arabellajones

It's looking as though the still-working tracking sites, reporting things such as concurrency, can't be relied on at the moment. I do see the problem that hit overnight at https://eregion.kicks-ass.net/munin/servers/akari.eregion.home/SL_Online_Now.html but updates stopped and http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/sl-statistical-charts/ hasn't updated since Wednesday. Since both seem to use their site's localtime it's not so obvious the updates stopped. Both show the Sunday spike, and it's unusual for them both to be stalled. Do the Lindens still emphasise total sign-ups rather than concurrency in their publicity? The longer-term concurrency charts seem to show a steady decline, and if they're still pointing to total sign-ups if feels like typical Silicon Valley economics

It seems a lot of status reports vanish from the history on the server, but the repeats via Twitter are still accessible, and they're all "Rolling Restarts", no distinction between a simple restart and a roll-out of new code to the servers. No message here from the Lindens, but the inference from the version numbers is that there was a roll-out of new code.

What I saw of the version-change messages the viewer can give, a lot went to 534597, but you never see the codenames.

It is looking as though the Lindens restarted every RC region in Jeogeot at almost the same time, not even channel by channel. I've seen a couple of individual restarts earlier in the week, and they were pretty quick. This restart took at least 25 minutes. There's enough lag on the map to be misleading, but I don't think it's enough to explain what I saw. The Lindens have just announced completion on Twitter so the total time has been sort of OK.

All I can tell is that about a third of the regions near me are down. That looks high for the RCs, but it's not far off for a random sample of the Grid. Zoom out a bit on the map, and it looks rather as if they pulled the restart trigger on every affected region at 07:00, which must really be hammering the network.

I wouldn't have started the Grid Drive of I had known this was coming. Checking on Twitter, the warning appears to be 10 minutes before the In-progress message at 07:00 PST I started the run at 05:28, sim crossing has been better than it was over the weekend, and now I have been waiting 20 minutes for a region to restart. OK, I am not in a good mood. The Lindens are making a good effort to make themselves look like a bunch of wankers

Rolling restarts for the RC began at 07:00 PST, no timestamp on the warning notice on Status, and no warning here. I am using an ISO date string, since there are sometimes paying customers from outside the USA Do you thimk the Lindens are hoping we won't notice?

The way I heard it, from non-SL friends in the USA, it's a holiday only for Federal workers, few private companies do anything special. The Lindens did do some scheduled maintenance on Monday.

OK, the sim I was in restarted with the standard in-world messages, and a pretty quick restart too. Was it a sign of rolling restarts? I don't know, but maybe not. There's nothing obvious on the map. No announcements anywhere. The Linden Lab mushroom farm seems to be in fine fettle.

It looks like there may be restarts. Bloody Lindens!

I remember, when advanced lighting came out, that the new code, we were warned, could slow rendering. Well, it depended on the hardware and graphics drivers. Switch on shadows, and you do get much slower rendering. I was using an already-old nVidia 750. and using ALM was faster. But none of the documentation of the calculation appears to invoke the computer systems. It's about the data, things such as triangle counts and texture sizes and LOD distances. Some details of the calculation have changed, and the changes aren't well-documented. Long, narrow, triangles used to be a killer for complexity, now it uses a simple triangle count. At least, it seems to. Some people don't seem to realize how LOD switching works for a rigged mesh, and how that can give different results, depending on the avatar wearing something. It's still nothing to do with graphics hardware and drivers. That will affect where you set the Max. Complexity so you get acceptable frame rates, but that's entirely your choice.

Perfection and reliability aren't the same. And how high a number, how big a difference, are you talking about?

Look, I know the number for avatar complexity isn't a perfect measure, and might change with Project ArcTan and can vary enormously depending on whether an item is attached or rigged, but why does it never get mentioned? You can't search for a low-complexity version of an item, and hardly anyone bothers to mention a number in the item page they create. Oh, and I know it's not the same as memory usage, which matters rather a lot for vehicles and smooth sim crossings. Some high-complexity components, such as flexiprims, can be pretty memory-efficient, but there's no way out of having both high complexity and high memory use from a mesh with a high triangle count. High-complexity outfits can be a nuisance for other users, but we can set the complexity limit in the viewer, and it can make a huge difference (I don't have such a slow system. but it doesn't take many avatars with over 200k complexity to slow things down). Anyway, it's our choice there. But why do the Marketplace and the sellers make it so difficult for customers to choose?

The screenshot shows the report on current Status. Scheduled maintenance was cancelled, and half an hour later announced as in progress. Maybe the staff had been told they didn't have to come in until later, but what are the Lindens playing at?

I think the Lindens have managed to go one better. (I an imagine a reason for this but it still manages to look damnably incompetent.)

As usual, variable results just now, but if it's like this before the weekend even starts it's hard to be optimistic. If regions are restarted on an automatic 10-day cycle, that's not what I am seeing. Undocumented changes, again?

The short time taken does raise that possibility, but it could be they got everything right. So which to bet on? It could be a bit of both, but on the performance of the last few months, it's getting hard to trust the Lindens. That makes as much sense as putting s fiver on Red Rum for the next Grand National.

The 1920s Berlin Project is on 533895, I was just there. Main Channel looks to be on 533447. I don't have a big problem with that. Trouble is, they just ran restarts on the RCs, according to Status it was scheduled maintenance starting 08:00, and it was on the Twitter account at about the right time. But the Scheduled Maintenance timetable announcement on Status was at 07:59.

I think next week is going to be interesting. The problems last week seem to have included problems with the tool that carry out the restarts (most likely shell scripts). It looks like they fixed them, hence the second restarts we saw, but "It works!" isn't always the same as something being correct, and I was half-expecting a test run on an RC. I expect the tools have been run, but that's not quite the same as a test. I had to dig out info yesterday, for an experienced sim-owner who had missed all the fun. Time zones and such, they hadn't been around, and they didn't even know there had been restarts.

I don't know what's been happening, but it looks as though today's restarts are being repeated

7th January, and restarts began at the usual Tuesday time. There was a Status message, but it wasn't the usual wording, and no post in this Forum. These restarts should have been predictable enough that the usual messages could appear, not new code but routine management. "We will be performing additional rolling restarts" looks odd.

It's referenced in Status, but not here in the forums. And the message is a bit unusually worded, but they've started running restarts. The last restarts currently recorded are in the Incident History section, and were at the end of November, and I am sure that is wrong. Somehow they seem to have lost a lot of what happened in December. Is it they only have non-scheduled stuff as Incident History? I'll try not to be surprised by Release Channel restarts on Wednesday, but they say often enough that they don't like having servers running for more than a couple of weeks without a restart, so this is all looking a bit clumsy

I'm thinking there's a lot of OK-looking sculpt products out there. I listed tools that I know work, with current download links, rather than leaving anyone dependent on that now almost useless official web page. If the creators want to do a quick and dirty conversion, they can. Chin Rey suggested Firestorm can do sculpt-to-mesh. Is that Build > Object > Save As > Collada or somewhere else? If it is there, fine, but at least we're talking about this, something a bit more useful than vague hand-waves.

There's some ways in Blender to reduce the triangle count, automatic tools that do an OK job. This view, same item, shows one of the awkward features of a sculpt, the way the wireframe of a sphere is still there. While the complexity calculation has been tweaked to take out the higher cost assigned the long, thin, triangles, they're not good. On this model, the texture on the underside of the jaw is very plain, but you couldn't really do anything else with the UV mapping of a sculpt. I think you could match the original at the "lips" so you might be able to use an existing texture. I'd be inclined to take the teeth and link them into one single mesh component. Not really a jawbone, but a similar hidden shape with the teeth sprouting from it. With some sort of "even" UV mapping, it could all be one face/material, a glossy off-white. (I reckon too many people use pure white and black, and so lose highlights or shadows.)

A sculpt is a particular prim distorted by the information in a texture. It has all sorts of limits, but there are still a lot of sculpt-based items on the marketplace. The info on the Wiki about tools is horribly out of date, but I thought I'd point to some still-available stuff. 1: I shall stick to Wings3D. This is entirely free and, if you have a legitimate copy of the sculpt map, the texture, you can recover the mesh and put it in a format any program can read. 2: Sculpts have a reputation for being more efficient than mesh. This is a false impression from that days when the comparisons we had were crude and inaccurate. First, the tool I used. There is a plug-in for Wings3D which can be found here, with a pack of base objects for making sculpts (I checked and downloaded them today) http://www.wings3d.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=12 As the thread points out, you need v1.4.1 of Wings3D, which can be downloaded from the same site. It will not work with the current version. While you can edit the mesh that can be made with an imported sculpt map, I'd hesitate. Export it in a portable file format, I used a Wavefront .obj file, and edit in whatever program you wish which can save Collada .dae files that can be imported into SL It depends how big the final mesh objects is, but sculpts have a fixed number of facets, whatever the size. This means far more detail that you can ever expect to see on a tooth, and not really enough on an aeroplane. And the LOD stepping is related to the object size, unless it is rigged to an avatar, when it is related to the avatar size. The quick and dirty way is to not to produce a new, more efficient, mesh, so you don't change the UV mapping. But you can cut the triangle count of the lower LOD models a lot for a small object. Why do all this? I took a prim-and-sculpt foot I had for a furry character and was able to halve the complexity cost without any loss of quality. And I am not sure I needed to closely match the sculpts. And I do see old sculpt-based items still out there. This pic shows a sculpt jaw. The teeth look dark gray because each is a distinct sculpted prim, and each facet, over 4000 per tooth, is tiny. The model is still available as part of the Luskwood Bigcats range.