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animats

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Everything posted by animats

  1. animats
    If it's a desktop, you may be able to upgrade the power supply. Depends on the computer in which it is installed. It's a routine job any shop which fixes PCs should be able to handle.
  2. animats
    See the LL policy on alts. "Your first basic account is free, and so are a few alternate accounts. However, if you create an army of alts, Linden Lab may charge a small fee of US$9.95 for the creation of each additional basic account as a way to recoup some of the cost. ... Currently, you can create: Up to five accounts per household. No more than two accounts in a single 24-hour period." Also see Second Life "bot" policy. You can have alts and bots, but there are limits and rules. LL hasn't been doing much enforcement in recent years. Maybe that's changing. Sometimes bots pile up at info hubs when their usual region is restarted, because the bot controller is not smart enough to get them back to their usual station. I've seen an infohub so packed with bots that some were forced through a wall by the physics engine. Filed a ticket on that to get some cleanup done.
  3. animats
    See this discussion about the NVidia 670. Known problem.
  4. animats
    I have Roth, the open source avatar. Can wear classic clothing, both BOM and mesh. More or less. Expect to have to adjust. Roth is really Ruth with a flat chest. So ankles are too small, arms are too thin, and thighs are too big for a man. Clothing can hide this.
  5. animats
    Graphics driver problem? If you are not running Firestorm in full screen mode, does the entire screen go blank, or just Firestorm's window?
  6. animats
    A few points. First, by "crash" do you mean "disconnected", or "program terminated with a crash". True crashes in Firestorm are very rare. The developers do a good job. About two years ago, I got one that was repeatable. So I built the viewer from source, ran it under a debugger, got a stack backtrace, and submitted a bug report. It's fixed now. Second, the "packet loss" rate reported by the viewer includes not just packets lost by the network, but packets dropped by the viewer because it was too busy to process them. Go to a sim where your frame rate drops, and watch your packet loss rate go up. You may just need to turn down your graphics settings. Third, if you're actually getting program crashes, it may be a memory problem on your computer. I had that once, and had to run a memory diagnostic for hours to catch it. Replaced the RAM, no more crashes. I recommend running "The Valley" as a test for your computer. The Valley is a graphics benchmark from Epic designed to fully exercise the GPU, CPU, and memory. It shows a nice valley with trees that you can explore. It looks like a game, and it's built with Unreal Engine 4 like an AAA title, but nothing ever happens; it's just a nice landscape to look at. Left to itself, it gives you a tour. If The Valley will run for an hour, your hardware should be able to run Second Life without problems.
  7. animats
    Beq Janus explained part of the problem at Server User Group. The trouble is that group messages are not "reliable" at the SL network level, which means they do not get re-transmitted if lost due to viewer overload or network lossage. So, to compensate, after the viewer receives a group message, it asks for all the group messages available. This gets it the recent messages plus duplicates of old ones. This in turn creates a huge load on both server and viewer with a group with a lot of message history sends a message. That's why. It probably made sense in the early days of SL. They were thinking of a few people organizing a raid, not 10,000 users of a popular body getting an product promotion. Worse, this goes through the sim servers, which means there's back-end traffic between sims and some message server to get messages to where you are in world. Group messages really ought to be handled by a server independent of the sim servers, because group messages have no locality. They have nothing to do with the 3D world. (Local chat does; who can hear you depends on where you are.) Gradually, SL has moved non-world-oriented things off the sim servers - first assets, then inventory. It's time to see that done for group chat. SL is a social network. The messaging has to work.
  8. animats
    Nice!
  9. animats
    Yes. A good example for new users is the pair of new walk-through tutorials at New Resident Island. There's a male and a female path, and you're guided through getting and wearing the Roth and Ruth open source avatars. At the end, there's some free clothing that fits those avatars.
  10. animats
    SL needs something that allows new users to get small amounts of L$ by spending time, to get them used to the system. Requiring payment info for that is counterproductive. It's widely recognized that SL has a tough onboarding experience. Adding more obstacles does not help. Now, having a setup where you get 2x as much reward if you provide payment info - that might work.
  11. animats
    There's something for that on a beach at Firestorm Help Island.
  12. animats
    "Insufficient land resources" means you need more available prim allowance on your parcel. You only have 18 available. You may need to delete some objects to free up some prim allowance. 32 free prims are enough for most vehicles, but 18 is low.
  13. animats
    It's possible to do quite a bit in world, especially if an experience is involved. With an experience you get a key/value store and can store more data. If you need a real database, you need a server outside of SL. Low-end shared hosting, for a few dollars a month, is often good enough. A big problem with in-world servers is that you can code them, but others can't find them. They don't have persistent IP addresses. There's no DNS server that lets you give them a name so they can be found. In theory, someone could try hooking up SL to DynDNS, so your in-world server could have a findable name. But servers within SL have so little capacity that it's barely worth it. Despite this, not only are there servers in SL, there are in-world data centers. Some manage large collections of CasperVend items. Items have to be delivered from inventory in some prim somewhere. So somewhere, there has to be a prim to do that job. It can look like anything. Some look like safes. Some look like rackmount servers. "Skill gaming regions" often have a data center hidden away somewhere.
  14. animats
    If you want to limit view distance, the right way to do it is via "fog", or atmospheric effects, rather than looking off into blankness. Hiding distant objects, right. Many games do this. It's exaggerated here. A little fog helps, because the distant impostors can be lower rez. Hiding distant objects, wrong.
  15. animats
    You can put both a image and media on a prim on the same face of a prim. So you can have an image with instructions on how to turn on media.
  16. animats
    This is one case of a general issue in Second Life - different forms of motion control are not interlocked. For example, keyframe motion (via llSetKeyframedMotion) and position setting (via llSetPos, etc.) interfere. You need to completely shut down one kind of motion and allow some time before starting another. The same is true of llTargetOmega, and of pathfinding. One control mode at a time. Come to a full stop and wait a second between changing control modes. Or, better, pick one control mode and stay with it.
  17. animats
    The Process Credit page breaks if a Google tracker, "ids.cdnwidget.com", is blocked. Only that page seems to require that tracker. Some of these problems seem to come from a re-branding from "Tilia" to "Tilia Pay" and a move from "tilia-inc.com" to "tiliapay.com". LL now needs to fix some links.
  18. animats
    Well, Tilia seems to have re-branded as "Tilia Pay". They have a shiny new web site at https://www.tiliapay.com/. But it's just a promotion for the business-to-business service. tilia-inc.com is now redirecting there. There's no customer support. They refer people back to Second Life. The "process credit" system no longer works. It just hangs, as shown above.
  19. animats
    The Tilia site is still blank, and it's now after 10 AM on Monday. That's not good. When a financial services business, suddenly disappears from the Web, people become concerned about its financial soundness. I tried the "Process Credit" page. It hangs either at authentication or at the Know Your Customer check. Cannot withdraw funds from Second Life. Tilia is a regulated business. Their primary regulator is the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. (415) 263-8500.
  20. animats
    Niagra Mohawk Power building, Syracuse, NY. The building, built in 1932, still exists. That sculpture is on the 7th floor, so you can't really see the detail from ground level in RL. Now that would look good in Second Life.
  21. animats
    The Heterocera main line has a rez zone at most stations. The Bellessaria signal system should be able to tolerate rez zones on sidings, but not in the middle of the main line. So, sidings.
  22. animats
    Yes. Each siding should be a rez zone.
  23. animats
    So unambitious. Here's a list of ambitious things SL might add. Face tracking of facial expressions, used to animate bento avatars. Bento avatars are capable of elaborate facial expressions, but nobody uses this. That's why SL talking-head videos look so dead. All it takes is a webcam, some open source face tracking software, and an efficient data channel from the viewer to LSL. Not many people would use this routinely, but machima and Youtubers would, so it would be seen by many people. Zoom calls to and from SL. Talk to people over Zoom as your avatar. This would get SL more connected to RL. Joystick and gamepad support for vehicles. You can hook a joystick to SL, but all it does is work the arrow keys. When you teleport beyond the current sim, show the map, zoom out, then zoom into the new location, then the world appears. Google Earth and GTA V do this. It gives you a sense of where you are in the world, and how big it is. Infinite viewing distance. This can be done with region impostors. As with map tiles, take a picture of each non-isolated region. Take it from 8 directions, plus above. Use that to make big impostors of regions beyond draw range. At last, see the mountains of the Snowlands and the cliffs of Heterocera from the distance. See the far shore when sailing. Physically based rendering. It's time. All of these are quite possible technically. Once LL management realizes that Tilia is not going to become a big name in finance, maybe they will return to paying attention to their core product.
  24. animats
    What's the exact text of the message? I looked for "impossible" in the Firestorm sources and didn't find it associated with login errors.
  25. animats
    "The sign of a good society and a good government is not in what it builds, but in what it maintains." - Eric Hoffer.
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