ChinRey

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Please share with us the locations of these abandoned double-prim lots so we can ask for them to be auctioned off. Are these the "abandoned lots that don't look abandoned because there are buildings on them?" Buildings like these you mean?  But interestingly, you're actually right. Seems all those parcels that were taken off the market just before christmas and look empty on the map now are not abandoned, they're still owned by somebody. I checked the parcel details for some of them. Most had a few prims but only one took advantage of that extra Bay City prim quota. So obiviously they're used as perfectly ordinary skybox anchors. Not sure what that means. Theresa Tennyson wrote: Could you explain your reasoning for assuming the first regions to be shut down will be low-maintenance, largely open-space regions that are frequently in use and surrounded by lucrative private regions? Sure. Lots of sims (they're homestead sims btw, not open space) that don't generate any income directly. Obvious choice to be the first ones to go. If you look at the big picture, they would be the absolutely worst possible thing to do - makes it even more of an obvious choice. It was meant as a joke of course but actually, I wouldn't be completely surprised if I turned out to be right Edit: Theresa Tennyson wrote: Please share with us the locations of these abandoned double-prim lots I would love to have a place in Bay City too, although 45 L$/m2 (the lowest price I could find) is a bit too much. It's a lovely area with a lovely theme and for the most part it still retains its integrity. But that double prim quota shouldn't matter anymore. This is 2016 after all. If you build sensibly you'll run out of space long before you run out of prims even on a Homestead parcel.

You mean add a landmark or post one? To add a landmark: Go to the place you want to LM and click on the star at the right end of the address bar at the top of your viewer window. That'll give you a landmark in you Landmarks folder and you can copy it, move it somewhere else in your inventory and give copies away to others. To post a landmark in this forum or anywhere else on the internet, go to the place, click on the text in the address bar and copy the URL that turns up there.

steph Arnott wrote: And you are still off topic.This is the op More crashes then usual Yes, and the answer to that is that there hasn't been a general increase in crashes recently and most crashes are caused by users doing something wrong. But that again brings up the question, how are the users supposed to know what is right and what is wrong? Imagine you've never ever seen or heard of a car before. Somebody gives you one, starts the engine for you and tell you it's so easy, you just turn that round thing to steer left or right and push that squarish thing with your feet to go faster. Who's fault is it when you crash?

Nalates Urriah wrote: The minimums and recommended requirements are here: https://secondlife.com/my/support/system-requirements/index.php? Interesting little detail: you need to log on to view that page. Does that mean Linden Lab refuses to tell you what hardware you need for SL before you sign up or is that info available elsewhere too?

Point your cursor on the speaker symbol at the top right corner of the creen. When a popup menu appears, uncheck "Music" and "Media". That will turn off all the unwanted media streamign but not affect other inworld sounds.

steph Arnott wrote: As the OP was about crashing you can hardly claim others are off topic can you. ChinRey wrote: Your post was off well off topic from what me and Pamela were talking about but we're hardly on topic anyway and your point is of course just as important.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Did I ever say the current Linden Lab documentation was good? Yes you were under suspicion of being a secret agent of LL Glad we got that misunderstanding sorted out. Theresa Tennyson wrote: People want to buy shoes. In Second Life right now most women's shoes are built for proprietary feet and are useless without them. Should Linden Lab tell new people this? If so, how much information should they tell them? Should they tell them where to go to get the feet? Which stores? Wouldn't Linden Lab naming stores interfere with the "free market?" And who at the Lab should follow shoe fashion to make sure the information is up to date? You know, I've only been here for less than three years and my view on Second Life is already so outdated I actually think of my avatar as my portal to a wonderful virtual world rather than the virtual world as a backdrop to my Barbie Doll. The idea that people would be so extremely fixated on the appearance of that little figure you see far behind and in front of your point of view right from the start simply never occurred to me. Your post was off well off topic from what me and Pamela were talking about but we're hardly on topic anyway and your point is of course just as important. This is how it goes then: You log on to Second Life for the first time ever and are immediately greeted by: Welcome to Second Life! Buy, Buy, BUY!Of course, anybody in the PR business will tell you that marketing needs to be a lllllittle bit more subtle than that to be really effective but you go for it anyway. You click on the "Buy, Buy, BUY!" button, and are taken to a website with lots of pretty pictures. You figure out you have to log on again there and spot an especially pretty picture of a pair of shoes. (We can skip the description about how to figure out how to get Lindens here since you can actually pay with RL money on MP.) You pay with your credit card (presumably you have one that is accepted by LL) and get a message that you item has been delivered to the Received Items folder of your inventory. After a bit of trial and error you discover that a suitcase is a good icon for the inventory folder and once you've found that, it doesn't take you long to spot the Received Items folder. Then you... No, this is getting out of hand, let's do it as a point list instead: Wear what you found in Received Items Figure out why your avatar suddenly has a box attached to her hand and how to get rid of it Figure out how to open the box and move content into inventory Find out how to wear items from your inventory Discover that there is no way to make the shoes fit Go back to MP to discover there is no way there to contact neither LL nor the seller Figure out how to contact the seller inworld Wait a week for reply Read the rather rude reply telling you that you need a special brand of feet to wear the shoes, that the MP listing clearly stated that and that it's nobody's fault but yours. Try to find a way to contact LL to complain Eventually decide to look for some information how to deal with such issues rather than trying to figure it out yourself. For once you're in luck, that info is easily found in the most obvious location (Inventory->Library->Notecards->Community Standards 11.1.05) Right at the bottom of the long text it says: "Buyer Beware Linden Lab does not exercise editorial control over the content of Second Life, and will make no specific efforts to review the textures, objects, sounds or other content created within Second Life. At first glance, some people may think this is a really nice introduction to Second Life, full of exciting challenges and everything. It does have a few flaws though. Can anybody spot them?

Oh well, apparently you genuinely don't understand so here's an example. Let's say you want to create an alt and you want to do it properly, according to TOS and all that. So you look for Linden Lab's Official Alt Policy. It's not easy to find but it does exist and with a little bit of Googling you should be able to get there. This is what you find: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alt_account_policies That page has one of my favorite LL quotes btw: "If you have legitimate reasons for creating multiple accounts but have been unable to do so: If you have a basic account, go to Help Island and talk to someone there."Do you need more examples or is that enough? Edit: Theresa Tennyson wrote: Of course - because nobody ever ever clicks the "Shop" button at the top of the viewer or the "Destination Guide" button, do they? Yes, I did mention that although Social Island is based on very good principles, it has a few flaws. That is one of them.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: The difficulty with having Linden Lab do that is they didn't build the vast majority of the things a new person will find in Second Life That's not what we're talking about here, Theresa, and you know it. Theresa Tennyson wrote: and there's no control over what someone will find within the first hour of being there Even ignoring the fact that your entire post it just a clumsy attempt to divert from any kind of serious discussion, that statement isn't even true. LL has full control over the content at Welcome Island and Social Island.

Liondandy wrote: I used to work with databases writing import export conversion scripts (mssql) this stuff can be pretty intensive depending on how many records you are working on but I wouldn't say impossible. How about a database with a few trillion records?

You may want to try again later. Unless things have changed in the last few months, the Linden Homes house control system is still in beta and sometimes it jsut won't work.

beethros Karas wrote: LL recently lower the fees for to get a private ful region from US$1,000 to US$600 Yes, they obviously did that to stop the sim death and maybe also to see if a price reduction would turn the tide. It's too little and too late of course.

Pamela Galli wrote: I have never seen much evidence that LL has ever hired 1) a skilled, experienced educator who was 2) very familiar with some aspects of SL. There are some exceptions but not many. I don't know if Torley has any experience or formal qualifications as an educator but if not, he sure has some serious natural talent for it. Unfortunately he's been "assigned to other tasks" now. Task analysis is just as important to a programmer as it is to an educator - that's the one thing we have in common with them - and programmers who understand that and also happen to be good communicators, can be excellent educators. Two members of the original LL crew, Cory and Andrew, are good examples of that. They must have had some professional help when they built the new welcome system. It does have some very obvious flaws but the fundamental principles are very good pedagogy indeed and the flaws may well be explained by lack of time and/or conflicting requirements from the Lindens. Much of the content there was made by a very skilled builder I've never heard of anywhere else and I suspect that would be the teacher LL hired in to teach them how to teach.

Haravikk Mistral wrote: Geez, I hope it doesn't come to that. IMO it would make more sense to cut the tier prices in half (or double their allowances) Ebbe Linden, answered that at one of the Lab Chats. The way LL sees it, there is no guarantee they would compensate the financial loss from lower prices with higher volumes and he is probably right. Haravikk Mistral wrote: ... and run sims two per (virtual?) core; the vast majority of sims are lightly loaded anyway, so as long as high traffic sims aren't sharing the same CPU resources that would allow costs to be slashed without having to reclaim land. It doesn't work quite that way but the principle is a good one. Today sims are assigned computer power according to which of three classes, full sim, homestead or open space, they are classified as. There are several sims that could be reassigned to a lower resource class with no problems at all (if anybody from LL happens to read this: Ruthenium, Rhodium, Palladium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinium, Campus, Terraform Me, Linden Estate Services 2-4, Hippo Hill Island, Loch Linden, Ruth's Retreat, Prima Point, Plain Plains ... those are the ones I can think of right away). There's not that much to save this way though. Haravikk Mistral wrote: With people able to have more land at the same monthly tier cost that should encourage sales again without downsizing. The question is, what would people buy more land for? Most active SL users today are well established and already have the homes and land they want. They're not interested in scaling up their SL involvement. Quite the contrary, many want to downsize. With no recruitment of new users worth speaking of, there's hardly any demand for new private home land in SL. There are still almost 25,000 sims in SL and the land used as private homes for active users probably don't add up to more than 3000, certainly not more than 5000 sims. It's always been that way really, although probably not quite as pronounced as today. Most of the land in SL is - and always was - used for other purposes and that's where the real decline has taken place. Much is used (or rather unused but still rented out and paid for) by passive users, people who kept their land because they thought they were coming back some day, people who just faded out of the scene and forgot to cancel, people who keep their place here just to visit once or twice a year. There are fewer and fewer of those because today, when people leave, they leave for good and they know it. Stores take up a lot of land. Most serious SL merchants still keep a store inworld for various reasons but they're scaling down. Instead of a full sim they find a nice little spot where they can place their redelivery terminal, where people can use the gift cards and where they may catch the eye of the occasional passerby. In a way this is an advantage to mainland since a parcel near a Linden Road is more suitable than an isolated island for a store like that. Privately owned clubs, sandboxes, rp sims and other public access land... well who's gonna volunteer to do the work and pay the tier? Fewer and fewer people are willing to do that. The bottom line is, there is a huge overcapacity of land in SL, the existing owners and renters aren't interested in expanding or moving and there are hardly any new customers.

Haravikk Mistral wrote: Shame, I've seen outfit and avatar combos that sell for more, seems strange that land has such a low value when you still need it to actually keep things rezzed. Is everyone renting now or something? Take a look at Zindra and Bay City on the world map and see how many parcels are for sale in these once popular regions and you see why. There were twice as many parcels for sale there only a month or two ago and few if any of the ones that have gone from the market have been sold, they've been abandoned by the wannabe sellers. Then take a look at a few mainland sims and see how many parcels are for rent and how much abandoned land there is. The bottom has dropped out of the SL (un)real estate market. The private island owners can cut their losses by closing their sims, and they do (124 sims gone last 30 days) but very reluctantly and even there you'll find a lot of vacancies. So far Linden Lab has chosen not to scale down mainland. It may not be long before they'll have to (the Blake Sea sims are most likely to be the first ones to go) but right now there is about twice as much land in Second Life as there is demand for.

Liondandy wrote: 1/cache once this thing caps (I think around 1.6 ~ 1.8gb) firestorm load times become unbarable (upto a minute initializing texture cache) entering new sims or camming around sometimes give upwards of 40second deadlocks where hard drive thrashes. whats causing it? guessing firestorm is scanning thought all the texutres and clearing the ones that don't have many hits ? this problem goes away every time by competly emptiing the texturecache, is there a better solution to this issue? Some sims in SL are extremely laggy and the only answer there is to stay away from them. But if this happens everywhere, there must be something else going on. My first thought is that your cache size may be set too low. In the Avatar menu select: Preferences -> Network & Files -> Directories Check that the Cache size slider is all the way to the right and that the number next to it says 9984 MB. That's the maximum cache size you can have in a Second Life viewer and unless your hard drive is almost full already, there's no point in keeping it lower. Liondandy wrote: 2/why dosn't invisible mode work properly Not sure what you mean by that. Can you explain? Liondandy wrote: and why does someone get a personal note in their trashcan telling them who deleted them? When you add somebody to your friends list, the viewer creates two contact cards - basically shortcuts to their profile - in your inventory for that person. When a friendship is cancelled one, but only one, of those cards is moved to the trashcan. It's just one of those idiotic things that looked like a good idea at some time long ago and then never was removed. Unfortunately there seems to be nothing we can do about it. It's a very good idea to delete all contact cards every now and then. They will be recreated next time you log on but then only with one copy of each - a small improvement at least. Liondandy wrote: 3/slightly related to above this is more of a suggestion but I can't beleve linden have not done this already. several people I met said they are onto their second accounts ... why not $5 ~ $10 USD keep all your stuff reset your account age / friends list and get a new resident name, get the impression so many peope would use this, why dosn't this exist? I can't imagine many people would want to reset their age and you can always clear your friends list manually. When people start a new account it's probably because they've lost the log on data for their old one and can't retrieve it. I may be a typical example myself here actually. I joined Second Life years ago, logged on for a few times and then stayed away for a long time. When I eventually returned, I couldn't find my old username and password and the email address I had used back then was long gone. So I started anew with a fresh account. No big deal for me since my first account only had the default inventory. The only thing I lsot was the chance to have an account with a last name and that doesn't bother me at all really. It's worse for others, some people have lost quite a lot of valuable content and, perhaps even worse, fond memorabilia because they had to switch to a new account. Changing the username for an existing account would be extremely difficult, there are so many things linked to it.

As Rolig said, scripts aren't nearly as significant to lag as many people believe. But unfortunately you can still get banned from places for wearing too many scripts because the landowners believe in that myth. Unnecessary scripts aren't doing anybody any good anyway, so regardless of lag, it's always a good idea to try to get rid of them. The things to look for are HUDs and wearable items with retexture and/or resize options. Particularly old style hair with old fashioned resizers. (Old resizers required one script for each and every prim and a hair can have lots of them. Modern resizers only use a single script for the whole thing). Mesh bodies don't add much to the script count (I checked a popular brand at it had 7 scripts, not including the HUD) but may be enough to take you beyond the limit. If you wear an OpenCollar or such. Well, I suppose that doesn't count as unnecessary scripts - if you waer one it's presumably because you want one. They do contain a lot of scripts though and it's quite common for people to be falsely accused of lagging down a place because of them. If you want to see how much lag your avatar actually generates. you can find that in the Advanced menu of your viewer. (If you don't have the Advanced menu, type ctrl-alt-D to activate it). Look for "Performance Tools" in the menu and select "Show Render Weights for Avatars" in the submenu. The number you get there is a far better lag indicator than your script count although it seems to udnerestimate the extra load fitted mesh adds. Generally speaking anything under 50,000 is perfectly ok unless you wear a lot of fitted mesh. 50,000-100,000 shouldn't cause anybody any serious problems, 100,000-150,000 may be a bit of a problem, depending on the situation. As for those outdated avatar script counters some people still keep on their land to kick out perfectly innocent avatars, I really wish I could tell you there is a modern render weight based alternative to them now. But since it was built by one of my best friends and scripted by one of my alts, I can't. And I definitely can't mention that it's only available at Cosmopolitan at the moment and will ebavailable on MP (two different versions at two different stores) and in-world once that event is over.

CallumBH wrote: ... More that they dropped their hardcore user base and bent over backwards to accommodate any investors who took a punt. ... That reminds me, did I remember to mention how important market surveys and market analysis are to a successful business?

steph Arnott wrote: A lot blame LL, truth is 99% of it is their end. I'm not sure if you mean 99% is on LL or on the lot who blames LL but i a way you're right in either case. Many technical problems are caused by Linden Lab neglecting basic maintenance for so long and being able to address even rather critical bugs in a timely matter. Most problems however are caused by user ignorance. We don't know how to operate the viewer properly, we overload the system and we have unrealistic expectation about what is actually possible to achieve in an open virtual reality. But that raises the question, why are users so ignorant and that brings us back to Linden Lab. Linden Lab is still hyping Second Life a bit too much, not as much as they used to but enough to give people an unrealistic impression of the quality of the experience they can get here. The viewer interface (any viewer, not just the official one) is unnecessarily complicated and messy, with hard to understand function names, relatively unimportant function featured and important ones hidden away etc.,etc. Even experienced users can get lost and for casual users and newcomers it can be a daunting - and completely unnecessary - challenge. (I still think the ctrl-alt-G shortcut is important here. Yes, in itself it's a trivial issue but the fact that Linden Lab thinks that particular feature is important enough to warrant a keyboard shortcut speaks volume about their attitude towards user friendliness.) Documentation, the user manual, is a mess, outdated, incomplete, scattered around, hard to find, so verbose you fall asleep reading before you get halfway, full of hard-to-understand tech talk and often so clumsily written it's hard to decipher. The cause of most of the problems we face is located between a chair and a keyboard and the user does have a responsibility to know how to operate a service or a product properly. But the service/product provider also has a responsibility to provide clear, complete and adequate instructions how to and there's no denying that Linden Lab has failed miserably there.

Bradford Mint wrote: What you've said is that it crashed a lot and then it behaved normally. Maybe crashing a lot is normal behavior? Seriously, I use the SL Viewer (some release candidate, don't ask me which), UKanDo, Firestorm and Singularity. Firestorm crashed once a few months ago but apart from that it's been perfectly stable. I can't even remember last time any of the others crashed. But what do you mean by crashes? Is the viewer freezing up or quitting for no reason or are you takling about the "You have been disconnected" message? The last one is not a viewer related problem at all. It's all abut the connection.

steph Arnott wrote: OK, watched them, so how does it use physics as Havok is only on the 32 bit? It's the uploading that matters there. The viewer needs some libraries to generate physics models correctly and those libraries are not available as 64 bit. Once the mesh is uploaded, it doesn't matter what kind of viewer you use since it's not involved in the physics part of SL anyway - the server takes care of that.

My turn to ask a question for a change. About two weeks ago I started to get these huge ping sim peaks - sometimes up to 3000 ms. I eventually figured out my firewall was the msot likely cause, seems McAfee had suddenly decided that Second Life is something really bad and automatically switched back on full firewall protection against it. So I open the McAfee controller and eventually figured out how to configure the firewall. (Digression: I have to take back many of the bad things I've said about viewer interfaces, a clumsy, amateurish attempt to make a user friendly interface is much better than a sleek professional one deliberately designed to be misleading!) I deactivated the firewall for all viewer applications and all slplugin.exe files I could find. That seems to have solved the problem for all viewers except Firestorm. So the question is, did I miss some helper application or should I look elsewhere for the cause? The problem isn't nearly as bad now as before I corrected the firewall settings and it seems to only happen when I move. As long as I stand still, everything is fine, the moment I touch an arrow key, ping sim jumps, sometimes as high as 1500 ms. Edit: Thanks Madelaine and Rolig, your answers helped a lot! :) Btw, I found out that hard drive activity is very significant here. After I fixed the friewall the big peaks only happen while Spyhunter is scanning, keeping my hard drve busy. Once Spyhunter has finished its work, the peaks are still there but far smaller and not big enough to cause any serious problems.

It's hard to give a good answer without knowing the specs of your computer. Second Life can be very laggy unfortunately, even under the best of conditions it can be quite a challenge for your internet connection and especially your graphics card and there are sims there that are heavy enough to overload even the strongest computer known to mankind. From what you wrote, it seems it's render lag you struggle with and the solution there is simply to fine tune the different graphics settings to get the best possible balance. Here are a few things to try if you use the standard SL viewer (with other viewers the different functions may be located elsewhere and have different names): Open preferences, click on the Graphics tab and set graphics to Mid. Then Click on Advanced and look at all the lovely controls there! In the list of Shaders checkboxes, uncheck Atmospheric shaders and Local Lights. Only keep Transparent Water, Bump Mapping and Shiny and Basic shaders on. This is really the absolute minimum today. Without those three switched on, most of SL will look rather horrible. Then look at the sliders to the right: First check that Mesh Detail: Objects: is set to Mid. Then look at Draw Distance. Turn that down to - as much as you can really Those are the two most important rendering factors you can fix yourself easily. You may also reduce the max numbner of non-impostor avatars but that shuold only make a difference in crowded places. --- Two more things you should check in the preferences: Under the advanced tab, increase cahce size as far as it goes. Unless you're really short on disc space on your computer there's no reason to save here Under the Setup tab, set Maximum bandwidth to 1500. You may want it a bit lwoer if you have a slow connection or are on wireless but I hope you aren't

Log on to the Second Life website: https://secondlife.com/ In the left column, click on Account and then on L$ Transaction History. You can only view transactions for the last 32 days there though.

arton Rotaru wrote: I think you are simply asking for too much from a real time renderer. That was the essence of my first reply of course - although I tried to be a little bit less blunt. But when I wrote my second reply to Caelicorn, I was logged on with a computer with very similar specs, same viewer, graphics set to ultra. The environment was fairly low lag but both I and a friend standing next to me were wearing mesh bodies, mesh hands and feet, and mesh clothing. I was not able to reproduce the problem in that setting. Not too long ago I did a serious load test with that same equipment, I went to Skinny Dip Inn with graphics maxed out. That was lag Hell of course but I never saw anything like this and I'm sure I would have noticed. You answer is very, very good general advice, arton. I wish everybody in SL would read it and take heed. But this particular case seems to have some other cause than general render overload. Edit: This is a shot i the dark and may not even help if it hits the mark, but did you check frame rate, Caelicorn? Edit 2: With all that being said, I'm not very familiar with mesh heads and for all I know, that may be the factor that drives the render load over the limit. According to people I've talked to who are involved in Project Bento, that project's main purpose is to offer a less render heavy alternative to all those different mesh bodies and pieces and especially the new breed of animated mesh heads. Now a Bento avatar is so render heavy there was serious doubt they could make it at all and it comes with a crash warning for older computers. What does that say about the functions it is supposed to replace? Only Linden Lab can answer that and they won't - they're even less blunt about it than me.