arabellajones

I have been trying for a while to figure out how to get some sort of "current" scripting for trains. The old SLRR scripts have options that just cannot work on the Bellisaria lines because of the different land permissions. I know one or two people have been trying other ideas. We don't really need a fully-working rail system, but I do get a feeling that some details are no more than decoration. Will some of the passing loops ever work? The newest section, marked red on some of the maps above, does suggest a possible east-west connection to form a closed loop. I know there has been talk of a connection to the north east, linking to that huge set of continents, but I do wonder if it will be ever worth it. Even a water link would need more coastal waterway along the continent edges, and, after some poor experiences of existing roads in the finished areas of the Loglands, it doesn't feel like much fun driving them. But, assume road or rail to Satori, as a long term prospect. Could a rail system ever be built for Satori? The road system is fragmented. There are places on all continents where short new road connections are possible but will it ever happen? Can an existing continent ever be more than an unconnectable dead end? So many ways of using Second Life have been developed, variations have been tried, yet we seem trapped with mistakes such as roads crossing region corners.

It's awkward that so few of these stations have rez zones. Not every station on the SLRR main line has them, but the rez gaps are shorter.

Something to remember: adding RAM is locked to that motherboard, even through 8GB will make a big difference. A video card can be transferred to a new machine, and the nVidia 10xx series is still pretty recent. It's not a dead end. And a 1030 is an OK card. One caution: nVidia stopped supporting VGA with the 9xx series chips. There are several different digital standards in use. These days an LED TV makes a fine monitor, with a 20" to 24" screen diagonal and HDMI input. And for ordinary sound you can use the TV speakers via HDMI. That's also the game console standard. Again, not a dead end. My computer is pretty old but decent for CPU and electrical power. More powerful GPUs might need a special adaptor lead to provide electrical power on an old machine but the 1030 avoids that problem, it's designed for your situation.

I think you're just trying to wriggle out of the issue of the quality of documentation, a long running and widespread pattern of failures which is exemplified by the path shown in my original post. Should I be writing at the Dick and Jane level? See Arabella try to find out how SL works. See Dick write.

When Planar mapping is on, the Repeats per meter box is greyed out. Yet your so brilliant explanation says this. You're not making sense. How can you use a greyed-out data entry box?

The page is dated 2014. so at least 6 years... The Default/Planar switch looks very odd. If you're on Default you can change the Repeats per meter, and the Horizontal and Vertical scale changes in proportion, but switch to Planar and the Repeats per meter box greys out and the Scale values change. It may be different on something which isn't a cube, or where the UV map of the face doesn't fill the full 0 - 1 range. I stick with Default mode, and things can sometimes get strange if the UV map isn't very simple.

There can be three textures applied to a face of an object, and what they all do can feel rather confusing: multiple web pages, snapshots of different moments in the history of SL. Here's the path I took. I was in a bit of a grumpy mood about the organisation of SL documentation. I was looking up how specularity is controlled, and I suspected alpha channels had a part in it. I didn't expect much here, but the links could be better. The next article I found was more specific, but was first posted in 2013, with an edit in 2018, but only deals with the alpha channel in the Specularity map. But at least there is a link to the Good Building Practises portal That's a very general link, we're just getting a list of web pages to look though, on all aspects of building. "Texture Usage" is from 2013, and implies some features are still new. Not really relevant to the alpha channels. Case Study - Katana using normal and specular maps looks promising, but something odd is happening with the images. It might be my browser, but that doesn't exclude the changes in HTML over the last seven years. It's for the LightWave crowd, maybe assumes too much for the rest of us, and since there's a company make wifi-connected lighting using that name, maybe "LightWave 3D" should be substituted. Finally i hit a useful page "Alpha Modes Do's and Don'ts". Suddenly I find an explanation of what the Normal Map alpha channel does, as well as a version of the Specular Map alpha channel that feels a bit different. I think it's the same, but some of the language is a little different. What is the " reflected environment map"? It seems to be synonymous with the sky, which might matter a lot more with what EEP is doing. The Normal Map Alpha modulates the Glossiness, the Specular Map Alpha modulates the Environment reflection. So you could have a flat surface using a normal map to produce a criss-crossing pattern of ridges, with the three alpha channels making the gaps transparent and different reflective: think of stained glass windows, You'd have to use Alpha Blending on the Diffuse Map, and I am not sure that has ever worked quite as described. That page also introduces the idea of an "Emissive Mask", which seems to use the same alpha channel as the transparency... Turns out it's in the options for a Diffuse Map with an Alpha Channel, one of the set None, Alpha Blending, Alpha Masking, and Emissive Mask. Trouble is, if we use the story-telling analogy, somebody was thinking they were writing Hamlet, when they should have been writing a story for a grade school audience. I had to furkle around in my viewer when they didn't even bother with a picture. Pictures tell stories too. That could do some interesting things with an animated texture.

I'm feeling grumpy about documentation problems. I was trying to look up details of how Materials work, trying to figure out a complete picture from a rather messy, scattered, set of web pages. What I find feels like a snapshot of the exchanges between an author and publisher over a draft text, rather than a final published story, sometimes feeling as if a character has accidentally changed names. But let's move to an example. I was looking up how specularity is controlled, and I suspected alpha channels had a part in it. I didn't expect much here, but the links could be better. The next article I found was more specific, but was first posted in 2013, with an edit in 2018, but only deals with the alpha channel in the Specularity map. But at least there is a link to the Good Building Practises portal That's a very general link, we're just getting a list of web pages to look though, on all aspects of building. "Texture Usage" is from 2013, and implies some features are still new. Not really relevant to the alpha channels. Case Study - Katana using normal and specular maps looks promising, but something odd is happening with the images. It might be my browser, but that doesn't exclude the changes in HTML over the last seven years. It's for the LightWave crowd, maybe assumes too much for the rest of us, and since there's a company make wifi-connected lighting using that name, maybe "LightWave 3D" should be substituted. Finally i hit a useful page "Alpha Modes Do's and Don'ts". Suddenly I find an explanation of what the Normal Map alpha channel does, as well as a version of the Specular Map alpha channel that feels a bit different. I think it's the same, but some of the language is a little different. What is the " reflected environment map"? It seems to be synonymous with the sky, which might matter a lot more with what EEP is doing. The Normal Map Alpha modulates the Glossiness, the Specular Map Alpha modulates the Environment reflection. So you could have a flat surface using a normal map to produce a criss-crossing pattern of ridges, with the three alpha channels making the gaps transparent and different reflective: think of stained glass windows, You'd have to use Alpha Blending on the Diffuse Map, and I am not sure that has ever worked quite as described. That page also introduces the idea of an "Emissive Mask", which seems to use the same alpha channel as the transparency... Turns out it's in the options for a Diffuse Map with an Alpha Channel, one of the set None, Alpha Blending, Alpha Masking, and Emissive Mask. Trouble is, if we use the story-telling analogy, somebody was thinking they were writing Hamlet, when they should have been writing a story for a grade school audience. I had to furkle around in my viewer when they didn't even bother with a picture. Pictures tell stories too. That could do some interesting things with an animated texture. But the key point is that the web site needs better organisation and management, keeping up to date with changes and telling a coherent story about how Second Life works.

I've been testing EEP. Two pictures, same place, same object, both using Nacon's Afternoon lighting. On the left, the current Linden Lab viewer, v6.4.4.543157, using EEP On the right, Firestorm, v6.3.9.58205, also the current release. using Windlight This is a huge difference in results. I am surprised that testing never noticed this before it even got into beta, even more surprised that it got through Beta testing. The differences for the floor and background objects aren't great, but could be down to a slightly different sun angle. It doesn't explain the way the look of the pan changes. I have a similar pan in my RL kitchen, non-stick lining. Why does something that looks right under the ALM/Windlight system suddenly look so incredibly different?

And now the bug report I submitted is closed. Whirly Fizzle and Alexa Linden knew about an undocumented debug feature, and seem to think this feature is sufficient answer, even though I suggested that poor documentation of the behaviour was part of the problem. They knew, and didn't think they needed to tell anyone. Words don't fail me, but they wouldn't be suited for polite company.

According to the one update on that JIRA entry, there's a debug option EnvironmentPersistAcrossLogin which suggests to me that a solution already exists, but the problem is the all too usual combination of UI and poor documentation.

OK, I've submitted a JIRA on this at BUG-228988 I'm not holding my breath, I have a life-long addiction to oxygen.

Those default positions are horrible, with the sun track being directly overhead, but then that was all Windlight gave you, you set a particular time of day to give the sun the angle above the horizon you wanted, and if you wanted a particular azimuth you rotated the scenery. I've been struggling to fix a Personal EEP sky, every time I have logged in I have had to go through the manual procedure, and the Lindens have never explained that you can't fix a personal default that comes on at login, even if there has to be a delay for inventory to load. There's always been a delay for your clothes to load, but they don't vanish when you log out. Is it so crazy to think that a personal EEP setting should be as persistent as personal settings such as, oh, your underwear? The failure to even bother with saying, "At this time, you must set your Personal Lighting whenever you log in to SL," looks like part of the sustained communications failure of Linden Lab which has persisted and worsened for over five years.

I mentioned the sim crossing problem (multi-car trains) at the SLRR even at SL17B, and got shouted down for not calling them "region crossings", but how often does a region crossing stay on the same sim-server? With the sims moving onto the cloud I doubt that is going to improve, and vehicle ferries, I reckon, are a very dead duck without significant support built in to both LSL and the server code. The railways in Bellisaria run on different enough parcel permissions that multi-car trains are a dead end.

I did a Google search, and found plenty of pictures. The Linden versions have the general style, but do have very thin legs. The open-water houses, such as a place called Stiltsville, have thicker legs. Real-world, eyeballing pictures and plans and stuff, 250mm (10 inches) looks a reasonable minimum for the main structure, but Second Life scale can be a bit strange, with the height of avatars. It does look like an extension of the normal timber framing, but the stilts look "earth-fast" in some cases, and would need some extra thickness because of damp and rot over time.

I checked the notice currently on the status page. This week it gives a date for the restarts, but not a time. That's a bit careless of the Lindens. But if they're not bothering to give a start time, can we assume one? They do usually give a warning with an hour to run but maybe that isn't kept visible.

Speculating a bit, but what is the cache-size set to? The default setting is rather low, only two gigabytes, I think. You can increase it to ten gigabytes. That's several minutes of traffic on your connection, and if you're in a busy place a small cache may not be holding on to textures, and always reloading them. There's another setting for caching using the graphics card RAM. Compressed textures in the disk cache, uncompressed when stored in RAM. I doubt that affects network traffic, but the default settings on both are set for machines with way less than what you appear to have.

I thought I remembered a link on the Cool VL Viewer site for a Mac OS version: it's still there on the page, links to a forum thread on the site. Go to the last page, there are recent v1.26 and v1.27 compiles but the 1.27 compile looks a version behind. Check the release notes, there are some very welcome improvements in v1.26.24.23 I hope the Lindens don't get ratty about posting a link Late June 2020 MacOS compile of Cool VL Viewer. I'm using 1.27.0.3 under Linux without problems, other than side effects of the UI differences.

SL17B as a model of communicating with customers is a piss-poor failure. The best way of finding out anything about any of the timetabled events seems to be knowing a Linden's real name and looking them up on LinkedIn. What sort of music is played on the DJ Stage? All you can do to find out is to turn up. What about the live performances: there might be something somewhere about a particular performer's abilities, but if they have a web page, there's no obvious link. It can't all be one guy with a guitar, but that's all I have come across. But, whether it's VR or a performance at the local pub, not promoting the music is a failure. What's the next live session? Somebody doing a furry George Formby while playing 50 Cent tracks on a ukulele?

It looks pretty obvious to me that the SL17B landscape has been designed and built using EEP viewers, because it shows that specularity bug ( BUG-228781 and BUG-228581 ), it's set to look right, and on a non-EEP viewer, such as Firestorm, things are horribly dark. As a creator, I take some care over material settings to get things looking good, and I am not feeling happy about the current situation. Nice trees, though. The Moles have had a lot of practice with trees, haven't they.

They're not really being very clear on some of this, but there was a notice in the secondlife:///app/group/8db35111-979b-14a7-6a74-b47be86ce04f/about group saying things would open at 9am Thursday. Which is fair enough as a time, but Linden Lab does seem to be struggling to communicate with their customers. And the overall timetable for SL17B looks rather feeble if you're not into the music scene, a daily Meet The Lindens is about the only thing that isn't music. I am glad I know some exhibitors, and so have another source of info.

Just what is the point of those water regions? What can they be used for? Those missing corner regions look rather odd.

Something I have a little experience of: the fake nVidia graphics chipsets. They use a very old chipset which falsely reports it is something more recent. They can work OK for a lot of ordinary things: web browser, video, and such. Even games can work for a while. But sooner or later the graphics driver uses code that CANNOT run on the old chipset that is there. One big clue is that nVidia stopped providing VGA output on 9xx cards and later. It can be done, with extra hardware, and it's possible that some specialised cards might have been built with that, but I have never seen one, and they're not likely to be cheap. Some of these fakes can have adequate performance, I used a genuine nVidia 750 for years. The fakes use the older Fermi microarchitecture, the 750 uses Maxwell, and the benchmark differences are tolerable. But there are things that just don't work. Part of the improvements in later chipsets are reducing power for the same performance. Since we have no system details to go on, this is all guess work. But the run OK and then crash pattern would fit.

There's a lot in that paragraph which makes me wonder what Linden Lab are really playing at. I wouldn't, myself, recommend using graphics below the nVidia xx50 level (and there are way too many fake nVidia chipsets which have come out of China, things like 450 chipsets reporting they are a 950 (and still using a VGA connector)). EEP just isn't going to work with that old hardware, it depends on CPU elements which just aren't there. At least the Sansar distraction is out of the way, but we need something better than a drip, drip, drip of near-rumour from a few privileged third-party viewer developers. Apple have been deprecating OpenGL for years. It would have been reckless to jump straight on the Vulkan bandwagon in 2015, but Apple's deadline is the end of this year. They're telling everyone. Other companies have some sort of roadmap, a timetable for the change. They want their customers to feel able to trust them. Linden Lab? They struggle to get timetables out for the end of this week! It's still possible that they have competent programmers...

OpenGL has been around for a long time: it's a standard way of communicating between the user software and the hardware drivers. And it is starting to look rather tired. Apple are replacing OpenGL with Metal, Windows uses DirectX12, but neither has the cross-platform advantages of OpenGL. A lot of Game and other graphics development is moving to Vulkan: cross-platform. All of these new systems are allowing features that OpenGL doesn't, doing things better. OpenGL doesn't manage GPU/CPU sharing very well, and if I am reading things right, that's currently a weakness for EEP. Worst case, you might need to run the right graphics driver on your system, which isn't so different from the early days of OpenGL. Vulkan looks a good bet for OpenGL replacement. It is a widely-backed cross-platform fix. That doesn't mean it's the only answer, I've seen other new tools with big-name support fail, but it's the right pattern. And, not a perfect answer, there are toolsets to sit between OpenGL and Vulkan.