Thrayce Lanley

This has probably been covered before, but 'SEARCH' isn't being a help. Does anyone know if there's a way to view SL in black and white, to the effect of taking snaps without having to photoshop afterwards? Thanks, and cheers!

Just so I'm clear, let me see if I understand: You're doing a dissertation, and can't even format a proper paragraph? ETA: Please understand, I'm not trying to be rude or anything like that. Your Q just strikes me as a little...off-the-wall- for someone doing thier dissertation.

I buy L$ from Gamerzfix regularly, and I've never had any problem with delivery. That being said, as far as how long delivery takes, it's usually a few days' wait after payment confirmation. Sometimes I've waited a day, other times it took three or four days before I recieved my L$. Cheers!

"SL uses index files to know what file(s) it has already cached." This is what I figured, just wasn't sure if all of the necessary files for 'transplanting' an existing cache were in the 'Cache' folder. From what you've said here, I assume that TEXTURE.CACHE and TEXTURE.ENTRIES are the checksum files for an existing cache. Thanx for the enlightenment. I learned a bit here.

Well, I suppose that settles it then. It's not so much a matter of the cache being 'precious' to me or anything. My current setup has things tweaked for maximum R/W performance to/from the SL cache, such as the dedicated-cache partition being the first partition on a second drive (closest to the heads), on a second SATA channel (simultaneous R/W), and is defragged every day. When the question was put to me, it occurred to me that with all the iterations of Niran's lately (sometimes two per week), it may save me a little bandwidth by recycling the cache. Believe me, I know it's overkill; just the way I manage my system. I suppose I spent too long tweaking other people's systems and unwittingly became **bleep** about my own...lol. Anyhow, thanx for the answers. Happy SL'ing!

Fair enough; I suspected as much. However, there's still another angle to this question and it has more to do with the way the viewer checks the cache to see whether the texture in question is already on the local computer or needs to be downloaded. That is, does the viewer check all of the files in the '\cache' folder for the texture in question, or is there a list of already-downloaded textures that is kept on the local system, and updated on the fly? If there were a 'checsum' file, I can only imagine that it would also be necessary. Thanx.

Alright, I've been asked this question twice in the last week, and as much as I've looked, I can't figure it out, so for better or worse, here goes. Is the Texture Cache portable from one installation to the next? For example, I personally have a 15GB partition on my 2nd hard drive which is dedicated to the SL cache. After a while, it gets as high as 5GB. Now, suppose I make a backup of that cache (the whole partition with the file-structure intact), and then I reinstall the viewer. I point the setup to the partition (which of course clears it), and re-plant the 5GB of cache from the backup into the partition. Will the reinstalled viewer use the cache, or will it simply re-download the necessary textures, overwriting what's there? I can go into more detail if this didn't make much sense. Thanx.

Whoa there... First of all, as I read your response I realized that I made it sound differently than I meant to say. For that, I apologize; no malice intended. That being said, I was not implying that everyone else was doing something wrong, neither did I mean to imply that I'm "one of the miraculous few..." In another thread along similar lines, I went into a little detail about the effect of Background-Processes, and this was more the point I was getting at. Understand, I'm not shooting in the dark here. I'm drawing off of fourteen years experience making a living upgrading, building, and (pertinently for this thread and others like it) tweaking systems for private businesses. More often than nought, the end-user has umpteen-thousand things going on in the background, and this has a tendency (major understatement) to impinge on the performance of, among other things games, apps, and of course Second Life. Niran's Viewer running 'miraculously' on my GPU on the ULTRA setting with everything enabled is not the result of a standalone-factor, nor the result of up-to-date hardware, but rather the combination of proper drivers for ALL hardware (not necessarily the latest up-to-date, in Nvidia's case), making sure that ALL unnecessary services are STOPPED, having NOTHING running in the background, my drives constantly defragged (I use a separate drive for the cache--on another SATA channel the readtimes improve), etc... Now, I of course realize that not everyone is a certified tech, and neither should anyone have to be to enjoy SL. That being said, not every user knows how to shut-down EVERYTHING in the background or to set thier system up for maximum gaming performance without spending 1K on new hardware. As I've said in other threads, there is always the case of Joe User with his WalMart e-machine, who wants to run SL with all the eyecandy while he has WoW, Messenger, Roxio, Word, and VLC all working hard at the same time; this is Joe's prerogative. If he wants to run his system this way, he's welcome to do so. What bothers me is when Joe decides that instead of shutting-down some background stuff, he'd rather BLAME LL and thier coders for the viewer being so laggy and slow. That was more my point, rather than trying to sound snotty or bashing anyone. Sorry for any misunderstanding; I was merely trying to contribute to the thread.

"I'd be reluctant to recommend the GTS250 right now. That is what I have and my performance with V3 code is horrendous. I have tried every optimization I have read about, changing settings for VBO, HTTP, Anti-aliasing, etc with virtually no effect." Hmmm...may be time to re-evaluate your OS setup. I've been running the Zotac GTS250 ECO 1GB for a year now, and running Niran's viewer on ULTRA; shadows, 2x AA, DoF, SSAO, and NO avatar imposters. This is full-time settings. I'm getting 18-25FPS on the average, whether in a SafeHub or in an RP sim. I've said this before, I read these "Viewer 3 slows my comp to a crawl..." threads written by people who have twice to three-times better hardware than I'm using, and I just don't understand it. Oh well... On a sidenote, I'll add that for it's age, and iteration of GPU, Nvidia really pulled-off a miracle with the GTS 250. The card just WORKS. With everything, and quite well.

"All 2/3 viewers above 2.7.4 perform terribly bad no matter what is what i understand inworld. Some seem to be lucky." "At this moment V2/3 viewers perform much worse than V1 iterations. Only top machines seem to be able to have a reasonable performance is what i see and hear confirmed inworld." "...since a major part in SL is still on an older viewer because 2/3 based viewers kills their performance." ???? Did you even read the above posts???

CPU: Intel E5300 2.6GHz Dual-Core RAM: 4GB DDR2 667 HDD: 320GB WD 7200RPM GRAPHICS: Zotac Nvidia GTS-250 Eco 1GB OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (streamlined, no unnecessary services, nothing running in background when in SL) CONNECTION: High-Speed Cable (not sure about speed, but no waiting usually, so no complaints) VIEWER: Niran's Viewer 5b (latest iteration) running full-time in ULTRA. Shadows, SSAO, 2xAA, DoF. FPS: 18-25 on a good day in a sparsely-populated sim. 12-18 in a populated SafeHub. Cheers!

There's a psychology to this, and it's common to everyone. Let me put an analogy: "Joe has been driving the same car for ten years. After all that time, the panels are rusted, the windshield wipers are long broken, the engine makes horrible black smoke, the mileage is pathetic, the muffler is dragging on the ground, the interior smells like a kennel, the radio is long since inoperable, and the air-conditioning is provided via a hole in the floor. Irregardless of the heap he is driving, Joe loves his old-faithful car (ol' Betsy) that (barely) gets him from A to B. Finally, after those ten years, Joe's friends convince him to buy a new car. He purchases a 2011-whatever. The body panels are sleek and shiny, the mileage is amazing, it has that new-car smell, the engine is all but silent, the stereo is state-of-the-art, and it comes with all the neat features (GPS, security, MP3 player, DVD player, automatic seatbelts, etc...). Yet, with all this, as Joe gets in and turns the key...the first thing he does is start to whine and complain that "it's just not the same as ol' Betsy" and promptly begins to point out everything thats "wrong" with the new car." Folks, this is exactly what we saw when V2 appeared, it's what we're seeing now with V3, and we'll continue to see it with V4, V5, V6...

Thanx for the correction, Leliel. As I said, I had read that post a while back, referred there by the Kirsten forum, and I had a feeling that I had the numbers reversed. :matte-motes-confused: Cheers!

"But if LL wants a virtual world where just a few can enjoy a more technically beautiful world, then they have most definitely been going in the right direction for the past two years." Again, define "just a few". I can't remember where I saw it, but not so long ago LL posted their classification list, which classified end-user hardware according to the degree which it could run SL on a scale from 0 to 3. According to the report that was attached, it was estimated that 65% of SL users were running thier viewers on class-3 hardware; that means that approximately 65% of users have hardware that is just barely capable of running well enough to stand in-place and chat. (a slight exaggeration, but the point is made). This leaves 35% of users with systems capable of running the viewer with the eyecandy to some degree. Please tell me the end-users of SL aren't falling into the haves/havenots thing like the 1%/99% thing. As Rolig put it, there are far too many users blaming LL for bad coding, when it's the system on the user's end where the problem resides. Don't get me wrong here; the real-world economy sucks right now, and a new system/upgrade is not within the reach of everyone. But honestly, should LL (as well as TPV devs) dumb-down the viewer code, removing SSE-extensions so that Joe User with the ten-year-old Dell can at least be on an even playing field? ETA: I don't have a citation for the LL system of classification that I mentioned above, and I think I may have the order mixed-up. Could anyone point me to this? Cheers!

We've had Derendering in Kirsten's Viewer and Niran's for as long as I can remember.

"We need something that can run on our computers, and still look good; if we had viewer 1.8 today, we'd have a beautiful experience. Unfortunately, we have viewers that require a Dreamworks mainframe to run as they're intended. Please, instead of adding anything else... Could you, please, just fix it so it'll run on the average computer?" (emphasis mine) Sassy has it right on the money here. How exactly do you define "Dreamworks Mainframe?" in relation to "average computer?" When LL (or any TPV developer for that matter) writes code for a viewer, they have to write that code with the idea in mind that Joe User's comp will meet a hardware average somewhere between "10-year-old Dell with 1.2GHz CPU and 512MB ram on an onboard GPU" and "Whizbang-2011 with 3.8GHz 16GB RAM and twin- 2GB GTX560's on SLI" With any hardware, there is a line beyond which, no matter how clever the coding, there will be a completely-diminished return; and for what can be defined as "average hardware" that line is where no amount of clever coding is going to make things prettier. Try to bear in mind that LL isn't in business just to make your SL-experience a terrible one. Rather, things like Mesh, Shadows, DOF, AA, and all the other neat stuff were implemented to make that experience better . Unfortunately, with all these wonderful implementations comes a harsh reality: Older or "non-Dreamworks-Mainframe" hardware simply isn't going to be able to keep up. In the end, they have a choice to make... a) delay implementation of things like Mesh and eyecandy (to the frustration of the userbase that can run then) in favor of keeping Joe User's ten-year-old Dell usable, or b) improve the quality of that virtual world by adding all the system-intensive eyecandy, and hope that Joe User with the 10-year-old Dell decides to upgrade his hardware. Of course, it's not always that simple, but my point is, far too often the blame is thrown at LL for 'incompetent coding' , when it's always too soon forgotten that it's just not always possible to make everyone happy. Cheers!

"It performs better for me than the Viewer 3 or V3 Development viewers do." Agreed, provided you're talking about the LL-V3 and V3-dev viewers. On a benchmark-basis, the V3-based Nirans Viewer (Build 8 beta 2) shows a much better framerate than FS, even with all the eyecandy. At first this struck me as odd, as Niran himself said that it was based on the LL V3 core, until I found out that Dave had been plugging-away at the render pipeline, to get things running smoother; it seems to have worked. Cheers!

Hi Maliwolf, welcome to SL! Getting SecondLife Viewers to run up to our system's expectations can be more of an art than a science at times, so take comfort that the trouble you're having is nothing out of the ordinary. Although ATI cards and SL viewers have a history of not getting along well, your card is well above the needed spec, and since your drivers are up to date, we can assume your GPU is not the culprit. Assuming your chipset drivers are also current, we can almost completely rule-out a hardware issue in general. This raises the question, and the answer many don't like to hear: have you tried clearing the list of apps running in the background when you start SL? Try closing anything in the taskbar that might be using up system resources (AV, defragger, downloads, etc..) and see if that helps. I'm running SL with all the eyecandy that KV can offer on 'ultra' with between 24 and 28 FPS with similar specs to yours, but it comes with the price of making sure there's nothing at all running in the background. Gerrard has a good point; start with the distance slider at a modest 32m or 64m. These are perfectly acceptable for everyday wandering in the virtual world; just crank it up for taking snapshots. LoveAngeL also has a good point. Start SL with the 'graphics' slider at the minimum, and adjust settings upward until you have a comfortable mix of performance and eyecandy. Finally, I strongly recommend (to help get around the difficulties of ATI/SL problems) that you do not use the AA built-in to the viewer, but rather use the hardware-AA in your ATI control panel. This is especially important if you intend to use DOF (Depth Of Field). There is a reason for this, and I'll go into it in-depth in an upcoming blog. All that being said, you have an enormous number of people here, ready to help! Cheers!

I don't usually use the SL viewer, but since there have been so many complaints lately, I figured I'd give it a run. Took a measurement under Fraps; standard graphics tweaks, shadows, DOF, 8xAA (from Nvidia panel). 24-28 FPS in an unpopulated sim, 18-22 FPS in a sim with eight other avies. Aside from being a little slow to respond to UI buttons, and a little slow starting up, I have no other problems. Agree with OpenGL VBO, and set bandwidth a generous amount above 500. Start with no AA, DOF, or shadows. Current specs: Intel E5300 Dual-Core, 2.6GHz 4GB DDR2 RAM Zotac 1GB GTS250 Eco Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit (streamlined, no unnecessary processes) Kirsten's Viewer S21 (Niran-Fork) Full-shadows, 8xAA, DOF, Global-Illumination: 23-26 FPS nominal

"And any phoenix third party viewer is not an answer." Sorry that you are having trouble, Ricky. Seems like there are a number of similar complaints associated with recent releases, not the least of which is the 'Automatic Upgrade' feature. More than likely, it's a workthrough on LL's part leading up to the next official release. What makes you so certain that Phoenix (and I assume Firestorm as well) are inherently 'dangerous/copybot-ridden'? Just askin'.

"Lag is complex, and the vast majority of times, has nothing at all to do with scripting. It has everything to do with what you wear and how intelligently it is created. The ARC or avatar rending cost can show you a general understanding of how much lag your avatar is creating." Agreed, and this is a very important point. Unfortunately, the debate between either scripts or ARC causing lag is one of the oldest in SL. Depending on where you look, LL will give you two different reasons for sim-lag, and it will be either one or the other. The debate between end-users over which of the two is the culprit is an unending one, and at times it's a real in-world drama. The official LL stance on sim-lag is that it is caused (mostly) by scripts. However, although scripts do cause a degree of server-side-lag, (and not a very large one at that), the end-user's hardware does have a direct-say about what effect ARC has on that particular user's client-end lag. That is, lower-end hardware will have a much harder time dealing with the collection of polys, textures, etc, and that's before you add-in all the eyecandy (shadows, DOF, etc.).

"Viewer 2 has already been highly under huge fire since only a handful seems to like it, but worse... with each quick release of an update came terrible show stop problems for too many users." Define a "handful" and "too many". "...for Duo core computers FPS has dropped significant since 2.8, like from an averge 35-45 to 1-5." In all honesty, I have not seen this. Someone seeing that kind of performance drop needs to re-examine thier viewer installation, or at the very least, to check thier driver setup. Duo/Dual-Core setups aren't actually 'supported' by most viewers, rather the CPU-workload gets evenly-distributed between the cores; dual-core, quad-core, this even-distribution is built-into the hardware and any OS from Vista onward by default. I've asked around, and no one I spoke to sees any connection between multiple-cores and a drop in FPS. "I waved 2/3 goodbye after a half year of all kinds of misery and went back to viewer 1.23.5. It's fast, stable and easy to use." Agreed, and this seems to be something that LL needs to pay more attention to. However, the 1.2-versions lack the structure to support the majority of features that a LOT of people (MUCH more than 5-10%...) want. As has already been said, it's an old standard, and has almost completely fallen into the 'outdated' category. On the Phoenix/Firestorm website, you can almost hear the developers pleading with users to accept this reality. "...as long as 2/3 is not to full satisfactory. And they are not." Does this imply that V2 and V3 users are idiots? Don't get me wrong. I completely agree that there are certain elements of V1.23 that simply 'worked better', but that being said, the 1.23 architecture is becoming limited.

Hi Victoria! I'm still trying myself to wrap my head around the reason for LL (not to mention almost ALL of the TPVs) dropping fullscreen from thier viewer. I'm using Kirsten's latest iteration, actually a variation called Niran's viewer, and fullscreen is right there where I like it. It's seems odd to me that LL would drop the idea when there's usually an increase in FPS under fullscreen, as is the case with almost ALL modern games; this has to do with the way resources are handed to the GPU under that particular mode. Furthermore, there's FAR MORE real estate on the screen in FS-Mode. Somewhere in this forum, there's a thread about the relationship between the end-users' hardware and the eyecandy that one can take advantage of. Nonetheless, if you were running SL decently before, you should be able to run it just fine now, howbeit with a little tweaking...:matte-motes-big-grin-wink: Welcome back, BTW!

Agree. I should have pointed out that I'm on a cable internet connection, which makes a HUGE difference. I have the connection-speed turned up to 3500kbps, as anything higher doesn't seem to affect performance. This is also a good place to mention that the HTTP-TEXTURE option has turned out to be a terrible bottleneck, and so I recommend turning it off. The GTS250 was a gift from my wife last november, and the improvement from the 8500fx that I was using before it was a hundredfold; so yes, getting a better GPU will almost always help. For the record, ATI cards and SL do not seem to get along, although mileage seems to vary from user to user. As well, just to drive the point home, I should also have made it clear why I mentioned that I use Kirsten's Viewer. It's relevent to my point because so many users have indicated that while the graphics capabilities of KV are 'above the curve', most say that their system simply can't handle the settings that facilitate all the eye-candy. Cheers!

Unfortunately, once again, the elephant in the room goes unmentioned...*sigh* There's more to getting performance out of your system then just going out and buying a GTX500-series GPU, an additional 12GB RAM, and two 10K-RPM drives set up in a RAIDzero array. All too often, the case of "my system can't run this-or-that well" can be narrowed down, at least partially, to USER-error/inexperience...even stubbornness. Allow me to explain: When I worked for a small system-repair/upgrade business a few years back, my brother referred a friend to me, who called explaining that his expensive new system (it was relatively state-of-the-art for 2007) was not running his games up to speed. I took a look at it, and indeed he had bought all the bells and whistles that comprised a gaming-system for that year. He fired-up one of the games he said was bogging (I think it was Counterstrike or something), and indeed it WAS a slideshow. I took over, exited the game, and it didn't take me thirty-seconds to realize what the problem was. Here is the list (as much that I can remember) that he had running in the background WHILE HE WAS TRYING TO PLAY THESE SYSTEM-INTENSIVE GAMES: *third-party firewall *antivirus running in 'continuous scan' mode *a rediculous number of mp3 downloads going on *watching a movie in a window on the second monitor *a number of messenger windows opened, as well as voice *third-party defragger *a seemingly-impossible number of chatbars prevalent in an open-browser Now, these are all just fine and dandy. But heres the rub: when I told him that he shouold try shutting those things down to free-up his system, or wait until they're all finished, he actually got irate, and told me (on no uncertain terms) that he "needed those running AT ALL TIMES, and that it wasn't all the stuff he had running in the background that was to blame, but "poor coding from the game companies" that caused the low framerate. 'Needed' all those things?... Sadly, this is all too often the case of system after system that came my way. I'd clean-up the tasklist, and the customer is happy. Customer brings computer back a week later and says "It's slow again..." I explain to said-customer that they should really not reinstall those twenty Yahoo-Toolbars and that there's no need to have THREE AntiVirus programs running at once. Customer, of course, informs me that they NEED those things running. So, what am I saying here? Well, I'm running a dual-core 2.6GHz, 4GB DDR2, Zotac GTS250 1GB, under Win7 Ultimate 64-bit. For a viewer, I've been using Kirstens (latest iteration, S21). Under said viewer, I'm running shadows, DOF, 4x AA, and Global Illumination. My point? (drumroll please...) I'm getting between 20 and 30 FPS regularly. How? I shut down EVERYTHING before I start the viewer. I mean that. No AV, firewall off, Photoshop closed, unnecessary services off, the whole nine-yards. This, in turn goes back to my original point about the 'quality' of hardware not being the end-all of viewer performance. The end-user has a responsibility to their system-performance, and just by shutting a few things down, it's amazing how much more that seven-year-old system can do. ETA: Sorry if this came across as complaining, which is far from my intention; just trying to further enlighten. Cheers!