Rhys Goode

Here is a link that might help: http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/firestorm_troubleshooting All of the viewers use variations on the same base code, and most of the suggestions above apply to any other viewer.

Your computer should handle SL just fine, so the next suspect is your internet connection. I travel a lot, and hook up to SL over many different routers. Usually using wifi, and I get wildly different results for different routers. (WiFi is officially "not recommended" somewhere in the SL fine print). Some work fine, others have lots of lag, and one or two conisitanly log \me off after a few minutes. If I am having problems with a router, it usually shows up as packet loss. SL in general, and HTTP textures in particular, are not very robust against packet loss. I have had very good luck in these cases by pluging directly into the router with an ethernet cable (not always possible, I know).

It sounds like you expect the collada file you get after exporting the baked model to contain all the information about the surface texture. It does not. You have to save the baked texture as a separate image file (.png or .tga), and upload that seperately from the model ( .dae) file, and finally apply it to the model in SL.

The impact of mesh on fps depends a lot on you computer, and it also depends on the viewer version. The first mesh viewers had a big negative fps impact on my old computer, the later versions ran as fast as non-mesh. My new computer runs all the mesh viewers I've tried on it faster than the pre mesh versions. So, you really ought to try the latest viewers, you might be pleasantly surprised. You can always uninstall them if they dont work well on your machine.

I have lots of skirts and dresses that to just that. Its one of the things I look for when buying clothes. One I got last week had a pants layer that left the "saddle" area open, and a nearly identical underpants layer that had built in panties.

First, this is a resident forum. LL rarely, if ever, monitors whats going on, so do not expect to contact them here, it just does not work. Second, just like out on the internet, just because some unknown person forwards you a notice from Joe Official, that is no guarantee that Joe Official has ever heard about the notice. In my experience, such warnings are rarely what they claim. Now, having said that, and allowing that "don't accept candy from strangers", is always good advice, I don''t think is is possible to make something that can drain your money without you explicitly accepting a popup that asks if its OK to take money. So, whatever else you do, never, never click a popup that authorizes taking money from your account unless you know exactly where it came from.

Oh thanks for the comment, that does make a lot of sense! I was beginning to think that to use mesh clothing I would need to make individually customized alpha layers.

I did something similar the last couple of days, downloaded a bunch of mesh demo clothes, from creators using standard sizes. I edited my avatar shape to match the parameters given for the standard XS size. And tried on various outfits. I was *very* disappointed. Only 1 or 2 of about 20 items labeled XS actually worked with an XS avatar. In the sense that when I walk or sat or danced, various parts of me did not poke out through the clothes. Using the provided altha masks helped a bit, as did using S sized clothes on my XS avatar. That and making a couple of custom alpha masks. The only one that worked out of the box withouth an alpha mask was a tank top, but the shoulder straps were hanging in space a good couple of centimeters abouve my shoulders, and the body of the thing was sized like a tent. Oh, and I did run into a a dress that had 3 different sizes of each standard size: XS small, medium and large. If only the edges along the top of the thing had not cut into my skin as soon as I moved, I would have snapped it up. It was really well done, other than that. So for me, "standard sizin" seems like a marketing fantasy.

In the LL and FS viewers for sure, but I think any of the other mesh enabled viewers, you can wear several alpha layers at the same time, just like you can wear several tattoo layers, or several underwear or other clothing layers. Just choose to "add" them to the current outfit, not "wear".

Is there a way to edit alpha layers in world? When I go to edit an alpha layer, I only see the option to replace the texture for the top, bottom, head, etc, with entirely new masks. Now these masks are not all that hard to make and import using PS or the Gimp or even Paintshop, but it would be nice to be able to tweek them inworld. Could you give a bit more detail on how to "shorten the lenght" of an alpha layer using edit appearance?

I ran into a shop using mesh "standard sizing". The clothes come in different sizes, and there is a chart that shows what are claimed to be the only shape settings that matter for making an avatar shape fit the clothes. For example, the size "XS": -XS Body Fat: 5 Torso Muscle: 31 Breast Size: 48 Love Handles: 25 Belly Size: 2 Leg Muscle: 45 Butt Size: 34 Saddle Bags: 30 Sadly, when I edit my shape to the specified numbers, my avatar still pokes out of the dress, especially when I dance. I've only tried one shop that claims to use this system. Is this "standard size" a viable approach? Did I just run into a case of poor execution? Or does even the best fitting mesh dress need to have an alpha layer to keep the avatar in while dancing?

There are some excelent tutorials for using Blender and the Primstar add ons. See the links under the "tutorial" tab near the top of the page. http://blog.machinimatrix.org/primstar-2/ Also, a good, active "blender primstar/jass" support group in-world. My guess about your message is that suclpties are very fussy, the mesh neesd to have exactly the correct number of vertices or they cannot be baked into a sculptie.

Regarding the performance of mesh enabled viewers, the latest SL viewer, and the latest FS viewer seem to run a lot faster than the origianal mesh programe. When I tried the first mesh vieweres, I saw a big hit in FPS, the mesh viewers only got me about half the FPS as the non mesh. (the SL or the Phoenix + mesh or the FS beta all sucked on my laptop). But the 3.2 vesions of both SL and FS consistantly give me better FPS on my laptop than does the old premesh Phoenix 1.6. Especially in a crowded sim, the newer viewers work better. About 10% faster in an empty sim, about 30% faster in a crowded sim. (on my universe of one laptop - your milage may vary) So, if you tried mesh early on, and where put off by the performance hit, my advice it to try the latest viewers, they are substantially improved.

Yeah, you would think that sometime in the last five years, I would have noticed it. Behaves just the same for a vanilla flavored prim cube as for my little sculptie. /me blushes

I made myself a small disk, about 4 cm diameter, 3 mm thick. When I look at it in world, I cant get a real closeup view, it just disappears if I get the camera too close. What's going on? is this a feature that I did not know about? Thanks!

I've seen this happen from time to time over the years, even with viewer 1. A relog has always cleared the issue for me.

In my case, I found that a lot of the lag was associated of the wifi router I was using to connect to the internet. BTW, wifi is specifically not recommended somewhere, but I know a lot of folk who use it because they have no practical alternative. At least in SL, wifi "noisiness" results in packet loss, and packet loss can give terrible lag and "rubber banding". You can see packet loss info in SL from the Help menu > about SL, or with the statistics window, ctrl-shift-1. If you are regularly higher than about 1%, packet loss is likely the source of a lot of your lag. Did a lot of travel recently, found that some wifi connections gave almost no packet loss, and some gave 5 or 10%. The later were unusable, even when the download bandwidth tested out high. Good luck!

My advice is to look at what your computer is doing. My old laptop was 32 bit, ~3.6 gb RAM, but the base system used enough of the RAM that some browsers needed to do a lot of hard drive read/writes. If you are using windows, then task manager >oerformance>Resouce Monitor is your friend. Try different configs, see if you avoid read/writes to disk. I found that with FS beta mesh, or LL 3.2, I do a lot of read/srite to hard drive if I have voice enabled. Leading to a big dropin FPS. And with the default 512 MB cache, a lot of read/write lag with FS beta mesh, got much better FPS wiht cache set t0 256 MB. But I just upgraded my laptop, have 16 GB of ram, and have been running the cache size up, seeing small gains if fps as I do.

I love the new FS release version! It has worked fine for me, out of the box. On my old laptop, it has better frame rates than either the FS mesh beta, or the latest LL 3,2 viewer. Not quite as good as Phoenix, but good enough for me. Great ability to configure the interface, a nice set of extra features, lots of thoughtful and useful littile touches. And the best in-world support I have ever seen. Thanks so much to the whole Firestone team!

Not just a Phoenix feature: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Enhanced-Avatar-Physics/ta-p/798525

Don't forget that changing the graphics settings on *your* browser only affects how you look on your computer, it has no impact at all on how you look to anyone else. So, OP mentioned that she uses medium graphics to get just the effect she wants on her browser, but using high graphics, the same facelight looked garish. Well, if it looked bad to OP on high graphics, it probably looks bad to anyone else using high graphics, OP's graphics settings have no effect on anyone elses browser.

I just got a new, much improved l top. I am using the latest Firestorm release version 3.2.2 on both machines. In a sim with lots of active devices, and about 15 people in front of me, with my alt on one laptop and me on the other: Old computer: (graphics default to medium) CPU: Pentium® Dual-Core CPU T4200 @ 2.00GHz (2000 MHz) Memory: 3584 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GT 120M/PCI/SSE2 getting about 5 to 6 fps ------ new computer (graphics default to high): CPU: Intel® Core i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz (2195.09 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/PCI/SSE2 getting about 50 -60 FPS --------------- I took the new one to the most crowded sim I could find, and with high graphics and a screen full of avatars, got about 20 FPS. If I go to an empty platform up high in the sky I get >120 FPS with the new one, unless I have on some hair with flexy and alpha parts, then the frame rate drops to about 60. But the hair does not have a noticeable impact on my frame rate in even a moderately crowded sim

I get "offers" like that all the time in my main email account, and have a large collection of different ways to spell Viagra from there. But in 5 years of playing SL, I have never recieved a single spam message in the email account I started for my SL avatar. I made a special account, expecting to be bombarded with junk from outsiders, but LL seems to be exceptionally good about not letting others have email addresses. (Yeah, I am sure there have been breaches over the years, but all in all I am impressed).

Interesting. I see a big hit in fps with any of the mesh viewers, LL or FS, although for me, the new FS Release is better (higher fps) than either the LL 3.2.1 or FS beta Mesh. My machine does not have enough RAM, and *reducing* the texture cache size and turning off voice both reduce the amount of read/write to the hard drive But for me, no particular impact of hair. I have long flowing hair, lots of flexiprims with alpha, and I can wear it or not, move the cursor where ever, and no consistant change in FPS. Sounds like one of those lovely, hard to trace issues that depend on the particulars of the graphics card running the browser. ------- CPU: Pentium® Dual-Core CPU T4200 @ 2.00GHz (1999.99 MHz) Memory: 3584 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GT 120M/PCI/SSE2

There is more to an intenet connection than download speed. I've been on the road a lot lately, and have seen WiFi links that consistantly give download speeds > 10 Mbs, are great for looking at newspapers and photoalbums and such, but are totally unsuable for SL, because of high packet loss. Trying to use such a link leads to all kinds of lag and rubber banding and even crashing SL and locking up my laptop. I have also seen WiFi with only about 0.5Mbs but little packet loss behave perfectly fine, a bit slow for texture downloads, but otherwise fine, and better than links with 10 times the download speed. Oh, and another think about WiFi, it is subject to all kinds of interference, just because it is fine now (with respect to packet loss) does not mean it will be fine in an hour. Also, the particular WiFi chipset in your computer makes a difference. At my daughers house, the download speed is around 15-20 Mbs, butI cant use my Asus PC with WiFi at all, it will lock up and need to be rebooted within 10 mins. The same router works fine if I plug in with with an Ethernet cable. Or it works fine with WiFi if I use a recent MacBook Pro, instead of the PC. If your link is experiencing more than a little packet loss, using http textures downloads is a really bad idea. Turn it off unless you have a good connection. For my laptop, using http speeds thinks up a bit if I plug into my router directly, but can really lag like mad with WiFi (depending on whether or not there is currently a lot of packet loss) I've found that my 3G/4G USB modem is usually much better than (most) WiFi, with low packet loss. But that depends to some extent on the particular cell tower I happen to be close to. Some of them are really bad, even if most are pretty good.