Rick Nightingale

Twelve years ago today, I apparently joined SL! Can't believe I nearly missed my rez day again, but then I have other things on my mind right now (tomorrow I check into hospital for surgery, and my lovely neighbours have kept me awake with their idea of music every night for the last four nights until 2 - 3 am which is why I'm here right now.) Anyway... SL's email tells me my longest logged in streak is 42 days! That's really me, not me as a bot, although I'm sure I wasn't actually at my keyboard the whole time. I know I used to stay logged in for a long time, but that's quite incredible: 1. Firestorm didn't crash... 2. SL didn't crash... 3. Windows 7 didn't crash... 4. My internet didn't crash... 5. I was there for every region restart to run away in time... ...for 42 days! Can anyone beat that? EDIT: Seems I misunderstood (I blame 3am neighbour music) - it's 42 days logged in every day. not 42 days without logging off. Oh well, not nearly as impressive. I could actually believe my first interpretation because I used to leave it logged in all the time.

I always thought (from researching this years ago) that only the first viewer instance has access to the cache. It certainly seems that way when I run multiple logins on the same grid.

I'll let you all into a secret I've kept almost entirely in SL. Only one person in SL knows this... until now. I have high functioning autism, diagnosed when I was in my 40's after it (and me trying to figure life out without knowing I had ASD and constantly, utterly failing) had destroyed every aspect of my RL. I got to the point I can hardly cope with being in company at all, in RL or SL. Not because I don't want to, but because the stress if causes my trying to figure out all the social stuff that I just cannot comprehend or even see is too much. I'm absolutely not antisocial; I just cannot cope with being social. It sucks. I'm saying this because I've seen a few posts like this here, and if someone like me can make friends, just about anyone can. And I did. Polenth's suggestions are spot on. That's what I did. It doesn't even need to be something you are really into, just something you can join in with. I was never good at RP (see: ASD) but joined a pirate battle group that used to run in Blake. It took me weeks months to work up the ability to actually say hello and join in, but I watched the group chat and events for a while to get a feel for it and the people. They were good people and when I did finally take the plunge, I fit in well and we all got on. I would turn up to the battles and events and even ended up running them, although I could rarely join in with any of the more social stuff they put on. I hated that, but that's the way I am. Another group that's really a good lot (and your name fits in quite well) is... I'm not sure I'm allowed to name it (would it be advertising?) but if you check my profile/picks, it's the only commercial pick in there. Or just IM me. We can all be gods Hanging around that group, especially around special occasions, hunts and holiday seasons is a really easy way to get involved. Amazingly, I ended up dancing on stage in costume at one of the events (Edit: I just remembered I was even pole dancing at another there). I couldn't even imagine being able to do that. That's the power of that group, its owner and members. It's a special place in SL, it really is. Hunts, while we're on that topic, is another good one for meeting people either just for a little while or longer, and since you're busy hunting you don't necessarily need to really talk much at first. Join the group, hang around, there's often someone at some point looking for a hunt partner. Or just shout out yourself for one. And there you go. I like the most twisted hunt in SL myself; more good people there. Unfortunately for me, I'm not doing well right now and haven't been able to join in anything for a long time. I've tried but just can't cope right now, plus my RL is pretty hard and unreliable due to my issues and my wife's health. That's the other reason I don't try to make more friends - I don't think it's fair on them to have someone like me who's there one day but then has to go quiet for a month or six because I can't even cope with a simple chat. I care about people and don't like letting them down. I'll probably regret posting this later...

I seem to have irked you @Henri Beauchamp - wasn't my intention and I think your tone is unwarrented. However... It doesn't seem to be an obvious LOD issue to me. When there is a second set of trees, identical to the first, right next to them not suffering the issue then I think there is something else going on, especially when the 1st->2nd and 2nd->3rd LOD switch points are so far away from me; hundreds of metres when I'm about ten metres away. I have to ask... what exactly do you mean by 'badly designed mesh'? The first video shows the trees completely vanish; not even the lowest LOD is visible. I wonder how you could make mesh that looks correct when the LOD model is viewed explicitely (all four do), but then not be rendered by the viewer, or whatever you think is happening. Earlier in the thread I mentioned that the FF edit panel shows an incorrect, tiny object radius (about 1m) when the trees have vanished. The trees do not have a small radius, nor do the shadows they still show when invisible, so why does FF think they do? Something must be happening before the LOD selection to give that incorrect radius. Even at 1m radius, the lower LOD models should still be visible to me at the distances concerned. Besides, I've never seen that sort of behaviour at LOD switches (flickering etc), and I check that out a lot when I'm making mesh. At some random point, the viewer (I guess, don't know how animesh is handled re. server/viewer) loses the plot for one (or more) of the trees. I do not think the trees being visible for days, then suddenly not (even when I've just turned away from them for a moment), then suddenly coming back with no intervention, is a different issue. I've read that bug report before and it is not the same as I'm having with these trees. The trees have their own issue. Thank you anyway for trying to help. Like I mentioned, I did have a visit from a Linden quite a while ago, following up from the bug report. He said he has quite a workload but this issue was in his queue (basically). Hopefully the I'm moving up the queue.

@Lucia Nightfire it's 30 (was 20 before I started investigating this issue). The region is empty most of the time apart from me, and no other animesh present. I'll try setting unlimited and leave it on that for a while, but I'm guessing it won't make any difference. Might take a few days before I notice the trees vanishing (or not); they behave when I'm waiting for it to happen.

@Henri Beauchampare you sure you were looking at the Animesh trees? There are a lot of trees on my land; just two sets of animesh near the pond. I'm checking because the point of using those trees (for me) isn't that they are animesh (I don't even have their animesh animations active), but they have a very strong LOD behaviour. I can see them (when they don't 'vanish' which can happen at any distance) at 1st LOD model from one end of my sim to the other, at viewer LOD factor 3. See screenshot below for switch points and triangle count. Note also that the behaviour seems completely random; the trees will be visible for days then suddenly they'll not be there (or at least one set wasn't - the other set was still visible). I made no changes to any viewer settings. If it was a straightforward issue that the trees were badly designed, would the problem not be more reliably reproduced? (You clearly know a lot more about the viewers than I do though, so I might be talking nonsense.) @Qie Niangaothe trees have astonishing numbers in the More Info box when animesh is unticked; see below. They have a high triangle count in all the LOD models (which is why I like them... they are visible from a long distance). It's all download:

This is still happening. I haven't used the trees for ages, but put some out a few days ago. This is with the latest FS viewer. I did get a visit from a Linden investigating the issue - sorry, can't recall your name now - hope you see this. This is odd - when I noticed one lot of two animesh trees had vanished today, I went into edit mode and clicked around where they should be until I got them. If I move them up and down, they vanish when I lower them and reappear when I raise them. Videos of this, and the trees just flicking in and out, especially if I cam around.

It's nothing to do with politics, but don't worry, I know when not to waste my time.

In case anyone finds this thread because of similar issues... I've just rediscovered (had completely forgotten since I last played with all of this) that the Maitreya Lara autoalpha script in the clothing can be removed* even if the clothing is no-mod. That means I can leave the scripts in the body (so still be able to change other things about it without having to change bodies for each little change). Problem solved... bye-bye autoalpha Just type in chat: /95 [item name] delete You can also say menu instead of delete.. for a menu I guess. Edit: Needs to be version 5 or later though... so I bet she has a lot of clothes that it won't work on.

She's my wife (in RL and SL )

Thanks, but it's nothing to do with the add-ons. It's just a failure of the autoalpha system itself. I'm working on making a load of alpha textures for all her main outfits

Yes, a bath in the bedroom works for us too. This is our shower at the moment, until I install more indoor plumbing:

I like that - thank you! I'll swap...

I took some photos. I'm still in the (slow) process of decorating etc. The 'bling' room; hope you brought sunglasses (I might have gone overboard making this wallpaper): The brandy and cigars room, artwork by Pierre Auguste Cot: The entrance hall; I think my butler needs an upgrade to animesh:

Funny that it's just occured to me, but I've realized I rarely bother with a kitchen at all, and a bathroom will probably not have a toilet in it. I guess my SL is a bit like Star Trek... they don't do things like that any more. The kitchen one is a bit odd though because I do love to cook in RL (you should taste my slow-roast mutton dinner or French onion soup!).

Yeah - the texture load is my bugbear too. With things I make myself I can optimize/minimize the textures, but some stuff I've bought over the years has been just silly. All my nice pictures on the walls don't help either. I once bought an old-style telephone, and soon noticed that when it was in my view, my framerate tanked to the point it juddered (this was a few years ago, before the GTX1080 graphics cards). Fortunately it was mod, so I took off the fourteen, 1024x1024 textures it had on its three parts and remapped it all onto one texture. You couldn't see the difference at all, but I still ended up deleting it because it had something like 75,000 triangles... talk about poorly optimized mesh!

The thing I enjoy most is having things around me that I've made myself; house included. Not everything is, of course. Apart from that... Pictures. I love pictures on the walls. Pictures of us, Pre-Raphaelite and Renaissance art and some modern interpretations of those, fantasy... all sorts. When I lived in a mansion I even had an art gallery! I recently made myself some nice picture frames that have a really good animated picture changer and are 1LI - and can all be linked to the house which absorbs most of that! Furniture... comfy but smart-looking sofas. Can't stand the 'shabby-chic' look myself (it's just an excuse to poorly finish a packing crate and save paint). Book cabinets, display cabinets and curio tables (just made some really nice ones) for nicknacks like Libertine Eggs and Twisted trophies. I would love the spare LI for more ornaments around the place but given that my framerate tanks enough as it is, it's probably just as well I'm on a homestead. I lean very much towards classical, art deco or art nouveay styles. I love staying at the Midland Hotel in Morecambe - been a regular visitor there for years. No TV. I'm bored of it in RL. I prefer to sit in front of a blazing log fire... so I have a few different fireplaces I've made. I would take some pictures but I'm only here right now because logins aren't available

Your vid won't play for me (my issue; I sometimes have trouble with youtube) and I don't know how much experience you have making mesh, but... Don't just export it and 'convert' it. I did that in my very early days of learning mesh, and it's not worth the trouble of cleaning up the export for anything bigger than a couple of prims. You'll see what I mean if you look at just a single exported prim in Blender! Export it, yes, but use that as only a template to build your new mesh around if you want the new model to be identical. Doing it that way will give you more flexibility to make improvements too, and do things like nice corner bevelling to round off the edges on the highest LOD models. Looks much better like that.

Heading there now... thank you

Yes, it's Lara that she uses. Yesterday I watched as she had to remove and re-add some jeans five times, before all the right parts on the body vanished. She has some demon legs that nearly always end up with the same two alpha panels still visible, until removed/re-added a few times. Autoalpha is practically unsuable for her. She was told in the group, when we started asking questions, that she should just use one body (instead of saving a preconfigured body with each outfit) and then the autoalpha will work. Well... it doesn't which is the main reason we started doing that. That might help with the race condition (which I'm sure I could do a better job of dealing with) but not in the examples I started with. @Qie NiangaoI completely forgot about using alpha masks with BOM. That's a way forward! I did notice someone selling a BOM alpha mask kit on the MP the other day too... but far too expensive when I can make our own, perfectly fitted ones. I've even gone to the extent of writing her a tool that uses RLV to add her clothes on an outfit change. The tool is saved in the outfit and configured with what to attach, delayed a little, including an autoalpha prim made from the devkit with all the alpha setup in too. The tool adds and removes that as well, a couple of times, to make sure that the body alpha actually gets set properly. It's ridiculous how much I've done to try and circumvent this for her. (I'm trying to keep it easy for her... she finds it hard to do things due to poor health so a mostly one-click outfit change is what she needs).

I hadn't seen that 2 second delay bug report, but I've definitely experienced it (including the on_rez not even firing) when I was developing the new twisted protocubes (breedables) a while ago. It was driving me mad, the amount of time-out checking, handshaking and dealing with outright failed comms I had to do when a new one was created. Edit: And yes, I'm fairly sure that the body does not effectively deal with it being attached second. Not exactly hard to do - my own things can do it.

Asking this more for my wife who relies on such things more than I do, but since I usually help her with her outfits it bugs me too... For at least a year, we've noticed that the autoalpha scripts in clothing and alternative body parts simply don't work reliably. I'm sure they used to be more reliable than this. Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe it's product specific (don't want to really mention the commonly used mesh female body in case it's nothing to do with it). It's often an obvious race condition, when logging in or changing complete outfits and the clothing gets attached before the body, so I guess the body misses the message* (If I were to write it I would mitigate that easily). Other times though, it's as if only parts of the message are getting through. Some parts of the body will alpha while others don't. It's so unreliable that we've resorted to preconfiguring individual bodies, removing the scripts and saving the body with the outfit. That's very far from ideal though. To save time... No, there's nothing wrong with my internet connection and my modem and router do not need resetting (I'm a CCNP among other things and have a high level, business class connection here.) The issue happens no matter the viewer and on different PCs. The only common factor is SL, the body and autoalpha scripts. *I wonder... when a worn item sends an llRegionSayTo() (or whatever), and that is heard by another worn object... is that process internal to the SL server, or does the message get relayed through the viewer? ETA: After talking with someone, there have been no reports of this in general so it looks like it's just us. The only other commonality then is the two regions we are usually in. Hmm - time to dig.

That's possibly the most common issue in the entire computer industry! User: Dear Microsoft... windows has this serious bug... MS: No it doesn't. User: Yes it does... look, here it is, and so say another 10,000 users. MS: No, that's been fixed. This is the workaround you need to do... User: But that's not a fix, that's a painful workaround that saves you from having to do something and incoveniences all of us instead. MS: [thread locked].

Not Alzheimer's, but I certainly comprehend. Sleep lack included. Been a 24 hour carer for eight years, on and off as symptoms vary; three years straight at the start and always have to be vigilant for rapid/instant deterioration. Instant life change for us both. I can get on SL when things aren't too bad. When they are, I can't even do this. Best wishes to you.