ChinRey

Jenni Darkwatch wrote: Depends on what you mean by "lag". ... Lag is a very ambiguous word. It is indeed. But the one thing all kinds of lag have in common is that we want as little of them as possible :matte-motes-wink: Jenni Darkwatch wrote: Load time? Yes. The entire scene loads faster if you have multiples of a single object. One load vs. multiple loads. Great! That's good enough reason for me. IvanBenjammin wrote: I too would be very interested in actual documentation of a technical explanation on what's going on. All I have is anectodal evidence - a shop full of modular building components and an observation that all pillars, for example, load at the same time. I've made similar observations. I have this town made largely from a few standardized modules with different textures and sizes for variety. I did it that way to reduce build time, not lag but others have commented on how fast the build renders compared to other pure mesh builds and I've noticed that all copies of the same module tend to load or (on rare occasions fortunately) misload together. The town spans across a sim border and that doesn't seem to make any difference in this case. arton Rotaru wrote: There used to be a mesh asset UUID, which is hidden to prevent mesh asset swapping via LSL. (The asset UUID is not to confuse with an object UUID, which is assigned to objects on rez.) I suppose that counts as a firm confirmation. If SL had such a system to start with, there's no reason why it would have been changed later. But... wouldn't it have been nice if we could actually swap mesh model through LSL the same way we can swap sculpt maps? Oh well, I guess that's just wishful thinking.

The uploader always sets physics shape type for meshes to convex hull and you have to change it to prim manually after uploading. Hopefully that's all you need to do. If ot, let us know and we'll try to figure it out. Trying to make floor surfaces you can both walk on (rather than in or above) and rez and with a reasonable LI can be a challenge even for some of our most experiecned mesh makers but there are a few tricks we can you to get it right

I have been told that tow or more identical mesh objects in a sim share memory and that it's possible to reduce lag quite a lot by by replacing similar meshes with ones that are identical. I can't fins any specific information about this anywhere though. Can anybody confirm this? And where can I find official documentation? Also, if it's true, do the meshes have to be absolutely similar or can they have different sizes and/or textures as long as they're copies of the same upload?

Innula Zenovka wrote: Do you think so? I've very rarely let the thought that I might not be wearing a hair or a skin or some shoes or some clothes or whatever in SL in a year or so's time stop me from buying them if I like them. It would be interesting to get some facts about that. All the merhcants I have chatted with tell me sales dropped significantly after the leak but I can't say if that's a general problem. Imagin Illyar wrote: If Linden Lab didn't create a new next generation virtual world, someone else would. That's true. Whether we like it or not, LL simply doesn't have a choice. There is a limit to how long you can keep patching up outdated software and SL reached that limit long ago. The only way forward is to rebuild from scratch. The question is how will LL do it? Very few people in Second Life feel any loyality to Linden Labs so they won't move over just because it's LL's big new thing. They need some real reson to move there. I think content is the keyword here. The things we own in SL may only be a few bytes of data on a server far away but they feel real. Many of them hold fond memories too. You don't just leave your home and all your belongings to start anew somewhere else. Not voluntarily at least and if they force you - well you certainly won't move in with the people who you feel destroyed your old home. To have any chance to succeed at all, LL has to offer a way for people to transfer their SL belongings to the new VW. The transfer doesn't have to be perfect - you have to expect some damage when moving - but it has to be good eough. As to new content, who's gonna make it? Why would anybody spend countless hours making some wonderful 3D object just to upload it to a VW where you may make a RL dollar or two from it if you're lucky. The reason why so many good builders work for SL is partly because the in-world tools still are relevant for 3D modelling, although less and less so for every month. Another reason builders stay in SL is that it's a great place to discuss and learn the craft. There are so many great and helpful builders here already so there's always somebody to discuss your ideas with. But it's also out of sheer habit. You started building in SL and you're so used to the thought that that's where your works belong, it doesn't really occur to you that you don't really have to upload your meshes there. All that will be gone with the Big Move and builders need a new, substantial, reason to build for this new world. What will that be? Will it be possible to make some noticebale income from it? Not very likely. Will this new world offer a big attentive audience? LL doesn't and there's no way the new world will be better - at least not from the start. The only thing LL's new VW can possibly offer builders in return for the time and effort they spend, is a place to work and tools to work with. They need to come up with a modern equivalent to the prim system - easy to use but with endless possibilities (and preferably a system not permanently sutck in Beta this time). If they can't come up with that, the new world is doomed from the start.

That depends on what you want of course. :matte-motes-wink: There are so many great but different places here so I think you'll have to be a bit more specific to get meaningful answers.

That's a rather interesting problem. Do you still have the prim on your land? You know you can select-edit objects from the list in Fs' Area Search, don't you? No need to physically click on it. Also, did you try to simply contact the person and ask? Not very likely you get a reply but you never know. The "newcomer" here is almost certainly a new alt for some old griefer but there's also a small chance it's a genuine newbie who has been tricked into doing something he/she shouldn't have done and if so, you may actually get a response on an IM. You definitely should file an AR. This may not be a clear TOS violation but it's supicious enough LL may want to take a look at it. And finally, have you considered setting a long(ish) autoreturn time rather than leave the sim wide open? As to what the mystery object can be, that's hard to tell. I may be wrong but I don't think there is anything that can be done with lsl to actually hurt you and/or your customers without tricking the victim into clicking on and OK button at some point so you should be safe there. If there were, LL would have put a stop to it long time ago. It may of course be just another stupid griefer script but if it was you'd probably have noticed by now. This may be a shot in the dark but my best guess is that it's a name collector script for soem spammer. I'm sure you've heard about them. They just place those scripts that collect names for their lists of people to spam wherever they can.

First thing you should do is check the Maximum bandwicth setting. There may be a bit to gain there. It's hard to say exactly what you should set it to though - depends on your connection. The idea is to find the sweet spot where your computer gives the connection enough attention to deal with the data transfer efficiently but without wasting time trying to receive data faster than the connection can deliver it. You objects and sculpt LOD setting is maxed out. That adds quite a lot of client side lag (and a little bit of network and server side too) and shouldn't be necessary today, not unless you spend a lot of time surrounded by outdated and/or poor quality sculpts and mesh. You may also want to reduce the number of non-impostor avatars quite a bit although it may not have any practical significance. How often are you in an environment with that many other avatars anyway? Draw distance - quite a bit to save there. Find out how much you actually need. Finally - and I know many will protest here - consider using the standard SL viewer or possibly Singularity. Firestorm is a much heavier program then those two and you should ask yourself whether you actually need all those extra features and if you do, are they worth the extra lag?

In addition to what others already have mentioned, this is also what happens when you view fitted mesh with a viewer that doesn't support that new feature. The solution for thoe cases is of course to update your viewer to the latest version.

Coby Foden wrote: ChinRey wrote: One day we will all use mesh avatars - ... Are you sure? Oh yes. It'll happen almost exactly three weeks before somebody introduces the new voxel avatars that you have to put on top of your mesh avatar that you have to put on top of your system avatar. Coby Foden wrote: Would it be a good thing? Seriously? Of course not. But unfortunately LL has made it a habit never to update existing features. Instead they add a new one on top of the old to cover the blemishes. I don't know how the SL software is patched together of course but it shouldn't be that difficult for LL to simply add higher resolution (that is more polys) to the existing avatar system rather than introduce a brand new one but that's simply not the way they do things there. Not only does this habit of theirs cause incompatibility problems like the clothing issue we're discussing here, it's also an extremely inefficient way of doing things. I'd be surprised if the SL network functions at as much as half its potential capacity by now. (Edit: LL does of course update existing features occasionally. For example, a few months ago they replaced the old physics algorithm with a new and much better one. But that doesn't make what I wrote untrue, just a bit exaggerated. And the new mesh avatars is a prime example how not to do things. I honestly can't see anything you can do with those new avatars that couldn't have been just added to the old system avatar - which of course also is mesh. The only reason I can think of they did it the way they did is that whoever was in charge of that project couldn't be bothered to go through and modify the old code somebody else wrote years ago.)

SaraCarena wrote: When you joined sl the avatars you can chose are of 3 types people, vampires and classic. The first 2 types people and vampires are what experienced users in sl call "the new mesh avatars" they work a bit differently to the "classic" avatars. I think that's a major issue that everybody, including LL, overlooked: there are no clothes that work with those new mesh starter avatars! That is, there may be some existing mesh clothing that fit but how is a poor newcomer supposed to figure out that? And how much L$ are they supposed to spend on clothing that turns out not work before they find something that does? That will change eventually of course. One day we will all use mesh avatars - and all the existing clothing in SL will be outdated. (And by then computer power should have increased enough to compensate for the extra lag this will generate.) But for now, just get out of that mesh avatar as fast as you can and replace it with a classic one. You can go to " Choose an avatar" in the "Me" menu to find the classic starter avatars SaraCarena mentioned and you can also find quite a few like that in the Library folder in your inventory. They're not very good but at least you can change their clothes. Next step would probably be to find a slightly better free avatar at one of the help centers or freebie stores and then just keep upgrading, upgrading and upgrading until you find the perfect look you want.

I think the answer to that question is obviously yes. It's in everybody's best interest. But as others have pointed out, it's not easy to implement good rules here. LL isn't likely to do anything about it so it's up to each and every resident to be considerate and respectful of others. There may be some good guidelines though: You have the right to keep strangers out of your house. If somebody enters uninvited, well the fact that they're inside a private house should be more than enough warning. Whatever happens to the intruder is their problem, not the landowner's or tenant's. Outdoors areas are a bit more problematic. I think some pre-warning would be a good idea there. Not just for the "intruder" but for the landowner/tenant too. I can't imagine I'll ever want to close any of my land from visitors but if I did, I'd much prefer they didn't enter at all than having them enter and then ejected. I've been told that in an alternative reality called Real Life™, they have this device called a "fence". Maybe that's something worth looking at? Using tp home rather than eject from land on mainland is just rude. Nobody who cares the slightest for SL or for other people would do that - unless they're very, very thoughtless that is. A much better solution would be to have the orb eject without warning if somebody tries to re-enter right after being ejected once. (I'm not sure if this applies to islands. On an isolated island there may be no place to eject people to so sending them home might be the only option.) Teleporting the vehicle along with the driver is a very, very good idea but I can't see how it can be implemented. Wearable vehicles yes, but they already are tp'ed along with the driver. But vehicles you sit in/on ... I can't see how that can be possible. No matter how many security devies you use and how well you hide your skybox, mainland can never ever offer the same amount of security as an island. So if privacy is a main concern to you, you don't really want a mainland home anyway - a place on a secluded island is a much better option.

I can't help you with this but at least I can confirm that items do sometimes vanish from the land without a trace and with no apparent reason. It has happened twice at my main sim, Coniston. Once a 30+ m long section of the port and a cottage nearby went AWOL, the second time it was the completle ruins of a ww ii coatsal fort. In both cases the items completely gone, they did not appear in my Lost and Found folder and they were not relocated elsewhere in the sim. Oh, and these were all old bulds who had stood there quietly for months, there were no other people with land powers who had removed them and there were no scripts running wild (the only script in any of the items was the cottage's door script). Fortunately I keep backups of all important parts of my build so I could replace the objects but it still wasn't a very pleasant experience. I guess the correct thing to do when this happens is to open a JIRA but with no trace of the item left at all, how do we document it? And of course, always keep backups, preferably with their coordinates written down so they're easy to position if/when needed. And never rez no-copy items on your land unless they're so cheap and easiily available it won't matter much if you loose them. (Edit: just corrected a few typos)

Yes, one of the most important lessons we have learned the past year is to control each and every model in detail and also which models to keep and which to zero out. To illustrate how far we've got: the window I posted a picture of was made for a house I'm working on at the moment. About 500 m2, quite highy detailed, irregular shape, two floors (but staggered so there are actually five floor levels), a very elaborate (85 prim) staircase... Back when prims were the only building material available, that house would have required at least 600-700 prims, maybe more. A year ago, it could have been made with mesh at an LI of ... perhaps 100 or so. Today ... I already know I can get the LI down well below 30 and I'm hoping for 20. That is with no LOD compromices worth speaking of. Set your graphics prefs to default medium - RVLF 1 and draw distance 128 and it still looks perfectly fine halfway across a sim.

Not sure if I should have created a new topic rather than reopen on that's over a year old but... Drongle McMahon wrote: The switch distances for an object are proportional to the object "radius", which is the half-diagonal of the bounding box. It can be calculatede as r = sqrt(x*x + y*y + z*z)/2, where x, y and z are the dimensions of the object in meters. That formula is not correct at the moment. Take a look at this picture: The two windows here are absolutely identical except for one thing: The one to the left was rotated 90 degrees before uploading (so that the long side was along the x rather than z axis) and then rotated back afterwards. It seems the size along the local z axis is completley ignored so the actual formula is: r = sqrt(x*x + y*y)/2 This is almost certainly a bug and I have posted a JIRA about it. But it's a good idea for everybody to be aware of it until it's been fixed. Chic Aeon wrote: So realistically you need to decide just who you are building for. If you make items that can be seen well from a distance at the lowest LOD settings, then you end up with much higher land impact cost. Since I'm posting here anyway, I think I'll add a comment to that. What Chic Aeon wrote was probably true back in March 2013 when she posted her comment. But we've learned a lot about mesh since then and LL may also have tweaked their algorhitms a bit. Today any skilled SL mesh maker has a vast arsenal of LI reduction techniques far more efficient and less destructive than the old LOD sacrifice method. This is similar to what happened to sculpts. At first all sculpts were low LOD but then builders figured out how to use oversized bounding boxes and strengthened points and today's expert sculpt makers are able to make sculpts that are nearly as LOD resistant as regular prims. Increasing RVLF comes at a cost. It forces the server to send far more data than necessary (since it affects all objects in the area, not just the low LOD ones) and that adds significant lag, especially on the client side of course but also on the server and network. It may still be necessary to view old sculpts and meshes (and sculpts and meshes made by builders who haven't learned the techniques yet) but generally I think it shoud be avoided whenever possible.

Pamela Galli wrote: I appreciate the effort, but there is no way I am going to understand that. I will take your word for it that it is not random, but to me it seems like it is. It can seem random sometimes to everybody, not just you, Pamela. The four "weights" - both the three that are the basis for LI calculation and that fourth one that isn't - are really attempts to calculate how much load the object places on various parts of the computer network: simply put, the more data the model has, the more calculations it requires and the more frequent the model is actually needed, the higher the weights. Usually, it is fairly easy to predict the weights and LI of an object once you've done a few hundred meshes (or other "new LI calculation" builds) but yes, there is this seemingly random factor too. Sometimes changes that should reduce LI actually increases it and vice versa. I think Drongle found the explanation for this: compressibility. Those computers don't work with raw data all the time, they use compress it as often as possible. It's often hard to figure out in advance the compressibiity of the data, sometimes seemingly simple thing can be hard to reduce down, sometimes seemingly complex things are fairly easy to compress.

Those final changes did not change the bounding box or overall dimensions of any model so it's that unpredictable factor then. Trying to figure that one out may be going a bit too far even for me - and I've been accused of trying to make SL run on a 386. :matte-motes-wink: But I went over that build I was working on one more time applying the compressibility principle everywhere I could. The end result was a 20% reduction in download weight. That's on an object that was unusualy well optimised to start with and most of the things I did are easily incoroprated in my regular work routines without adding much to build time. I started this thread out of curiosity and didn't really expect it to have any practical significance but this is actually a good result and well worth an hour or two of testing and posting. :matte-motes-big-grin: Thank you very much for your help, Drongle!

Replying to my own post here but: ChinRey wrote: it seems that right triangles with the legs aligned along the axis is more compressable than other tris. That is now confirmed. I tested two versions of the same object. Both of them with the same high, mid and low res models and the only difference in the lowest res models was that one had only right-angled triangles (8 of them) while the other had four right angled and four isoceles triangles. The one with all right triangles had a download weight of 0.707, the one with icosceles triangles 0.729. Then I modified the low res model too, changing the isosceles triangles there (2 out of 10) to right-angled. That brought the download weight down to 0.700. That doesn't seem like much but it can add up in a complex linkset and even in a single unlinked mesh it may well be just enough to decide whether the LI count will be rounded up or down. Add Drongle's observation about the significance of normals directions and there may be considerable LI to save by optimising a mesh for compressability. But I did two more test and got some really strange results: To check whether data concordances between models mattered, I repositioned two of the triangles that were identical in both the low and lowest res models. That actually reduced download weight to 0.687! Rotating one of the triangles 90 degrees brought it further down to 0.671. I can't think of anything that can explain this. The two triangles I moved defined the outer limits of the lowest mesh model along the x and y axises but I only moved them slightly along the z axis. oving them didn't change which triangles were detacted and which were attached either. Can anybody explain this?

Don't know anything for sure but rumours say there was a delay with some stipend payments. I wouldn't worry until tomorrow really. The stipend is supposed to arrive on Tuesday but as far as I know, there's nothing said about what time during that day it is paid.

Talking about the latest item I meshed here. I've seen the same thing happen several times before but it's easier to relate to one specific case for now: Drongle McMahon wrote: Have you looked at the uploader triangle and vertex counts to see if there has been an unexpected invrease? Yes Drongle McMahon wrote: Is it definately the download weight that's setting the LI? It isn't but that's irrelevant since I was talking about download weight specifically, not LI Drongle McMahon wrote: Is your triangle/quad detaced or attached to the rest of the mesh? The quad-to-triangle conversion doesn't change this - not in the latest case. Drongle McMahon wrote: Can you reproduce the effect on a very simple model? The latest build I noticed it on is a very simple model. Drongle McMahon wrote: As far as I know, the download weight is still calculated from the mesh data size after compression. OK. That must be the explanation here. There are two possible explanation why reducing the triangle count on that atest build of mine would make the file less compressable but judging from earlier cases, it seems that right triangles with the legs aligned along the axis is more compressable than other tris. Well, they obviously are of course but I'm surprised the difference is big enough to be measurable - there can't be many bytes we save that way. And of course, the more raw data the various models have in common, the more compressable the file will be. That's good to keep in mind.

Here's something I don't understand. I'm sure we all often make meshes where we don't need to keep all mesh faces in the high resolution model in all the others so the sensible thing is of course to reduce those faces to a minimum. Reducing such a face down to a single small square reduces the download LI of course - there's often a lot of LI to save there. But - for some reason, reducing it further down to a single triangle actually increases the download weight slightly! Can anybody explain why? Is it really easier for the computers to handle two triangles forming a rectangle than a single triangle on its own or is it just the weight calculation that is inexact?

It is highly unlikely that your problem is caused by cache overload. Even the most powerful computer would probably lag down to a crawl long before the cache gets overloaded by a single environment. Besides, a cache overload should cause textures to turn gray, not blurred. A more likely explanation is a bug in Project Interesting (see https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-5978 ). That's easy to check. When the problem occurs, open Develop Menu -> Consoles -> Texture Console and look at the Bias number. If it's stuck at 5, it's the Project Interesting bug. If it is, please add acomment to the Jira with any info you can provide. The case is currently listed as "Needs More Info" and anything we can do to help LL solve it would be greatly appreciated. Regardless of that issue, I agree with you about cache size. The more files we can store locally, the less load we place on the servers and the network and the less lag we get. Today even the smallest computer tend to have plenty of storage room to spare and it just makes sense to give everybody the option to use that unused resource to improve SL. :-) You should post a Jira about it. That's where suggestion for new features are supposed to go. --||-

Qie Niangao wrote: Although the hearts are exceedingly ugly blotches, I'm unclear: Are those owners, specifically, blocking what was once open waterway, particularly "continent to continent" channels? I don't know about Heartless Land in general but I know there is one instance where the answer is a definite yes. Mystical Rentals have bought Montserrat and blocked it off with a security orb that teleports you right home so fast you don't even have time to react to the warning message. Other owners have done similar things throughout Pine Coast. As a result North Islands is no longer a part of Sansara and can only be accessed by teleporting. (Edit: just fixed a typo)

+ You get 300 L$/week - that's quite a lot actually. + And you get access to live support chat - that's really great. + If I understand correctly, you can also exchange your Lindens for real life money through LL at a slightly better rate than elsewhere - that's nice of course but you need to have tons of L$ before that becomes important. To me the first two of those are more than worth the money even though it goes downhill fast from here: - It may be nice to have a Linden Home ready for you when you're a newbie but you probably don't want to keep it longer than absolutely necessary. They're not exactly good houses and the neighbourhood is bland at best, horrible at worst. - The Premium Gifts are just rubbish, not even worth spending the minute it takes to collect and unpack them.