Rhys Goode

Interesting. The official SL viewer works much more smoothly for me than FireStorm, it gives about 2 x the frame rate when I turn on advanced lighting and shadows. I guess a lot depends on your particular machine. For what its worth, my details (from help, about, default settings): Second Life 3.5.3 (276452) May 24 2013 02:06:23 (Second Life Release) Release Notes CPU: Intel® Core i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz (2195.07 MHz) Memory: 16362 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560M/PCIe/SSE2 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0012.9616 OpenGL Version: 4.2.0 libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.0 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.12 Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded) Voice Server Version: Not Connected Built with MSVC version 1600

Here is a link to the FireStorm wiki article on some steps you can try to recover missing inventory items, and most of it applies to all viewers, not just FireStorm http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_missing_inventory

not a fix, but easier than right clicking.... toggle wireframe on/off, ctrl-shift-R, and the textures all pop at once!

I've had that happen from time to time when I used to use the Firefox browser. The only way I could get the old format back was to uninstall then reinstall firefrox. Never seen it happen using Chrome or IE, and it was easier to switch to Chrome than to figure out what was messing up with Firefox.

I've been blocked from TPing into a full sim often enough, and been in sims that are full. I rarely crash at all but when I do, it is usually an indication of flakieness of my internet connection, I really do not associate it with full sims. When a sim is full lag gets really bad, it really stresses your machine, and also puts a lot of stress on your connection. Oh, and it can really slow down the server, but not always. I've been in full sims where there is hardly any server lag. But when the server gets too laggy, I leave, so maybe I just dont wait around long enough.

Here is a link on solving missing inventory problems http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_missing_inventory By the way, with that large an inventory you are almost asking for trouble. If you have any connection problem (packet loss) at all, you will almost certianly have problems trying to get it repopulated after a cache clean.

Well, my guess is that the dress and the pendant were both set to the same attachement point. Then if you choose "wear" for one, you will push the current item off; but if you "add", the attachments will stack nicley. I like *unrigged* mesh for neclaces and such. You can position it where you want, and change the size in x, y and z. "Rigged"mesh on the other hand is closley tied to the AV shape, and you cannot fine tune the alignment.

You can also attach rigged mesh items to different attachment points exactly the same way as ordinary prims, but unlike prims or non-rigged mesh attachments, the riggged mesh will look the same no matter where you attach it. I like to attach my skirts to my pelvis, same as I do flexi skirts, makes it easier to manage my clothing.

Codewarror has the right way to do it. I thought I'd share one *wrong* way to do it. I was fooling around with a mesh dress I've been working on, and want the ability to change textures. I have my dress linked to a prim., and the prim has some textures and a script. I can rezz it on the ground it works well, click the prim, get a menu, change the texture. Or you can attach the linked prim/mesh to your avatar, the rigged mesh will work as clothes, the prim will be seen where you attached it, and you can click on it, or let others click on it, change the textures, works just fine. I decided to see if it would work as a hud. So I mounted the linkset as a HUD, and it worked perfectly! Click on the HUD, change the texture. No fussing with listener sripts, etc, I thought I was done. So I went off to show a friend, and learned something interesting. While everything looked fine in my browser, it turns out that anything you wear as a HUD is automatically invisible to everyone but you. So while my dress looked fine to me, to my freind I was quite naked. I'm just glad I tried it with one person first, and did not show up at a formal dance with invisible clothes.

I've been struggling with weighting, and was also wondering how to get some poses for testing. Putting a few poses and their mirror images in keyframes then scrubbing is a great idea. I'm also struggling to learn blender in general, and a few weeks ago, I would not have known what keyframes and scrubbing meant, but today I can read your outline and say "wow! What a great idea"! Thanks, Gaia.

I have lots of older shoes that use invisprims, and invisiprims do not work with advanced graphics. They look fine with advanced graphics turned off, but show my deformed heels with it on. So, I looked around on marketplace for a set of free alpha-masks, and spent some time finding a mask to work with each of my old shoes. Now they look fine with or without advanced graphics. Well, they look better with it on, invisiprims never did interact well with the alpha chanell on other objects, and that probolem goes away when you use the alpha mask and advaced rendering with a pair of old shoes.

I have advanced graphics turned off on my computer for much of the time, not because my computer can't handle it, but because I end up in a room where someone has a particularly bad facelight and it ruins the whole room for me. Such faceights usually do not look too bad with adavanced graphics on. But there is usally a bad one in any large crowd, so good graphics is usually unusable in a club. I do know that not all facelights are that bad. I got a bunch one time and tried them with/without advanced graphics on. Some of them worked quite nicely with high end graphics, but most of them were *garish* and lit up a large area all around me, just my face.Sadly, some peope's computers do not support the advanced rendering at all, so they cant have a look for themselves.

I don't know much about hair, but I saw some really great mesh/flexy dress hybids this weekend. Makes me think.....

It happens to me too, not very often, but it happens. Usually when I have to log off in 5 mins and have barely enough time to choose an outfit for later. Yesterday was quite unusual, after changing outfits once or twice, I could not add ("rez item failed") or take off any attachments. A quick relog fixed it up.

Cerise Sorbet wrote: It's RenderVolumeLODFactor - but, it's better to toss out items that don't display well on the default setting and replace them with ones that have decent LOD behavior. No way will everyone bother to fiddle with that, so you;re only "fixing" things for yourself. I strongly agree. Good LOD performance is something that ought to be built into the items, I always turn my LOD factor down when I am designing something with mesh, I do not want to make things that only look good to people who have machines that are not as capable as my own.

I travel a fair bit and sign onto SL from many different routers in hotels, and campgrounds around the US. Typically using wifi. And one thing I have found is that the bandwidth of the connection is a poor predictor of SL performance. Oh, if Speedtest.net shows you with less than about 0.5 Mbts, then you know that nothing will help. But I have seen plenty of connections that test out at 10 Mbps but are totaly unusable for SL (unless you like lag, rubber banding, and gray avatars). For me, the key indicator is the packet loss I experience in-game. You can see yours from Help>About, its at the bottom of the report. More than about 1% packet loss, and things rapidly go downhill. And for me the cure to such symptoms is my 4-G wireless modem. When I am stuck with a bad public connection, and want to get rid of gray avatars, I switch to my wireless modem, and usually everything is fine. It costs $10/Gigabyte to use it, but it gets the gray out everytime. For what its worth, that has been my experience, and it is why I usually suspect something in the network connection when someone sees really bad SL performance from a machine that is cabable of running SL.

Well, there is a way. But it's not pretty, and it's a bit of a chore. It involves going to the Beta Grid... First, change your SL password, and wait 24 hours. Then log onto the Beta Grid. If you are using the SL viewer, you need to go to the advanced tab of preferences, and check the box to show Grid Selection at login. (Once you change, you can change back to your old password. I usually wait an hour, but I think I am being conservative.) When you first log in to Beta Grid after a password change, it will make a copy of your inventory, mostly just current inventory. Some strange behaviors with groups and friends and calling cards, but mostly it shows your current inventory on the main grid. Now, open inventory, go to the recent tab of inventory, type in a random string, and wait till your inventory builds, and the number of items in inventory settles down to the grand total. Now the fun part. Write down the number of items. Best save it off in a spreadsheet. Start deleting your stuff. Delete and purge. It will have no effect on your main grid inventory, But after each delete/purge, you can write down the total number of items in inventory. Folder by folder can be a bit tedious, so you can also delete related groups all at once. Hey, I *told* you it wasn't pretty. But it works!

When I need to limit my usage, I make sure to turn off the music and media. I usually stream the audio when I am in SL, and that is usually accounts for about 1/3 of my data consumption for a session. Oh, and I keep a close eye on my usage in real time, so I can tell right away if things are getting out of hand. I use the BitMeter package from codebox.org.uk.

Well, the new version of FS (4.4.0) is running great for me. Last week I was comparing the current LL V 3.5.0 viewer and the 3.x version of FS. For me, performance in a crowded sim is important, so I go to several such places, get the graphics prefs set the same, and watch my frame rate. I was surprised that I was getting ~ 20 - 25 fps with FS and 30 - 35 fps with LL, even with defered graphics and shadows enabled. A year ago, with the same hardware, I could never get more than about 10 fps if there were more than 10 AVs in the room, so something good must have happened with the constant stream of tweaks LL is making to the server and client code. I was a bit surprised that the V3 LL viewer was substantially faster than FS, but LL updates the client every month or so, while FS updates at much longer intervals. Yesterday and today, I looked at FS 4.4.0 and the LLviewer. They both work very well, I really cannot see much difference in framerates between them. Ooops. the slider slipped! With both viewers actually set to highest graphic level, the LL viewer has a clear performance edge, and the newest version of FS is not obvioulsy different than its replacement. It's too bad that the improvements are so dependent on the hardware you are running.

Some people have facelights that look simply garish with advanced graphics enabled, even though they are not so bad without it. Wearing a bad one wash out the avatar and everyone else around it. Good builds look *much* nicer with full advanced graphics, but I constantly have to turn off local lights either because of those ugly facelights or because of poor lighting design in the build. There are facelights available that do a fine job but you have to look around for them.

It "block" may be the default action this week, but I've been scripting things for years and never seen it before. Thanks for showing me how to turn it off, Solaria!

What is up with the "block" button on all the dialog boxes? It suddenly appeared, and I know for sure I did not put it in any of my scripts. It is very, very annoying, I keep muting my own toys by accident. I can't figure out what is good for either. I've never had an issue with unwanted dialog boxes in my 6 years of SL. Now If LL were to give me an easy way to mute something really annoying, like gestures or the spam from someone else's scripted attachment, I would be happy. But why would I want to mute the dialogs on my own devices???????

Theresa Tennyson wrote: OpenGL is a current, maintained protocol and the SL rendering engine has been re-written to use revised OpenGL calls. Right now I'm currently getting higher framerates on higher settings than I was a few months ago with the same hardware. Wow! I haven't checked in a while, and yeah the latest offering from linden seems much improved. I usually use Firestorm, but just did quick back to back tests in a couple of busy sims. With the new linden viewer, and with defered rendering enabled, I was getting 30-35 fps while with the same settings I was getting only around 18-22 with FS. I'll stick with FireStorm, but I'll be glad when they update and include some fo the improved linden code.

I've got to say, it wierds me out a bit, when I am chatting with someone and look at their proflle and see online status = offline. A definite minus for me, in terms of continued interactiions. We all have a mute button. Isn't that enough?

So a meter in SL is exactly the same as a meter in RL. Hmmmm. How to test the hypothesis. To use the standard definition, I would need to build something like an atomic beam. Sadly no one in SL seems to able to supply the needed isotopes of caesium or rubidium. Now I really dont care get the 10th decimal place, so simpler methods are available. I actually used a He-Ne laser to accurately measure the distance between two optical flats once. Sadly, no listings in world for working lasers. And you need to use things like invar and zerodur for the cavity, or else thermal stability will be an issue. Again, I strike out on Market Place. OK, so maybe I can settle for a simple reference object. I have a meter stick by my desk, but I can't figure out how to import it into SL. Sigh. I guess we have to resort to astronomy. After all, the original definition was one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole, and we can easily determine the length of a unit rod by measuring the length of their shadows at local noon on the same day, but at different latitudes. Back in the day, this required a lot of coordination to get the timing down, but with TP in SL, its dead nuts easy! We do need to know the diameter of the earth for this, but that's easy enough to Google. OMG!! I tried this in different widely separated sims. The shadow lengths are always the same. This world is FLAT! Something is profoundly different about the world of SL. I'm afraid I have no way of checking to see if a meter in SL is exactly the same as a meter in RL. Given the size of every objects like furniture, houses, and people, I strongly suspect that there the SL meter is stretched a bit with respect to the RL meter, but I can think of no way to tell for sure.