Rick Nightingale

I tend to view that page the same way I do our local police - crime historians.

https://secondlife-status.statuspage.io/

https://secondlife-status.statuspage.io/

Got my alt in after five minutes of the above errors, but outfit changes and other server related things are still very, very slow

Same here - trying to log an alt in. On the already logged in account, the servers seem to be responding very slowly - a full minute for an outfit change, 30 seconds for a BOM change...

Hmm... I didn't know about the no-copy items issue either. Check out who you are renting from, carefully, if you value stability. Until quite recently I wouldn't even consider renting; had always bought mainland. When I decided that I might give it a go and started looking, checking out the owner was top of my list. After passing quite a few, I was fortunate to find a good piece of land from Prokofy, whom I had seen a lot of on the forums here and met (just in passing sort of thing) in world a few times. I felt comfortable enough with what I knew to take the plunge even though I know stuff can go wrong and sometimes happens without any warning to anyone. If I hadn't found Prokofy's rentals, I most likely wouldn't have rented. (Not saying there aren't other good land owners too - but like everything in SL, it's all buyer beware and I don't trust people easily.)

I had an RL friend, years back, who would buy any electronic gadget or computer type things that I bought or even talked about buying. This was back in the very early days of computing, when new and interesting stuff was coming out daily. After a while, I started deliberately mentioning things to him, just to see what he did. Without fail, he would have the thing within a few days. I nearly bankrupted him!

Could be. Maybe the system was more sensitive when I happened to try it years ago, or I was just unlucky. No matter - I was only seeing what it was.

I never understood how people could cheat with speed enhancers and the like in the Realms. The few times I bothered to play there, I would get chucked out on a regular basis - just by normal running and jumping around. Jump over a rock - get chucked out. Slide down a mountain... get chucked out. Just be mid running... find myself back home yet again. I never used or did anything to cheat. So how on Earth do cheaters manage? It got on my nerves so much I gave up. Besides, there are other 'games' which seem far more lucrative for less stress, not that I bother.

I've recreated the Slink Extra Alphas from the textures (what a pain, lol). You can grab it free here, or chat me up in world for a copy: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Slink-Free-Extra-Alphas-works-with-any-avatar/24509691 @LibGwen it will save you some work if you haven't done it yet I've made the pack no-trans just to stop unscrupulous types from reselling it for money.

I've just had to refund a customer who bought an item, and it was delivered and charged three times under three different order numbers. Now I'm trying to get a refund of the MP fee from LL.

Ditto both of the above. I use some Anna Erotica trees here to 'fill in' with more land impacty trees in front, and some Skye stuff. Skye has the best waterfall and river kits in SL I think.

Oh, you mean those that get locked? Well, I didn't intend it to be... I just found what I saw quite amusing so I posted it.

I'll tell you my answer... three or four. My wife and I are at a store, and she said why are there so many people on the radar, but it's empty? They are all on an empty floor just above the sales floor; just above the two of us. Sometimes the store really is elbow to elbow, but when it's empty, it's like this. Notice the dice-like five dots? There are three, but one is partial. Apart from two of the dots (me and my wife) and another two that are indicated higher up, almost every one of them is either 6 years and 6 or 7 months old, or 1 year 1 month, with a couple of outliers. All of them are standing still, most in a starter avatar outfit, no profile, picks or groups, not indicated as bots, etc.. The odd one has a bit of a profile (the age outliers as mentioned), as if it's an abandoned alt. I guess someone's playing the traffic game. So much for using traffic as a search criterion... is that still done?

Am I right that one thing we won't be able to do with PBR is have specular highlights of a different colour to the albedo? Like on my mer tails which are green, but flash with red patterns when at right angle to the light.

I was thinking that, but the viewer I was thinking that too, but the viewer can interpolate movement in-between server updates, and there are also purely viewer side things like llTargetOmega and particles. There's still no need for framerates beyond what is required for normally smooth viewing though. Higher framerates are craved by gamers for that extra 0.01 second or so they think gives them an edge in shooting or dodging... can't say I've ever been good enough to notice myself. It's useless in SL.

Hmm, that's odd since, as Animats says, it should be installed along with the viewer if it's not already on your system. And it not already being there would be a bit strange unless it's a clean Windows install. From the link Animats gave you, download and install both the x86 and x64 versions of the libraries. If that doesn't fix it... come back and we'll talk more. I did get a really stupid one the other day - trying to install a Microsoft application of all things! It outright failed to even install, and when I checked the error log it was because the VC runtime installer failed. That failed because... wait for it... the runtime library was already installed! Microsoft Muppets can't even get it's own stuff together. So, I uninstalled that library via Control Panel/Programs/Updates, then the app installed just fine including re-installing the VC library.

@benchthis I don't think you can in LL's viewer. There is Vsync, but not a software rate limit even in debug settings I don't think. You can probably rate limit your graphics card in its own settings though, and maybe set a profile for the viewer. If you have an nVidia card, you can limit the framerate through the nV control panel or the Afterburner bloatware. I have mine capped in Firestorm to 60fps - that's all my monitor will run at so no point heating up the GPU to do more. I really don't think high framerates are useful in SL anyway. It's not an FPS or racing game where it might make a difference if the monitor can go faster.

Not yet! Can't beat an old diesel that will run forever on raw vegetable oil

Yeah, I get your point. Try saying that though to some newbie who's just bought their first L$ and been ripped off with an empty box on the MP. We get them here occasionally and they basically get told to get over it because there's nothing they can do. I bet they feel it's pretty real though. And frankly so do I if I get ripped off. At the end of the day it does amount to real money at some point; paid in and paid out. Just because it's used for intangible* goods in-between those two points doesn't mean that isn't real. To me, the only difference is that governments are not 'noticing' us, largely I guess for the reasons you say but that doesn't mean there is any fundamental difference between my examples in RL and in SL. It's just a matter of scale. The L$ trading that goes on outside SL is of course nothing like the scale of bitcoin trading and wasn't even when it was LL-legal so there's no impetus for governments to care... not enough for them to bother stealing off us. Anyway... good debating with you *Edit: hey, there's a good word, at least I'm sure we can agree on that one

I disagree. People keep their L$ on sale at a high value, hoping to get a windfall if the price rises that high. Not much different to RL investing. Until it was banned by SL, L$ were traded elsewhere, and I know they still are although (for LL readers) I certainly don't have anything to do with that or the places that do it. I just know they exist. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value until you sell it for fiat currency. I think my point is that the digital age is redefining what we can call 'real'. Governments are slow to catch up with some of it, fortunately or not depending on one's view I guess.

But it's not real It's an example of a real world law being applied in a place where nothing is real, according to you (I'm not really arguing with you on that). How about another example: I buy a music download with bitcoin. The download is digital, it is no more or less real than the thing I might buy in SL, whether visual, audio, whatever. Someone created it, someone sold it, someone bought it. The creators has legal rights to their creation... so does that make it real as far as the law is concerned? Bitcoins are not real. They exist only digitally, just the same as L$. I can buy and sell and trade them, but I cannot hold one in my hand. Do governments consider them real? Too right they do... and they get taxed! What's the difference, really, between that and SL?

Playing devil's advocate... then why did gachas have to be banned? It's virtual things, traded for other virtual things in a game world and neither are real. Likewise loot boxes on other games. It's only 'not real'* because so far our governments haven't said otherwise. I truly hope it stays that way despite the drawbacks it brings mostly for consumers. *Edit: wrong way to say it... I mean it's only not attracting real legal interest, or something like that

I don't think you're missing something; laws have been made about or applied to other in-world 'game' areas (see Loot Boxes in particular, and SL's gacha machines). At what point does 'buying' something for 'game money' cross over into a real world transaction with real world laws governing it? Ultimately, it's all real money since it has to be purchased and can be cashed out. The UK parliament has a currently active bill to discuss such things as Loot Boxes and their legality and taxable status. At the moment most of this goes on under government radars. To be honest, it's not really an area I want explored too deeply - we get taxed enough in RL here! If you want to go down that sort of road though, my biggest thing is that I, a human, with legal rights and not my 'avatar' paid for my items in SL... I should be able to use them on any avatar I choose that is mine. After all, it wouldn't be hard for LL to link alt accounts together, especially if they all share the same legally identified payment details. Personally I think the alt situation would have been much better handled by having one log-in account for LL, under which numerous avatars could be created and logged into the grid. Let the sellers go bat-crazy over that one. Talk about wailing and gnashing of teeth! (That's just one of the many things that crosses my mind at 3am when I can't sleep in bed and I'm redesigning the whole of SL, along with in-world mesh creation, an overhaul or the permissions system to protect both creators' and consumers' rights...)

Why not just do as I said... right-click, open, copy to inventory. Three clicks and you're done. That's what the Open option is for.