arabellajones

I did a similar test today, when the number of logins was around the minimum. It's a poor measure, but it's one of the few bits of hard data we can get. The region crossing delays were less than one second. All the measures of my connection were similar.

Posting numbers here. Internet ping time to Phoenix: about 150-160ms. This is pretty consistent , has been for years. Note this excludes direct server-related delay which the viewer-reported ping time includes Minimum region crossing time: about 6 seconds Some variation with time-of-day. Peak log-ins come at about 21:00 UTC, minimum at around 09:00 UTC, and high log-ins correlates with poor performance. region crossing and asset loading

The weekend Grid Drive had a lot of problems. Even walking, no vehicle, every region crossing took at least six seconds. It was a timed run, and I logged 88 grid crossings, So a minimum of 8m 48s, and the leader board being used displayed time from under 5 minutes to 12 minutes. So, obviously, this all varies a lot. I was seeing maybe one third of my total time down to the region crossings. I connect from the UK, with an internet ping of about 150ms. The draw distance may also have some effect on total load on my end of the connection. I was using a vehicle I was pretty familiar with. I can't avoid a feeling that the Lindens have never been able to cope well with the idea that customer connections can vary so much. The cry of "It's your connection!" almost seems like their Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. And both AWS and the Content Delivery Network risk making sensitive assumptions about the communications.

About the only change I can see since the original post seems to be in the support for the Starlight add-on. The default colour choices for the SL Viewer are still horrible, and I am not sure the Starlight option is still usable.

Had this sort of problem this morning S&W MD900 helicopter, pilot only, froze at region boundary, in the new region but waiting for the pilot

There is a lot of old content, mesh and otherwise, which EEP ruins because of how specularity works.Check with an old viewer, and you have a set of options which don't need any fussing over textures, colours, or numeric values. The options are None, Low, Medium, and High. The only safe choice is None. Switch to EEP and even Low is way too shiny. First step: use that tiny Blank texture as the Specularity texture, white and 32 pixels square. That will shut off the presets. Second, set the color to a desaturated version of the object colour. How far you go with the desaturation depends on what the material is. Paint and bare metal behave differently. I usually add a touch of blue. Some things can use a darker shade, but never totally black. Set the two numeric values to 5 and see how it looks. That's enough for reflections to help show the shape, or for a normal map to work.. You can darken the colour and increase the number. High numbers work for chrome plate. Try around 25 for gloss paint. I have just spent half an hour fixing a rather nice vehicle, because of this. At least I can change the texture settings.

I am holding back on EEP because materials I have set up under Windlight look so different under EEP, and EEP frame rates are so much lower. Windlight and ALM have some features for compatibility with non-ALM rendering. It's sort of OK that they have been dropped for EEP, but a lot of existing content does use them. And some of it is surprisingly recent. I doubt EEP was adequately tested. The bug-fixes coming through will be welcome, but they will change the overall effect. I regularly check my monitor settings to make sure I can see as near the full colour range on my screen as I can. With the effects of room lighting, it can be hard getting to see the full range. And it's not a good idea to use the extremes in a material, texture or colour setting, because there's no room for shadows and highlights. Right now, it feels as though EEP has wasted all my efforts. A knitted sweater, which uses just enough specularity to show the normal map effects, suddenly looks like embossed latex. I was making some auto wheels, trying to get chrome plating looking like chrome plating. Arguably, until Firestorm switched to a bug-fixed EEP as a full release, I should stick with Windlight, since that is what most people use.

Open GL is almost dead. It may be that EEP is necessary for a switch to Vulkan. Apple and Microsoft use different alternatives to Open GL. Vulkan is being supported by current hardware drivers. Project Sansar was a huge distraction. The really hard problem is poorly made content. I have a low-complexity mesh body that looks good, and I try to meet that standard with the clothes I make and wear. My total complexity is usually under 20,000. Most people I see are over three times that complexity.That's not the only measure, it may be missing parts of the problem, but better optimisation could easily double the apparent speed. I'm not hopeful. The quality of the documentation is pretty poor.

I was a bit surprised to learn it was closing, not just scaling back. There was a lot there, though the number of people seemed to be dropping. It's pretty recent that the formal confirmation was released/ It was a rather large site, with a maze of corridors and rooms running East from the road and down to the sea.

I run Firestorm 6.3.9 with the frame rate limiter set to 30fps, half the frame rate of my monitor, and that works pretty well. There's plenty of margin. Long draw distances, crowds of avatars, and shadows all drag it down. My CPU rarely goes over 10%. I have some old hardware, some not so old, that gave me a pretty cheap box for the power. I am seeing some people boasting about some crazy expensive hardware. Are there enough of them to be worth selling to? Firestorm 6.4.5 is the Public Beta. If there's later versions, with faster code, they're not saying anything in public. I don't feel EEP is stable enough to rely on for creating content, whatever viewer you might use.

I can agree with that. One of the EEP problems is that there are a lot of problems which have been accepted as bugs, and are in a process of being fixed. I feel I can trust you to keep up with those changes. Some TPV developers feel over-secretive on this. The moving target for EEP doesn't help anyone, I am probably going to change every material I have set up to look "right" in EEP (and I am not sure, reading reports upthread, if I have even started with useful EEP environment settings: what can I trust?). There is a Beta of a very widely-used program available with EEP support. It seems to me to be inevitable that there will have to be a second Beta. It's possible that the developers haven't noticed the Linden plan yet, Linden communications is erratic but there might be better channels available to the privileged. Looking at what the public gets, "better channels" is a damnably low bar. I have a low opinion of the whole JIRA thing. It's a project management tool, and I think it's misused at a bug reporting tool. I know of at least one old-time, long-dead, tool which was at heart a spreadsheet, yet which also presented for data entry as a word processor and database. It worked, but I don't see of any sign of JIRA even trying to present an alternative interface. I said I feel I can trust you. I know, you're French, not English, but we can both speak human language. I know other programmers who can, who even have reputations as authors, independent of their programming skills. It's C. P Snow's The Two Cultures in a mirror image of what he described over sixty years ago. Instead of the Humanities side not knowing there is a Second Law of Thermodynamics, we have too many on the STEM side failing to know the tools of human communication. I know all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. And I know how that much-quoted line references C. P. Snow's thesis. Never mind me, I shall go and write another song about science.

Even if the settings for Blender were imported, there's enough difference between the old Windlight and the new EEP to mess things up.The numbers in the Materials system don't change, but the results, especially Specularity, look very different. Some things you can check in Blender, such as UV mapping and where it puts parts of the texture (likewise for any mesh program), and other things you have to work out in SL. Some viewers let you see a "local" texture, rather than having to pay to upload it. It's either that or Beta Grid, normal maps really need checking before a paid-for upload

I'll give the green-only a try... DirectX and OpenGL, eh. What a surprise.

I did a quick coin-thing today, a prim with normal maps. Nothing all that fancy, but one of the normal maps was showing the high parts of the surface as low. Can you invert a normal map? Yes you can. I use the GIMP Go to the Colours menu and pick Curves. It shows this graph, a line from bottom left to top right. Leave the Blue channel alone, but change Red and Green, line from top left to bottom right. You just have to drag the end markers. OK, maybe some normal maps are wrong for SL in other ways. In this case I got this result. There are various ways to get from a height map to a normal map, plug-ins or websites. These two images may help you figure out if the generated Normal map is right for SL. You could just use whatever height option your creation tool has. But that's not an choice if you download a freebie. If you use Photoshop there's almost certainly a way to doing the same. There may be another way of doing it in the GIMP. But this makes it pretty clear what you need to do.

After weekend experience, the new region crossing code is better, but there can still be problems. Some regions still have very sluggish scripting, which can throw off vehcles, and the total download/streaming weight, vehicle and avatars, definitely has an effect. It also looks as though the login level is a factor. That last might be eased on the cloud. I've not seen any signs of the problem crossings being related to different server versions. If you have a road running through server versions A-B-B and entry tp the middle region is problematic, it doesn't matter whether you are travelling A-B-B or B-B-A

I figured I might as well show the whole vehicle, the original rather sub-optimal mesh, and the version with a lot of invisible-parts removed and with my wheels which are closer to the original. James Dean bought this auto on the 21st September 1955 and crashed on the 30th September 1955. The third photo is a 1950 Ford Tudor, the sort of car he crashed into. With EEP and the right materials settings you can get something close to all that chrome plate.

I have been working on some material for SL, and I am not sure just how things can be transferred. I have found how Windlight and EEP can produce such different results with the same settings. The textures should fit, as the import from Blender to SL doesn't change the UV mapping, but I wouldn't go above a 512-square texture in SL. You should avoid using the Low/Medium/High option for Specularity, it seems to work for Windlight, and goes crazy for EEP.

Two pictures. The multi-spoked wheel uses 4 triangles for the Low and Lowest LOD models, 16072 for the High LOD. I made the other wheel. They have similar LI. Mine doesn't go weird as you get too far away.

Not quite the same thing, but some of the vehicle scripting packages are getting up to L$4000, though that can include free updates. One is version n in the marketplace, was version n+1Beta about 4 years ago, and I am not sure what upgrades it's had since, except it's out of beta.

Don't forget that textures have their own LOD system, so if you have a logical face for the tyre-tread and another for the hub and tyre side the auto-generated mipmaps are used, don't waste pixels in the rendering, and would work pretty well on a cylinder as a low-LOD model. For the Lowest-LOD a cube may be enough, Low-LOD, 8 or 12 sides, High and Medium could use the same model, since even Medium is only seen pretty close, so it doesn't add much to LI It can pay off to use a normal map for some of the detail, and there is a way in Blender of generating a normal map from a SuperHigh-LOD model The auto-generation sucks. For this picture, I compared a stock truck with a version I modded to use my own mesh container and wheels. I also adjusted the size to a smaller scale, though for things like SLRR we're stuck with being hugely over-scale.

Some very well-known, prolific, vehicle brands in SL include some older mesh models which are poorly optimised for SL, and look to be imported 3D models. It may be the tech change over the last few years of SL, but I was working on one modifiable model, working out a new paint scheme for it, and there were faces which would be invisible allocated to tiny, detailed, meshes of things such as bolt heads. I ended up making my own wheels, dropping the total LI by 20% and with the LOD not collapsing into visibly triangular wheels. They also managed to look like the wheels that the 1955 original used. I also took the chance to set up the materials to work well with EEP lighting. A lot of things use the option for none/low/medium/high specularity, and that fails badly with EEP. A recent product from the same brand shows a lot of the same problems. I'll not be selling the final model I made, though it would be OK for me to sell the wheels I made. All my mesh and textures. As it is, I wonder why I bothered, when I see the money the rubbish is selling for. Thanks to the Lindens for the work they have done on improving region crossings, but how much has been lost through poorly optimised meshes?

Region Crossing has improved a lot, Thursday morning. It's a relatively quiet time of day, I suppose the big test will be the weekend, when several vehicle-oriented groups run assorted journey's across the grid. The first weekend of August was still pretty horrible, last weekend sort of OK. Why do the Lindens have to rely on Inara Pey to tell us this sort of rather basic stuff?

I should have put in a link to that. See my post at It worked with the version briefly out last week as the release version. Rolled back, things are still working. The same basic approach works for the Windows version of Firestorm, which does give you access to some Havok options when uploading Mesh. I am not sure Havok does as good a job on LOD and physics models as a manual creation.

As you may have noticed from elsewhere, I am a Linux user, and so the only way of getting at the SL viewer is the wine system. I posted on that with an explanation of what needs to be done. Linden Lab does something a bit awkward: at least, that's what it looks like. There is another viewer, running directly on Linux, which handles EEP. Problem is, with OpenGL on the way out, the term is "deprecated", just keeping Windlight working is going to be a big job. There are tools which allow OpenGL to be translated to the replacements, but they'll still need the results to be tested. Anyway, I make stuff. I go to a lot of trouble to optimise the mesh. I try to take advantage of normal and specular maps. But there is one specular material shortcut, which I luckily haven't used much, that looks OK for windlight, and totally breaks under EEP. You HAVE to use a specular texture, though that tiny "blank" texture is enough. I don't think that was well-explained by the Lindens. That's going to be a problem.

What a lively day it has been. Thanks everyone for the clear explanations here. What I saw coming through the Status page, and the repeats on Twitter, was a bit worrying. (Different timezones, too.) You need to be careful reading the timestamps on the messages, the Twitter version loses some of that. Go to Status to be sure of the times. Still needed to come here...