Rhys Goode

I lost a friend over this issue once. She gave me a big pack of obviously stolen dance animations. We argued over the issue of whether taking the stolen goods from someone else (but not actually ripping them ones self) was a legitiamate thing to do. Turns out she belongs to the "Its not stealing for me, because I am special" crowd. Our friendship did not survive. And a few weeks later, those animations disappeared from my inventory. I was not outraged that LL had "taken my inventory". My only complaint with LL is that they were not *faster* at enforcing IP rights.

I made a nice string of prim pearls once. The hard part for me was getting around the size limit. So I made my unit pearl from a hollow sphere. I applied a alpha texture to the outer surface, and my pearl texture to the inner surface. This let me make nice tiny pearls. I did not actually use a texture, I just set the inner surface to low shininess, glow to about 0.03, the texture blank, and the color to suit. It looks a whole lot like a pearl. It took me a while (days) to arrange them in a string, having to create and move them one at a time. All in all, to make them on a string, much better to learn blender, etc, etc.

If you want to look up info on SSB, it may help to know that the Lindens call it by a different name, some times "Project Sunshine", and sometimes Server Side Appearance. This video gives a resonalby non technical explanation, I think: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Project-Sunshine-Goes-Grid-Wide/ba-p/2148427

So, let me understand. You log in 2 years later, and things have changed? ZOMG!

4 Gigs memory can be a problem, if there are other programs going in the background. When I had a system with only 4 Gigs, I had to be very careful not to have other processes going, or else SL would start swaping memory on and off my hard drive, and performance would go way down. For me, disabling voice made a big difference in how much the hard drive was used (even when not actively using voice). Also making sure that media is disabled, depending on where you are. I have also heard that the Singularity viewer is a lot kinder on under powered machines than Firestorm. Might be worth checking out.

I know of a mainland sim that keeps a stable of about 15 inactive bots off in a closet, far removed from everyone else, as a way to reduce lag for other users. They are registered so as not to increase traffic. They give indirect control over how many active avatars can be in the sim at any time, and so the peak lag is less than if it were full of active avatars.

I've played around a bit "torturing" prims, switching the physics shape type between convex hull and prim, and can easily boost the LI from a single prim from 1 to 250, at least with a tortured torus. I am a bit suprised that a dimple on a sphere has this drastic an impact, but only a little. Mesh has so much less impact, I sometimes wonder at the fact that they grandfathered in the prims. I guess its a trade off between accessablitly and efficiency.

cgtextures.com has a nice collection of textures. I might have used a few myself, had I known about it sooner. Too bad the owner got a flea up his @##. He may even have a valid point, seems like a lot of hairsplitting to me, but I am not a lawyer. But there are lots of other sources.

Dear Jandid "I just hate it. I hate people complaining about this game all the time, because they have real reasons to complain. and yada, yada, yada...." Then why the hell are you hanging around? If you don't understand the fundamental difference? I'd wish you well and ask if I could have your stuff when you go, but it you are that clueless, its really unlikely I would be interested in your stuff. So I'll just wish you well, and hope you stop torturing youself real soon. Go play the Sims or something.

So, I was making a model in blender, one part for which I made a mirror image copy, and a center part. 3 meshes, I joined them togeter into on mesh. I assigned the mirrored parts to 2 different vertex groups, so I could do a bit of tweaking. Well, I tweaked and I tweaked. Saved and restarted the .blend file several times. And suddenly I noticed that one of the original submeshes was staying pegged in object mode, staying in place when I tried moving the whole mesh. When I switched to edit mode, everything looked fine, the whole mesh had the expected shape. But I could only move part of the mesh in object mode. Eventually, I noticed that somehow, the orginal submesh, now a vertex group in the overall mesh object, the part that was nor moving witht he whole mesh, had become associated with an empty frame. I deleted the empty frame, and now everything is working fine. I have no idea how I accidentaly triggered this seemingly bizarre behavior. I can think of a few things it might be useful for, if I knew how to control it, but I have no idea at all how it happened. Any thoughts?

So, I was making a model in blender, one part for which I made a mirror image copy, and a center part. 3 meshes, I joined them togeter into on mesh. I assigned the mirrored parts to 2 different vertex groups, so I could do a bit of tweaking. Well, I tweaked and I tweaked. Saved and restarted the .blend file several times. And suddenly I noticed that one of the original submeshes was staying pegged in object mode, staying in place when I tried moving the whole mesh. When I switched to edit mode, everything looked fine, the whole mesh had the expected shape. But I could only move part of the mesh in object mode. Eventually, I noticed that somehow, the orginal submesh, now a vertex group in the overall mesh object, the part that was nor moving witht he whole mesh, had become associated with an empty frame. I deleted the empty frame, and now everything is working fine. I have no idea how I accidentaly triggered this seemingly bizarre behavior. I can think of a few things it might be useful for, if I knew how to control it, but I have no idea at all how it happened. Any thoughts?

1.4% packet loss seems pretty high. Are you using wifi? I use it most of the time, and while most of the time it gives me packet loss <~ .2%, sometimes it goes up to a few percent. (the neighbors garage door, the phase of the moon?) And when it does, I lag like mad.

I am a confirmed FS user, and as lots of others have mentioned, it has a lot more features than the LL viewer. I'll tell you my favorite features, but one thing I do have to say. On my machine, FS does not come close to the LL viewer in terms of FPS. The LL viewer sets itself between High and Ultra, I can turn off shadows, and walk around crowded sims at 30+ fps. FS defaults to the notch between Mid and High, and forget about shadows if I want to get more than 15 fps. (At the FS recommended setting, it is 30+ fps) But the features in FL keep me with it. For example. The inventory. LL has two tabs, FS adds a tab for ."Worn". LL lets you filter if you go to a menu. FS has buttons that let you collapse or expand or filter. And I can search my inventory by Creator or description. FS has a nice "area search", lets you search the surrounding area (by name, creator, etc). LL does not. FS supports RLV. My wardrobe organizer needs RLV, and I need it to keep my shoes organized. I can program FS so that it rings a bell whenever someone says my name in chat. LL has radar that shows you who is nearby, and lets you IM them. FS radar shows you who is nearby, lets you show both display and legacy names, shows you thier ages, lets you TP to thier location, lets you put on a beacon so I can follow my friends in crowded sims. The FS user interface is much more customizable. It has 42 buttons, the LL version has 21. Some of the FS buttons are for things like the area search, that does not even exist in LL viewer. FS lets you use the old style profiles (my strong preference as an old timer) or the new ones. It lets you do the old style search (better for some things) or the new. These are the things I use every day, and why I keep my time in the LL viewer to a minimum, in spite of its better FPS performance on my machine.

TimBuilder wrote: *snip* - when building a complex object, we can load multiple temp textures to see if everything blends together seemlessly , temp texture can do that while local texture only allows one texture to be seen at a time *snip* Tim, I agree that temp textures were a wonderful thing, I will miss them. But just FYI, you *can* add multiple local textures, and apply them to different objects or to different faces on an object, and veiw them all at once, seamlessly. As far as I can tell in this regard, exactly the same functionality as before. Except of course that only you can see them on your viewer.

I've had similar issues occasionaly. For me, it is usually either my home sim acting up, changing sims clears the problem. Or my wifi link acting up (rare for me, but it happens). If I suspect a problem, I look at help>about, it gives a number for packet loss. If it is over 3-5%, SL will suck. Speedtest.net does not always pick up SL packet loss problems

Late to the party.... But the OP wins my nomination for the most incoherent post of the year award.

And your point is ... ??????? I for one, have always taken this as a given. Its been spelled out in plain language forever. Do something that atracts law enforcement on SL, and LL will provide any and all info to make you pay. Other than that? meh. Don't like it? Unplug from the internet, and go play with yourself.

http://martiniinthemorning.com/ would be a good stream for you to try.

Rolig Loon wrote: ... Failing that, though, you can try Catznip, Exodus, or Singularity, each of which is a good viewer but less demanding on your system than Firestorm or V3. ... I would not ignore V3. It puts a *lot* less load on my system than Firestorm. (But I am a confirmed FS user, my favorite anyway) My guess is that some viewers work better than others on any given machine, and that looking at all the available candidates would lead to different "best" viewer choices for one particular person's setup than for someone else's.

I enjoy playing with sploders myself, I know the owners of the clubs get a cut, and its one way for me to support them while having fun. The clubs where I hang out do not limit payments to members only, and they do allow payoffs to avatars who have logged off when the sploder finally splodes. I myself have been "AV offline" more than once, and so have my friends. It is a nice feature, because I know, even if it a slow night, and no one else enters the pot, sooner or later I will have my chance at getting back a few $L's, even if I am sound asleep in RL.

I use a RLV device that helps a lot. It works by making all the items in a given folder come off together when any one of them is removed. So if I have a mesh dress, I put it in a folder along with the alpha mask, and include an invisible systems skirt, and sometimes even a tweaked avatar shape. Then when I take off (or someone else does it using RLV) to invisible skirt, the mesh and the mask come off two, and if I had a special shape in the folder it automatically switches back to my default shape and turns my physics back on. If it is a mesh shirt, I use an invisible systems shirt. It works great for clothes that have flexi or other prim attachments too. Like shoes or boots: Left and right foot, left and right lower leg, system shoe shape and alpha mask all go in one folder, then taking off any one piece takes off all the rest. It requires some work to get it set up right, but I find it is well worth the effort. My friend who makes it calls it the "striptease helper", but I think of it as a wardrobe manager. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Smart-Striptease-Helper-BOXED/4120190

I've got to add my two cents. I would never by a piece of mesh clothing without a demo. Its not just the fit of the mesh, its the topology of the mesh that is the problem, and why I look at a lot of demos but end up buying only a few. Getting the mesh to fit right is not all that hard. Getting it to deform gracefully while covering the mesh of an SL avatar, that is *very* *hard*, and most mesh designers do a poor job.

I use the old-style profiles in Firestorm, and they behave just like I remember the old style profiles from before the web based profiles were introduced. Which is to say, pretty useless in a crowded room. At least when right clicking on an avatar. Been this way for many years. One of my favorite Emerald/Phoenix/FS features is the radar, specifically because asking for the profile from the radar is much more apt to work than right clicking on an avatar. (in a crowded room, I usually hang out in crowded rooms, so that is what is important for me)

Most of my clothing comes in 5 "standard sizes": XXS, XS, S, M, L. You can find free shapes on MP, load them into blender, and alter things to fit the standard sizes. Here is the first of several free standard size shape sets that popped up today: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/JJ-Sammi-Sample-Mesh-Standard-Shapes/4896857 Note, not all the body shape sliders are standardized, there are significant differences from one standard shape to the other. My own default shape is XS, but I still have to fiddle to get things to fit right. And a lot of stuff only fits if I stand still, some designers are much better than others at getting things to work well when you start to dance. Here is a tutorial for how to do it in Blender: Happy Blending!

Sorry you are having problems, Desolate. SSA/SSB is a clear plus for me, earns LL a gold star.