leliel Mirihi

Those are not very good numbers to use when comparing to GPUs from different families. The GMA950 is actually not even a 3d chip, it has no vertex processing capabilities and only limited texture processing, feature wise it's barely better then the nvidia tnt2 released way back in 1999. For a bit of a history lesson the GMA900/950 are the chips intel bribed microsoft to certify as aero capable when they were anything but, they are almost single handedly the reason aero got such a bad rep when vista was first released. The HD4000 is a much, much, much faster chip, it performs about on par with the geforce 610m / radeon hd 6470m. As for LL's minimum requirements, I'd recommend you take them with a very large grain of salt. The geforce 6600 is more than twice as fast as the "minimum" ati cards listed which are quiet a bit faster than the "minimum" intel chip listed. What LL lists has more to do with the number of people using said hardware then how fast it is (i.e. there's tones of people out there using old decrepit hardware and LL doesn't want to scare them away).

Nvidia's latest driver has this version string "9.18.0013.1407", aka version 314.07 as listed on the download page. Altho you said you were using a laptop so the oem is probably rolling its own driver which uses its own version string. As for why singularity is faster on your machine who knows, tho it may not stay that way. Three months from now firestorm could be faster, and three months after that some other viewer could be faster.

This is definitely an annoyance, no disagreement there. However alpha textures have been a nightmare to deal with in real time 3d rendering for decades now, it's the price you pay for using them. Another thing to think about is that the automatic alpha masks is a good thing over all. Changing your textures so it doesn't kick in is one option, but you could also adjust your textures so they don't look bad with alpha testing ( mostly avoid alpha gradients, go for sharp edges).

Tell them it's enabled by default because it works 99% of the time, provides a modest speed improvement and helps minimize alpha sorting problems. Of course saying that won't exactly help your case for why they should disable it, so maybe it would just be better if you lied. Alternatively you could figure out why your items are having problems with this feature and try to fix it.

ImaTest wrote: Call me confused-it certainly wouldn't be the first time-but why do people care so much about where others are looking? If you went to a club with your girlfriend and spent the whole night staring at some other woman do you think she'd care? Would you blame her for being mad about it? Stop thinking about it in terms of sl and the issue becomes a lot more clear. The problem isn't the people, it's the option. People turn this option on and think it's telling them something it's not, then they have a perfectly natural reaction to this misinterpretation. That's why I call it obscure, because most people have no idea what this option is showing them or how to interpret the info it's giving them.

Perrie Juran wrote: leliel Mirihi wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: I get it that most users just don't know any better, but because of that, the feature really belongs buried deep in Debug settings. Try telling that to the TPV developers. For some reason some of them seem to think that if there's an option, no matter how obscure it is, no matter how small a minority of people actually need it, that it has to be front and center in the preferences window. For one thing it is not an "obscure option." Torley publicised it when he did his Video. I like that the options are easily available in the preferences window. I perve cam a lot. I enjoy looking at how other's dress, etc. So I have had to turn off "broadcast my target hints" to avoid the Drama Llama's. Am I supposed to pretend that there aren't other Avatars present? Am I not supposed to look around my surroundings? I think you just proved my point there. Show look at is a debug option that's only useful for debugging the camera and or animations. The fact that TPVs had to add an option to prevent the viewer from sending the look at hints speaks volumes about how many people are using show look at and for what.

Qie Niangao wrote: I get it that most users just don't know any better, but because of that, the feature really belongs buried deep in Debug settings. Try telling that to the TPV developers. For some reason some of them seem to think that if there's an option, no matter how obscure it is, no matter how small a minority of people actually need it, that it has to be front and center in the preferences window.

Porky Gorky wrote: 1. Do you have shadows turned on in your viewer? If so what do you think of the shadows that your viewer displays in SL? Yes. I think they're a reasonably good implementation of c. 2007 shadow maps, which admittedly is exactly what they are. There are better ways to do shadows now, but we all know how fast LL moves. 2. If you were to buy a tree or chair today, would you want or expect a ground shadow texture (on a prim/mesh) to be included? I hated prim shadows long before the viewer supported shadows itself. 3. What is your opinion about textured shadowing inside buildings? For example should the shadows from the window frames be built into the floor texture or do you think the viewer should be rendering all shadows nowadays? I don't mind baked in shadows and highlights for interior lights that are part of the building, anything other than that just looks horribly wrong. 4 Any other opinions or issues you have with shadowing on textures or shadows rendered by your viewer? Less is more.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: leliel Mirihi wrote: The moral of this story is don't use alpha textures unless you have a signed note from god saying it's ok in this one special case. Do you have a PO box or email address by any chance? Yeah, it's doesnotexist@example.com. If you think you might need to use an alpha texture contact me asap. While you're waiting for my reply rebuild your object with opaque textures since we all know it didn't really need alpha textues anyway. But in all seriousness; user made content...try to use some common sense...failing that don't do it. Blah, blah, blah, etc., et al.

Aethelwine wrote: I would hazard a guess that there is a problem dealing with rendering the number of alpha textures overlapping or something. This is actually the problem right here, it's know as overdraw. Basically the problem is as such, in order to keep from drawing things that won't actually end up on the screen the application and your gpu use all kinds of neat tricks. Things such as frustum culling, occlusion culling, and generally just trying to draw things front to back with depth culling. Now as you might imagine, alpha textures throw all that right out the f'ing window. You can't do [almost] any culling of alpha textures, you have to draw all of them, then do the alpha blending (an expensive operation itself) before you will know which actually end up on the screen. So when you have a large number of overlapping alpha textures your gpu has to spend a lot of time drawing them all when 90% of it will never end up on the screen. This is why ALL sims with a large number of plants have horrible render lag. The moral of this story is don't use alpha textures unless you have a signed note from god saying it's ok in this one special case.

Innula Zenovka wrote: The problem is, as I understand it, that everyone knew perfectly well what was causing the problem originally -- the viewer was using a deprecated OpenGL function that Nvidia no longer supported for their more recent cards. The viewer was rewritten so as not to use it, and that fixed that. But the same symptoms seem to be appearing for a few unfortunate people, even though the cause must now be different. Since you brought it up I'd like to point out that the TDR error is the most generic error message ever invented. It can literally be caused by anything, including but not limited to, the application, the OS, the graphics driver, some other program, you hardware, the quality of your power, the weather, the phase of the moon, the aliment of the stars, etc. All the error means is that the OS hasn't heard from the driver in X amount of time so it automatically restarted it.

You need proper lighting when taking photos in the real world as well, but nobody walks around pointing a flashlight at their face.

Chuck Vintner wrote: I miss emerald leliel Mirihi wrote: There was plenty of evidence to show that those Emerald devs were up to no good many months before the end, but the viewer was so popular, and LL's viewer so hated, at the time that many people just refused to believe it. Emerald is a prime example of people willfully ignoring loud and clear signs of danger for the sake of comfort and features. It's a black stain in the history of SL that should not be forgotten. I wrote that in another thread a few weeks ago. It's nice to see that the reality distortion field is still in full force three years later.

Sounds like the vertex data is getting corrupted. Try disabling vertex buffer objects in preference. If that does fix it then it's a bug in the viewer, a problem with your graphics driver, or your video card is over heating / dying. Since you say this problem has been getting progressively worse over the last few months, and other people haven't reported this issue I think it's most like one of the latter two.

I've found that I don't really need to disable attached lights now as much as I had to 3 years ago, tho obviously it depends on where you hang out. I think the word as gotten around about how bad excessive face lights look so they aren't nearly as common these days as they once were.

Luther Weymann wrote: Oh yes, shadows is now turned on for me for the first time in 5 years. I don't see any settings here in preferences to adjust that but I will look else where. I have never used Windlight,ever. Thank you. Why did you buy a $350 video card if you're just going to run the viewer with graphics settings a $50 video card could easily handle? It sounds to me like the problem is your house has way too many lights, all of which are at full intensity.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Orca Flotta wrote: They put now up to 16 full sims on 1 server and dunnohowmanymore homesteads. It's simply breathtaking how grossly underpowered SL is Every now and then I read this. Never have I seen any source though. (I'm not saying it isn't true, so if you do have a reliable source, please post) I don't care if LL puts 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc sims on one core, all I really care about is the performance and from personal experience all I can say is my homesteadsim is performing much much better than it did a couple of years ago. The sim contents have barely changed. The 'source' is the current hardware market. Class 5 sims were introduced at the end of 2006 with 2 dual core CPUs and 4GB of ram and ran 4 regions. Now 6 years later you can buy servers with 64 cores and upto 512GB of ram, it would be a waste of money for LL to run 4 regions on such a machine. You're right that it doesn't matter in the end tho. As end users all we should care about is the level of performance LL can deliver. Harping about X number of regions on a machine is missing the forest for the trees.

Knowl Paine wrote: The system requirements page should show photos of the card styles. There are 2 completely different Graphic Cards that use the 5,000 number series. It's very misleading. No, there's one graphics card that comes in two form factors. They use the same chip, possible running at different clock speeds and or having more or less shader units. From the viewer's point of view the only real difference between the mobile and desktop version is the mobile one has the word mobile in its name (i.e. none at all). The viewer really doesn't care which one you have.

Masami Kuramoto wrote: leliel Mirihi wrote: Why wouldn't they, are you joking? Yes you're right, everybody secretly dreams of being a sysadmin. Of setting up their own server, installing all the software, keeping everything up to date, trouble shooting hardware problems. Yes everyone wants to do that, no really. Why would anybody use a third party site like facebook, youtube, gmail or twitter when they could just run their own site. That's totally what everybody does. Many people do run their own sites, but few of them are sysadmins. Does the term "managed hosting" ring a bell? Example: According to Wikipedia, the WordPress 3.0 content management system was downloaded 65 million times in 2011. Why didn't those people just get a hosted blog at wordpress.com, blogger.com or elsewhere? Website administration is a subset of system administration... So after some quick googling it looks like there's an estimated 2.4B intenet users as of 2011, 65M downloads is ~2.7%. Sounds like a great plan, hope it works out for you.

Masami Kuramoto wrote: leliel Mirihi wrote: The only way to work without that clause is if every single creator owned and operated their own asset server. Yes, of course. Why wouldn't they? Don't get confused by what Mr. Deakins said. OpenSim hosting is just like website hosting. Each running instance of OpenSim comes with its own asset server by default. Why wouldn't they, are you joking? Yes you're right, everybody secretly dreams of being a sysadmin. Of setting up their own server, installing all the software, keeping everything up to date, trouble shooting hardware problems. Yes everyone wants to do that, no really. Why would anybody use a third party site like facebook, youtube, gmail or twitter when they could just run their own site. That's totally what everybody does.

Masami Kuramoto wrote: >> "Please explain to me how SL could work without that clause." When you upload content to your own website, you don't cede rights or grant licenses to anyone. Even if the website operates on third-party hardware running third-party software. You own the content. All rights reserved, literally. Could SL work without that clause? I don't know. OpenSim certainly does. No OpenSim does not. The only way to work without that clause is if every single creator owned and operated their own asset server. If you don't own the server then the person who does needs redistribution rights. Small time sites may not bother with that, just like they don't bother with a lot of things. But major sites making real money that they want to protect have legal teams to figure this stuff out. And guess what. For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube's (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the Service a non-exclusive license to access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms of Service. The above licenses granted by you in video Content you submit to the Service terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your videos from the Service. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of your videos that have been removed or deleted. The above licenses granted by you in user comments you submit are perpetual and irrevocable. Link Look at that, the wording google uses is pretty much the same as what LL uses. Seriously how are we arguing over this. By default a copyright grants absolutely no rights to the end user other then fair use, therefore it should be pretty obvious to anyone that the rights holder(creator) needs to grant the distributor (LL) distribution rights in order for this to work. Just because some opensim grinds are run by a bunch of hippies that don't bother doesn't mean it's legal

Masami Kuramoto wrote: >> "Jesus Christ, talk about distorting the truth to push an agenda. LL doesn't grant you a license because they don't have the authority to do so and you damn well know it!" I recommend reading the TOS. Linden Lab, as the man in the middle, gets a sublicenseable and transferable license to the content for free. The consumer who actually pays for the content gets nothing. That is an indisputable fact. Please explain to me how SL could work without that clause. The specific wording LL uses may be overly broad, however LL needs the right to redistribute in order for everyone else to see your content, without it LL has NO LEGAL RIGHT TO DO SO, FULL STOP. And you completely ignored my point that many creators don't want you to take their works out of SL. Pro Tip: SL isn't the only content distribution service on the internet with such a clause in its TOS. Masami Kuramoto wrote: From the creator's point of view, this would be acceptable if LL's platform helped them make a living from the content they upload. For creators living in third-world countries it might actually work. But the only real winner in this game is Linden Lab by reselling server capacity ten times above market prices. $300 per region and month is absolutely ridiculous. lolwut? So now it's LL's responsibility to get people to buy your stuff. Next you're going to tell me Flickr has a legal obligation to make people buy images from the photographers that post on that site. That can not be what you're trying to say, please elaborate.

I understand where he's coming from too. But Masami makes it sound like LL is doing something other than obeying the law as it is currently written. It's not LL that's preventing you from making backups or transferring your purchases some where else, it's the creators that are restricting you by the rights given to them through copyright laws. He is intentionally distorting the truth to make LL out to be "the bad guy" so as to push his open source agenda.

Masami Kuramoto wrote: It's not just about ownership of the database. When you upload or create something on Linden Lab's grid, you "automatically grant Linden Lab a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the content." The license includes " the right to copy, analyze and use any of your content as Linden Lab may deem necessary or desirable." Ironically, when you purchase items from another SL resident, you are granted no such license. You instead depend on Linden Lab's goodwill to exercise _their_ rights on your behalf. If they lock you out of their service, you lose what you bought. If they screw up their database, you lose what you bought. If they shut down their service or go out of business, you lose what you bought. You can't take backups, you can't take the content elsewhere. Second Life's "virtual property" is merely a means to firmly lock you into their service. The larger your inventory grows, the harder it will be to let go. Jesus Christ, talk about distorting the truth to push an agenda. LL doesn't grant you a license because they don't have the authority to do so and you damn well know it! Only the original creator can grant you such a license, many of whom explicitly say you can't transfer the content out of SL, the rest you'd have to ask for permission to do so but 9 times out of 10 they'd say no as is their right under copyright law. You're entire argument is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack against copyrights and has nothing to do with LL or how they run SL.

Masami Kuramoto wrote: Fast forward 15 months, the deformer still hasn't been rolled out. People consider it not ready for prime time because it has trouble with wrinkles, folds, collars, appendices, and rigid attachments. The sound you are hearing now is the world's saddest song played on the world's smallest violin. The reason people don't consider it ready for prime time is because a certain person hyped a deformer up to be the best thing since sliced bread, made of magic pixie dust and unicorn farts. If that person hadn't claimed that a deformer would bring world peace then maybe people would have somewhat more realistic expectations of it now.