Tim Alvarado

There is no leadership in SecondLife now. There was a leader, long time ago. I believe Phillip was his name. :-) Then he left and we got a new leader for a while. Then he left and Phillip HAD TO come back for a while and point the ship in the right direction. Then Phillip left again -- he's totally bored with SecondLife and want to do other fun things now -- and we got another new guy as the leader. What's his name? Do we ever hear a single word from the "leader" of Second Life? No blog, no nothing. What's he do all day at Linden Labs? The only thing going on in Second Life now is the viewer wars. Old viewer, viewer 2, Phoenix, etc. Now when someone asks me for help in SL that's the first question I ask -- what viewer are you using. If you say the one I'm using, I can help -- otherwise you get no help from me. Sad, but I can't tell you what to click on if I don't use it every day. No leadership, no sense of direction, no unified viewer experience for all users. That's my big three reasons for no growth in SecondLife.

I had horrible lag when I upgraded from 2.7 to the 2.8 viewer. I turned on the Statistics Bar and found that Ping Sim was continuously over 500msec. So everything was laggy slow. I'm running SL 2.8 on a Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and the NVIDEA GeForce 9600M GT with 512MB. Switching back to viewer 2.7 and everything is fast again with Ping Sim back to less than 100msec. After more fiddling with 2.8, i found that if i set the Graphics to "Low" the Ping Sim was under 100msec and SL was not laggy. Just turning on the "Basic Shader" check box in the Graphics preference would cause Ping Sim to go over 500msec and stay there. Uncheck the "Basic Shader" check box and Ping Sim was back down to below 100msec. So there is obviously some big bug in 2.8 that effects my MacBook Pro and GeForce 9600M graphic card. I'll stay with 2.7 until they fix this. Can anyone else duplicate my findings? Tim

Regarding v2.3, you say in known issues : "Antialiasing + OS X 10.6 causes Viewer 2.3 to render the screen as a white "glow" - If you're running OSX 10.6, go to Me > Preferences > Graphics > Hardware and set 'Antialiasing' to 'Disabled'. Why is this still not fixed? I was going to download the 2.3 beta, but now I will wait. I'm too used to the SL world at 4X antialiased to view it with antialiasing disabled. As soon as antialiasing works again on Mac OS 10.6, I'll give the new viewer a try. For now, I'm forced to stay at v2.1.1.

The original Tomb Raider and Thief games. They had great introductory walkthrough levels demonstrating all the skills you needed. You are right, Crap. I remember playing the first Tomb Raider and watching Laura walk around, run, jump and shoot the vicious wild dogs at the beginning. I think this is what is needed for newbies to SL. An on-screen here is how you do basic things walk through similar to what Tomb Raider had. Tim P.S. Is it really a good thing to have "Crap" as your first name?