[Ad-based attack on Second Life]

It's not just an attack on Second Life. Other searches, such as "Firefox bug" lead to the same place.

[Ad-based attack on Second Life]

This is an ad on Bing. Sometimes the top search result for "second life". Don't go there. This is what happens.

 

That's where the link goes. It's supposed to look like a Windows desktop and asks for your user name and password. This is on Linux, so that's not very convincing. If you had the browser in full-screen mode on Windows, it might be convincing.

It's really hard to get rid of this page. It has something that uses huge amounts of memory.

[Environmental Enhancement Project (aka EEP!) Feedback Thread]

It's really annoying, running current Firestorm 6.3.2 on an EEP sim. The day/night cycle is off. Sometimes, after entering the sim via TP, the only light source is direct light from the sun, with no diffuse light. Changing from "estate time" to something else and back will get reasonable lighting.

[Sometimes I Despair of the Mainland]

How about trying a new covenant on the Sharp Continent, the old Teen Grid? That's been underutilized since the separate Teen Grid was phased out.

Hyperion, on Sharp Continent. A nice little city, but empty and neglected now.

North of Sharp Continent would be a good place for the next continent of premium homes, too. That could connect more continents, and Hyperion could be a convenient commercial district for the premium homes.

[Can someone tell me what this means please]

Either it's an estate where someone turned pathfinding off, or, randomly, sometimes the viewer misses the message saying that pathfinding is available.

Pathfinding doesn't use server time until you have a pathfinding character present. The first pathfinding character costs about 3ms/frame, depending on how much stuff is in the sim. More pathfinding characters add little overhead, because the first one turns on the system which tracks all moving objects and updates the navmesh. I've tried 50 pathfinding characters, and the overhead doesn't go up much past one.

Unless you're using pathfinding, don't worry about it. If you are using pathfinding, you have other headaches..

[What happened to SL]

3 hours ago, Adam Spark said:

Technical limitations kept SL from being that game-changer as long as those technical limitations existed. Linden Labs refusal to solve them is what is continuing to keep it from becoming that game changer.

I know. There's so much that could be done with SL, but it's way beyond the abilities of the current dev team. It would require a new viewer, based perhaps on Unreal Engine 4, with parallelism and physically-based rendering. It would take a set of creation tools which took you from a good-looking but inefficient mesh to optimized game-quality assets without pain points. It would take a level of detail system which was smart about what to load in what order and what resolution. It would take a background system which automatically worked through all the mesh assets, re-making optimized versions of lower levels of detail where where they had holes or were really bad. It would take an overhaul of the back end to improve concurrency, so that entering avatars didn't cause two seconds of slowdown, scripts didn't slow the server, and region crossings worked every time. It would take an impostoring system, so distant objects were represented by billboard impostors or simple forms, and you could see all the way to the horizon.

And that just gets you SL's current capabilities brought up to modern game technology.

Then you'd need to go on from there. Figure out how to support crowds, so a few hundred people at one event will work. Offer webcam facial expression tracking, so your avatar reflects your own facial expressions. Optional, but it would be expected of performers.

 

 

[How does your avatar look today ?]

Dani taking a a coffee break.

Another of my animesh NPCs at work. Or shirking work. Dani, in a "GTFO Hub Loss Prevention" shirt, patrols the Bruissac GTFO hub, randomly makes stops at about ten locations, and finds and says hello to anyone in the area. Just set up more of the dock area for pathfinding. First place she went was the coffee stand. As usual, this isn't posed; I just watch them move and take pictures.

(This is a good test for my NPCs. Bruissac, GTFO HQ, is a full sim, with docks, a large mall, an airport, truck traffic, and many visitors. If the NPCs can make it here, they can make it anywhere.)

[💖FULL PRIM SIM - 20000 PRIMS - CLASS 8 SERVER💖]

What is a "Class 8 server?"

[Bellisseria Choo-Choo Train Thread]

1 hour ago, Reggie Warrhol said:

Simply not enough Rez Zones in for rail in this area.

Yes. The usual SLRR convention is that each station and each siding has a rez zone.  Bellesaria doesn't have anywhere near that many.

And where there's a road to a station, it should have a rez zone.

[S.S. Galaxy in Bellisseria]

A rez zone near the S.S. Galaxy's landing dock would be nice. Then you could re-rez the boat that brought you to the ship.

[When I do llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast, sometimes not everything updates for me]

Oh, so llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast uses unreliable updates. That should be documented.
Second Life sends update messages either as "reliable", which get retransmitted a few times before giving up, or "unreliable", which don't. Properly, the only "unreliable" messages should be ones that are regularly superseded by later messages, like move updates. (ImprovedTerseObjectUpdate, which tells the viewer something moved, is the main legit unreliable message. Can you put a color change in an ImprovedTerseObjectUpdate?) But apparently more than that is sent in "unreliable" mode.

Try SetLinkPrimitiveParams, without the "fast". That's supposed to be synchronous.

If you're doing this to animate something, don't.  Use texture animation. Much lower overhead; it's all viewer side once started.

[SL Viewer Disconnection Issue with New FTTH Router - Help]

4 hours ago, WishMore said:

I am now using Ethernet cable to connect with FTTH router and now SL is working fine, no disconnection, no crashes, but this can't be permanent solution for me. I do need wireless connectivity. Please advice further how to make it work wireless also. I can attach snapshots of router settings pages if required

OK, a wired connection works, but a wireless connection does not. That means it's not SL, either the viewer or the servers. It's the WiFi system. That router is known to have a firewall.

See

• Open outbound access for TCP ports - Second Life servers do not establish inbound TCP connections to client systems running the Second Life Viewer software. Instead, they use the "request / response" message pattern. Enable outbound TCP access for ports 53, 80, 443, 12043, 12046 and 21002.
• Open outbound "session" access for UDP ports- Although UDP is a session-less transport, many firewalls block unsolicited incoming UDP traffic to a particular port unless it has seen recent outgoing UDP traffic from that same port. Activate outbound UDP for ports 53, 3478, 3479, 5060, 5062, and 12000-29999.

Some routers assume that all you will ever do is surf the web, which requires only TCP port 80.

 

[Region Crossing/Teleport Longer than Usual in some legs]

When you read Firestorm logs, you see a huge amount of dirty laundry. Like those 404 errors.

Possible failure [Http_404] cannot POST url 'https://sim10198.agni.lindenlab.com:12043/cap/110e72cb-6b98-34db-3eab-c0da0fcfbb1e' because Not Found

The viewer is trying to tell the sim something via a POST request and the sim refused to listen. Unclear what that means, but it's common.

I used to have a modified Firestorm which logged all avatar-related object updates, which was more helpful. I discovered that errors such as the above did not seem to be associated with region crossing failures. It's possible to have a region crossing failure with no error in the Firestorm log. Sometimes the gaining sim just never starts sending object updates for the avatar. Something sim-to-sim we can't see apparently goes wrong, and the viewer doesn't get told about it.

Viewer logs just aren't that helpful in diagnosing region crossing problems. I spent way too much time looking at them a year ago.

[Tips rage]

23 hours ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

I've seen it sometimes. When I had my club, I didn't worry about as I ran it for fun. I had seen one club have a tip jar that would name avatars that didn't tip yet about every 20 minutes. I put that place on my crap list.

Classic New York City Xmas card: "Merry Xmas. Second notice".

[Making 4th dimensional skybox in SL.]

4 hours ago, Sean Heavy said:

Is it like Schrödinger's Cat? Does the prim exist or not exist? We will never know until it is rezzed.

You don't know where prims come from? They come from a drilling rig in the ANWR Channel, and they go through a pipeline to shore at Calleta near the railroad yards.

[Why beginners don't learn the basics first?]

 

7 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

BUT at close... VERY close inspection...

Is that close enough?

The stitching detail could be improved with a normal layer.

That's what tooling should do. Take an ultra-high detail version and hammer it down into something like this, with fine detail represented as normals.

[Why beginners don't learn the basics first?]

6 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Not to mention those complaining about the lack of individual buttons and stuff on garments "if you update your item with actual detail instead of painted on [insert type of miniscule object detail here] I will change my review on the demo(!) and maybe actually buy the item" 

Shoes. SL mesh shoes have insane triangle counts. 20,000 tris per shoe is not unusual. I've seen ones where every eyelet is a full 3D model.

About 2600 triangles for a pair of shoes. Do you need more detail than that?

Made by Duck Girl. A custom job done for my animesh characters. 4 LI with animesh accounting.

What we really need, though, is a level of detail system where the highest level of detail is not loaded unless you get very, very close.

 

[How do scripts just suddenly stop running?]

37 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

Thanks, So scripts can somehow just give themselves a script error?

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Errors

There are only a few ways a script can error out. The most common one is running out of memory, a "stack/heap collision".

 

[The 1 LI Mesh Challenge]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

LoD good enough the object looks fine at any view distance up to 128 m with LoD factor set to 1. Include photos showing all the relevant LoD models.

Yes.

I'd like to see some good vehicle wheels. The wheels are usually the first part of a vehicle to disappear.

They really do have wheels. You just have to get closer enough to see them. LOD factor 1.

Low LODs for wheels are easy, but not automatic. Take a picture of the high LOD and paste that onto a simple face as an impostor. Good wheels, especially spoked ones, tend to be complicated, and mesh-reducing them makes the spokes or struts disappear. At distance, a flat picture looks great.

There are hundreds of wheels for sale on Marketplace, but too many of them behave like this. Most can't be seen in world. (My apologies to the Lesbian Ranch, where I landed by following a "see item in world" link for a motorcycle wheel.)

[Animations not working for customer]

Scripts turned off on her parcel? Higher priority animations in her avatar's AO?

[How do scripts just suddenly stop running?]

That usually means you got a script error, but were out of talk range when it happened. If you'd been close, you'd have seen a dialog pop up with the error.

For my own use, I have a script in another prim which listens on DEBUG_CHANNEL. If the object gets a script error, the listener in another prim receives it, and sends me an IM. So I can tell when my objects have problems, even when I'm not nearby. That is how I get my NPCs debugged; they phone home if there's a problem. This script has to be in a different prim than the one causing the problem, because prims can't listen to their own "say" messages.

Sort of like this:
 

default
{
    listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string message)
    {	if (channel != DEBUG_CHANNEL) { return; } // this is not a DEBUG_CHAN message
        if (llList2Key(llGetObjectDetails(id,[OBJECT_ROOT]),0)) !=
            llList2Key(llGetObjectDetails((llGetKey()),[OBJECT_ROOT]),0))
        { return; } // this message is not from our linkset.
        llInstantMessage(llGetOwner(), message);                    // send IM to owner
    }
}

 

[Needed: Updated current Bellisseria image map]

[GeForce Now]

There are several streaming services like that. They're expensive, because you're renting a dedicated rackmount gamer PC by the hour. NVidia is willing to lose money for a while with the introductory pricing, but it's going to go up.

Some startup had a system where you could do installs on your rented server. That could run SL. But I can't find that site any more. That approach is general but requires too much effort by the user, so most of these things have a limited set of games. Definitely bug them to offer an SL client.

There's an open source package called Moonlight, which allows you to use a machine of your own as a streaming server. It's basically a remote desktop. If you have enough uplink bandwidth for video, you could use that to get Second Life out to your phone.

[Making 4th dimensional skybox in SL.]

You could do an unfolded tesseract in SL using an experience token.

Unfolded tesseract. Eight cubes. Put a door in each face of each cube, connected to the appropriate door in another face of another cube. Use an experience token to do the teleport.

Advanced users can implement a portal gun.

[Art/media Copyrights?]

11 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

If you do not own the copyright and do not have permission from the person or entity who does, do not use it. At all.

It's not quite that bad. First, everything published before 1925 is now public domain in the US. That year advances one year each year. And copies of objects, including photos, of items before that date are not copyrightable in the US.  (See Bridgeman vs. Corel.) So if you just need artwork for your walls, everything pre 20th century is available.

Items copyrighted prior to 1976 are under different rules. If they were published and not formally registered and marked as copyrighted at the time, they are public domain now. See U.S. Copyright Office Circular 15a. There are more special cases, but those are the big ones.

One useful special case is that works by employees of the United States Government are uncopyrightable. That's why some of my videos use music from U.S. military bands.