Aishagain

Support says they have database issues (thought they'd "resolved that earlier". Looks like the elastic band broke. SNAFU.

@Coffee PancakeCoo, I see now, thankyou!

I must be a old fogey because for the life of me I do not see the point of 360 degree pictures.

I stand corrected. I never realised that FS parcel Windlight could be altitude dependent. Seems I was also misled as to what the "shared Experience" rules were, I am now wiser.

@Henri Beauchamp: Well you might well be correct, Henri, I won't argue. However since one of the changes that EEP addresses is parcel environment settings at different altitudes and this is something that could NOT be set with windlight rendering. That being unavailable, I would have thought that since eg I running a Windlight rendering viewer visit a friend's skybox, and this friend has set an altitude dependent environment, I would not see it: surely that breaks the shared experience rules? In the limit I don't care one way or the other, it was just how I had had it explained to me.

You are, of course, right Solar. You always are, even when you are wrong. So it goes.

I am aware of the commonly accepted interpretation of the term "rolling restart" . You refer to a literal interpretation of the term. I am also aware that LL rarely use the term to indicate a general restarting of region hosts.

LL are jesting, surely? TheGrid status Page announces a Rolling Restart for Main Server this coming week. Rolling what?? Following on from the debacle of this past week's roll to the RC channels there IS nothing to roll! The new code was reverted; at least it was everywhere I go. Or will this be a revised version of that rolled to the RC channel last week, with a "Hail Mary" expectation that the changes they will have made cure the restarting issue that many regions suffered? What happened to QC testing via the RC channels first?

I will just, and totally unofficially, restate that the use of EEP rendering was made mandatory by LL and any viewer significantly deviating from the default system is deviating from the "shared experience" that LL is so fond of restating. Firestorm undertook a "3 versions only" policy after the rules regarding the shared experience were forcibly restated by LLgovernance, but I am actually surprised that LL did not force the "retirement" of 6.3.9 earlier for the afore mentioned reasons. That "might" have been because they knew that early EEP viewers had significant performance penalties for even high-end systems. Like most folks I found 6.3.9 with Windlight rendering a far superior viewer in most ways even to 6.4.21, itself a big improvement on the previous two EEP versions.

There is something fundamental that is being missed here in these pointless rants. The issue between FS 6.3.9 and ALL later versions is the change from Windlight rendering to EEP rendering. That change was forced by Linden Lab, it has nothing whatever to do with the FS devs. The render pathway that is used now puts a far greater load on the graphics engine within the viewer (both GPU and CPU) and the resultant loss in FPS is unavoidable. I still have not seen a good argument for the "advantages" of EEP, and I have read the whole of the thread in the technolgy forum on the subject. As to whether LL should have released EEP in the form they did is still debateable, since it is still far from finished. The most recent evolution in both the default LL viewer and TPV compiled from it is a small improvement but it is still in need of improvement. As an aside I would be surprised if Niran Dean could not make a valuable contribution to the improvement of EEP but no doubt the LL devs would still turn their noses up at any suggestions from the TPV community. As with the changes that accompanied the introduction of Windlight all those years ago, there is a palpable hit to rendering in ALL viewers now and some GPUs just will not cope..'twas ever thus, and I heartily agree that the microstutters introduced by the new render pathway are a right royal PITA.

I'm going to stick my neck out here and suggest that the big change that finally defeated your graphics card (which in SL terms is a museum piece) was the change in SL to EEP vs Windlight, which involved a lot of under-the-hood changes to the render pathway. Back in 2008 the introduction of Windlight itself caused many of the then current graphics cards to curl up and die, or give wildly inaccurate renderings (anyone remember the ragged scarecrow avatars?). My old ATI Radeon x300 card just about held on so long as I reduced my graphics to low with about 10FPS! I migrated to a slightly more modern NVidia 9400GT which is more or less the next generation on from your card and soldiered on for another couple of years until that cried enough with the advent of mesh. Life, technology and SL all progress or at least evolve and expecting obsolescent hardware to cope with modern demands is just not reasonable.

@Ardentika: Are you sure that the viewer is using your main dedicated graphics card, look iin "Help">About Firestorm. In that list you should see which Graphics card is being used, ie the onboard from the CPU which is not good for SL or the Nvidia card which is adequate. There is a software on most, if not all laptops which will force an application to use the dedicated GPU, but right now I cannot recall its name.

Following on from Lucia's advice, if you get unsolicited IM or anything, note the sender and just block them. Problem solved.

@Mazidox Linden...and I assume this week is another week of not a lot going on, since there is nothing on the Status Page either?

@OptimoMaximoyeah that's why I asked!

@Beq JanusSince you seem to be the fount of a great deal of techy knowledge on FS can you explain this phenomenon I am seeing with the current Firestorm? I have always had to lower my settings at crowded events such as clubs and I used to set max non-impostor avs low-ish (12-15). Now I find that the more non-impostor avs in a scene the slower and more jerky my viewer gets (Yes I whitelist everything): if I increase non-impostors until most, if not all the avs are moving normally (say c20), my FPS only drops fractionally, if at all and the jerkiness disappears. That is counter-intuitive to me, so what is happening? My CPU is a Ryzen 9 3900 and my GPU an Nvidia GTX1660Ti, I have everything on SSDs and 32GB RAM. oh and please tell me how to type better, you would NOT believe the number of corrections I needed on this text!

Yes well...I reread Mazidox's post and now I understand what it means and of course it WAS correct (though I still don't know what the changes mean, I guess I am not expected to). Mea Culpa.

@Mazidox Linden Reread your post Mazidox, paragraph 2 is wrong. Or, if it is not wrong please don't be so shy of explaining why.

Rude, rough, disorganised...I don't much care what you call it. NOT. GOOD. ENOUGH.

It's not as if we don't know what's coming or when, it's just common courtesy to post the thread LL. The roll is already happening yet there is nothing posted again. It's just rude, LL.

Just my two pennorth: for me this version of FS is approximately 10-25% better FPS at any given setting,though the gains seem more noticeable at high/ultra graphics settings. As to loading, it seemed no differnt to me on first startup and I would expect slow loading of textures at first as Pantera notes above. AV whitelisting was as per all previous versions. The addition of an asset cache may make a difference once I am running mature caches, I must wait and see. One change that puzzles me (mere curiosity on my part) is that during the viewer start up after "detecting hardware" I see "Loading Firestorm" rather than the "initializing VFS"...I wonder what that indicates? The final "initialising cache" message is unchanged.

@Mazidox Linden:Have a care Mazidox, you'll be having us believe you guys are human next. 😁

SNAFU...I'm getting used to this.

@Frigga Freidman What Malware Bytes is identifying is the media stream, that can also be blocked within the viewer (Firestorm) by enabling the media filter in preferences. You will then be asked each time a media or music stream is available whether you wish to play or block the stream. There is no need to deny yourself many of the good and safe streams that are available in SL.

@Mazidox LindenTsk! This is another fine Mesh you have gotten us into!