Coffee Pancake

This isn't correct and stems from confusion over the terms simulator and region. A simulator (as defined by LL) is the physical server box in a rack someplace. A region is the is the land mass in Second Life ... that we have all be referring to incorrectly as a Sim since forever. The old Class 7 Simulator would host 4 regions - one per core. The Class 8 Simulator would host 8 regions - one per core. If you look on LL's current documentation, each region runs on a single core and we have no idea how many cores or how much ram is on them .. assuming they have a modern datacenter, it going to be LOTS and WAY MORE than we think. Multi-threading isn't a panacea and retro fitting it often moves or creates new bottlenecks without actually boosting performance in line with the additional raw resources. Likewise, memory per region isn't and never was an issue, all those script counters.. pure snake oil resident invented witch hunt .. We have no idea how much ram a region has or how much is used (or even what percentage was devoted to what), the only thing that is certain is the numbers script counters used to show avatar memuse were years out of date and didn't factor in how the mono engine even worked. And it doesn't scale .. If LL closed up shop noon on a Tuesday, we would DDos all the Opensim login servers by 2 minutes past and by the time it finally came back up, the bulk of SL users would have long moved on and lost interest. The reason we haven't had many BIG headline features the last couple of years isn't just the Lab being distracted with Sansar, it's because the staff who remained working on SL were reworking the entire backend to slim regions down and offload as much as they could to HTTP. They have literally been fixing the bugs .. it's just not sexy, no one gets excited about inventory over HTTP or use of Amazon's CDN. The whole region in the cloud thing is a side effect of all this work.

There was a thing on your account page where you could set your preference / set a date of birth or something but I cant see it on mine .. so it might have been removed This page suggests you contact support.

I've had mixed results .. some store owners are more receptive than others (most are awesome) .. some were not receptive (meh, they will think about it) .. one blew up in my face, ranted at me, followed up with personal attacks based on what little he could glean from my profile (zomg I have pink hair RL, I must be some kind of femnazi), threatened to ban me from his store and delete me from the servers so I wouldn't get updates anymore.

Your client might not be showing you your inventory due to a client, connection or region issue. Make sure you are using one of the latest up to date clients - if you have old old viewers installed, delete them, there have been service changes affecting inventory. For this problem (and as Rolig suggested you might end up poking LL), I recommend the default linden viewer. Go to the region "KARA" (just type that in the address bar and hit enter) .. this is a full, empty, mainland region. Relog, and be patient. It might take a little while. Plan B .. Poke LL Plan C .. Your old stuff isn't going to be relevant anyway, were all on mesh bodies, mesh heads, mesh clothing designed specifically for specific mesh bodies .. you're gonna have to start over anyway. So ... unless it's sentimental .. maybe not worry about it.

The most you can have on an entire private region (and you have to pay extra for it) is 30,000

Yes, it totally is. Public mini game servers. Doom isn't really a 3D game .. and SL doesn't have 40K users on the same server. Most servers have less than 5 at any given time. Planetside 2 manages 2000 per continent. If you haven't played, go give it a go (it's F2P) .. the mayhem really needs to be witnessed. I'm not asking for it to be replaced, I'm asking that it be given it's legs back. There is nothing wrong with the physics engine we have, just how we get to interact with it.

What is SL Packet Loss Packet loss in SL is a very specific issue. The region is sending you some data over UDP. UDP data can be seen as time-sensitive. Say, the position of an avatar. You need to know NOW .. you don't care what the value was a second ago. The sim sends you a stream of packets, and you viewer has to be ready to catch them as they arrive, in order. If for some reason it isn't managing to do that then you will have packet loss. A good analogy is the server is playing catch with you and throwing too many balls too fast. The bandwidth slider in your viewer preferences is a throttle for this data - its badly labeled and has nothing to with how much bandwidth you actually might have, just how fast your computer and connection can play this game of real time digital catch - It used to affect everything way back when, but not anymore. Most of the viewer data has been moved to TCP which is way more reliable and will be unaffected, this is why things mostly seem to work when you have packet loss. However ... The SL service does still send some non-time-sensitive data over UDP, so having packet loss can result in a generally poor experience with non-obvious causes. Note - Voice is an entirely separate service provided by a different company. It working or not working has almost nothing to do with SL. Resolving packet loss. The cause of packet loss could be many things, most of which can be outside of your control. It really is your connection (or maybe a painfully slow computer). Update your viewer. Always use the latest released version. Start up the viewer fresh, set the bandwidth slider in your viewer to 200, the slider is poorly named and does not throttle the whole viewer (as the name implies) just the game of UDP catch. It used to affect everything, but that's not the case anymore - If that doesn't instantly fix your problem (you can continue to try tweaking it lower) then it's almost certainly your connection to SL that's at fault Next, if you're on Wifi. Switch to using a cable plugged into your router, if you can't do that, move to a different spot to play SL or move your router. Wifi is a common cause of packet loss. The best you can do to resolve it is switch everything off for a minute (computer, router, wifi etc), go make a cup of tea and then fire everything back up. If you still get packet loss .. and you're on a wired connection and all your gear is fast and shiny and working perfectly .. the source is between your home and SL, the only thing you can do is call your ISP or find a new one. tl;dr yes, it's totally your connection The Lab have been working for years now to slowly move everything that shouldn't be using UDP over to HTTP. This is one reason why you should always try to use the very latest release of your viewer, and why we haven't had quite as much sexy shiny from LL as we might have hoped for. Server side stuff just isn't sexy and doesn't get people excited, but this is why SL runs better than it ever has.

that would get you banned

For someone on YT to make anything they have to be pulling many thousands of views on a library of videos, and even then, many depend on patreon to support them directly. But by all means, buy/rent yourself a sim and fund it with real world adverts. You can do it, blaze that trail, prove us all wrong and laugh in our faces!

.. the only difference between M and A is that M land cant have commercial adult activities. It's perfectly ok for someone to pose in a very adult outfit (or lack thereof) right in front of your suggested Lowes advert. Which will be the last time anyone sees it after the screenshot ends up on Twitter

From Pengallen Bridge.

L$9 .... All that effort for NINE LINDEN. Scripted objects in SL do NOT know a clients IP address. They have NO IDEA if an avatar is a person or a bot or an alt. The best they can do is look for bot like movement or ask the user to press a button and hope the bot makers haven't figured it out ... oh .. and sploder users reporting each other for being bots trying to get them banned from the system. But still .. played SL on a gaming PC for an hour to get .. L$9 ... US 3 cents ... Switching the PC off, reading a book and buying some L$ would be more fun AND cheaper.

That's what we want you to think.

That's not how IP addresses work ...

I'm not talking about avatar physics, jiggy butts and boobs etc .. Those are still a thing and they work with mesh bodies. I'm talking about the physics engine that underpins the entire platform.

The whole world caters to straight folk.. Second Life is an LGBT mecca. It's easier to find like minded people, make friends, feel comfortable, be open, especially if you're introverted or unsure or questioning. Second Life is where people find themselves.

No.

12 years 3 months ^^

You're missing the part that for many in SL, they wont even be able to see the trees in those beautiful well engineered spaces. Single digit FPS, with everything as low as it can go, standing alone ... at <10 FPS with a junk integrated "GPU". No amount of optimization will improve Second Life, texture memory is system memory and they have literally none by todays standards. Better mesh .. they can't see any mesh! Everything is rendering at the lowest LOD and appears as a single triangle. Smaller textures.. the viewer is already culling almost everything to the lowest decode. Edit - This is why there are still people logging in with pre-mesh viewers, those run and don't even try to render current content. Why are some houses full bright? Because for their owners.. it's dark. Why prim? Because those actually render. System body? Their own avatar with a mesh body kills the client.

Simulator physics and the number of updates sent to the client is solely responsible for the way Second Life feels. Movement, running, vehicles, combat games, even simply walking are dependent on it, and wholly responsible for Second Life feeling like treacle at best. This feeling is responsible for a large part of the "Second Life Sucks" impression many people have, creating an instant negative impression from the very first session and causing pain every single day for the rest of an avatars life. It's impossible to create anything avatar-movement-interactive that feels like an actual game, and while we're all busy declaring "SL ISN'T A GAME" .. we're covering up for the fact we wish it could at least feel like we're interacting with one. Gaming in SL could totally be a thing, it's easily possible to get the aesthetic and interactive elements right (even more so with Animesh approaching).. just so long as nobody moves. Just a little more time for physics would make a huge difference to literally everything we do in SL that isn't standing still chatting .. imagine if we could actually do more than that! How about some physics on the client with the havok libs we already have on everyone's desktop for navmesh visualization and mesh uploading. At this point the only reason I can think this has persisted for so long is that no one at the Lab has ever played an actual game. Some one set up a minecraft server, get a few staff on and run around for 20 minutes punching each other and then log into SL.

I don't think that applies, the biggest growth all happened when the grid barely worked, grey goo nuked everything every 3 days and the clients render pipeline was designed on a napkin. SL's users will stick with it even when it makes no sense for them to even try, a staggering number of people log in for hours every single day with single digit framerates on obsolete hardware with minimum settings. Literally no amount of technical magic can be applied to improve the experience for those users aside from buying them new computers. This is why you still get ugly full bright builds, those who live in them honestly can't tell that it looks bad because everything looks like that to them.

Following a long search for suitable mainland recently, I'm sharing some of the most egregious BS used to try and talk up mainland parcels for sale. A plot in the ocean surrounded by "floating" houses / prim ground isn't water front. A plot bordering a void where a region should be isn't protected or ocean. A plot half way up a mountain doesn't have an ocean view when the neighboring land sim doesn't rez. A plot surrounded by abandoned land isn't "Linden protected" nor does it offer "excellent privacy". A 16sqm road side plot isn't a "prim opportunity" (although this was one of my favorites). A 4m wide strip on the side of a mountain with a prim sticking out like a pirate ships plank, does not offer a "wonderful view".

The Lab do love their statistics

Bah .. I missed that part. Thanks !

The removed this kind of thing as it had zero impact on actual retention but imposed a lot of extra work. Literally nothing they did had any effect on the end number. Statistics aren't everything, they wont tell you who stayed, just that a certain number did. I do wonder if the Lab ever worked out an internal time based "resident quality" score based on prims rezzed, money spent, money earned etc and then tried to correlate that with the type of entry experience that resident had.