arabellajones
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Posts posted by arabellajones
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On 4/2/2024 at 1:40 AM, Rowan Amore said:
It's April Fools Day.
The images were a bit hard for me to real, so I checked with my own viewer. Yes, there is date/time info visible on that screen.
But I am still, several days later, getting similar warning messages. Same style, not jokes, but I know I wasn't getting them, a week ago, before All Fools Day. So it looks like some setting in Firestorm changed, but I have had no luck in discovering how I can switch this off.
I could have accidentally turned it on, I was trying to find a different setting, but finding these switches can be difficult.
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This is about Viewer Skins, which define the basic User Interface colours. Most third-party viewers use similar choices to Second Life viewers.
Skins are mostly light text on a dark background. This is useful in some circumstances, and on smartphones and tablets is often labelled as "Dark Mode". It's better at night because you don't dazzle yourself, but there are warnings against using it in other situations. In the smartphone/tablet world you can quickly switch from Dark to Light. It's an easily available choice.
(I have an uncomfortable feeling I should remind people that "colour" and "color" are different spellings of the same word.)
If the Second Life viewer does provide this choice between light and dark it's a change I have missed. Sorry. But it hasn't been documented. I have been able to confirm that a few other viewers provide a usable choice. Most don't.
I suppose I should confirm that my colour vision is OK, and my monitor is sited to avoid such problems as the screen reflecting light from windows. But my eyes are not your eyes.
I don't have a solution. I do know that there are ways of creating a different skin, but I am not a programmer, and I am weary of the DIY responses.
I do know that an old set of skins, the Starlight theme, vanished for a while but has been revived. They do fall into the light mode class. But the available instructions for new skins are old. I found this from 2008:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Skinning_How_To/Add_3rd_party_skins_to_the_skins_preferences_panel
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Since this thread is still popping up in Google searches, I figure I should link to an answer to the Dark Mode problem that I described. It is a working answer.
For me it is a huge improvement over the commonplace light text on a dark background. Why no other set of skins includes such a choice still bewilders me.
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On 9/20/2022 at 8:00 AM, Beq Janus said:
With energy prices as they are here in the UK, I can embrace the FPS and be warmer 🙂
There's not such a lot of power used, even by a powerful desktop.
There are a lot of changes happening to electricity metering in the UK. The label to be wary of is "smart metering". You don't always have predictable timing for the different rates. Better to pay attention to keeping the heat in the house, whatever rate is charged. I have a place wired for the old Economy 7 system, which has storage radiators connected through a time clock to use cheap rate power. Only thing is, I am now getting charged the same rate on the two meters.
Not really relevant to Second Life, but it looks as though people are going to get caught out by such changes. I saw a letter to a newspaper extolling the advantages of overnight cheap-rate electricity. Somebody is going to get a surprise. My computer has an idle/sleep option which I use now. Second Life uses a lot less power than something such as video coding.
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On 9/20/2022 at 1:04 AM, Aishagain said:
I know it's not your job, Mazidox but it'd be nice if the GSP had some reference to all this before Europe went to bed!
This isn't the big issue with what happened on Tuesday, but Second Life runs 24/7 and Linden Lab doesn't. There is a big chunk of every day when things can go wrong—my most recent experience was a region going down—and there seems to be no way of reporting it. I think I could have submitted a JIRA, but that needs a different password, and I can't call it a user-friendly. And, key question, how long before any action gets taken? That applies however the report arrives at Linden Lab.
I have had to deal with various fault-reporting services over the last few months, and I know it's not easy. I'm English, but I hesitate to trust speech recognition systems. I have struggled with the accents of some call-centre staff. And a telephone call to North America? Second Life is international in scope, but even with a common language I wonder if it is run to cope with that.
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The machine I am using is rather old, but it was a high-end office desktop. It needed a gaming-quality GPU card to handle Second Life.
When I look at the numbers for currently-produced computers, what I do see is greatly-reduced power consumption for the same amount of work done. If you're not using the absolute latest kit, it may not matter, but it was hot enough this last summer that it might. If you're not into the specialised solutions, cooling or otherwise, that's OK. Second Life doesn't force you into bragging-rights territory.
The only hardware ID in this thread I have recognised is "GTX1050" which is an nVidia GPU. I am not sure their numbering system is the same as it was, but that's basic gaming quality.
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On 9/15/2022 at 6:45 AM, Alwin Alcott said:
you spilled 5 posts on something you could have checked yourself at the statuspage. Thats the ónly tool all other residents have to answer your question.Â
The trouble is that the Status Page isn't reliable in the early stages of a problem. Yes, we should check it, and "nothing on the Status Page" is part of a good initial report, but some of us do have tools available to us that others don't. Some people seem able to use the JIRA, but it started as a job-tracker used by management, and I still have doubts about it for bug reporting.
I have a suspicion that JIRA is being used in London to manage The Queue.
If you can handle the JIRA interface, use it. If you can't...
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I have installed the new Firestorm version, released on Friday, and it is running OK on Linux. This is v6.6.3.67470
This does feel like a quick release, but there have been a lot of changes to the SL viewer and this release is playing catch-up. It looks like one change is the handling of group notices. If you have been away for a few days, you will see a lot more accumulated.
It's pure luck that I caught it when I did, but there is no need to rush. The download site may be pretty busy.
With the Havoc code, the Windows version may feel a bit different.
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3 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:
if in 2022 your network cant handle 1.5mbs or it "may cause issues" then that person might really need to upgrade from AOL dialup LOL
The problem there may be in the viewer or in the server. "Too-high settings can cause the viewer to request data that is not available." is in the Firestorm web-page on the subject.
I haven't found a clear explanation on the Second Life website.
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41 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:
I did consider removing entirely the bandwidth setting from the Preferences floater, but it still may make sense for people with very limited Internet link...
This said, the default settings should be good for most people (and it is how I setup the defaults in the Cool VL Viewer, so that you do not have to fiddle with obscure settings in order to get good results).
Why is it still called just "bandwidth", which could be misleading?
OK, it could be that there isn't room to change the label to "UDP Bandwidth" but I just checked Firestorm and it's not a problem there: plenty of room.
Cool VL Viewer does a good job with the pop-up help. Firestorm directs you to a web page for a "suggestion", and I am not sure which is better. I would call the web page an "explanation", but I am English, and so speak a different language. (And it's not JIRA.)
I run my "bandwidth" at 350 Kbps for Firestorm. It shows a slider with different recommendations depending on the internet connection type, and I don't think those have changed since the days of UDP-only texture delivery. With the reductions in UDP traffic that sort of reduction works for me, but I am not sure how the bandwidth setting really works. I am not going to assume that every SL-user has an exclusive connection. My bottleneck is the DSL to my ISP, and I could have a family member start downloading a video.
I'm OK with my settings, but the internet has changed. SL has changed. Does the "bandwidth" setting need an up-to-date explanation?
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On 9/3/2022 at 4:38 PM, Frionil Fang said:
You should not touch the blue channel when inverting a normal map direction, tangent space normals should always have the normal vector pointing outwards, and removing the blue channel would break the vectors and mostly make them point inwards.
Instead, try flipping the red and green channels, as described here. Can be done with Blender's color curve nodes.
This is quite old, and the thread suggests that I only needed to do this to the Green channel, though the basic method can handle that. All I can say is that what I did worked. I now usually use an on-line converter to convert a height-map to a normal-map. There are several, and the map generated may not be right for SL, but this editing method works, and similar methods in other software than The GIMP. I also have a GIMP plug-in which is almost too-complicated and can generate "wrong" normal maps.
This web page outlines the basics of normal-maps in SL, including a caution about The GIMP. I know there is a normal-map generator plug-in for The GIMP which can generate the +y type of normal map used by SL.
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In Firestorm that's in Preferences > Graphics > Hardware Settings as anti-aliasing. There's a range of values possible.
A restart of Firestorm is recommended, but you don't have to be logged in to SL to change this setting.
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17 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:
This is okay, but I'd say get an SSD over a hard drive.
It depends a bit what you are doing, but a large hard drive is worth having as well as an SSD. It doesn't have to be an internal drive, USB and Network connections to an external drive are fast enough. And while I have used an SSD for my SL cache, the write-load on an SSD from a cache can certainly be argued about. I don't have a definite best answer, but I would hesitate about an SSD-only system.
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This thread is old, not the current week. There are the usual initial warnings on the Grid Status page, posted on Friday. We maybe should always expect restarts on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
But there is a difference between a mere restart and a new server version, and even restarts sometimes take a long time.
Kept in the dark and...
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In all this talk about textures going missing, whether a texture, a bump-map, or a specular-map, I can see reasons why LL have moved them from being part of the viewer download to being part of the general download-from-server system.
But we still seem to have very old defaults for the cache and the download bandwidth, and other elements that could affect these.
My understanding is that the "bandwidth" setting only affects UDP traffic, and texture downloads now use HTTP. Most of us have a far higher total download capacity, but are some of us pointlessly increasing that "bandwidth" setting?
A bigger-than-default cache size should help, though some of us do have disk-space limits.
Could these default textures be better handled by distinct cache-like storage which only deleted a file when an update was available? Done right, this pseudo-cache could be applied to different viewers but I am not sure I could trust the Lindens to get that right.
How many people, complaining about these missing-texture problems, have even bothered to report their cache-size?
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20 hours ago, Mazidox Linden said:
Hello everyone! We're deploying a fix for BUG-232525 to some RC channels this morning. This release fixes just this one issue, but if you're interested you can find the release notes here.
To "some" RC channels?
So how do we know which regions even have the bugfix? I suppose we have to check for server version 2022-08-24.574550
We do have the usual warning notices for next week, but they are so vague and so automated that I wouldn't rely much on them.
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There are going to be RC Restarts, Friday, starting very soon, to partially fix this problem.
"Scheduled for Aug 26, 07:00 - 15:00 PDT "
That was posted to Grid status yesterday, but no mention in this forum. And it's only described as a partial fix.
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The first mention, on the Grid Status Page, was 8 minutes before the Restarts began.
The Lindens obviously have a cunning plan.
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Power consumption can still add up with the crazy pricing in Britain, which is far higher than in France. The reasons are political, and I shall say no more than that.
Henri's measured power figures are some comfort, but I used the "Suspend" option far more than I used to. Again, politics, but Jack Monroe's cookery website is focused on quick-to-cook meals. I'm in an environment that may be paying too much attention to power costs, but they are yet another reason to raise the scarlet banner high....
(And the colour choice will confuse Americans.)
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My Stipend has come through, but nothing definite about restarts, not even the usual vague warning on the status page. If they do use the usual timing,it will be another three hours before it starts, two hours before the usual warning message on Status. So there could be nothing, but I don't trust this silence.. Enough did happen last week that I can't blame them for not trusting the new code.
Next Monday, 29th August, is a Bank Holiday in England. Labor Day in the USA is a week later on 5th September. I half expect something next week to at least have something stable for that long weekend.
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The mentions of "Task Manager" say Linux to me, but there isn't an SL Viewer for Linux, so I am guessing you are on Windows.
It's better to be explicit about that, Linux or Windows or Apple Mac, and graphics drivers for those three options are often distinct. Just saying "Latest driver" feels slipshod to me.. I do not use the GPU hardware you do, but I know that the latest driver version can cause problems. I know the driver numbers for nVidia are different for Linux and Windows, and I have seen some of the know-everything types apparently not know that.
After that experience, I try to be precise. Firestorm does give this basic info in Help > About Firestorm before it even logs in to SL. And it's the one thing you don't give us as a screen-cap. (I am not having problems, but if I were I think this would answer most of the questions you have been asked.)
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SSP?
in Linden Homes
14 hours ago, Matthieu Quander said:So the Lab may or may not add coastline to these void adjacent regions? Deciding to not add coastline there would be very disappointing. I'm not sure my OCD could handle it. Â
This is the area where I was thinking there could be a plan with unresolved options.
1: Those hard edges are unresolved. There's one spot where the railway is obviously meant to be continued northwards. The map doesn't show the big river, starting at about the NE corner, running through the Chalet sub-continent, and reaching the southern tip of Satori. It would make sense for there to be a connecting channel.
2: Assume a continuous, usable, water-edge channel somewhere north of the current hard-edge. What type of sub-continent forms the north side doesn't have to be defined. The current rail line is likely to continue, and that could rule out one or two possibilities, such as a fantasy theme.
3: The rail lines of Bellisseria are different to those elsewhere, mainly the parcel permissions that apply, and their use does depend on somebody doing the scripting work, and making it available. We do have a couple of multi-vehicle trains that work well, so we know a useful-looking train is possible. I have made efficient all-mesh trains which use the old scripts. The old-style scripts have a weakness for such things as a steam locomotive with tender, and bogie railcars, which can start to look wrong. I have tried to work out better scripts.
4:Â No names, but there is at least one producer of new trains who still depends on the old-style scripts Some of their products might be usable on the Bellisseria lines, but there's no sign in the item descriptions that they are aware of the difference.
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I don't have any reliable timing for how long the updates take, and it could depend on both which viewer you are using and when you last logged in, but I do see what looks like local caching of the map tiles. Somebody who knows the viewer code may well be able to tell us exactly what happens. I think I know who I can trust, and I suspect the core of the problem is still on the Linden-side. I have been watching the new connection between Satori and the Newbrooke regions, and it does look as though there are graphics lingering for non-existent regions, distinct from the slow appearance of new regions.
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SSP?
in Linden Homes
I would say that the roads and waterways of Satori have plenty of design weaknesses, and there are no easy fixes. There are weaknesses in the layout of Bellisseria, as a whole, but we can hope some of the gaps have a plan set, even if, for instance, there is still a choice open for the sub-type. The Newbrooke regions could easily have been something else, without changing the edges.
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Building objects: A problem.
in General Second Life Tech Discussion
Posted
I may have been drunk. At least the texturing worked.