Rhys Goode

I just went to the Kingdom of Sands sim. And a nice sim it is, a very attractive build. Anyway, when I TP'd in to the landing zone, I was getting 60 - 100 fps. But when I TP'd to the main play area of the sim, my fps went down to about 20. My fps fluctuates, depending on where I look and if I am moving. If I stand still and don't change the camera, fps will pop up to 25ish, but if I turn and start waliking in a different direction than I had been looking, fps will drop to 16 or 18, then bounce back to 25 when I stop. I am using the high graphics settings, 256 m draw distance. If I were going to stay and play, especially if I were going to try some combat, I would probably reduce the draw distance to something less than 100. There were maybe 10 or 15 people scattered around the sim, not what I would call crowded. The statistics for the sim itself look just fine, 45 fps, and no time dialation.

If they are full perm sculpt maps, then yes, its possible to read them into blender, and edit the resulting 3D model. There is nothing easy or straightforward about Blender, so be forewarned. But you won't be able to do much about the LOD shifts, they are built into the system for sculpties. I'm pretty sure there is nothing you can do to change them. (that is, there is no simple setting you can check) But some sculpts are much better behaved than others in this regard, because there are tricks you can use when you are building the model. Sculpts from more skilled modelers can be dramatically better than sculpts from beginners. Oh, and note that RenderVolumeLODfactor only affects how *you* see the world, it does nothing for anyone else's client.

I regulary log into SL using a USB modem. I used a 3G modem for several years, and upgraded to a 4G/3G device last year. I currently use a Novatel 551L. Performance is decent, but not flawless by any means. It depends pretty strongly on where you happen to be, from what I can tell, down to the particulars of your local cell tower. At the end of the day, the cell tower you happen to be connected to has finite bandwidth to allot among whatever users happen to be around. So, if I am using a tower that happens to have 3G service, out in the countryside with my RV, it will often test out to give download speed of 1 MB or more, and then SL will run just fine. Sometimes, it only delivers .5 MB download, and then SL becomes pretty sluggish. And sometimes, it can start a session with 1 MB download, but because other users log in, that can drop to 0.05 MB for the odd hour or two, SL is out of the question and you are lucky to be able to check email. Same location, the next day, it might run SL all day long without a hiccup. 4G service is availbale in lots of places, and works better than 3G for SL. Download rates test out >10 MB many times, almost always > 4 or 5 MB. I've not seen it slow to a crawl. But at times of the day when there are likely to be a lot of users online all at once, it does have a tendency to disconnect suddenly. The place I have been staying this week has usually been just fine, but there was an hour or two yesterday when I could not hold a connection for more that 10 minutes. Then it cleared up, and I've been connected for 12 hours without a glitch. The other draw back to using 3G/4G is of course the cost. My device comes with a 5GB/month allowance, and etxta GB's cost me $10 US. An evening playing is SL (streaming music while I play) can easily cost 500MB downloaded data. Not nearly as bad as watching HD movies, but the data costs can add up if you are not careful.

My old computer had only 3800 MB of RAM, and that was kind of marginal for running SL. I had to keep other programs in the background to a bare minimum, or else SL would start swapping from RAM to hard drive, slowing things down a lot. Two things that made a big difference for me, and they both reduced the memory swapping problem by a lot. First, was disabling voice. Even when I wasn't actively using it, just having the capability on made my machine start swapping memory to disk like crazy. The other thing that made a noticeable difference for me was the size of the graphics cache. Cutting it down to 512 MB or even 256 MB reduced the amount of memory swapping to disk, more than making up for not having as much data in my cache, This was my experience, your mileage may vary.

FPS results depend pretty strongly on where you are. With my GTX 560M, I get 100 fps when I am up in my skybox with a friend or two. If I am in a busy, nearly full (but unimpaired) sim, my FPS can easily drop to 20. Usually only down to about 30 fps, even in a crowd, but it does depend on the sim. Oh, and keep an eye on the sim statistices, crtl-shift-1, in particular sim fps, and time dialation. An unimpaired sim will show 45 fps, and time dialation >~0.98. If these numbers start going down because the server is overloaded, then your client will perform poorly, no mater how good is the graphics card.

This happens to me from time to time, usually when I am out on the road, using wifi at some hotel. Whenever I see it happening, I check my packet loss (help, about, packet loss is at the bottome of the report), and it is always running 5 to 10%. When I check packet loss at a hotel where I am running normally, it is 1% or less. At home, I almost never experience the problem, but there I have a solid connection, I never see more than about 0.1% packet loss.

I am very pleased with my Asus G74S. I usually run it in high graphics mode, and I get > ~80 fps in my empty skybox, but this drops to about 30 fps in a crowded, nearly full sim. (full sims often, but not always, have low fps. I get my 30 in a sim that is full but not impaired)

You cannot inspect an item of rigged mesh clothing when it is worn on an Avatar. But you can inspect any other mesh item, like a mesh table or chair, or a mesh hat worn as an attachment (not rigged) or even rigged mesh clothing if you rez it on the ground. I can often tell the difference if I look in wireframe (ctrl-shift R), mesh items usually have a lot fewer poly's, at least well designed mesh.

Huh? Firestorm choppy? Not on my machine. I was listening to someone bitterly complain about all the SL lag in a sim the other day, so I checked the statistics panel, the sim was running at 45 fps, no time dialation. And I was running at 40 fps, no sign of lag. Now I know there are lots and lots of things that can go wrong, including software bugs in the viewer. But most of the time when I have had a problem like OP describes, it turns out to be the intenet connection, often showing up as dropped packets. Or my IP suddenly going from ping times of a few 10's of ms to a few 100's ms. Or my IP suddenly going dead for 20 or 30 secs. Your milage may vary, but thats where most of my lag and crashes come from.

I am a simple customer using Marketplace to shop for stuff from time to time. Yeah it has warts, and when it does mess up bad, I'm sure its a big PIA for the merchants. But as a shopper using it to locate stuff, I think its a lot more usable than 2 or 3 years ago.

I don't know a thing about Game Stop, or how it might have led you here. That you have "plenty of money on my Visa Card", seems to imply that the card in question is a prepaid Visa card, and SL payment systems just do not work with prepaid or gift cards. Which I for one find very annoying, but thats how it is.

I got stripped opening a box with some hair in it recently. I rezzed it on the ground, clicked "open", then clicked the option to wear and copy to inventory. The box must have triggered "replace outfit", rather than "add to outfit". I don't know how wide spread this is, I almost always copy stuff to inventory before I wear it.

First, you have to find the scult maps in your inventory. Depending on how they were delivered, you may have to unpack them from a box first, to get them into your inventory. In inventory, they will show up with a texture icon, and if you open it, you may be able to see the sculpt map directrly, or it may be hidden by an alpha channel. If the map is not hidden, you can actually take a screen shot, cut out the sculpt map part, and have blender interpret that as a sculpt map. This is why people hide the map using the alpha channel, to make unauthorized copying more difficult. But, you have full perm maps, so you can right click on the sculpt map texture in inventory, and then choose "save as" from the context menu. That will let you save the texture to your hard drive, where, you will be able to access it from blender or whatever other program you wish.

I've been buying more as time goes by. Fitting can be a big issue with mesh, too much of it only looks good if you dont move, and relies on alpha layers that make you look hollow when you cam in close, or when the avatar is doing something other than a static stand. When I wear mesh, I use a modified version on my own shape, tweaked to one of the "standard sizes". For dresses, I always try the demo, take it home and watch myself dance for a while. Sometimes, I can salvage a piece, if I create my own alpha layer, but frankly, most of the dresses out there just dont work very well when I move. But there are a handful of designers who make clothes that actually move so well with my standard shape that I don't need an alpha layer at all. (I am talking about close fitting dresses that show a bit of cleaveage, not the circus tent dresses that some people offer) Boots, on the other hand, work extremely well, and are nowhere near as fussy as dresses. I'll never buy scultped boots again. Someone mentioned dresses with the prim flap replaced by mesh, and yes, this is a great use for mesh. But it also reminds me that with prim dresses, some designers can manage to make the prim flap work very well when you move, the textures are so well designed that you hardly noitce there is a flap at all. But many, many other designers have flaps that only look good in a particular standing pose, like the one used to take the picture on the box, but when you move the flap looks like someone attached a piece of paper with masking tape. The skill of a designer makes a big difference in this simple area, so I am not really surprised that the skill of the designer has a big impact on how well a mesh object follows your avatar shape when you move.

I am curious, how you know they are level 2? I've never been able to find out the priority of an animation, except by trial and error.

For keeping score of how much stuff you can have rezzed on a parcel, LI has completely repleaces prim count. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Calculating-land-impact/ta-p/974163 Your basic 512 m^2 parcel now has no constraint at all on prim count, only a 117 LI limit. LI has a simple relation to prim count for objects made of classic prims, or sculpties: 1 prim = 1 LI. LI as applied to mesh is much more complicated, see the link. Most of the things I build with mesh end up with about half the LI as I would use making similar things with prims, but YMMV. So, the statue is likely made of one mesh model, uploaded all in one operation, to form a singel item in inventory. When you rez it on your land, it will have LI 40. (just the same as it would be if it were made with 40 prims)

So the median monthly concurrency rose by a factor of 10 from july to july? of 2011? I'm not sure that everything is quite right about that chart. (and not just the spelling)

When I joined SL 6 years ago, I was very worried about spam. But to my ongoing surprise, my SL email account has never had a single spam message sent to it, at leas none that dont get filtered out without comment by Google mail.

The lowest LI is 1 for a standalone item that you rez. And it will cost at least $L11 to upload it. Simple, low vertex items get rounded up to LI 1. If they are very simple, you can end up with two LI 1 items than can be linked together to form a single item with LI 1. I made myself a nice little potted plant with two parts, the pot and the plant, uploading separately then linking, ends up LI 1.

This is a good question, I hope some folks with experience can chime in. My (very possibly wrong) understanding is that clothing and tattoo layers both use 512x512 texturers in world. Even if you load a 1024x1024 or higher, then SL will convert them to 512x512 internally. So a little blurring around the edges cannot be avoided. Having said that , I sometimes see tattoos (or makeup layers) that seem awfully sharp. Am I confused about limits on textrure resolution, or are there some tricks of the trade for dealing with the relatively coarse resolution?

Well, from what I can see, the rolli backs were successful. My house has a roof again, my friends store is back in business. I'm glead I waited a bit before trying to rebuild prim by prim.

Odd things happened today when they reset the RC servers, especially(?) those running LeTigre. I have two parcels, one had the building half disassembled, and the floor of the platform all sent to my lost and found. Looked like a tornado had hit it. The other had just one prim returned. I have two friends who had their houses half destroyed, like mine. LL, bless their hearts, claim to be on top of the situation: "[UPDATE 12:40pm PDT 03 October 2012] We are aware of the issues with Object Returns on LeTigre regions and will be performing maintenance to correct the issue. Refrain from rezzing no copy objects on these regions. You can check the server version of the region you are on at Help > About Second Life. In the section that shows your location it will say Second Life RC LeTigre. Please monitor this blog for any new updates." Good luck to all you folks with parcels on LeTigre!

You could try Kayleigh at Body Canvas, she does very nice work. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Baba%20Yaga/80/76/48

I know several designers who include an anti copying message with each and every item they sell, not all that unusual, especially for people who have been around long enough to get burned. In cases where a proper DCMA was filed by the real creator of the copybotted items LL will sometimes replace affected items in your inventory with an empty placeholder item. Unless they find pretty convincing evidence that you were involved in stealing them in the first place, this is about the worst that could happen. This happened to some dance animations a friend gave me. One day, they were gone from my inventory, with only an empty placeholder left behind. Now if I had paid a lot of $L's for the dances, I would have been really pissed, but since they were free, I shrugged my shoulders.

A very minor point. OP mentioned setting their object LOD to the max. That setting in the browser is for overriding the built in shifts of LOD with distance for sculpties. It makes sculpties appear sharper at a distance in you own viewer, it has no effect on what anyone else sees. Mesh objects use an entirely different system for controlling LOD shifts, and I am pretty sure, the LOD factor you can set in your browser has no effect on mesh at all.