Theresa Tennyson

I'm a little confused about how you're setting things up, Tegan. I get people who I IM'd previously but closed out in my "Recent People", however I keep my chat logs turned on. When I get an IM from someone I"ve previously IM'd I see the end of the last conversation I've had with them in gray before the new text rather than a blank history every time. Did you turn your chat logs off in preferences? Also, are you using tabbed IM's or individual ones? It's an option in "Preferences." I recently switched to tabbed IM's which all appear in the same window and I find I have trouble getting RID of the darn things because you have to consciously close them rather than clicking an "X" in the corner. It's also possible that your current setup is broken somehow.

Also, since SL has been around for years some of the internals of the rendering system are old and cause problems with newer graphics cards and drivers. What viewer are you using? I know Phoenix shuts off OpenGL VBO's by default now because they cause problems, and any viewer that supports mesh right now has OpenGL problems that are being worked on at LL as we speak.

Okay, Wolf, here's what's going on with the graphics issues... Graphically intense software communicates with video cards using a "language" called OpenGL. Over time this language is revised as new features come out. Sometimes the new revisions supercede old procedures. Videocard manufacturers update their drivers frequently using the latest versions of OpenGL. As SL has been around for quite a while, some of the OpenGL coding used in it is rather old. Newer video drivers and video cards no longer support it properly, causing crashing when certain features are used. This becomes worse as more graphics options are added to SL. For instance, some people can run SL with old Nvidia drivers like version numbers like "266" but the current driver "285" will crash. However, OTHER programs prefer the NEWER drivers so keeping the old drivers may not be an option. Right now, to try to fix this there is someone at Linden Labs (his name is Dave) who is re-writing how the viewer communicates with OpenGL by using the latest procedures. This is a complicated thing - imagine someting like changing all the bolts in a car from Imperial to Metric. He's making good progress but they don't feel ready to release these changes to the general population because in computer programming fixing one thing often breaks another and they want to be sure it works and that people with OLDER hardware don't get left out in the cold. For instance, some people testing these changes have had the moon suddenly turn huge and bright red and appear in the middle of the day. However, from time to time they release "developer" versions of the viewer that include these changes. I've been using one lately and it's fixed the viewer crashing I've been experiencing. It may work for you too. To get the test viewer go to the three links next to "Install" - click CYGWIN if you run Windows, Darwin if you have a Mac and Linux if you run under Linux. You'll start downloading a file which, if run, will install a separate version of the viewer in addition to the one you have now. It will be labeled "Test" and have a white background behind the icon, but it will otherwise behave like the current viewer. I've been using these "development" viewers heavily for about a week and I'm quite happy with them. I used to crash frequently in crowded places and randomly while trying to log in and that's stopped happening. I can't guarantee they'll work as well for you because all computers behave differently, which is on of the reasons for these problems in the first place.

Oberon, look up a few posts for my reply to Alzarin. The developer build I linked to should help. There are problems with the "OpenGL" graphics system with SL viewers and many newer video cards/drivers. They're working on fixes but they're not included in the general release yet. This developer release quite well for me though.

You might want to change back to Viewer 3.1 for now but also download the beta 3.2.1 and practice with it. I had a similar reaction but I've gotten used to the new initerface. There are serious internal probems with all mesh viewers right now that are being repaired but it's very doubtful that the repairs will be applied to the old interface by Linden Labs and most third-party viewers are aimed at people who hiss like cats at anything resembling the Viewer 2 interface (Firestorm is an exception but I don't know how long they'll keep the sidebar themselves.)

Try this build: http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/davep_gl-development/rev/244377/index.html The current OpenGL setup is a hot mess because it contains a lot of older commands that new video cards don't care for anymore. They are busy rebuilding the OpenGL to take care of this and are making good progress. The build above works well for me and I used to have the same problems.

Savoir Hair is only an "in world" thing, I think. You need to search for it when you're on SL and teleport to it. It's worth it, trust me.

The reason you couldn't make your hair shorter with the menu that you found is that only works for really old types of hair that almost nobody uses any more. The type of hair you got can't be edited that way. You may be better off just getting new hair. If you want a good place, search for "Savoir Hair". It's a store that's full of free or L$1 hair from pretty good designers that they're offering as promotional items. They have a really good variety.

To get rid of unwanted buttons, pull down the "Me" menu and select "Toolbars." Then drag the unwanted buttons from the side/bottom and drop them into the floater that appears.

Here's the developer build I'm working with. It seems to be pretty stable and I don't have many problems with my Nvidia 430 card and Nvidia 285 drivers anymore. I know CYGWIN is Windows and Linux is, well, Linux - not sure what Darwin is. http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/davep_gl-development/rev/244377/index.html

You probably are wearing an "alpha", which is sort of like a "cloak of invisibility". The boot maker gave you an "alpha" to make sure your feet and legs don't stick out of the boots and you didn't take it off when you took off the boots (because you didn't know it was there. Right click yourself and slide over to "Take Off..." and see if "Alpha" is higlighted. If it is, just click it to take it off and your legs should come back.

"I started over four years ago, so maybe I qualify as an "older user". I've seen and I've used all kinds of viewers during that time. Linden Lab viewers V1, V2, V3. Various TPV viewers V1 based, V2 based, V3 based. Some viewers I have liked, some not so much. Some have been my favourites, like Phoenix and then Firestorm. I have never felt "alienated". Surely there is always learning curve when changing from viewer what one has used for long time. Seeing all the complaints how many are complaining about viewer upgrades and changes, I might consider myself lucky as I don't have any difficulties in learning different UIs. In fact I'm always curious to learn and try out new things. Learning new is actually fun. Only by thoroughly trying out the new things one can see are they suitable for ones needs or not. Short usage and leaving it with **I hate it** is not enough. "Only thing what is permanent is change" has a lot of truth in it. We have to adjust ourselves to it, or else be left behind." Coby, much of what you say is true, but I assume you had some choice in the matter and consciously experimented with new viewers in a time frame you determined. Linden Labs didn't announce they were changing the UI Tuesday night, it isn't even mentioned in the release notes, and the web page STILL hasn't acknowledged it. And the LL viewers default to automatic update. You and I have enough experience to shut this off, but as you're using a beta and I'm using a developer release we have more than the average amount of SL savvy. As it happens, I have a partner in SL that I'm devoted to. The only time I can count on seeing her is for an hour-and-a-half on Tuesday nights. Imagine how I would have reacted if I'd logged on to see her and downloaded the latest upgrade, expecting it to be simple bug fixes, and found my precious time with her was spent trying to find where all my controls had gone. I would have been BEYOND alienated. I like new things; I'm willing to change if I'm given a good reason to. But concerning how this update was handled? I'd have to say that "It sucks" is a pretty fair assessment.

Okay, think of things this way - the vast majority of people who use the UI of a computer program use it as a means to accomplish SOMETHING ELSE. The UI is a tool that should function transparently without their trying to think about it. Think of it as a "language". With the exception of linguists, most people use languages to do SOMETHING ELSE instead of thinking about the structure of the language itself. All of Earth's languages have strengths and weaknesses, and most people find it easy to use the language they learned from birth and more-or-less difficult to use any other one unless they've had time to learn and work with it, and they probably won't embrace new languages unless they have a compelling reason to do so. The whole problem started with Viewer 2. Imagine a country that speaks French. The leaders announce, "Studies show that it's easier for new people to learn Spanish than French, so from now on all new residents will be taught Spanish and new laws and regulations will be issued in that language. We encourage all of you to start speaking Spanish now. Have a nice day." And that worked just about as well as you'd expect. The French speakers felt no reason to learn Spanish, especially when they discovered that many of the new works were badly written because the writers themselves weren't completely fluent in Spanish yet. When new residents came to them speaking pidgin Spanish most of the older residents, many of them not terribly friendly to those who didn't even speak French well, encouraged the new people to speak French instead "because it's easier and better." For those who already spoke it, of course. However, there were other new residents who learned Spanish and found themselves fluent in it. They found many French speakers to be stubborn and annoying and French itself to be a clunky and difficult-to-use language compared to Spanish. So in essence, the country found itself a little Canada or Belgium, struggling with two different languages and having difficulty advancing with the language conflicts. So the leaders decided to try to address this. After an interesting experiment limiting new residents to the vocabulary of a Spanish translation of "Go Dog, Go," they decided to attempt to work out a compromise that would appeal to both camps. So, one Tuesday evening most of the Spanish speakers woke up to discover that they were suddenly expected to speak Catalan (the dialect of eastern Spain that's sort of halfway between French and Spanish but not instantly understandable to either.) There was dancing in the streets of Barcelona, but other than that there was understandably mass confusion. Some French speakers were pleased that the heathen Spanish speakers were now expected to speak a language that was "better" because it was closer to French, but most of them just kept on speaking French because they were used to it. Many Spanish speakers rebelled and declared they'd just keep speaking Spanish. AND the new Catalan works reached even FEWER people than the Spanish ones did. I'm not going to say anything about the relative merits of "French", "Spanish" or "Catalan" as languages. Because of how I was "born" into SL I prefer the Viewer 2 "Spanish" of my birth, but have learned "Catalan" and function well in it as I HAD ADVANCED NOTICE because I poked around and found out about the change and HAD A COMPELLING REASON TO because not-yet-released versions of the Viewer 3.2 model fix my crashing problems. However, the way the rollout of 3.2 was handled, with little advance notice and no training for 3.1 users and many bug fixes for the OpenGL libraries not yet included, was BREATHTAKINGLY IDIOTIC. Everyone who is upset has good reason to be upset and I have no idea how Linden Labs is going to win back people now. Personally, I think Linden Labs should change their logo to a hand with its palm over a face because that's what I do when I think about things like this.

The OpenGL crashes seem to be largely fixed in the developer thread that is addressing them - they're not included in the new viewer release. I've been using this developer build and it's behaving quite well - far fewer crashes than 3.1. The graphics seem a bit slower than the current release (when the current release isn't throwing its frequent hissy fits) but I can run graphics on High everywhere with VBO on and haven't had login or crowded-place crashes lately. http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/davep_gl-development/rev/244377/index.html Good luck - if you want further updates go to the Second Life JIRA bug tracker and search for SH-2240

How they did what they did was idiotic, by giving no notice or transition help, but the viewer itself isn't bad. In the "Me" menu open up "Toolbars". You can drag the buttons you don't want off and move the ones you do want to either side or the bottom. And, assuming you've only been using Viewer 2/3, if you tried using Singularity you'd probably kick a hole in your monitor because the layout is COMPLETELY different from Viewer 2.

"SL remembers the locations of windows once you open and place them. If you like you can open each window, move and size them in the area where your sidebar used to be. Close them and re-open them to find they are exactly where you left them. Granted, its not exactly what you had before, the Tab Buttons will no longer slide out from the sides of the viewer but its close and leaves us with a workable UI for both camps." If you drag the buttons to the right, then drag the MENUS (which ignore the button locations) to the right, you'll find notifications and IM's raining down over your menus. Then you will start to swear. I've been using 3.2 for a while because the developer builds seem to fix many of the OpenGL crash issues of 3.1. I've found a layout that is reasonably workable for a Viewer 2 stalwart like me: Expanded Local Chat palette in lower left corner, former sidebar menus on the LEFT spanning from the top bar to the top of the chat palette and stacked one on top of each other to mimic the sidebar behavior, and tabbed IM's on the right, about halfway down. That reduces most of the traffic jams. Do I like it as much as the sidebar? No. But it's workable. If I could move the IM's and notifications I'd be happier. But, for better or worse, it's what we've got. My developer pre-beta release is far more stable with new Nvidia drivers than Viewer 3.1 is. Which is seven kinds of sad, of course. However, Second Life and the friends I've made in it are enough for me to tolerate Linden Lab's inexplicable decisionmaking. Your mileage may vary.

You can see what the plans are if you use the current beta. They're adding the option to have the basic "Avatar" , "Destinations" and "How do I..." to the basic interface, and have made it (theoretically) customizeable. You can pick what menus and buttons you want to see and where you want to put them. I've been using it for a few days and in the latest developer version it seems to crash a lot less with modern video cards.

Apparently ALL SL viewers have problems with Nvidia Optimus technology, unfortunately. This is a link the URL to the bug-report page concerning it. There are some work-arounds that might for you in the comments. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-26533