ChinRey

MadDog Tremor wrote: TRUE....if your computer is a POS. FALSE...If your computer didn't come from Walmart. Yes but a Second Life that only welcomed people with high spec expensive hardware wouldn't draw any crowd at all. Edit: That kind of post doesn't really deserve a proper answer but you get one anyway: I got some bad news for you boy: This is 2016, it's time to wake up! Second Life is not cutting edge technology anymore and holds no attraction to the computer-savvy people. And nobody but nobody spends money on hardware just to try Second Life and see if it's anything for them. So what you're really saying is that Second Life should only be for the established core of die-hard fans and that's n endangered species. Edit 2: Like most people in SL I'm not from the USA so I don't know what kind of computers Walmart sells. But you definitely need something far heftier than a mid price off-the-shelf general purpose computer from a serious computer store if you want to spend quality time in crowded SL places.

Persephone Emerald wrote: I'm not on the team. I just went to listen in on the meeting between creators & Lindens working on the project. Oh, you're a secret spy! Don't worry, we won't tell. This thread is classified as TOP SECRET. Seriously, I only know the names of a few of the creators involved but from what I know it seems they've really called in the elite forces this time. And also, I don't know if all those rumors about LL only using their Best Buddies among builders were ever true but if they were, they most certainly aren't anymore.

BonitaBunny wrote: I'm aware that typically uploading something with ridiculously high polycount will give errors like this It will also cause ridiculously high lag after it's been uploaded, BonitaBunny wrote: Yes it does SORRY! I confused myself because the finished mesh was 60,000 but after removing mass of the mesh to test it out, it was only 6,000 and still gave me the same issue. Oh, that's more like it == Even so, my answer is still: make the LOD models yourself. Not only is that guaranteed to eliminate any problem of any kind with ridiculous poly counts from the uploader, it is also guaranteed to give you far better and more efficient mesh. Yes, advanced LOD model optimisation is difficult, really difficult, and also rather time consuming. But coming up with something at least a little bit better than the uploader's is something anybody who knows how to handle a 3D editor can do and it only takes a minute or two.

Kelli May wrote: So, as you point out, the render weight number doesn't necessarily mean that much. I think there are several reasons for that. One is of course the one LL always points out: Actual render weight depends so much on the client's hardware it's impossible to calculate precisely. Another is that the formula is clearly outdated. Linden Lab did a lot of really good reasearch when they created that formula but a lot has happened since then and it doesn't take into account how SL and computer technology in general has evolved over the last few years. The third is that render weight is all about cpu load. All evidence suggests that the added lag caused by "regular" mesh is gpu rather than cpu related and it's very likely that this is the case with most of the fitmesh lag too. Unfortunately SL has no mechanism for estimating client side gpu load. Kelli May wrote: What I suppose this means is that there are different kinds of people with regard to render weight: those who don't even know how to check it;aka SL users. I overheard some local chat at a crowded place earlier today. A woman said: "sorry about my avi my viewer is not working right not sure what wrong with it yet". That's the level of awareness we usually find in SL and there is nobody to tell them different. Kelli May wrote: those who know about it, but don't care; aka Lindens. No, sorry, that was rude of me. They have started to wake up now. You forgot to mention those who know about it, but don't really understand what it means or how to deal with it. I think that's the majority of content creators right now. Kelli May wrote those who know and try to keep the number low; Quite a few prominent content creators belong to that category. Kelli May wrote: and those who'd love to keep the number low, but don't trust the tools we're given. Yes but what can we do? Those are the tools we have and we have to make the mot of them. At least they're far better than no tools at all.

Drongle McMahon wrote: Furthermore, Lag: " a period or term of penal servitude; prison sentence." Lag (Norwegian): "Team". Edit: Swedish too, come to think of it. And LL has a Swedish CEO who is trying hard to get the Lindens to work better as a team. Maybe we have some kind of language barrier misunderstanding going on here...

KarenMichelle Lane wrote: Most crowded clubs in SL I AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE !!!!!! LOL! You can't really have big crowds in SL anymore, not the way you could a year or two ago. Avatars have become so heavy now that often a dozen or less of them moving on the same dance floor is enough to lag the place down so much only bots and afks can manage to hold on. Apart from that, try to do an in-world search, for "No Bots" in Places -> Hangouts. Add one of your preferred music styles to the search too if you like. Sort by most popular and then check each place that looks interesting on the map. If there are less than five green dots there, try again later, it may just be a quiet hour for them. If there are more than ten, approach with caution if at all. Anything in-between, go for it! Also, remember that just like in RL, you can't just drop in as a lone complete stranger at a club. Unless the place happens to have a very, very good host, it wil take a while before you get to know the regulars and become one of them. Edit: Seems I spoke too soon. That search hardly turns up any results at all. Even some clubs I know advertise as "no bots" were missing from the list. Oh well, maybe it will work eventually. It seems some club owners have started to realize that bots are bad for business in the long run.

IIianII wrote: thank you so much for all those info YW

Aquila Kytori wrote: I had something similar happening in the Uploader a while ago but not sure if it is caused by the same thing as you mention it only happens "when I add flat planes". It happens if you do a test upload with high poly LOD models. Afterwards the poly coutns for the autogenerated LOD models will never go lwoer than the ones you used then unless you reset the stored upload data. Unti recently the only way to do that were to delete that slm file so many people have trouble finding or rename your dae file but recently LL added a reset button to the uploader.

BonitaBunny wrote: I'm meshing hair, nothing complicated, but for some reason I'm unable to change the LoD in the uploader. I can change the triangle limit, but it doesn't change the triangle or vertices count, like I wanted. They're all at their own set limit, and I don't want to upload a mesh with such demanding detail—or pay the price for it. There's a reset button under the Upload tab. Click on that and that problem is fixed. But really, reading your profile here I assume you're making some mesh clothing or mesh hair for sale. I do not want to sound rude but more than 60 000 triangles is an enormous lot for something like that. It's the level of poly count you only should use on very rare occasions and obly for the kind of very intricate collector items you only rez every now and then to look at, not for something intended for regular use and certainly not something you wear in public. And if you make mesh for sale you need to make proper LOD models, not rely on the botched ones the uploader can generate.

This is a strange one. It's easy to see what happens, your computer keeps derenedering and rerendering items all the time. It's harder to say why it happens though. Object thrashing is something that happens in SL and Firestorm seems to be more prone to it than other viewers. But it should never occur unless you've been logged on for hours and filled your cache with several heavy scenes and even then it should be easy to correct with a quick relog. I'm afraid Rolig's suggestion that your graphics card may be broken seems like the most plausible explanation. Or possibly you ram since it seems to be cache related. But before you do anything as drastic as replacing hardware, do all the standard tests: Click ctrl-shift-1 and check the performance stats. Look at ping sim time, packet loss and fps. Neither of those should cause problems like this but you never know and it only takes a few seconds to check. (Ping sim time depends on where you lvie and how fast your connection is but anything higher than 500 ms means trouble. Packet loss should be 0%. Fps should not be lower than 15 ms, preferably at least 30.) In preferences->graphics switch Atmospheric shaders off or switch Ambient Occlusion on. There is a bug in Firestorm that can cause objects to blink in a similar way. It has something to do with Atmospheric shaders and seem to be overridden by the more advanced Ambient Occlusion shading system. It doesn't look quite the same though and I've never heard of it happening on a scale like this. Try to lower the graphics settings overall and see if that helps. You may also try to switch to a faster viewer, such as the official SL Viewer, UKanDo or even Singularity.

Kelli May wrote: eta: someone showing 546,289 just dropped in. That's absolutely unbelieveable! Kelli May wrote: Someone near me right now is reading 511,424. No idea what's causing it, because it's not a mesh body and she's not wearing hair. Most mesh bodies don't add much to the calculated render weight. That is they don't add much more than any other object with the same poly count. The two mesh bodies I use both have render weights well below 4000. They're made by makers who actually tried really hard to keep their works as low lag as possible but from what I've seen even bodies by less considerate creators don't usually go much into the five digit range on their own. But render weight isn't always a good indicator of actual client side load anymore. The formula for calculating it was developed long ago and a lot have changed since then. There are many more recent load icnreasers that are simply ignored by the render weight calculation.

IvanBenjammin wrote: That definition of lag is about as relevant to SL as any other Except of course: Lag: the act or the condition of lagging Lagging: material for thermal insulation especially around a cylindrical object IvanBenjammin wrote: In the last couple years it seems like they've made an effort to catch up and address the problem. It's not as if they have any choice. But they're horribly late. And they're still trying to grasp the basics of a concept that has always been completely ailen to their coprorate culture: Consequence analysis. Bad habits die hard and a boss can't just give an order like "from now on we do things this way and not the way we used to". Each and every co-worker has to be followed up closely and be trained and motivated and the lesson has to be repeated over and over again for it to really sink in. That takes time, a lot of time and in LL's case they have to do it while they're desperately trying to find a way out of the hole they've dug for themselves.

IIianII wrote: yeah it's a test upload and solely for personal use only. I'm trying to figure out texturing cuz it's the one that puzzled me the most and I want to know all the ways/most convenient way to do it and apply them all to my creations. I'm still new and learning and to see a prim with textures made on overlapping UVs makes it more confusing for me. is it to preserve texture resolution for objects with big UV maps? It's a bit tricky to explain. UV maps and the texturable faces aren't really directly related to each other so it's better to explain them separately. A UV map is essentially a flat sheet where you can place the vertices and triangles of a mesh to tell where they belong on the texture. If you want to, you can place each and every tri on the map independently of each other and you can overlap them as much as you like. The advantage to overlapping is that you can fit more onto a single texture which again means higher actual resolution and/or lower lag. The disadvantage is of course that the overlapping bits reuse the same aprt of the texture so it'll have to fit them both. A good example here is the UV map for the upper body of the avatar. The arms are positioned at the same place on the UV map so they both use the same part of the texture (one of them is mirrored of course). Faces - or Materials as they are called outside SL - allows you to apply different textures and other surface effects to different polys. You can assign polys to different faces completely independent of each other and completely independent on where they are on the UV map. In principle that is. Of course, you really want to keep some sort of system both to UV mapping and to face assignment or you'll end up with a mess rather than a mesh.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: You're right, and that's the best part! Each to their own. I prefer to leave the messy jobs to others.

IvanBenjammin wrote: (leaving aside the fact that the word 'lag' doesn't mean what most people think it does) "a usually long putt struck with the aim of having the ball stop near the hole" according to Merriam-Webster. (Some other definition there too but that's the one we use here, right?) IvanBenjammin wrote: b) its not the environment that causes SL to run poorly. There certainly are exceptions but not many. Second Life has always had very strict restrictions how much you can rez on the land but very few limitations to what you can wear. I don't know if that means they felt avatars were too imoprtant to restrict or that they never thought avatar lag would ever become a serious problem. But this meant that Second Life tended to be more attractive to people interested in avatar appearance than in the scenery and even many of those who came here to experience the wonderful virtual world tended to become more and more avatar centered. People are always very good at finding and exploiting loopholes of course and the result is what we see today.

steph Arnott wrote: I just kept to SL, else would have extended beyond the subject matter Well, nos. 25 and 26 of the good (or possibly not) old (definitely) Rules of the Internet still apply today: 25.Relation to the original topic decreases with every single post. 26.Any topic can easily be turned into something totally unrelated All the others may be outdated (especially nos. 28-30 but they would bring us back on topic again and we can't have that) http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Old+Rules+Of+The+Internet

steph Arnott wrote: SL removes that restraint allowing some to be behave in ways that are beyond social acceptable standards SL? Have you been to some of the other "social" forums on the internet??? Apart from that, I agree with you of course. Far too often SL is "Your World. You Imagination. Your Neighbor's Nightmare". Never understood how LL could forget that third sentence in their slogan.

steph Arnott wrote: ... or define roleplay as something totaly different to some that post here. Yes, I think this is more about different definitions of the word than an actual disagreement.

Drongle McMahon wrote: ETA - actually. considering a bit more carefully, that is probably an exaggeration. Since any triangle can only be seen from one side, the renedring would only have to work out which side for each. Yes, that was my point. Also, from what I understand (I may be wrong) vertices add a lot more to the load than polys. Drongle McMahon wrote: That's still a pretty heavy burden though. You'd gain some and loose some and I have no idea if the sum would be positive or negative. It's all just idle thoughts anyway.

Drongle McMahon wrote: You can preview this behaviour in Blender by turning on "Backface culling", using the checkbox in the "Shading" section of the Properties panel, usually to the right of the 3D view. That way you can save the effort of uploading to identify the inverted normal problem. To see the (face) normals, click the rightmost of the three box icons in the "Mesh Display" section of the Properties panel in Edit mode. A third way to identify normal issues is to jsimply look at the color of the polys. Backfaces are shaded according to the light they get from the other side and on a larger surface with mixed normals they will always stand out because of that. We should also have mentioned there are two quick ways to make a large number of normals conststent in Blender: Ctrl-N to make all nomrals in the selection point outwards, Cltr-Shift-N to make them all point inwards, regardless of which way they flipped at the start. Of course on a complex model it is not always possible for Blender to determine what is in and what is out but they work surprisingly well and can save you a lot of time hunting for the misbehaving polys. (Edit - and completely off topic: Am I the only one who can't help thinking how many polys we could have saved if SL had allowed for backfaces?)

Yes. But... If it's a file you downloaded rather than one you made yourself, do you have permission to upload it to Second Life? There are mesh files on the internet that can be legally uploaded to Second Life but most can't and me and most other advisors on this board are rather reluctant to give advice unless we know for sure it's for something legal. Also, if you don't know how to handle materials in a 3D editor, do you know how to make LOD models and physics models? Or to put it another way: Are you trying to run before you've learned how to walk?

October Ronas wrote: Blender v2.76 // SL Firestorm 4.7.5 If you use Firestorm to upload, make sure it's the 32 bit, not the 64 bit version, and the Second Life-only one, not the one with access to other grids too. The reason is that Second Life uses the HAVOK physics engine. HAVOK only exists in a 32 bit version and Linden Lab's user license only applies to Second Life so they're not allowed to make it available to other grids. (The latter is a bit silly since it's easy to reconfigure any viewer, even the official SL viewer, to work on any grid and the client side part of HAVOK probably wouldn't have had any effect on a non-HAVOK sim anyway.) October Ronas wrote: I have no idea how to view the log but I did research here. It wouldn't have done you much good anyway. There may still be somebody at LInden Lab who are still able to decipher that log... October Ronas wrote: The top and bottom of the letter appear from all angles but the sides are invisible and can only been seen on the inside. Normals pointing the wrong way. Common Blender problem, not only for SL. Select the problem faces type ctrl-F and select "Flip Normals". October Ronas wrote: I noticed after saving my mesh as an object I lost my market seams. I also saved it as a ply once and had the same results as the obj. That time I took the time to re-seam my whole mesh but when I imported it to SL I lost my seams again? As far as I know, the seams are only used for UV mapping. They may have other purposes too but they're of no use whatsoever inside Second Life. October Ronas wrote: I don't understand, seams are supposed to be considered 'faces' inside of SL right? No. Materials in Blender are Faces in SL.

500 L$ is just two U.S. dollars and you can withdraw those Lindens again afterwards of course so all you actually have to pay is an even smaller transaction fee. It's mainly for your safety, to confirm that the account info you've given is correct (not outdated, no typos and so on) so the money they send will reach you. As far as I know all serious online money transactions ervices have similar systems.

Bobbie Faulds wrote: 2 bodies/heads is insane. You can wear many fitmesh clothes with the mesh bodies without a problem. You mean a ton of fitmesh clothes will solve the problem? Sorry, couldn't resist it. You have a very important point of course. If everybody got rid of all the unnecessary things, all those details that will never actually be rendered on anybody's computer screen anyway, we'd hardly have any lag issues in SL at all. That's not going to happen though. Bobbie Faulds wrote: As for the "rubbish", The SL default is deformed on the curved sections, like the breast, calves, elbows, etc. They are really pronounced if you go over certain limits in the butt and breast areas. And we all want to go over the limits there, don't we? I certainly do. You forgot to mention the spades they use for hands and the tree trunks they use for feet. The Second Life avatar was actually absolutely brilliant back when it was introduced and even today it's still way better than what you get in most other virtual environments. But it is beginning to show its age and avatar appearance has become so important to Second Life. Without it, there's hardly anything left to interest people here. Somebody at BB chat - can't remember her name - started making fun of various social media, Facebook is for telling the world what you had for breakfast, Twitter is for insulting people and so on. When asked what SL was for she wrote: "Second Life is where we play with Barbies and pretend it's art." Linden Lab could and should have upgraded the system avatar long ago. But they never took client side lag seriously. They're beginning to realize their mistake now. But I don't think they've realized the magnitude of the blunder yet and although they're desperately trying, they still haven't found a way to out the genie back in the bottle. We could start a group called "I Told You". Could become a big one.

Alwin Alcott wrote: i can't wait till the render limit is in all viewers ... It's not that effective unfortunately. The render weight formula it is based on is old and doesn't take into account recent lag inducers like mesh bodies, normal maps and specular maps. You'll have to derender lots of percetly safe and innocent avatars for it to catch all the lag monsters. Besides, people aren't going to accept that solution. They don't want to see a world populated by red jellybeans. So they turn render protection off or set the limit so high it might as well be off and then they get angry and blame the lag on everybody else and especially on how bad SL is. There's a not too old thread on this forum where somebody complained she had been evicted from a club for nudity when she tp'ed in and her mesh body didn't render. She got lots of sympathetic replies: people have to understand that modern avatars are laggy and it's not fair to ban people from a place just because they lag everybody else down. Even Linden Lab seem to still be in denial to some degree. As far as I know, they still claim the many event sim breakdowns were caused by griefers. Well, I went to an event just before it opened once. No supsicious looking avatars there, just event organizers and merchants and it still was so laggy the poor sim was barely able to function. Edit: Has anybody else noticed the recent promo pictures on the SL website's start page btw? Heavily photoshopped closeups of unrealistic avatar faces. That's the message they want to give the world: "This is what you get if you join Second Life!"