripts work for other people, merchants may want to have separate private and business accounts and so on.

An alternative to the method Theresa and Rolig suggested is to simply launch two different viewers. The only real limits are how much load your computer can handle and, of course, how many alts you are allowed to have. Somebody ocne told me in a group I'm in that he had logged on more than a hundred alts at the same time from a single computer, using the Radegast lightweight viewer. Those were bots of course, not manually controlled alts but that only increased the load on the client.

Drongle McMahon wrote: Instead, I am pretty sure you mean it introduces the resource consumption effects that would have caused increased LI and render cost if the calculation didn't ignore it. Just trying to resolve this slight ambiguity. Yes, of course. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Drongle McMahon wrote: *ETA Yes CTS-631, but that's an old mesh beta one, in discontinued jira section, June 2011. I don't suppose many will be able to see it, and I can't see a way to change it's visibility. Can you tell us why it was rejected? Didn't they see the need for it or was it too difficult to implement?

Penny Patton wrote: Ideally, the lowest LOD levels should be far enough away from the person viewing them, that they don't notice that your super detailed victorian table lamp is reduced to a pair of cubes. The real problem here is of course that it isn't. Contrary to what Immy said early in this thread, LoD models aren't that common in 3D design and when they are used, LoD factor is set individually for each object. The SL system with four LoD visual models and fixed universal switch points was made for prims and it is really only suitable for prims. Its application for sculpts and mesh is nothing but a crude hack really. Penny Patton wrote: As a side note, this is also why mesh increases in LI cost the larger you make it. Because it holds it's higher LOD states over larger distances. Yes, and that brings me to one objection to the LoD factor system I haven't mentioned before. One of the most important factors in both the Li and the render cost calculation is an estimate how often each LoD model is needed. The LoD factor skews this estimate so what you essentially do is bypass the calculations and induce higher LI and render cost than the nominal ones.

Chic Aeon wrote: That better quality at the same LI is true in some situations but not in all. I've yet to see an example where LoD butchery was necessary. There are so many other non-destructive ways to reduce LI. I mentioned a few of them in an earlier post, weight balancing and compressability are perhaps the most important on that list. They can have huge impact on LI yet very few builders seem to recognize how effective these techniques are. I don't use impostor faces very often myself since it's not that suitable for the kind of builds I do. But if you make items where you don't expect the user to retexture it can give a huge LI reduction, much better than increased LoD factor and once you have that, the LoD factor simply isn't relevant anymore. Another question is of course, how important is LI reduction today anyway? The limit was set back in the early days of SL when all you had to build with was prims. Today, with good content optimization and effective use of all the building materials and techniques we have at hand you should run out of space on your land long before you run out of prims.

counttopotato wrote: I am assuming this is to bump up traffic figures to get on to the destinations list. Is this permitted? No, traffic bots are not allowed. All bots have to be registered as "scripted agents" so they can be excluded from the traffic count. But as Nova said, how do you know they are traffic bots? Yes, it's hard to imagine what else 21 invisible bots hovering in the air could be but we don't know for sure. They may not even be bots at all. They may be people trying to get away from the lag on the ground. Or they may be traffic alts. As far as I know it's not illegal to get people to park an alt or two at your sim to increase traffic, if only because such a rule would be impossible to enforce. You can file an abuse report about it and let LL sort it out if they want to and have time.

Chic Aeon wrote: I personally feel that is unfair to the folks that actually have purchased good computers so that they can enjoy Second Life as it can be experienced. Those folks would then be penalized with high land impact. But they don't gain anything from it, Chic. I've yet to see a single mesh requiring increased LoD factor that couldn't have been optimized for LoD 1 with little or no LI increase. All that extra power is used not to improve the visual quality but to compensate for poorly optimized content. Quite often optimization would not only have improved LoD but also reduced LI because it's not about reducing the quality, it's all about getting more for the same "price" by reducing the overhead. I have two pictures (well, I haven't actually taken them but I could) that would have illustrated this very well. Unfortunately I can't post them here since the creators would have been too easy to identify. But it's two quite popular town houses you can see all over SL, very similar in style, exactly the same size and everything but, of course, one with horrible and one with excellent LoD. The one with good LoD also has lower LI and lower render weight and when you compare them side by side, it also looks noticeably better with far more detail both in the mesh and the texturing. Sorry about the awkward description. A picture or two would have said more than a thousand words but in this case pictures are not allowed. I hope I made my point clear though and it is not a unique example in any way. You can make similar comparisons many places in SL.

entity0x wrote: Any shortcoming in this part will be due to lack of documentation and support (and tips from LL) to meet these LOD expectations. I don't think they have that documentation themselves actually. The Linden in charge of developing the mesh software quit shortly afterwards and before he documented his work (and the code obviously includes quite a lot of peculiar shortcuts and other unusual solutions), his boss doesn't work here anymore and his boss' boss doesn't work here anymore. It's quite telling that the Moles were very slow to learn mesh and if anybody had access to the docs, they would. (They've produced some excellent mesh recently but it took them a while to figure it out.) entity0x wrote: Drongle is the only guy so far I have seen to explain this in detail very well. Don't forget Aquila and Arton! And many other contributors on this forum and in-world too! entity0x wrote: I'm all for learning about how to optimize and upload my meshes for SL. First step is of course to remove superfluous vertices from the main model. I know you know that already but it's amazing how often you see even perfectly flat and even surfaces split up into countless triangles. Usually it's because the mesh was made from a grid and then the maker didn't remove the unnecessary vertices before uploading. Next step is to make the LoD models manually but you already know that too. The uploader's simplification algorithm, GLOD (Geometric Level of Detail) uses triangle decimation which is totally unsuitable for any 3D modelling purpose. Even the far better vertice decimation algorithms used by Blender and MeshLab and, in a very simplified way, by inworld converters like Mesh Studio and Mesh Generator, can only help you a little bit of the way. Even the most inexperienced mesh maker can easily improve on the result they provide with manual editing. Third step: Know the switch points - the theoretical distances the various LoD models are applied at. You really want to do some testing on the beta grid for that (tip: use the ctrl-0 function to scale up the view to see the switch points better) but if you don't mind a little bit of math, SL uses three slightly different formulas. If I remember correctly, they are: M=L*0.48*√(x²+y²+z²) M=L*0.6*√(x²+y²+z²) M=L*0.48*√(x²+y²) Formula 1 is used for cube and pyramid prims and for meshes with more than four faces Formula 2 is used for sphere, torus, ring and tube prims, for sculpts and (I think) meshes with less than three faces Formula 3 is used for cylinder prims and for meshes with three or four faces. It's possible the constant should be 0.6 rather than 0.48 there. M is the switch point between the high and mid resolution models, L is the LoD factor (we want that to be 1 of course ) and x, y and z are the dimensions along the three axises. It's very important to note that Formula 3 ignores z dimension. This was probably a deliberate feature for cylinder prims and definitely a bug for three and four face meshes. Medium-to-low switch point is four times and low-to-lowest eight times M. It looks complicated but I have entered the formula into a spreadsheet once and for all and now I just have to type in the dimensions and get the result right away. I still check every single mesh on the beta grid though. You can't really tell exactly what will work before you've seen it. Once you've got all of that, it's up to you to decide which details are actually necessary for each LoD model. Download weight - one of the three factors determining LI - is calculated separately for each LoD model according to the model's file size and an estimate how often that particular model will be needed. That means that the lower LoD models are the most significant LI increasers for small objects while the higher models become increasingly significant the larger the object is. LoD models with switch points beyond 128 m, default draw distance, hardly add any download weight at all. That's the LoD issue. There are several techniques to reduce LI not directly related to LoD. Smooth normals can be very important. As the name implies, they allow you to get much smoother curved surfaces with fewer triangles and that is always useful. Many mesh experts also recommend you use smooth normals as much as possible elsewhere since in theory they always give lower download weight than flat ones. That isn't always the case though. I don't know why but sometimes you actually get lower weight with flat than smooth normals and in any case, smooth normals sometimes require you to add more detail to the LoD models to avoid sudden jumps in the shading and when that happens they can backfire badly. The download weight is determined from the size of compressed files, not raw data and you can reduce it a lot by making the model as easy to handle for the compression algorithm as possible. This is where we getting into the Black Art of Content Optimization and I can't really explain all the principles in a fairly short forum post but a little bit of thinking can get you a long way here. Let's say for example you have one vertice with the x coordinate 1.0000 and one with the coordinates 1.001. Move them to exactly the same position along that axis and the the file becomes a little bit more compressable. Do that consistently (on the UV map too, not just on the mesh model) and you can often shave off 10-20% of the download weight. Except every now and then it backfires - SL is supposed to defy all logic after all. Intelligent splitting of a mesh helps a lot to reduce download weight. Generally (but not always), the more meshes you split a model into, the lower the total download weight. Splitting increases server weight though (see below). You should be especially careful combining small and big triangles into a single mesh. Size and the total number of triangles are both important factors and with several small triangles and a few big ones you get the worst of both. Download weight is just one of the three factors that can determine the LI. The other two are physics weight and server weight. It is very important to realize that it is only the highest of these three weights that counts. It just doesn't matter how you make those LoD models and how you optimize for lower download weight if it's already lower than one of the other two. The finer points of physics weight optimization is again part of the Black Art, sorry. But I suppose most mesh makers know that very often all you need is a cube. Very simple physics and only 0.360 weight. Server weight is very easy to calculate, 0.5 for each part in the linkset plus about 0.2-0.3 for each active script. And that brings me to the final tip for now: weight balancing. Physics weight is completely independent of the others so there's not much we can do there but there is a very useful way to balance the two other weights for the lowest possible LI: splitting the mesh. Two relatively simple meshes have twice the server weight but usually lower combined download weight than they would have if they were merged into a single more complex one. You can save a tremendous amount of LI by finding the sweet spot where those two weights are approximately the same.

Rolig Loon wrote: That's why I said that Linden Lab's default of 1.25 is "ridiculously low." It's a worthy ideal, but it's not realistic for SL today. ... A more realistic default in this world of amateur modelers would have been something like 2.5. (Sorry to cut up your post that way, Rolig) There's a dilemma there. All those numbers, LI, LoD and render weight/render complexity are really about lag and subsequently the requirements for being able to use Second Life effectively at all. Most people who are interested in using Second Life for their creativity - or for some other purpose - are not willing and able to spend a grand every two years on hardware they have no other use for. And very few need that kind of graphics power for other purposes. Yes, I'm very much for the idea of freedom to do anything you like in Second Life. But that really only means something if people are actually able to access Second Life and run Second Life effectively on their computers. I will hate the day when I launch Firestorm and read "Grid Status: Online | in-World: 3,000". There's no real solution to this dilemma but I think it is every considerate content creator's responsibility to do their best to minimize the problem. Edit: It's not the hobbyist builds that cause the serious problems anyway. They are not agressively marketed and distributed all over the grid. If somebody wants to lag down their own place, that's nobody's business but their own.

Bitsy Buccaneer wrote: That hurts. Sorry about that. I'm not going to apologize but I really ought to nuance a bit. There are several mesh makers in Second Life who know how to make mesh that fits my description, with good LoD even without increased LoD factor, with low land impact and with sensible polycount and texturing that don't lag down the place. Those people are better content creators than everybody else, they prove that simply by creating better content. But of course, most builders in Second Life are hobbyists and they never pretend to be anything else. That's great! One of the best aspects of Second Life is that everybody are allowed to create here. And you can't expect hobbyists to be at a professional skill level, that goes without saying. Also, even the best had to learn the craft - it's not as if LL provided anything resembling adequate documentation. That was a long and tedious process for everybody and people who are still busy learning the craft don't produce masterpieces, that too goes without saying. The problem is all the pretenders, the wannabes who fool themselves and others into believing they are better than they are. Like a violinist in a local amateur orchestra who decides he or she (usually he) should have a job at the Royal Philharmonics. The answer to that is, no, it doesn't matter how "artistic" you are if you can't play in tune! Shortly before I posted that snide remark, we had somebody in a group I'm a member of pestering everybody about how unfair it was that she wasn't invited to join the first group of Sansar beta testers. She went on for a week, the moment anybody mentioned the word Sansar she started. Eventually I went and had a look at what her store sold and it was really bad. Really, really bad. Quite nice design I have to say, simpistic but effective. But high land impact, quite high render weight and disastrous LoD. Yet she was absolutely convinced she was the creme de la creme of Second Life content creators. Apparently quite a lot of people believe her too, no name given of course but I'm talking about what seems to be one of the best selling stores in SL. Not all the pretenders are self-delusive btw. A while ago I had a chat with one of the most popular full perm creators in SL. Quite an interesting chat in many ways but rather annoying since he kept bragging about how great a builder he was and how successful he was far outside SL. So I went to his store and took a look and just asked him straight out: if you're such a great builder, why is everything in your store garbage? His answer was that Second Life wasn't worth more. People here bought anyway. I couldn't argue against that of course.

Bitsy Buccaneer wrote: So you're getting different render weights when you rez fit mesh items and when you wear them? As far as I can see, you get exactly the same render weight regardless of actual size even though a smaller object is supposed to be less render heavy than a bigger one. The only explanation to this is that render weight for fitted mesh is calculated from the size it had when it was uploaded and that size changes that is made in-world (by the rigging) is ignored.

Bitsy Buccaneer wrote: I'm sure I'm not the only one who is curious to hear what you did to achieve a 100% lossless 3/4's reduction. Judging by this post she didn't achieve it, she's just seen it somewhere else. I may have found the answer and if I am right, it's not an actual reduction of render cost but a way to cheat the system into giving too low figures: Calculated render cost depends on an object's size since the different LoD models are weighed according to an estimate how often they are displayed. A fitted mesh has two different sizes of course, one nominal - the one the item is uploaded at and you get if you rez it - and one actual - the size it has when streched over an avatar. The render cost is based on the nominal size while the LoD and switch points seem to be based on the actual size. That means you can cheat a lot simply by making the fitted mesh object very tiny and let the rigging scale it up to the size it needs to be. If I'm right - and the few quick tests I did seem to indicate that - we have a serious flaw in the whole ARC system, serious enough we have to ask if ARC means anything at all when fitted mesh is involved.

Not the most important thread ont he forum I know, but I'm looking at my sales figures and got curious: when do people buy in SL? What time of week and what time of day? Monday and Tuesday used to be my best days in SL, Saturday and Sunday the worst but recently it seems to be the other way round. And recently there has usually been one - and only one - "dead" day. Sometimes it's Tuesday, sometimes it's Wednesday. My own sales start to pick up seriously shortly after 12 AM (SLT), slowly increase until they drop sharply shortly before midnight - the first few hours of the new day I'm lucky if I make any sales at all. But I get commissions for some scripts I made for a friend and it seems her best sales figures are just when mine are at their lowest.

Script lag is one of those myths that just won't go away. Linden Lab fixed it many years ago but it's stuck in people's minds. Everything that happens in Second Life adds to the overall lag level of course but scripts aren't anywhere near the top ten list. The only exceptions are: Scripts can lag other scripts - as Rolig already mentioned Scripts can sometimes trigger laggy events - moving things around, communicating with other servers, rezzing objects and so on. Scripts can cause serious temporary lag when you move from one sim to another - either by crossing a sim border or teleporting. The real causes for serious lag in Second Life are: Avatars with high render complexity Too many and too high resolution textures in the environment Poorly optimized content (especially content so poorly made you have to increase RenderVolumeLoDFactor to see it properly) Too many avatars Too much content Unrealistically high graphics settings The vehicles and other physical objects Rolig mentioned can indeed add a lot of lag in some places but they are so rare I doubt they cause much lag to SL as a whole.

wherorangi wrote: i love playing this game for its own sake. What??? It's the money that coutns! Yu can easly make a dollar day there if you're good!!!

Ignore the messages you get, they are not reliable. I've seen the "You may not be rendered by anybody around you" message even with an ARC well under 30,000. That being said, 80,000 is the default value for mid resolution graphics and that seems to be a rasonable limit in any case. You will have to put some thought into assembling a gorgeous lookign avatar with an ARC that low but it is possible, just look at some of the examples in this thread.

Rolig Loon wrote: I think the Linden Lab default is still 1.25, which is ridiculously low. Not at all! Any mesh maker knows how to make low LI mesh that works perfectly well with LoD factor 1.0. Those who don't, are mesh fakers.

You have to go to the in-world store. The body is not for sale on the Marketplace for fairly obvious reasons.

Oh, you had to remind me of the Linden Realms! Had to try it again now of course, it's great fun! I wonder how many people have actually played the game there. Seems to me that everybody just skip right to the crystal collecting part.

Sadine wrote: I'm sure there are some basic understandings of Mesh that are not intuitive, common tricks, and pearls of wisdom that newbie mesh creators like myself would benefit from. There are so many tricks an techniques. The most important one is to never trust the uploader. The uploader tries to be helpful and offers to generate LoD models and physics model for you. It even offers to split meshes with too many faces into separate ones for you. Don't let it! It always messes things up. So: If any of the menus in the "Level of Details" tab says "Generate" and the corresponding Triangle Limit/Error Threshold is not 0, you are doing it wrong. (Plants are a special case here btw. It is never right to zero out a LoD model for a plant, so if you're making one of those and you see the word "Generate" anywhere in the uploader, you're doing it wrong). If the "Level of Detail" menu in the Physics tab says anything but "From File" you're doing it wrong (unless you know exactly what you're doing and one of the LoD models just happens to be spot on for the physics too). If you try to upload a single mesh with more than eight different textureable faces, you're doing it wrong. I think that's the place to start. Even the most inexperienced mesh maker can create far better LoD models and physics models than the uploader and you can easily improve both LI and quality that way.

If you want to discuss this, I suggest you repost it here. The answers section isn't really suitable for prolonged discussions. It is a very interesting topic and there is certainly more than one side to it. But do not expect anything to happen. A mesh body is essentially just an object like most other objects in Second Life and the faces can be tinted any color you like. You don't even need a HUD to for it. As long as the body is modifiable, anybody with a little bit of building skills and a bit of patience can do it manually. You'd have to rewrite the software handling mesh in SL from scratch to completely prevent it. Edit: The answer to the question in the title is yes, it is legal. An applier is a retexturing HUD for certain faces of a mesh. Even if you supply textures for that you have no legal rights whatsoever to dictate how the user modifies other aspects of the mesh or what modifcation options the creator gives the user.