Tracy Redangel

I have an late-2009 iMac with 8GB ram,nvidia card, etc. I've found the Second Life viewer runs the best. Exodus is also a very good viewer.

Have you ran a speed test on your internet connection?

Yeah, I'm not gonna bother reading half of what you wrote (who has that kind of time?) but I'll just echo what everyone is trying to tell you. It's simple. Griefing is griefing. Roleplaying is roleplaying. If you are in a roleplaying sim where they engage in whatever combat using huds, and you don't want to participate...then don't. They can have whatever sort of rules they want. If you don't like the rules and don't want to play, don't go to that sim. Move to another. If people harrass, threaten or mistreat you MUTE them. If you are in a non-roleplay sim and you are being griefed, then all you can do is file an AR, mute the chat spam, turn of particles, then contact the Estate manager or sim owner to clean up the mess. I've been griefed, lots of people have been griefed. No, it's not fun, but Linden Labs will do pretty much next to nothing to help you out. You have to handle griefers by yourself. My husband and I are now estate managers of our sim we share with a couple of other people. We have object entry turned off. Rezzing objects, running scripts, flight etc is set to group only. Everyone has a security orb on their land, so anyone who is not on the access list can only stay for 30 seconds before getting kicked. Guess what? No more griefing. Those people can curse our names until the day they die, and you know what? I could care less, because those buttholes can't do a damn thing to me, haha.

I think these improvements are great. I'm curious to see how they will impact those with older machines and graphics cards. We always see a lot of people complain about poor performance, but how many of those people are running on PCs that belong in the recycle bin? It's not realistic to expect Second Life to run the same on a ten-year old machine as it will on a tricked-outed gaming tower. Not that you need an expensive gaming PC to run SL, but you get the point.

They would have to make a much simpler version of Second Life to run on a hand-held mobile device. Has anyone checked out Facebook's new 3D MMO Cloud Party? Well it's basically like SL before we got really cool builds, textures, skins, etc. It sort of looks like the SIMs and this other really tiny MMO called Onverse. It's completely browser based. Personally, I have an iPhone, and I'll play Angry Birds or watch Netflix on it, but I really don't want to play Second Life on it. I don't have any desire to own an iPad, because I already have the phone, and that's just too much crap to carry around. But aside from that, I love playing Second Life on a huge monitor. When presented the choice, I would choose a desktop with a heftier graphics card, processor, and big, beautiful display screen.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: I'm also on the official viewer. No really reason not to be unless it fails to work with your system. Its very good at present. I can get 30-80 fps easily, take very solid snapshots, and manage to run at pretty high graphics. On an iMac here. An older $350 Toshiba laptop also runs it decently well in low-mid settings. Hi Pussycat, if you don't mind me asking, how old is your iMac? I have a 2009 model, 24-inch with Nvidia 9400 card. I can manage to get about 30 fps at the most in quiet areas. I have high speed connection and it's solid, so I'm just wondering if the slowness is because the machine and graphics card are older.

If you can't go through 10 responses, what would you do with real data you can actually use?

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: I think the Linden strategy now is akin to tossing up 10K ants towards the ceiling in a small room. A few of them might just land in the cup of water on the floor and learn to swim. It's like procreation. You have hundreds of little swimmers fighting their way through to be the ONLY viable one. Many poor little Noobies die off in a hostile environment while one survies to become a full-blown Resident.

I would suggest buying a shape, and trying a new skin. You can find very reasonably priced avatars, to very expensive ones, depending on how much you'd like to spend. Riccelli sells avatars that include shape, skin, and a few clothing items for just a couple hundred linden.

Right now I'm using Exodus. I was using Firestorm for several months, but the newer releases just crippled my frame rate. I get twice the frame rate with Exodus. I have not tried Niran's viewer, I don't believe they make a version for the Mac. If they did, that would be great, I'd love to try it.

Everything looks fantastic, I can't wait to check it out!

I'm not at my home computer, so I'm going off the top of my head for my computer specs: iMac from 2009, 266Ghz, 8 GB memory, 256 L2 Cache, Intel Core i3 (I think??), duo core, Nvidia Ge Force 9400 card. My internet connnection is decent (high speed cable), but we have three computers in the house running off the same connection...so I'm not entirely sure how that affects my individual connection. But when I have done the speed tests, I come up with decent clock speeds, so I have my bandwidth set at 1500. I always use my graphics setting at Mid to test everything. It's at least good enough to see detail. I get the slowest frame rate with Firestorm 4.0 (latest upgrade). In quiet areas, I average about 16-22 FPS. Inside our house with furniture, textures, and my husband to render, I get about 8 - 10 FPS. In crowded areas (Like Wet Willies, for instance) I can get between 3-7 FPS. I've not experienced any difficulty with mesh, textures, objects. Using the exact same settings (Mid graphics and debug adjustments) I get better performance with the V3 viewer. I can get 20-35 FPS in quiet areas, 10-15 FPS in average areas, 5-10 FPS in crowded areas. I just downloaded Exodus viewer yesterday and tried it for a bit. I experienced no crashes, and the viewer is easy to use if you've already used V3 or Firestorm. I get the most FPS with this viewer than either Firestorm or V3, but not a huge difference. I clocked 25-35 FPS in quiet areas, 15-20 FPS in average areas, and about 10-15 FPS in crowded areas. I did have a problem rendering mesh, but I adjusted the MeshMaxConcurrentRender (I think that's what it was?) setting to 100, and that improved quite a bit. I still experienced a few glitches with all mesh disappearing, and I had to re-log. It only did that once, so I don't know if it was just a glitch. I'm also going to try Niran's and Dolphin viewer to see how they compare. My graphics card (Nvidia GeForce 9400) is 3 years old, so I don't expect it to be screaming fast. I'm not sure if it's possible to upgrade the card in a 2009 iMac, or if that would even make a significant improvement in my machine's performance. Pffft...now my husband's computer (he has a PC...Asus) is only a year old with a screaming fast card (Nvidia, but can't remember) and he gets between 30-70 FPS.

I've never experienced this issue with LL's Viewer 3 or Firestorm 4.01.27000. I did have this problem with I tried the Exodus viewer. I adjusted my settings (the debug MeshMaxConcurrentRequest), and that DID help. But it still has some glitches.

It would be a shame to lose this world, because I still think Second Life is the mother/father of all virtual worlds. There is no other world where users can create absolutely anything that comes to the imagination and with such spectacular beauty. I think there are still improvements that need to be made, but I feel SL still has so much to offer. Mesh is far from perfect, but when it works...it's amazing. My husband and I still very much enjoy our SL. Yes, land is expensive, but we love our 1/4 sim so we certainly don't feel we're wasting our money on a hobby. We have room to build, landscape...whatever we want to do. Does Linden Labs want to be Zynga? I think they certainly want a share of that 2-D game market. I don't see a 2-D facebook/phone app version replacing the full blown version of SL though. I think a version like that would be a great addition, but not a replacement for the graphically rich world we have now.

There is an in-world Firestorm Support group that is very active. There's always people chatting in there 24-7, so that may be of some help to you. Good luck.

Jhon, it helps to know the specs of your computer, are you on a PC or a Mac? What is your processor speed, how much Ram do you have, how old is your graphics card, etc. Second Life does not always load very quickly for everyone when they first log in, it often takes tweaking some settings to get to operate smoothly. Read through the SecondLife Wiki, it's full of resources: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Main_Page

Jhon, as a couple of others have already pointed out, Linden Labs does not read these forums. However, there are many very helpful individuals who might be able to help you adjust your settings in SL if you can be more specific about the issues you are having. It coudl be your Graphics settings are too high, or your draw distance.

Oh thank you Emmet, but that pic was actually taken by a friend I love taking photos, but I still can't even figure out how to get the lighting and shadows LOL But I love that pic, because to me it's what SL is all about

My SL is pure FUN. My RL boyfriend and I play together and we have so much fun in SL. We actually met and fell in love in SL and two months later became a real life couple living together in RL(going on 2 years) as well. We still love to play because we both individually love gaming and virtual worlds. We've met some pretty good friends in SL too. My boyfriend & I (he's not always a shark LOL)

Ooooh I need to go get mine! Have you seen 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" That totally reminds me of that movie LOL I need to go check it out

You can still see muted people on your radar. You can get radar huds to make it even easier to see who is within your chat range. 99% of the time in SL, muting crazy people gets them out of your hair. Yes, it sucks they got you kicked off the land, but consider yourself lucky to be rid of a lousy SIM owner, right? If you want this person gone from your SL, REMOVE them. Don't talk to them, DON'T engage with them, don't even acknowledge their existence. Rent from a reputable land owner who simply cares that you pay on time and follow the sim covenant. You can ban them from your land. Invest in a good security orb so they can't bother you. I can understand harrassment. A stupid biker gang declared war on my husband and I. We had all of them banned, muted, everything. All they could resort to was griefing my neighbors. Now, I felt bad for my neighbors, but it was seriously pathetic. Now my husband and I are the estate managers so they can't do A SINGLE THING to bother or disrupt our SL.

I don't think AR reports do much good either, because the same *insert expletive here* jerks have keep griefing my neighbors (since they can't grief me..idiots). When it comes to griefing, Linden Labs pretty much leaves you on your own. I've even tried live chat support. They just tell you to file a report. Pffft. The best thing I was able to do is have my Land owner grant me Estate Manager rights, so now I can just clean up the junk myself and ban the griefers.

I love N-Core for prim feet shoes, the color match is great. I've not tried Simplicity, but I think I'll get a pair to try. I've only bought one pair of Stilletto Moody's because they were bubblegum pink with sparkly diamonds and adorable. They are way overpriced for what they are though, and the fit is not all that great. I love Pixel Mode just for easy shoes to put on. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/PM-Pixel-Mode-Baby-Ts-Plain-Blood/1366175 G-field has great shoes, most under 200 linden. Bax Boots are a staple for boot lovers, and the store helpers will custom fit them to your avatar. I've bought some of the new Maitreya mesh boots, the Jazz and Radical boots, and they are fantastic! The Radical boots also come in unrigged mesh with a hud, so you can choose to resize them if you wish.

Thank you Melita, I definitely will compile everything, and get my friends to do the same. This little biker gang has watched too many episodes of Sons of Anarchy LOL. I'm not worried about the griefing, because all they do is rez a bunch of stupid stuff and chat spam *rolls eyes*. In fact, the more they do that infantile stuff, the more evidence I can gather. In fact, I logged on yesterday and there were more objects littering my land (my husband forgot to turn rez off LOL) They can't even grief properly while we're online LOL. I'm not the only one who wants to see Linden Labs perma-ban the leader, there's 8 different residents that I know of personally who have filed reports. I know there's more. Yes, it's possible people can find a way back on an alt, but I know this guy doesn't want to lose his main account.

ah, thank you 16, that's great information. Yes, I wondered about the 'kill list', but I wasn't sure how seriously that would be taken.