arabellajones

According to Inara Pey's report on the SUG meeting, a particular version was rolled out. So unless you go to the right in-world user group the Lindens just don't care about us. I thought being a paying customer would help, but I feel more like food.

This is essentially the "You Do it" answer which makes huge assumptions about skills. Incidentally, I was careful to distinguish between Skins and Color Schemes and in the context the difference matters a lot. I do have some computer language skills, but trust me when I say they would be useless to any TPV project.

It's fair enough that TPV development teams have to pick and choose what they work on, just as Linden Lab has to. Most of us will know of the Dark Mode setting for smartphone and tablets, which is useful in particular circumstances, and in other times isn't. What can be a little confusing are the overlapping Preferences of the Skin and the Color Scheme. It's the combination which can get the look of the viewer into that Dark Mode territory. First, a little history. There has been a BlueLight Skin for a long time, originally meant for for the Linden Lab viewer. It was picked up and used by Firestorm. As far as I can tell, the Skin sets up the labels used by the Color Scheme but includes a lot of other details. As things worked out, breaking away from Dark Mode came to depend on BlueLight, with one exception. You have to go back to the general Viewer 1 look and use Henri Beaumont's Cool VL Viewer which does have a Silver colour option. It's a viewer worth having as a sanity check. If you can see the scenery you have made with that, it's a good check. Going briefly off to one side, there's a lot of detail on this page about setting an LCD monitor. http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ If your monitor isn't set right, you're not going to be able to see all the colors. As a practical matter, your textures can't use the full 8-bit brightness age, you need room for the ALM-generated highlights and shadows. It's now become apparent that the creator of the BlueLight Skin has vanished. It may be in its last days of use. Which means the Silver Color Schemes will vanish I know I shall struggle.There are reasons why a generally dark screen is not good for seeing things, such as the inevitable dilated pupils. It's already been suggested I "make your own!", so the team elects to support ten de facto Dark Mode Color Schemes and deny a useful choice to their users. I shall stop here, Or I shall say something very rude about some people.

The prolonged total time for this was disappointing. Started at 07.01 PDT Completed at 11.00 PDT It is hard to trust you.

MC looks to be on Second Life Server 2022-03-24.569934 RC looks like Second Life Server 2022-04-01.570305 We shall see how long it lasts this time.

I didn't see any sign of MC restarts on Tuesday.

The lack of a successful RC run is consistent with the status messages for the current week, just an RC roll-out and nothing on the MC regions. But apparent no-restart in the MC regions seems foolhardy. Does the USA get hit with as many holidays over the Easter weekend? Aiming for a longer run without restarts, testing the current servers, does have value.

I have seen several mentions of cryptocurrencies, and related tech, in this discussion They're a scam, a Ponzi scheme, using insane amounts of energy for each transaction. A useful internet rule about any technology is to check whether the furries are using it. They don't use cryptocurrencies. They don't use NFTs.

I had such fun exploring the web, and seeing so little clear information about the Apple Silicon. So much just uses that label, and if it is an ARM-type instruction set, the past sales and resales of the ARM tech, they're now talking about an IPO, starts looking even more interesting in a cursed sort of way. But if you want computing power now, it seems you need to have code that can properly cope with multi-threading, it's not just about OpenGL.I have at least five computers using multi-core ARM chips, and they're just a routine solution, nothing special. Linden Lab are looking more and more like the dead end.

I have been hunting around on the web, and it's hard to see the Apple M1 and M2 as being any more non-Intel than the AMD-Athlon was. back when Second Life was using bleeding-edge tech. My recollection is that the AMD processors had some extra instructions, but you didn't have to use them. They were related to the instruction I did use to replace some very slow interpreted BASIC.

Linden Lab, and the rest of us, are lucky to be still able to use OpenGL. They've had years of warning, and now OpenGL is officially deprecated on some hardware platforms. That's been its status for about three years. The Lindens seem to have done sweet Fanny Adams. I suppose we should use the technical meaning of "deprecated". It still works, but there is no certainty that it will work in the next release. There's a lot of overlap with standard English dictionaries, and you can call this usage jargon, specialised usage but not secret.

My OS does does have a method of identifying a window and inverting that window. This is the result for me. It is possible to set up this color-inversion to be more selective, using more specific sub-window labels, but that depends on a properly defined WM_CLASS label so the different sorts of compositing call can be distinguished. This doesn't look like a useful solution, so Firestorm is likely to remain a de facto Dark Mode viewer.

I am not sure of the reading ability of some of those who have responded to my initial comment. I set out a very general user interface problem, with a citation. About half the population have an eyesight defect, astigmatism, which interacts badly with the popular Dark Mode colour schemes. They are an almost universal option for smartphones and tablets, but remain an option. In some environments they work well, they have a purpose but they are not universal. On Firestorm I used the Starlight skin, which has the only colour scheme not in Dark Mode territory. I hadn't realised how the needed support had collapsed. It's something that Firestorm users can still look at to see for themselves how big a difference the colours make. I'm willing to accept the loss of Starlight skins, but it will make Firestorm an entirely Dark Mode viewer. If you like Dark Mode, that's OK, I only want it to be an option, part of a set of adjustments you can make to get the best out of your hardware. If you are saying it's open source and I can fix it for myself, you are making a big assumption about my skills. And if you dismiss my observations on those grounds, I do have words to describe you which go beyond mere fool, but I choose not to use them. I have been looking though the Firestorm skins, and I have found a couple of borderline Dark Mode, but they're not that much better. I have checked my monitor settings and how it interacts with room lighting. I know how the brightest and darkest colours in textures need to leave room for the effects generated by the ALM. You might have something useful to add, such a viewer that has avoided the Dark Mode trap, but on what I see so far, responses have already dropped into "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." How do you want to look?

While the Starlight skins are the really obvious exception to the prevalent Dark Mode fashion, I am trying to step aside from that aspect. The problem I am having is with the colours used, and as the multiple Starlight versions demonstrate, Starlight itself isn't the problem Run your copy of Firestorm, log-in, and open your Preferences window, choose Skins. You don't need to change your Skin, don't worry. Now pick the Starlight skin and compare what is shown for these two subsidiary colour schemes: Nostalgia Blue Silver Blue I have been looking through the other skins and their colour schemes and not found anything close to that Silver Blue colour scheme, nothing with the same general light/dark difference outside the Starlight family, and the Starlight family lets a user choose. A similarly light skin in the Firestorm group would also be a useful basic test.

I am feeling grumpy about the Firestorm teams reactions, elsewhere. Because it is described as "experimental" they don't seem to care about problem reports. Let's be clear: there are new tools in Firestorm to "Improve Graphics Speed...", and they're described as "experimental". I suppose that means they might vanish in the next release, or be changed enormously. But if they can't use an existing skin's colour system, can't usefully use the way text and button background colours are defined, they have a deeper problem. It's not just that light texts on dark backgrounds are difficult for about half the population, because of vision defects such as astigmatism (and I gave you citations for that), it's that this Dark Mode can be useful, some of the time for some people, but it's being treated as a universal. And, instead of a fashionable option, we lose the choice. Fashion shouldn't be forced. And since nobody else can see out screens, these fashion-driven UI choices feel a bit pointless.

So far, the best I have found in Firestorm is the "Vintage Classic" Skin, which seems to be closer to the original Viewer 1 choices. I still get some windows which use white text on very pale grey backgrounds. The skin is not the full high-fashion Dark Mode. It's not so very different to the choices used in Henri Beaumont's Cool VL Viewer. I am left with a feeling that nobody on the team bothered to check. White text on very pale grey seems such an obvious bad choice, whatever the overall nature of the skin.

The new version of Firestorm is out, caught up with the official viewer and with the usual plethora of other options. But there is a looming change, next version, which may be a problem. I am not 100% sure, but the Starlight skins will be removed if nobody takes on the support work, and they seem to be the only skins that give dark text on a light background. This was rare in the past, but has become fashionable in the past few years. It is getting very common on smartphones and tablets, but it is presented as a choice for use in darker environments. That choice makes sense, but research published in 2018 and later reveals it needs to be a choice. Some people it helps, some it doesn't. Report on the effects of Dark Mode in Wired The source is Professor Susanne Mayr at the University of Passau. Let me be clear, a lot of the Starlight Skin changes are other than colour choices. The buttons are different shapes, some things are arranged differently. I don't need full Starlight, but if Linden Lab and other viewer teams can't make Dark Mode a choice I may have problems. If I have missed the skin choice or setting, Firestorm or any other viewer, which gives me the choice, you can blame me, but I am already grumpy enough about the quality of documentation. "Try the Starlight skin" is not a useful answer.

This comparison is why I keep an up-to-date version of Henri Beauchamp's Cool VL Viewer. I am a Linux user, so the usual sensible suggestion trying the Linden Lab viewer has problems

So we should be expecting something Tuesday, and because of the DST change we will see it an hour earlier in Europe. I don't know effects elsewhere, but I expect there are a lot of places that haven't changed, especially southern hemisphere. I have a clock app on my smartphone which displays time in San Francisco as well as UTC and London, and my wristwatch has a hacking second hand. Worrying about seconds still feels a bit picky, but you easily notice a whole hour.

Went down. came back. I am in the UK, and we have just had a third storm warning announced. I don't think that has anything to do with the problem, but I am seeing intermittent problems with internet sites, specific internet sites, not general. Something at my end would affect everything

I have bigger things to worry about right now, very high winds in some parts of the UK, Wednesday night and forecast for Friday, which can affect electricity supplies and internet connections for some. Wednesday night hit the north of England and Scotland the worst, Friday is going to hit southern England more. This isn't the only place that Linden Lab announces stuff. My understanding is that the new release version is a revised version of last week, with the LSL bugs rectified. Inara Pey reported it as being announced at the Simulator User Group Meeting. I try not to get too worked up because I know how different my time-zone is. The last-minute announcements in California can be after midnight for me. But that alone doesn't excuse the lack of an announcement.

We're getting a bit more visible on the map, the usual signs of other roads and buildings.

I'm not sure how much this is down to nVidia/AMD and how much is the insane pressures on the market that are down to cryptocurrency mining. I'll stick with the nVidia cards I'm familiar with: an xx50 card is the low-end gaming, always has been, and some details of Second Life are inefficient as gaming, both viewer design and SL content design. My current card is a 960, benchmarks close to a 1050, and that gives good framerates without shadows. But a 1050 is a couple of hardware generations old now, and yet the prices of new 1050 hardware haven't fallen back to reflect that. There are complications. There is fake hardware out there, which would maybe be OK for non-gaming use. The Covid pandemic has messed up a lot of the chip manufacturing, as well as snarling up the transition out of OpenGL. I had some hope that Linden Lab would have given me a clear path to follow, but I am not going to pay silly hardware prices until I know what drivers I will need to use for Second Life. I can get 30fps from my low-end hardware, depending on draw distance and the number of avatars visible. Sometimes it gets up to 80fps, and I get a feeling that there is too much inefficient content as part of that variation.

Thanks, I saw the Status message but there was nothing about whether the version was being changed, just "Investigating" as if they didn't know who had pushed the button. We have to guess what the Lindens are really doing, and I am not sure that they know.

I am not sure how much the inventory problems I have seen, first weekend of February, are related to what has been causing this. Nor can I tell if the Inventory Server maintenance on the 8th February has any connection. But things do seem to have improved. The recent problems I saw have ceased.