Rick Nightingale

Thank you for the comprehensive replies. This will probably shock people now - but I still use Windows 7. That's how I can disable the AV permanently and know it stays that way. That's also the sort of reason that I still use Windows 7. The OS is still under ESU from Microsoft (most people think it is out of support - it isn't), so security updates still happen for it (yes, that takes some, erm... fiddling). My installation on that PC has been held static for a couple of years now; nothing has changed and I did not update the OS again in or near the time frame over which I've seen this issue. I'm very careful what I do with the PC and how I use it. I've found (live/active) AV programs to be nothing but a pain for as long as they have existed and long ago stopped using them. Instead I rely on upstream firewalling and content blocking (which is not being triggered by anything SL related) and a personal firewall which is the only one I ever tested that I could not break through myself. I broke every other one on the market. I would have noticed if I had missing inventory issues before. My internet is very stable; I keep an eye on it. Back in the day I was a CCNP among other things. I'm on FTTC 80/20 and about 30m from the cabinet. I'm on a 'business' level connection with my own IPv4 routed subnet and an IPv6 allocation so huge I could give an IP address to every quark in the known universe. I did try the usual of rebooting modem and router; not that this has ever fixed any issue I've had. My SL PC even has its own, dedicated, static-NAT'd public IP address. I would bet a million $ it's not my network or internet (if I had a million $ to bet, lol!) Anyway, like I said, FS does load the entire inventory once I clear the existing cache, and loads it quickly. My inventory is well organised in folders; I'm used to not leaving too much in root folders from the days of DOS, lol. It's between logging off and logging back on, definitely, that the problem occurs. When I watched what was happening with the files as I logged off, it really gave me the feeling that something (a GZIP thread for instance) was closing too early, before it had finished. That doesn't really make sense and I doubt that is what is really happening, but that's what it seems like from the way I seem to get an incomplete gzipped file. Edit to add: It's not any sort of congestion on my LAN either. There aren't that many devices on it and I keep an eye on that too. All IoT stuff (like Echos) are on an isolated VLAN away from everything else. My line certainly isn't saturated. The only problem I ever had was when a NIC decided to start failing and flood the LAN with bogus packets. Wireshark soon spotted that when I realised I had a local issue; funny that it only showed up when doing SL - everything else still worked as normal but it does show how much something else can cause problems. I've always kept that in mind and investigate everything I can think of locally before thinking it's a viewer or SL problem. Edit 2: Out of curiosity, since you mention the SSD timing... I'll move the cache to some spinning rust later today and try that.

It's happening more than I realised. The missing outfit error message is not always triggered, so there are times I'm missing inventory and have not noticed. Today, before logging on I checked the size of my inv cache file; it was smaller than it should be. When I logged in. my inventory was 20k items short of the 70k it had when I logged off last night. Things I was using last night had vanished. It really seems that the cache file is not being written properly when I log off. I have watched the files being written as I log off, as a temporary cache file is created and then gzipped. When I get this problem, it is notable that the size of file I get if I manually extract the gzipped cache is much smaller than the temporary file which is being gzipped in the first place. At least it looks like that if I'm interpreting what I see correctly. Has the gzip library been changed? Could it be dodgy?

Wow - A few days back, local mesh... now this... I'm a happy devil!

Good idea, but I don't run an antivirus; not live scanning anyway. I have it disabled and have done so for many years*. Just do occasional out-of-band system scans (which I have also done for this issue, just in case). I do have a very good personal firewall though. *The last time I got a malware infection (attempted, anyway) was many years ago. My AV (an expensive commercial one) didn't spot it even when I pointed it stright at the infected file. It was my firewall that alerted me and killed the attempt. Given how often I found an AV to be causing problems with something, I finally gave up on them and practice good system hygeine instead.

@Natasha BloodroseInteresting... please may I ask what operating system you are using? I have a theory...

Thanks - yeah, I did that. Wiped the cache folder and the appdata folder. Uninstall wiped the program files folder; I checked. I restored settings from a backup. I doubt the issue is in there. It seems to be a failure when exiting, as if it fails to re-write the new inventory cache file. Sometimes. I've even tried the latest FS beta (to try out the local mesh facility); that does it too. I'm a bit tempted to wipe again and revert to the previous release version, but I'm enjoying the much improved rendering right now. Edit: Oh nuts, I'm going to bite the bullet and revert to the previous. If that stops the issue, I know it's this relase of FS and not my PC.

After about 25 successful logins with the LL viewer, and no issue, I went back to Firestorm and it's happening every few logins. Since no-one else is complaining about this, and it's pretty obvious if it happens, I must be a fringe case. Again. I'll head off to file a JIRA in a few minutes. I've done everything I can think of here, down to changing out my cache SSD, multiple passes of Memtest86 to check for memory errors and a clean install of Firestorm (all folders wiped manually after uninstalling via control panel). Edit: You have to laugh don't you... I'm trying to get it to do its trick so I can add before and after logs to the JIRA. Of course, it won't do it now I'm watching.

Yeah, linksets are tricky I imagine. I used it to check a build the other day and just joined all my meshes in blender. Would be horrendous LI if I did that for the real thing but since the triangle count was still below the limit, it worked fine for testing the shape. Right at this instant I'm using local mesh to make a single-mesh meandering path for my land; twisty, turny, up and down. No way I would bother with that without this ability. Edit to add: I guess it isn't using physics yet...? It isn't picking up my physics model; no 'prim' option in the physics shape type. It's named correctly with _PHYS suffix. The log does say skipping 'path 0.5_LOD0.dae' etc. but no mention of _PHYS. No worries, that can be checked on the beta grid. It's the shape I need to do in local mesh and that's working great. Also, I don't seem able to scroll the log window. It can be copied out with Ctrl-A into notepad though. (I'm not complaining... this is a wonderful tool that I've dreamed about for years. Just reporting )

I'm probably too late with this suggestion but I often do this by exporting the prim linkset from SL into Blender; no need to recreate it if you made it. Right click in the viewer (Firestorm at least), Save as, Collada.

No, the blame does not lie with the OP. Blame lies with the perpetrator, not the victim, regardless of what lawyers have convinced some of society about to get their criminal clients off the hook. That said, wisdom is something gained in hindsight.

Absolutely; exactly what I've found myself (I'm really just an amateur, I only sell stuff to fund my SL). I fully agree with everything else you wrote too. You've described my building/testing/optimising process. I've just checked my house and other buildings on my 256m-long slice of land. Everything I've made stays looking good at 256m away at LOD-factor 2.0. I usually run at higher than that (3 typically) because things I haven't made (like trees) vanish, and I like a long view. The detailed roof edging vanishes just at that point, but otherwise you can't tell. The interior rooms of the house though collapse to a few triangles long before that, for low and lowest, but leave appropriately textured planes behind the windows so you still see a room 'interior' through the window at a distance where it actually no longer exists. @Prokofy Nevais spot on about the textures too. I learned early on that it makes a big difference. I've always been prim-poor with whatever land I've had (I remember celebrating when LL increased the allowance years back - I was down to like ten free prims). I guess that prompted me to both learn to make my own mesh, and make it low LI while looking good because it's the visuals in SL that floats my boat. I doubt that running at LOD factor 4 could damage a PC; there are far worse things (like long draw distance and countless full-size textures) but it does take more server effort, network bandwidth (both of which impact everyone on the sim) and GPU power even if it's not noticeable on a decent PC.

I was just reminded of this thread while shopping. I'm looking for a fancy, stone gazebo-type structure. Seen two that looked like candidates after 14 pages * 96 items per page on the MP. I went to have a look in world. One, by a very well known store, was so close I nearly bought it immediately I saw it. The rather low resolution texturing put me off just long enough for my brain to kick in, although at a short distance it was beautiful. Still, it was mod perms so I considered retexturing it. Then I remembered to check the LOD. After the High LOD it dropped to 6 triangles for the remaining three LODs. From half way cross my land it would disintegrate at LOD factor 4. Nope. If only the maker had made just one lower triangle model for LOD2, or even just used LOD1 for LOD2 as well, it would have done the job. The second was outrageously expensive (L$1000's), but extremely well detailed and, while not as pretty as the first, was good enough to consider. This time I checked the LOD first. The fancy stone details didn't just disappear, they turned into black blocks at the edge of talking distance on the people radar circle. Another one that just minimised the lower three LODs to a few triangles and couldn't even get that right. Useless. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to Blender I go. I would buy something if I could find it but once again I'm forced to make it if I want something decent. Thanks to Firestorm for its LOD information in the edit panel. Edit to add: I just looked at another. It's not what I'm looking for really, it's wood, not stone. It's well made though, and actually has all four LOD models at reasonable triangle counts. Higher on the first LOD than the first one above, yet has a lower LI than both the above and doesn't change appearence jarringly even moving to 256m away and LOD factor 2! So it can be done. Shame it's not what I'm looking for but I'll remember the creator.

Rick daylight giggles like a little girl.

Rick Daylight snickers...

I have been doing similar things with my Aesthetic since it came out. Rescripted the Aesthetic Enzo hands (pre-Bento) to have automatically animated hands. That was my first big seller on the MP. Could automatically grip when a pistol was held, for instance. (yes, now we can do that with Bento). Removed the onion layers for lower complexity. Occasionally added multiple onion layers for special effects. Made skin features that cannot be done with any no-mod body that I've seen, like metallic skins, bioluminescence and ghost-like translucency. Was doing fancy effects with materials before such control was available on most bodies' HUDs. Scripted skin effects like animations (without having to wear a 3rd-party mesh 'overlay'). Merged it with assorted non-human body parts. Even converted it to BOM (because everyone said it couldn't be done), but doing so reduced the graphics resolution and needed custom skins, so was no use commercially. If Lara was mod, it would be much easier to do some of the humanoid avatars I do with my wife. If one sticks to mostly human avatars and doesn't get too adventurous making stuff, then mod perms is likely no benefit to you. But if you like to experiment, mod is really essential.

Sodium bicarbonate works too; raises the pH without changing the taste.

Yeah, guess I'll have to use LL's viewer for a while. One of the things I noticed after installing the latest FS was that it closed down more quickly, when I closed it. Probably a silly thought but I did wonder if it's sometimes closing all its threads before the cache has been fully written to disk. Edit: although if so, would the file even be finalised by the OS / NTFS, or just be dropped? Not done any deep Windows programming for a long, long time. Edit again: In retrospect, I could extract the inner file from the truncated, gzipped cache file without any complaints so I guess it's being written like that.

This is still happening; maybe 12 times now. It's just happened again. It also happens on other alts logged in on this PC. I've moved my cache to a different SSD, so it's not that failing. Memtest86 didn't find any memory faults. The cache file [avatar key].inv.llsd.gz is clearly truncated going off the file size. I've just logged in with LL viewer and copied the file over from that, although I doubt that is going to fix the issue since even completely wiping my cache folder hasn't helped. It's as if FS is truncating the cache file when it saves it at log off. Something is going wrong here, and it seems restricted to just the inventory cache.

As I recently admitted here, I'm autistic (and male), so I don't think I present as 'typical' anything to others. In one RL workplace, I discovered that most of the staff (men and women) thought I was gay (I'm not - and I very much like the opposite sex, always have!). But then, that was a place where most of the men were misogynists and womanisers and most of the women (who were, of course, employed by the exclusively male management who were not really interested in the professional qualities in their employees) seemed happy with that situation. Neither were the sort I was interested in, in any way.* While I don't 'use' a female avatar myself, I have frequently driven my wife's alts to keep them updated when there's a sale on or something. My wife struggles with stuff, even using a mouse is very difficult, so I help her out a lot like that so she can just have easy fun when she's on the PC. I also 'make' her avatar; shape, skin, outfits etc.. I even did that a bit in RL, long before she got ill eight years ago. There were plenty of times I would tell her to buy something because it would suit her, that she wouldn't even have considered, and it became one of her favourite outfits. It was always gratifying when we caught someone (man or woman) eyeing her up when we were out (in RL I mean); that happened quite a lot. I must have a bit of talent for it. While driving her alt around a store or event, I'm not infrequently approached by a male avatar. Often I will just say hello (I don't like to be rude and ignore people) and not respond further. Sometimes though I play along a little, out of boredom or curiosity. No-one has ever guessed I was male, even after a long and obviously flirting conversation. I could have had plenty of dates. I never let it get that far, and tried not to be cruel with how I left it. Given that my wife's main avatar has a partner listed, that should be a clue to people anyway that they might not far. It was certainly interesting being 'on the other side', but then I've never really known how my side was supposed to work, with the autism. I'm not talking about the "Let's have SLex NOW!" type of conversation starters; those just get an "In your dreams" response if any. Perhaps the way I present is influenced by the fact that, when at primary school (5-11yo) I would frequently, deliberately misbehave, just enough to get the first stage of 'bad' punishment. Why? ... because that first stage punishment (for a boy) was to suffer the indignity and ridicule of sitting with the girls. In our school the girls tended to be seated on one side of the room; the boys on the other. I much preferred sitting with the girls, especially Nicola or Hazel, and not because I liked playing with dolls . I thought the boys were daft and missing out, and spent most of my time on that side of the room. Similarly at playtimes. The few good childhood memories I have are related to that. *A couple of illustrations how bad the place was: 1. A couple were found engaging in very 'adult' activities, mostly naked, on a desk as the next class was being brought in by the PSW. Who got in trouble? The PSW for making a complaint about it to the school's head. She was new, and was threatened with losing her job if she didn't keep quiet about it. The two who were seen got away with it completely... he was a rugby player and popular with the sport-obsessed management, and she was known to have had relations with the school's head, deputy head, and a few others, despite being married. 2. The head of the school was eventually caught for repeated sexual abuse of one of the temporary staff, found guilty and banned for life from holding a position in a school (after being head and doing things like this for 15 years). The rest of the management were no different and had all covered each others' backs countless times.

If you have (or buy) a hat that has modify permission, it's easy to script it to bob up and down. The more complex you want the floating to be, the more scripting would be involved. Better to ask in the scripting forum in that case. This script will bob up and down, you can change the height and speed in the variables near the top. Click to start, click to stop. Drop it into a rezzed cube to try it out: vector gInitPos; float gStep=1.0; // metres up/down float gTime=5.0; // seconds up/down integer gRunning; default { state_entry() { llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_PHYSICS_SHAPE_TYPE, PRIM_PHYSICS_SHAPE_CONVEX]); } touch_start(integer num) { if (gRunning=!gRunning) { llSetKeyframedMotion([],[]); llSetPos(gInitPos); } else { gInitPos=llGetPos(); llSetKeyframedMotion([<0,0,gStep>,gTime,<0,0,-gStep>,gTime],[KFM_DATA,KFM_TRANSLATION,KFM_MODE,KFM_LOOP]); } } }

Not a rip-off - As I recall Nancee planned to close it (after getting RL married and moving on from SL) but was persuaded to hand it over to someone willing to continue with it as it was. I haven't been there for a while though; had no idea it was gone. Shame. But such is (second) life.

Here's my most used PC's stats. It's an HP G2 mini that I'm on right now; 16GB RAM, i7-6700 @ 3.4GHz, CPU/Intel GPU. At home, ALM off: 42 fps At home, ALM on: 22 fps At FGI, ALM off: 21 fps At FGI, ALM on: 15 fps and a bit difficult to move around, sluggish response Shadows, AO and DOF off in all tests. Draw distance 120m, LOD factor 2, water minimal reflections, 1920x1200 monitor (see image below). I'm just turning on/off the ALM checkbox. FGI= Fallen Gods region, a fairly 'heavy' place to test. Note that I use this PC a lot if I'm building in SL, or scripting. It's quiet, uses little power, and does everything else I need including running Photoshop, Blender, VMWare workstation VMs, NI Labview, Mentor ModelSim and other EDA software, QGIS and other map creating software... blah blah blah. It's quite a capable little PC. I use my bigger PC (with MSI GTX1080Ti) if I'm 'exploring/enjoying' SL, rather than working. Edit to add: This is with the latest Firestorm viewer, which improved the framerate a lot compared to the previous.

Be careful what you wish for... https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Really-Weird-Stuff/24015759

Whether it's art or not (it's not) AI has a long way to go before I would consider it useful. For a start, it needs to understand things like what a hand is, how it moves, how many fingers it has and where they should point. You know, basic anatomy that an artist understands instinctively (even if sometimes they need training to be better, or in the case of many DA artists I think they need to get out more and see what real people actually look like - still, they do better than AI). How many AI pictures are there with too many, often truncated, limbs, or hands and fingers that look like they've been through a scrap metal mangler, eyes that face forward when the face is sideways, oddly shaped nostrils, etc.? No wonder so many of the pictures just look wrong at first glance. AI has no such understanding of what it is actually making, even with a database of millions of examples. While it's perhaps harder to see in pictures which are just landscapes, or simple, head-only portraits after a dozen or so iterations, there is still the same issue that AI has no understanding of what it is producing, any more than a sheet metal stamper understands the shape it stamps out.

Given that I end up doing most of the work for my wife on her Maitreya, I would add that giving it modify permission along with the above (two posts up that is... the immediately above post came in just as I posted mine) would mean she (and I) would never need to even look at another body. My favourite male body is still Aesthetic, mostly because I can rez it out and mod it. The UV mapping might be a pain (even more so than the SL standard) but being able to manually edit it and use things like emissive maps for bioluminescence is great. Especially on the higher resolution it offers with those annoying maps. I've so often wished we could do that with Maytreya to match the mermaid tails I make.