ChinRey

You may want to repost this with the additional information Whirly mention in the Viewer Tech section of the forum: https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/bd-p/SLViewer It may take a little bit of questioning and answering and discussing to sort this out and that's easier to do there than in the Answers section.

wherorangi wrote: unless you fly backwards in the world every 7th day. So can have 2 Sundays, then fly forward and have Tuesday next (: Yes but remember that saying is old, traditional and ancient. The days were far more strictly organized back then. Nowadays we can play with time zones and such of course and in SL we can even tuesday on Saturdays.

I don't know but I can think of two possible explanations. One is of course that the RL age SL has on file for you is incorrect. If that is the case, you probably need to open a support case to sort it out. Another and more likely explanation is that it's just a little bit of delay. The inworld search engine is not handled by the SL software directly but by a separate website. It may well take a little while before changes you make in your prefs are registered by the search engine. I suggest you just wait an ohur or two and try again. If the problem is still, there, contact LL at https://support.secondlife.com/contact-support/.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: I strongly disagree. There should be no exceptions other than the score. But there is. Just click on a jellybaby and select "Show in full" (or something like that). Pussycat Catnap wrote: This is not a policy or drama setting - it is a technology setting to protect your system from harmful stress. I don't get the impression that equipment poretection has ever been a significant factor here. I may be wrong but it seems to me that it's all been about improving visual quality by reducing lag. Gpu deterioration is mainly a European problem. (It's not legal to use lead to stabilizie the solder here so electronic equipment made for that market is far more vulnerable to heat damage than equpiment sold elsewhere in the world.) It's quite plausible LL isn't aware of how important this is to a large number of the users. Pussycat Catnap wrote: The solution is to convince people to use newer optimized goods that have lower complexity scores. That is one of my main points too. QuickGraphics has no value whatsoever if people don't actually use it, and they don't want to use it, the negative effects are plain for anyone to see while the positive effects are very subtle. It's going to be a very tough sell and that is why I keep insisting on testing. Not just testing btw, that's not enough, it's also important to document the tests. Hard, irrefutable facts are the only really effective argument we have if we want to convince people that QuickGraphics is indeed a good thing but right now we don't have any hard, irrefutable facts. Anyway, the JIRA has now been triaged and marked as "Minor" which essentially means that no matter what we do or say, nothing is actually going to happen. I don't see any point in continuing this discussion.

Rhonda Huntress wrote: ... is it any worse than using non-verbs as verbs? "I don't want to Monday today." I think you made it into a verb there. But at least this time we know who to blame. You always have to monday after you have sundayed - (old, ancient, traditional proverb that I just made up right now)

Theresa Tennyson wrote: I'm not sure that's completely correct. With a mesh, it's more work to calculate the first one but once it's calculated it's consistent and repeatable. One Maitreya mesh body will produce a substantial drop in framerate, but going to the Maitreya store and watching a dozen avatars wearing Maitreya bodies doesn't produce a drop a dozen times as high becase many calculations can be re-used. This is not a reliable test in any way; running three alts on the same computer introduces way too many unknown variables. However, three alts on that same darned sky platform over that same darned sandbox, one on the SL Viewer, the other two on Firestorm: Render complexity readouts for the same avatar differed slightly. Even the two alts using the same viewer on the same computer showed slightly different render weight for exactly the same avatar. Base fps with all avatars completely masked: about 40 With one avatar wearing a well known mesh body (rw about 4000): about 32 With all avatars wearing that same mesh body: about 30 With all avatars wearing different mesh bodies (total render weight about 18 000): about 30 With all avatars wearing very different flexi hairs: (total render weight about 168 000): about 24 Using AOs to introduce some movements (three different ones of course) didn't seem to have much effect. It was very hard to get any reliable readings though since my computer was so heavily overloaded. During all tests fps kept fluctuating, sometimes dropping down well below 20. A test like this should be done with more than three avatars running on separate computers to be reliable. Of course I should also have tested with three identical flexihairs but I couldn't find one really high ARC style that all three avis had. In any case, I'm done with my tests. They've already stolen way too much of my time. Inconclusive as this test was, it does indicate that multiple fitted mesh bodies "stack up" better than multiple flexis. A plausible explanation is that they all are built on the same skeleton and that even different bodies from different makers use pretty much the same vertice pattern (probably the system avatar with all edges split in half and the vertices shifted for a different shape). Another explanation is that the lag from flexihair depends more on the alphas than on the moving vertices and that alpha lag doesn't stack up as well as "flexilag" does. This of course raises quite a few interesting questions but maybe we shuold leave them for later... I have to emphasize, in case there is any doubt about it, that I do not know what the answer is. I do not even know if it is possible to calculate actual render cost precisely enough to make QuickGraphics a useable feature. But it is clear that what we have now is not nearly as good as it could be and needs to be- There is something fundamentally wrong with how the viewers and servers determine an avatar's ARC. You run the same data through the same software several times and you get different output, in this case different enough that the deviation can be more than enough to determine whether an avatar should be shown in full of "jellybabied" out. Regardless of how the formula is handled by the software, it has serious flaws in itself. We've barely touched the matter of new materials. Alpha masking does not alter an object's render weight. Hide the whole object from the scene with alpha masking and it still shows up with exactly the same render weight as if it had been fully visible. Normal and specular maps do not alter an object's render weight. Add as many and as high resolution maps as you like and there is absolutely no change in the render weight. Those omissions are more than enough to cause serious doubt about the reliability of the formula as a whole. What is the multiplier for fitted mesh btw? We don't actually know. The documentation mentions rigged mesh and we've only assumed that the same multiplier is used for fitted mesh. In the beta testing feedback thread I asked Oz Linden about how QuickGraphics had been tested. His answer was that they had tried to visit different places with different avatar lag levels using different computers and that they had found good "safe" threshold levels for all occasions. Of course you can use QuickGraphics to eliminate all potential avatar lag issues! Just set the threshold low enough that everybody become jellybabies. Job done! Not! He did not in any way indicate they had done any more thorough tests than that and never responded to followup questions.

Theresa Tennyson wrote ChinRey is wrong - prims with alpha masked textures aren't subject to the alpha texture multiplier. Oh, you must have misunderstood me there. What I meant is that an object completely hidden by alpha masking still has a render weight although there isn't actually anything to render at all. No alpha mutliplier but the base weight and the texture weight are still applied. This can have quite an impact on the nominal render weight of mesh bodies and body parts where it's not uncommon for more than half the tris to be alpha masked away.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Bingo! You figured it out.

Freya Mokusei wrote: Right, exactly. I think we're actually agreeing - I'll rephrase. My mistake was using equal-footed, when I should have emphasised more equal than older methods. Aww, I misread that as "more equal than others" at first. Freya Mokusei wrote: Power language escapes the worry of appearing to be weak and needing help. It says "maybe you agree that this is a problem" rather than "maybe you could help me". That's possible. From the article you inked to (thatnk you btw.) I think I can see two other possible explanations: One is of course thoughtless emulation of powerful people, like Mark Zuckerberg who clearly uses it as power language: "This is what I say, so it has to be the truth." Another explanation is the common confusion between internet forums and private sphere. When you ask a family member or close friend "So how did it go?" the question is actually in a previously established context, allbeit a tacit one. It's easy to forget that is not the case on the internet. All these explanations seem plausible and the reason may well be a combination of them. Personally I don't think it will last though. Looks more like a fad than a permanent language shift to me. That reminds me of a completely different question: Is Second Life still performant or is it functional instead these days?

DoriantheGray wrote: ... I got the message, the support would be down. Assuming you mean Live Chat Support, it isn't open 24/7 and has never been, or at least it hasn't been for a long time. It's closed between midnight and 8 AM PST and that's right now.

Freya Mokusei wrote: It's also used in questions, like in this thread's title (proliferation here seems most obvious, as it sounds more equal-footed than Why, How, Where - which often sounds more parent/child or teacher/student) . That is interesting because it is exactly the opposite to how I see it. Starting a question without any previously established context with a "so" almost automatically turns it into a rhetorical one and rhetorical questions are definitely power language. They're one of the oldest manipulation tricks in the book.

And that means it's perfectly ok to start a sentence with a conjunction now? But I never really agreed with that rule anyway. Nor do I follow it myself. So I'm hardly in postion to criticise. But I think the reason why it seems so strange to me is that I interpret it as: "Now that all have been said and all the facts are on the table, what is the conclusion?" In other words: The OP has already made up his/her mind, knows the answer and is not interested in hearing what others have to say. Could work as a header for an article (although the gimmick would grow old fast) but it's hardly the way you'd usually start a discussion, is it?

I'm genuinely curious. It's certainly not the worst language abuse we see on interent forums but I've never noticed it anywhere but here and it just looks so strange.

Almila Augenblick wrote: thank you for your reply! So if i buy e.g 550 Lindens will my zero limit upgraded immediately? Yes

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: No you don't need a premium account to sell $L's. You must have bought $L's in order to sell any. Or shopped on the Marketplace using your credit card or PayPal or whatever payment method you have on file. The point is that you need confirmed payment info on file before LL can use it to transfer money to you. This is not a special Second Life thing btw, it's a standard secutiry measure used by most any online money transactions service.

Qie Niangao wrote: Oh, okay, as long as that's what we're talking about, then yeah, I can see how a graphics card's performance could deteriorate as it throttles clockspeed to compensate for less efficient cooling. (Otherwise, it sounded as if GPUs were subject to creeping decrepitude, maybe a little rheumatism, some aches and pains... the sorta thing that might benefit from chondroitin, glucosamine, and a touch* of sherry.) And they do as I said in the second part of my post and in my reply to Drake1. The connection between the components gradually loose conductivity over time, the more heat they're exposed to, the faster they deteriorate. This may not cause reduced perfomrance directly. But it sure increases the heat which again forces the clockspeed to be throttled so it goes for the same. However, on second thought this may actually be an Eruopean problem only which might explain why you're not familiar with. It's illegal to sell electronic equipment that uses lead in the solder alloy in Europe and the leadfree alternatives we are forced to use are of much poorer quality than traditional solder. With the heavier equipment the guys can jsut resolder everything (perversely it's perfectly legal to sell and use proper solder as long as it's not part of a finished product) but we haven't found a soldering iron small enough for digital circuits yet so we just have to accept that they wear out much faster than they used to. Edit: Found this in case anybody is interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_%28metallurgy%29 May explain quite a lot of it.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: I really hope that was a tongue in cheek post... Not at all. Remember I was talking about local overheating. A single microscopic drop of solder heats up for a fraction of a second and it goes slightly out of position. Not enough to matter in itself but if it happens over and over and over again, the cummulative effect is significant. It doesn't really have to melt either, it expands when warmed up and shrinks when cooled down. Eventually It'll start to crack. A store I used to work at (and still do occasionally) also has a fairly big sound engineer department and I can assure you we know this problem very, very well. Not with graphics cards of course but there's no reason why they should be different from other computer components in this respect. As for baking a failing graphics card at 250C, sorry I did get the temperature wrong - try 200 instead: http://lifehacker.com/5823227/save-dying-video-cards-with-a-quick-bake-in-the-oven I haven't tried it myself but one of the teachers at Builders Brewery did and it worked for him.

As Alwin said, it iz alll TOP SEKRET So I'm afraid I can't tell you that on mainland the prices actually increase once you go over one sim - your second sim costs you a bit more than your first, your third a bit more than your second and your fourth a bit more than your third. (I definitely can't tell you what happens beyond that because I don't know.) Nor can I tell you that there is no automatic quantity discount for 60 or less private sims, probably not for anything more either. Whether LL is willing to negotiate is another question of course. As Alwin said, you'll have to ask LL. Sorry we can't help you here. (Edit: Maybe I shouldn't have joked about this but although the price list isn't public, it's hardly a secret either. All you have to do is contact them, tell them you are interested in buying so-and-so many sims and ask what the tier will be. Anybody can do that.)

Innula Zenovka wrote: That tells us about what's happening client-side but -- though I may be wrong -- I think that's only half the story. Not really. Render weight is all about the load on the client's gpu. Server and connection load are covered by the other three weights, server, physics and download weight. Innula Zenovka wrote: The load on the simulator has to be a potential pinch-point, I'd have thought. Throughout all these tests sim fps remained at a fairly steady 45, never more than 0.2 or 0.3 from that. That's not surprising. A sim server will have to be seriously overloaded before its fps starts to drop. Just as a quick check, I went to a sim with 60 avatars and a not particularly low lag environment. Even there sim fps stayed well into the 40s most of the time with only occasional drops down into the high 30s. It is important to note that most of my "reality checks" were done in very low lag environments. I had to do that to eliminate as many uncontrolable variables as possible and the point was always to illustrate the difference between the various figures, not their absolute values. Innula Zenovka wrote: I would be interested to see what the fps figures look like if there are 20 or 30 people close to you, all similarly blinged out, as you put it, and jumping around. Oh yes. I do think my informal demonstrations are enugh to conclude something is wrong with the way render complexity is calcualted and thus the way QuickGraphics works. The deviations are simply too big and to consistent to be written off as flukes or special cases. They don't even begin to explain what is wrong though, we need much more thorough testing to figure that out. But that is something that should be done by the people who are actually paid to do it. You can't expect volunteers to take on a task of that size, even my quick little reality checks stole far too much time. Innula Zenovka wrote: ...but I'm told that experiments with the debug console suggest you get sent textures, at least, from new arrivals at ground level even if you're in a skybox 3000 metres up That isn't really directly conencted to render cost but yes, I've tried that and it's actually just the start. A slightly easier way to test whish textures are actually downlaoded is clear your cache, log on and see what turns up in your cache folder: Every single texture, sculpt map, normal map and specular map found anywhere in the sim, at least most textures etc. found anywhere in the neighbor sims, the profile pics of everybody on your friends list, every group you're a member of and everybody logged on to a group chat you're in, lots of skin and clothes textures that haven't actually been used by a viewer since SSB rolled out in 2013, clothes and skin textures and profile pics for people you can't for your life understand where they come from, all the graphics used by the viewer interface.... the list goes on and on and on.

Qie Niangao wrote: Umm. What? I can't even.... Do you mean... cooling effectiveness could decline as cruft builds up in the heatsink or the fan itself wears out, so the card throttles itself to avoid meltdown? Yes, unbelievable as it may sound, dust can actually be a problem. Of course, everybody know they need to vacuum clean their computer every day, and brush their teeth twice and shine their shoes and check the engine oil and tire air pressure before they drive off to work. All those obvious things that are part of everybody's daily routines. Some people do occasionally forget some of those things but when that causes problems, they have nobody but themselves to blame so let's ignore such cases. I'm not sure what kind of solder is used for graphics cards but the commonly used alloys have melting points ranging from about 170 to 260 °C. Recommended working temperature for soldering electronics is usually around 320 °C, a bit higher with leadless alloys. I do know that the solder of a graphics card is well and truly melted at 250°C, so it must be a relatively low temperature alloy they use. In any case, local temperatures at "hotspots" can reach temperatures in that range even during moderate overheating. It can actually happen while the card as a whole is nice and cool. Even if the solder doesn't melt completely, the repeated heating and cooling will eventually cause it to crack, reducing the connectivity between the components (which as you said are much more rugged themselves). It's a vicious circle too, the worse the conenctions are, the harder the card has to work and the greater the risk for overheating is. There is a trick to revitalize a graphics card that's on its last legs: put it in the oven and bake it at 250°C for long enough to let all the solder melt throroughly and (hopefully) settle back into place. It's crude and risky and should only be tried when you have nothing to loose but it's amazing how often it works.

Oh well. Right now QuickGraphics seems to be dead in the water. Not even good for target practice. Shooting it to smithereens is just way to easy to be an itneresting challenge. Almost 15 times the ARC and lower actual lag. You might as well just derender avatars at random. But we need more data. This is all from one computer and it may be some sort of special case. And we need to hear what LL has to say to their defense. So let's hold the fire until Monday, Ok?

Oct Oyen wrote: Is there a workaround or better way to separate the meshes in Blender? Yes. Blender uses 64 bit decimals for positions and dimensions while SL uses 32 bit. Just make sure the dimensions fit 32 bit decimals and you'll be fine. No, seriously, you probably want an easier way than that. Keep the dimensions of all the meshes at an even number of millimeters - like 9.622 m should be fine, 9,621 is risky. I can't guarantee that trick always works but it hasn't failed for me yet.

Lucierda Solari wrote: Can you help me? I do not understand how I can get this kind of lag on such a high end GPU and with so much RAM. Lots of possible factors here. First, there is no such thing as a completely lag proof computer for Second Life. Some places are so heavily overload with objects and textures they are giving even the strongest computer a hard time. I've even seen SlGo servers break down under the pressure. So one possible explanation why your computer is struggling harder now than it used to is simply that the scene is more complex now than before. Another possible explanation is gpu deterioration. A graphics card will loose much of its performance over time, especially if it's driven hard. If you spend a lot of time in heavy sims with graphics settings very high, it's quite possible you'll have to replace the graphics card every year to stay on top. There are probably other possible explanations too but those two are the most obvious ones. Now, how to reduce the load on your poor overworked graphics card... The first thing you should look at is probably the LOD factor. 4 is excessive, should never be necessary and it adds a lot to the object rendering load. Ideally the LOD factor should never be higher than 1 - those higher settings are only there to compensate for the flaws in poorly made sculpts and mesh. Unfortunately there is a lot of poorly made sculpts and mesh in SL so you may have to crank it up a little bit but not as high as 4. Try 2. The next thing to look at is draw distance. Do you really need to see as far as 256 m? You decide. Draw distance has even more impact on render load than the LOD factor but it's actually something that is worth keeping for its own sake so you may want to keep it anyway. But remember, twice the draw distance means four times as many objects for your computer to handle. If it's still not enough, I'm afraid you'll have to consider switching off Advanced Ligting Mode. Yes, those normal and specular maps can look great but they don't come cheap. I've done some tests on my own computer and found that ALM almost doubled the gpu load. I'm not sure how typical that number is but a serious increase in GPU laod it is. Of course, if it's a place you own and control yourself, you may try to simplify the scene a bit too.

maeglutz wrote: In action GIF: https://gyazo.com/d8811fe1a33a950148abd28ff9af178b Yes, that's normal behaviour for SL terrain. The simple explanation is that the terrain file doesn't have nearly as many vertices as it seems to have. Only a few are stored and fixed, the others are interpolated from the position of those key vertices, not just the ones nearby but all over the sim and even to some degree key vertices in neighbor sims. This is usually not a problem if the terrain is fairly flat before you start terraforming but a steep drop like the one shown in your picture will affect the ground across the entire sim, making it much harder to control. I don't think you can expect any kind of precision terraforming if you want to keep that steep drop but there are some techniques to make the most of it. Think of the terrain as a wrinkled curtain you need to iron out. Start in the middle and work yourself out towards the edges. Set the strength to minimum and keep switching between "Lower" and "Smoothen" - you may want to use the "Raise" and "Flatten" functions every now and then too. When those unwanted peaks elsewhere on the sim turns up, smooth them out very carefully. Try to use the Smoothen tool for that first and if that doesn't work, switch to Lower. Alternatively, if it's a private sim and you have full editing rights, make a RAW file for the terrain shape you want and uplaod it.

wherorangi wrote: here is me nekkid and just wearing my flexiprim hair. And wearing my most see-thru outfit. And only 75k complexity I had to try that myself. So one more reality check: + Standing on a blank sky platform above an empty sandbox wearing nothing but a full body alpha: ARC: 0 Client fps: 84 + Adding an old flexi hair: ARC: 75801 Client fps: 76 + Removing hair, adding a well known fitted mesh body (just the body, no hands or feet or head): ARC: 5162 Client fps: 73